jwilzewske: chemistry

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Sunday, November 7, 2010

Nash Ensemble: Beethoven and the Russians

C hamber music was considered by more narrowly nationalistic musicians to be too ‘academic’, too ‘Germanic’, to deserve a place in Russian [musical canon] at all. When Borodin started work on the first of his quartets in 1875, he wrote to a friend, referring to the nationalist critic of the time as well as to the leading nationalist composer, that ‘to Stassov’s and Mussorgsky’s horror, I have sketched a string quartet’.”
— Anthony Burton, Nash Ensemble program notes, 2010.

M embers of the Nash Ensemble gave a thoroughly compelling performance last night at Wigmore Hall. Stephanie Gonley (vn) was superb, as were David Adams (vn), Lawrence Power (vla), Philip Dukes (vla), Paul Watkins (vc), Alice Neary (vc), mezzo Christine Rice, and pianist Susanna Stranders.

W hat striking sonorities the 2 cellos achieve in the Arensky String Quartet in A minor, Op. 35! I’d never heard this work before (unique for its 1 vn, 1 vla, 2 vc orchestration), but, after hearing Nash members perform it, I can only say that, if you intend to create astounding Elegiosity, go for the 2 cellos!

A rensky composed this unusual piece in 1894 as a memorial to his teacher, Tchaikowsky. This was when Arensky was just 33, a short while after Tchaikowsky’s death. The first movement has all the strings with their mutes on—great to hear in an intimate hall like Wigmore, up-close. The A minor theme is taken from ancient Russian Orthodox sacred music—a setting of some psalm or other. The middle section is in A Major; then the psalm theme again, back to the minor, finishing the movement.

T he second movement is comprised of 7 variations on a children’s song by Tchaikovsky, ‘When Jesus Christ was still a child.’ The elaborateness of the 9 minutes of variations upon variations suggests feverish, obsessive grieving. Then the muted 3-minute coda at the end of this movement evokes ancient Russian chant or possibly other archaic atmospherics that would be primevally familiar to Russians. Poignant ‘leave-taking’ as the Nash’s program notes have it. The emotive material in here is amazingly effective even on the limbic systems of us non-Russians… traps like this do not require ‘bait’ to work.

K ravitsa rïbachka!
Prav k beregu ladyu
I vïd, I syad so mnoyu,
Day ruku mne svoyu.

Bolovku mne na serdtse
Bez strakha polozhi.
Morskim volnam bespechno
V veryayesha zhe tï.

A serdtse to zhe more:
To buri v nyoem, to tish,
I mnogo perlov chudnïkh
Sokrïto v glubi.

[Lovely bassin’ gal!
Steer your bass boat to this shore;
Come and sit with me;
Give me your hand.

Lay your head right here,
And don’t be afraid.
Trust me just as much as you trust yourself, heh,
Daily, to those waves there.

My heart is like the sea, you betcha:
It can be calm or choppy,
And lots o’ big pearls
Are hidden in them depths.]”
— D. Kropotkin, after Heinrich Heine.

T he third movement Andante sostenuto tugs on our heartstrings yet more and is followed by Allegro moderato finale, which has fugal structure and develops the nationalistic Russian hymn ‘Slava Bogu na nebe, Slava’ [Слава Богу, на небе! Слава!] (Glory to God in heaven! Glory!), which is found also in the Allegretto of Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 59 No. 2.

F rom a performer’s point of view, this Arensky Quartet is special in another respect: the ‘dialogical’ interactions between the parts have tremendous symmetry or parity in terms of technical and expressive challenges… All of the parts are exciting all of the time, and, despite this surfeit of interesting material, the pungency of so exceedingly much being said miraculously doesn’t tax the listener or undermine the credibility of the memorial. It’s emotionally ‘over-the-top’ in a quintessentially ‘Russian’ style but it never becomes pastiche. Fantastic!

Arensky – String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 35
Borodin – Songs with cello obbligato (Razliubila krasna-devitsa [‘Beautiful girl fell out of love’]; Slushaite, podruzhen'ki, pesenku moiu [‘Listen, my friends, to my song’]; Krasavitsa-rybachka [‘Beautiful fisher-girl’]
Tchaikovsky – Night, Op. 73 No.2
Rachmaninov –The Ring, Op. 26 No.7; To the Children, Op. 26 No.14
Tchaikovsky – Andante Cantabile from String Quartet No. 1 in D, Op. 11
Beethoven – String Quintet in C, Op. 29

T his program is one in a series that Nash Ensemble have prepared, illustrating the connections between Beethoven and Russian composers.

C hristine Rice’s account of the Borodin folk songs with Paul Watkins’s cello and Susanna Stranders’s piano was superb, drawing shouts and prolonged raucous applause from the normally-reserved Wigmore Hall audience. Her rich, expressive voice and spell-binding operatic gestures abundantly conveyed the passion and desolation—the authentic ethnic Russian sensibility of these lieder.

I t was a surprise to me to learn that the ‘Mighty Five’ or Balakirev group of 19th Century Russian composers took a dim view of ‘chamber music’—they severely criticized Borodin, for example, for engaging in such a diminutive and ‘academic’ genre [see Podlech, link below]. Well, last night—with the ample sound from the Nash members and the exceedingly wide dynamic range that they lent to their interpretation—we experienced a sonorous and strong ‘orchestral’ feel, even in the ‘smaller’ chamber pieces.

C annot help but think that the ‘Mighty Five’ would’ve amended their opinions about chamber idioms had they heard so mighty an ensemble as the Nash. Wow!

