Category: CD

Impressionism lives

cliveoconnell

THE SKY IS MELTING

Marianne Rothschild and Glenn Riddle

MOVE Records MCD 505

The Sky is Melting

Here’s a window into a corner of the country’s musical composition world, one that is centred around Melbourne.  Both performers are locals: violinist Rothschild studied at the Victorian College of the Arts and the Australian National Academy of Music and has freelanced round the country; Riddle is currently Lecturer in Keyboard at Melbourne University’s Conservatorium of Music and a pedagogical force in the national music sphere.  Much of what they present on this now somewhat dated disc (released in 2014) is bound up with their collaboration; in fact, the major work on this recording, Linda Kouvaras‘ Bundanon Sonata for Violin and Piano, was written for the duo.  Andrian Pertout‘s Sonus Dulcis – a construct that the composer keeps on re-framing – was arranged for these executants, who also gave the premiere performance of William James Schmidt‘s Argentine Etching.

Kouvaras has provided both the opening (and title) piece of this CD, as well as the substantial sonata.  Both have connections with the composer’s stints as artist-in-residence at the Shoalhaven River estate of Arthur and Yvonne Boyd.   In the brief initial vignette, Kouvaras gives the piano high arpeggio patterns to offset a slow-moving violin melody which suggests the heat of mid-day at Bundanon, although the images come courtesy of an impressionist sound-world so that the pictured countryside has a Gallic tang complete with whole-tone chords and little rhythmic variety beyond a 4/4 pulse.  Some double-stops around the 4:20 mark make a small change of diet, but the last pages move into a more satisfying atmospheric area with the violin meandering in desultory style above a stolid piano part, this combination making a fair proposition for sonic heat exhaustion.

Stuart Greenbaum‘s six Occasional Pieces are just that: bagatelles written for two specific birthdays, as well as a birth-day, a funeral, a marriage and the last of the set (and longest) serving as a wedding gift.   How to be in the world makes for pleasant listening, Rothschild’s violin operating in a high register for the most part, with inescapable shades of Vaughan-Williams’ lark, some small jazz interpolations disrupting the idyllic sweetness.  The lament of Life Cycles emerges as a violin solo; a slowly striding line, generally diatonic in matter, punctuated by some Celtic-style skirling and a series of ‘snaps’.   For Alette begins with  brisk pizzicato that moves to a rising scale motive with Riddle’s eloquent piano doubling the string line until the ternary shape is finished off with a sparser version of the opening gestures.   Ideas follow each other in quick succession during The 4th Saturday in April piano solo, which offers no real development but maintains an optimistically major tonality, appropriate for this small-scale epithalamium.   Another violin solo, Curves on the Great Ocean Road, proposes a pattern of self-reflecting turns, nowhere near as unsettling as the real thing, but its central section has intimations of the drive’s rugged terrain. Finally, The Lake and the Hinterland revisits the British early 20th century folk music arena with a broad tune treated in turn by both instruments, a dour middle interlude, before a reversion to the Midsomer landscape.  Some spikiness interferes with the prevailing harmonic sweetness but the piece concludes in an unambiguous D Major.

Better known to me as a pianist, William James Schmidt avoids the temptation to do a Piazzolla in his Argentinian Etching, although you can hear a plethora of Latin suggestions as well as irrepressible murmurs of a the dansant.   It maintains a steady common time pulse in a combination march-tango.  Following the crowd in this disc’s ternary form feast, Schmidt stops for a gentle meander, charming if aimless, which comes to a mutually reflecting and reinforcing climactic point before the duo hurtles back to the dance where the cross-rhythms and syncopations become pronounced and the dynamic tension heightened.

Sonus Dulcis by Andrian Pertout has a Japanese modal foundation, yet it’s not as simply utilised as it would have been in less interesting hands.   On occasions, Rothschild makes sounds that could suggest a bowed lute but, apart from some pizzicato, a dash of col legno and a hefty sprinkling of piano movement in fifths, the Orient is hinted at more than imitated.   At about the 3:30 point, the unlikely spirit of Spain and de Falla emerges, interrupted by a violin cadenza loaded with Japanese folk colour, before the Hispanic/Nipponese combination returns in a sort of 6/8 gigue finale. Most of the works that Rothschild and Riddle perform can be taken at face value; this piece offers more of an interpretative challenge.

