Autoharp Recital

Most of the performances I write about here are of classical music or opera.  On Saturday afternoon, though, I had an opportunity to attend something truly unique - an autoharp recital held at a Japanese association in an office building on Eighth Avenue.

The performer was my best friend Chiemi Aoki from Tokyo.  Though I have known Chiemi for ten years now, this was the first chance I'd had to hear her sing and play.  I found she had a truly beautiful soprano voice, clear and limpid, and played her instrument with considerable skill.  This in itself was quite an accomplishment as the autoharp is almost unknown in Japan and there are no teachers or lesson books available to those seeking instruction.

The music itself was what would be labeled "folk" in our own country even though, with the exception of "Amazing Grace," all the vocals were sung entirely in Japanese.  These were simple uplifting melodies that possessed a strong spiritual dimension.  Chiemi also sang one lovely song at the end that she had composed herself.

As I was the only American in attendance, the afternoon afforded a fascinating glimpse into Japanese culture and manners.  The audience here was totally involved and sang and danced along to the music with a great show of spirit.  And all the guests were wonderfully hospitable to the outsider among them as they drew me to my feet and had me dance alongside them.  I ended up enjoying myself immensely.  This was really the most fun I'd had since my last visit to Tokyo.

I've posted more photos of the event on my other blog, The Photographer as Novelist.

Alice Tully: Adam Golka Performs Beethoven, Lutoslawski, Bartók, Chopin and Brahms

On Sunday afternoon I went to Alice Tully to hear a recital by pianist Adam Golka for the benefit of the Musicians Emergency Fund.  Although I was not familiar with the musician himself, I was sufficiently intrigued by the program - which included selections by Beethoven, Lutoslawski, Bartók, Chopin and Brahms - to attend the event.  With the exception of the Lutoslawski, these were all well known works.

The matinee began with a performance of Lutoslawski's Butoliki ("Bucolics") (1952).  The composer had a difficult life.  While still a child, he was taken by the Bolsheviks to Moscow where his parents were held prisoner and eventually executed by a firing squad; in the 1940's, he was persecuted by the Nazis; and in the 1950's, his work was subjected to strict censorship by the Soviets.  Lutoslawski certainly didn't give much of himself away in this piece whose five movements were identified only by tempo markings.  It was the last movement, marked allegro marziale, that was the strongest even though there was nothing particularly martial about it.  (For that matter, none of the movements were even remotely bucolic.)  It had a bright modern sound that captivated the listener and dated from the period when Lutoslawski, in order to earn a living, was composing popular music under the name "Derwid" while at the same time working on his more serious compositions.  That was before the 1956 "Polish October," when Soviet interference lessened and Lutoslawski first began to receive recognition as a major composer.

The next work was Bartók's Szabadban ("Out of Doors"), Sz, 81, BB 89 (1926).  It was written, along with many of the composer's most famous piano pieces, at a time when he was first becoming aware of the piano's ability to function as a percussive instrument.  (It was this same insight into the properties of the instrument that would underlie the composition of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion more than ten years later.)  The present work consisted of five movements each of which, unusually for Bartók, was provided with a programmatic title - "With Drums and Pipes"; "Barcarolla"; "Musettes"; "The Night's Music"; and "The Chase."  Of all these, it was the fourth movement, Az éjszaka zenéje, that was to prove the most popular and was often played by the composer in his recitals during that period.  This may have been at least partly due to the fact that it was an excellent example of Bartók's "night music" style characterized, according to one source, by "eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies."

The final work before intermission was Brahms's Four Ballades, Op. 10 (1854).  The work was written shortly after Robert Schumann's suicide attempt and consequent commitment to a sanatorium.  Brahms, along with Joseph Joachim and Julius Otto Grimm (to whom the Op. 10 was dedicated), temporarily moved into the Schumann household in Düsseldorf in order to help care for the children; and it was at this time that he began to develop his personal attachment to Clara.  Though the ballade form had been invented by Chopin only little more than a decade before, Brahms's approach to the genre was quite different from that of his predecessor.  This may have been because the style was too recent to have been formalized.  Notably, Brahms took the term "ballade" much more literally than had Chopin and actually based the first of the series, the D minor, on a grisly Scottish ballad entitled Edward.   The music was therefore necessarily much more programmatic in nature as it closely followed its source material.  It was no accident that Brahms should have turned to Scottish poetry for his inspiration as he had been deeply influenced, as had many other Romantics, by the work of Ossian.

