St. Louis classical calendar for the week of January 5, 2015

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Second Presbyterian Church presents a piano recital by Peter Henderson of the St. Louis Symphony on Sunday, January 11, at 4 p.m. "Join us for an exciting program of Russian piano music. This recital will feature Alexander Scriabin’s dynamic Fifth Sonata, Igor Stravinsky’s neo-classical Sonata, and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s dramatic, epic First Sonata. Dr. Henderson is an ensemble keyboardist with the Saint Louis Symphony, a faculty member at Maryville University, and a respected teacher and performer in the Midwest.” The church is at 4501 Westminster Place in the Central West End. For more information: secondchurch.net.

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.

"And I shall call him...Mini-Mozart"

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Who: Pianist Ann-Marie McDermott and the Calder Quartet with bassist David J. Grossman
What: Mozart: Piano Concertos K. 414, 415, 449

Mozart piano concertos performed with a string quartet? Sounds crazy, no? And yet that's exactly what versatile pianist Anne-Marie McDermott brings us in this new Bridge disc of Mozart's piano concertos K. 414, 415, and 449. She's accompanied not by the usual full orchestra, but by the Calder String Quartet, with bassist David J. Grossman for the K. 449. And you know what? It works awfully darned well.

In fact, historical evidence seems to indicate that at least the first two concerti in this set were intended to be performed “a quattro” (with a string quartet) as well as with a full orchestra and optional winds. That’s probably true of the K. 449 concerto as well which, even though it was completed a year later, may very well have been started around the same time as the first two in 1782.
The logic behind this might have been economic to some extent. In Mozart’s time public concerts were not the common events they are today. Most music lovers learned about the latest works by playing them. And while only the wealthy could afford to assemble an orchestra, the expanding ranks of the bourgeoisie could easily manage to get together in their homes to play the latest music. If you were an amateur pianist, your circle of friends might not include a chamber orchestra, but it might easily include a string quartet.

Hearing these early concertos in such intimate arrangements certainly has its advantages. The musical structure is thrown in to high relief and the dramatic and even operatic quality of much of the writing is more evident. That’s especially true when the performances are as elegant, graceful, and sympathetic as the ones we get here from Ms. McDermott and the Calder Quartet (with the addition of Mr. Grossman for the K. 449).

As an Artist Member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Ms. McDermott might be expected to handle this material well, and so she does. This is wonderfully nuanced and supple playing which is, nevertheless, not lacking in drama when that’s called for (as it is in K. 449).

That’s equally true for the string players—both the quartet and Mr. Grossman. They seem to be the perfect performing partners for these concertos. After a while, I began to feel that a full orchestra might not, after all, be all that necessary for this music.

That said, I’m not sure a modern piano is the ideal instrument for concerti a quattro. Ms. McDermott and the string players are nicely balanced, but even so the piano sound feels a bit too robust. Mozart was likely writing for a five-octave fortepiano, which would have had a far more delicate sound and would, I think, blend better with the quartet.

Still, it’s a welcome release and highly recommended. Bridge seems to specialize in the unusual and rarely heard. You can find out more about their catalog at www.bridgerecords.com.

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

On the other hand

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The history of pianist Leon Fleisher’s career is one of the great comeback stories in American life.

His genius was apparent as early as age 9, when he became the youngest pupil ever to be taught by the great Artur Schnabel. By age 16 he was appearing with the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Monteux. When he signed a deal with Columbia/Epic in 1954 to record every major piano and orchestra work from the standard repertoire with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, it was a bit of musical history in the making—and he was only in him mid-20s. The recordings he made for the label between 1954 and 1963 are still considered classics.

Then, at the height of Fleisher’s career, disaster struck in the form of focal dystonia of the right hand in 1965. Undaunted, he continued to record and perform, concentrating on works for the left hand alone. There’s more of that than you might think thanks, in part, to the many works written for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein (older brother of famed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein), who lost his right hand in World War I.

Photo: Joanne Savio

By the early years of the 21st century, though, Fleisher began to recover the use of his right hand as a result of botox injections and the system of soft tissue manipulation known as Rolfing. In 2004 he made his first two-handed recording in forty years and continues to concertize today. In a review for 88.1 KDHX of his performance of Ravel’s “Concerto for the Left Hand” with the St. Louis Symphony last April, I described his playing as “both powerful and elegant.” “Mr. Fleisher may walk like an octogenarian,” I wrote, “but he doesn’t play like one.”

In recognition of Fleisher’s fifty-five year career, Sony Classical (which now owns the Columbia/Epic library) is issuing a 23-CD set titled “Leon Fleisher: The Complete Album.” It’s scheduled for release on July 16th, in anticipation of Fleisher’s 85th birthday on the 23rd. Fleisher himself will observe his birthday year with a concert tour that will include a performance with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival on July 28th.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously claimed that there were “no second acts in American life.” Leon Fleisher is one of the more famous examples of how wrong that assessment can be.

TPTBT (The Place to Be Tonight): Wednesday, February 27

Peter Henderson

What: Pianopalooza
Where: The Sheldon Concert Hall
When: 8:00 PM
Why: This celebration of 100 years of classical music features St. Louis Symphony pianist Peter Henderson along with Daniel Schene, Alla Voskoboynikova and Martin Kennedy.  The evening includes "music both old and new - each performing works ranging from early-20th century composers to contemporary classical."  This is a rare chance to see four top-notch local pianists at work in the superb acoustics of the Sheldon.  For more information: sheldonconcerthall.org.

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