Concerto Guide: Shostakovich, Piano Concerto no. 2, op. 102

I mentioned last week that I am running up against the copyright wall as the concertos from now on are all likely to still be under copyright and therefore not obtainable from IMSLP. True, I could and should simply order study scores from the publishers but they take weeks (if not months) to arrive and are quite costly. This blog has a pretty tight budget as I do not collect revenue from anywhere, but just do it on my own nickel. But I don't entirely discount the possibility of ordering the score of a recent concerto if it seems really interesting. The Violin Concerto by Salonen might be a candidate.

However, I have managed to find a two-piano reduction of the Piano Concerto no. 2 in F major by Shostakovich. He didn't rate this work terribly highly himself. As Laurel Fay notes in her biography of Shostakovich:

A week after its completion on 5 February 1957, Shostakovich pooh-poohed it in a letter to Denisov as a work with no redeeming artistic merits. What he did not say was that the concerto ... had been written as a vehicle for his son Maxim, then in his final year of study at the Central Music School.

She goes on to tell us that Maxim premiered the piece on his 19th birthday in May 1957.

Critics were greatly taken with the concerto's charming simplicity, carefree spirit, and lyrical warmth.

Say what? That doesn't sound much like Shostakovich whose music is usually better described as being dark, tortured, sardonic and depressive. But it is undeniable that the Second Piano Concerto is a very cheerful work--and why wouldn't it be? Shostakovich was obviously delighted with his son's achievement in music and delighted in writing a suitably exuberant work for him. It is interesting that the only other piano concerto by Shostakovich, which I posted about here, is also a very cheerful work, one that he wrote for himself when he was a young man of 27. These two light-hearted piano concertos contrast considerably with the ones for cello and violin, which are much more substantial, and darker, works. I don't have the scores, but if I come across them, I would certainly post something on them.

But back to the piano concerto. Here is the opening theme, which we hear a portion of in the orchestra before it is stated fully in the piano:

Which is a perfectly normal theme in F major that might have been written by Haydn except for the fact that it goes astray, wandering into D flat for a measure or so before closing in F. This little divergence turns an 8 measure period into 10 measures. Rhythmically it is a bit odd as well. I suppose that it would be easy to call this neo-classical though by this point, that phase was long over. There are no substantial contrasts in the movement; the second theme is not so different from the first, if rhythmically smoother:

This theme as well has a tendency to wander into D flat major. There is another theme in D minor:

All these themes have a bit of a family resemblance. A modulation to, well call it C major (or G major, or some mode or other) as the one-flat key signature disappears, signals an energetic development section:

In which the piano double-octaves its way in a slightly nutty fashion while the orchestra states the opening theme. This development gets more and more interesting as the crazed fairground mood becomes more intense. The orchestra comes to the fore after quite a lot of virtuoso piano writing with this hymn-like theme:

Click to enlarge

Which is, of course, an augmented version of the D minor theme we heard before, now in major. This is followed by an extensive cadenza for the piano using the themes we have heard. Following this, inevitably, is the recapitulation with the orchestra recapitulating the themes while the piano offers ornamental decorations above.

All in all, there isn't much wrong with this piece. Sure, it's cheerful, but it was a happy occasion and even Shostakovich is allowed to write the occasional cheerful piece. It breaks no new ground, which is reason enough to condemn it if you are a card-carrying member of the avant-garde, but it is charming and listenable--just like a piano concerto by Mozart.

Let's have a listen. This is the composer himself playing the concerto with the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française, André Cluytens, conductor

Hot New Release in Classical

I just got an email from Amazon announcing "Hot New Releases in Classical" and, apart from the usual suspects, Andrea Bocelli and so forth, there was one odd one:

Ho-hum, I mumbled to myself, $22, not such a great deal. But wait a minute! 10CDs? Here's what you get:

Well, that's a horse of a different colour, isn't it? I think I owned a couple of these on vinyl way back. This is an excellent cross-section of the high modernist phase of 20th century music. I suspect these discs mostly came out in the 60s and 70s and because of that, there is a dated look to the repertoire: Takemitsu but no Reich, Crumb but no Pärt, Boulez but no Glass. But for $22, how could you lose? And besides, this is the perfect repertoire to terrify your neighbours with.

Anyway, I ordered it. But here is a question for my learnéd commentariat: how many of these pieces will be considered masterworks 50 years from now? Ives? Maybe. Stravinsky, certainly, but probably not Agon. Haubenstock-Ramati, Nono, Maderna, Ussachevsky, Ichiyanagi? Likely not. I even have some serious doubts that people like Cage, Babbitt and Xenakis will be listened to very much, except as curiosities.

