Latest / The Piano Maven with Jed Distler / Schumann's Fantasy in C Major in 15 Recordings

Transcript

Schumann's Fantasy in C Major in 15 Recordings · The Piano Maven with Jed Distler

• 0:00
  This is Jed Distler and I welcome you to The Piano Maven, your friendly podcast guide to piano recordings.
• 0:17
  When my friend David Hurwitz posted a video on his YouTube channel about Robert Schumann and which work of Schumann,
• 0:26
  he would choose if he could only have one Schumann work.
• 0:31
  David picked that composer's fantasy in C major, Op. 17.
• 0:37
  In many ways, I could see why the fantasy was Dave's number one choice.
• 0:43
  For starters, Schumann's strongest and most original large-scaled compositions were those that he wrote for solo piano.
• 0:52
  At least that's how I feel. That's my opinion about that.
• 0:56
  And in many of his best large-scale solo piano works, Schumann did not feel encumbered by traditional sonata forms or precepts.
• 1:08
  David calls the fantasy a fascinating self-evolved structure that not only typifies Schumann at his best,
• 1:19
  but also encapsules romanticism's quintessential characteristics.
• 1:25
  David goes on to say that if romanticism means anything, it's the triumph of irrationality.
• 1:33
  It's the freedom to dream and it's the ability to seem as though you are improvising, although you are creating a satisfying structure.
• 1:42
  So given the work's title, C Major Fantasy, it's kind of ironic that Schumann first conceived of this composition as an actual three-movement sonata form.
• 1:57
  The work was first intended as a contribution toward the construction of a Beethoven statue in Bonn, Germany.
• 2:07
  And this was a project spearheaded by Schumann's friend and colleague, Franz Liszt.
• 2:12
  Schumann sketched this composition in detail in 1836, and then he proposed it to his publisher in the form of a three-movement composition entitled Ruins, Trophies, Palms.
• 2:30
  That's P-A-L-M-S, Grand Sonata for Piano for Beethoven's Memorial.
• 2:37
  That's kind of a mouthful of a title, isn't it?
• 2:41
  Anyway, by 1839, the piece reached its final form and it was eventually published under the title Fantasy in C Major.
• 2:55
  And that's what we know today.
• 2:57
  And it has a dedication to Liszt.
• 3:00
  However, Beethoven's spirit looms quite large in Schumann's musical background.
• 3:07
  In the Fantasy's tumultuous first movement, for example, Schumann makes allusions to the final song from Beethoven's song cycle,
• 3:18
  Andiferne Geliebte, Opus 98, and Schumann states the Beethoven theme in the first movement coda of the Fantasy.
• 3:29
  However, I also hear Beethoven's influence in the first movement's big cresting waves of left-hand figurations and also in those explosive alternating chords between the hands.
• 3:45
  These gestures remind me a lot of what Beethoven does in his Appassionata Sonata.
• 3:52
  Also, the central movement's obsessive march rhythms and contrapuntal complexities and the notorious skips in the coda
• 4:02
  also remind me of Beethoven specifically in the scherzo of his Piano Sonata in A Major, Opus 101, the Sonata No. 28.
• 4:14
  But on the other hand, the lyrical finale's themes, at least to my mind, evoke the kind of cross-rhythmic writing that you find decades later in the music of Brahms.
• 4:30
  And I also should tell you that in Schumann's original manuscript, on the final page of the Fantasy, the actual Beethoven quotation that we heard in the first movement is recapitulated here in a radically different, in a radically reharmonized manifestation.
• 4:53
  I think the first pianist who recorded the third movement in its original version was Charles Rosen.
• 5:01
  And I remember hearing Emmanuel Axe play that original version when he played the C Major Fantasy at Carnegie Hall some years ago.
• 5:11
  However, the 15 recordings that I will be recommending in this talk all use the revised ending of the third movement that most people play.
• 5:24
  Now, before I discuss these recordings, I know that you are going to have favorite recordings of the C Major Fantasy that I will not be mentioning.
• 5:36
  And I know that you'll be sending me feedback saying, hey, Jed, how come you didn't choose this pianist or that pianist?
• 5:43
  How can you be so ignorant?