The Kouvaras sonata, in four movements, has its feet firmly planted in the Boyd estate’s landscape.  The substantial opening, Pulpit Rock, is a sonic view of Boyd’s paintings focused on this geological formation with the violin as unabashed preacher while Riddle underpins with solid, pillar-like chords.  The composer uses brief phrases from the Ein feste Burg chorale and, on tremolo violin, a fragment from Mahler’s Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt song to add a bit of European context to the abstract sermon that this landscape advances.  But the portentous keyboard chords wear out their usefulness well before the movement’s clangorous conclusion where the violin alternates high and low notes as a gravity-loosening device.

For her second movement, The River Changes,  Kouvaras begins with a floating violin line, supported by a supple ripple of piano figuration.  Rothschild generates a clean unstressed arch, her vibrato well-regulated throughout what amounts to a meditation on the Shoalhaven, revisited after a decade-long gap.   As the sonata’s scherzo, Ballad of the Singleman’s Hut takes a syncopated waltz format; not that distracting in its soundscape surroundings but with something contrived about its shape, possibly in the rhythmic basis which lacks consistency, as though the intention is to unsettle the listener by substituting the incomplete for the spectral.

The sculptures at Bundanon, some of which are in trees, gave Kouvaras the impetus for Earth Art Could Fall from the Skies which jumps from one block of activity to another, bringing to this listener’s mind the formal practices of Carl Nielsen.  The action ceases at about 3:22 for an interlude of high tessitura violin and low bass movement – a bush silence passage – and then the rapid-fire action returns with the opening repeated patterns revisited.  A series of smash-and-grab piano chords with violin top notes bring this considerable composition to an affirmative end.

While the performers demonstrate a fine precision and finish in their work, neither Rothschild nor Riddle is greatly overtaxed by much on this CD, the Kouvaras sonata offering fair but not virtuosic challenges.  What makes the collection surprising is the conservative nature of most of the compositions.  Schoenberg said, ‘There is plenty of good music to be written in C Major’; much of the work to be heard here could be used as an attempt to substantiate the thrust of that statement.  Not that this adoption of neo-orthodoxy in compositional parameters should be decried; it’s just something that takes me aback – not for the first time and probably not the last.

A few of my favourite things

cliveoconnell

TIMELESS

Tamara Smolyar

MOVE MD 3372

Smolyar

A luminary at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University, Tamara Smolyar is one of this city’s foremost pedagogue/practitioner pianists.   The product of an extensive number of Ukrainian, Russian and Australian teachers. she is well-known outside Monash circles for her partnership with violinist Ivana Tomaskova in the Duo Chamber Melange recitals at the Melbourne Recital Centre.   On this disc, she performs a pretty broad program of works that she has made part of her repertoire, a few of them familiar but most more honoured by reputation than by performance.  As she indicates, the music itself transcends its own time of creation, having become part of our long-running and all-too-familiar European tradition.

Smolyar begins with the CD’s earliest music, Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor, which she works through with assurance and a no-nonsense approach, handling the first eleven of the set as a continuous unit before the tone changes to the major at Variation 12.  The performer is linked to a substantially authoritative and orthodox school which takes its Beethoven without reconstructions or torques on accepted practice, so the return to the home key in Variation 17 continues the direct, somewhat pell-mell attack that leads to the elongated final variant which brings the piece to a determined conclusion.  The work is carried off clearly enough, although Smolyar is not hesitant in using the sustaining pedal, even during the more thick-textured passages.

Next come two Chopin nocturnes from the back of the book: the Op. 62 No. 2 in E Major and the posthumous Op. 72 No. 1 in E minor which are the last and first written in the sequence.   For the E Major Nocturne, Smolyar holds back on the potential for glitter, taking plenty of time over the mini-cadenzas that punctuate the melodic flow but heightening the drama where it should be emphasized from bar 40 on with a sensible subdued thunder in the work’s low-lying central segment.  The composer held back the E minor attempt and, to me, the piece only gets into its stride at the octave restatement of the first theme.  But this interpretation offers a fair case for the nocturne’s survival in the canon, the later treatments of the material handled by Smolyar with sensible restraint and flexibility.

