Tag: Piano

CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Piano

Piano Music by Kenneth Hesketh (CD Review)

Kenneth Hesketh

Hände – Music for Piano

Clare Hammond, Paladino Music

 

Composer Kenneth Hesketh has written several works for piano, and Clare Hammond has for years been their most dedicated advocate. Hände is a collection of her detailed performances of seven pieces, ranging from miniatures to two substantial works. The first of the latter is Poetic Conceits (2006), a six movement suite of character pieces. “Epigram,” “Epigraph,” “Epitaph,” and “Mad Pursuits” demonstrate colorful post-tonal harmony and angular gestures, while “Of Silence and Slow Time” and “Cold Pastoral” proceed gradually with aching lyricism.

 

Pour Henri (2013) is dedicated to the composer Henri Dutilleux, with whom Hesketh studied at Tanglewood. It employs several quotations, including the French song Bonne Anniversaire, the composer’s second piano prelude, and his iconic string quartet Ainsi la nuit; all of this in a compact minute and a quarter. It is a moving elegy. Lullaby of the Land Beyond (2018) is another valedictory piece, dedicated to Oliver Knussen. Similarly, it includes a number of Knussen quotations, as well as one from Boris Gudunov, a favorite of the late composer. Higglety Pigglety Pop, Knussen’s second opera, which concludes with the portrait of a dog’s afterlife, provides a receding, misty ambience for this poignant goodbye to a great figure in English music.

 

Heu, Heu, Heu… Eine kleine ausschweifende (Hey, hey, hey… a little riotous celebration) (2012) is as advertised and requires staggering virtuosity, which Hammond has here and throughout in abundance. Chorales and Kolam (2019) is less boisterous but also makes a powerful impression all its own. A kolam is a geometric pattern drawn on the ground by women and girls in India and Southeast Asia for luck. The piece is built from reconstituted material from Hesketh’s piano concerto. The chorales are refracted in a series of variations that gradually unthread the verticals into stratified lines, only to have them gradually reassemble into arpeggiations in a shadowy coda.

 

Hände, Das leben und die Liebe eines zärtlichen Geschlechts (Hands: the life and love of the fairer sex) (2015) was commissioned for Hammond. When one views it live, the pianist plays along with an eponymous 1928 film that uses the play of hands nearly throughout (there are excerpts in the video below).  Correspondingly, the musical work is based on the shape of hands. Not only is Hammond called upon to play repeated notes, chordal ostinatos, diaphanous rolls, and fleet gestures, she also plays inside the piano, uses knitting needles to strike the strings, and clangs six small bells set to the side of the instrument. Like the film, elements of surrealism abound. Hände is a major piece, tailor-made for Hammond’s imaginative and risk-taking approach to performing. The recording as a whole is an excellent showcase for both composer and pianist, and is one of my favorite CDs of 2024.

 

  • Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, early music, File Under?, Piano

Francesco Tristano – Bach: The 6 Partitas (CD review)

Bach: The 6 Partitas

Francesco Tristano, piano

Naïve 2XCD

 

In his 2024 recording for Naïve, pianist Francesco Tristano interprets some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s most challenging pieces, the six Partitas for clavier. Tristano’s 2022 On Early Music was an admirable outing, with pieces by Giralomo Frescobaldi, Peter Philips, John Bull, and Orlando Gibbons, serving as a taster course for Italian and English approaches to harpsichord playing in the early seventeenth century. 

 

Tristano’s keyboard isn’t the harpsichord, but a beautiful sounding grand piano in a recording studio in Kakegawa, Japan. Abetted by sound engineer Christoph Frommen, Tristano reveled in using all of the studio’s devices at his disposal to make what his liner notes essays calls, “BachtotheFuture.” This never sounds like mere trickery, instead it imparts organic sounding, pleasing results. 