For some reason, the pianist chose to combine the Bartók with the Brahms works without leaving any break between them.  This did not serve either piece well and was confusing to the audience.

The second half of the program began with Beethoven's Sonata No. 6 in F major, Op. 10, No. 2 (1796-1798).  This was something of a disappointment as the program had originally called for a performance of the Sonata in A Major, Op. 2, No. 2 (1795).  Even though the A major is an earlier work, it is - to my mind at least - a far more interesting and ambitious piece than the F major which is rather undistinguished in its half hearted attempts at humor.  The pianist, however, had already performed the F major last month at a Beethoven Sonata Marathon at BAM and no doubt found it less trouble to reprise the more familiar material at this recital.

The afternoon ended with two pieces by Chopin, the Nocturne in G major, Op. 37, No. 2 (1840) followed by the Ballade No. 3 in A-flat major, Op. 47 (1841).  Both these works were written about the same time, and some critics have seen in each reminiscences of the summer the composer spent in Majorca in the company of George Sand.  The nocturne, unfortunately not so popular today as it once was, is one of Chopin's best and has a haunting melody that reminds the listener of a Venetian barcarolle.  The ballade, the only one of the four to conclude on a major chord, was dedicated to Pauline de Noailles and is often thought to have been inspired by the poem Undine by Adam Mickiewicz, but a more explicit program has been ascribed to it that relates to the time Chopin and Sand spent at the Valldemosa monastery where conditions during their stay were far from ideal.  Be that as it may, I recently came across a fascinating comment on this piece by pianist Paul Cantrell:

"The melody that opens the piece is the stepping-off point for all that follows in the next two and a half minutes, but then it disappears, and the music goes somewhere else entirely. Listen for it. The experience of wanting that melody to return, and it not returning and not returning and then — that’s the force that shapes the piece."

Another Chopin piece that had not originally been scheduled was also included on the program.  That was the Polonaise in F-sharp minor, Op. 44 (1841).  As the piece was quite different in spirit from both the nocturne and ballade - its central movement is a mazurka introduced in an awkward fashion - there appeared little reason for its presence other than to take up time.  Chopin himself seemed of two minds regarding the piece; while working on it, he wrote to Julian Fontana: "The weather here [in Nohant] has been exceedingly lovely for several days, but as for my music, it is ugly."

ACJW Ensemble Performs Mozart, Janáček and Schumann

On Wednesday evening I went to Paul Hall to hear the ACJW Ensemble perform works by Mozart, Janáček and Schumann.  As I had not renewed my subscription to the ensemble's series at Weill, this was only the third opportunity I'd had this season to hear these excellent musicians.

The program opened with Mozart's Quintet for Horn and Strings in E-flat Major, K. 407 (1782).  The work was composed at a turning point in Mozart's career.  After having quarreled bitterly with Archbishop Colloredo, he had left Salzburg the year before to start over in Vienna where he hoped to eventually make his fortune.  He was also a newlywed after having married Constanze Weber in August of that year.  The quintet was written for Ignaz Leutgeb, a former member of the Salzburg orchestra who had relocated to Vienna at about the same time as Mozart.  He must have been quite a virtuoso if he were able to handle the intricacies of the horn part that were made all the more difficult by the absence of any valves on the instrument.  Mozart went on to write his four horn concertos for Leutgeb, who also ran an unsuccessful cheese shop that had been financed by Mozart's father Leopold, and the two continued as close friends even if Mozart did sometimes tease the musician unmercifully with his jokes.  In later years, Leutgeb was one of those willing to lend Mozart money when the composer had fallen on hard times.