Here, as an example, is Fontana Mix by John Cage:

Non-post of the day

I just can't seem to find anything to write about today, except for a few items for the Friday miscellanea. So let me amuse you with some composers doing normal stuff taken from this blog.

Stravinsky having breakfast

Shostakovich having a miserable time with his wife Irina

Conlon Nancarrow hanging out with Györgi Ligeti

Leonard Bernstein getting a haircut

Frank Zappa having a smoke and hanging out with some French guy (Pierre Boulez)

And for our envoi, a little Ligeti. Here is his Lux Aeterna performed by A Cappella Amsterdam, Daniel Reuss & Susanne Van Els.

It was 50 years ago today

Fifty years ago, well, not today, but yesterday, the Beatles played the first mega-concert of the rock and roll era. They were booked into Shea Stadium in New York and sold out all 55,000 seats. Back in those days the amplification systems were primitive and couldn't compete with the screaming of all those fans so this concert went largely unheard. The Wall Street Journal has an article on the event.

I think that, many years later, George rather summed things up when he said that "the whole world decided to go mad--and blamed it on us!"

The Summer Listening List

The Wall Street Journal yesterday had an essay on the fading of the practice to undertake an ambitious list of reading over the summer--the kind of stuff you normally don't have time to get to the rest of the year.

These days, the summer-reading list seems to have gone the way of the perfect tan ... Schools and colleges still make available reading lists for students who are devoted, or anxious, enough to pack Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians”... in with their kayak paddles, but few people seem any longer to identify summer with catching up on the great books of the past or even on the must-reads of the present.

Well, that's probably true. I can recall one summer I spent trying to complete reading Proust, "In Search of Lost Time", but I didn't quite manage it. The essay gives a bit of history of the summer reading list practice:

Perhaps the most representative instance of the dissemination of high culture to the average intelligent reader occurred in 1960, when the editor and critic Clifton Fadiman published his “Lifetime Reading Plan.” The monumental list began with the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and proceeded up through the novels of William Faulkner (it was updated in 1978 and 1986 and once more in 1998), each of its dozens of sections devoted to a single author and his or her work or works. It was the Platonic ideal (Frederick Copleston’s nine-volume “History of Philosophy,” summers of 1975-99, status: unfinished) of the summer reading list.

I read much of the Copleston history as an undergraduate and got all the way up to Kant before I hit the Wall of Utter Incomprehension.

But I think that setting yourself some goals to fruitfully use your leisure time is basically a Good Idea. Otherwise you could end up randomly surfing the Internet, watching cat videos or Russian dashboard cams or, shudder, watching television! So, to forestall those possibilities, let's come up with a summer listening list. Yeah, I know, summer is just about gone, but I just thought of this and whaddayagonna do?

The modest list for beginners:

1. The symphonies by Beethoven, available on 5 cds with Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe
2. The violin concertos of Bach, Hilary Hahn and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra
3. Seven string quartets by Joseph Haydn, Emerson String Quartet: The Haydn Project (2 cds of Haydn plus a bonus cd of other composers from Mozart to Shostakovich)

That's pretty easy--you could probably get through those nine cds by the end of the month.

The medium list for intermediate listeners:

1. The string quartets of Beethoven, available on 7 cds by the Alban Berg Quartet
2. Bach, Mass in B minor on 2 cds with John Eliot Gardiner, Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists
3. The string quartets of Bartók with the Emerson Quartet
4. The six "Haydn" quartets and the string quintets by Mozart with the Guarneri Quartet (terrific bargain, six cds for only twenty bucks)

The more challenging list for hard-core classical fanatics:

1. The piano sonatas and piano concertos by Beethoven on 12 cds performed by Friedrich Gulda
2. The complete symphonies by Haydn on 37 cds with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra
3. The complete concertos of Prokofiev on 3 cds with various artists on Decca
4. The complete symphonies and tone poems of Sibelius on 7 cds with Neeme Jarvi and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra
5. The complete string quartets of Shostakovich on 5 cds with the Emerson Quartet

That will keep you busy to Christmas, at least. Here is a little sample: Friedrich Gulda, piano with Horst Stein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the Piano Concerto No. 4 by Beethoven:

Sequence

I'm still working my way through Beardsley's book on Aesthetics and just came across a passage where he is discussing forms common to the arts and mentions that while things like "color" have analogues in both visual arts and music (tone color in music and color tonality in painting) there are others that are found in music and not in the visual arts. His example is the theme and variations form. Yes, you can have regions in a painting that echo certain elements with variations, but the essence of the musical form rests on the existence of the theme as the central element of which the others are variations, and there is also a dramatic order or sequence to the variations. It is this ordering in sequence that is unique to music and not found in the visual arts, where the eye can wander as it wishes over the visual field.

