Note: This article contains a music track auto-generated by YouTube which might not be playable outside the USA. There are several other performances available there, though.
I'll never stop singing the praises of Herbert Howells (1892-1983), one of the greatest British composers of all time in my humble opinion. Widely known for his choral music, Howells also excelled in instrumental music of all shapes and sizes, including his brass band classic Pageantryand his luscious Rhapsodic Quintet. Far lower on the fame rung are his piano works, few of which were published in his lifetime, perhaps due to the fact that he never had a really big work (no sonatas like Bax or Tippett) except for large sets, chiefly his brilliant Elizabethan throwback sets Lambert's Clavichord and Howells's Clavichord. In the late '90's Thames Publishing, a sheet music outfit I've never heard of before, published a two-volume collection of his shorter piano works with dreadfully dull green covers, and for the benefit of everybody who likes good things the most wonderful Margaret Fingerhut recorded a pile of those works along with a couple previously published: selections from Lambert's Clavichord and one of his last works, a Sonatina written for a piano competition. I'll get to more Howells later (especially the Two Folk Dances recorded on that same album), but for now I'd like to look at a piece which should have long ago become a standard encore piece, not just for piano concerts but for pretty much any concert - and considering how beautiful the piece is I'd bet even big-time composers would work for free just to get the chance to arrange it.
The introduction to the Thames edition sums it up quite nicely:
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That's quite a bit of backstory for such a short piece, a mere 16 bars, but its concentrated artistry and resounding beauty justify its lengthy, personal germination. Howells was very much a Pastoralist, my label for the English style of Impressionism that dominated the first half of the 20th century on the fair isles, and here we have one of his most soulful tunes, obviously influenced by his native folk music but crafted for maximum harmonic depth. It was originally published for violin and piano as part of a set but to be honest I think a violin would only rupture the hymn-like perfection of the part-writing. There aren't many pieces I would call "perfect", as perfection requires a great deal of restraint to achieve consistency and a lack of unnecessary elements. Heck, one of my favorite pieces of music is Stravinsky's Petrushka, a ballet crammed with so many ideas it seems like he thought he'd never write again, so while it's far from a rigorously "perfect" piece it's still amazing. The 'Chosen' Tune is perfect, perfect in its brevity, its craftsmanship and its timeless resonance. It's so perfect that talking about it any longer is useless, so let's hear Ms. Fingerhut and have a warming Sunday evening in these cold days.
Thanks for Hayk Melikyan for supplying the score for this article!
With a new job still taking time away from my productiveness and a lot of performing at the beginning of the month my big Nikolay Tcherepnin article is still in the works, but thankfully a leaf has fallen into my lap that begs for articlizing. This descent into blog eligibility came about oddly compared to much of the music I cover here in that I heard the piece before seeing the score. Shocking, I know! But this is the way it'd probably be without a little help from my friends, as no amount of internetty searching could give me any solid info on this:
If you heard the Tcherepnin works from the Baba Yaga article and the article of his 6 Horn Quartets this should come as unexpectedly as a voice from beyond the grave. This "Old Russian Song" is a rare piece for piano right hand alone, a genre that hasn't gotten much attention as many pieces already feel like they're for the right hand alone (...Chopin...). It took me ages to find the score for this piece, as eventually I had to resort to contacting the pianist, Hayk Melikyan, through his official Facebook page - eventually his manager sent me a scan and I can't stop thanking them for their help as otherwise I probably would have never found this piece.
As far as I can tell this piece has only been published in a mid-1980's Soviet collection edited by Nikolay Kopchevsky (...who?...) and I still don't know if it's part of a larger set. It's a minor revelation in what can be done with a single hand, putting all its chips on pacing, right-hand dexterity and pedalled atmosphere and winning big. Most composers don't have the guts to write music this sparse and precious, always going for Bigger rather than Better, and I've long admired these kinds of pieces, such as when Persichetti proved that his simplest song could also be one of his most powerful. This is definitely a piece from late in Tcherepnin's career, during a period of wistful experimentation that included his enchantingly oblique Sentimental Pieces (another Forgotten Leaves candidate) - the dramatic arc is flat and repetitive, forward motion is nil and the harmonies are insinuated through Syrinx-esque chromatic trailing. And, man, how many people I'd kill to have thought of that final denoument. Hayk Melikyan's performance is arresting in its sensitivity and amplification of Tcherepnin's subtleties and little brilliances, making this a heck of an interlude on your next mixtape, and maybe my next recital. Surprisingly great work all around, and hopefully you won't have to wait too much longer for the Big Tcherepnin Show...
A featured composer this month on these blogs is Nikolay Tcherepnin, the first in line in the mighty Tcherepnin compositional dynasty, carried forth by his more famous son Alexander Tcherepnin (author of that dang Bagatelle) and his lesser-known son Ivan Tcherepnin (a guy we might be getting to in a future article). He closed out my Baba Yaga article a bit ago and you'll be seeing the Big Show article in the coming days but here's a skinny version: Nikolay Tcherepnin (1873-1945) was one of the best students of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov and inherited his mentor's deftness for orchestration and advanced harmonies and taste for the fantastic, writing for the Ballet Russes with great success and generally kicking ass and taking names. That Big Show article is going to go over a LOT of music and discuss his place in both Russian and French musical history, so before we get navel-deep in his oeuvre let's dip a toe first with a peek at his excellent contribution to an unfortunately neglected instrumental grouping.
French horns have a reputation for being the most difficult instrument in the standard orchestra to play next to the bassoon, but it makes up for its technical beastness with a warm, pleasant tone, graceful technique and a wide note range. Because of this horn ensembles have a special appeal and surprising effectiveness, and the most common of these is the horn quartet. One nice thing about these groups is that you can just use the same instruments and get full coverage from soprano to bass, so quartets are both attractive and economical, allowing players to switch parts easily. The most famous piece for horn quartet is probably the 1952 Sonata by Paul Hindemith, a work that stuck in the mind of Michael Tippett when he wrote his own horn quartet in 1957, also a Sonata. Other modern composers to tackle the genre include Jean Françaix, Carlos Chavez, Christian Wolff and Leslie Bassett, a richly diverse bunch if I ever saw one, as well as a heap of lesser-known composers whose contributions to the oeuvre could be worth a spin. As for the last (*COUGH* ONE BEFORE LAST GOOD SIR *COUGH*) century the coverage is spottier and mostly relegated to third banana names. Tchaikovsky wrote a short Adagio when still in school and scored it for horn quartet, though I can't tell if he meant it to actually be played with four horns or he was just sick of writing string quartets; a Notturno by Rimsky-Korsakov gets played frequently but I couldn't find the score; and some other works pop up which seem like they're not worth our time. However, our good friend Nikolay took a crack at it in 1910 and came up with six elegant miniatures, published as his op. 35 and freely available on IMSLP. Not only are they some of the most charming and assured brass ensemble works of la Belle Epoque but five of the six are leaf-sized, making them an easy fit for this October's slate of articles.
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Things begin preciously with a "Nocturne" in D-flat, the best nocturne key in my humble opinion, and eschews the pianistic nocturne signature of bass arpeggios with a more manageable contrapuntal tack. The part-writing here is accomplished without being showy, essential for the mood, and the distant quality of the horn timbre, as well as the tendency by hornists to avoid vibrato, makes this opening as satisfying as it is quiet.
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The second quartet is an "Old German Folk Song", once again given the air of a melody drifting across an alpine valley. The melody is allowed more sweetness to start and later echoed at pp, only to be all shook up by fanfarish interjections. There are small details that add to the atmosphere of the piece, a notable one being the quite long pedal tones in the fourth horn, especially that last one, letting the melody repeat into nothingness as if watching the setting sun. The most important detail, however, are the moments of silence, and if pulled off well they can be essential dramatic statements, proving that silence is the most underrated aspect of music.
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The fourth piece is in the rare "Choeur dansé" form ("Dancing Chorus"), one that I've only ever seen in a scant handful of other pieces:the closing movement of Lyadov's 8 Russian Folk Songs, op. 58, a piece for string quartet by Rimsky-Korsakov written for a collaborative set with Glazunov and Lyadov, a number from a ballet by Jacques Herz (who?) and one of a set of piano pieces by Nikolay Shcherbachyov, another student of Rimsky-Korsakov's who may or may not appear in these blogs (and who also had two relations who were composers, a distant cousin and a nephew). It's most likely a Russian folk song form that I'm unfamiliar with and hasn't been used much outside of Rimsky-Korsakov's circle (that Herz piece might mean something else, for example), combining heavy chordal writing with lively rhythms. This is one of the more anodyne ones but isn't without quaint charm, and is arguably the one most likely to be heard in a turn-of-the-century gazebo being performed by a municipal group, much like the Oskar Boehme Sextet.
