Early, Classical and Beyond

Robert Nathaniel Dett – Northern Magnolias
Luke Welch
Independent (lukewelch.ca)

When we think of musical contributions made by Black composers in America during the late 19th and early 20th century, names like Scott Joplin or William Handy may come to mind most immediately. Yet alongside these composers were others such as William Grant Still and Florence Price who were more closely aligned with the late-Romantic European tradition. This list would also include Robert Nathaniel Dett who was born near Niagara Falls, Ontario in 1882.

Dett began piano studies when he was five and later studied at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio where he was the first Black graduate to receive a Bachelor of Music degree. He enjoyed a successful career as a composer, pedagogue and conductor and a fine selection of his piano works appears on this delightful – and attractively-packaged – recording by Toronto-based pianist Luke Welch.

The disc opens with the five-movement Magnolia Suite from 1912, Dett’s first large-scale work for piano. Movements such as The Deserted Cabin and The Place where the Rainbow Ends are highly evocative, harkening back to a more innocent age. Other compositions range in date from 1913 to 1922, all of them finely crafted miniatures with a wide range of contrasting moods. After the Cakewalk clearly shows the influence of Scott Joplin with its syncopated rhythms and ragtime harmonies, while His Song from the suite In the Bottoms is quietly introspective.

Throughout, Welch displays a real affinity for this engaging repertoire, his playing elegant and sensitively articulated. The disc concludes with the Inspiration Waltzes from 1903. Ebullient and joyful, this is very much music of its time and Welch treats it with great panache, rounding out a most satisfying program.

Beethoven – Piano Concerto No.1 in C Major; Sally Beamish – City Stanzas
Jonathan Biss; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra; Omer Meir Wellber
Orchid Classics ORC1003339 (orchidclassics.com/releases/orc100339-beethoven-5-vol-2)

This is the second volume of a series of the five Beethoven concertos from pianist Jonathan Biss, each pairing a newly commissioned piano concerto with the Beethoven work that inspired it. Here, Beethoven’s Concerto No.1 in C Major Op.15 is paired with City Stanzas by British composer Sally Beamish. The opening tutti of the Beethoven is immediately warm and elegant, with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra directed by Omer Meir Wellber in fine form. Biss’ entrance is sensitively shaped and coloured, with the piano balanced slightly forward. The central development section is darkly atmospheric, piano and orchestra creating a stilled and mysterious hush which still manages to keep a sense of forward momentum. Biss plays the longest of the three cadenzas Beethoven wrote, but it does not outstay its welcome despite its oversized dimensions; Biss is by turns dramatic, playful, and improvisatory, with an acute awareness of the unexpected harmonic shifts. The Adagio second movement is deeply serene, and the finale playfully energetic, with Biss and Wellber making the most of the music’s many contrasts. Throughout, Biss is especially impressive in the sparkling clarity of his passagework. In short, this is a performance both sophisticated and exciting that fully delivers on the ambition and expressive depth of the young Beethoven. 

The companion work by Beamish is engaging and accessible, well-suited to Biss’ transparent textures and awareness of sudden character changes. While all the work is derived from some aspect of the Beethoven concerto – pitches, rhythms, and structure – the mood is dark and sardonic, inspired by urban decay, greed and anxiety for the future. The toccata-like opening movement is spiky and pointillistic, the second builds to a climax of deep anxiety, and the work concludes with a rhythmically dynamic rondo. As in the Beethoven, the performance is first-class, the recording detailed and realistic.

Liszt Metamorphosis
Charlotte Hu
Pentatone PTC 5187 259 (pentatonemusic.com/pianist-charlotte-hu-presents-liszt-metamorphosis)

It has been said that Franz Liszt quarried all available musical sources and reworked the material into showstoppers that revealed he could play octaves faster and hit the keys harder than anyone else; to even break piano keys. However, as these performances reveal that while there may indubitably be more than a dash of the showman in Liszt, his contribution to the development of 19th century music was immense. His pianistic fireworks represent just the surface, for in his symphonic approach to music he anticipated the tone poems of Strauss, the fluid structures of Wagner and the passionate romanticism of Schubert and Schumann. 

It may take more than one disc such as Liszt Metamorphosis from the prodigiously gifted pianist Charlotte Hu to demonstrate what Liszt’s enduring legacy did for not simply piano repertoire, but for music as a whole. However, Hu’s uncommonly deep dive into Liszt’s conception – and her own artistry – is a wonderful start. 

Liszt’s shining genius – and Hu’s own transmutation – is evident in the overwhelmingly powerful and authoritative readings of this performance. Hu unveils passion and piety in the Schubert transcriptions, especially Ave Maria (D 389), and the hair-raising Erlkönig (D.328).

To play Liszt’s 3 Concert Etudes S.144 requires formidable technique. To play them so that the poetry (rather than the effort) shines through – as in No. 3 Un Suspiro – requires a gift afforded to few. Hu’s Liszt shows her to be at the apogee of her art.

