Die Beziehungen zwischen der philharmonischen Welt der großen Orchester und dem Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts erfundenen Saxophon sind nicht besonders eng. Das Label "audite" bietet jetzt ab November eine CD an, die Begegnungen von Saxophon und Orchester dokumentiert.

Das von dem rührigen französischen Instrumentenbauer Adolphe Sax entwickelte konische Blechblasinstrument mit einfachem Rohrblatt fand zwar nach seiner Patentierung 1846 relativ schnell Eingang in die Militärkapellen der Zeit, jedoch kaum ein Komponist integrierte es - und wenn, dann nur gelegentlich - ins Sinfonieorchester. Nur in wenigen Opern- oder Orchesterpartituren wird es verlangt: so unter anderem. in einigen Werken von Meyerbeer, Massenet, Ambroise Thomas, Bizet, Debussy, Ravel, Strawinsky, Hindemith, Bartok, Berg oder Honegger. Im Jazz sieht die Sache ganz anders aus, den kann man sich im kleinen Ensemble oder der Big-Band ohne Saxophon kaum vorstellen, und die Namen großer Solisten wie Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan oder John Coltrane sind weit über die Fangemeinde hinaus bekannt. Klassische Werke für Saxophon und Klavier gibt es eine ganze Reihe, und auch Solokonzerte für Saxophon und Orchester hört man gelegentlich im Konzertsaal: relativ bekannt wurden da Werke von Jacques Ibert, Claude Debussy, Alexander Glasunow und Frank Martin. Das in Detmold ansässige Label "audite" bietet jetzt ab November eine CD an, die manche Begegnungen von Saxophon und Orchester im 20. Jahrhundert dokumentiert - und diese Begegnungen fanden vor allem in Frankreich statt.

Musikbeispiel: Henri Tomasi - 'Cadence’ aus: Concerto für Saxophon und Orchester

Das ist Dominique Tassot, der Solist unserer heutigen Sendung. Er ist 43 Jahre alt, studierte in Metz und am Pariser Conservatoire, gewann verschiedene Wettbewerbe, ist Mitglied eines Saxophon-Quartetts und war an mehreren Produktionen und Uraufführungen beteiligt. Heute unterrichtet er als Professor am Konservatorium der Ardennen-Stadt Charleville und ist als Solist und Kammermusiker tätig. Zusammen mit dem deutschen Hornisten und Dirigenten Manfred Neuman fasste er den Plan, unter dem Motto "French Saxophone" Solokonzerte des 20. Jahrhunderts für Saxophon und Orchester beispielhaft aufzunehmen. Heraus kam eine CD, die insgesamt 5 Konzerte bietet, von denen bis auf eins, die Rhapsodie von Debussy, alle erstmals auf Platte erscheinen. Dabei sind Debussys Werk und die "Légende" von André Caplet in diesem Jahr 100 Jahre alt, das "Concerto" von Henri Tomasi stammt von 1949, die von der Tonsprache "modernste" "Musique de Concert" von Marius Constant ist fast 50 Jahre alt, während das "jüngste" Stück die 1971 komponierte "Fantaisie-Caprice" des Belgiers Jean Absil ist. Mit vier Ersteinspielungen also bereits eine fürs Repertoire wichtige Aufnahme, ist die technische und musikalische Qualität der CD hervorzuheben. Dafür bürgt neben dem souveränen und in diesem Stil hocherfahrenen Solisten auch das Münchner Rundfunkorchester, das in der Hierarchie des Bayerischen Rundfunks zwar erst nach dem Rundfunksinfonieorchester kommt, dem es aber gelingt, sich in einer Vielzahl geschickt genutzter Repertoire-Nischen immer wieder mit makellosen Aufnahmen zu Wort zu melden.

Musikbeispiel: Marius Constant - ‘Intermezzo’ aus: "Musique de Concert" für Saxophon und Orchester

Soweit ein "Intermezzo" aus der "Musique de Concert" für Saxophon und zwölf Instrumente von Marius Constant. Von großer formaler Klarheit ist die Fantaisie-Caprice des Belgiers Jean Absil: In jungen Jahren ein glühender Verfechter von Polytonalität und Atonalität, klingt dieses Alterswerk wie eine Rückkehr in romantische Gefilde.

Musikbeispiel: Jean Absil - aus: "Fantaisie-Caprice" für Saxophon und Orchester

Im ebenso umfangreichen wie lesenswerten Booklet-Text zur CD schildert Autor Michael Struck-Schloen anschaulich die Entstehungsgeschichte der beiden ältesten der hier eingespielten Konzerte. Er schreibt: " Einen ... kuriosen, gleichwohl folgenreichen Fall von Geburtshilfe leistete ... die Französin Elise Boyer, die 1887 den Bostoner Arzt Richard Hall ehelichte und später – als "Therapie" gegen ihre progressive Gehörlosigkeit – das Saxophon erlernte. Weil Literatur für das Instrument verschwindend gering war, ging Elise Boyer-Hall die vornehmsten französischen und belgischen Komponisten um neue Werke an. Nur Wenige (darunter Gabriel Fauré und Ernest Chausson) konnten den Lockungen des üppigen Auftragshonorars widerstehen, und so gingen bei der Dame in Boston schließlich Partituren von Claude Debussy, André Caplet, Florent Schmitt und Vincent d’Indy ein, die heute zum "klassischen" Stamm des Saxophon-Repertoires zählen."
Da es sich bei Madame Boyer nicht um einen Profi, sondern um eine engagierte Amateur-Spielerin handelte, stellt das Stück von Caplet den Solopart nicht in den Vordergrund, sondern bettet das Saxophon sozusagen ein in die Gruppe der Holzbläser im Orchester, die hier aus Oboe, Klarinette und Fagott besteht. Trotz des vielsagenden Titels "Légende" hat Caplet keine Programm-Musik komponiert, sondern wollte damit wohl eher den insgesamt romantischen Ton dieses 1905 von Elise Boyer-Hall in Boston uraufgeführten Stückes charakterisieren.

Musikbeispiel: André Caplet - aus: "Légende" für Saxophon und Orchester

Für Claude Debussy war die Auftragsarbeit für Elise Boyer-Hall wohl eher eine etwas lästige Pflicht, die sich auch länger hinzog. Etwas herablassend berichtet er 1903 einem Freund: "Das Saxophon ist ein Rohrblatt-Tier, mit dessen Gewohnheiten ich wenig vertraut bin. Liebt es die romantische Süße der Klarinetten oder die etwas grobschlächtige Ironie des Sarrusofons? Am Ende habe ich es melancholische Weisen murmeln lassen, zum Wirbel einer Militärtrommel."

Als Titel zog Debussy "Arabische", "Maurische" oder "Orientalische" Rhapsodie in Betracht, um es schließlich beim neutraleren Begriff "Rhapsodie" zu belassen.

Musikbeispiel: Claude Debussy - aus: "Rapsodie" für Saxophon und Orchester

Die Neue Platte – heute mit französischer Saxophon-Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, gespielt von Dominique Tassot und dem Münchner Rundfunkorchester unter der Leitung von Manfred Neuman.

Music that grapples with demons and is never wholly at ease, even when wings bless the darkness with glimpses of light – when you’re Robert Schumann, angels are terrifying too.

The symphonic models are clear and we hear the ghostly spectre of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Mendelssohn – but no one has told Schumann’s material that it needs to conform, and the music cannot help but spill over any frame its composer attempts to place around it. The first movement of his Symphony No 1 reaches an apparent cathartic end-point as a solo flute line marked dolce reconciles grinding harmonic and structural inner tensions. Time to stop this madness. But then brass, percussion and trilling woodwinds unleash a stampeding burlesque march. Baleful chromatic inclines smudge the harmony, like Offenbach or Sousa turned on their dark side, and such instability derives from the restlessness of Schumann’s mind, you think, rather than being an overtly conceptual compositional strategy.

The free jazz of the Second Symphony’s sostenuto assai prologue, C major credentials asserted by having the strings play anything but, as the brass sustain pure C major triads; in the Third Symphony, that extra movement that sneaks in before the finale, a cobwebby and gothic reimagining of the grounding contrapuntal principles of Renaissance music and Bach; and the audacious cyclic structure of the Fourth Symphony, each movement played attacca and dovetailing into the next. This music of demons and angels grapples also with angles – to take on structure, awkward punctuation, Schumann pushing form, his personal mission being to remould the symphony. And when the realisation dawns that Schumann composed the first version of what would become his Fourth Symphony in the same year as his First Symphony, eyes blink in astonishment. The natural order of things would be to presume that Schumann’s streamlined Fourth Symphony is a perfect distillation of the first three symphonies – but the pathway through Schumann’s symphonic journey is filled with unexpected and improbable twists and turns.

Deciding to record a cycle of the Schumann symphonies begs the question: what exactly should be recorded? And complementary but divergent ideas about the Schumann symphonies have been paraded as rarely before, with four major conductors during the past 18 months releasing four major cycles on disc. Sir Simon Rattle, with the Berlin Philharmonic, gives us four symphonies with the early 1841 version of the Fourth, while Yannick Nézet-Séguin (and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe) and Robin Ticciati (with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra) opt for Schumann’s 1851 revised version. But Heinz Holliger and the WDR Symphony Orchestra of Cologne – like Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, whose trailblazing 1997 Schumann cycle was given the boxed-up DG reissue treatment last year – perceive Schumann’s symphonic evolution in seven stages. When Holliger completes his cycle during the next year and a half, Schumann’s early Symphony in G minor (theZwickau Symphony) will take its place alongside the first three canonic symphonies, both versions of the Fourth, and the often-overlooked mini-me symphony Overture, Scherzo and Finale – Schumann’s compositional twists of fate put into historical context by a composer/conductor/oboist who has been obsessed with the composer’s enigma for more than 40 years.

I made Rattle’s cycle my Critics’ Choice album of the year in the December 2014 issue; I’ve also elevated Nézet-Séguin’s to an equivalent position in the past. Ticciati’s set has given me much pleasure too, and even more to think about. Nézet-Séguin and Ticciati deploy chamber-orchestra string sections, with Ticciati most explicitly evoking period-instrument practice. Rattle’s Berlin set carries its weightier orchestral ballast very elegantly, and his set became my portal back to Schumann after a longer period than I care to admit when my listening had been dominated by Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner. Rattle’s opulent, rapacious approach – the climax of the First Symphony’s opening movement and the Trio in the Second Symphony’s Scherzo seemingly moving faster than time itself, while the Berlin strings float the slow movement towards heaven – represented the warmest welcome back possible to Schumann’s dream-built chimeric fantasy world, the heartfelt directness of his melodic fancy played out over structural chess moves. Ticciati’s sometimes manically driven, flintier orchestral sound can be unexpectedly austere; Nézet-Séguin’s cycle is the most unashamedly Romantic of the four, fevered-brow gesturing, rubato with attitude.

Despite their differences, though, the sets are unified by one underlying common denominator – none of them could have been recorded 30, or even 20, years ago. Over the phone from his home in Zurich, Heinz Holliger suppresses a laugh when I ask: why now? Why, suddenly, have maestros gone all Schumann crazy? ‘Well, I started conducting him 30 years ago, when too many conductors had problems with Schumann,’ he reflects. ‘He was never a problem for pianists or composers – Debussy and Berg held him in great esteem – but conductors realised that you cannot try to sight-read Schumann; if you do, the music is completely grey.’ And even 50 shades of grey would not be enough to express Schumann’s multiverse of colour? ‘He does not write out everything; he doesn’t tell you which voice is the principal and which accompanies; nor whether one instrument should have a diminuendo while the others crescendo. To make a Schumann symphony sound light and transparent, as he intended, takes a lot of rehearsal. Each player needs to know whether they’re playing part of only the harmony, or whether they are involved in the counterpoint. Schumann was a great writer of words too, and you need to understand how close the phrasing is to speech. But many conductors are not so interested in this background; they just play what they read.’

Holliger reminds me that Schumann never heard more than 12 first violins during his whole life and, in his view, the period-instrument movement has had a very positive effect on how conductors perceive appropriate orchestral weighting and internal balance. And when I talk to Sir Simon Rattle a few weeks earlier, he makes a characteristically smart analogy: ‘We think of Beethoven and Brahms as being the grizzled old lions of Austro-German symphonic tradition,’ he tells me, ‘but Schumann’s symphonies move like a panther. Beethoven plunges his feet forcefully through the ground; but Schumann’s feet sprint and never fully touch the floor.’

Rattle can’t quite explain why Schumann is suddenly so de rigueur, although sometimes, he says, mysterious forces collude to raise the collective consciousness around a particular composer. But the important thing for Rattle is that distinct and informed conductorly perspectives must all be celebrated. Ticciati’s way is not his way, but Rattle admires enormously how he tackles the 1851 revision of the Fourth Symphony: ‘Robin makes a clear case for how the revised version can retain the radical edge of the 1841 version. Still it sounds like a fireball and I take my hat off to him.’

Which Fourth Symphony? That’s the most fundamental decision any wannabe Schumann conductor must make. To programme the 1841 version is to agree with Brahms, who owned the autograph score and wrote: ‘It is a real pleasure to see anything so bright and spontaneous expressed with corresponding ease and grace.’ He found the revised version charmless and stodgy, and Rattle and Holliger concur with Brahms, and each other, that the first version is much preferable – although they choose to do notably different things with that information. ‘Schumann made the revised piece in a depressive state,’ Rattle says, ‘and Brahms was completely right about the relative merits of the two versions.’ Holliger adds that Schumann’s orchestra in Düsseldorf, which premiered the new version, was nowhere near as honed as the standard of playing he had become accustomed to in Leipzig, while Schumann himself ‘was heavier, and moved and spoke more slowly’. But the pertinent point for Holliger is that Schumann retained his high-velocity metronome marks. Rattle chooses to ignore the later rewrite – Holliger gives us both but attempts to play the 1851 version, as he says, ‘retaining the true spirit of the earlier version’.

Holliger reminds me that he met Rattle 40 years ago when the young conductor invited him to perform Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. And Rattle clearly remains in awe of Holliger’s status as a Schumann guru – ‘Ask Heinz, when you speak to him, to tell you about the tempo relationships in the symphonies and about his extraordinary discovery in the fourth movement of the Rhenish Symphony.’ And I’m happy to take my cue from the Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic.

On paper, and in the mind, Schumann’s Second Symphony registers as the most conventionally ‘symphonic’, its four movement groundplan – with a slow introduction breaking into an Allegro trot – putting you in mind of the first two Beethoven symphonies or of Haydn. And as I began to reacquaint myself with Schumann’s symphonic world, I pondered how a composition that felt instinctively unified melodically and motivically could also sound so disparate and varied, like each movement acting as a standalone character piece (not that you would necessarily want that). Holliger provides an answer.

‘The first and second movements,’ he tells me, ‘have the same metronome mark of crotchet=144, and the slow movement is nearly half; then the finale is in a very fast one-beat-per-bar, but still you feel like each bar matches the beat of the slow movement. The whole symphony is in one, like the conception of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.’ Holliger explains how the music is glued together throughout by a four-note cell, but I ask him to tell me about the music’s disunity. Am I right to hear each movement orbiting independently too, in a way that is uniquely Schumann? Holliger alludes to Bernd Alois Zimmermann, the composer of Die Soldaten, Photoptosis and Requiem für einen jungen Dichter, who died in 1970, and who was famous for pieces that made liberal use of collage and knitted together layers of borrowed material. ‘He was fascinated by the idea of Kugelgestalt – that time is like a ball, and all times of all centuries are focused in one single point. I think Schumann understood this too. You ask about the Second Symphony – well, the beginning could be like 17th-century polyphony and then, suddenly, it looks 120 years or more into the future. You feel this composer knows the whole history of music.’

The Second Symphony’s Scherzo has something of the lightness of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Holliger explains as he tells me about those angels and demons, ‘but is relentless, a diabolic dance, in the mood of ETA Hoffmann’. And that shockingly abrupt change of mood, the solo flute overtaken by a brutal march as the first movement of the First Symphony reaches its climax, is another characteristic Schumann moment. ‘In the First Symphony the flute symbolises a butterfly which here is overwhelmed by very tragic music. Marches are a frightening thing. Send soldiers to kill, and you’re asking them to stop thinking about what they are doing. Trills in Schumann, like the woodwind trills you mention, often tremor and shiver like music with a high fever – this is not the Baroque idea of a trill as ornamentation.’

Holliger talks about the symbolism of instrumental identity in Schumann’s music. In Overture, Scherzo and Finale a choir of three trombones appear suddenly like a premonition of the role they will take in the fourth movement of the Rhenish. ‘When his brother Eduard was dying, Schumann woke up at three in the morning. He had been dreaming about three trombones, and later he learnt that his brother had died at 3am. Always in Schumann, three trombones is a message about death.’ I mention that Rattle urged me to ask him about this same movement. ‘Well, when I looked at the sketches, I realised that the tempo changes to double the speed two beats later than in the printed score – nobody ever does this, but the difference is essential.’

That Schumann had such specific ideas about orchestral colour and instrumental identity runs triumphantly contrary to that tired cliché about his orchestration being somehow inept and clumsy. In the September 2014 issue of Gramophone, Robin Ticciati revealed that, for him, the attraction of Schumann is precisely because the orchestration is so, as he put it, ‘crazy’. ‘It’s also so controlled, and the palette is extraordinary. And I think when you get to a Schumann score, the first reaction is not to go, “What is all that?” but “What does he want?” and “What’s important here?”’ Ticciati hears clues about how Schumann ought to sound orchestrally in how he ‘orchestrates’ his piano music; and in the booklet-notes accompanying his cycle, Yannick Nézet-Séguin discusses how the defined attack and decay of modern trumpets help balance the orchestration.

And so Schumann wins. The consensus, circa 2014/15, is leave well alone. ‘Schumann learnt lots about orchestration from Mendelssohn, the greatest orchestrator of his time,’ Holliger explains, ‘and he tried to have a very transparent sound in the orchestra. It’s not that very heavy “German potato soup” sound. I never change a single note in any of the symphonies.’ Rattle confirms that Schumann must be ‘light and singing, or the sound can be too brittle – the key word is sostenuto.’ The impulsive and spontaneous side of Schumann is also important to Rattle. ‘The last symphonic music Schumann wrote was the Rhenish,’ he says, ‘and the fourth movement feels like Schumann falling apart, then the finale is an attempt to cradle him in a warm embrace. And for that to work, you can’t micromanage too heavily.’ Music to Schumann’s ears, I suspect – a composer who clearly knew the value of spontaneity: ‘My symphonies would have reached Opus 100 if I had but written them down,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I am so full of music, and so overflowing with melody, that I find it simply impossible to write anything.’

This download unfortunately came with no accompanying booklet, which led understandably to some confusion on my part. To begin with, not initially knowing the names of the players, I wondered if these might be historical recordings by once famous violinist Jacques Thibaud teaming up with cellist Pablo Casals, as he often did, and as he sometimes did with Fritz Kreisler on viola. But that didn’t seem to square with these very modern-sounding performances and recordings. For my next point of confusion I have ArkivMusic to thank, which lists a 2004 recording on this same label of Beethoven’s three op. 9 Trios by an ensemble named Jacques Thibaud Trio. So, was Audite repackaging the earlier recording, along with a new one of the op. 3 Trio and Serenade, as a two-disc set (in its physical form), or were these all new recordings? To muddy the waters further, ArkivMusic, under a separate entry for Jacques Thibaud Trio Berlin, lists this new 2015 release containing all five works.

It’s highly unlikely that there are two different string trios, one calling itself Jacques Thibaud Trio and the other calling itself Jacques Thibaud Trio Berlin; I’m quite sure they’re one and the same. After poking about on the Internet for a while, I found the ensemble’s web site, jttrio.com/string-trio/about, and learned that the group was formed in 1994 at the Berlin School of Art and is currently comprised by Burkhard Maiss, violin; Hannah Strijbos, viola; and Bogdan Jianu, cello. Moreover, the web site’s media link indicates that these performances were recorded live at Dixon Hall in New Orleans during December 2012. The players are a long way from home, but at least that puts to rest the question as to whether the op. 9 Trios might be a reissue of an older recording by this same group. They’re not.

Beethoven’s five works for string trio—four formally designated as trios for violin, viola, and cello, and one designated a serenade—are even more astonishing than they might otherwise be by virtue of being such early works. All were composed between 1795 and 1797–98. The Trio in C Minor, op. 9/3, is especially shocking for its convulsive violence, interrupted phrases, lurching rhythms, and compressed gestures—a foretelling of the “Serioso” String Quartet to come over 10 years later.

