Maria João Pires / Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / André Previn CHOPIN Piano Concerto No. 1

 

PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1

 

Patrick Messina / Fabrizio Chiovetta SONGS

 

SONGS

 

Carolina López Moreno / Doriana Tchakarova IL BEL SOGNO

‘My aim with this recording is not only to realize a beautiful dream, to conquer the stage and to touch people’s hearts, and to lead my listeners on a journey of great emotions in the world of music. I would like to uncover the dreams that lie dormant in all of us and that are yearning to be brought into the open – desires which often reveal themselves in our dreams, where they seem tangible and achievable. Dreams of love, and phantasies of the world we would like to live in.’ (Carolina López Moreno)

Sandrine Piau / Susan Manoff CHIMÈRE

After a number of appearances in Alpha productions Sandrine Piau now joins the label for several recordings. With Chimère, she invites us on a voyage into the intimate and infinite territory of dreams. ‘Chimera: an illusory, unsatisfied quest, the graveyard of our illusions...’ She and her long standing partner, the pianist Susan Manoff, have thought up a programme combining the German lied (Hugo Wolf, one of Schumann’s Mignon songs, a scene from Goethe’s Faust by Carl Loewe), Mélodies by Debussy and Poulenc (his Banalités), and Art Songs by Barber along with discoveries of more rarely heard composers like Ivor Gurney and the Dickinson Songs of André Previn – the celebrated American conductor is less well-known for his compositions, which include this magnificent cycle written for Renée Fleming. Equally at home in French, German and English, Sandrine Piau is at the peak of her artistry. Fantoches, Clair de Lune, Solitary Hotel, Will there really be a morning?: set out for the world of dreams following this unique poetic itinerary. ‘The land of chimeras is the only one in this world worth living in’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau).

Anne-Sophie Mutter / Gewandhausorchester Leipzig / Kurt Masur MENDELSSOHN (CD 36 / ASM35)

To mark the bicentenary of Mendelssohn’s birth, Anne-Sophie Mutter is honouring the composer with a very personal tribute combining symphonic music and chamber works on CD and DVD: the Violin Sonata in F major of 1838, the Piano Trio in D minor op. 49 that was completed in 1839 and the Violin Concerto in E minor of 1845, a work which even today has lost none of its fascination.

Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg on 3 February 1809, the son of a well-to-do Jewish banker, but grew up in Berlin. A brilliant pianist, he was also a conductor and an impassioned chamber musician. Not infrequently he himself gave the first performances of his own works, and this was also the case with his Piano Trio op. 49. Anne-Sophie Mutter admires Mendelssohn for a number of reasons: “He was a man of many parts, but also one with many obligations and duties who showed great commitment to all that he did. His importance to the history of music is clear not least from the fact that he played a significant part in the Bach Revival. He was the baptized Jew who 80 years after Bach’s death reintroduced the St. Matthew Passion to the whole of Europe and ensured its lasting popularity. Another of his great merits was his pronounced sense of social responsibility. It was in his keenness to ensure that a musical education was not just the luxurious preserve of members of the upper classes that he helped to set up the Leipzig Conservatory. He was also an eminent man of letters, with a fluent command of Italian, English and Latin, and, finally, he was a magnificent painter, who produced some wonderful watercolours.”

The E minor Violin Concerto received its first performance in Leipzig in 1845, when the soloist was the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s concertmaster, Ferdinand David. The work was written with David in mind, and the solo part was in fact substantially influenced by him. Anne-Sophie Mutter first recorded this work in 1980, at the start of her career, with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Herbert von Karajan. For her second recording she travelled to Leipzig, the scene of the work’s first performance, where Ferdinand David led the Gewandhaus Orchestra for more than 30 years. Even though the original Gewandhaus building no longer exists, there is still a Gewandhaus Orchestra that can look back on a long and distinguished tradition and that worked regularly with Mendelssohn between 1835 and his death in 1847. More recently, its music director was Kurt Masur, whose 26-year tenure is fondly remembered by Anne-Sophie Mutter. In particular she recalls “the transparency and elegance of the sound and the understanding of the need for an inner balance”, for the musicians “not only play together, they also feel together and breathe together”. Her work with Kurt Masur is “a bit like flying”, a comment prompted by an experience that the virtuoso violinist recently had with Masur and the New York Philharmonic: “We were recording the Beethoven Violin Concerto and had reached a passage in which the orchestra needs to listen and accompany. Masur said: ‘Just let her fly!’, which is exactly what I feel when I play Mendelssohn, for example, with Kurt Masur. Especially in a concerto that involves so much tempestuous and propulsive passion.”

For Anne-Sophie Mutter, this “Sturm und Drang” element in Mendelssohn’s music is extremely important, not least in the Violin Concerto: “It is striking that the performance marking appassionato occurs very often in Mendelssohn’s output, not only in the opening movement of the Violin Concerto but also in the final movement of the Piano Trio.” This sense of urgency and vitality also inspired her interpretation of the slow movement of the Violin Concerto, an interpretative decision for which she received decisive encouragement from Kurt Masur, who drew her attention to the Venetianisches Gondellied op. 57 no. 5 of 1842: the same accompanying figure is found in the piano part here as in the orchestral writing in the concerto. “Central to the gondolier’s song is his wish to flee with his lover, it is all about burning desire and this youthful sense of impulsiveness”, placing considerable demands on the interpreter, who is required “to combine purity of expression with the impatience of Mendelssohnian passion”.

The violinist regards the concerto’s final movement as “entirely typical of Mendelssohn”, a kind of elfin dance similar to the one that he devised for his Octet op. 20 of 1825 and that he repeatedly used in his later quick movements and scherzos. “This scurrying, gossamery, ghostly element is enormously virtuosic, its lightness of tone representing a real challenge for the interpreter.” Anne-Sophie Mutter believes that the success of the Violin Concerto is grounded in the music itself, “which combines everything that constitutes great music: passion, virtuosity, purity of expression, depth of emotion and an unconditional surrender to the musical expression. It is a stroke of genius, and this music is immortal.”

Like the E minor Violin Concerto, the F major Violin Sonata of 1838 was written for Ferdinand David. This demanding three-movement work by the mature composer is notable for the impassioned and raptly triumphal tone of its outer movements, while its central Adagio is a captivating dialogue between violin and piano. The work’s genesis suggests in fact that Mendelssohn struggled long and hard to resolve various compositional and, above all, technical details in the violin part. Although he played through the piece with Ferdinand David, he made little progress on revising it, his alterations being limited to the opening movement. Possibly his manifold artistic obligations as a soloist and conductor and his often extended and exhausting concert tours simply left Mendelssohn with no time to undertake a final, thorough revision of the piece. As a result, there is no authorized version of the sonata, which remained unpublished during its composer’s lifetime. Not until 1953 did Yehudi Menuhin publish a version based on the initial draft and on the revisions to the opening movement, and this remains the only edition of the work. It is also the one used by Anne-Sophie Mutter: “There’s no doubt that it’s an authentic piece, but one that was not fully revised by Mendelssohn. Many other great works, including the ‘Italian’ Symphony, for example, suffered the same fate. It would be an immeasurable loss if these works were not performed.”

Completed in 1839, the Piano Trio in D minor op. 49, conversely, was not only published during Mendelssohn’s lifetime but was also held in high regard. It was first performed in Leipzig on 1 February 1840, when the performers were the composer himself on the piano, Ferdinand David on the violin and Carl Wittmann on the cello. A profound and substantial piece, it was described by Robert Schumann as “the master trio of the present day”, a work that “will delight our grandchildren and great-grandchildren”. Anne-Sophie Mutter shares Schumann’s enthusiasm: “For some time I have been absolutely wild about Mendelssohn, and this is palpable in the Trio.”

The opening movement is an animated and elaborate Molto allegro that is followed by a songlike Andante and by what Anne-Sophie Mutter describes as a “breathtakingly virtuosic Scherzo that strikes a note both elegant and playful”, its scurrying elfin strains recalling the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The work ends with a thrilling rondo-finale.

The first of Mendelssohn’s two completed piano trios, the present piece is notable for its successful balance between melody, harmony and translucency. The piano part is clearly more weighty and more independent than the parts for the two string instruments, with which it acts as a foil: the writing in general aims not to create a sense of integration between the three instruments, as is the case with Beethoven’s piano trios, for example, but to establish a sense of contrast between the piano on the one hand and the strings on the other. In André Previn’s hands, the independent piano part, bearing the weight of the musical argument, is contrasted with the interplay of equals between Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lynn Harrell, a partnership typified by “spontaneity and a multiplicity of tone colours”. All three players achieve a sense of balance by dint of a premise that is by no means self-evident: “We trust each other, listening to one another and performing as of one mind.” (Susanne Schmerda)

Anne-Sophie Mutter / Daniel Müller-Schott / André Previn MOZART Piano Trios K. 502, 542, 548 (CD 35 / ASM35)

Anne-Sophie Mutter describes Mozart as “the composer I have grown up with, who was always there waiting for me at every juncture of my career”; and she quotes with approval Tchaikovsky’s description of Mozart’s music as “filled with unapproachable, divine beauty”. For this latest instalment of her Mozart project, conceived to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth, she has chosen the three finest works among his half-dozen completed trios for violin, cello and piano. In these, he developed the medium beyond its original conception as an accompanied keyboard sonata, giving the cello and, especially, the violin a much greater degree of independence, and so putting the latter on what Ms. Mutter calls “a level of equality” with the piano. She adds: “This is Mozart writing for pure enjoyment – his own included – in the best sense of the word.”

There is a hint that Mozart might have partaken of that enjoyment as a player in the postscript of a letter he wrote to his friend and fellow-Freemason Michael Puchberg in June 1788, around the time he completed the E major Trio, K.542: “When are we to have a little musical party at your house again? I have composed a new trio!” But his relish for private music-making during his later years in Vienna must have been clouded by his recurring financial problems. The same letter to Puchberg also contains a plea for a loan to be repaid over the next year or two, and for an immediate advance to help him out of a temporary difficulty. These three piano trios were presumably composed with the primary intention of improving Mozart’s long-term financial situation, since he sold them to his regular Viennese publisher Artaria: they were issued in November 1788 as his op. 15.

In fact, this set was completed at the same time as Mozart was composing his last three symphonies, nos. 39 to 41, which may also have been written with one eye on the possibility of publication. And, with the trios as with the symphonies, Mozart seems to have gone out of his way to create a triptych of pieces with strongly defined and differentiated characters – something which he ensured not least by his choice of keys.

The first of the three, completed well before the others in November 1786, is in B flat major – a key which seems to have been something of a favourite of Mozart’s, and one which usually conveys a sense of robust well-being. An oddity of Mozart’s use of it is the number of sonata-form first movements in B flat in which the first and second subjects are closely related, but a brand new theme is introduced at the start of the development section – as happens here, with the initial idea in sweet parallel thirds dominating the opening exposition section, and a new lyrical melody on the violin at the double-bar. The slow movement, in the warm, solid key of E flat major, is in triple time; its recurring main theme begins with an upbeat of three quavers (eighth-notes), and so do the themes of the subsidiary episodes, which makes possible some neat overlapping between sections and, later, between individual phrases. The finale has a main theme in gavotte time with two crotchet (quarter-note) upbeats; as Alfred Einstein pointed out in his study of the composer, this movement begins “like the rondo of a concerto, as if with a solo passage, piano, answered by a tutti passage, forte, but without any sacrifice of the finely wrought detail of chamber music”.

The key of the second trio, E major, is rare in the classical period and has something ethereal about it, as if its distance from more common tonalities removes the music from everyday reality. In the opening movement – in a smoothly flowing triple time, like the first Allegro of the Symphony no. 39 in E flat which Mozart also wrote in June 1788 – this feeling of remoteness is pointed up by an unexpected modulation towards the end of the exposition, from B major to the more down-to-earth G major; Mozart repeats this exactly in the recapitulation, from E to C, so that we can again enjoy the surprise, and appreciate the ingenuity with which he works his way back to his tonal starting-point. The delicate central movement, in a 2/4 version of gavotte time, is in a limpid A major, with a middle section in A minor which includes a haunting series of key-changes anticipating Schubert’s poetic use of modulation. The rondo finale, with its jaunty violin triplets and brilliant piano passage-work, makes a more determined attempt at jollity than the other two movements; but even here the violin’s C sharp minor melody in the central episode strikes a note of tender seriousness which is never wholly dispelled.

Mozart entered the last of the three trios in his catalogue of his works in July 1788 – less than a month before his last symphony, the so-called “Jupiter”, which is in the same open, serious, ceremonial key of C major. The first movement of the Trio indeed shows some affinities with that of the Symphony, in its strong opening gesture, followed by a gentle answer, and in the restlessness of its development section. The slow movement, like that of the Symphony, is an Andante cantabile in F major and in 3/4 time; its serene flow is merely ruffled by patches of lightly touched-in demisemiquavers (thirty-second-notes), but is disturbed for a moment by the sternly dramatic octaves after the half-way double-bar. The last movement, rather than adopting the sonata form and fugal texture of the “Jupiter” finale, is a rondo in dancing 6/8 time – though it is still closely worked in the manner of the Symphony, with the arpeggio figure of the main theme passed round all three members of the ensemble almost to the end.

Anthony Burton