There are three meanings of the word "sequence" in music, two of them specifically technical and one more general. The musical genre of the sequence is a chant or hymn, usually composed to couplets in Latin. The best-known example is the Christmas carol "Adeste Fideles", the English version is "Oh, Come All Ye Faithful". Here is an earlier example, "Veni Creator Spiritus":

UPDATE: I am informed by a commentator (who obviously knows more about Catholic liturgy than I do) that the example of sequence I want is actually Veni sancte Spiritus:

The second meaning of the term "sequence" comes from music theory and refers to a harmonic or melodic pattern repeated at different pitches. Here, from the Wikipedia article is a simple melodic sequence of a four-note scale segment repeated ascending one step each time:

There are also harmonic sequences that were developed in the 17th century and by Vivaldi's time had come to be used extensively. The effect for the listener is a bit like being on a Ferris wheel, with the feeling of rotating through space. Here is an example of the most common type, the descending fifths sequence, in which the bass line descends a fifth each time:

There are several other varieties of varying complexity and composers have displayed considerable ingenuity in their use. If you want examples, you will find them in nearly every quick movement from the Baroque and Classical eras. Rather than repeat myself, I will refer you to two posts I have put up on sequence previously here and here.

But those two uses aside, there is a general sense in which we can use the word "sequence" in talking about music. Like theater and dance, music is a "time-art" meaning that it takes place in time. Musical events are ordered in a dramatic sequence. Now in the 20th century many attempts were made to suppress or eliminate this aspect of music as part of the general modernist project of experimentation. Some composers, like John Cage, eliminated the dramatic sequence entirely by choosing notes by chance procedures so that no logical sequence was possible. He also wrote a piece consisting only of silence that achieves the same end. Other composers made pieces consisting of lengthy drones which also tend to downplay any sequential drama. Steve Reich and Philip Glass wrote pieces in which the events are so extended that the sensation is almost that there is no temporal progression--one feels trapped in a single moment. New Age meditation music seeks the same feeling.

But all these experiments, to my mind at least, really demonstrate that the unique strength and power of music is that very thing: the dramatic sequence. All attempts to avoid or eliminate it tend to be boring as music, fascinating though they may be from the point of view of metaphysics or meditation.

The great masters of dramatic impetus in music are found in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Before then, composers were still discovering how to assemble musical structures that drove forward, taking the listener on a kind of journey. As we move into the 19th century, the whole dynamic tends to slow down as something called the "romantic trance" is developed. But for that fairly brief time between 1700 and 1830, music achieved a remarkable ability to grab the listener, take them on a stimulating and multi-faceted journey and deposit them back home, fulfilled and amused. That's quite a feat, given that the mechanism is just a few compression waves in the air.

It is sequence that achieves it all. A sequence of short and long notes within an underlying pulse gives us rhythm. A sequence of different pitches building to a climax and tapering to a finish gives us the melodic phrase and the organization of harmony into a principal key and excursions into related harmonies, near or far, gives us the large structure. Master all of them and you can construct a piece of music.

Well, enough blather. Let's listen. Here is an interesting early example by C. P. E. Bach, who was the bridge between the somewhat more static structures of the Baroque, and the dynamism of the Classical style. Here is the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by Ton Koopman playing the Symphony No.1 in D major, H.663 Wq.183 by C. P. E. Bach. And yes, there are some pretty good examples of the harmonic sequence here and there.

Friday Miscellanea

I post this item simply to prove that I'm not the only curmudgeon in the world of music: even pop music has them! "Spin magazine founder: Today's music isn't any good."

“The commodification of music is so complete that artists these days create songs thinking they would make a good car commercial,” Guccione says. “And they’re more fixated on their social-media strategy than they are on their music.”

Or as I have said: today's classical artists would love to sell out, but nobody's buying!

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Something we have occasionally discussed is the digital music world and how well it handles classical music. Here is an article on managing classical music in iTunes 12 from Macworld.

