Month: December 2023

CONCORD

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.

Sunday December 10, 2023

Alex Raineri

Almost missing out completely on Alex Raineri’s excellent enterprise, I managed to get to this final-day recital featuring the artistic director himself performing Charles Ives’ mammoth Concord Piano Sonata No. 2, prefaced by the world premiere of Australian composer Lyle Chan’s Sonata en forme de cri. On this final day/night of the festival, Raineri took part in four of the five recitals on offer, but this was his only ‘solo’ performance (allowing for brief contributions from viola Nicole Greentree and flute Tim Munro in both sonatas).

Not that conditions for this event were ideal. Due to Translink’s decision to close the Gold Coast line on Sunday, I had to drive to South Brisbane, leaving the car at the only parking lot I knew; then travel two train stops, finally negotiating the uphill climb to the top of Queen Street where I joined 19 other enthusiasts in a small studio space (fortunately air-conditioned on this stinking hot day) to experience Raineri’s pianism at close quarters. Then, repeat the travel sequence in reverse post-recital. However, say not the struggle nought availeth because the sweat-inducing wriggles of getting there proved worthwhile.

Chan’s work left (as expected) scattered impressions, prefaced as it was by an address from the composer which informed us of nothing at all about his own composition but concerned itself with the Ives sonata exclusively. As Chan said, the American work is rarely performed here (or anywhere much in live performance); I recall only a few performances in Melbourne from Donna Coleman, neither of which I managed to hear. But the Concord Sonata has several worthy recorded interpretations and the work itself is over a hundred years old, standing firm as one of the bulwarks in American piano music history.

My own experience of the work has been structured through a recording of extraordinary power by Aloys Kontarsky, set down for Time Records in 1962. Quite a few critics disliked this interpretation, chiefly because they thought that the German pianist didn’t get Ives ‘right’. I believe that Kontarsky took what he found and turned it into a splendid tapestry, somehow imposing order on a work that other pianists view as a hotch-potch – and play it as such. To be sure, any other pianist sounds technically inferior to Kontarsky whose mastery of contemporary piano compositions was remarkable, but it’s true that he produced the fastest Concord on record. Which is not to say that it lacks the necessary profundity.

But then, you have to ask whether the sonata and its musical portraits of the New England Transcendentalists are that deep. Perhaps the finest achievement of the work is Ives’ ability to depict each of the four individuals/family – Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, Thoreau – as a creative composite, each movement incorporating the opening Beethoven Symphony No. 5 motif while investing each of them with its own distinctive material. This intellectual spread makes huge demands on the work’s interpreters, if not on a first-time audience, and I sense that some of us on Sunday were Ives neophytes.

What little I retain of Chan’s new sonata (and probably his only one, if he follows his practice of writing only one work in each of the canonic forms) is how much of it seemed to parallel the Ives score. On one hearing, you can’t expect to fathom Chan’s harmonic language, but in the actual moment it sounded very much as being on the older composer’s wavelength with crashing chords, an acerbically dissonant series of powerful climaxes, relieved by quiet interludes as a rhetorical contrast, with flute and viola duets serving in an antiphonal relationship with the keyboard, before all three coalesced in a momentary trio.

But after all the Sturm und Drang explosions and relief, presumably expounding the cry (of anger? grief? horror?) suggested in the score’s title, Chan offers a resolution that presents as a chorale-prelude; if I didn’t know better, I’d think it was based on Aus tiefer Not, but I wasn’t familiar enough with the theme about which was woven a near-traditional complex polyphonic web, couched in tonal language – rather like Ives’ third movement.

To make any sensible comment, you’d have to hear the work again – several times, to be honest. No doubting the composer’s emotional commitment to the task, yet his style of piling on the climaxes and powerful washes makes your involvement subject to numbness. As with the Ives, you can’t predict anything – except that there will be more plosive eruptions just around the corner. And, once again, you have to admire Raineri’s passion for contemporary art, here presenting a score that, whatever its merits, is probably not destined for many future hearings outside of the recording studio.

Taken as a whole, you found many riches in the pianist’s account of the Ives sonata. He took his time over the opening Emerson movement, the argument reaching powerful unremitting blocks before the Slowly and quietly interlude – doubly welcome for its page-long placidity – which again moved into thick, well-pedaled territory before the series of variations that start when the composer introduces a 7/8 8/8 alternating time signature and the passing relief of a vast stretch couched in C Major. While the later pages were treated with fair accuracy, the arrival of Greentree’s quiet viola triplets 12 bars from the end made for a refreshing timbre change – which is just the surprise that Ives would have intended, I suppose, after the fierce piano writing that preceded it.

Kontarsky takes the Hawthorne movement extremely fast, but he gives his right hand prominence when it’s a melody-bearing line. I got lost after Raineri’s first page, up until the E sharp and E natural cross-hands points in the narrative (such as it is). The executant made telling use of his 37 cm wood panel, the famous cluster-chords controlled and subservient to the left-hand melodic material. Later, at the repeated four bars interlude, I’d never heard before what the left hand was doing; not much, admittedly, but interestingly at organized cross-purposes with the upper staff’s content – something I wouldn’t have come across except for Raineri’s measured pace.

Raineri made fine use of the room that Ives leaves for diatonic relief at his G Major and F sharp Major soft harmonizations-extensions of the Beethoven motif. Yet the fast march time that Ives asks for six bars further on struck me as too restrained, over-cautious for its bouncy drive; still, by the time we reached that marvellously manic passage packed with five-note clusters, eventually in both hands, Raineri gave us a most persuasive entry into Ives’ most vehement dynamic landscape. Certainly, the prospect sounded rather thick as the march rhythm enjoyed a thorough exercise, but the last five-and-a-bit pages, starting at the From here on, as fast as possible direction, came over as very hard work. It’s not as though Raineri got all the notes, although I only picked up on exposed high pitches for most of the time, but much of this movement’s ‘developments’ are a trial to penetrate, let alone to articulate; the final flourish, following a faintly discordant echo of the hymn, fell into place most happily.

Not much to report about The Alcotts, even if the pace was very deliberate; even the faster exhortation after the A flat Major key signature is negated could have been accelerated without much exertion. Then again, Raineri invested a fine sentiment into the Stephen Foster melody that arrives with the E flat Major key signature in the movement’s second half. Of course, if you give this executant a triple forte demand, he will exercise a gratifying level of power-in-attack, as shown in the blazing C Major treatment of the movement’s main Beethoven Fifth variant right at the movement’s conclusion.

Of all the sonata’s parts, Thoreau impresses me as an indubitable success, mainly because of its husbandry; the composer keeps his aim focused on the final quiet peroration without straying into ragtime or diatonic harmony or the aggressive panoply employed in the first two movements. The lengthy flute appearance is a sign that the transcendent conclusion is near, and Raineri projected the intransigence of that underpinning, slow A-C-G bass motto with impressive calm. Certainly, these pages aren’t all impressionistic dreaminess or concerned with the upper planes; you can find textural complexity allied to dynamic power throughout, but the lyrical moments take on greater importance and Ives’ use of right-hand echoes leavens the urgent bravura of those technically challenging segments.

Once more, we have to thank Raineri as performer and festival director. I don’t know how he manages to attract the talent that can be seen during these recitals, nor how he contrives to keep the festival’s head above water, particularly when only a score of us turned up for this (to my mind) major event. No, he doesn’t do it all on his own, but his contribution to so many programs across this fortnight ranks as extraordinarily generous by any measurement standard. Perhaps I just happened to pick a program that failed to interest others; well, they missed a singular, engrossing achievement.