A bracket of Rachmaninov impresses for its internal variety.  The Elegie in E flat Minor makes its points across a canvas of slowly rising passion with some fierce moments of intensity in the later pages, the elegiac quality eventually subsumed in tragedy.  Smolyar comes closest to familiar ground on this disc with the Prelude in G sharp minor giving a generous account of the piece’s difficult central stages, the metrical disposition changing from the continuous current of semiquavers in groups of six.   To her credit, Smolyar makes light work of the many punctuating splayed chords, even if you might have expected a greater dynamic explosion in the lead-up to the D sharp Major climax.  But the outstanding element in this set comes with the Etude-tableau Op. 39 No. 1, coherent for once as a study that tests the right-hand’s stamina and the rhythmic security of the left.  A continuous energetic surge that becomes more impassioned as it progresses, this remarkable exercise in dexterity enjoys an unexpected clarity of texture in this realization.

Shostakovich’s Prelude and Fugue in E flat minor provide a bracing, slightly acerbic interlude with an enviable lightness in the four-part fugue, all the more appreciated after the fraught, tremolo-informed harbingers of disaster that precede it.

So far, the recording’s origin has been the Iwaki Auditorium in the ABC building, Southbank.   For the last piece, Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, Smolyar changes venue and piano.   It remains unclear what instrument the ABC provided but she uses a Schimmel Concert Grand for this last offering and the sound becomes less full-bodied; clearer to discern the composer’s contrapuntal interweaving, but more bright in its timbral quality.  The artist handles with calm virtuosity the score’s many demands – the roiling sequential exercises of the first part, those solemn rolled chords in the chorale and the all-in-together-boys textual imbroglio of the work’s last section – yet the final impression is more of a task well accomplished than an engrossing journey from restlessness to affirmation.   Still, the CD as a compendium serves as a reminder of the many byways available for exploration to be found in between (or behind) the better-known masterworks of the serious pianist’s basic repertoire.

Powerful persuasiveness

cliveoconnell

MICHAEL BERTRAM  FANTAISIE-SONATA

Michael Kieran Harvey

Move Record  MD 3407

Michael Bertram Fantaisie-Sonata

It’s not a form you come across too often, the fantasy-sonata combination.  There are the two by Scriabin – an early one outside the canon and the Op. 19 in G sharp minor (there’s a lovely key for you) – one by Raff, another by Turina. Only the German composer uses the same title word-order as Michael Bertram; not that it would make too much difference, I suppose, except in giving some hint about the composer’s set of priorities.  The Australian work is a confronting amalgam that has a great freedom in its opening, then becomes more formally conservative as it moves towards its ending.

The Fantaisie-Sonata is this CD’s major offering, coming in at a little under 50 minutes.  In comparison, the other compositions are slighter: two of the Six Bagatelles from 2012, the Seven Sarcasms for an Out-Of-Tune Piano, and an isolated Violet 2, written five years ago.  None of these cracks the five-minute mark, the Sarcasms cycle’s elements decreasing in time-span as the work moves to its conclusion.  But, as a job lot, these comprise a substantial amount of the composer’s output for solo piano.   Still, the oldest piece is the CD’s title work which has waited 16 years for its appearance here, performed by its initial interpreter with splendid technical mastery and obvious sympathy.

Bertram’s Fantaisie-Sonata consists of three movements that offer a progress from the particular to the general, a fairly localised background to something approaching the transcendental.   If you search for the fantasy element, the work’s first and longest segment comes closest to it.  Each of the movements is explicated  –  or not –  by a quotation and, for the first, Bertram cites part of The Wanderings of Oisin by Yeats:

And then lost Niamh murmured, ‘Love, we go

To the Island of Forgetfulness, for lo!

The Islands of Dancing and of Victories

Are empty of all power.’

‘And which of these

Is the Island of Content?’

‘None know,’ she said  .  .  .

The aim is to set up a ‘Celtic phantasmagoria’, and so the listener is given this mental framework of the legendary Irish hero wandering through the centuries with his loving fairy princess before coming to the realization that his age is past.  The movement opens with Morse code-style twitterings in the instrument’s high register above a sequence of repeated chords and gestures; a heavy start that fades to placidity, where the material moves to manipulating intervals and motifs, like oscillating 3rds and 4ths.  At the 10/11 minute mark, the texture moves to washes of colour, semi-impressionist in flavour where a mid-range ostinato supports small flashes or flourishes in the piano’s upper and lower reaches alternately.   The movement turns darker with block bass chords punctuating the restless onward flow before a release of tension as Bertram takes his dominant line for a Klee-like walk.   More formal patterns come into play, almost an exercise-type interlude when Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum is suggested at the 13-minute mark.  The key of C minor dominates in this sudden excursion into Debussyanism which at one point could almost be breaking into a reminiscence of Jardins sous la pluie, but the ominous ostinato returns to centre the action and also move away from any focal tonal suggestions.  The fantasy element continues to a small nodal point where the work breaks into oscillating 3rds at the 16-minute point before a burst of Rachmaninov-style roulades, taken with infectious dash by Harvey, the movement’s climactic point arriving after some determined crescendos, with an error at 19:13 distracting for a moment from the high-point’s stentorian insistence which dwindles, you would think, to silence before an emphatic big bass full-stop.

For his second movement, Bertram sets the scene with a sentence extract from the Conclusion to Pater’s The Renaissance:

we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more.

After the first movement’s freedom, this offers stark contrast in a set of variations on a brief theme.   It begins with softly-drawn pastel textures punctuated by some more colourful outbursts.   The segments that follow offer: a Gershwin-style jaunt with plenty of artfully placed grace notes; an etude of restrained elegance; a burst of Latin rhythm that suggests a habanera/tango hybrid couched in salonesque language; an exercise in Bartok-style intervallic play (if not as rigorous in its counterpoint as the Hungarian master’s practice) which develops into rhetorical bravura before a return to the opening’s discipline; yet another Debussy suggestion as a shimmering backdrop underpins a long-ranging melody weaving above the susurrus, before the four-note theme appears, set in high, soft relief before broken arpeggios and triads conclude the movement peacefully.  Bertram presents this as a ‘life-story’, an abstract on Everyman and I suppose there’s plenty here to suggest the multiplicity that our existence has to offer.

For his concluding pages, the composer resorts to Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi :

Man [in imitation of his creator] wanted to reproduce the continuity of cosmic time  .  .  .

In this section of his text, the mathematician/astronomer is postulating that making music or song is an attempt by man to share God’s joy in creation.   So Bertram has moved from the specific if imaginary that Yeats hymns, to the mundanity of real life with its ups and downs, to this plane where the world disappears and we observe – and participate in – the opposition of darkness and light.   The first is given musical voice through a sequence of ‘synthetic’ scales, which suggest Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition but are simpler in presentation and employment; the light takes the form of insistent notes and chords.  This Manichaean juxtaposition opens with clouds of ascending and descending scales, Harvey’s sustaining pedal applied lavishly; Bertram obviously enjoyed this textural mesh as he maintains it almost to the stage of irritation.  Then come the repeated notes, recalling the first movement, here tamed by supporting chords that are eventually repeated common chords.  The scales return, then the chords in quick succession before a long sequence of composite textures rooted in the C tonality.  A final downward scalar plunge precedes the victory of the light’s repeated chords alternating between left and right hands, fading to a concluding broken C major triad.

For its breadth – of intellectual ambition, of pianistic skill, of emotional flexibility, of sustained continuity – this is an extraordinary construct, Harvey giving it as eloquent an interpretation as you could want.  What I find particularly attractive about it is that it maintains your attention; it excites, puzzles, illuminates in turn and what sense you make of its language, form and imaginative processes depends on a willingness to enter Bertram’s idiosyncratic but remarkably open sound-world.

No. 2 of the Six Bagatelles, called Chant, is based on a Russian folk-song fragment that has obsessed the composer for some time.  The melody is not covered in additional excrescences; rather, you notice the large number of repeated single notes in its outline with a modest application of harmonizing chords.  At the end, the tune is left pretty much to speak for itself.    No. 5, Uranus, uses an upper spaced/broken arpeggio pattern with isolated, sustained chords underneath.  Bertram cites Brian Eno as inspiration; I presume, the appeal lies in the British composer’s minimalist ventures as you hear a fair amount of pattern work while Bertram is proposing his sound-images of this icy, faceless planet.

Violet 2 is a travel piece that employs a central minor chord ostinato as an immediate suggestion that the journey is either fraught at the start or going to turn unpleasant, if not tragic.  The tune begins with an alternating 2nd interval in the soprano register, the focus changing to a slightly more interesting motivic cell in the bass.  The texture grows pointillist, reverts to the juxtaposition of high and low sound-layers before a clear expression of frustration at a dissonant-laden high-point.  The piece’s ending is as dark as the music gets on this CD.

