Review-in-Brief: "Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin's Russia" by Elizabeth Wilson

An invaluable overview of the life and art of Mariya Yudina, one of the 20th century's most original performers, better known by reputation than by actual acquaintance with her work. For many, Yudina might be best remembered for her appearance in Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovichian ventriloquist act Testimony, where she is reduced to a caricature. Wilson restores the dignity that was Yudina's personal credo, rendering her into a three-dimensional figure hitherto unknown in the English language. The author’s profound sympathy for her subject is charismatic enough to suspend the reader’s impatience with her earthbound prose and dispel the whiff of pedanticism that occasionally creeps in. (Does the target audience for this biography of a relatively obscure Russian pianist really need an explanation of who “The Mighty Handful” were?) Shortcomings notwithstanding, this book is an essential read for anybody interested in Russian music, as well as the cultural life and history of the Soviet Union.

CD Review: Finnissy and Gershwin, lone wanderers at the end of musical history

Classical music composers in the 21st century find themselves in an unenviable position. Can there really be anything new under the sun? After the disintegration of the mid-20th century avant-garde, followed by the implosion upon tonality that was the minimalist movement, it can sometimes seem as if the composers of today are lone wayfarers on a landscape decimated by the tramping of the giants which had preceded them. Some composers have sought their way out by finding refuge in a past which provides some semblance of order; others, like Michael Finnissy, rummage through the wreckage of musical history and ponder what it all meant.

The jumbled kaleidoscopic visions of Finnissy’s Gershwin Arrangements and More Gershwin are no straight transcriptions, not even “rambles” in the style of Percy Grainger. Even when they are at their most exuberant, the prevailing mood is that of a post-mortem. The once living human being known as “George Gershwin,” these works suggest, has been obliterated by the sheer weight of his own success; his resulting absorption into postwar consumer culture stripping him and his legacy of their original organic meaning. Instead, what Finnissy creates here are edifices that are the aural equivalents of a mobile sculpture composed of trash, akin to Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers: Recontextualizing detritus into something entirely new and strangely beautiful. Gershwin’s melodies are treated like random found objects repurposed with newly devised incongruous, often audacious results that their original creator could never have possibly dreamed of. Musical history is over, one often feels listening to these works, and all that is left is to write the obituary.

Pianist Lukas Huisman is a compelling and clear-eyed guide through these wondrous, phantasmagorical scores; dancing sure-footedly through this complex music which sounds as if the Roaring ‘20s were processed through a meat grinder. He also provides the disc’s excellent liner notes. Piano Classics’ sound is close-up, but not garish, allowing enough reverberation to impart a mildly hallucinatory quality to the proceedings.

There is no woe or despair in Finnissy’s declaration of death as proclaimed by Huisman. Rather, both composer and pianist invite the listener to consider how a new music could arise from the ashes of the old. Classical music is dead, long live classical music.

CD Review: Yunus Kaya's gorgeous Brahms recital

Pianist Yunus Kaya is a name I had not encountered before this recent album of Brahms’ late piano music on Ars Produktion. A quick search for the name on Qobuz turned up a single track of Eurotrash EDM—perhaps another Yunus Kaya? 

At any rate, in his brief remarks included in his own recording of Brahms’ late piano works, this Yunus Kaya writes: “It is important to me that my interpretation seems spontaneous, almost improvised.” How exactly one goes about to achieve this or even to define what “spontaneous” and “improvised” sound like are not explained. Likewise, the artist’s biography in the same liner notes are filled with airy marketing mumbo-jumbo about his interpretations evolving “between inner silence and intimate communication with the audience.” Huh? 

Kaya’s recording, at least, is an excellent contribution to the distinguished discography of these winsomely autumnal works. He seems to have a natural feeling for their smoky, interior world; with an easy, but never facile command of their sometimes tricky polyphony and unostentatious melancholy. His playing sounds deeply considered, to use my own critical mumbo-jumbo, with carefully balanced voicing and unhurried pacing which allows the rich harmonies of this music to bloom. The impression is one of beauty borne out of nobility; even in the occasional tempestuous passages in these late works, nothing ever sounds ragged or coarse. 

Ars’ production matches the beauty of these interpretations with lush sound to match. The stage sounds deep, with enough air around the piano, but not excessively resonant. Kaya’s instrument—a Steinway D—sounds lovely.

In short, a very welcome recital by a name which, hopefully, will become better known to music lovers in the coming years.

Allan Evans (1956 - 2020)

I never met Allan Evans and will always regret not having been able to. We were supposed to have met last October, but insurmountable obstacles on my end prevented this from happening. “I’d be glad to have you sit in on one of my classes [at Mannes] whenever you’re able to,” he said to me over the phone shortly before concluding an interview with him about a musical mentor from his youth. That was just over six weeks ago.

At the age of 12 I was bit by the classical music bug and life has never been the same since. Through a series of chance happenstances, I quickly ended up diving into the proverbial deep end: Specifically mid-20th century avant-garde music and historical recordings. Both of these youthful loves were combined in my discovery of Ignaz Friedman, by way of the Pearl Records set which Allan Evans produced and wrote his splendid liner notes for. Hitherto my only encounter with Chopin’s Mazurkas had been through Arthur Rubinstein’s late RCA recordings, which presented this music as desiccated relics caked beneath a thick layer of formaldehyde. (It was not until about 20 years later that I finally began to love Rubinstein’s Chopin—except for his Mazurkas.) Hearing Friedman’s fingers, however, was something else altogether. Chopin’s bristling rhythms and harmonies (in the late Mazurkas sometimes closer to Schoenberg’s Vienna than the Paris salons of his own time) came alive. Suddenly one wasn’t hearing a neatly curated museum curio kept tidily under glass. Friedman understood the performance of Chopin not as the reenactment of esoteric rituals encoded in a ceremonial dead language, but as documents of joys and sorrows uttered in a living lingua franca. Here was Chopin the lover, the poet, the dreamer, the frustrated patriot whose music drew a starlit patina over subversive nationalist yearnings of a future Poland resurgent. Heady stuff for an 8th grader!

Somehow I managed to collect my thoughts and scribble out a fan letter to Allan Evans, which was sent in care of Pearl Records, who then happily forwarded it to my hero. What I wrote has since vanished into the recesses of my memory, but Allan Evans kindly replied to me, patiently answering a number of questions, and encouraging me further on my adventures in listening. 

A co-worker at a record store gig long ago once chided me for my musical preferences. “If you listen to classical music now, what are you going to listen to when you’re old?,” he snickered. Presumably he had never heard Rachmaninoff’s sweetly rueful observation: “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.” (And that in a time well before today’s present atomization of music and the listening audience.) Yet it was precisely because of classical music that I needed to hear and absorb other styles in order to better contextualize it. Over the next quarter of a century I used my ears, to borrow a phrase from Charles Ives, like a man. Coursing through my cochleas like an unstoppable torrent were tangos, milongas, Weimar-era cabaret songs, psych-folk rock from the 1960s, easy-listening instrumentals for bluehairs long gone, experimental noise from East Asia, mournful prewar Japanese gunka, electronic novelty amusements, languorous romantic ballads from a Latin America now the dust of eternity—alongside Shostakovich, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Boulez, Feldman, Webern, Brahms, Beethoven, Revueltas, and Carter. Although he was unaware, Allan Evans presided over it all, my distant spiritus rector.

A few years ago at another record store job, a co-worker inducted me into the mysteries of blues music. As my head swirled with the frisson of hearing this music for the first time, my thoughts turned to musicians from another, seemingly unrelated time and place. It struck me that there was a thread of kinship, however unlikely it appeared, between Rev. Gary Davis, Washington Phillips, and Blind Willie Johnson; and the likes of Ockeghem, Wolkenheim, and Josquin. One could call the latter representatives of “Western European roots music,” if you will. (With Bartók, arguably, being its final practitioner and synthesizer.) This epiphany, vividly illustrating the “only two kinds of music” quote apocryphally attributed to an ever-expanding who’s who of musical notables, was the kind of deep listening personal experience fostered by Allan Evans. 

He was a gentleman scholar whose restless intellectual curiosity touched countless people, some even afar and unknown to him; an individual who is a rarity in any age, but especially so in our strident and vulgar times. We shall not see the likes of him again.

I never met Allan Evans and will always regret not having been able to.

CD Review: Kabalevsky delights from Korstick and CPO

Like Stravinsky and Prokofiev before him, Dmitri Kabalevsky cast his gaze across the Baltic Sea towards France, although unlike them his inclinations were generally towards musical conservatism. Had his world been a kinder one, his lightness of touch and skill at crafting melodies could very well have made him a latter-day Russified Massenet or Chabrier. Reality was otherwise, of course. Instead he spent a significant portion of his career squandering his considerable talents on musical agitprop, although not without also composing a number of works which have managed to nudge their way onto permanent places in the concert hall and recording studio.

Pianist Michael Korstick, whom CPO has kept busy with various recording projects (including two previous Kabalevsky programs), presents here a compilation of all of the composer’s piano preludes, some of which are well known in piano pedagogy, but are otherwise on the periphery of the performing repertoire. The centerpiece here are the Twenty-four Preludes, Op. 38, which according to the informative liner notes by Charles K. Tomicik, was composed at the height of World War II in 1943. One would never guess: This joyful and guileless music betrays nothing of the harrowing times from which it emerged.

Each prelude uses a Russian folk melody as its basis (including an unexpected appearance from Stravinsky’s The Firebird in Prelude No. 13), which the composer develops into miniature tone sketches. Among the most delightful are the étude-like Prelude No. 12, the skittering Prelude No. 23, and tongue-in-cheek martial color of Prelude No. 24. Whether listened to individually or as a whole, Kabalevsky’s Twenty-four Preludes exude an easy-going charm rare in music of the 20th century.

Serving a more didactic purpose, but no less a pleasure to listen to are his later set of Six Preludes and Fugues, Op. 61 which cleverly makes sophisticated musical principles appealing for children to play. Take a listen to the wistful little chorale which makes up “Becoming a Young Pioneer,” or the closing fughetta of “A Feast of Labor.”

The end of the disc turns back the clock to the beginning of Kabalevsky’s career with his Opp. 1 and 5, consisting of three and four piano preludes each. The mood of these works are heavier, their idiom more searching than the preceding ones; both sets being strongly redolent of Myaskovsky and Scriabin, and leaving one wondering how the composer would have developed his talents had he not become an enthusiastic proponent of “socialist realism.”

What is remarkable about Korstick’s recordings for CPO are their consistently high quality, with none of the featureless workman-like qualities that are often the poison pill in these sweeping recorded surveys of neglected piano repertoire. His warm touch and sympathetic performances, with great care lavished upon phrasing and textural color (abetted winningly by CPO’s excellent engineering), are perhaps the finest these works have yet been treated to on records. 

Could CPO and Korstick be persuaded to look over the piano works of Mikhail Nosyrev, Vladimir Shcherbachev, Nikolai Rakov, or the still criminally neglected Gavriil Popov next? One can always dream.

Kabalevsky turns up the Soviet charm.

CD Review: "Blue" Gene Tyranny "Detours" Into a Twilit Soundworld

For years I had seen this album staring back at me from the avant-garde section at Amoeba Hollywood, where I had worked years ago. But despite my adoring his Out of the Blue and Country Boy Country Dog (How To Discover Music in the Sounds of Your Daily Life), to say nothing of Detours’ appealingly late 1990s-esque cover, I never took a chance on the album. Having finally acquired it during Unseen Worlds’ coronavirus relief sale, all I can ask is: What took so long?

Tyranny unspools thread after lyric thread of lyricism, while gently peeling off the veneer of pretense and affectation that have encrusted themselves upon minimalism post-John Adams. It is simultaneously a distillation  and an encapsulated retrospective of Tyranny’s art. Wafting by are traces of influences, of musical doings long ago; bits of parlor song calling out across the chasm of time, the sprightly chatter of synthesizers wryly answering back. their wistfulness augmenting this music’s crepuscular feel. It is music borne of a lifetime’s strivings, hopes, heartbreaks, joys; untouched by bitterness; filled only with gratitude.

If Bartók had his “night music,” then in Detours “Blue” Gene Tyranny gives the listener “twilight music”: Rarefied musical visions which dance along the shimmering frontier straddling waking and repose. 

A quiet milestone in the work of a modern American master.

Laid back melancholia: “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s Detours.

CD Review: Wang and Dudamel Lost Amidst Adams’ Footnotes

If modern mainstream American academic music can seem like a never ending series of footnotes on Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassical phase, then the work of John Adams are footnotes upon those footnotes; less music than it is aural commentary on the original accomplishments of more talented predecessors; descending further into the same, exhausted ready-made gestures that may have amused long ago, but now decades later seem embarrassingly twee. 

Philipp Gershkovich infamously called Dmitri Shostakovich “a hack in a trance.” Had he lived long enough to hear Adams’ blowzy Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, the former pupil of Anton Webern would have found a more fitting target for his ire.

Composed for Yuja Wang, who premiered the work in Disney Hall last year (and from where this “live” recording was patched together), the work is a three-movement concerto of the usual Adams twitch-and-shout; awkwardly subsuming reminiscences of others’ music within a basic framework of kitsch nostalgia. 

Although the opening movement is marked “Gritty, Funky,” the music is—white boy appropriation of black urban slang from half a century ago notwithstanding—anything but. It ambles about smiling wanly, goaded forward by involuntary rhythmic tics, perhaps geriatric in inspiration. It is minimalism for bluehairs, Liberace for intellectual posers. Pastiches of Bartókian “night music” (shades of the Hungarian’s Piano Concerto No. 2) in the central slow movement give way to the “Obsession/Swing” finale. Those familiar with the composer’s Century Rolls, Chamber Symphony, and Naïve and Sentimental Music (or Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto and Capriccio, for that matter) will have heard it all before. 

Sound as per usual from DG’s recent live recordings tends to be diffuse, yet spotlit (take a listen to the cello riff at the opening). Long on surface, short on substance, the music is tailored well to Wang’s glitzy style, who bangs away as compellingly as the composer presumably hoped. Her performance of Adams’ early China Gates—Terry Riley for yuppies—is fine. Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have a solid grasp of the work, but their palpable sense of eking through the score one measure at a time suggests they have yet to fully embrace this music. 

Speaking of “Mr. Showmanship,” the underrated composer Michael Daugherty accomplished a quarter century ago in his Le Tombeau de Liberace what eluded Adams here: An ironic pop-flavored tribute/eulogy to “plastic fantastic” postwar culture. Adams’ concerto hardly approaches the brittle wit and transient moments of genuine pathos (to say nothing of originality) of Daugherty’s superior score.

For those seeking a musical equivalent to the egomaniacal, navel-gazing, grand-standing bien pensant smarminess of a Shepard Fairey or Noah Baumbach look no further. Admirers of serious new music, however, would do better to seek Daugherty’s concerto instead. 

Why must Adams have all the good commissions?

Jörg Demus (1928 – 2019): A Personal Appreciation

Nothing lasts forever. A hard lesson repeated since time immemorial which each generation, each individual must learn as if it were new. Not only is our personal existence an impermanent thing, but as the burning of the Notre-Dame de Paris illustrated to a horrified global audience, the very world upon which we hinge our existences, too, is a transient one.

The death of Jörg Demus last month was, perhaps, a similar reminder of the ephemerality of our existence, as well as a loss of comparable magnitude.

Not that his was a household name even among the rarefied coterie of admirers of Western musical arcana. It is a testament to the man’s humility that his best-known work is, paradoxically, not as glamorous soloist, but as the eloquent and unassuming partner to such performers as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elly Ameling. Not that he had anything to hide. As these or the number of solo recordings which remain highly prized amongst record-collecting congnoscenti readily testify, Demus was a musician devoted to the cultivation of beauty. His cycle of Schumann’s piano works—the first ever integral set—remain a model of poetry and poise.

But it is, perhaps, in the work of the composer whom Wilhelm Furtwängler once referred to as a “modern Schumann” where the breadth of Demus’ art is unfurled to its fullest.

That some of the greatest interpreters of Claude Debussy’s piano music were German or German-trained would have been a rueful irony to the great musicien français. Pianists like Gieseking and Arrau were among the few who most closely approximated the composer’s velvety ideal of a piano without hammers. (Comparatively, French pianists often seem to equip their instruments with ice picks.) In his own traversal, Demus follows in that Teutonic tradition, conjuring through his fingers a Debussy of poetic reveries on the verge of becoming mist.

Listen, for example, to the panoply of veiled hues he elicits in Voiles; his Des pas sur la neige of soft-focus blurs slowly coming into focus; the simple charm of his Arabesques or Rêverie; the warmth and human scale of his Études. Threading through it all are those sensitive hands carefully constructing subtly variated textures, drawing long-breathed singing lines, and shaping a dynamic flow as natural as breathing itself.

Here, as in all his best recordings, is the illusion woven by the greatest musicians, who by dint of their virtuosity of body and mind, subsume themselves seamlessly into the composer. In our time when classical music is beset by crude, egomaniacal keyboard-bangers and hair-tousslers who treat their art as merely a prop to frame their Botox-infused, PR-managed “sex appeal,” the plain sincerity of Demus’ art seems not so much as from another time, as it is from another planet. Would that more of his kind light up ours.

The late Jörg Demus at the piano. [Image credit: International Jörg Demus Festival]