My reference is, of course, to the famous quote by the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
--Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 39 [Free Press, 1979]
The more I study Stravinsky, the more I see that he is so central to the course of music in the 20th century that it could be seen as a series of footnotes to his music. A few random examples:
his use of folklore, not only in the use of folksongs integrated into modernist works such as the Rite of Spring, but also the structural use of the techniques of folk music such as the march that begins Renard, precedes the use of folk music by Bartók by a couple of decades
his neo-classicist phase was a tribute to the past and was a forerunner of the Early Music movement of the 70s and 80s
he was perhaps the first 20th century composer to use popular genres in his music as we see in his Ragtime written in 1918, this was many decades before composers started integrating popular genres in their music
his compulsive use of motoric rhythms and ostinati resonates with the minimalists of the 1970s
his interest in theatre and invention of new theatrical genres such as in Oedipus Rex and, again, Renard, precedes similar theatrical experiments of the 60s and 70s
The Standard Narrative on 20th century music is that it was launched by Claude Debussy and this is partly true, but Debussy himself in his second book of Preludes for piano, dating from 1913, was influenced by Petrushka, his favorite piece by Stravinsky. Taruskin refers to the Prelude 11, "Les tierces alternées" as "from beginning to end a study in Petrushka textures." [op. cit. p. 773]
Music historians, a bit stumped as to how to categorize Stravinsky, took as their conceptual model of progressivism in music the technical innovations in terms of dissonance and harmony of the Schoenberg school (followed by Boulez and Stockhausen) and in so doing managed to get the history of 20th century music rather muddled. The Standard Narrative as it has been taught reads rather like Deuteronomy: And in the beginning there was Debussy who discovered new colors and textures, but the real foundations were laid by Schoenberg who had as disciples Berg and Webern and they begat Boulez and Stockhausen and there were others in that place, though lesser: Bartók and Ligeti and others of their tribe. There was also Stravinsky, but he did not follow the Commandments, so who knows what he was up to!
This Standard Narrative, which really deserves a doctoral dissertation or two, was the product of the first wave of the European avant-garde who were essentially conducting a revolution in music in terms of atonality, serialism and, most important, a complete break with the past. This has echoes of the Russian Revolution with its starting history over again at zero with the new Soviet man. Stravinsky was, in those terms, a reactionary, a member of the old Russian aristocracy and whose music was full of references to previous music. One of the basic books of the Standard Narrative was René Leibowitz' Schoenberg and His School, first published in 1949.
If I get a chance, I should do a post on the Leibowitz book as I am sure an examination of its biases and assumptions would be fascinating. I read it sometime in the 70s and lost my copy years ago. Luckily it is available on Kindle.
For our envoi, let's listen to one of the pieces that are at the core of the Standard Narrative. The Quartet op. 28 by Anton Webern was the subject of innumerable classes in 20th century analysis but in the larger scheme of things is not of much lasting significance. The performers are the Emerson String Quartet:
Now it is finally time to take up Le Sacre du Printemps, The Rite of Spring, but before doing that, I want to just mention a couple of things regarding influence. So many who wrote about Petrushka assumed that, since it was written in France and premiered there, that it was somehow a "French" piece on Russian themes. Just how this is the case is never specified. Taruskin points out that composers like Ravel, who might use sonorities resembling the Petrushka chord, do so in a quite different way, as a decorative surface to an underlying classical structure. Whereas in Stravinsky, his usages come out of a long Russian octatonic tradition and are quite structural. In the case of Debussy, on the other hand, it seems to be the case that it was Debussy in his second book of Preludes for piano, dating from 1913, who was influenced by Petrushka, his favorite piece by Stravinsky. Taruskin refers to the Prelude 11, "Les tierces alternées" as "from beginning to end a study in Petrushka textures." [op. cit. p. 773]
The influence of Petrushka was particularly strong on the Parisian aesthetic of the 1920s, on composers like Les Six, particularly Auric and Poulenc. But enough of the "street ballet" Petrushka. On to the Rite.
The original conception of "The Great Sacrifice" actually predates Petrushka and Stravinsky promised his collaborator Roerich that he would get back to it as soon as the earlier ballet was finished. But before he did, he did some vocal settings, one of which provided a path to the latter ballet. Konstantin Balmont, while not the most fashionable poet, was, due to the sonorousness of his verse, immensely popular with composers. The anthology Zelyonïy vertograd (A Green Garden) from which the poem Zvezdolikiy was taken, consists of stylizations of Russian spiritual folklore. The inspiration was a sect, the skoptsï, known for their ritual castration, that were a breakaway from the khlïstï, known for their ritual, whirling dances. These late 18th century sects, with their evocation of a huge army of the castrated rather remind one of the Unsullied from Game of Thrones! This is the esoteric subtext to the poem Stravinsky set.