Mozart's quintet is unique among his works in its unusual configuration of instruments.  Aside from the horn, the work was arranged for one violin, two violas and one cello.  Mozart was an accomplished violist and displayed a great affinity for that instrument.  Here the viola's mellow tones worked perfectly in conjunction with the low range of the horn.  In some places, the piece seemed more a concerto than a chamber work as the horn was continually given solo passages in which the strings were used only as accompaniment.

The next work was Janáček's Mládí ("Youth") (1924) for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon and bass clarinet.  It's seems that the composer's chamber works have been performed more often than usual during the past few seasons; hitherto I hadn't had much opportunity to hear any other than his two famous string quartets.  As I've been exposed to more of Janáček's oeuvre, I've gained a much greater respect for his abilities.  The work at hand consisted of a standard arrangement for a woodwind sextet and served the work's purpose very well.  The composer's intent had been autobiographical.  He had wished to create in musical form a reminiscence of his long past schooldays (Janáček was already age 70 at the time he wrote this music) at the Augustinian monastery in Brno, the Moravian city in which he spent almost his entire life.

After intermission, the evening ended with Schumann's Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 63 (1847).  This was the strongest performance of the evening.  It was also particularly interesting to hear this work after having attended a performance on Sunday of Mendelssohn's C minor trio that had been written only two years earlier.  In fact, Schumann's choice of the D minor key in his own work was a tribute to Mendelssohn's D minor trio with which Schumann had been extremely impressed and had written upon first hearing it:

",,,the most masterly trio of the present era, just as, in their times, were the B-flat [Archduke] and D major [Ghost] trios of Beethoven and that of Schubert in E-flat major. It is a beautiful composition that years from now will delight our grandchildren and great-grandchildren."

Listening to any of the works Schumann composed in the 1840's, one cannot help watching for signs of the incipient madness that was to overtake him in the following decade.  And indeed this trio, especially in the first and third movements, is filled with darkness to the extent that Schumann himself characterized the piece as "gloomy."  The death of his infant son Emil, which occurred as the composer was at work on the trio, could only have contributed to the sense of despair with which the work is infused.

Of the three Schumann trios, it is the D minor that is usually regarded as the most accomplished.  In a sense, however, it is a throwback to the Baroque era in that the strings are not given equal weight with the piano and are sometimes used only as accompaniment.  In spite of this, the trio is one of the composer's most successful and best known chamber pieces.  It's definitely a powerful work, and the three talented musicians who performed it on Wednesday evening did an excellent job of expressing all the depth of feeling Schumann had put into it.  These were Shir Semmel, piano; Siwoo Kim, violin; and Caleb van der Swaagh, cello.

Omega Ensemble Performs Shostakovich, Brahms and Mendelssohn

On Sunday afternoon at Christ and St. Stephen's Church on West 69th Street the Omega Ensemble performed works by Shostakovich, Brahms and Mendelssohn as well as a medley of virtuoso violin pieces.  This was the first chance I'd had to hear the ensemble perform since last May; I noted, however, that the musicians playing at this recital were all listed on the program as "guest artists."

The program opened with the fourth movement allegretto from Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67 (1944).  As an introduction to the full program, it was an odd choice.  Written while World War II was still raging and details of  the Holocaust were only first coming to the world's attention, the movement (aptly termed a "Dance of Death" in the Wikipedia article) is utterly bleak and filled with despair.  Shostakovich was not Jewish himself, but it would have been difficult for him not to have recognized an analogy in the plight of the Jews under Hitler to the oppression the Russian people were at the same time experiencing under Stalin.  Reinforcing this interpretation was Shostakovich's use of the same Jewish melody in his String Quartet No. 8, perhaps the most personal of all his chamber works.

As was customary at all the Omega Ensemble's recitals, this opening work was performed by a young musician referred to as a "Next Generation Artist."  Here that performer was the violinist Ari Boutris.  He was accompanied by cellist Brook Speltz and pianist Dominic Cheli.