• 5:45
  Don't you know that pianist X or pianist Y made the greatest recording of the C Major Fantasy ever?
• 5:53
  But listen, because I've picked 15 doesn't mean that the 743 other recorded versions that I did not mention are not worth your time.
• 6:05
  Look, the recordings I'm going to talk about are recordings of the C Major Fantasy that I enjoy and I frequently turn to.
• 6:14
  And I think that these 15 represent a good starting point for you to get into the Schumann Fantasy.
• 6:22
  Many collectors think that Wilhelm Bachhaus was the one who made the first commercial recording of the fantasy.
• 6:30
  I'm talking about his 1937 HMV recording on 78s.
• 6:35
  Actually, his recording was the second version made.
• 6:39
  The first was by pianist Walter Rehberg.
• 6:42
  But it was the Bachhaus recording that dominated throughout the 78 RPM era.
• 6:48
  And probably because there really was hardly any competition at all.
• 6:53
  The American music critic B.H. Hagin basically trashed the Bachhaus recording and called it shapeless.
• 7:02
  And I totally disagree with what he says.
• 7:05
  I think this is a very coherent and cogent interpretation.
• 7:09
  It's not the most impassioned or foaming at the mouth, mind you.
• 7:14
  But I like the swift tempos and the sweeping authority and the directness that Bachhaus consistently conveys.
• 7:22
  To say nothing of his really ironclad and solid, yet flexible technique.
• 7:29
  Rudolf Verkushny recorded the C Major Fantasy in 1949 for Columbia Masterworks.
• 7:37
  It's recently been reissued in the Sony BMG Complete Verkushny Columbia and RCA Recordings box set that I wrote the booklet notes to.
• 7:49
  I still feel that this recording of Verkushny was one of the best C Major Fantasy recordings of the mono LP era.
• 7:59
  He is not so forceful nor heroic a player as Wilhelm Bachhaus.
• 8:06
  But the inherent classicism and the sense of proportion that typifies Verkushny's pianism and music making,
• 8:15
  I think yields more rewards with each hearing.
• 8:19
  And this recording has really grown on me over the years.
• 8:23
  Now, some listeners might insist that Wilhelm Kempf's mono recording of the fantasy on Deutche Gramophone is superior to his stereo remake on the label.
• 8:36
  Now, pianistically speaking, that might be so, but musically speaking, I prefer the stereo version because I hear more of an improvisational arc
• 8:49
  and a feeling of declamatory power throughout all three of the stereo versions' movements.
• 8:57
  And as so often the case as it is with Kempf, you always hear where the inner lines and bass lines are moving in relation to the top melodic lines.
• 9:10
  It's a very horizontal performance and it really holds your attention.
• 9:17
  If you want intelligent musicianship along with largeness of scale and unambiguous technical finish and technical freedom,
• 9:28
  I would recommend Claudio Arau's studio recording that was first issued on the Phillips label,
• 9:35
  except for the fact that there is a live performance with Arau from September 9th, 1959 that was issued on the Hermitage label.
• 9:47
  It was also on the Italian Aura label. You can probably find it on other labels.
• 9:53
  I'm not really sure, but it's not all that difficult to source.
• 9:57
  And this live performance has all the qualities I talked about before with Arau, but with ten times the passion and ten times the sense of risk.
• 10:09
  And you can hear how those treacherous leaps in the second movement coda should sound inevitable.
• 10:17
  And they certainly do here. They don't sound just tacked on as a virtuosic afterthought.
• 10:23
  And besides, Arau often caught fire in the presence of an audience and he just really let loose.
• 10:30
  And he certainly does in this performance.
• 10:33
  So if you want to hear Claudio Arau in the Schumann fantasy, I would check out this live 1959 performance first,
• 10:42
  although the studio recording is still pretty wonderful.
• 10:45
  I also recommend Vladimir Ashkenazi's really strong and confident and full bodied studio recording of the fantasy from the 1960s.
• 10:56
  I think it's better than his 1980s digital remake.
• 11:00
  I like the directness and I like the attention to hidden inner voices in the left hand throughout the first movement.
• 11:08
  In a way, Ashkenazi's 1960s C major fantasy reminds me of the one that Geza Anda made for Deutsche Grammophon around that same time.
