jwilzewske: schubert

Showing posts with label schubert. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Paul Lewis’s Performance Suggests Cardiovascular Kinesthetics as Source of Inspiration for Features in Schubert’s Late Piano Music

T he excellent performance last night by pianist Paul Lewis at the Mozart-Saal in the Konzerthaus in Vienna provided some new insights about acoustic effects that are idiomatic of piano that may have interested Schubert late in his composing career.

T here are many passages in the Vier Impromptus (D 935, 1827), Fantasie (D 760, 1822), and Sechs Moments musicaux (D 780, 1823-28) that have emphases with the sustain pedal applied—the Sechs Moments more than the others. The impression we receive as the sound “blooms” or blossoms in the few hundreds of milliseconds after the chord’s strings have been struck and sympathetic resonances are established in other strings and in the soundboard amounts to a tactile/haptic sense of flow—of a “systolic” pushing of blood through large blood vessels, and of the blood vessels’ elasticity, acting as a “reservoir” with network-like capacitance to absorb the flow and to subsequently dissipate it in the rete of smaller vessels beyond.

I t requires a piano with an efficient, high-impedance soundboard with a high Q-factor (fast decay of high overtones). You can play around with these properties with the Pianoteq software if you like. The software enables you to alter or exaggerate the “bloom”—how quickly or slowly it develops after the hammer strikes the strings; how long it takes for it to ring-down and decay while the sustain pedal is depressed.

I n Lewis’s playing, we see the physical origins of the sound—besides the properties of the instrument itself, there are elements of his performance practice that contribute to his technique and the sound that it affords. For example, he places the piano bench very high—so that the top of the bench is almost even with the underside of the keyboard… Last night, it was only 2 cm lower than the surface of the flange that mounts the pedal mechanism to the underside of the Steinway Model “D”. The thighs slope downward, and this puts Lewis’s legs in an angle of slight extension—about 140° between the femur and the tibia shaft centerlines. His elbow is high as well—also in a position of slight extension.

L ewis’s pedaling technique involves, then, considerable so-called “concentric” contraction by the rectus femoris muscle of the right leg, in addition to the flexion of the ankle. The dynamics of Lewis’s right leg motions contributed substantially to the “blooming,” systolic sonic effects of the accent-sustains in these Schubert pieces.

W hy does this interest me? Because these pieces are introspective and quite emotional, and I want to think about how they came to be so. These pieces were created late in Schubert’s short life, after the consequences of his syphilis had begun to be apparent, and after his treatments with mercury compounds (one of the few modalities of “treatment” for syphilis in the 19th Century) had also begun to exert their neurotoxic side-effects.

W hile it is possible for those of us who are not musicians—who are not composers—to be oblivious to the rhythms of our bodies, to the rhythms of our life and of our mortality, it is pretty implausible that a composer, or any elite-level musician performer—would not notice. And, having noticed such things—especially abnormal things, changed or changing things, potentially life-threatening things—like the pulsatility of one’s heart that is altering day by day as it has to work harder; or palpitations of a chronic or sub-chronic abnormal heart rhythm; or the progressive dilatation of an abdominal aortic aneurysm; or the worsening of stenosis of the aortic valve in the heart, or worsening incompetence of the mitral valve—having noticed them, it is, I think, impossible for a composer not to attend to them. Impossible for those physical, kinesthetic effects not to creep into one’s music; impossible not to become a bit preoccupied or obsessed with such persistent sensory stimuli in one’s writing.

L ewis’s lucid, passionate, pulsatile playing of these late Schubert works last night—evocative as it was of preoccupations with systole, and pressure-wave run-off, and hemodynamics equations, and windkessel compliance, and vessel elastance and storage, and ventricular-arterial coupling, and how severe aortitis changes these things—caused me think of this. Life is short: compose like hell, while we can; play like hell, while we can.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Melvyn Tan: 19th-Century Conceptions of Self and Narrative

B etween 1837 and 1840 Liszt made no fewer than 44 transcriptions of Schubert lieder.”
— Derek Watson, p. 45.

T oday it is less necessary to defend the art of transcription, and arrangements are again part of the accepted repertoire. In the 20th Century the prevailing tendency to condemn them was a symptom of the age of radio, of recording, and of anti-Romanticism.”
— Derek Watson, p. 195.

T his was a concert of the choicest winter food, perfect for a cold, dark November London night—the sort of music that beautifully follows a meal of roasted autumn root vegetables, music that you can live off of, music to eat with a fork—the kind of savoury dish that even the most impassive of souls eye with envy when a waiter carries it by. Melvyn Tan gave us lots to contemplate, which we did with gratitude, ensconced in the warmest of red velvet Wigmore Hall seats.

T his program emphasized ‘autobiographical’ and ‘biographical’ narrative qualities, aspects that are a particular strength of Tan’s playing.

Schubert – 3 Klavierstücke, D.946
Liszt – transcriptions of Schubert: Sei mir gegrüsst, S. 558 No. 1; Auf dem Wasser zu singen, S. 558 No. 2; Du bist die Ruh, S. 558 No. 3; Liebesbotschaft, S. 560 No. 10; Ständchen (Horch, horch! die Lerch), S. 558 No. 9
Chopin – Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58

T he Klavierstücke came in at under 10-min, 11-min, and 5-min durations, the total of them about 1 minute faster than most recent recorded versions. The 4-min, 4-min, 5-min, 3-min, and 3-min durations of the Liszt transcriptions were closer to, say, conventional tempi (of, say, Murray Perahia), but the beauty of Tan’s speed here was the sense of ‘confession’ that it conferred. The overall effect was one of an inspired storyteller, telling sagas of tremendous import with great urgency and pressure-of-speech befitting the excitement and twists and turns of the plot.

T an’s ‘matter-of-fact’ pedaling technique, especially with the prompt releases in the ‘Du bist die Ruh’, added to the strong confessional, diaristic impression of his interpretation.

P laying this entire program from memory lends even more authority to the first-person, omniscient-narratorly effects that Tan conjures up.

I nevitably, that close and prolonged contact with another composer’s music [leaves] its mark on [one’s] own development—not least on his own Lieder.”
— Gerald Larner, program notes, 2010, remarking on the consequences for Liszt of years’ immersion in transcribing/arranging Schubert [consequences that have their parallel, I believe, on immersive performers like Tan].

T he seriousness and tenderness of the Chopin nocturne that Tan played as an encore touched every member of the audience… a wonderful reprise and a fine ending to a truly memorable evening!

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Christian Zacharias: Thematic Instability in Schubert’s Sonata in A major (D. 959)

T he opening theme chimes majestically, inner voices nestled between pedal points in the high and low registers. Schubert then responds with an arpeggiated triplet figure that forms the basis for much of the movement. Wide leaps, double thirds, and hand-crossings take us on a journey that maintains its majesty and lyricism. The slow movement, the Andantino, starts as a barcarolle but becomes tempestuous in its chaotic middle section. Musicologist John Reed calls it ‘probably the wildest outburst of fantasy Schubert ever committed to paper.’ Chromatic scales, trills, tremolandi and thunderous broken octaves become increasingly explosive in this central episode. Melody is abandoned. Order disintegrates into utter hysteria and despair. This is as close to an aural description of a physical and mental breakdown as Schubert will ever get, as he looks into the abyss. The movement returns to the simplicity and quietude of the opening. Melody and order are restored as the movement ends in tragic resignation.”
— Laurie Schulman, FCM program notes.

Context-dependent ambiguity must serve expressive purposes that the composer intends and that the performers and audience can grasp, or else it does no good. The first movement of the Schubert Piano Sonata in A Major (D. 959) has plenty of ambiguity to try and comprehend. Chord progressions that appear at the end of the movement are anticipated by earlier material in the movement. Without those anticipatory hints the ending would be ambiguous. Instead, the final statement of the progression provides a long-awaited, satisfying resolution. It is not a ‘retracing’ of a trail of ‘breadcrumbs’ Schubert left for us. It’s the tracing itself, coherently concluded. The two-chord voice-leading is crucial for how this ‘set-up’ and ‘resolution’ scheme works.

Viewed from this perspective, this movement is maybe more cohesive than some musicologists (Donald Tovey and others) have judged it to be. Brendel is, I think, closer to what I have in mind—in his writings (Fisk, too) and in his playing—and Zacharias seems to endorse this view as well in his performance tonight in Kansas City.

Tovey especially seems to have looked for orderly exposition and recapitulation as the way things should go. Schubert did not comply. The first movement of D. 959 arrives at its end not to recapitulate but to express itself forthrightly for the very first time.

Mozart and Haydn sonatas typically signal the beginning of the recapitulation with a return to the tonic and to the primary theme. Additionally, Mozart and Haydn usually emphasize the signalled return by restating the primary thematic material exactly as it appeared in the beginning, without changes in orchestration or melodic contour. Schubert doesn’t hold to this practice; or at least in D. 959 he broke the mould. The things that some writers have said are ‘chaotic’ in this sonata strike me instead as diaristic entries of extemporaneous musical thoughts by someone who knows he will likely die soon. It was September, 1828, when Schubert was editing the D. 959 manuscript, the fair-copy as we have it today. It was two months before his death. This was not for Schubert a time of conventional composerly exposition. What he instead gives us is a vivid essay on the end-of-life journey that was commencing and that he full-well knew was commencing.

The psychological effect of this sonata’s design can be unsettling—and surely this is what Schubert intended us to feel. “That’s strange! Schubert’s already heading for the ‘barn’. I must’ve missed the start of the recapitulation. But which bit that he’s played would we be recapitulating anyway?”

Christian Zacharias provided wonderful interpretations of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Op. 15, and Beethoven’s Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 7. But, for me, the most rewarding moments of the evening were in Zacharias’s inspired rendering of the Schubert. The audience responded with an immediate standing ovation. Superb performance, Christian!

W e tend to think of virtuosity as the musical equivalent of an extreme sport: lots of fast, loud, bravura passages that show off finger power and agility, ideally with enough originality in the phrasing to make the performance seem more than just whiz-bang display. But in his recital at the Rose Theater on Wednesday evening, pianist Christian Zacharias argued that virtuosity comes in other forms as well, most notably as an expression of patient introspection. That may seem counterintuitive, but some of Mr. Zacharias’s most electrifying playing was graceful and understated, with commanding gradations of tension. This was certainly true of his account of Schumann’s Kinderszenen. These are gentle pieces at heart, and Mr. Zacharias addressed most with a light touch that defined fantasy in terms of dreaminess.”
— Allan Kozinn, NYT, 23-FEB-2008.

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Schubert’s Polyphony and Non-accidental Accidentals: Peaceful Resistance & Portato

T o be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history, not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. And if we do act—in however small a way—we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of ‘presents’, and to live now—as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us—is itself a marvelous victory.”

— Howard Zinn, The Optimism of Uncertainty, The Nation, 02-SEP-2004

Schubert Sonata No. 21, 4th movement, m.85-90

CMT: Look at this! The fourth movement of Schubert’s Sonata No. 21 in B-flat. This polyphonic pattern has the fixed position distributed to a double-note and the playing voice distributed to the other three fingers as a melodic figure. It transforms into a delicate and ethereal texture.

DSM: And look back in the first movement. Schubert’s Romanticism here is a harmonic proposition: the entire theme is played out over a dominant prolongation. And his Romanticism is also a motivic proposition: the portato notes (portato, notes against resistance, caressing notes) headed always for the dissonance/resolution. The portato is played by sounding the note for about half of the note's duration; the other half of the duration is to be treated as a rest. A portato is notated by placing a slur above the desired notes which themselves are written with "staccato" markings. The musical heaves and sighs (the crescendos and descrescendos) contribute to this . . .

CMT: The ongoing crescendo meets an “accident” of a portato. And, in place of B-flat major diatonic tones, we get the “accidental” E-natural in bar 11 and 37 (bars 136 and 162 on the repeat). Except that the “mistake” is really beautiful. It’s no kind of accident at all, in the normal sense. It’s a wayward deviation from the sunny path. Comical almost, in the way that an infant can be comical. It’s not a self-conscious E-natural against the F. The E-natural is just straying from the trail a little bit. It doesn’t threaten; it doesn’t demand attention. It’s just a sweet little E-natural on a leash.

DSM: Let’s rip an MP3 sample of it and edit the MP3 sample in MPtrimPRO. MPtrimPRO has a feature that lets you easily and accurately set the ‘begin’ and ‘end’ frame for creating your MP3 clip by using the position of the piece in WinAmp. You pause WinAmp where you want to set the ‘beginning’ of your clip, and then you go to MPtrimPRO (the ‘How much do you want to trim?’ form) and click on the ‘W’ in the ‘begin’ part of the form. Then you fast-forward in WinAmp to where you want to set the ‘end’ of your clip, and go to MPtrimPRO and click on the other ‘W’ in the ‘end’ part of the form. If you want to check to make sure that you set the frame the way you want it, just click on the play-arrow in the MPtrimPRO form and listen to the frame, delimited according to the settings you just created. If you need to adjust the settings you can do it from MPtrimPRO directly (using the time form controls) or from WinAmp. It’s possible to make nice MP3 illustrations for teaching or other purposes pretty easily in this way, taking advantage of the interoperability between MPtrimPRO and WinAmp. Here’s a clip of the bars we were just talking about:

CMT: We also see in this first Molto Moderato movement of D960 an example of how Schubert handles recapitulations. The recapitulation of the phrase you just cited occurs in bar 352.

DSM: And there are more chromatic “accidents,” too. The B-sharp in the left hand in bar 253. The dark, passing intrusion is like a musical interjection. Within a predominantly sunny B-flat major work, it’s a reference to a dissonant inflection from some other narrative, some other piece of music. This is late in Schubert’s life. The B-sharp accidental is a tiny commentary on how Life goes—dissonances, mess and all!

CMT: But bar 11 and bar 253 are “benign” compared to the “accident” in bar 464! The crescendo-decrescendo on the G that looks like a resolution of the F-sharp just dissolves. The resolution dissolves. It lets us know how tenuous and fleeting any security we may have can be! The F-sharp is no ordinary “accidental”. It is an emblem of the uncertainty of the human condition. Yes, it passes. But its effect is corrosive!

DSM: And, in the second movement—in the Andante Sostenuto—look at the B-sharp in bar 32:

and its restatement in bar 121:

CMT: The F-doublesharp in the left hand in bar 121 lends a bit of solace to it. The effect is like a kindly grandparent telling us that things will be alright! Doesn’t it seem that way to you?

DSM: Yes. But it depends on your fingering, I think. The Nineteenth Century fingering systems—Kullak’s The Aesthetics of Pianoforte Playing, Liszt’s Technical Exercises for Pianoforte, Pischna’s Technical Studies, Czerny’s, and Dohnanyi’s Essential Finger Exercises—are now supplemented by Tansescu’s treatise, which is recently translated. Dragos Tanasescu applies mathematical permutation formulas to technical patterns of keyboard performance, to devise polyrhythmic patterns to be practiced between voices in polyphonic exercises and new transposition alternatives. The permutations each have a somewhat different color.

CMT: While Tansescu’s intent was predominantly a pedagogical one, the effect of examining the many permutations is to (re-)discover the many nuances of views and attitudes that different fingerings can lend to a passage.

DSM: Charles Fisk explains how Schubert’s views and attitudes toward his own life may well have shaped his music in the years shortly before his death. Fisk’s book on Schubert is based on evidence from the composer’s original correspondence, his song texts and his written letters, and from his vocal and instrumental compositions. Noting extraordinary aspects of tonality, structure, and gestural content, Fisk argues that Schubert was trying to relieve his sense of exile. He was also, according to Fisk, trying to cope with his sense of mortality—his anticipation of an imminent death from syphilis. Fisk performs careful analyses of the structure and correspondences in the Schubert works that he explores. He identifies in them some detailed musical narratives that relate to the themes of mortality, alienation, hope, and desire. Schubert’s views of these likely informed his composing.

CMT: Besides that, it’s important to consider the political situation in Vienna late in Schubert’s life. Vienna was not a sweet sylvan place of gardens and waltzes at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. The peacetime was filled with repression and censorship, and Vienna was a city where the safest thing was to stay inside. There was an aura of fear, as we see in Erikson’s book. Unlike his Beethoven, who moved in higher social circles and was relatively immune to political pressure, Schubert occupied a middle-class station in life and had to be careful. But music was maybe the safest of the arts, because, given its abstractness, it was impossible to prove that a composer was expressing subversive political ideas in a particular piece. Vienna essentially became a police-state during Schubert’s adulthood. Schubert’s posture as a musician is, in some ways, not unlike that of Howard Zinn as a historian . . . Schubert’s accidentals are intimations of moral intercession; acknowledgments of principled resistance . . .

DSM: Several Schubert biographies make some note of Schubert’s self-destructive behavior and his ambivalent sexuality, as well as his growing isolation and anxiety in his long final illness. These factors all contribute to D960, the Sonata No. 21 in B-flat that he wrote just a few months before his death in 1828. The subdued, yearning inwardness is other-worldly in spots. The opening theme is grand and resigned. But the rumbling trill in the left hand disrupts the serenity. You can feel Death hovering nearby. The slow movement, with its turbulent middle section, seems like a fare-thee-well gesture. Buchbinder’s varied touch and color are perfectly suited to this Sonata. His phrasing is clear but fluid, like that of a consummate storyteller. He makes the fingering complexities in this piece appear effortless.

CMT: Well, maybe not effortless—but more like the blazing ember of a young person dying of cancer. There is an energy that Buchbinder draws upon that animates this piece in a manner that suggests Schubert himself in his last months or weeks. Very convincing. It is as though Schubert knows what is coming, knows the bad end that will soon befall him, but finds the energy to defy it—to stave it off for awhile. Buchbinder’s interpretive liberties feel just right, and his expressiveness is deeply felt.

DSM: He takes some liberties, true, but they are never sentimental ones. His rendering of the first movement of D960 is flowing and has a certain puissance but at the same time manages to be serene, dreamlike, somehow above-the-world.

CMT: The second movement is slow but cohesive. ‘Collected’ if you are a horse person. The scherzo is lightning fast, but it remains light and crisp; it is virtuosic without drawing attention to its virtuosity. In Buchbinder’s hands, the finale is also nimble but never rushed. His performance was superb throughout, but the Schubert is what really brought the audience to its feet!

DSM: The challenges of Schubert’s music to interpreters are many, both technically and emotionally. Schubert once exclaimed, “Das Zeug soll der Teufel spielen!” (‘Such stuff the Devil should play!’) when converging on the finale of the Wanderer Fantasy. The D960 has something of that in it.