Johannes Brahms – The Symphonies
Chamber Orchestra of Europe; Yannick Nézet-Séguin
Deutsche Grammophon 486 6000 (deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/brahms-the-symphonies-yannick-nezet-seguin-13508)

“I shall never write a symphony! You have no idea what it’s like, how hard it is to compose when always you hear the footsteps of that giant marching behind you,” Brahms wrote in a letter to the conductor Herman Levi in 1872, when he (Brahms) was 40 years old. So deeply had he struggled to write his first symphony, his early years spent in fear of being compared with Beethoven, that his first symphony didn’t see the light of day until 1876. 

Within a decade he had completed his second, third and fourth symphonies, a sequence so revered that many declared them to be the most distinguished symphonic music since Beethoven. Hans von Bulow, who conducted the premiere of Symphony No.4, famously declared that his favourite key was E flat (signified by the letter b in German),  for its three flat notes symbolised for him the “Holy Trinity” of Bach, Beethoven and now Brahms. 

No such shadows pursue Yannick Nézet-Séguin as he conducts the Chamber Orchestra of Europe through his cycle of Johannes Brahms: The Symphonies. He appears unfazed despite the fact that he follows such giants as Wilhelm Furtwangler whose 1940s/1950s cycle seethes with brooding energy and an overriding sense of tragedy. Nor is he affected by Herbert von Karajan’s traditionalist cycle. He does appear to give Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s brilliant cerebral cycle on period instruments a run for its money, though.  

The quality of the conducting by Nézet-Séguin, and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe’s playing on this cycle, is altogether exceptional. Nézet-Séguin takes nothing for granted in his Brahms, nor should we while listening, even if you know how Brahms “goes.” Not that he does anything wildly idiosyncratic, let alone provocatively iconoclastic, à la Glenn Gould and Leonard Bernstein. Rather, he plainly understands that every interpretation is just one possibility, and he offers us a very enticing opportunity to open our minds, especially to a familiar composer (and his works) most burdened by the weight of his great idol who bridged between the German Classical and Romantic tradition.

In the mighty rumble of timpani that opens the first movement of Symphony No.1 in C Minor Op.68 we find drama and power, followed by epic strivings, that develop into exultant triumphalism. At the end of the fourth movement we marvel at the degree of sage poetry that Nézet-Séguin imparts to Brahms’ epic achievement. This is followed by the refined, lustrous orchestral performance of Symphony No.2 in D Major Op.73. Particularly impressive are the massed cellos in their great melody in the slow movement, and the finale which develops bounding energy as it progresses.

Nézet-Séguin’s use of pivotal phrases to change the pace and emotional temperature allows him to suggest immense breadth of emotion coloured by an autumnal resignation in Symphony No.3 in F Major Op.90. Nézet-Séguin’s shepherding of the orchestra in an emotional rollercoaster of a performance of Symphony No.4 in E Minor Op.98 highlights the inner logic of Brahms’ brilliantly grave symphonic work. The performance of No.4 is evocative only of Carlos Kleiber’s version with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Nézet-Séguin certainly challenges that great master in the command of orchestral colour and electrifying dynamism in his performance. Overall we have a cycle of Brahms that is superlatively judged by Nézet-Séguin on his own terms. Bravo!

Forgotten Sounds
Graeme Steele Johnson; various artists
Delos DE3603 (naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=DE3603)

Whether ‘tis nobler to let sleeping dogs lie, some folks will play archaeologist and unearth the bones of former titans, or giants, or mere mortals perhaps. Such is the admirable effort displayed on this disc by clarinetist Graeme Steele Johnson, assisted by some very fine chamber players. Forgotten Sounds is the title of both the album and the last track, an arrangement of Charles Loeffler’s pretty little bit of fluff originally for voice and piano, here played by Johnson with Bridget Kibbey on harp.

The centrepiece of this disc is Loeffler’s Octet (clarinets, strings and harp) discovered and recomposed by Johnson. It includes two clarinet parts just as Brahms’ original sketches for a nonet* did. Coincidence, you ask? Hmmm.  

Loeffler is referred to as a “cosmopolitan” composer, a European living in the U.S, acclaimed in his lifetime, ignored since. His style places him in the conservative end of the spectrum of post-Brahmsians, tonally less inventive than either Schoenberg or Zemlinksy, with quirky structural and timbral tropes both puzzling but pleasant. There’s no way of knowing how much the piece reflects decisions only the arranger could make, but verbatim it seems, like Saint-Saëns, Loeffler “lacked only inexperience.” Some of his compositional gambits make me wonder whether he wasn’t a bit cynical, providing what was expected of a European artist. Unoriginal post-colonial kitsch, if you will. 

A reduction for similar forces (minus clarinet two) opens the proceedings with a version of Prelude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Steele’s arrangement gives pride of place to the flute voice, played with enchanting lyricism by Ji Weon Ryu. Loeffler’s dabs of whole-tone scale colour indicates he respected the Frenchman’s music enough to borrow some of it for his own piece.

*(An aside: Brahms’ didn’t publish his nonet; it was rescued by his editor, with Brahms’ consent. Brahms showed the original chamber piece to Clara Schumann, who prompted him to rework it for orchestra. Eager to please, he abandoned his notion of answering the Beethoven Septet, and Schubert Octet. Using the same content he wrote his first orchestral serenade. Thank goodness for that editor, it’s a truly lovely chamber work.)