A musical influence around this time on Stravinsky, despite his later denials, appears to have been Scriabin whose Prometheus was published in early 1911. Incidentally, one of the chords from the "motto" of the Stravinsky song Zvezdolikiy is a C minor chord superimposed on a C major chord:
"Coll. III" refers to one of the three possible octatonic scales
This is almost identical to the chord used by Jimi Hendrix that appears in "Purple Haze" though I wouldn't claim any influence. Others who used this sonority include Scriabin. As Hendrix used it, the root is doubled, the fifth omitted and a seventh added, (likely due to the way it lies on the guitar fingerboard) but the fundamental idea of having both the major and the minor thirds is shared with the Russians:
"Hendrix" chord
The melodic line found in the Zvezdolikiy motto also connects to perhaps the most memorable melodic motif from the Rite, the ostinato found in the pizzicato strings in "Augures printaniers":
Zvezdolikiy, dedicated to Debussy, is also known under its French title Le roi des étoiles:
Debussy, among others, regarded this little "cantata" as being unperformable due to intonation problems for the choir and it was not premiered until 1939! The importance of the song is due to its development of the intersections between the octatonic collections and the diatonic and whole-tone ones, techniques that will prove to be of great importance in the composition of the Rite.
We are not yet done with Petrushka, I'm afraid. What we are getting from Taruskin, via my summaries in these posts, is even more than you would get in a graduate seminar on Stravinsky. I know, as I have done one! In doctoral seminars it often seems there is not enough time to really get into the details, everything is rather rushed. But here we can take the time to go through Taruskin's exhaustive book on Stravinsky (just volume one, mind you) that he spent decades researching. As one of my musicology professors remarked in a seminar on DuFay, "it is the details that we are interested in."
A couple of interesting details are the discovery by Russian musicologists that, contrary to long-standing opinion, Russian folk music is actually polyphonic! Yuliy Nikolayevich Melgunov (1846 - 93) was the first to assert this and notate in his 1879 collection the "undervoicelets" or little heterophonic elements typically found in performance. Prior to this, the collectors of folksong tended to sit down with individual informants to notate what they sang. But Russian folksong is nearly always performed by a group. Until the advent of the use of the phonograph to record these performances, it was nearly impossible to notate what was going on. The first musicologist to go into the field and record these performances was Yevgenia Eduardovna Linyova (1853 - 1919). Her first expedition using the phonograph was in 1903 and the third and last collection of folksongs transcribed from recordings was published in 1909. It was her view that only now was a true neonationalist program in music possible because only now was the true nature of Russian folksong revealed. Was Stravinsky even aware of this research? You bet! Taruskin's exhaustive research into the archives turned up a letter from Stravinsky to his mother asking her to send him:
folk songs of the Caucasian peoples that have been phonographically transcribed ... I already have the first volume of "Great Russian Songs in Folk Harmonization" (as transcribed phonographically by Linyova). [op. cit. p. 733]
Taruskin points out some interesting ironies: despite the authenticity that underlies the depiction of the Shrovetide festivities, the impression is not naturalistic. The street scenes are a magical invocation, but viewed through the eyes of the puppets, who are the only real "characters" with individuality. The world of the puppets is more "real" than the world of the humans, danced by the corps de ballet.
Taruskin traces some hints of the "Petrushka chord" polytonality in previous music by Rimsky-Korsakov, in Scheherezade, where a great deal of the music is exhaustively octatonic. You might recall that the "Petrushka chord," much-loved by theorists, is a superimposition of a C major chord and an F# major chord, something not possible in common practice harmony, but very feasible in an octatonic context as both chords are derivable from an octatonic scale. Here are the two possibilities starting on C. The upper one consists of a tone/semitone sequence and the lower is the semitone/tone version:
If you look at the lower version of the scale you will see that it contains the three notes of a C major triad: C E G and also the three notes of an F# major triad, though they are spelled as a G flat major triad: G flat, B flat and D flat. In Petrushka we have not only a vertical conjunction of the two chords, but also their extension in time as a structural device. The second tableau, Petrushka's Room, for example, begins with a passage on C and ends with a cadence on F#. I'm not going to discuss all of Taruskin's analysis here, fascinating though it is. If you are interested, please go directly to the book yourself.