The full program then opened with Fritz Kreisler's Praeludium and Allegro, Brahms's Contemplation as arranged by Jascha Hefeitz, Witold Lutoslawski's Subito, and Manuel Ponce's Estrellita, again arranged by Heifetz.  These were all showpieces designed to display the talents of the violinist, here Brendan Speltz, to best advantage.

This was followed by Brahms's Sonata No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 38 (1862-1865).  As can be seen by the dates of composition, the entire work was not completed in a single attempt.  Brahms had originally composed the first two movements, along with an adagio he later deleted, in 1862 and only returned to the work three years later at which time he composed the final movement, an allegro whose opening theme is taken from Bach's Contrapunctus 13 from Die Kunst der Fuge.  The entire sonata is actually "a homage to J.S. Bach" as the principal theme of the first movement is also taken from that same masterpiece.  Perhaps because Brahms himself played the piano at the work's Mannheim premiere, the composer was very careful to note that in this work, dedicated to cellist Josef Gänsbacher, the piano part should be given as much importance as that of the cello.  He wrote:

"[the piano] should be a partner - often a leading, often a watchful and considerate partner - but it should under no circumstances assume a purely accompanying role."

After intermission, the program concluded with Mendelssohn's Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66 (1845).  This was a fairly late work, written only two years before the composer's untimely death in 1847, and displays the full range of Mendelssohn's genius.  By the time he came to write the piece, the piano trio already had a fairly distinguished history.  Originally a genre that even in Haydn's time had emphasized the piano part and made use of the strings only in a supportive role (Haydn had in fact titled his earliest trios "Sonatas for pianoforte with accompaniment of violin and violoncello"), it had been given a much more balanced arrangement by Beethoven, most notably in his masterpiece the Archduke Trio, in which the strings were raised to the level of full partners.  And, of course, Mendelssohn himself had already had the experience of writing his own D minor trio, the Op. 49, six years before. The most remarkable feature of the Op. 66, which is not nearly so famous or often performed as the earlier trio, was Mendelssohn's implementation in the final movement of a well known 1524 Lutheran chorale Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ. 

Atget: The Pioneer

In December, I reviewed an exhibit at Pace MacGill of vintage prints by the French photographer Eugène Atget whose work has served as an inspiration for almost all the twentieth century documentary photographers who followed him.  Berenice Abbott, Brassaï and Walker Evans, among others, were deeply indebted to him in the development of their own styles.  But beyond their historical importance, Atget's prints are notable for the sheer beauty with which they depicted turn of the century Paris.  They are magnificent works of art in their own right.

What makes Atget a unique figure in the history of the medium is that, oddly enough, he never made any claim to be a photographer.  As far as can be determined, Atget only took up the camera after he had failed at both acting and painting and then for no other purpose than to pay his rent.  His advertisement read simply "Documents for Artists."  The implication here, of course, was that he was not an artist himself but only providing prints for reference to those who were themselves creative.

But this is really only a guess.  Atget's own thoughts on his work and even on photography in general must forever remain unknown since he never made any statement concerning them (even though he was quite voluble on other subjects).  He worked in obscurity throughout his entire career without ever seeking or receiving any recognition for his remarkable achievement.  It was only in the months before his death that his work first came to the attention of other photographers.  By then it was too late.  Atget died in complete ignorance of the influence his prints would exert on the history of photography and of the fame that would come to him posthumously.  Nevertheless, it seems impossible that he could have trudged with his view camera day after day along the streets of Paris and set up literally tens of thousands of shots without ever having formed any aesthetic or any ideas on the nature and practice of photography.  The very genius of his oeuvre argues against such a supposition.

