Living here on the Upper West Side, I'm lucky enough to have the opportunity to hear many great chamber recitals. This season, I expect to attend more than fifteen performance by the excellent Jupiter Symphony Players alone. Of these many performances, however, two that stand out are those recently given with Seymour Lipkin as pianist. The man is one of the finest musicians now active and a great favorite of audiences here in New York City, but still he has never received nearly enough of the recognition he deserves. This may in part be due to the fact he is a faculty member at Juilliard (the only venue where I have heard him play) and not a touring musician, and yet he is fully the equal of any soloist I have seen over the years at Carnegie Hall.
This was the third attempt at staging this event. It had already been postponed from its original date in the first part of the season and then was canceled again when the city was recently threatened by a blizzard. But if Mr. Lipkin does not have much success in scheduling his recitals, he certainly has a great deal in the violinists with whom he's chosen to work. I had already seen him last month with Miriam Fried in a recital of Mozart's G minor Piano Quartet, K. 478 and had thought that incredible enough before having then heard him play with Laurie Smukler in Friday evening's all-Schubert program. I had never before heard Ms. Smukler perform and was deeply impressed by the quality of her playing. Schubert's violin works require not only a mastery of the instrument but also the ability to play together with the piano rather than be merely accompanied by it. Ms. Smukler excelled on both these counts.
The program opened with the Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major, D. 574, Op. 162 (1817). Written when the composer was still only twenty years old, this was the last of Schubert's violin sonatas (he wrote four altogether - the first three, written in 1816, are usually referred to as sonatinas). The year 1817 had been an exciting one for Schubert - he had moved from home, given up his teaching position and scored his first real musical success with the now lost cantata Prometheus - and this may have had something to do with the new directions his work began to take. Essentially, as he found his own voice, Schubert was leaving behind the strong influence of Beethoven that had given much of his early work an imitative quality. Though the presence of Beethoven, most clearly recognizable in the scherzo, can still be heard, there is a new lyricism in this work that separates it from those written the year before. This is especially evident in the two final movements, the andantino and the closing allegro.
This was followed by Mr. Lipkin playing two selections from Schubert's first four Impromptus, D. 899, Op. 90 (1827). These were the No. 3 in G-flat major and the No. 4 in A-flat major. I've always felt the impromptus, along with the moments musicaux with which they are usually paired, are the most beautiful of Schubert's piano works and the pieces in which his incipient romanticism is most fully realized. There is something heartrendingly beautiful about them that brings home to the listener Schubert's sense of his own impending death. Though the depths of the composer's sorrow can be heard in every note, there is nothing maudlin about them. What makes them work is their suggestive power. Mr. Lipkin's rendition was all the more powerful for being so subdued and straightforward; his limpid playing allowed the beauty of the pieces to shine forth on its own.
After a ten minute intermission, the program concluded with the Fantasie in C major for Violin and Piano, D. 934, Op. Post. 159 (1827). This was Schubert's final work for piano and violin, and the first full work he had written for that pairing of instruments (aside from the Rondo in B minor, D. 895) following the completion of the A major Sonata ten years before. It was premiered at a private recital in Vienna in 1828 by pianist Carl Maria von Bocklet and violinist Josef Slavik. Despite the virtuosity of both musicians (Chopin himself described Slavik as "a second Paganini"), the performance was reported not to have been a success. This was most probably because the Viennese audience found the work to be too innovative. The Romantic "fantasy" was still a fairly new concept at that time and must have seemed quite radical to those accustomed to more classical forms. That Schubert's work gave full rein to his lyrical impulses can clearly be seen in the composer's adaptation of his own lied Sei mir gegrüßt, D. 741 in the andantino movement. But it is precisely this Romantic element that makes the work so attractive to modern day listeners.
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