 

Tristano is eminently capable of taking fast tempos, such as his fleet renditions of the Allemande from the B-flat major Partita and the Gigue from the G major work, where the counterpoint is clearly delineated in a virtuosic environment. However, he prefers not to rush, and the midtempo and slow dance movements are the better for it, with clear dance rhythms and cleanly delivered ornaments. Extended movements, such as the Sinfonia in the C minor Partita and Toccata in the E minor work, are well-shaped and paced. Indeed, each movement seems to have been carefully considered in its conception and receives a level of attention that makes all that work in the studio in Kakegawa seem well worth it, even necessary. 

 

It is hard to pick favorites among Tristano’s performances of the partitas, and perhaps one’s mood may play a role, as they each seem tailored to a different demeanor. If a doleful mood besets the listener, the pianist’s traversal of the C minor Partita is truly masterful, and will likely meet you where you are and provide considerable uplift by its conclusion. Bach: the 6 Partitas is one of my favorite recordings of 2024.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
BAM, Contemporary Classical, Criticism, File Under?, Guitar, New Age, Performers, Video

James Romig – Matt Sargent – The Fragility of Time (Recording review)

James Romig

The Fragility of Time

A Wave Press

Matt Sargent, Guitar

 

Composer James Romig’s previous piece for electric guitar, The Complexity of Distance, written for Mike Scheidt, was an overwhelming paean to distorted revelry. It was a swerve from Romig’s previous compositions, which were primarily for acoustic instruments, such as the Pulitzer-nominated piano work still and a number of pieces for percussion. His latest composition for electric guitar, The Fragility of Time, is played clean, sans distortion, and serves as a sort of companion to The Complexity of Distance. 

 

The hour-long work returns to the gradual unfolding of still. Romig began his mature career writing serial music with rhythmic vivacity. In recent years, he has retained a constructivist mindset, but slowed down the tempo of his works. One is tempted to attribute some of this to his many residencies at national parks, where the scenery and time to create seem to have metabolized in a tendency for his phrases to breathe differently. 

 

One could scarcely hope for a better advocate than Sargent who, in addition to recording The Fragility of Time, has performed it at several venues. The level of concentration required to render the piece’s asymmetrical gestures, moving frequently between regularly fretted single notes, verticals, and harmonics, is considerable. The dynamics are subdued for much of the piece, though as it progresses the texture is peppered with single forte gestures, and it closes with forte harmonics.The pitch language itself is post-tonal in design, but doesn’t eschew the use of tertian sonorities.

 

The Fragility of Time has a mesmeric quality. Listeners may attend to subtle shifts occurring throughout the piece or merely bask in its attractive sound world. Either way, The Fragility of Time is a rewarding experience: take time to savor it.

 

Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, Piano, Twentieth Century Composer, Violin, Vocals

Hannigan and Chamayou Perform Messiaen (CD Review)

Messiaen

Barbara Hannigan, soprano

Bertrand Chamayou, piano

Charles Sy, tenor; Vilde Frang, violin

Alpha (ALPHA1033, 2024)

 

Soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan is an extraordinarily talented and versatile performer. Bertrand Chamayou is a superlative player of the French repertoire. Putting  the two together in a recital of vocal works by Olivier Messiaen is inspired programming. The CD’s gestation is detailed in Hannigan’s program note, which describes the two artists’ first meeting and subsequent decision to collaborate. The soprano’s longtime duo partner, Reinbert de Leeuw, was too ill to continue performing, and by the time that Messiaen was recorded, it was after his passing. The sessions were done on de Leeuw’s piano at his home, a fitting tribute. Hannigan’s first impression of Chamayou’s playing was its “liquescent legato,” which she would emulate when they performed. This is certainly the case on Messiaen, where the soprano’s sound seems to celebrate a sense of luxuriant line.