It was the Surrealists who first discovered Atget.   Brassaï made his acquaintance in 1925 while visiting the art dealer Léopold Zborowski and was entranced by the large (24" x 30") prints he was shown.  Man Ray also lived close by and stopped by long enough to purchase a few carefully chosen prints and then saw to it that his neighbor's work was published in la Révolution surréaliste.  More importantly, Man Ray introduced Berenice Abbott, who was his assistant at the time, to Atget; it was she who was really responsible for preserving his photography and bringing it to the attention of the public.  After Atget's death, she bought almost the entire stock of his glass plate negatives and prints and then took them with her to New York when she returned to America from France.  She was thereafter tireless in proselytizing the late artist's work.  It was Abbott in fact who first showed Atget's prints to Walker Evans who thereupon experienced an epiphany in the creation of his own documentary photography.  The depth of Atget's influence can clearly be seen in Evans's American Photographs and other publications.

Atget: The Pioneer is, unfortunately, not the best work on its subject.  It is prefaced by three essays, none of which are particularly informative and are almost entirely lacking in biographical detail.  The presentation is also problematic.  In attempting to emphasize Atget's influence on later photographers, the book places his own photographs side by side with theirs.  This is distracting, and the juxtaposition is sometimes jarring.  The reproductions are of good quality but those of Atget's work represent only a small fraction of his output.  There is, however, one group of photos, accompanied by an essay by Sylvie Aubenas, of the trees at the Saint-Cloud Park with which I had not previously been familiar and are definitely worth viewing.

Juilliard String Quartet Seminar Recital: Haydn and Bartók

I went on Friday afternoon to Paul Hall to hear the first half of the annual Juilliard String Quartet Seminar Recital.  The event was described as follows on the school's website:

"Each year The Juilliard School hosts a weeklong seminar to foster the artistic growth of pre-formed, pre-professional string quartets. Through intensive coaching and mentoring with members of the Juilliard String Quartet, as well as interaction with other participating quartets, students are able to refine their artistry in a stimulating artistic environment. The results are displayed in these final seminar recitals."

The program opened with the String Quartet No. 61 in D minor, Op. 76, No. 2 (1797) by Franz Joseph Haydn. The piece is nicknamed "the Fifths" for the widely spaced intervals played by the first violin in the opening bars.  It was written while Haydn was still resident at Esterházy and was the last full set of quartets he completed.  While perhaps not as groundbreaking as the Op. 20 or the Op. 33, these six quartets still represented a milestone in the development of the genre and helped formalize its structure for future generations of composers.  Haydn was, of course, known as "the father of the string quartet" and I was lucky enough this season to have heard a number of performances of his works performed by the Orion Quartet, widely acknowledged as authorities on Haydn, including one of the No. 5 from this same set.  Those performances, as well as Friday's, have helped deepen my appreciation of Haydn's genius and his ability to innovate within a genre until he had perfected its form.  It's strange to think that without the groundwork laid by Haydn, Beethoven's late quartets might not exist, at least not in the form we now know them.  On Friday, the work was expertly performed by the Cordova Quartet consisting of Andy Liang and Roseminna Watson (violins), Blake Turner (viola) and Matthew Kufchak (cello).

The second work on the program was the String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7 (1909) by Béla Bartók.  The piece was written shortly after the First Violin Concerto and, though the composer had recently gotten married to his first wife, he was apparently still suffering while composing the quartet from his unrequited love for the violinist Stefi Geyer.  When writing to her, he in fact described the quartet's first movement as a "funeral dirge."  More importantly, the work displays, especially in its final movement, Bartók's early use of the Hungarian folk themes that were to prove the key to the development of his modernist style.  It's much easier to see in youthful works such as this and the Piano Quintet (1903) the manner in which the composer first began adapting these motifs to his own form of expression.  The work was performed by the Calliope String Quartet consisting of Tianyang Gao and Julia Glenn (violins), Molly Goldman (viola) and Hélène Werner (cello).  All the musicians were extremely talented, but I was especially impressed by the virtuoso performance given by Tianyang Gao on first violin.

The recital lasted less than an hour and had no intermission.  The second half of the program was to be played that same the evening and and was to feature a performance of Bartók's Fourth Quartet.  I had already heard that piece performed earlier this month by the same musicians who were to be present Friday evening and who have now named themselves the 412 Quartet, and had thought their rendition truly excellent.  It's a shame both the Bartók quartets could not have been played at the same performance so that the audience could have better followed the evolution of the composer's style over the nineteen year period that elapsed between the creation of the two works.