Finally, the Seven Sarcasms suggest Prokofiev in their title and the first of them has a tang of the Russian composer although the parallels don’t go very far in a short piece notable for its use of repeated chords.   The second, a waltz, eventually moves into a regular rhythm but stops continually for pregnant pauses; the piece hints at satisfaction but remains unfinished, stunted in its progress.   No. 3 uses the Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen melody, opening in orthodox mode before veering into Messiaen-suggesting chords above the tune with a repeated pedal note to add to the fun. The following piece seems Webernian in character – it’s disjointed enough – but the referent sounds come through only in flashes;  Bertram is too fond of sustained washes to mimic the serial master’s acerbic scintillations.   The fifth of the series seems to propose one effect after another; despite an arresting and original cluster series, this terse scrap avoided engaging attention.   No. 6 skipped past in Hindemith’s Lebhaft mode; happy if brief.  To end, a Presto with quick pattern-work bubbled above some striding left hand Hindemith-style action.

These smaller-scale works give some further samples of Bertram at work, all of them assimilable and often atmospherically convincing.   Still, the effect of the disc as a whole is rather lop-sided because of the impressive canvas on which the composer has set his fantasy-sonata.   For all that, Move has done us all excellent service by giving a voice to this impressively questing, challenging composer and by providing a forum once again for the insights and artistry of this country’s finest pianist.

Softly, softly

cliveoconnell

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

Judy Diez d’Aux & Peter Sheridan bass flutes, Lachlan Dent cello

MOVE MD 3403

Continental Drift - Copy

No matter how obscure you think a particular combination of instruments may be, or how much you wonder if anyone could possibly be interested in it, when you express your reservations, you can be stunned by the chorus of enthusiastic affirmation that rises from the throats of a host of aficionados and fans, demanding to know how you can possibly question the appeal of said combination.   Here is a CD from the innovative Melbourne label that features, for the most part, original compositions for the bass flute – or, better still, two of them; in this instance, the duet is sometimes supported by a cello underpinning and, for good measure, all three participants enjoy solos.

I’ve known (and worked with) a few flautists and, while they have all been happiest with the normal Middle C-based instrument and can enjoy for limited periods a stint on the alto species, not one of them made much of a case for the bass.   Not surprising, really, when you compare the repertoire available across the three-level spectrum; while the alto has been put to striking use by 20th century masters, the lower-pitched instrument is a rare sight in orchestral ranks and never emerges from the shadows for a solo, except during a Master’s all-in recital, perhaps.

Peter Sheridan, the American flautist now resident in Australia, has done more than most performers to commission and promote music for the bass flute.   Here, in collaboration with fellow-countrywoman Judy Diez d’Aux and Melbourne cellist Lachlan Dent, Sheridan presents a series of works, some of them slight while others are fairly substantial, most of them written in the last few years.   As bookends, the musicians play some Haydn: the outer movements of the first London Trio in C as an ice-breaker, and the opening to the G Major Trio No. 3 to finish.   The benefit of these transcriptions, at the start in particular, is to give some context for the timbral interplay at work, acclimatising the listener to the breathy wind texture, initially reminiscent of some of the less assertive flute organ stops.

A fair amount of what is enclosed by these brisk, mildly spirited Haydn pieces comes from America, starting with Gary Schocker‘s Underwater Flowers of 2014: an impressionistic triptych for bass flute duet suggestive of Debussy in chamber aquatic mode, at its most original in the middle Flower Hat Jelly which inserts some jauntiness to animate the work’s undulating fluidity.   From Quebec’s Ella Louise Allaire/Martin Lord Ferguson partnership comes a 2015 diptych, Spring Awaking, which employs the cello as well.   It was hard to see much difference between the initial awaking and the pendant awakened segments, mainly because the writing style remained uniform; easy listening, certainly, with a penchant for unison and octave work but leavened with some sequences that bordered on the banal.

Sheridan’s solo, Doggerel by New Zealand writer Eve de Castro-Robinson, brought to the fore some interest in terms of sound production with plenty of initial plosives, a few passages that featured harmonics, some bent-note mini-glissandi, and what sounded like a dash or two of multiphonics.    As the piece progressed, a jig-type rhythm became more and more clear, helping to reinforce the relevance of the work’s title, I suppose.   Still, it made a fine vehicle for Sheridan’s skill, particularly an impressive breath-recovery rate. Madelyn Byrne, the computer music expert from California’s Palomar College, produced Suite in Sea three years ago and it presented as the most harmonically daring work so far on this CD.   Suggestive of the marine, but not as predictable as Schocker’s  Flowers, the middle Soliloquy for solo flute and the following Sea Spirits for flute duet revealed a well-harnessed lyricism and atmospheric eloquence, although the concluding Argentinian Ghost Tango for all three musicians intrigued for its out-of-left-field context and its use of Dent’s cello as a rhythm bass that eventually moved into an independent line of its own.

