L’obra única de Frederic Mompou, interpretada amb el talent de Maria Canyigueral i el complement de músics amb una perspectiva externa, donen com a resultat una interessant versió del folklore català.

Franz Liszt skrev aldrig färdigt sin enda opera Sardanapalo. Efter första...

I enjoyed this disc enormously. Neither orchestra is technically flawless but both play extremely well for Szell and the minor blemishes, such as they are, are more than offset by the sense of spirit in both performances. As for Szell, he’s on excellent form here, conducting two excellent and charismatic performances.

I’m delighted that these two performances have been made available on CD. Since the presentation standards are up to Audite’s usual high standards, which enhances the appeal of this release, this disc is a very enticing proposition.

Swiss-born Edith Mathis enjoyed a long and distinguished career singing lyric operatic roles, and there are a few recordings of Mozart and Haydn operas to prove her excellence. Her greatest successes however were in the world of oratorio. One understands why conductors loved her, as throughout her career, one finds unwavering perfection of pitch, tone, and rhythm, whether in the recording studio, or on stage. She is reliable.

As the dramatic scope of the art song is wider and more varied than the oratorio, and as there is no conductor to be the temperamental catalyst, Edith Mathis’s artistic power fades somewhat when matters are left in her own hands, and the hands of her accompanist, in this case, the Swiss born Karl Engel. Pitch, tone, and rhythm all dutifully appear in their proper places, in their proper roles, but they seem to have fulfilled their duties at this point without delivering a compelling attitude or atmosphere to enchant the listener. This is a particularly significant drawback as the repertoire, aside from Bartók’s jangling set of folksongs, is common fare, and one recalls too easily a host of great artists who have sung Das Veilchen, or Widmung, and made deeper impressions on the mind and heart than these pristine and proper readings given at Lucerne in 1975.

“Mommy! Mr. Reger is picking on me again! He said I was [sob!] a pedestrian blockhead! And I wasn’t even walking! I was riding in the back seat!” Then I woke up.

But that dream was also a prophecy: Max Reger, a composer who gets many more pages in music reference books than people standing in line waiting to buy recordings of his music, eventually called me a pedestrian blockhead. This was an epithet he reserved for anyone who disagreed with his approach to the music of Bach. Carefully placing his monocle in full Charlie McCarthy position, and staring at me with the expression of a kipper who thought he owned the world but suddenly found himself on a plate, skewered by a 24k gold fork, continued: “I am alerting you in advance that my perhaps ‘too personal’ way of playing, and accordingly of editing Bach will very much challenge the objections of the pedestrian blockheads … they will consider my many nuances … too modern and entrench themselves behind the wall of mental laziness, insisting that Bach should be played classically! Such people, who are more Catholic than the Pope, [Oh my, I hope the long line of rabbis and cantors from whom I am descended never see this! DR] cannot be helped.” Oh, I don’t know—maybe I am a pedestrian blockhead. That would explain why I have so much trouble finding a hat that will fit me.

One of his colleagues says that Reger was “… capable of expressing, in the most radical way, the idea that the work he had beneath his hands was at that moment his property.” This is a very serviceable idea, and no doubt occurred to the pickpocket who had liberated my wallet while I was in Riverside, California staring with fascination at the Parent Orange Tree (one of, and perhaps the only, tourist attractions in that city).

So, as you see in the headnote above, Reger found the time to transcribe lots of Bach’s music, including all of the Brandenburg Concertos, for two pianos. This was immensely valuable, for it had the potential to bring this great music to people all over the land, who lived far from the big cities and couldn’t go to concerts, and therefore were doomed to musical ignorance (unless they somehow found the power to go out and buy a record player or a radio—Reger lived well into the 20th century).

So nobody really needed a piano reduction. Well, what did it accomplish? I’m sure that whenever it was played, many audience members thought to themselves, “Wow! It sounds sort of like the Brandenburg Concertos!” and then, around the middle of the second movement, those ideas morphed into the chances that they’d be selling sandwiches during the intermission. So at least this music boosted the take at the concession stand.

Because, after all, the Brandenburgs are totally dependent upon the orchestration. The Brandenburg No. 2 without the high trumpet? It’s like the difference between a veterinarian and a taxidermist (with a taxidermist, you get your dog back). Bach was as great an orchestrator as he was in every other phase of music. And if somehow we could arrange to have him listen to this disc—well, Bach told his dear son C. P. E. (known affectionately in the family as Seepy) that his music faded, like Prussian blue; just think what he’d say to Reger.

If you’re a part of a piano duo, you might want to play some of this music as a stunt. But contemplating the level of difficulty, you’d better leave plenty of practice time, and you’d better be at least as good as the consummate pianists, Norie Takahashi and Bjorn Lehmann, who play flawlessly, at breakneck speed, and as if they were Oscar Peterson seeing how many notes he could cram into a measure of 4/4 time.

Well, you will know immediately whether or not you want this recording, and if you do, it will never be played better than it is here.

On only two previous occasions have I had the opportunity to review an album by pianist Andrea Lucchesini, and on one of them, which included a performance of Saint-Saëns’s early Piano Quintet in A Minor, Lucchesini was just one of five players in a chamber ensemble rather than a soloist. That album, nonetheless, received an urgent recommendation from me in 40:5, and made it onto my 2017 Want List.

The past being prologue, as Shakespeare tells us, my first encounter with Lucchesini was on his album of Schubert’s Impromptus in 35:6, a recording I very much enjoyed, and would have given an even more enthusiastic endorsement to than I did if not for the glut of competing versions vying for an ever-shrinking market. And here, some seven and half years later, we have Lucchesini once again in a new album of works by Schubert, this one titled Late Piano Works, which contains the composer’s penultimate sonata, the A Major, D 959, and contrarily the Sonata in A Minor, D 537, which dates from 1817 and isn’t “late” at all.

One might argue, I suppose, that for a composer who lived to be only 31, it’s not too much of a stretch to label even works he wrote in 1817 at the age of 20 as “late.” It could also be argued, however, and probably should be, that assigning cardinal numbers to Schubert’s sonatas, as Lucchesini does, is a practice that long ago fell out of favor among pianists who have surveyed the composer’s oeuvre in the genre. That is true of Alfred Brendel, Radu Lupu, Andràs Schiff, Maurizio Pollini, Paul Lewis, and others, including Barry Douglas in his recent and still ongoing cycle. All of them identify the sonatas only by their keys and Deutsch numbers, as now do almost all Schubert catalogers, curators, and music historians.

While I imagine that the last three sonatas will always be thought of as Nos. 19, 20, and 21, just as the “Unfinished” Symphony continues to be programmed on record and in concert as No. 8, despite the tantrums of the academics to demote it No. 7, there is good reason not to assign sequential numbers to the sonatas because it turns out that, according to the Neue Schubert-Ausgabe, Series VII/2, volume 1–3, there are only 19 complete sonatas, while according to IMSLP and the Wiener Urtext Edition, there are 21, and ... wait for it ... according to the Franz SCHUBERT: Catalogo delle composizioni at flaminioonline.it and the Franz Schubert Catalogue: 610—Oeuvres pour piano at musiqueorguequebec.ca, there are 23. Debate among authorities arises mainly from whether to include in the count, especially among Schubert’s early sonata efforts, quite a few movements, either whole or fragmentary, that represent beginnings abandoned.

That confusion is evident on this very release, for what is identified here as the Piano Sonata No. 20 in A Major, D 959, is identified as the Sonata No. 22 in the above-cited two Franz Schubert catalogs; as No. 14 in Franz Schubert’s Werke: Kritisch durchgesehene Gesammtausgabe—Serie 10: Sonaten für Pianoforte (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel (1888)); and as No. 18 in the above-noted Neue Schubert-Ausgabe.

Bewilderment runs amok when it comes to the Sonata in A Minor, D 537, identified on the present disc as the Sonata No. 4. According to Wikipedia’s detailed and annotated list of Schubert’s complete works for solo piano, No. 4 is assigned to a one-movement fragment in E Minor, with its former D number, 994, most recently reassigned the D number, 769A. The three-movement A-Minor Sonata, D 537, performed on the recording by Lucchesini, appears in the list as the Sonata No. 5. So, the best advice is to ignore the cardinal numbers that Lucchesini and Audite provide, and just go by the Deutsch numbers, which everyone seems to agree on.

Not mentioned at the top is that this release is labeled Volume 1 of Schubert’s “Late Piano Works,” so we know it’s not a one-off. What remains to be seen is what in Schubert’s solo piano output constitutes “late” according to Lucchesini, since, as noted above, this first installment already includes the A-Minor Sonata from 1817, which, as most years for Schubert, is filled with songs. But the two Overtures in the Italian Style, D 591 and D 592; the “Grand Duo” Violin Sonata, D 574; and seven other piano sonatas date from the same year, as does the beginning of work on the so-called “Little” C-Major Symphony (No. 6), D 589. The line between “early,” “middle,” and “late” is not as clearly drawn in Schubert’s output as it is in Beethoven’s.

I find myself most impressed, not to mention, deeply moved, by Andrea Lucchesini’s playing on this disc. The A-Major Sonata, D 959, affects me on an even deeper emotional level—or at least a different one—than the great B♭-Major Sonata, D 960, that follows it. I hear the B♭ Sonata as music of exalted, sublime munificence. Its spirit escapes gravity and rises heavenward.

The A-Major Sonata, in its first movement, is moody, restless, and emotionally unsettled. But it’s the second movement, the Andantino, that I find chilling and profoundly disturbing. Schubert seems to go to a place that’s very dark. The music’s slow, inexorable tread, the “hole-in-the-middle effect” of its open, wide-spaced chording, and the F♯-Minor tonality, with its unrelenting insistence on the E♯ leading tone, contribute to a doleful tolling effect. Furthering the cold, terrifying trepidation are the gaunt, stabbing, fp, open fourths—F♯-B, second inversion chords momentarily missing their third (D)—which deliver hollow, numbing shocks. Surely, this movement projects one of the most baleful visions in all of music. I can think only of moments in Shostakovich’s works that portray a similar rictus, frozen in place by a horror so overwhelming it becomes surreal. The mind, body, and senses detach from it, and we see it unfold in slow motion as onlookers, unfeeling and paralyzed to act.

Few, if any, pianists I’ve ever heard play this movement as Lucchesini does. His halting gait, as if too fearful to go forward for what lies ahead, captures the essence of Schubert peering over the rim into the abyss with shocking and shattering clarity. Lucchesini is able to make the movement’s central section, with its uncontrolled paroxysm of rage, sound truly manic, as it should. And when the altered A section returns, and Schubert adds the bell-like tolling in the treble voice, Lucchesini turns it into a shudder. This isn’t just pianism of consummate technical skill, it’s artistry that makes the instrument speak and tell us a story; and terrible as that story may be, it rivets us. This is what music-making, in its finest sense, is and should be about.

There’s logic in Lucchesini’s programming of his disc. The second movement of the A-Minor Sonata, D 537, opens with a subject whose rhythm Schubert would modify slightly and then use as the Rondo theme in the finale of his A-Major Sonata, D 959, 11 years later. D 537, by the way, is Schubert’s first sonata left in a completed state, and its stormy first and last movements, surrounding its serene, songful middle movement, foretell things to come.

Schubert composed the Allegretto in C Minor, D 915, we’re told, shortly after his first and only face-to-face meeting with Beethoven in March of 1827, just days before the elder composer expired. It was a bittersweet meeting, filled with inexpressible joy for Schubert, who practically idolized Beethoven, and yet at the same time a sense of injury, for Beethoven was the one composer in Vienna who could have helped Schubert gain recognition but didn’t. Beethoven lurks not far beneath the surface of Schubert’s Allegretto, so beautifully and sensitively played here by Anrdrea Lucchesini.

Based on this first volume of Lucchesini’s survey of Schubert’s “late piano works”—whatever limit that imposes on the contents of future releases—I have to say that we have here something that is very special. Urgently recommended.

This recording of Schubert’s 21st Piano Sonata and the three piano pieces D946 are evidence of a musician full alert to the demands of this deeply felt music. The Piano Sonata has had several recordings of significance, but at a stroke this new reading joins that exalted company.

The German ensemble Trio Lirico made an impressive debut on disc in 2016 with the two string trios of Max Reger (41:6). For their second album they have ventured further into the 20th century, with recordings of the string trios by Weinberg, Penderecki, and Schnittke. The liner note draws connections between the three works by presenting them all as messages of defiance against communist regimes, and as two of the three players grew up in the GDR, this angle no doubt has a personal resonance. But the three works are characterized more by contrast than similarity, and the program is cleverly structured to move from the Shostakovich-like tonality of the Weinberg, via the complex mix of Sonorism and tonality in the Penderecki, and finally on to the more austere utterances of Schnittke.