I can appreciate the Jacques Thibaud Trio wanting to play the hell out of the piece and strike fear into the hearts of the audience in the process, but the risks the players take in this live performance to achieve their end, I’m sorry to say, result in some really bad and scrappy playing. It’s not simply an out-of-tune note violinist Maiss hits on his second sf chord (G-E♭-C) in measure 18, it’s the wrong note. Anticipating the jump to C♯ in the following measure, he misses the C♮ and hits what sounds like a C♯ in the chord instead. Granted, stuff happens in a live performance that wouldn’t necessarily happen in a studio recording, or that would be fixed in a retake or in the editing booth if it did. These are fine musicians, and they’re commended for wanting to give their all to these performances; but for my taste, there’s just a bit too much roughness around the edges in these readings—too many instances of “scrunched” chords, shrill high notes, gruff tone, and “smooshed” runs.

It was much the same overly aggressive approach by the Trio Zimmermann that elicited some criticism from me in a review of that ensemble’s second volume of Beethoven’s string trios in 38:2, and the Zimmermann’s players sound tame compared to the Jacques Thibaud Trio. Part of the problem is the too up-close recording, but physical distance would only lessen the impact of wrong notes and abrasive bowing, not magically right them. I continue to prefer the Grumiaux and Leopold String Trios in these works, but my favorite—still listed at Amazon but not at ArkivMusic—are the recordings on Denon by the Mozart String Trio with Jean-Jacques Kantorow, violin; Vladimir Mendelssohn, viola; and Mari Fujiwara, cello. They seem to find just the right balance between tonal grace and refinement in the lyrical passages and intensity of expression in the agitated passages.
Some may like the Jacques Thibaud Trio’s Beethoven for its unvarnished bluntness and bareknuckle approach, but my preference is for greater civility.

Immediately obvious from the above tables is that the son and mother team, Dmitri Sitkovetsky and Bella Davidovich, skip the first and third movement repeats in the early F-Major Sonata, considerably shortening their performance. For purists, of course, that’s a deal-breaker. For me, it’s less of an issue, considering that there’s something strangely a-melodic about this sonata. It seems to proceed in fits and starts, with jerky folk-like rhythms and not a singable tune anywhere, leaving me to wonder why I would want to hear portions of it repeated.

But there’s something else besides the omitted repeats that recommends against the Sitkovetsky version. Originally recorded in 1982 by Orfeo, it doesn’t benefit from the best sound, and while Sitkovetsky plays in tune and doesn’t hit any clunkers, he “smooshes” some of his runs, and the performance has the quality of a dry run-through. That feeling tends to persist as well throughout the G-Major and C-Minor Sonatas, in which there are no repeats. Overall timings for Sitkovetsky and Davidovich are faster in all three sonatas. So, I’m going to eliminate their recording from contention.

Dumay has as his partner the wonderful Maria João Pires, one of my favorite pianists, and, as you can hear from the very outset of their F-Major Sonata, they bring a spring-like freshness and expressive charm to their reading that’s completely absent from the Sitkovetsky. Dumay plays with such sweetness of tone, and Pires plays with such tender touch, that Grieg’s listless melodies and limping rhythms suddenly come alive. It’s amazing, really, to hear the differences between these performances.

Pietsch redeems herself in these readings with pianist Detlev Eisinger. Her casual approach to the printed score, as noted previously in her playing as a member of the Testore Trio, is gone. Interpretively, her view of these sonatas is quite similar to that of Dumay. Pietsch plays with fullness and warmth of tone, is responsive to Grieg’s folkish, occasionally Hardanger-like fiddle tunes, and she has in Eisinger a sympathetic partner. Technically, I’d have to say that Pietsch is not quite as dexterous or articulate as Dumay, nor is Eisinger quite a match for Pires, who is a piano virtuoso of the first order. Then too, Dumay and Pires have teamed up for a number of outstanding recordings; they seem a bit more comfortable with each other, and they’re a dream team that’s hard to beat.

I guess if I were recommending a recording of Grieg’s violin sonatas, I’d have to give the edge to Dumay and Pires, but it’s a slight edge at that. Pietsch and Eisinger are very, very good, and succeed in making this music speak to me in a way that others I’ve heard don’t.

