Steven Isserlis / Dénes Várjon CHOPIN Cello Sonata SCHUBERT Arpeggione Sonata

Not given to routine planning, Steven Isserlis comes up here with a generous, characterful programme of early-Romantic masterworks—formerly B-road stuff, these days anything but—offset by two suspendingly beautiful song arrangements inimitably natural in their tessitura, utterly painful in their introspective longing. There's a forgotten little 6/8 Larghetto, too, by the dedicatee of Chopin’s Cello Sonata, Auguste Franchomme (1808-84), published in Leipzig in 1838, during the E-flat middle section of which Schubert, dead ten years, quietly dances the ether.

Isserlis approaches both main works expansively, getting his 1726 'Marquis de Corberon' Stradivarius to sing, project and fade with beauty, form and expression foremost. More than once one is struck by how paragraphs and episodes breathe, surge and cadence, rests and silences given potent tension; this is finely articulate cultured playing—ruminant poetry and reflective musicality, aristocratically suspended climaxes, carrying the argument free of ego or 'produced' theatre. Chopin's complex first movement, a ballade-like narrative difficult to hold together, particularly impresses, amounting in Isserlis's hands to perhaps the closest the composer ever got to sustaining a prolonged symphonic dynamic. It compels at every turn of its leisured fifteen-minute journey. Similarly one would not want to be without the gloriously poised aria of the Largo. The early Polonaise brillante goes with a Slavonic swagger, its imperial rhythms ideally placed, neither rushed nor laboured. Good polonaise playing, like good mazurka feeling, is an art not all have the key to.

In programme order, out of Chopin's later (1845 and same key) ‘Nie ma czego trzeba’ comes Schubert's 1824 Arpeggione Sonata (for a now-defunct instrument), unpublished until 1871, a bouquet of traceries and grace, its more strenuous passages benefitting from the openness of the keyboard writing. Repeatedly, Isserlis regales us, Schubert the Sonata man was one like no other—fashioning canvasses as dependent on sighing Lied contrasts and expanding caesuras as the pursuit of purely Beethovenian dialectics. In these pages strasse tunes and sparing motifs go hand-in-hand, uncontrived companions of the Biedermeier hour, lilting and tilting their way through time. Isserlis's 'song without words' Schubert is magical. And infinitely sad.

His booklet essay is wisely expressive reading. Likewise his note on the editions used. Most telling, in the Chopin Sonata, is his adoption of two autograph tempo markings otherwise ignored: Maestoso rather than Allegro moderato for the first movement, and Più lento for the Trio section of the Scherzo – both bringing needed air and space to the music. Apparently small changes, yet, as he says, 'these things make a difference…'.

Dénes Várjon is a gracious partner, maybe not always at home in Chopin's trickier figurations but otherwise agreeably in accord with Isserlis's wider vision. He plays an 1851 Érard (Birmingham University Music Department), tuned to A430. More opaque and less 'big' than expected (compared with examples we've heard in Paris or Warsaw), the lyric mezzo domain is where it speaks best, generating a warmly pedalled halo of overtones and breathtaking die-aways (the end of the Arpeggione for one, both song transcriptions for another). In denser, louder textures, though, it loses clarity and attack, the engineered balance with cello—picking up on an ambient acoustic prone to cloudiness— producing occasionally muddied artefacts. (Classical Source)