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I have a generally critical attitude towards a lot of the most characteristic art of post-war modernism. I'm not alone in this view as demonstrated by this rather thorough debunking of one of the leading post-modern artists of Britain, Tracey Emin, who managed to parley a lack of ability and a lot of cheek into a nice career in the modern art world:

When quality and accomplishment are no longer factors in who receives institutional support, it becomes a scramble for notice. It’s a matter of who can most offend the disdained others, make the most noise, kiss the most rings and/or asses; a game for those most willing to do whatever it takes to win the lottery of who the self-proclaimed gate keepers wave through to join the privileged circle. Emin, with her toilet stall quality doodles and screeds, is now a Royal Academy Professor of Drawing and on her way to knighthood. This is a clear demonstration that those in charge have lost all perspective of what is meaningful in art and life.

The music world is, thankfully, rather different as, for most composers, traditional craft and aesthetics still govern a lot of what is done, at least in abstract instrumental composition. Music theater and opera are a different story.

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This is an entirely unexpected and mildly amusing article about "The strange and surprising musical histories of the GOP presidential candidates."

Before heading off to UCLA law school, Carly Fiorina once toyed with the idea of becoming a concert pianist. She eventually landed at another keyboard, settling in tech and rising to become the CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

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Over at the Guardian they have the Devil's Advocate interviewing András Schiff about his upcoming performance of the Goldberg Variations at the Royal Albert Hall. It's an amusing effort, but could have been a tad funnier:

TDA: Are you going to play all the repeats?

AS: Yes.

TDA: Why? It’s going to be terribly long and boring.

AS: I beg to differ. Bach has specifically asked for the repeats, and this is a must. It is not a matter of choice. The structure is symmetrical, the Aria is in two halves, both 16 bars long, and each half is to be repeated. All the variations follow this pattern. The music is of such complexity that a second hearing is required; it gives the listener a second opportunity to hear the material again, and the player another chance to correct certain shortcomings. In tennis terms this is our “second service”.

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Also at the Guardian is a longer piece by Ed Vulliamy that offers a rather frothy argument, stuffed with anecdote and light on analysis, to the effect that:

We should be sick and tired of the ubiquitous partition of “classical” from “pop”, in schedules and among audiences and fans; in some cases the bigotry – and ignorance of the other – is entirely mutual, and always tedious. After all, Jimi Hendrix cited Handel and Mahler among his major influences, while Dmitri Shostakovich – who outlived Hendrix by five years – loved (and composed) jazz and comic operetta. He even wrote a ballet about football.

Ed reveals his basic assumptions with phrases like these:

Not much good art ever came from conservatives or conservatism

He is thoroughly convinced that the fundamental nature of art is to be revolutionary, political and shocking--and certainly some art has been. To his credit, he admits that sometimes producers go too far and that not all artistic "gambles" pay off.

* * *

This is a bit out there: a tenor has brain surgery and sings Schubert during the operation:

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Via Slipped Disc we find this article on the disappearance of music critics in America:

Both guests estimate that there are currently about a dozen classical music critics at U.S. newspapers, down from about 65 only two decades ago.

There's even a map, though I notice that they leave out Canada entirely. I wonder how many are left up North? Two or three in Montreal, one or two in Toronto, one in Vancouver? The piece at Slipped Disc has some entertaining comments.

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 At the New Yorker, Alex Ross weighs in on the opera scene in the new Tom Cruise thriller, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation:

The tendency to associate classical music with murderous insanity is a curious neurosis of the American pop-cultural psyche. There is little evidence of such a predilection among real-life serial killers, who seem to prefer Black Sabbath, AC/DC, REO Speedwagon, and, of course, the Beatles.

But, thankfully, the new movie goes against all those stereotypes. Read the whole article.

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Over at Sinfini Music there is a surprisingly interesting article about piano performance then and now that delves into the subtleties of technique and interpretation:

Hough cites Friedman’s 1933 recording of Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat, No.2, Op.55, as an example. Fortunately, there’s little of the thin, scratchy brittleness common to old records. The instrument glows with a warm bass and a singing treble. More importantly, Friedman’s playing is tender, unhurried and lovingly detailed; you can trace the music’s multiple inner lines. Notes perfectly match the decay of preceding ones, so there’s little harshness or false accenting. The whole performance is so perfectly paced and proportioned, it feels like one, long breath. Yet: ‘This style of playing is no longer sought after,’ says Hough. ‘Audiences – and pianists – don’t know it’s there.’

There are also some excellent clips by way of example. (I don't think, by the way, that the same might be said of guitarists. Early recordings of guitarists in the early 20th century like Andrés Segovia do not reveal wonderful subtleties so much as rhythmic waywardness.)

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For our envoi today, let's listen to that 1933 recording of Ignaz Friedman: