jwilzewske: nash ensemble

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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.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Nash Ensemble: Atmospherics and Encores

O ur piano quintet is looking for new ideas for encore pieces. Any suggestions?”
— Anonymous.

The usual objective is a sparkling, novel, jewel-like ‘character piece’ that is shorter than 3 minutes in length and that is ‘approachable’ and does not make heavy demands of the listener. It should read like pungent microfiction. Additionally, you want something that conveys an intense presence—show-stopping emotionality.

One serious option is to treat the encore as a ‘tag’ or a synoptic ‘capstone’ for your program—melding with the other pieces. You choose for an encore a character piece that is light and simple, something composed about the same time as other pieces on the program and preferrably by someone whose style and compositional methods and worldview are coherent with the rest of the program. If it has those features, it can serve as a ‘tag’, and its tagness/epilogiality will be immediately evident to the listeners.

A whimsical option that aims at surprise is to choose something wholly unexpected (a polka or mazurka, if the rest of your program has been heavy going) or something that embodies a counterintuitive, dramatic contrast against the other pieces (much slower or faster tempo; different articulation or timbre)—possibly composed in a different period or by someone of disparate worldview and methods, yet arriving at a similar result or addressing a similar compositional challenge as the other pieces had done.

You can go for drop-dead flash virtuosity. You can tug on the audience members’ nostalgia. You can ‘plug’ your most recent recording or an up-coming performance with a short selection. You can capsulize your ensemble’s namesake [composer] if you’re one of those eponymously-named ensembles, provided your eponymic was thoughtful enough to write a short, sweet piece. And so on.

In any case, a good encore piece should be the musical equivalent of a bespoke chocolate truffle. [The foregoing was just a brain-dump for the anonymous question-asker (and for others who struggle with similar challenges), on ‘How We Search for Suitable Encore Pieces’.]

For sheer bon-bon-ness, you might try Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals VII, ‘The Aquarium’.

S aint-Saëns] invents various kinds of musical masquerade and cross dressing. Furthermore, many aspects of the work suggest that it is a musical farce to be put on by the very people who are supposed to get [the jokes], evoking the spirit of carnival as described by Bakhtin... [The] musical depictions demand that the instrumentalists performing the piece impersonate themselves as ‘characters’ in the salon, just as the instruments they play represent particular animals. Essential to the work is this kind of performing ‘about’ performance, a notion that in effect literally materializes immaterial aspects of music such as melody and timbre and allows Saint-Saëns to subvert the Romantic surface-depth paradigm by taking up instrumental materiality as one possible ‘substance’ to be revealed within the context of late nineteenth century chamber music.”
— Erica Scheinberg.

Carnival of the Animals’ nominally is a set of orchestral character pieces, each of which is meant to describe a particular animal, usually by mimicking the sounds it makes or characterizing the way it moves or carries itself. But, as musicologist Erica Scheinberg has written, it contains many ‘inside jokes’ about composers and music. There are passages mocking Offenbach’s ‘Can-Can’, wry liberties taken with Berlioz’s ‘Dance of the Sylphs’, poking fun at Mendelssohn’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, mocking the turgidness of several Rossini arias, parodying then-current dance-hall tunes, and mocking Saint-Saens’s ‘Danse Macabre’.

It is extremely ‘meta’—today, just as it was during Saint-Saëns’s lifetime—and so is just waiting, ready to serve your own meta-purposes!

What’s more, ‘Carnival of the Animals’ has for many years been a prime vehicle for music outreach and education programs for kids (see, for example, this, from a kids’ program at Music Institute of Chicago). Consequently, performance of the piece triggers for many adults today intense and instantaneous memories of their musical childhood—of everything that has led them now to be sitting in their concert hall seats listening to you. This is a bonus that you cannot get with just any old encore selection—instant [Freudian] flashback and epiphany. To be honest, my own response to these pieces is like this—primitive and immediate, as though I were five years old once more. That alone is enough to make these Saint-Saëns movements good encore material—and it exemplifies some of the qualities that you might look for in other suitable material.

The 7^th movement, ‘The Aquarium’, is wonderfully atmospheric. For the image of water splashing (brighter, compared to deep rumbling of the sea in the cello part and the flutey undulations) we have the glass harmonica’s and two pianos’ (or glockenspiel, xylophone, celesta, or small cymbals) movements. A realistic evocation of moving water involves varying and controlling the dynamics on a short time-scale and the contrary-direction voice-leading in the different parts. Irregular intervals represent the erratic swimming of fish. Saint-Saëns creates florid kinesthetic/synaesthetic ‘visual-acoustic’ parallels.

Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16. No.3 (Faben) likewise convey ‘visual-acoustic’ parallels, and likewise mostly via short time-scale timbre changes. The Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16. No.3 (Faben) is sometimes translated to English as ‘Color Music’, ‘Morning on the Traunsee’ and ‘Summer Morning at a Lake’ by authors like Boretz and Cone. The musical progressions move in a slow and undulating manner throughout, which is similar to the ‘quivering reflection of the sun on a sheet of water’ (Dahlhaus, 1989). Schoenberg acoustically mimics the changing light on the waves by the changing timbre of instruments; the colors of the changing brightness lie in the differing timbres of the instruments. Saint-Saëns’s ‘Aquarium’ is like this, although the voice-leading in the Saint-Saëns’s string parts represents, I think, rays of light filtering down to the depths, from the point of view of the fish. The flute and pianos and glass harmonica manifest most of the surface watery features, including the sparkly play of light up top.

Insofar as ‘Aquarium’ has been used in many film soundtracks, it has the added advantage of being especially familiar to general audience members (compared with other of the ‘Carnival of the Animals’ movements). The Nash Ensemble has a particularly nice rendering of ‘Aquarium’.

[50-sec clip, Nash Ensemble, Saint-Saëns, Carnival of the Animals VII, Aquarium, 1.5MB MP3]

The Nash’s octet version does include the flute and glass harmonica and two pianos as-scored by Saint-Saëns. But the glass harmonica is out of practical reach for most ensembles and, in any event, the instrument does not travel easily—delicate; risky. Most of the time, the orchestral incarnations of the piece have a celesta or glockenspiel or xylophone substituting for the exotic glass harmonica. And, anyhow, the anonymous emailer in the blockquote above said her/his ensemble are a piano quintet; you are not going to bring out a flute or other players to participate in an encore when the rest of your program was straight piano quintet. Right. So is there a published arrangement of this Saint-Saëns piece for piano quintet? No. So improvise one!

Here’s one way: take the string parts from the original octet score, and take the Lucien Garban reduction of ‘Aquarium’ for solo piano and put them together. Fine-sounding instant piano quintet!

Yes, some of the spectral qualities that the glass harmonica or celesta add go by the boards. If that disappoints you, then improvise some flourishes in the upper register of the piano. The Garban transcription is tough enough by itself, so your efforts to accessorize it into something even more virtuosic will be all the more dazzling. (N.B.—Whether you improvise or leave it as-is—the string parts and the solo piano reduction—the piano’s doubling of the strings does risk trampling on the string parts, so you’ll need to rehearse with care, to make sure you’re achieving a good balance.)

Yes, the first-piano part descending ‘ten-on-one’ and ‘eight-on-one’ ostinato, while the second-piano plays ‘six-on-one’, is lost in the Garban transduction to solo piano. (After all, not many human beings can totally decouple the right-hand rhythmically from the left-hand.) So some of you purists reading this blog post may object strongly to my idea of a piano quintet adaptation of ‘Aquarium’. That’s fine. If the sacrilege is too great, don’t do it. But if you try it and it ‘works’ for you, more power to you!

Tempi of various ensembles’ performances of ‘Aquarium’ vary widely, with performance times ranging from 1:50 to 2:40. In other words, your effect can be ethereal/dreamy or near-demonic, depending on your taste. You can be over-the-top lyrical; or conjuring and fantastical; or subdued and meditative; or ironical; or elegantly benign and charming—you choose! The insider jokeness and transgressiveness that were intended by Saint-Saëns provide you a very long interpretive ‘leash’ with this piece.

You may want to consider how such an atmospheric piece would ‘fit’ with other program elements from the piano quintet literature:

Elfrida Andrée: Piano Quintet in E minor (1865)
Anton Arensky: Piano Quintet in D major, Op. 51 (1900)
Béla Bartók: Piano Quintet (1904)
Arnold Bax: Piano Quintet in G minor (1915)
Amy Beach: Piano Quintet
Franz Berwald: Piano Quintets No. 1 in C minor and No. 2 in A major (1857)
Ernest Bloch: Piano Quintets No. 1 (1923) and No. 2 (1957)
Alexander Borodin: Piano Quintet in C minor (1862)
Johannes Brahms: Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34 (1864)
Frank Bridge: Piano Quintet in D minor (1905, revised 1912)
Ernő Dohnányi: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 1 (1895) and No. 2, Op. 26 (1914)
Antonín Dvořák: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 5 (1872) and No. 2, Op. 81 (1887)
Edward Elgar: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84 (1918)
George Enescu: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 29 (1940)
Louise Farrenc: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 30, and No. 2, Op. 31 (both with double bass)
Gabriel Fauré: Piano Quintet No. 1, Op. 89 (1905) and No. 2, Op. 115 (1921)
Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet (1985)
César Franck: Piano Quintet in F minor, M. 7 (1879)
Wilhelm Furtwängler: Piano Quintet in C major (1935)
Hermann Goetz: Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 16 (with double bass; 1874)
Otar Gordeli: Piano Quintet (1950)
Sofia Gubaidulina: Piano Quintet (1957)
Reynaldo Hahn: Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor (1921)
Heinrich von Herzogenberg: Piano Quintet in C major, Op. 17 (1876)
Johann Nepomuk Hummel: Piano Quintet in E-flat minor, Op. 87 (with double bass)
Vincent d’Indy: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 81 (1924)
Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Piano Quintet in E major, Op. 15 (1921)
Bohuslav Martinů: Piano Quintets, H. 35 (1911), H. 229 (1933), H. 298 (1944)
Nikolai Medtner: Piano Quintet in C major (1949)
Krzysztof Meyer: Piano Quintet Op. 76 (1991)
Leo Ornstein: Piano Quintet (1927)
Joachim Raff: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 107 (1862)
Alan Rawsthorne: Piano Quintet
Max Reger: Piano Quintet Nos. 1 and 2 in C minor
Carl Reinecke: Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 83 (1865)
Anton Rubinstein: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 99 (1876)
Camille Saint-Saëns: Piano Quintet in A minor, op. 14 (1855)
Franz Schmidt: Piano Quintet in G major (1926)
Florent Schmitt: Piano Quintet in B minor (1908)
Alfred Schnittke: Piano Quintet (1976)
Franz Schubert: Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 (Trout Quintet with double bass; 1819)
Robert Schumann: Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44 (1842)
Giovanni Sgambati: Piano Quintets Nos. 1 and 2
Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 (1940)
Jean Sibelius: Piano Quintet in G minor (1890)
Sergei Taneyev: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 30 (1911)
Louis Vierne: Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 42 (1917)
Anton Webern: Piano Quintet (1907)
Charles-Marie Widor: Piano Quintet No. 1, Op. 7 (1881)
Yitzhak Yedid: Piano Quintet ‘Since My Soul Loved’ (2006)
Ludwig Thuille: Two Piano Quintets (1885)

The Hinson and Roberts book (pp. 545-68) is the premier source of ideas as you explore your options.

It’s ideal for your encore piece to be familiar to the audience—this is a correlate of the requirement that an encore piece sparkle and divert the audience without placing large demands on them. But the competing requirement that the piece be ‘novel’ and ‘exciting’ means that your selection had best not be a familiar piece that receives excessive or clichéd airplay. I think this 7^th movement of the Saint-Saëns piece is nearly perfect from these perspectives.

Incidentally, only the movement ‘The Swan’ was published before Saint-Saëns’s death. (He was supposedly anxious that the pastiche qualities of these pieces would undermine his reputation. For 35 years (between 1886 and 1921), ‘Carnival’ was hardly even a ‘salon’ item, so cautious was Saint-Saëns about restricting its performance—obsessive, almost to the point of being paranoid about it.) After Saint-Saëns’s death ‘The Swan’ quickly became popular among cellists, and is one of Saint-Saëns’s most frequently-performed pieces. ‘The Aquarium’ is far less commonly performed live, despite its popularity as film-score material. Therefore it has an aspect of novelty that makes it a good choice for live encore presentations.

The Nash Ensemble next present a concert on 25-SEP, at Malvern Concert Club in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, with a program that includes the Mahler Piano Quartet; Mozart Piano Quartet in G minor K. 478; Dvořák Piano Quintet in A minor Op. 81. Then on 11-OCT their next concert is at Wigmore Hall in London.

A fter 40 years and over 250 premières (140 commissions) the Nash Ensemble is still the best champion that any composer could hope to have. Its concerts are always meticulously polished, but what impressed about this heroically well-stuffed programme—two premières and four other chamber pieces, none more than four years old—was the illusion conjured by the players that they lived with this music for years, even if the ink was barely dry on the page. Perhaps it is precisely because the ensemble is not entirely dedicated to doing contemporary work, that it can radiate so persuasive a feeling of new pieces being assimilated into chamber-music heritage, stretching back two centuries or more.”
— The London Times.