The program consists of two song cycles, Chants de Terre et de Ciel (1938) and Poèmes pour Mi (1937), and the scene La Mort du Nombre (1930). All have texts written by the composer, with imagery and reference points taken from the New Testament. Chants de Terre et de Ciel, “Songs of Earth and Heaven,” is substantial, containing six songs but lasting over a half hour. The music celebrates the birth of his only son, Pascal. It begins with Bail Avec Mi, (pour ma femme), “A Pact with Mi (for my wife).” Mi was Messiaen’s nickname for his wife Claire Delbos, a composer in her own right whose works he championed. It has the quality of a recitative, the piano playing birdsong adornments. The rest of the cycle concerns Pascal, in the next three songs as a celebration of his arrival and life. The last two songs take a turn. Minuit pile et face (pour la Mort), “Midnight Heads and Tails (for Death),” is a nightmarish view of death, and it is followed by an ecstatic vision of the afterlife, Résurrection (pour le jour de Pâques), “Resurrection, for Easter Day.” These last two might seem incongruous, but what parent doesn’t fear the death of their child? And Messiaen devotedly looks to the promise of the Resurrection; he hopes and trusts that it will be experienced by his child. 

 

Poèmes pour Mi is dedicated to Delbos. It is about their romantic love and, as the cycle proceeds, a sense of the agape love that embodies both families on earth and the family of believers in union with the divine. The nine songs are split into two books, the first consisting of four and the second of five. This helps to underscore the move from eros to agape, from earthly to spiritual love. Messiaen recommended that the part be for a dramatic soprano, which is not how I would describe Hannigan’s voice. However, she declaims the forte passages strongly without ever pushing, maintaining the aforementioned liquescent legato. The piano part requires frequent shifts in demeanor, as Messiaen’s predilection for composing blocks of sound rather than formal throughlines is omnipresent. Possessing a seemingly endless reservoir of resources, Chamayou provides a different touch and timbre for each new section. There are several recordings of this cycle that I admire. In my estimation, Hannigan and Chamayou’s rendition has significant differences in approach but equals the benchmark recording by Phyllis Bryn-Julson and Mark Markham (Music and Arts 912). 

 

La Mort du Nombre (The Death of the Number) includes two guest artists, tenor Charles Sy, a frequent collaborator of Hannigan’s, and violinist Vilde Frang, acquainted with Chamayou but new to working with the soprano. Both acquit themselves memorably in this comparative rarity from Messiaen’s early catalog. In the part of the Second Soul, Sy plaintively sings a text floridly rich with allegory about being kept distant from God. The First Soul, sung by Hannigan, urges her counterpart to take courage and stay the course, gently declaiming a recitative of koan-like aphorisms. Chamayou is then given a virtuosic part to accompany Sy. Frang follows with an interlude that is accompanied by music in the piano filled with the coloristic harmonies Messiaen used to represent resurrection. Hannigan joins, singing an arioso over whole-tone arpeggiations from the instruments, the poetry describing “an eternal spring.” La Mort du Nombre betrays its youthful naivete in places, but it also reveals a number of musical and textual reference points that would remain constants for Messiaen’s entire career. Well worth reviving.

 

The recording is distinguished by sterling production values, affording the performers a resonant, yet not overly reverberant, acoustic, that captures even the most subtle dynamic shifts. One hopes that Messiaen is just the beginning of the musical partnership of Hannigan and Chamayou. It is one of my favorite CD’s thus far in 2024.

 

-Christian Carey, Sequenza 21


by Christian Carey
BMOP, CDs, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Orchestras

BMOP Records Galbraith (CD Review)

Nancy Galbraith

Everything Flows

BMOP Sound

Published by Sequenza 21 

 

Nancy Galbraith has taught for a number of years at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. During that time, she has created a body of compelling orchestral works. Colorfully scored and post-minimal in approach, Galbraith’s music has received prominent performances but been relatively underserved on recording. As a corrective, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose, has recorded for BMOPsound three of her concertos, all written in the past eight years. 

 

Violin Concerto No. 1 (2017) was premiered by its soloist here, Alyssa Wang, with the Carnegie Mellon Contemporary Ensemble. In the liner notes, Galbraith says that the piece was waiting for a talent like Wang with whom to collaborate. While it is surprising that it took the composer this long to create a violin concerto – she has written well for strings in the past – the piece is an important one in her catalog, in which she explores an abiding interest – Asian music. 