The idea of two competing tonal centers a tritone apart fits well with Stravinsky's original vision in his Konzerstück for piano and orchestra, sketches for which precede the ballet. The idea was that of a conflict between order and chaos that became mapped onto the ballet scenario. In the ballet, the polarity is between the human world and the puppet world, reflected in the "white key" versus "black key" music of the C major/F# major opposition.
What of the reception of Petrushka? It was an enormous hit with the Parisians and while Russians would not hear a performance in Russia until years later, there were certainly commentators who had either seen a performance in Paris or at least studied the score, published in 1911. Myaskovsky wrote:
Petrushka is life itself. All the music in it is full of such energy, such freshness and wit, such healthy, incorruptible merriment, such reckless abandon, that all its deliberate banalities and trivialities, its constant background of concertinas, not only fail to repel, but, quite the contrary, carry us away all the more, just as you yourself, on a Shrovetime aglitter with sun and snow, in the full ardor of your fresh young blood, once mingled in the merry, rolicking holiday crowd and flowed with it in an indivisible exultant whole. [op. cit. p. 762]
There were others who now regarded Stravinsky as an apostate, among them his erstwhile friend, Rimsky-Korsakov's son Andrey. He wrote, regarding a performance of three fragments from the work:
Petrushka glitters with an artificial assortment of bright rags and patches and clatters with ringing rattles. Were it not for the big talents of Benois and Stravinsky, this piece, with its vulgar tunes, would have been a monstrous crime.
Even fifty years later Stravinsky was still so wounded by this that he recalled it with bitterness. In other reviews Stravinsky's music was compared unfavorably with his conservative antipode, Glazunov. Possibly the most thorough and penetrating review came, unexpectedly, from the patriarch of Russian music criticism, the seventy-six year old Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kashkin who ended his lengthy commentary by saying:
The main thing to be said in conclusion is that Petrushka is the work of a real talent, from whom we may expect a very great deal in the future.
Right he was!
One thing that is immediately noticeable, to me at least, is how Petrushka is a kind of antithesis to The Firebird. Their structures are kind of mirror-images. The Firebird begins in mystery while Petrushka ends in mysterious pizzicati. The Firebird builds to a magnificent, blaring climax while Petrushka begins with the magnificent tapestry of the Shrovetide fair. The Firebird looks back in homage to Rimsky-Korsakov while Petrushka absorbs authentic folklore and fuses it with an incipient modernism. With Petrushka Stravinsky finally becomes Stravinsky.
Let's end with two more performances of the ballet. The first, with the score, is Pierre Boulez conducting the New York Philharmonic:
This is a restaging of the ballet by Nicolas Beriosov for the Paris Opera, based on the original sets. The audio in this clip is pretty iffy, but it is interesting to see a different production:
Every now and then I have to do a controversial post, just to provoke some comments. I think the majority of my posts these days are pretty serious ones about Stravinsky or aesthetics, but I have to mix in more current ones because those seem to be the ones people like to comment on. So here I go, into the mouth of the lion (or should that be the cave of the bear?). I just ran across this little item over at The Guardian: Pianist Ludovico Einaudi’s haunting iceberg performance to draw attention to Arctic plight. It is just a short video and you don't even have to follow the link as it is on YouTube:
Just about everything about this is fake. First of all they just decked out a barge with white and stuck a piano on it. They mixed in the amplified sound of ice falling. The environmental claim is that the Arctic ice is disappearing. In fact, not too long ago people were claiming that by now there would be a permanent passage through the Arctic year-round. If you do an internet search you will encounter hundreds and hundreds of articles stating that climate change is affecting the Arctic in important ways. You have to dig around a bit, but the reality seems to be that the amount of Arctic sea ice has remained very stable over the last decade at least. The public seems to be seeing through the hysteria as the percent that report that they believe that climate change is an important issue seems to fall lower and lower every year. This is despite a constant hectoring campaign supported by government and media going back decades.
Oh, and the music? Good grief, if I thought that this was all you needed to do to be a famous musician, I think I would have gone into carpentry or small appliance repair instead. Dreary tinkling over a hackneyed chord progression for a couple of minutes? Mind you, this is exactly the kind of music you would expect to find in a context that is primarily ideological.
As Brahms said once on leaving a party, "If there is anyone here whom I have not insulted, I beg his pardon." So please weigh in in the comments about my grievous errors!
Some of the most remarkable aspects of Petrushka are the numerous authentic details of the vanished world of the St. Petersburg Shrovetide fair. These largely came from Benois, the acknowledged expert in these matters. This is confirmed, not only by Benois' own memoirs, as one would expect, but by other accounts by journalists from earlier days who write of the cries of vendors, the sounds of barrel organs, the squeak of Petrushka (remember his high squeaky voice is part of the character), the soldier's uniforms, costumes of the nannies, the live bear, and so on. All this, the action of the first tableau of Petrushka, is reflected directly in Stravinsky's music in a montage, a sort of rondo.
Here is a translation of part of Benois' original scenario:
During the Shrovetide revelries an old Magician of the Oriental type exhibits his animated puppets--Petrushka, the Ballerina and the Blackamoor--who perform a wild dance amid the astonished crowd.
The Magician's magic has imparted to the puppets all the feelings and passions of real people. The most richly endowed with these is Petrushka, and he suffers more than the Ballerina or the Blackamoor. He bitterly senses the cruelty of the Magician, his own bondage, his isolation from the rest of the world, his deformed and ridiculous appearance. He seeks consolation in the Ballerina's love and it seems to him that he has found a response in her heart, but in reality she only fears his strange ways and shuns him.
The music Stravinsky provided is equally rife with authentic genre detail, some of the sources of which can be identified. For many others, such as the cries of the vendors heard at the opening, even though these are notated in the Russian musicological literature by Alexander Mikhailovich Listopadov in a 1906 article, Stravinsky would have encountered these not only in his daily life, but also in at least one of his favorite operas when he was young, Power of the Fiend, by Alexander Serov, where a similar assortment of cries appears. Other materials come from Rimsky-Korsakov's own anthology of folk songs dating from 1877, which Stravinsky had previously used for some folk songs in The Firebird. On pages 696-7 in the Taruskin book he provides an extensive list of the songs and sources used in Petrushka.
One interesting example is the use of a Bylorussian carol collected in the Korsakov anthology that Rimsky himself used in the opera Snegurochka in an unusual voicing that Stravinsky used in a similar low-voiced texture. Taruskin quotes the three:
Another example of Stravinsky's mining of folk and popular song comes in a letter he wrote in early December 1910 to his friend Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov (son of the composer), begging him for two songs:
Taruskin, op. cit. p. 700
You have to look rather carefully at the score to identify some of these tunes because Stravinsky, rather ingeniously, combines different tunes in different meters that does not show in the notation.
Stravinsky creates remarkable montages of different kinds of music to depict the riotous crowd, something a Futurist might have called a "Street Symphony." One element of this is the way Stravinsky portrays a barrel organ with a group of clarinets and flutes:
Petrushka, just before figure 10
We could go on and on as, apart from the second tableau, which uses no folk material, the whole ballet is permeated with this kind of "authentic detail." There are specific tunes, borrowing from folkloric and popular material, used to depict specific moments in the ballet such as the dapper merchant who bursts in with a gypsy girl on either arm, the flinging of banknotes into the crowd by another, the tune for the bear trainer modeled on the tuning of the traditional instrument used, the dudka which was tuned to a whole tone scale (!) and so on.
An example of the intersection of the folkloric and modernist comes with Stravinsky's portrayal of the hurried nonsense jingles of the carnival barker, who jams wildly disproportionate syllables into his patter. This seems to be reflected in the music when Stravinsky has the oboes play a septuplet as we can see in the example I just put above. This is a genuine Stravinskian original, not previously appearing in Russian art music, what Taruskin describes as "static, additive, nondeveloping ostinati of variable length that continually break off and start up again" becomes a trademark of Stravinsky's style though its origins are perhaps an attempt to faithfully render an aspect of folk reality. [Taruskin, op. cit. p. 713] Here are some examples he offers:
That should give you enough to chew on for today! Let's end with a concert performance of Petrushka so we can just concentrate on the music. I recommend downloading the score from IMSLP which you can do here.
If you read many biographies of famous artists you will soon discover that a lot of them tended to behave in dysfunctional ways. Perhaps the most brilliant person I ever knew personally drank himself to death by age forty. I was just reading about Sergiu Celibidache who fought for twelve years to remove a principal trombonist from the Munich Philharmonic, unsuccessfully (and was considerably less than graceful in his criticism of, well, everyone). Igor Stravinsky was very, very unkind and unfaithful to his first wife, Katya. Jean Sibelius was also very unkind and neglectful of his wife not to mention an alcoholic and spendthrift. If you read how he spent his time, you wonder he was able to compose anything! Indeed, so many of the great musicians and composers we know of were quite insufferable in their personal lives. Bach, Mozart and Haydn are among the few that seemed to be pretty decent people, but they were the minority!
So why is this? And why should we be forgiving? One reason is that we owe a great deal to great artists and it costs us nothing to be grateful. Another is that it is rather more gracious to be forgiving to the dead. But we are still left with the why. In order to answer that, I think we have to put ourselves in their shoes.
A lot of very, very talented people somehow never manage to achieve success and the reason why begins to answer the question: they are too nice. If you are very talented at something, the greatest opposition you will face is not, as with most of us, your own incompetence. No, indeed, the greatest resistance will come from your friends, neighbors and associates who will resent, sometimes bitterly, that you are more talented than they are. Most people can be pretty mean about this. Children are particularly adept at picking out those who do not fit well in the herd and punishing them unmercifully. One suspects that the arrogance and narcissism and dysfunction of great artists forms pretty quickly--as soon as they encounter their less-talented peers! You either give in and try and fit in, which means concealing if not actually suppressing your abilities, or you fight back and try to give them as good as you are getting. This means learning how to be a nasty piece of work yourself!
Going back to my friend, who provided me with some insight. He was a brilliant, truly brilliant, musician. But when I met him in first year university he was not, as one would expect, enrolled in the music department. No, he did a degree in psychology instead. After meeting the theory professor I started to see why. This fellow, a perfectly decent mediocrity, probably knew half as much about music theory as did my friend James. I recall one conversation with him in which he explained at length the difference between conical and parallel recorder bores in the Renaissance and Baroque. This guy is going to sit in first year theory and have someone explain that 7ths resolve down? I don't think so!
Nasty bullying is one thing, but as your young talented genius grows older he will encounter something even worse: mediocrity. At least with bullies you recognize that they are the enemy and you fight back. But what about the host of well-meaning mediocrities that staff most music schools and are the arts administrators hiring and firing and giving out grants and commissions? They are the ones that are going to make or break your career. And most of the time, if you really are a brilliant artist, you are going to make them uncomfortable with their mediocrity and they will simply sidetrack you every chance they get.
A truly talented artist often has the choice between marinating in bitterness or fighting back. How do you fight mediocrity? As we see from the careers of many artists, it is with boldness and arrogance--but a special kind of arrogance that comes out whenever you encounter a mediocrity trying to tell you what to do. Now doesn't that explain a lot of seemingly dysfunctional behavior? Some artists learn to deal with people by being, well, a bit outrageous, most of the time. And it often seems to work.
Let's listen to one genuine genius who had to fight the particularly strong and determined mediocrity that dominates Canadian cultural life: Glenn Gould. Here he is playing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein was so uncomfortable with Gould's interpretation that he felt he had to deliver a speech before, separating himself from the interpretation!
(No, Bernstein was not Canadian, nor was he a mediocrity. Still, this was the most salient example I could find in YouTube of genius struggling to be heard.)
Largely ignored by audiences outside its borders, the popular music of Somalia in the 1970s and ’80s was informed in part by culture-quaking politics: the establishment in 1969 of the Somali Democratic Republic led by President Mohamed Siad Barre and a socialist system that supported the arts but also promoted nationalism, curtailed freedoms, often violently, and led to a civil war during which the country disintegrated into a failed state. Somali musicians of that tumultuous era experienced both the ecstasy of liberation and the terror of war, chaos and brutality.
Because Barre had nationalized the arts, Somali music was owned by the government and performed on government-owned national radio or in its national theater in Mogadishu. Perhaps he thought it was his to destroy. When Barre’s fighter jets attacked Somaliland, the former British protectorate in the northwest part of the country, in 1988 to thwart an independence movement, they bombed Radio Hargeisa, home to some 50 years of recorded music by Somalis, very little of which had been properly commercialized. In advance of the airstrikes, some tapes were hurried to Djibouti and Ethiopia. Others were buried underground.
This story is at the Wall Street Journal and if you get blocked by the paywall, you might be able to find the story by putting the headline or part of it in a search engine. You can also find some clips at YouTube:
For a home-made cassette from the 70s that doesn't sound too bad.
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Apparently the Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper, is trimming down its arts coverage even more: no coverage weekdays. As they pretty much stopped mentioning classical music years ago, I'm not sure this is much of a loss.
Canada’s leading newspaper for arts coverage will be shutting down its weekday arts section by the end of the year.
First reported by Canadaland, The Globe and Mail will be consolidating its “Life and Arts” and “News” sections, beginning in December. The reshuffling means that arts reviews will be relegated to the generic “News” section, and that dedicated space for other arts coverage would be found exclusively in the paper’s weekend edition.
The news deals a significant blow to Canada’s already weakened print media landscape, and comes on the heels of last week’s announcement that The Globe will terminate its Atlantic Canada edition by the end of November.
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One of the most controversial conductors of the 20th century was Sergiu Celibidache. Slipped Disc puts up an interview with him and all hell breaks loose in the comments:
I was at that concert too and so was, it seemed, every major musician in town. The 30-minute standing ovation they gave hem was like nothing I’ve never seen anything like that at Carnegie Hall. The first time I heard him conduct was a 1970s radio concert featuring the Mozart Symphony #41 and Ein Heldenleben with the Stuttgart Radio Orchestra.. I had intended it just as background but within moments of the Jupiter, I just had to sit down and listen. I had never heard members of an orchestra play with such awareness of and sensitivity to one another. It was like the best chamber music.
Of course, not every performance hits the mark. I heard a live concert that opened with what can only be described as the coldest and darkest interpretation of the Overture to the Barber of Seville in history – infused, as it was with the spirit of Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony. But the Brahms 4th that followed was wonderful. He was quite old and frail by this point.
As for his opinions about other conductors, one can only surmise that he just said what many other conductors think but don’t say. (A rather waspish public remark about Eugene Ormandy apparently didn’t go over terribly well when he was working with the Curtis Orchestra back in 1984.) But he was a great conductor and he was not willing to compromise unless he absolutely had to. Maybe he was a little nutty about some things – and way off the mark with certain repertoire, but I think we could all provide a list of great musicians who were more than a tad eccentric and misread certain composers. At least he never brought a gun to rehearsal like Rodzinski did.
And the negative comments are extremely negative!
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Pianist Taka Kagawa played the entirely of Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux in New York and the New York Times has the story:
Olivier Messiaen’s “Catalogue d’Oiseaux” (“Catalog of Birds”) is an absurd undertaking for a pianist. Its sprawling score demands that performers master three hours of complex music: the painstakingly transcribed sounds of European birds.
The piece is an ideal fit for Taka Kigawa, the adventurous pianist who will play Messiaen’s “Catalogue” on Monday at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village, his frequent performing home. Mr. Kigawa has a reputation for tackling heady and exhausting music with ease. He has performed the complete solo piano works of Pierre Boulez in a single evening, and all of Bach’s “The Art of Fugue,” from memory and without a break.
But both those programs were far shorter than the 13-part “Catalogue,” which Messiaen wrote in the 1950s for Yvonne Loriod, his wife and muse. And learning the work requires more than just skill; a successful performance is also a deep dive into ornithology.
Concerts like that are a pretty good reason to live in New York!
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Sudip Bose writes a substantial article on Sviatoslav Richter's Schubert in The American Scholar:
Nobody played Schubert like Richter. I could bring up any number of felicities—his sense of narrative and structure, his exquisite touch, the attention he paid to the most innocuous detail, the way his interpretations of the standard repertoire seemed at once controlled and improvisatory—but when I think of Richter’s Schubert, one thing comes to mind first: tempo. Slow tempos, glacial tempos, tempos that make no sense on paper, but that, when heard, transport the interpretations into visionary terrain. The most famous example perhaps is Schubert’s Piano Sonata D. 960, the last he ever wrote. The first time I heard this piece, a little more than two decades ago, it was on a recording of Richter’s, made at the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival, on England’s Suffolk coast. The playing of the first movement was unlike anything I’d listened to before. It unfolded at a pace so slow as to strain credulity. Ordinarily, you’d snuff the life out of a musical line by reducing its speed by half, but strangely, with Richter, nothing at all seemed labored. Indeed, once I began to surrender to the music on the pianist’s terms, the effect was magical and mesmerizing.
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Some Friday's I am rather stumped as to what to put up as an envoi, but today we have an embarras des richesse! Something by Celibidache? Messaien, Richter's Schubert? Why not all three? First, one of Celibidache's famous Bruckner performances. This is the Symphony No. 6 by Bruckner with the Munich Philharmonic in 1991:
Next is Bk 1 of Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseax played by Yvonne Loriod with the score:
And lastly, Sviatoslav Richter - Schubert - Piano Sonata No 18 in G major, D 894:
