Music for Piano, including Sonata, Op. 91 and “Rustles of Spring”
Jerome Lowenthal, piano
Bridge
Question: What does the music of Norwegian composer Christian Sinding (1856-1941) have to do with the contemporary music of our time (which, presumably, is what the Sequenza21.com website is all about)? I’d have to say, “Absolutely nothing.” Of course, I pretty much review what our zookeeper sends me, but Sinding seems a really odd fit. In his student days in Leipzig he was under the spell of the new music of the day, which then meant Liszt and not Wagner’s “music of the future.” His forms are conventional, and his harmony while striking, was used mostly for coloristic purposes and was decidedly not revolutionary. Even his Sonata in B Minor, Op 91, his most ambitious work on the present program, while organically conceived like Liszt’s masterpiece in the same key, is nowhere near as daring. As Jerome Lowenthal points out in his program notes, Sinding relies on subtle mood fluctuations to achieve organicism, rather than the contrapuntal devices Liszt employed.
A survey of the ten character pieces that accompany the sonata on this disc reveals Sinding to be a true Romantic composer of the old school, distinguished by his continuous flow of feeling, his turns of phrase that seem to embody the cadences of his Norwegian language, and his lack of emotional complication. His was music of heartfelt simplicity, to be played in the parlor “at the end of a perfect day.” The virtuosic element occurs mainly in the tumultuous flow of his short pieces, often ending, as do “Con fuoco” and “Capricccio” in a very decisive cadence that we might take as part of the composer’s thumbprint. The more intimate pieces such as “Melodie” and “Serenade” embody a mood of gently melancholic yearning rather than pathos or neurotic self-pity. “Irrlicht” is a will-o-the-wisp, descriptive but less ambitious than Liszt’s take on the same shyly lit subject. And his pieces in march time, “Alla marcia,” “Pomposo,” and “March grotesque” (but without the sinister spin that Prokofiev would later give that qualifying adjective) are pleasant but certainly not militaristic.
That brings us to “Rustles of Spring,” which was once so enormously popular that, as Lowenthal wryly observes, pianos of that period were said to have learned the Sinding habit and could play it by themselves, without the benefit of a pianist! Lowenthal makes much of the fulsome flow of feeling and the composer’s evident love of nature in this piece. As we have heard in his traversal of Tchaikovsky’s Complete Works for Piano and Orchestra (Bridge 9301 A/B), which like the present offering originally appeared on the Arabesque label, this pianist likes to “take it big” with the music, and he is here given numerous opportunities to do so. It all makes for a very pleasant way to spend your time, as long as you’re not looking for music of real greatness.
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