Dénes Várjon DE LA NUIT

“Negotiating dynamic shifts of emphasis,” The Independent has noted, “Dénes Várjon displays that most valuable of gifts: the ability to play in a way which makes you listen anew to the familiar.”  This capacity is to the fore in the Hungarian pianist’s sensitive exploration of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Bartók’s Im Freien – an illuminating journey through three worlds of poetic imagination. As Jürg Stenzl writes in the liner notes. “All three works were bold forays into fundamentally new music that far transcended the limits of their time. They require pianists for whom transcendent virtuosity is second nature.” Dénes Várjon more than fulfils the requirement. One of the most sought-after soloists and chamber musicians, he is a musician who puts the core and meaning of the compositions ahead of self-display.
Recorded in Lugano in 2016, De la nuit is Varjon’s fourth appearance on ECM and his second solo album for the label, following on from his widely acclaimed recital Precipitando, with music of Berg, Janáček and Liszt. Two other New Series releases revolve, directly and tangentially, around the world of Robert Schumann.  Together with Carolin Widmann, Dénes Várjon played Schumann’s Violin Sonatas on a recording showered with awards and praise (“the most eloquent and convincing performances I have ever encountered of this music”, wrote Nigel Simeone in International Record Review.) Várjon also contributed to Heinz Holliger’s Romancendres, a creative meditation upon the lost Schumann Romances. (ECM Records)

HEINZ HOLLIGER Romancendres CLARA SCHUMANN

A fascinating concept album circling around the fragility of artistic sensibilities in German musical and literary romanticism. Two important pieces by Swiss composer Heinz Holliger (born 1939), both of them inspired by Robert Schumann, are combined with a chamber work by Clara Schumann. They all intersect in the year 1853, when 20-year-old Johannes Brahms first visited the Schumann couple in Düsseldorf. The initial piece, Clara’s three wonderfully melodic romances for cello and piano, is followed by Holliger’s imaginative and multi-faceted hommage to Robert’s “Romances” in the same scoring. Much to Brahms’ approbation they were burnt by Clara in 1893 as she feared her late husband’s reputation could suffer if compositions from the onset of his mental illness would be publicised. All that survives is a vivid description by violinist Joseph Joachim. Holliger takes this verbal account as a starting point for a music that subtly meditates upon the double character of love and death, music and silence, romances and cinders. “Gesänge der Frühe” first performed in 1988 is scored for choir, orchestra and tape. Schumann’s last piano work of the same title from 1853 is superimposed in a most visionary way with texts from the late period of Friedrich Hölderlin – another romantic genius who fell prey to mental illness. (ECM Records)

András Schiff / Dénes Várjon / Budapest Festival Orchestra / Heinz Holliger SÁNDOR VERESS Hommage à Paul Klee

Sándor Veress represents a high water mark in Hungary’s rich musical heritage. He belongs between the generations of Bartók and Kodály, his teachers, and of Ligeti and Kurtag, his pupils. He experienced both world wars and Hungary’s police state afterwards, emigrating to Switzerland at age 45. Veress also taught Heinz Holliger, who was responsible for this fine recording, a loving tribute to his teacher.

The Hommage à Paul Klee, the first of the three works on this disc, is nowhere near as grim as one might expect from someone escaping tyranny. It is a seven-movement work combining transcendent soundscapes with a frisky jazziness, presumably reflecting in music seven of Klee’s paintings. It has been adapted for ballet no doubt due to the both celestial and playful moods which Veress manages to invoke through his limpid musical lines. That said, its fifth movement, marked Allegretto (Stone Collection), is an exciting and rhythmic tour de force, with pizzicato strings adding infectious momentum to the rambunctious pianos. Similarly, the near-mystical reverie in the next-to-last movement – an Andante (Green in Green) – is followed by a tumultuous Vivo (Little Blue Devil) that charges in a headlong rush to close the Hommage.

Although neither in sonata form nor theme-and-variations structure, this Hommage à Paul Klee is a (two-) piano concerto in all but name. It convincingly blends tuneful folk forms within a near-austere aesthetic. Weightless although far from light, its ethereal transparency beautifully suits the simple yet evocative paintings that the Hommage seeks to mirror. Its shape as a suite of movements bears comparison in a number of intriguing ways to Frank Martin’s 1974 Polyptyque for violin and two small string orchestras. Claudio Veress, who runs a website for his father’s music, reports that the composer was a great admirer of Martin’s music. This work suggests that the sentiment may have been reciprocated.

Steven Isserlis / Dénes Várjon SCHUMANN

‘There is no composer to whom I feel closer than to Schumann. He has been a beloved friend since I was a child; I remain as fascinated today as I was then by his unique blend of poetry, ecstatic strength and confessional intimacy.’

Steven Isserlis’s own words give the background to this fascinating disc.

Schumann’s affection for the cello ran deep. It was an instrument he had played in his youth, and considered taking up again when, at the age of twenty-two, an accident to his hand forced him to relinquish his dream of being a virtuoso pianist. ‘I want to take up the violoncello again (one needs only the left hand for this) and it will be very useful to me in composing symphonies’, he wrote to his mother. The sound of the cello played without the right hand would have been somewhat minimalist; but his love for the instrument is clearly demonstrated by the cello parts in all four of his symphonies, as well as in the concertos for piano and violin, and of course throughout his chamber music. As the great musicologist Donald Francis Tovey put it: ‘The qualities of the violoncello are exactly those of the beloved dreamer whom we know as Schumann.’

Dénes Várjon PRECIPITANDO

“Perhaps it is the lustre of Dénes Várjon’s playing that lifts everything he performs here into a state of newness, of beginning, and thereby directs our attention to how, in all this music, beginnings are crucial and, once made, decisive.” So begins Paul Griffiths’s liner note for the first solo recital recording by Dénes Várjon. It is a recording that brings the music of Franz Liszt into juxtaposition with work of two composers inspired by him. As Várjon says, “It is always highly interesting to find connections between composers, and bridges between epochs in musical history. In the mirror of other composers and periods, I begin to see new dimensions of works which I have performed, and this is especially the case when I play pieces by Ferenc Liszt.” 

For Várjon, the importance of Liszt transcends the piano and his vision of its possibilities. “Even more strongly, I see him as a main figure of the current of music history. There are certain works by him I need to play and explore again and again - especially his enigmatic late piano pieces, including the four Valses oubliées and the Mephisto Waltzes, the A major piano concerto and, most importantly, his B minor Sonata. I feel the Sonata is a most essential and pure manifestation of the art of Ferenc Liszt. For all its rich texture, its great structure and its length, there is not one single note which is not a most important part of the whole.”  

Playing Liszt in context with Berg’s Piano Sonata and Janáček’s “In the mists” offers further insights. “I hear of course the echo from Liszt's music in Berg and Janáček but even more I realize, through the latter composers, the new and the modern in Liszt's work. The harmonic world of Alban Berg opens the ears to all the innovative solutions of Liszt, and the one movement shape of the Berg Sonata gives new perspectives on just how modern it was in Liszt's time to compose a piece like his B minor sonata. I also don't see it as a contradiction that while I hear the modern side of Liszt, the Berg opus 1 is also a very romantic piece for me.” Written around 1907, while Berg was under Schönberg’s tutelage the piece is also indebted to Mahler and Debussy as well as to Liszt. Paul Griffiths points to similarities between the Berg sonata and Janáček’s “In the mists” of 1912: “the influence of Debussy, the extending but not breaking of tonal harmony, the motivic consistency, the constantly vocal utterance ….” (ECM Records)

Carolin Widmann / Dénes Várjon ROBERT SCHUMANN The Violin Sonatas

ECM debut for two outstanding young soloists playing with vigour and temperament. Carolin Widmann’s reputation as a both committed and exciting performer of contemporary music has constantly spread in recent years. Her first CD with unaccompanied violin works ranging from Eugène Ysaÿe to Salvatore Sciarrino met with unanimous critical acclaim and was immediately awarded an annual prize at the German Record Critic’s award (Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik). Composers such as Matthias Pintscher, Erkki-Sven Tüür and her brother Jörg Widmann write pieces for the Munich-born violinist and in summer 2008 she is giving first performances of no less than five new violin concerti including, in September in Leipzig and Lucerne, a piece by Wolfgang Rihm with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly’s baton.