 

The first movement employs the sliding tone and rotating pentatonic scales found in Chinese music. Alongside it is a riff using the same scalar elements but with a blues scale cast. The soloist remains in the world of Asia, while the ensemble traverses the musical distance between Beijing and the Bayou, particularly in the piano part and the movement’s final cadence. There is even a snatch in the middle of a Gershwin-like sauntering dance. The second movement, subtitled “Eggshell White Night,” inhabits an impressionist sound world, the solo intermingling with flute, harp, and an exotic theme in the strings and brass. It underscores the connection between French music at the turn of the twentieth century and the incorporation of non-Western materials. 

 

The last movement intersperses short arcing cadenzas and perpetual motion passages with another theme using five-note scales in the strings. As the piece progresses, harp, chimes, and wind chords are added to the mix. The violin soloist plays modal arpeggiations against polyrhythms in the orchestra, then a final cadenza, beginning slowly with double-stops and building to an emphatic flourish. The orchestra rejoins, presenting the theme against a final scalar passage that closes the piece in the stratosphere. Here as elsewhere, Wang does a superb job balancing virtuosity and expressivity, creating a thoughtful and ebullient reading of the concerto that befits its heterogeneous identity.

 

Lindsey Goodman is the soloist in Galbraith’s Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (2019). The opening sets up metric transformations and mixed meters in bongos and other drums, and Goodman soon enters with a syncopated solo that serves as the theme for the movement. Her tone, even in the highest portions of the melody, is rich and dynamically nuanced. Chords in the strings and mallet instruments accompany a second melody, bifurcated into oscillations and arpeggiations. Repeated notes move the piece into a brisk section completed by a cadenza with a series of special effects. The main theme returns to complete the movement. 

 

The second movement features chimes and imitation between the strings and the flute solo. It is an elegant combination of exoticism and pastoral effect. Eventually, the flute is joined in a contrapuntal version of its solo and then a ground bass in the strings that lead into another cadenza passage, this one using standard techniques with off-kilter  phrasing. The chimes, other pitched percussion, and a registrally dispersed version of the string chords accompany a denouement in the soloist and winds. The final movement is a moto perpetuo redolent of South Asian rhythms and melodic elements. Once again, the bongos provide a strong groove that is soon replicated rhythmically by the flute in flurries of arpeggios. The soloist remains in the foreground, with harp and pizzicato strings joining. The tempo downshifts a bit and a muscular passage of string melodies and overblown flute is accompanied by clangorous percussion. A final cadenza brings the music to a boil, with a racing tutti passage accompanying the flute playing fleet arpeggios and an altissimo octave leap to conclude. 

 

Everything Flows: Concerto for Solo Percussion and Orchestra, is an ideal showcase for the talented percussionist Abby Langhorst. Syncopated, jazz-inflected riffs include an Aeolian theme that serves as a refrain between solo breaks and appears fragmented elsewhere. An electric guitar adds to the vernacular quality of the orchestration. The percussionist plays a number of non-pitched instruments, including a plethora of different-sized drums, woodblock, brake drums, and cymbals. They embellish the refrain rhythms by successively troping it and adding contrasting polyrhythms. The percussionist also gets their own chance to play the refrain in glockenspiel passages. There is an oasis in the midst of the work, with the soloist undertaking a lyrical melody on vibraphone. The departure from it slowly rebuilds from small solo passages in several of the winds and then a subdued major key ground that adds vibraphone, guitar, and double bass. As this floats away, the final theme is announced by quick lines on the marimba. This is a feint, as we return to the earlier ambience. A chiming solo passage, accompanied by alto flute and sustained strings, is belatedly succeeded by a return to the uptempo riff on woodblock and a fortissimo cadenza of toms, bass drum, and, finally, the entire fleet of drums at the soloist’s disposal. The main theme returns in an artful division into the various sections in swinging counterpoint. The soloist buoys the ensemble with the groove from his final cadenza, the piece ending in a fortissimo tutti.