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Arguably the loveliest of the set is no. 5, "A Russian Folk Song", very Russian indeed and incredibly delicate. The gradual introduction of interweaving lines is so fine as to send shivers down the spine, and you don't often see a canon at the unison but dang does it ever work here. Once again Tcherepnin lets certain players stand alone in a field, never using too many notes, and generally writes the song that makes the young girls cry*.
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The closing quartet is a grand chorale, based on "A Mighty Fortress is Our God", one of the best-known hymn tunes of all time. Each section of the melody is spiced with little moving parts and harmonic subtleties, keeping things fresh even as they're as old as time, a stirring end to a stirring set. There's one missing here, though, and while I can't talk about it because of its length I can certainly show it, and I can note that it's an excellent bridge between 2 and 4 and easily the most exciting one of the set.
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I can also toss in this performance, one that really shows off the round tone and expressive capabilities of the horn. See you in the big Tcherepnin tchowcase...
~PNK
*Under no circumstances will I apologize to Barry Manilow for my actions.
Much like the hullabaloo created by the revival of Entartete Musik - music suppressed by the Third Reich - there was similar hubbub when, around the same time, there was a big revival of Russian Classical composers who were suppressed by the Soviet Empire. Most of this music, though much of it was written before the revolution, was created in that wonderful window of the first decade of the U.S.S.R.'s existence, ending around 1928 or '29 when hearings were held decrying Avant-Garde music as "formalist" and not fitting the Social Realism that was gaining traction in the government's eye. This first decade, what I call the Lunacharsky* era, was presided over by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet People's Commissar of Education, who was ousted by Stalin during his rise to power. Lunacharsky was an interesting figure, one that was able to run the state censorship board while allowing many fascinating artistic movements, such as Futurism and Constructivism, to work with the freedom they'd had in the previous decade, as well as saving many historic buildings from destruction by the Bolsheviks by arguing for their architectural value. The Classical music being written at this time was some of the most invigoratingly original music to ever come out of Russia, taking the baton from Scriabin's late mystical music and running in all sorts of incredible directions, creating what I think of as the Scriabinist school. While there were a ton of great composers working during this period and the years leading up to it three in particular were singled out as the most important composers of the time. Two of them, Alexander Mosolov and Arthur Lourié, excelled brilliantly in Futurism, "machine music", such as Mosolov's The Foundry, and striking experiments in engraving. The third, Nikolai Roslavets, was dubbed the "Russian Schoenberg" for his experiments in "synthetic chords". Roslavets flew right out of the gate with his first compositions in the 1910's, crafting passionate, dark rhapsodies in strikingly exotic harmonies, using them so naturally that the pieces surge with depth and meaning. His emotional range was so great that he wrote his blackly iridescent Three Etudes for piano (1914) -
- relatively hot on the heels of the lush impressionism of his Nocturne for oboe, two violas, cello and harp (1913), one of the most ingenious unused chamber groupings I've ever seen, so unique that it is literally the only piece in its genre:
It's easy to see that Roslavets never had to sacrifice the heart of his music in order to push boundaries, and his craftsmanship and sincerity weren't stunted even when he became a victim of political maneuvering and purges like so many of the best and brightest of his generation and he was forced to simplify and "tonalize" his language. After his death his apartment was ransacked by a Soviet goon squad and many of his scores were confiscated; a lot of them are lost to this day. Luckily we still have most of his work and many previously lost scores have been reconstructed, making everything in print one way or another. I was lucky to find a collection of his piano pieces at a used bookstore of all places, and among them were some of my favorite Roslavets pieces, the Five Preludes (1919-22), which ends with a disarmingly wistful ditty.
While the Preludes are all written in Roslavets's highly individual Scriabinist language, the fifth prelude is a fond look back at tonality. The extended tonal chord progressions are almost too traditional even for the more conservative composers of his time, banking heavily on the great sensitivity that seasoned performers of Scriabinist music get so good at. This idea is actually more Schoenbergian than you'd think, as he ended his 1913 free atonal song cycle Pierrot Lunaire with a song that makes meaningful reference to the key of E major called "O Alter Duft", or "O Scent of Old". While Schoenberg's use of major chords was more ironic than sentimental, very much fitting the pessimism and horror of the cycle, it seems that Roslavets needed the solace and warmth of the circle of fifths. The older I get the more I realize that the only thing that really helps a piece of art become timeless is sincerity and hopefully the world will be able to see Roslavets's music as being more timeless than most - the fact that you can get many of his scores for free here is a good start.
The recent resurrection of the amazing works of Vytautas Bacevicius has put a new face on Lithuanian classical music, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that the bulk of American music lovers didn't know Lithuania even had a face of classical music. This is understandable, as Lithuania is a small country tucked away in a corner of what was the Eastern Bloc for most of the 20th century, and before that the most exposure it got artistically might have been its passing inclusion in Alfred Jarry's batshit anti-art masterpiece Ubu Roi. However, one name did rise to international prominence at the beginning of the 20th century, not only in music but in painting and literature - Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis. A dedicated proponent of the symbolist movement, Ciurlionis crafted a considerable body of paintings and musical pieces that show a vivid and fearless imagination with an emphasis on epic fantasy and rich aesthetics. Before we get to his music I need to show more of Ciurlionis's boss paintings:
Now that's the kind of thing that inspires people to go to art school. It's clear that Ciurlionis had a passion for unique naturalism, and few piano pieces of his live up to that goal better than The Nightingale, op. 19, no. 3:
Many of Ciurlionis's pieces are miniatures in a Scriabinist vein, though the textures and harmonies he uses are very different, leaning towards sturm und drang forebodingness. One wouldn't think that a nightingale would inspire creeping dread but Ciurlionis did it and did it with real craftsmanship. The piece is essentially variations on an ostinato, the first measure in the left hand transposed and unfurled over and over while a right hand whistles and dances in the air. The melodic figures here are highly chromatic and skewed towards odd angles, deftly imitative of how varied and improvisatory the song of the nightingale really is. His tempo marking, Con grazia e rubato, quasi un' improvvisazione, allows the pianist to bend and sworl through the bird's turning song, and this pianist takes great and wonderful license in this regard. It's a great addition to a long line of fascinating nightingale pieces (though nothing will beat Ervin Schulhoff's Bass Nightingale) and a sly introduction to Ciurlionis's very personal music, and at leaf length what more could you need?
My introduction to Max Reger (1873-1916) came from an amusing book called The Best, the Worst and the Most Unusual, an overview of notable achievements in (mostly Western) literature, sports, music and the arts as decided by a wide survey of critics in the mid-70's. Reger's name popped up as the "worst" composer, and the entry rattled off a number of eccentric and unattractive details of Reger's personality and biography (including his odd dietary habits, obviously the most germane factor in assessing one's oeuvre) while inaccurately calling him out as attempting to blend modern classical techniques with 16th century marching band music, while not a single piece of his displays that particular genre as an influence. Reger was enormously prolific during his brief composing career, writing over 150 works of often striking complexity and craftsmanship in a wide variety of instrumentations, always sticking to the grand "absolute music" tradition of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. His style pushes tonal writing to its breaking point in terms of daisy-chained diminished chords, gnarly counterpoint and Wagnerian denial of the tonic, and part of his quixotic reputation comes from how he would sometimes take such leaps in tonal logic that the development from one key to the next would be so abrupt as to give the listener whiplash. I'll admit that I don't like every work of his I've heard but I'll never fault someone for trying as hard as they can within their own artistic language.He was especially skilled at writing fugues and managed to churn out dozens of them despite their being very difficult to write - I know, as I took fugue class at two different schools and mostly wrote crap. One of his most celebrated works, the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by J. S. Bach, op. 81, ends with a 7-1/2-minute fugue that is among the greatest I've ever heard (though nothing will top this one by this guy). On a more modest scale, we've got this little guy:
This fughetta lacks an opus number but was written in 1916, the year of his untimely death of a heart attack at age 43. The "deutschlandlied" is Deutschland uber Alles, the German national anthem, and Reger was correct in thinking that it would make a nice subject for a fugue with its clear stepwise motion and neat harmonic progression. While this is far from the thickest of the Reger fugues little chromatic squibbles are still present and the piece serves as a good introduction to his habit of logically elliptical harmonic motion. The end has that dark, accented quality that the end of Bach's fugues often take on and prompted Arnold Bax to say that the finales of Bach pieces sound like "the running of a sewing machine". Either way you slice it the Fughette is a congenial leaf that would make a fine encore to an all-Germanic piano recital, and it's nice that, when the pianist Markus Becker mounted a multi-CD overview of Reger's complete piano output, he didn't forget this piece.
In the age of the Inter-Butz it's easy to forget that not every scrap of information one could glean from the 'net is actually gleanable. In spite of how obscure most of the figures and works I cover here are I've usually been able to get enough info for a good paragraph and some change - not so with today's subject, Annette Dieudonné. Dieudonné became a student of Nadia Boulanger in the 1910's and after fourteen years took up the duty as herPA for most of her life. Her bio stops about there pretty much every place you look. As I'm no Boulanger expert I probably wouldn't have ever heard of her if not for my own efforts to look over every single French piano piece written in the 1910's and 20's. Those surely well-used efforts unearthed a 1922 set of piano pieces, the Douze Images en Courtes Preludés, and once again I'm pleased to be defending well-crafted modesty.
Each image is conveniently (for FL) only a page long, and few of them are much more difficult than this one. They're most certainly pedagogical pieces and appear to be the only piano pieces Dieudonné was able to get published; all her other published works are sacred choral music. Her style is amiably clear and straightforward, totally entrenched in a kind of bittersweet elegance particular to French composers of the 1910's. Even pieces one would expect to be extroverted, like "The Weasel"-
-still focus on rich voicing and serious harmonies, as if the weasel was dancing a courante at Fauré's birthday party. I get the feeling that Dieudonné had little interest in extroversion, and diffuse color tricks like the right hand's lydian/myxolydian rippling in "The Garden's Tranquil Water-Path" resonated more in her soul.
That isn't to say that "The Weasel" was her only attempt at humor, as "The Parakeets' Cage" squawks appropriately (though not without effective modal voicing, of course):
"Cypress Alley" is the most lugubrious of the bunch, its marching mountains of a left hand straight out of Debussy (such as the Berceuse Heroique") but might be closer to Holst in execution, and it takes a good 30 seconds for a flat to appear. The succeeding "Lullaby" features much lighter voicing, showcasing how the light pinging of upper-register secondal intervals with the pedal down are great representations for sleepy recognition of the world's troubles, and is no poor shakes in the vast and wonderful piano lullaby rep.
Methinks that Dieudonné had a liking for birds and perfect fifths, and "The Aviary" goes whole hog on both fronts. This isn't as tricky as it looks, but keeping the hands from running into each other is a special practice session all its own. Actually, the most difficult part is the rhythmic precision required to land the bass-clef fifths in measure 6 and similar measures. The quintal harmonies turn to quartal, and far more plodding, in the following piece, "The Poor in Church". There's a sense of depressed plainchant, as Dieudonné presumably thought the Poor would bring the sorrows of the world to Church. I'm not sure what the grace notes in the left hand are - perhaps the Church's organist playing the notes sloppily? Though that's the problem with trying to interpret tone-painting - there's no end to it and you'll most likely overshoot the author's intentions.
Well, enough of that - here's a clown!
(If I'm being terribly honest, this one's my least favorite simply because it doesn't go far enough. You need a lot of pyrotechnics and zip to make clown pieces work (like Debussy's "Général Lavine - eccentric") and this one just isn't wacky enough. You also need an excellent pianist with a lot of 'tude to really clown the place up and not every serious pianist has the nerve to put a lot of work into clown music.)
"The Old Carriage" is another sad piece, eschewing the humor of a broken-down carriage (or car, I'm not sure which one she's referring to) in favor of lost strength. The alternating seconds (from D/E to D/E-flat) intimates creaking unease, but once again perfect fourths and fifths lead the way.
"Bells on a Festival Morning" is pretty self-explanatory, requiring as much pedal as one can get without getting overwhelmingly jangly...or should it?
The set ends with "Clear Paths", possibly the most philosophical piece in the bunch. A study in parallel motion, the piece exudes a calm and confidence that makes for a holistically reassuring ending. The whole set is reassuring, a warm and sane contribution to the less-difficult piano rep and a nice resource for piano teachers looking for something left-of-center. I'd be interested to see Dieudonné's sacred works as I'm sure they're welcome siblings to the sacred works of the Boulangers, which means we'd most certainly be in good hands. Annette Dieudonné might be the most obscure figure I'll discuss this WHM but her sole piano work is worth more than a footnote in history. I was considering making my own recording of these works, as there is no commercial recording, but thankfully Emile Naoumoff, Nadia Boulanger's last student, made a fine interpretation for his YouTube channel. In case non-jazz improvisation interests you Naoumoff has been making daily improvisations for some time now. Either way it's good that someone's looking out for the little gal, and people like him are exactly what Women's History Month needs.
After much rumination I regret to announce that I don't "get" Vittorio Rieti (1898-1994). A man who saw the entirety of the 20th century pass before him, his grew out of the post-WWI Italian Avant-Garde and honed a semi-ironic Neoclassical voice, only deepening his own groove long after his work became marginalized in an uncaring America. He's one of those rare cases where I have trouble telling whether or not he's serious or ironic in his mature style, a burbling, deceptively simple approach that is as close as one can get to a Neoclassical counterpart to Max Reger's swiftly tilting Romanticism. A charitable interneter uploaded a bunch of his piano works to Scorser, Russia's response to IMSLP's copyright crackdowning, and you can click here to stick a toe in Rietian waters (but only click the "PDF" buttons). I've managed to record a few particularly accomplished miniatures, including these two works from his 6 Short Pieces (1932), "Elegy" and "Barcarole":
Both of those works exhibit his mature style with grace and unexpected beauty, though they occasionally swoop through their chord changes a bit quickly for my taste. The third piece I recorded comes from a decade earlier, the opening to his Avant-Garde miniature set Briciole (literally "Crumbs").
One of a handful of his works in the public domain (available here as a Google Books scan), Briciole is the most available works from his striking early days as a Futurist. Featuring a satirical blend of Chopin and Debussy, a Marionette dance and two pieces about music boxes, the "Berceuse" is the best and easiest to advertise of the set. Using a simple, hypnotic rhythmic structure, Rieti bets all his chips on pinging, clustered harmonies and plays to win. The audience is given a stepwise melody to follow, meaning that thick chords, such as the mid-register clusters in measure 3 don't seem like cheap special effects, and liberal pedal use brings out the nocturnal mystery of his textures. The slightly differing, icy arpeggios up high are a particularly subtle effect, high enough that holding down the pedal blurs them enough to the point that the listener can't tell how they differ but know something's up. The lullaby has no real conclusion, just a variation and final sparkle as the sleeper falls into the Deep. While I can't say I'll become a huge fan of Rieti his Berceuse is a strange and inviting window into the hall of mirrors that was inter-war European experimentalism, though ultimately it may lead to an entirely unseen realm.
Perhaps it's due to the glut of brilliant talents that French classical music produced at the fin de siècle, but even a cursory glance at the compositional scene of the day shows that France had no shortage of regional heroes. Paris has always been the center of culture in France, and a combination of a healthy reaction to that kind of artistic exclusivity and increasingly prominent efforts to collect European folk music saw a number of composers celebrate their regional heritage through their works, such as Guy Ropartz with Brittany and quite notably Joseph Canteloube with Auvergne, whose Chants d'Auvergne are sung quite frequently. Heck, I would've covered Joseph-Ermend Bonnal on one of these blogs earlier if recordings of his stuff weren't so hard to find, and his heritage included the Basque region that stretches across both Southwestern France and Northeastern Spain. Likewise, Déodat de Séverac's most written-of attribute is his celebration of his Languedoc heritage. Séverac (1872-1921) is one of those outer Impressionists that I've always known about but never really explored, partially due to his music never really taking flight with Impressionist technique and as such getting lost in the shuffle. That isn't to say that his music isn't worth investigating - he's just a slightly awkward 'tweener, clearly enamored with the musical elite around him but unsure of how to make their art his own. He is mostly remembered for his piano works, including the ambitious pictorial suites En Languedoc and Cerdaña, and there are plenty of recordings of his piano works (including an exquisite oeuvres complètes series by Satie champion Aldo Ciccolini. The other piece of his that still gets played is much shorter than those - in fact so short it can be written on a leaf.
I'll freely admit that Séverac's setting of the Tantum Ergo isn't recognizably Languedocian, but nobody said that a hometown hero can't talk about anything but his native soil. Written in 1920, the year before his untimely death, the Tantum Ergo has some of the most novel synthesis between all that stepwise-motion voice-leading your theory teachers kept talking about and the kind of French post-Romanticism that Franck and Chausson pioneered. The lines wax and wane with an intense yearning, kneading into each syllable in that gorgeous way that only a capella choirs can bring to life. While the harmonies are entirely tonal he'll find perfect spots to phase between junction chords à la Franck. His dissonances are held on to only long enough to press against the temples, quickly sliding to the next poignant moment, and it's this continual liquid passion that makes the piece so precious. There are dozens of performances to choose from but the performance below by Schola Cantorum Oxford has the most clarity and simple mastery of any of them, accentuating each supple curve and fully aware that the piece thrives on not wasting anyone's time - hugging the listener's heart and carefully releasing it back into the world.
It's time again to visit Stravinsky's leaf oeuvre, as he left so many miniatures behind it would be entirely possible to make the whole first half of a concert from his leaves alone. While he made a point to publish a few of them (such as the Double Canon), others were discovered among his papers after his death, such as the elusive Lied ohne Name.
Written in 1917, at the height of his primitivist period (my favorite, BTW), the Lied ohne Name ("song without words", a form pioneered by Mendelssohn) went unpublished until the mid-60's when it was included in a bassoon technique book, and it didn't get its own edition until 1979. Stravinsky certainly wasn't so famous and powerful in 1917 to get every stray note the publisher treatment, and bassoon duos aren't exactly a big-money market. That hasn't stopped this charming piece from receiving a few recordings, mostly on all-Stravinsky albums like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra's phenomenal 1996 Grammy winner Shadow Dances, one of my all-time favorite classical albums and a gold standard for Stravinsky interpretation. Equally unstopped was the composition of an Avant-Garde deconstruction of the work for the festival crowd, though we had to wait until 2013 to experience it.
(Sorry about the poor quality)
Written for the Festival Ars Musica 2013, violinist/composer Paul Pankert'sVariation ohne Name grows from the core notes of the Lied and stretches out into some very odd, atmospheric places. Pankert swaps Stravinsky's amiable walking speed for static anticipation, the vast spaces allowing extended techniques to flow. With rhythms as hard to count as these a less-than-literal touch can be either an asset or a poison, but in the case of the Variation the improvisational, bravura lines can wax and wane without the audience catching wise to any mistakes. It might be a little silly to expect a profound examination of the Lied, and thankfully Pankert only sets out to have fun, getting as much cheeky elaboration as he can into 16 bars. Obviously these two leaves demand to be performed together, so here's just such a performance (the premiere, of course).
Much like Stalin's artistic overlording, the Third Reich implemented an artistic suppression program, though their justifications for suppression involved labeling Jewish and modernist art as "degenerate" (entartete), and a special death camp, Theresienstadt (in the Czech city of Terezín) was notable for housing artists, as well as being the camp they showed to visiting foreign dignitaries as a nice clean façade for the Final Solution. Nearly a whole generation of Jewish composers were sent to Theresienstadt and other camps, and their music was resurrected much later in the 20th century to much acclaim and popularity, showcasing some truly unique voices, the greatest of which may be Erwin Schulhoff (1892-1942). A composer of incredible versatility and fecundity, Schulhoff was sent to the Wülzburg concentration camp and died in 1942 from tuberculosis, and the revival of his works is one of the great humanitarian efforts in 20th century art. And dang, did he write some doozies.
While his music went through a number of transformations, his earliest notable period was one of Dadaism, starting in the late 1910's right alongside the likes of Braque and Duchamp (though they never met him). His experimentations with dadaism (including the baffling Symphonia Germanica (please click that link)) were contemporaneous with his development of "sophisticated jazz", easily the best and most sophisticated of the many European attempts to blend jazz with classical music between the wars, and the two styles meet in his 5 PIttoresques. While the outer four are decent examples of the early stage of his jazz pieces (though they pale in comparison to later masterworks such as the 5 Jazz Etudes), the third pittoresque, In Futurum, out-bizarres all expectations.
Not since the works of John Stump has the world seen such extensive perversion of musical engraving. Not one parameter is sacred, from the impossible 3/5 and 7/10 meters to the use of rests rather than notes. This silent piece predates John Cage's 4'33'' (which will NOT be making an appearance on this blog, in case you were wondering, as there are zero pages in the score), though it is predated by Alphonse Allais's Marche Funebre, which I'll get to at the proper time. While nothing can be physically played there is an arc to the piece, with a mid-level climax at the pair of faces in the third stave. These cartoon emotion-notes should appear in more pieces, and are a perfect jab at simplistic tonal resolutions. The big halt is at the last bar of the fifth stave, a Grand Pause accentuated by five exclamation points, and the piece ends with two happy faces, just like music should. There's never been a commercial recording (I wonder why?...), but I did find this hilarious performing solution by a student pianist who should be very proud of his work.