Now that Weinberg has been fully recognized as a distinctive musical voice, comparisons with his close friend Shostakovich seem increasingly redundant. But the music of the String Trio, composed in 1950, comes closer than most, especially in its outer movements. The difference is more one of temperament than style—the chamber music of both composers works within the remit of Socialist Realism, but Weinberg is less focused and furrow-browed. His musical discourse is substantial and well argued, but you get the feeling that he could just drop it all at any time, and make out it was all a joke. Many of Weinberg’s endings give that impression too, functional but abrupt, without any grandstanding. This trio seems to just grind to a halt, an impression beautifully realized by the players. The other interesting feature of Weinberg’s String Trio is the distinctly Jewish Andante middle movement, with a melody rich in augmented seconds and played with daring portamento by violinist Franziska Pietsch. Performance-wise, this is the highlight of the disc, and it’s little wonder that Spotify trailed the release with this as a preview: It’s clearly the single of the album.

Penderecki’s String Trio opens with a series of polytonal dissonances. The work was completed in 1991, but this opening looks back to the composer’s avant-garde period in the 1950s and 1960s. It soon moves into other areas—expressive, lyrical, even Minimalistic at times. Trio Lirico give an impressively even account, maintaining the directness of expression while acknowledging the music’s textural fluidity. Schnittke’s String Trio is probably the best-known and most often recorded work here. It was written to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Alban Berg in 1985, with Schnittke drawing on his own German roots (his father was a German Jew and his mother Volga Deutsch) to plug into the Second Viennese School aesthetic. In fact, the work demonstrates that Schnittke’s musical outlook was more Russian than he would be prepared to admit; structurally ambiguous, filled with progressions between unrelated harmonies, and regularly interrupted by the sound of Orthodox Chant. The music is by turns anguished, furious, and meditative, moods that Trio Lirico express with a direct passion.

The most obvious comparison for this release is a disc on Avie (2315) from 2014 by the now-disbanded Ensemble Epomeo (38:5). They presented an identical program, but also included a collection of Signs, Games and Messages by Kurtág. Trio Lirico has the better audio quality (surround-sound downloads are also available from the website, audite.de), but the difference of interpretive approach is instructive. In the new recording, Trio Lirico lives up to its name, and when any of these composers lets their musical argument give way to a beautiful melody—and they all do at some stage—the players really make the most of it, applying rubato that often seems audacious against the Epomeo accounts. That really benefits the Weinberg; the Andante movement comes to life here in a way that makes it seem like a different piece compared to Epomeo’s more pedestrian reading. In the Penderecki and Schnittke, the superior audio gives an immediacy to the grinding dissonances that the earlier recording can’t match. But there is something about Epomeo’s more austere accounts that is lost in the floating and ethereal sound to Trio Lirico. That is particularly the case in the Schnittke, where the Orthodox chant should feel like a voice from beyond, an interjection into the musical discourse rather than a continuation. But the sheer listenability of the Trio Lirico recording is an advantage in all these works. The fact that the players can spin their melodic lines, often across continually dissonant harmonies, allows the ear to follow the musical argument in a way that requires much more effort with the earlier release.

Karabits's performance of this large work is several minutes longer than average, without dragging in the least: he gets the moody quality that is lost in splashier readings. A very strong Liszt release, with fine sound from the Congress Centrum Neue Weimarhalle.

Die spanische Pianistin Maria Canyigueral hat bei Audite Forum eine CD unter dem Titel Avant-Garding Mompou herausgebracht. Auf ihr stellt sie die Cançons i Dansas von Federico Mompou zeitgenössischen Werken gegenüber, Stücken von Nicolas Bacri, Moritz Eggert, Anton Garcia Abril, Josep Maria Guix, Joseph Phibbs und Konstantia Gourzi. Neben dem intelligenten Programmkonzept, das für spannende Begegnungen sorgt, überzeugt die Pianistin mit einem fein nuancierten, sensiblen Spiel, dem man gerne zuhört.