• 11:19
  But I think Ashkenazi has more vitamins. I think he has more dynamism.
• 11:24
  And I was really happy to rehear this when I reviewed Deka's humongous box set containing all of Ashkenazi's solo recordings for that label.
• 11:35
  I reviewed that set a few years ago for Grammophon and my God, that was really quite a project.
• 11:42
  I was very impressed with Murray Pariah's Schumann fantasy when it first came out.
• 11:49
  I think it was the late 1980s and it was coupled, if I remember, with Schubert's Wonder Fantasy.
• 11:57
  This recording has really held up marvelously over time.
• 12:01
  Superficially speaking, I might describe it as a fusion of, oh, let's say, Firkushni's intimacy arouse large scale drama and Kempf's linear awareness.
• 12:16
  And I think that Pariah achieves a gratifying synthesis of these three qualities that all add up to an interpretation that I would simplistically label as
• 12:29
  romanticism with brains and classicism with heart.
• 12:34
  But do check it out. I really, really like the Pariah recording.
• 12:38
  We do need to talk about Vladimir Horowitz and the Schumann fantasy.
• 12:43
  As many piano mavens know, Horowitz played the fantasy at his famous May 9th, 1965 historic return concert to Carnegie Hall,
• 12:56
  which was his first live concert appearance in 12 years.
• 13:01
  When my late friend Harris Goldsmith reviewed this performance when it was first released on LP,
• 13:09
  he called it, I think, elaborately disjunctive. Or did he call it disjunctively elaborate?
• 13:17
  I have to check out the original review.
• 13:20
  I can understand that point of view because it is true that Horowitz frequently toys with the pulse and pulls out inner voices,
• 13:31
  or he highlights melodies in an arguably artificial way, or he turns Schumann's dynamics upside down.
• 13:41
  What's interesting is that these gestures all sound as if Horowitz is pulling them out of his magic hat on the spur of the moment.
• 13:49
  But I think there's more pre-planning here than you might suspect.
• 13:54
  And I can tell you that because a few years ago, Sony BMG published hours and hours of Horowitz recordings
• 14:04
  where he was rehearsing for these concerts on the Carnegie Hall stage. They were all professionally recorded.
• 14:11
  And when you hear Horowitz go through the fantasy on various rehearsal days,
• 14:18
  many of these seemingly spontaneous gestures already are part of the fabric of his interpretation.
• 14:27
  Now, of course, they're not exactly the same each time.
• 14:31
  But I kind of maybe think of how the conductor Willem Mengelberg's distinctions of phrase and Beethoven and Brahms symphonies
• 14:41
  always sounded as if they were conjured up on the spur of the moment, yet obviously they had been rehearsed to the nines.
• 14:49
  Otherwise, how could the concert about orchestra had executed them so well for Mengelberg?
• 14:57
  But the bottom line is that no one quite plays this C major fantasy like Horowitz.
• 15:05
  And if he loses your attention at any given moment in his performance, you simply are not listening.
• 15:12
  And just one little aside, there was a lot of talk about how in the concert,
• 15:18
  Horowitz had a tiny little snag in the skips during the second movement coda when perspiration got into his eyes
• 15:27
  and he couldn't see the keyboard for just a split second.
• 15:31
  And you also have heard about how when the recording was being prepared for release,
• 15:37
  that the producer inserted a cleaner take of the skips from an earlier rehearsal take.
• 15:44
  And critics did beat up on Horowitz back in the day saying that he was tampering with history
• 15:51
  and that if this is a real bonafide live recording, how can you justify any editing?
• 15:57
  I think all the edits in the recording were justified and basically they're small cosmetic fixes.
• 16:05
  And in 2003 when Sony issued this historic return concert without edits,
• 16:13
  the little mistakes were just that, just little tiny blemishes.
• 16:18
  There were no out-and-out disasters.
• 16:21
  So had the concert originally been released without editing, would Horowitz's reputation have been tarnished?
• 16:29
  I don't think so.
• 16:31
  But was he justified in wanting to repair a few little glitches with edits?
• 16:36
  I think so. Why not?
• 16:38
  And besides, he did leave in certain wrong notes, you know,
• 16:42
  the very exposed wrong note at the beginning of the Bach, Busoni, Toccata, Andagio and Fugue.
• 16:49
  You know, that's a very famous wrong note, probably the most famous wrong note in all classical recordings.
• 16:55
  And he left that in there, but then he edited other things.
• 16:59
  Anyway, let's get back to talking about Schumann fantasy recordings.
• 17:05
  I have often discussed both the Maurizio Polini and Yevgeny Kisen studio recordings of the fantasy
• 17:14
  in the same paragraph, describing them as either the Alpha and Omega or the Ying and the Yang of Schumann fantasies.
• 17:23
  These recordings are total opposite ends of one another.
• 17:28
  Polini is big on architecture and symphonic unity, whereas Kisen operates from the hip pocket, so to speak.
• 17:37
  And these two pianists clearly aim for different things.
• 17:41
  But what they do share is unflappable technique and a real clear vision about what they want to project in the music.
• 17:52
  And also they both have this ability to bypass the piano and any mechanical issues or any technical issues.
• 18:02
  And just going directly into the music.
• 18:05
  Leif Ove Ansness channels both Polini's ironclad mastery and Pariah's intelligent warmth.
• 18:14
  And I also would say the same thing about Andreas Hefliger.
• 18:18
  And I return to both the Ansness and Hefliger C major fantasy recordings with unalloyed pleasure.
• 18:26
  I like these very much.
• 18:28
  Also, I can't forget a recent recording with Fabrizio Chovetta.
• 18:35
  His C major fantasy is elegantly nuanced and impeccably paced.
• 18:40
  It's absolutely first class.
• 18:43
  Also, I should talk about Arnaldo Cohen.
• 18:46
  He made an excellent recording for Vox.
• 18:49
  It's a little more subjective in scope, but it's quite an engaging C major fantasy that is definitely worth hearing.
• 18:57
  Now, there's an interesting and long out of print recording on the Tellark label that features pianist Nina Lelchuk.
• 19:07
  I don't know if you can find this recording anymore.
• 19:10
  It's kind of hard to source, but I'm mentioning it because I think it's well worth hearing because it's very subjective in many respects.
• 19:19
  With lots of modification of pulse and stopping at various street corners to smell the roses or pick the daisies, so to speak.
• 19:30
  Some of my critic colleagues felt this recording to be overly discursive and meandering.
• 19:37
  Somehow, I think it all kind of holds together in a way that I think is better experienced than described.
• 19:46
  However, the expansiveness and subjectivity that Sergio Fiorentino brought to his studio recording from October 1996,
• 19:59
  originally issued on the APR label, is rooted in an overall seriousness of purpose and a true sense of gravitas.
• 20:11
  The music never stops soaring and moving forward, even in the most quiet meditative moments.
• 20:20
  And the sheer beauty of Fiorentino's tone and his contrapuntal awareness convey spontaneity and grunder in a sense of direction at all times.
• 20:33
  Sometimes he reinforces climaxes with added left-hand octaves or he fills out chords, but I couldn't care less about that.
• 20:44
  You really get a sense in his performance that he has really pondered over and absorbed each and every detail.
• 20:53
  And that he now has the luxury and maturity just to transcend all of the study and thought and interpretive options and just to let go and just to make music.
• 21:11
  It's kind of like when the Grateful Dead's late, extraordinary bass player Phil Lesh said at the funeral of his bandmate, guitarist Jerry Garcia,
• 21:26
  he said, Jerry has stopped becoming and now he is being.
• 21:31
  And I think that Sergio Fiorentino's Schumann's C major fantasy really represents a state of being, a sense of being in the present,
• 21:42
  a sense of the composition unfolding on the spot in real time as if Schumann was writing it and then the music was just coming out of the piano.
• 21:53
  There are a number of live Sergio Fiorentino performances of the C major fantasy from around this period of time and basically they present a similar interpretation with different details, of course.
• 22:06
  But it is this 1996 October studio recording that is my top recommendation.
• 22:15
  This is Jed Disler and you've been listening to the Piano Maven, your friendly podcast guide to piano recordings.
• 22:24
  Thank you for being with me and I look forward to being with you for our next podcast episode.