Of equal importance to Widmann is the preoccupation with the repertoire from the Baroque to the romantic era and the conception of programmes that highlight affinities between composers from different epochs. Together with Dénes Várjon whose formative influences in his native Budapest included masters such as Ferenc Rados, György Kurtág and András Schiff – his career took of after a sensational first prize at the Zurich Géza Anda competition, in 1991 – she has worked on Schumann since the start of their collaboration in 2004. Especially on the three violin sonatas from his last years of his life, highly-demanding scores which clearly reflect the composer’s difficult mental situation in the 1850s.

“I had always been under the impression that certain traits of these pieces had never been thoroughly explored, and this applies most of all to the third sonata which was virtually unknown for decades and was only recently published in a reliable critical edition. We wanted to contribute to the understanding of this music, revealing just how fantastic, crazy and modern these compositions are. Schumann has been one of my favourite composers for many years, everything I know out of his works grips and touches me. Dénes shares this passion, and he completely understands the mental attitude of these pieces”, says Widmann who has been a professor at the Leipzig Musikhochschule since fall 2006 thereby getting even closer to Schumann and the localities the latter’s artistic activities.

In retrospect, the violinist describes the recording session at Lugano Radio Auditorium – a venue which Manfred Eicher has as well chosen for several important jazz productions in recent years – as a very lucky constellation. “Once the hall, the piano and the mutual trust with your partners both in front and behind the microphones fit so well together you can really play in a way you wouldn’t have thought possible”, Widmann confesses, not so much alluding to technical perfection but rather to the courage to take risks in the rendition of the scores: “It was Dénes who always wanted to go still a step further, saying ‘we can surprise each other much more!’ And he was absolutely right: There is this enormous variety of characters in these sonatas, each tone has a different colour, each bar a new pulse. Maybe Schumann, as opposed to so many other composers, really is the one whose black dots on white paper represent the least that is actually to be said. No traditional triple meter can properly express the right kind of rhythmic inflection and that’s why, in our playing, I wanted to virtually make the bar-lines disappear, suggesting rather some kind of three-dimensional notation. In this respect, too, Dénes, with his incredible flexibility, has been an ideal duo partner to me. With many Schumann interpretations I miss this ‘edgy’ feeling and the constant quest of the meaning of every detail.”

Part of this questioning and digging is the work on very specific sound hues and timbres which should always be related most closely to the respective expressive qualities. “It’s terribly sad when we violinists reduce our spectrum to one or two colours, so I’m consciously looking for the sombre and rather grim shadings but also for some very bright, even piercing sonic qualities. I like to use open strings because this can be so painful: It hurts much more when this open E-string shrieks than when it’s appropriately muffled – the second finger on the A-string ... this really eschews all tragedy!”

The unusual sequence of the three sonatas on the record arouse from extensive experiments and ruminations between the two musicians and producer Manfred Eicher. “Even from today’s perspective I somehow understand why Clara Schumann held back the third sonata and some other of Robert’s late compositions for such a long time” says Widmann. “She must have feared that they would expose just too much of this mentally ill man whose – then quite unstable – reputation she had to protect. Me, too, I sense a certain emotional decay in the course of this cycle, that’s why we didn’t conclude the album with the chronologically last sonata. For a while we were even thinking about a reverse order, putting the first sonata last. But this way one would have sensed even more how Schumann was drawn down within the years between these pieces.” This is not to express as judgement over artistic or compositional qualities: After her thorough work on this ragged third sonata, Widmann doesn’t share the communis opinio of this piece as a deficient Schumann whose creativity is almost extinguished. “You really have to accept the conflict of antagonistic energies, this constant back and forth between a rather strained classicism and complete unleashed passion. It’s essential for late Schumann to be uncomfortable – which might account for the difficult reception of this repertoire. But if you take the challenge a completely new world opens up. In such a world there is always a way to solve the technical and instrumental problems of certain passages.”