Bench warmer

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Who: Frank Glazer
What: Music of a Bygone Era, Bridge Records

Back before the advent of recorded sound, when a home music system was the piano in the parlor, the odds were good that said piano would be accompanied by one or more bound volumes of short pieces intended for amateur performance. They might contain anything from bagatelles by Beethoven or humoresques by Dvorak to occasional pieces by lesser composers to arrangements of popular songs.

Classified as "salon music," these pieces were heard often in both parlors and concert halls in the early years of the last century and were popular with piano teachers when I was taking lessons back in the 1960s. I recall struggling (without much success, to be honest) through works like the Paderewski "Minuet" and trying to imagine what a real performance would sound like. Back then recordings of this repertoire were few and far between.

Bridge Records has released a delightful album of some gems from those old books. Recorded by legendary pianist (and pupil of the great Artur Schnabel) Frank Glazer back in 2005, "Music of a Bygone Era" is a thoroughly entertaining trip down memory lane and a reminder of why this music was so popular. These are pieces that are easy on the ear, filled with appealing melodies, virtuoso flourishes, and just enough musical imagination to keep things interesting.

Frank Glazer
Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

The runs and grace notes of Grieg's "Papillon," for example, nicely capture a butterfly in flight while Christian Sinding's "Rustle of Spring" evokes the eruption of new life at the turn of the season. Liadov's "Musical Snuff-Box" remains a charming imitation of a tinkling music box. And Stephen Heller's "The Trout" provides a collection of interesting embellishments on the theme of Schubert's "Die Forelle."

Listening to the grace and facility of these performances, it would be easy to forget that Mr. Glazer (born in February 1915) was 90 when he made this recording. In his liner notes, Mr. Glazer relates that while he (and many other piano students) played these pieces in the early years of the 20th century, when he arrived in Berlin to study with the great Artur Schnabel "I soon became aware that he would not be listening to this genre of repertoire, so it lay dormant, unused until may years later, when I decided to revive some of this music in a performance of 'A Sentimental Musical Journey' for a Brown-Bag Lunch concert at the Saco River Festival in Cornish, Maine. The program was so appreciated by the audience, reacting as many did with smiles and tears, that in the following two years we reminisced with additional such programs."

I smiled quite a bit myself at hearing these old chestnuts played with such conviction. I expect you will as well.

Memory lane

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Who: Rosa Antonelli
What: Remembranza: Remembrance of Latin Sounds

Have you ever been touched by a piece of music or a performance in a way that you can’t quite adequately express in words?  It has happened to me more than once.  Most recently it happened while listening to Rosa Antonelli’s wonderfully atmospheric world premiere performance of the piano version of Astor Piazzolla’s “El Mundo De Los Dos” (“Our World”) on her new CD “Remembranza: Remembrance of Latin Sounds” on the Albany label.  There’s a sense of nostalgia, melancholy, longing, and a few other difficult to define things both here and elsewhere in this very engaging disc.

“Some critic,” wrote Winthrop Parker in The Musical Quarterly in 1930, “once observed that talking about music is like singing about economics; and it must be admitted that most conversation about music supports the apothegm, for it is commonly as strange a perversion of the subject as would be the transformation of Das Kapital into a lullaby.”  Still, we critics do our best, even when we’re dealing with something as difficult to pin down as Ms. Antonelli’s remarkable readings of Latin piano music both familiar and obscure.

Rosa Antonelli

The well-known works here include the ‘Quejas ó La Maja y El Ruiseñor” (from “Goyescas”) and "Allegro de Concierto" (Op. 46) of Granados and Nazareth’s “Odeon-Tango Brasilero” (a favorite of mine, as it happens).  They (and other pieces on the album) given loving interpretations which, considered individually, might come across as overly sentimental and filled with rubato.  As part of the (to my ears) meticulously programmed recital on this disc, though, they make perfect sense.  There are times—in the opening bars of Albéniz’s “Granada,” for example—when you can almost feel the warm, perfumed languor of a Spanish night.

This is, in short, heady stuff.

Ms. Antonelli has been much praised for her performances of Spanish and Latin American music.  After listening to “Remembranza” (which I have done several times) I can see why.  It’s a lovely piece of work and highly recommended.  For more information: www.albanyrecords.com

Track list:
Piazzola: La Ultima Grela
Piazzola: El Mundo De Los Dos
Piazzola: Adios Nonino
Piazzola: Imperial
Villa-Lobos: Poema Singelo
Villa-Lobos: Valsa Da Dor (Valse De La Douleur)
Nazareth: Odeon-Tango Brasilero
Granados: Quejas, A La Maja Y El Ruiseñor (From Goyescas)
Granados: Allegro De Concerto In C, Op. 46
Albéniz: From Suite Española: Granada (Serenata)
Albéniz: From Suite Española: Cádiz
Albéniz: From Suite Española: L'Automne Waltz