Current Reviews

        by Jon Yungkans

Sergei Prokofiev
Piano Concerto No. 1-3

Martha Argerich, piano
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor



Samuel Barber
Orchestral Works and Concertos
Leonard Slatkin, Charles Munch



Rimsky-Korsakov
Evgeny Svetlanov


Beethoven
Symphony No.9
Piano Transcription by Franz Liszt
Konstantin Scherbakov, Piano



Kronos Caravan

This is a welcome but strange release, with Sony taking a Jeckle-and-Hyde approach. Most of the pieces here scream “Easy Listening” but those who take them as such will have to sit down and “take their dissonance like a man” (Charles Ives’ phrase) when they get to the Schuman works. Except for the bonus cuts of Ives and Copland, this disc exactly duplicates an earlier “Bernstein Century” release. Sony has released another Masterworks Expanded disc of Bernstein’s Adagio parallel to this one, this time with a mix of other short works. As Dr. Seuss wrote for the film The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, (one of the great films on how to not train a piano student) the situation gets “puzzlinger and puzzlinger.”

Confusion aside, the performances here are wondrous. Calm, measured and meditative, Bernstein’s Adagio for Strings is shorn of its usual pathos and extra-musical baggage. Instead of a lament, the music becomes a probing, searching examination of soul and spirit, with its climax not the breaking point of grief and tension but a flash of revelation leading to inner peace. Emotions still run extremely deep – Bernstein couldn’t conduct a heartless note even if he wanted to. But it is good to have a performance of this work that nurtures the heart instead of tearing at it, ending on a note of true solace.

Isaac Stern’s traversal of Barber’s Violin Concerto with Bernstein has always been the performance of this work for me – loving but not syrupy (Gil Shahan) nor lacking fire or backbone (Hilary Hahn). Like the Adagio, nothing is forced or contrived, either musically or emotionally. Everything simply flows, the drama rising and ebbing as naturally as the tide with never a false moment or overstated phrase. Stern and Bernstein wisely allow the expressive shadows to lengthen and thoroughly chill the central Andante, showing it the sinister makeweight of the Allegro instead of a sunny continuation of it. All hell breaks loose in the finale, with Stern’s fingers losing no finesse and showing considerable steel. From first note to last Bernstein stays glued to Stern’s side through every syncopated hairpin turn and dramatic curve – a wild ride that feels like it is lurching over the cliff any second but never does.

From the cliff’s edge we plunge straight to the rocks below in with the first notes of William Schuman’s To Thee Old Cause, a threnody on the then-recent assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. With those two violent deaths it seemed to Schuman (as to many throughout the world) that the candle of optimism that burned during John F. Kennedy’s presidency was finally snuffed out, the light of Camelot (replaced, as history soon showed, with the dark paranoia of the Nixon years) no longer aglow. For Bernstein, friend of the Kennedy family and true believer in the liberal causes King and Kennedy espoused, it was a doubly personal loss.

For the listener who has sat comfortably through the brighter charms of the Barber works, To Thee Old Cause will at first seem more thorn than rose. But listen often and carefully and the bud of this dusky flower unfolds its petals of passion as well as pain, sweet memory along with bitter loss. The word “haunting” is used superficially too often (and for which I have sometimes been guilty myself), but that is exactly what this score is – haunting, lingering in the memory to be meditated upon, pondered, and weighed as a reminder of the price of mortality. Bernstein shows us that cost in this performance, embracing the darkness instead of shying away from it, living the nightmare of grief before our ears. No wonder he never re-recorded this piece. Harold Gomberg’s oboe solo is especially touching, dialoguing with the other instruments like an individual grasping for true meaning of unfolding events.

At first, In Praise of Shahn seems like it will be brighter, more a celebration than a dirge – and it is – but proves as knotty a listening experience as To Thee Old Cause with its sharply dissonant but still tonal vocabulary. Schuman said he wanted to capture artist Ben Shahn’s “contrasting yet wholly compatible duality – unabashed optimism and a searching poignancy.” He does so brilliantly, with two festive episodes flanking a core of probing introspection. The New York Philharmonic ensemble work doesn’t seem as tight here as in the other works, but Bernstein’s zeal and energy help carry them through.

Hearing Ives’ The Unanswered Question after these works is an odd experience, as though hearing the question to the meaning of life posed immediately after it has already been answered. Schuman’s American Festival Overture, a Bernstein specialty, would have been more appropriate and finished the disc on the same note of celebration that Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man sets out to capture. Here it is anticlimactic – a balm to soothe our ears after the lacerations of the Schuman scores?

Up to the Ives, Sony may have been onto a good idea, albeit an old one. The Barber Adagio works well with the Schuman compositions, though the two composers’ incompatible styles would make you think otherwise; and although not an ideal choice, the Barber Violin Concerto lightens the mood at just the right time. Had Sony followed this notion through to the end and not, apparently, yielded to the label’s marketing department, this would have been a more worthwhile and valuable disc. (If there is a Bernstein performance of the Schuman overture somewhere in the Sony vaults, it has never been issued on CD, at least in the United States.)

If you don’t have the “Bernstein Century” release, pick this up for the Barber and Schuman.
 

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