Dent makes a fine case for Stuart Greenbaum‘s Lunar Orbit, a solo that depicts simultaneously two aspects of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission: Armstrong and Aldrin sleeping in the landing module while Collins has to orbit the Moon by himself.  The composer makes uncomplicated pictorial suggestions with deliberately limited material but this was, so far, the most sustained piece of composition on the disc; not that at 5 1/2 minutes you are being intellectually stretched, but it makes its case with cogency and comes to an ardent and persuasive conclusion.

Peter Senchuk, Canadian/American in background, wrote the CD’s title piece last year. Another triptych, this score employs the flutes only and is very agreably constructed for them in a kind of fast-slow-fast format, both Diez d’Aux and Sheridan revealing a fine responsiveness to its emotional climate.   Not that the work over-stretches these players and the rhythmic interplay in its opening Divergent movement holds no terrors.  The central Slipping segment involves a good deal of luxuriant paired work where the lines move uniformly rather than showing much disjunction; the final Convergent pages offer a tad more complexity but not the ‘flutes frantically dance’ activity level proposed in the cover-notes.

Australian composer Brennan Keats‘ Fantasies and Wilderness, yet another triptych, also employs all three executants.   Its inspiration is Ireland: a nostalgia for the land itself, the sadness caused by young men leaving for war, and the sublimated depression generated by migration, in this case to the United States.   Keats uses a conservative harmonic language, which is effective enough in the opening section with its mournful summoning-up of some Celtic twilight.   In the middle pages, he quotes Danny Boy in an unabashedly euphonious arrangement, although the context calls out for something less humdrum; possibly the folksong Fil, fil o run o?   The last part also uses a well-worn quote – When Irish Eyes Are Smiling – which turns minor to suggest migrant struggles in America and the widespread social disharmony that prevailed, but then returns in full sentimental strength, although the work ends in something approaching depression.

Yuko Uebayashi‘s Le vent a travers les ruines is Diez d’Aux’s solo.   Full of pauses and couched in an aphoristic, slow-moving limited language, the composer’s ruins are not menacing – just deserted, offering little opposition or challenge to the placid wind that blows through them.   Its later stages offer a fine exploration of the instrument’s lower register as its moves to a calm, understated conclusion.  Stanley M. Hoffman‘s Arirang Variations began as a piano solo, the composer arranging it last year for Sheridan’s use.  Another work for the two flutes, it takes a Korean melody and offers four variations on it, the original tune announced at either end of the work.  This is intended for young players, to give them some intellectual impetus and to improve their skills; needless to say, these players handle it with aplomb and the sort of polish that would be the admiration of any player at any age.

Oddly enough, the more you hear of these pieces, the more intriguing the combination sounds.   At moments, Dent’s cello is unexpectedly dominant; at others, the variety of attack makes the organ-flute stop comparison invalid, chiefly because in this situation we are dealing with two distinct lines played by well-matched but not identical individuals. Still, at the end, you feel that the mysteries of the bass flute have been well-expounded, if not exactly exhausted.

Going bravely into the lists

cliveoconnell

CHOPIN

Enrico Padovani

ZDB Classic CD

ChopinCD

A native son of Parma,  educated in that city and Florence, Enrico Padovani has cut a swathe through the various competitions for piano in his native land – Fusignano, Racconigi, Pistoia, Piombino, Riccione, Padova, Moncalieri – winning prizes as both soloist and chamber musician.  Approaching the middle years of his career, Padovani – teacher and performer – has issued this sample of his considerable talents entering a particularly crowded field; most of the works performed on this CD have been recorded times beyond count by musicians of superb, transcendent insight as well as by players who over-estimated their own abilities.

It’s hard to think of a composer whose works have been the subject of so much brilliantly incisive scholarship and investigation for its own sake.  Chopin remains the ne plus ultra for many pianists, his works presenting challenges in their own right as well as in the light of recorded performances by high-profile executants.  Even these days, 165 years after the master’s death, players of all nationalities and abilities grapple with works that range from the near-unplayable to the deceptively simple and straightforward.  As well, Chopin is one of the few composers to have an international competition  – one of the most searching (and often controversial) on the European stage – held in his honour.

Padovani’s choice of material shows a bracing response to the Chopin challenge.  You don’t find the all-too-familiar pieces in this 11-track offering.  The stand-alone popular works – Berceuse, Barcarolle, Fantaisie-Impromptu, D flat Etude, E flat Nocturne – are absent as Padovani goes for the jugular with the Sonata No. 3 in B minor, the four Opus 17 Mazurkas, the non-flamboyant C minor Polonaise and the posthumous Waltz No. 19 in A minor. His only gesture to the well-known comes courtesy of the B flat minor Scherzo No. 2.

The sonata takes pride of place and Padovani approaches it with a firm grasp of its confrontational nature.  Unlike many of his peers, he repeats the first movement’s exposition in a fluent exhibition of technique with a deft mixture of discipline and rubato in the interpretation’s metrical progress.  The development sounds over-muscular, the texture pretty thick; but then, this segment of the work is probably the most problematic and disappointing for any executant, let alone a dispassionate analyst of the movement itself.  In the following Scherzo, for once the actual rhythm is clearly articulated, not the usual meaningless run of catch-as-catch-can quavers meant to dazzle with legerdemain while at the same time puzzling for a lack of structural sense.  Just as impressive in musically informed terms is the movement’s Trio, where the middle voices emerge with appreciable clarity.

It would be hard to cavil at the B Major Largo that opens in brusque majesty, only to fall back into a finely spun melodic paragraph.  As with the preceding movement, Padovani makes several individual strokes in the central section where his use of rubato is both pronounced and well-positioned.  He also shows an enviable tenth-embracing left hand stretch just before the turn back to the movement’s home key.  With the Finale/Presto, this interpretation gives pride of place to the left hand in those places where the right has sequences of downward-rushing scales, an emphasis that robs these pages of some much-needed lightness of texture.  Still, the final blaze into B Major is both well-accomplished and exciting to experience.

Few of the near-60 mazurkas ring recognition bells with the public, except for the early B flat Op.7 and the two used in Fokine’s Les Sylphides ballet. This Op. 17 set are fairly obscure, only the first favoured by many pianists, but none of them is technically challenging to negotiate.  Padovani begins the first B flat piece with a definite rhythmic impetus, albeit restrained in its dynamic contrasts.  The following E minor work succeeds much more pleasingly with a sensitive amalgam of strength and fragility, the left hand drones sustaining a finely-honed melody line that gradually shrinks into itself.  Pick of the set is the ambivalent No. 3 in A flat, Padovani investing its two pages with excellent shapeliness of phrase and sensitive variety of touch: an outstandingly sensible, and coherent interpretation.  The last of the sequence, Lento ma non troppo, shows an individualistic approach with the tempo direction’s last three words informing the chosen pace.  Here is not the mournfully languid meander that many other pianists make of it but a much more insistent creature; its inner propulsion both unnerving and somehow just right as a no-nonsense patina-stripping exercise.

The most sombre of the polonaises, the C minor of Op. 40, holds few moments of virtuosic excitement, unlike its Military A Major companion.  Padovani underplays the work’s tragic connotations, taking a very aggressive approach with the left-hand octave melody-line and giving us little consolation in the A flat Trio where Chopin inserts some actual polonaise rhythmic gestures; here, these passages are given sotto voce before the muffled call to arms makes its re-appearance.  In sum, this is a striking example of how to look with fresh eyes at pages that have been typecast in solid ambient gloom for far too long.

The Scherzo finds the executant using his sustaining pedal to create sound-washes, sometimes effectively, at other stages over-painting the harmonic welter. The work comes to a powerful, dramatic conclusion but the right-hand descending figure that dominates the main theme’s second strophe is often articulated oddly; its notes are all there, but they register unevenly, some weightier in impact than others.  It might be an essay in internal diminuendo each time but the effect is ungainly – a rare disappointment.

Finally, Padovani provides his own encore with the small-scale waltz, a mini-essay in delicacy and the least difficult piece on the CD.  For all that, it makes for an ideal rounding-off after all the preceding pounding vitality, as the pianist gives it a clear-speaking integrity of phrase through a muted dynamic palette that speaks volumes for his powers of musicianship and sensitivity.

He might not be the most eminent name among current Chopin interpreters but Padovani shows us through his enterprise in producing this CD how many-sided, how protean is the Polish composer’s genius, achieving this end with devotion and indubitable craft.