This was the one of the last recitals I'll hear this season at Juilliard, and while at Paul Hall I was struck again by what an incredible resource the school represents to those with a love of great music.  All season I've heard top level musicians give exceptional performances of some of the most important works in the chamber repertoire.  I definitely feel privileged to have attended these recitals and am deeply grateful to Juilliard for having made them available to the general public.

Jupiter Players Perform Reicha, Mozart and Dvořák

On Monday afternoon at St. Stephen's Church, the Jupiter Players gave their last recital of the season.  The ensemble has been a mainstay on the Upper West Side for lovers of chamber music and this season alone gave twenty superlative performances that took the time to explore the work of lesser known composers as well as that of the masters.  It was not surprising then that this final performance featured works by artists - Reicha, Mozart and Dvořák - whose styles differed radically from one another.

The program opened with Anton Reicha's Variations for Bassoon and String Quartet (n.d.).  This was such an obscure work that I could find nothing online relating to it when I attempted to research its history before attending the recital.  Its date of composition is unknown and no opus number was ever assigned it.  Reicha himself, of course, was hardly a household name even in his own time and has been largely overlooked since the close of the nineteenth century.  This lack of recognition was due partly to the politically fraught political situation in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century.  Reicha was forced by the wars raging about him to relocate from Bonn to Hamburg to Paris to Vienna until finally he returned to Paris where he spent the rest of his career teaching composition at the Conservatoire.  Another factor that caused the composer to be forgotten was his own refusal to put himself forward.  As his Wikipedia biography pithily notes:

"None of the advanced ideas he advocated in the most radical of his music and writings (not used in the 25 great wind quintets), including polyrhythm, polytonality and microtonal music, were accepted or employed by nineteenth-century composers. Due to Reicha's unwillingness to have his music published (like Michael Haydn before him), he fell into obscurity soon after his death and his life and work have yet to be intensively studied."

The present work was certainly interesting,  In it one could hear the influence of both Mozart and Beethoven.  What struck me as I listened to it was how unfamiliar are present day audiences with works that so prominently feature woodwind instruments such as the bassoon.  Instead, we are much more used to hearing winds play as part of an ensemble at orchestral concerts.  I believe this lack of appreciation for wind instruments is yet another reason Reicha is so often overlooked in our era. 

The next work was Mozart's Serenade No. 11 in E flat major, K.375 (1781).  The piece was originally written for performance on St. Theresa's Day and was arranged for two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons.  Shortly after Mozart had completed the serenade in this form, however, a wind octet was established at the Viennese court that featured two oboes in addition to the aforementioned instruments.  Mozart was forced to hurriedly rework his manuscript to include these instruments and, as a result, the final composition displayed a number of unusual features, such as the horn solo that appeared out of nowhere in the first movement recapitulation.  The overall structure, though, remained traditional - a central slow movement with two minuets on each side which were in turn flanked by two fast outer movements.   The current performance was unusual in that made use of the original arrangement without oboes.   With or without those instruments, this is still a heartrendingly beautiful work that only Mozart could have written.

After intermission, the program ended with one of the best known works in the chamber repertoire, Dvořák's Piano Quintet No. 2 in A major, Op. 81 (1887).  The work began as an attempt to revise an earlier quintet, also in A major, the Op. 5.  Luckily for future generations of music lovers, the composer soon enough decided the task was hopeless and instead wrote an entirely new quintet to take its place.  If nothing else, this gave Dvořák the opportunity to continue his exploration of Czech folk sources as can be clearly heard in the second movement Dumka that forms the heart of the work.  In the past few seasons, I've heard excellent performances of this work by both the Chamber Music Society and the ACJW Ensemble, but I still found the Jupiter Players' rendition eminently satisfying.  The performers were Gilles Vonsattel (piano), Mark Kaplan and Lisa Shihoten (violin), Dmitri Murrath (viola) and David Requiro (cello).