Galbraith’s recent concertos are expert creations. Abetted by abundantly talented soloists and the skilful advocacy and playing of BMOP under Rose, this release is highly recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Minimalism, Review

Philip Glass Solo – 88 keys at 87 (Review)

Philip Glass Solo
Philip Glass, piano
Orange Mountain Music

This is the second piano album made by Philip Glass. Solo Piano (1989) contains some overlap of tracks with the latest recording, Philip Glass Solo (2024), but there are distinct differences between the renditions on each. At 87 years of age, and in demand from opera houses, symphony orchestras, chamber ensembles, and filmmakers for a steady spate of new works, a solo performance recording might seem like an unnecessary addition to Glass’s catalog. But it is in those aforementioned differences found in the music that he shares a different vantage point on his work.

Timings suggest tempo and, in the case of Glass’s music, tempo fluctuations. “Mad Rush,” a work that many pianists have interpreted, here appears like it is being created before the listeners’ ear, lasting a few minutes longer than the previous recording, with a sense of suppleness that belies the motoric fashion many adopt when playing it. “Opening” has a pulsation to the ostinato patterns that shimmers, different voices accentuated in the texture to create a gesture akin to windmills instead of, again, motors.

Four of the “Metamorphosis” movements are programmed. Here, there is a positively Romantic ambience that in “Metamorphosis 1” recalls the shifting appearances of Schumann’s “Papillon.” “Metamorphosis 2” has soaring high melodies like those of Chopin, while thunderous bass, modal mixture, and hemiola give a Brahmsian cast to “Metamorphosis 3.” “Metamorphosis 5” is girded with chromaticism of a Lisztian variety.

“Truman Sleeps” is one of the most memorable sections of Glass’s score for The Truman Show. Here, he builds from a delicate, rubato opening to virile verticals and a gripping, arcing melody. The piece’s coda moves the material down to the bass register, its chord progression both eminently memorable and vintage Glass.

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Canada, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Piano

Martin Arnold – Flax (CD Review)

Martin Arnold 

Flax

Kerry Yong, piano

Another Timbre

 

Martin Arnold’s solo piano work Flax has a sad backstory. It was originally commissioned by the abundantly talented new music pianist Philip Thomas, who shortly afterward became seriously ill and was unable to premiere the work. Kerry Yong performs the piece in his honor on an Another Timbre CD. The piece was already well underway when this transpired, but one cannot hear the considerable poignancy and elegant gracefulness of Flax without connecting it to Thomas’s loss of health. 

 

Arnold is a Canadian composer whose work is influenced by Morton Feldman and the Wandelweiser Collective. Feldman is a nexus between Arnold and Thomas, whose recordings of Feldman’s complete piano music are superlative. Flax, at over eighty minutes in duration and in a slow tempo throughout, is certainly reminiscent of the aforementioned influences. However, when creating Flax, Arnold also had other considerations to ponder. In the CD’s program note essay, we learn  that Thomas had mentioned to Arnold that the composer’s use of the upper register had made the pianist rethink it. Thus, Flax prioritizes the top two octaves of the piano. When writing the piece, Arnold was also considering bebop and early modern jazz, how there are dissonances added to the changes that create harmonic ambiguity. The first two thirds of Flax use extended verticals garnered from this practice. The ending section of the piece returns to modality and organum, both aspects of much of Arnold’s other music. 

Thelonious Monk’s voicings and Feldman-esque delicate slowness are an interesting mix. The placement of much of the music in the upper register also reframes the harmony. Until nearly halfway through, when a bass note appears, it feels like an event. At that point, there begins to be a duet between diminished chords and bass notes in the left hand and slow motion bop in the right. 

 

Kerry Yong is a persuasive interpreter of Flax, with a detailed approach to dynamics and phrasing that punctuates distinctive registral spaces in the music. Voicing of the harmony is a pivotal component of this piece, and it is where Yong truly excels, providing a sense of trajectory throughout.  

 

I don’t think that I have heard a Wandelweiser adjacent work that embodies anything close to this one. That said, Flax is a successful experiment from Arnold, stretching his language in surprising and appealing ways. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Piano

Frederic Rzewski – Late Piano Works (CD Review)

Frederic Rzewski

Late Piano Works

Bobby Mitchell, piano

Naxos

 

Frederic Rzewski (1938-2021) was a gifted composer and pianist. His oeuvre included pieces in many genres, but it is his piano works that, to date, are best known. Rzewski premiered a number of pieces, but in his later years deputized pianist Bobby Mitchell, dedicating works to him and trusting his talent to be sufficient for their often virtuosic and complex interpretive demands.

 

Rzewski’s pieces combine modernism and vernacular styles, particularly leftist folk songs, often in sets of multifaceted variations. War Songs (2008) includes songs that are both pro and anti-war. It has an Ivesian cast, with the materials layered in a welter of dissonance and complex verticals. Mitchell’s performance is vivacious, reveling in the many quotations, pointing up the places where pro and anti-war songs wage their own conflicts.

 

One of the composer’s large piano cycles, Dreams, is represented here by its last two pieces: Ruins and Wake Up. These pieces were written for Igor Levit in 2014, and they provide a contrasting pair. Ruins seems to be a disturbed swath of unrest, filled with dissonant counterpoint, thunderous bass notes, and angular lines. Besides the directive connotation of Wake Up, it is also the title of a Woody Guthrie song that serves as the piece’s opening gesture. 

 

Winter Nights (2014) was composed to celebrate Mitchell’s thirtieth birthday. This triptych is inspired by the tale about Bach’s Goldberg Variations, in which his student Goldberg played them in order to cure his patron’s insomnia. I’ve often wondered if the vivacity of the Goldergs wouldn’t make for toe-tapping rather than snoring. Winter Nights too has long stretches that seem in homage to Carter’s Night Fantasies, post-tonal, rife with trills and passagework. Elsewhere are long stretches at extremely slow tempos, with gradually unfurling, attenuated single-line melodies. Mitchell does a superb job rendering these detailed scores in vivid fashion.

 

The recording concludes with Saints and Sinners (2016). Originally written for Milton Schlosser, it was performed by Mitchell at Rzewski’s funeral. A substantial piece cast in a single movement, it recalls mid century neoclassical Americans such as Roger Sessions, Arthur Berger, and William Schuman. In a sense then, it is a piece that comes full circle, recalling Rzewski’s initial impetus and training to compose. Late Piano Works is excellent in terms of curation, quality of music, and performance. Recommended.

Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
CD Review, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Renaud Capuçon and Martha Argerich on DG (CD Review)

Beethoven, Schumann, Franck

Renaud Capuçon, violin; Martha Argerich, piano

Deutsche Grammophon

 

Three violin sonatas by great nineteenth century composers, all in A, grace this recording by violinist Renaud Capuçon and pianist Martha Argerich. Longtime collaborators, the duo sound seamless in these performances. They create detailed renditions, faithful to the scores but keen to put their own stamp on the pieces.

 

The first movement of the Schumann exemplifies this approach, with the performers digging into the main theme and unspinning  legato lines in its development, the tempo treated flexibly. In the second movement, an Allegretto of considerable delicacy, Capuçon and Argerich provide shading between its major and minor sections that create a chiaroscuro effect. The final movement is dazzling, with Argerich’s right hand and the violin doubling in a fleet duet. Emphatic chords and sforzandos punctuate the music, which culminates with a heroic cadence.

 

Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata is one of the most prized in the violin-piano literature, and Capuçon and Argerich play it with powerfully delineated dynamic contrasts, exquisite attention to phrasing and articulations, and a sense of familiarity by dint of long association with the piece. Every time one or the other player stretches out, they know that the other will be there to support them, even catch them. The breaths provided by subtle ritardandos and slightly extended rests are part of what gives the performance a special character. Beethoven’s music isn’t meant to be motoric, but more timid performers sometimes play it that way. The second movement, an extended set of variations. The F major theme, as so often for this key in Beethoven, has a simple, limpid quality. Despite its length – over sixteen minutes – the music is shaped with a keen awareness of its overarching form. After the piano leads off, the violin takes a turn in the foreground with ornate soprano register embellishments. A minor section mid-movement lends the music a melancholic flavor, with keening accentuations doubled by violin and piano. A return to the major key references the beginning, with florid ornaments even more present. The major key persists in the last variation, the longest in the movement. It is slow and grandiose, with a cadenza-like piano introduction. The violin enters with trills and the two render the tune in a call and response duet that brings the movement to a warm conclusion. It is followed by a presto sendoff, a sonata rondo. Once again the length of the movement is significant and the jaunty theme is subjected to many different permutations and harmonic underpinnings. The playing is virtuosic, displaying Capuçon and Argerich at their fleet-fingered best. 

 

César Franck’s Violin Sonata, composed in 1886 when the composer was sixty-three, is an example of  late Romantic treatment of chamber music. Sinuous melodies, denied resolution again and again, suggesting the influence of Wagner’s operas. There is a winsome character to the first movement’s tune that is affecting. With the change in style, one is afforded a different sense of the musicians’ playing. Argerich displays a sonorous, muscular tone and Capuçon complements this with a steely sound of his own. The second movement, an Allegro, is where the dramatic conflict of the sonata occurs. It is followed by a recitative and fantasy, which stretch phrases nearly to their breaking point in mournful melodies. The ambiguity of harmony and interwoven rhythms move the piece to the other side of the romantic divide, reminiscent of Johannes Brahms. The sonata comes full circle, returning to an allegretto tempo for the final movement. The beginning’s descending thirds are offset later by shimmering altissimo duets. Juxtaposed are A minor, in boisterous passages, and the more lyrical exploration of A major. Cascades of piano arpeggios,  scales and supple variations of the tune by the violin build the piece to a rousing finish. 

 

There are many recordings of these pieces. Few display the lived-in quality and consummate sensitivity of Capuçon and Argerich. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, jazz, Piano, Pop

Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles (CD Review)

 

Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles

Brad Mehldau

Nonesuch Records

 

Pianist Brad Mehldau is a chameleon-like figure, able to play music in many styles and a creative composer. He excels at finding new standards, recent pop songs that benefit from jazz treatment. The Beatles’s songbook is among the most durable in the pop canon, having endured numerous revisionings, some inspired and, sadly, some insipid. Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles is strongly inspired. 

 

A live recording that consists of ten Beatles songs and a David Bowie encore (“Life on Mars”), the audience is warmly enthusiastic. Other pianists who mine pop for new standards, Herbie Hancock, Ethan Iverson, and Christopher O’Riley to name just a few, each bring their own approach to the task. Often, the original’s arrangement is discarded for flights of fancy. Mehldau sometimes stays true to the Beatles’ recordings. I Am the Walrus’ adheres to as much of the psychedelic bounty as two hands can manage. “For No One” is riff-filled during its instrumental breaks, but keeps true to the verse and chorus and its beginning and conclusion.

 

Elsewhere, Mehldau uses the songs as springboards for improvisation. “I Saw Her Standing There” is given a rousing rock ‘n roll treatment with a bluesy solo. “Golden Slumbers” is adorned with post-bop riffs. “Your Mother Should Know” gets a swing shuffle treatment, while “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” sounds in places like Thelonious Monk has visited the stage. “Here, There, and Everywhere” is moving in its restraint, played by Mehldau with a rubato approach that begins true to the original, then adds modal jazz’s parallel planing of chords and dissonant extensions that add surprise to the  tune. 

 

The Bowie encore is performed with poignancy alternating with virtuosic octave passages. Interestingly, instead of embellishing the chord structure, Mehldau strips out a few passing chords to keep the changes in a more Romantic vein. 

 

Above all, Mehldau displays curiosity and affection for the songs themselves. The Beatles will continue to inspire different approaches to their music. Future interpreters would do well to keep Your Mother Should Know in mind as a touchstone for how it should be done. 

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey