jwilzewske: tovey

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Razumovsky Ensemble’s Account of Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat

Octet: Winfried Rademacher, Alexander Sitkovetsky, Laura Samuel, Anna-Liisa Bezrodny, Krzysztof Chorzelski, Barbara Doll, Oleg Kogan, Gemma Rosefield

O ur soul—how like the water! Our Fate—how like the wind!”
— Goethe.

It is difficult to find words that could possibly enhance enjoyment of the [Op. 20 Octet] Scherzo: [it is] at once a perfect and sufficient piece of abstract music and the most vivid tone-painting of wind-swept, cloud-wracked Nature: it is all gossamer, filigree, fugitive enchantment.”
— Hugh Wood.

The study of Mendelssohn has been ‘hot’ in recent years, and attention has focused on Mendelssohn’s identity. Jeffrey Sposato, professor at Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, in particular discusses Mendelssohn’s response to his Jewish heritage. There are examples of cadences composed by Mendelssohn and their close correspondence to cadences in Jewish ritual chants. It is easy to be reminded of this while listening to this famous early composition by Mendelssohn, presented by the Razumovsky Ensemble tonight at Wigmore Hall in London.

The 1825 Octet] attempted to capture the spirit of the last stanza of the Walpurgis Night dream in Faust: ‘The flight of the clouds and the veil of mist / Are lighted from above. / A breeze in the leaves, a wind in the reeds, / And all has vanished.’ One feels so near the world of spirits...”
— Jeffrey Sposato, The Price of Assimilation, p. 111.

It is reflexive, not deliberative; the narrative trajectory of this Octet is dramatic and impulsive. There is an energy of motion that is enhanced by the power of the eight instruments. The extrovertedness of the Octet is amazing—that of the then-16 year-old Mendelssohn—and is unlike the tempered, conciliatory, non-athletic dialogues of, say, Op. 44 and beyond. Larry Todd has a nice analysis of Op. 20 in his Mendelssohn biography, beginning at page 151.

Rather than a mere doubling of a quartet, Mendelssohn approached the writing as if it were an eight-piece orchestra. That much is conventional wisdom. But, to me, it seems that the biographers and historians have, to date, been writing hagiography; none has seriously considered what it must’ve been to write this piece as a teenager.

Mendelssohn composed his Octet for strings soon after his family had moved into a big house in the Leipzigerstrasse on the outskirts of Berlin. On the grounds was a garden house which had a room large enough to seat a sizeable audience for the family’s Sunday morning chamber music performances, which involved a number of Herr Mendelssohn’s musician friends. Mendelssohn presented the Octet to his string teacher, Julius Reitz, as a birthday gift. He wrote the soaring violin phrases at the beginning of the first movement in hopes of pleasing his teacher, but he was careful to provide meaty enough parts for the rest of the ensemble as well. This is the context that is seldom mentioned, in biographies or in program notes for this piece.

Octets for strings show signs of ‘clotting’ into an orchestral style. Spohr hit upon the device of dividing the eight into antiphonal quartets: and his four double quartets are much nearer to the true style of chamber music than his string quartets … But Mendelssohn, in the wonderful Octet, does not find Spohr’s simple antiphonal scheme worth the trouble of specially grouping the players when he can instead use 255 different combinations of the eight without enquiring how they are seated.”
— Donald Tovey.

How badly we need a detailed exploration of Mendelssohn’s notes with Fanny or other evidence—to see what frame of mind he was in during those months when this Octet was composed! This Octet is not a narrative of Jewish assimilation into Protestant Berlin; it is instead, I believe, a narrative of a precocious and eager-to-please teen’s assimilation into Leipzig adult culture. It is a story not of Jewish identity per se so much as it is a story of teen identity. Have a look at the books by Deborah Browning and Jane Kroger (links below) to explore this line of thought.

The Razumovsky Ensemble gave an enthusiastic reading of the Octet tonight that lends credence to the contextual importance of teenage identity and exuberance. The Razumovskys are an ad hoc assemblage of different world class soloists who are convened by Kogan for particular programs, based on their individual proclivities and repertoire affinities.

In 1989 Oleg Kogan won the All-Soviet Union Cello Competition. He has performed with orchestras including the Moscow Philharmonic, the Latvian State Symphony Orchestra, the Geneva Chamber Orchestra and London Soloist Chamber Orchestra and has given recitals in France, Germany, Holland, Israel, Switzerland and the U.K. In 1998 he became founded the Razumovsky Ensemble, a group of dynamic soloists and section leaders from world-class orchestras based in London. Tonight’s beautiful and illuminating performance was just one configuration of Oleg’s many friends and colleagues.

Mainstream kids do assimilate more smoothly and easily into social situations and their own neighborhoods, but often it is the children with out-of-the-box characteristics, who have the ability to make a significant and inspiring contribution to their community and the talent and vision to change the world in a positive way.”
— Stephanie Lerner, Kids Who Think Outside the Box, p. 3.

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.