The Russian school of pianism rolls forward like an Energizer Bösendorfer bunny, apparently unstoppable. Not that I’d ever want it to stop, as evidenced by Georgian pianist Elisso Bolkvadze, whose powerful, charismatic playing stands on the same level as the far more famous YouTube sensation Valentina Lisitsa. Born in Tblisi in 1967, Bolkvadze is referred to as a national hero in her native Georgia, and she’s been named a UNESCO Artist for Peace. If U.S. audiences aren’t likely to know her name, she’s performed around the world and placed sixth in the 1989 Van Cliburn Competition. Besides making an early album for Sony, there has been a steady stream of later recordings.

What sealed my enthusiasm for this new release was unexpected, a galvanizing reading of the Prokofiev Second Piano Sonata from 1912. We find the composer half-perched as bratty precocious Modernist—at 21, he was already a prominent member of St. Petersburg’s contemporary music culture—and an extremely knowing writer for piano, well on his way to developing a unique personal style. The Second Sonata, which stands in sequence between the scandalously raucous Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, roams freely from Chopin through Liszt and Rachmaninoff, adding zingers and flashes of dissonance that must have sounded incongruous at the time. These innovations are squibs compared with the bombshell Stravinsky would drop the next year in Le Sacre, and it’s difficult to bring out a sharp profile for the whole work.

Bolkvadze manages to, however, by force of will, playing the first movement on a grander scale than, say Yefim Bronfman in his well-regarded Sony recording from 1995. At times he’s freer and more imaginative in his phrasing, but Bolkvadze has more impact. Prokofiev introduces fine-textured filigree as a contrast with power in the first movement, and Bolkvadze makes the two fit naturally together. There’s also more energy and personality throughout than with Bronfman.

Being a natural at Prokofiev has no predictive value in Schubert, and no matter how hard I squinted, the two composers don’t really belong together. Except for Richter, I don’t think of Russians pianists being very attuned to Schubert (even Horowitz made a hash of the late, great B♭ Sonata, on DG). The first set of Four Impromptus, D 899, is much loved and much recorded, so what does Bolkvadze have to add? Happily, she passes the bar insofar as her Schubert genuinely sounds like Schubert in its sensitivity, natural flow, and melodic grace. This is immediately apparent in her poised, tender reading of Impromptu No. 1 in C Minor.

I don’t hear Brendel’s refinement of touch, but I’m not sure that’s a lack; for all its fame, Brendel’s Schubert mostly strikes me as too cool and objective (although his Philips recording of the Impromptus is a standout). When an obscure pianist like Bolkvadze competes with great names, you wait for the moment when her imagination or technique falters in comparison. But it doesn’t. She builds the C-Minor Impromptu to a powerful climax that does justice to Richter’s impassioned Schubert, in fact.

Everything goes just as well in the remaining three pieces. In Impromptu No. 2 her left hand could spring the rhythm with more verve as the right hand is racing along. The middle section is considerably more forceful than the norm, but I count that a plus. This is a pianist with all the intrinsic style that the Russian school stands for, who also adds a lyricism and tenderness, beautifully exemplified in Impromptu No. 3’s enchanting melody, that even some illustrious Russian pianists didn’t possess.

It’s a delight to encounter, by chance, really, such a mature artist. Despite the chalk-and-cheese coupling of composers and the skimpy total timing, this recital disc is one to place on a short list of the year’s best. Clear, realistic piano sound; slimline cardboard packaging.

Nelsova montre tout l’étendue de son tempérament engagé et pétillant.

Un rinnovato interesse per le opere orchestrali di Robert Schumann ha visto...

Un rinnovato interesse per le opere orchestrali di Robert Schumann ha visto...

The work for four horns stands out, if only for the novelty of its scoring, and Holliger’s performance – with a fabulously secure quartet of soloists – luxuriates in the sonorities it generates, while in the two works with piano, the soloist Alexander Lonquich finds moments of poetic beauty in the lyrical interludes.

Holliger durchmisst mit dem vor Energie strotzenden WDR Sinfonieorchester eine unfassbare räumliche Tiefe – Kopatchinskaja lässt ihren Geigenton vielfach schillern, das alles in präziser Linienführung. Schumanns Klavierkonzert dagegen befreien Holliger und Pianist Denes Varjon entspannt und reflektiert von schwülstiger Romantik, verleihen ihm Dynamik und Licht. Wahre Referenzaufnahmen!