W hen Alexander was 9 years old, Borodin’s mother was seriously alarmed by his chemical experiments, fearing that her house would be set on fire. Not all his experiments were as harmless as his self-made watercolors, which he used for painting. The incendiary bombs he made in the basement were a particular worry for his parents.”
— Joachim Podlech.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Vadim Gluzman: Mixtures of Human Virtuoso plus Virtuosic Instrument

V adim Gluzman believes the violin has a living soul and, from the pile of performance reviews on my desk as well as from my own ears, I believe he knows something about how to give it breath.”
— Laurie Niles, Violinist.

I t has this unbelievable G string, it sounds like a del Gesu or a viola—dark, dark, dark; huge! If you think about both Glazunov and Tchaikovsky concerti, they both start on (A3) first position on the G string. Both were written for this violin.”
— Vadim Gluzman, interview with Laurie Niles, Violinist.

M y regular employment involves engineering—informatics and computer science mostly, but occasionally chemical engineering as well. Recently, I was working on a project that involved calculating percentages of different dissolved compounds to achieve an optimal net chemical reaction rate.

I began, then, to daydream about how it is that we realize when a particular instrument is especially apt for us; how we realize when a particular piece of music is apt for us; how we choose combinations of these. Sometimes we realize this when we attempt to switch and try to play on an instrument (try to dissolve into a “solution”) that is less apt for us (in which we are less “soluble”), or when we attempt to play a piece of music that is less apt for us. Sometimes, we realize this when we serendipitously find an instrument that suits us particularly well, or encounter a piece that lies well under our “hand”, on account of cognitive and biomechanics reasons that we may or may not understand or be able to explain to others.

I n principle, could these highly subjective things be objectively measured? After all, enthalpies of transfer (ΔH_tr) of electrolytes from one solvent into another solvent are routinely determined by comparing enthalpies of solution in the two solvents, where solid electrolyte is dissolved in each solvent and the heat exchange is measured. Sometimes, the reverse method is used (in which ΔH_tr is derived from enthalpy of precipitation measurements, where electrolyte that was dissolved is caused to come out of solution as a solid precipitate). Waveform (enthalpic and entropic—) analysis of back-to-back digital recordings of Vadim Gluzman moving from Nino Rota to J.S. Bach? Put musicians and instruments in giant, room-sized bomb calorimeters and measure per-minute heat flux normalized to time-average identical sound emission?

O f course, musicians and instruments and compositions are not molecules or bulk-phase ensembles of large numbers of molecules, but nonetheless the statistical mechanics of solutions—the effects and the equations that are involved in these—are suggestive of phenomena we recognize when we are mixing musicians, instruments, and compositions. It is only half-serious, my daydream…

D o the components in mixtures of performer, instrument, and composition each have a property analogous to what, in chemistry, would be called ‘fugacity’? Suppose the answer is ‘Yes’: Performers-as-solutes; instruments-as-solutes; compositions-as-solvents; concert halls, recordings, etc., as ‘vessels’ to contain the resulting solutions.

B orn in Ukraine, violinist Vadim Gluzman began playing with a remarkable fugacity at age seven. When he was 16 his family moved to Israel and he continued his studies at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and later with Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard. At age 19, he arrived in Dallas, where he was a participant in the New Conservatory summer music program and subsequently became a student of Arkady Fomin at Southern Methodist University. Vadim Gluzman plays the 1690 ex-Leopold Auer Stradivari on loan from the Stradivari Society of Chicago. He is currently on the faculty of Roosevelt University. Vadim’s wife, pianist Angela Yoffe, was recognized as a high-fugacity musician-in-the-making at age four. She studied in the Darzinia School of Music in Riga, the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and the Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas. Vadim and Angela perform as infinitely-miscible co-solutes all over the world and have recorded for Koch International and Bis.

N ino Rota’s solvent, ‘Improvviso in D minor,’ provides frequent exposure of A3 and other high-fugacity notes for the ex-Leopold Auer Strad, which facilitates Angela Yoffee’s accompaniment on her Steinway with an emphatic, dark lower register and nice miking on the recording.

[50-sec clip, Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe, Nino Rota, ‘Improvviso in re minore, 1947’, 1.6MB MP3]

I mprovviso in D minor was composed in 1947, for the Gianni Franciolini / Carlo Ponti film ‘d’Amanti senza amore’ [Lovers without Love], adapted from Tolstoy’s novel, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’. Inharmonious doctor (played by Rolando Dupi) impulsively marries harmony-craving pianist (played by Clara Calamai)…

T he marriage is unhappy, and a despondent Calamai attempts suicide, only to be stopped by clueless Dupi. Desperate for real companionship, Calamai makes friends with the violinist (played by Jean Servais). Dupi suspects that his wife is having an affair, but when he obtusely discusses the matter with Servais, he discovers the suspicions are groundless.

S adly, Dupi realizes this after he has already murdered his pianist-wife.

C lara Calamai was 33 and Jean Servais was 38 when they played these roles, and Nino Rota was 36 years old when he composed this film music. Gluzman’s and Yoffe’s age, speed, passion, and fearlessness are especially well-matched (1) to Rota’s gypsy conceit, including its defiant, ‘diabolical’ coda, and (2) to the robust sonic preferences of their respective instruments.

G reat solution ‘chemistry’!

A ll violin sonatas are microtonal. ;-)”
— Steve Gregoropoulos, 27-FEB-2010, FaceBook.