A pioneer during the emergence of electronic and electro-acoustic music, Luciano Berio drew inspiration from a well fed by sources as diverse as 12-tone music, Italian opera, and semiotics. Although a hand injury sustained at the tail end of World War II put paid to his goal of becoming a concert pianist, he continued to mine the instrument’s expressive resources in works whose idiosyncratic harmonies, timbres, and gestures are often infused with a keen sense of drama.
Dedicated to the American piano duo of Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold, “Wasserklavier” (“Water Piano”) is one of four brief “encore” pieces inspired by the classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water. (The other two pieces in the collection also have nature themes.) The score—which Berio marks “tenderly and far away”—features soft, Debussyan halos of sound, like ripples in water. Like a stream, the music seems to be suspended in time, with neither beginning nor end.
Unlike the great composer-pianists of the 19th century—like Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt—Schubert was by all accounts a less-than-stellar keyboard player. There seems no reason to question the judgment of the contemporary composer (and virtuoso pianist) Ferdinand Hiller that he “had but little technique.” On the other hand, Schubert’s brother Ferdinand testified that “although Schubert never represented himself as a virtuoso, any connoisseur who had the chance of hearing him in private circles will nevertheless attest that he knew how to treat the instrument with mastery and in a quite peculiar manner, so that a great specialist in music, to whom he once played his last sonatas, exclaimed: ‘Schubert, I almost admire your playing even more than your compositions!’” If Schubert’s impromptus, moments musicaux, ländler, and other short piano pieces distill the essence of his lyrical genius in its purest and most concentrated form, his mature piano sonatas, fantasies, and other works combine the intimacy of the salon with an almost symphonic breadth.
Schubert’s contribution to the four-hand piano literature was integral to his artistic vision. The lightweight songs, marches, and polonaises of the 1810s and early 1820s—a number of which were inspired by his pupils Marie and Caroline Esterházy, of the aristocratic Hungarian clan—prefigure the monumental variations, romances, and fugues he wrote at the end of his short life, culminating in the great F-Minor Fantasie. Completed in April 1828, the Fantasie is dedicated to Countess Caroline, for whom the composer nurtured an unrequited love. The music’s bittersweet beauty and emotional volatility arguably lend themselves to the autobiographical interpretation that Beethoven’s biographer Anton Schindler read into the score: “He who wishes to open the book of his own life will surely find a page there depicting a situation to which Schubert, in this Fantasie, has created the music. The sweetest and yet most melancholy feelings of bygone days, with all their struggles of passions and reason, will spring to the mind of the sensitive and thinking listener and pass before the mirror of his soul like beloved shadows.”
The Fantasie comprises four interconnected sections of sharply different characters. The first is built around a wistful F-minor melody characterized by an insistent dotted figure and stuttering grace notes. Seamlessly modulating upward a half-step, Schubert abruptly shifts gears in the F-sharp–minor Largo, with its melodramatic trills and jagged rhythms, before throwing us off-balance again with a fleet, triple-time scherzo that flickers between minor and major modes. The original theme returns at the beginning of the “finale,” only to give way to a brisk fugue based on another tune we’ve heard earlier.
A representative of American music’s so-called “maverick tradition,” John Cage refused to swim with the musical tide, be it the serialist orthodoxy of post–World War II modernism or the stylistic promiscuity of late–20th-century postmodernism. Eschewing any sense of thematic development and harmonic progression, his music is typically free-floating and nondirectional, reflecting his immersion in Zen Buddhism and his attraction to the aesthetic values of Asian cultures.
Conceived as dance music—it originally accompanied a short solo by Cage’s longtime collaborator, Merce Cunningham—Experiences No. 1 anticipates the language of latter-day minimalists in its lulling repetitions and undemonstrative, white-keys-only simplicity. The music’s delicate, finely nuanced sonorities, to be played “(without accent) quietly,” arise from Cage’s trademark interpenetration of sound and silence, consonance and dissonance, motion and stasis.
Arkansas-born Conlon Nancarrow was as radical in his politics as he was in music. After fighting in the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War alongside other members of the Communist Party, he spent the rest of his life in political exile in Mexico City. Inspired by Henry Cowell’s book New Musical Resources, a locus classicus of avant-garde ideas and techniques, he purchased a player piano and a roll-punching machine in 1947 and used them to compose several dozen fiendishly complex studies reflecting his belief that “time is the last frontier of music.”
Beneath its easygoing, easy-to-listen-to surface, Study No. 6 is one of the more formidably arcane pieces in Nancarrow’s collection. The music is organized according to the Medieval concept of isorhythm, a term applied to the simultaneous, but unsynchronized, appearance of recurring rhythmic and melodic patterns whose interactions are governed by precise mathematical ratios. The resulting sonic layer cake twists and turns unpredictably in a continuous process of shapeshifting.
Often pegged as a “post-minimalist” composer, John Adams has given a new and richly expressive twist to the repetitive harmonies, melodies, and rhythmic patterns of first-generation minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Best known for a series of operas on contemporary topics—including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic—he received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his choral-orchestral work On the Transmigration of Souls, a deeply felt response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Hallelujah Junction is a tiny truck stop on Route 49 on the Nevada-California border, not far from where I have a small mountain cabin. One can only speculate on its beginnings in the era of prospectors and Gold Rush speculators (although a recent visit revealed that cappuccino is now available there). Here we have a case of a great title looking for a piece. So now the piece finally exists: the “junction” being the interlocking style of two-piano writing which features short, highly rhythmicized motives bouncing back and forth between the two pianos in tightly phased sequences …
Hallelujah Junctionlasts approximately 15 minutes and is in four parts, linked one to the other. The first section begins with a short, exclamatory three-note figure which I think of as “-lelujah” (without the opening “Hal-”). This energized, bright gesture grows in length and breadth and eventually gives way to a long, multifaceted “groove” section. A second, more relaxed part is more reflective and is characterized by waves of triplet chord clusters ascending out of the lowest ranges of the keyboard and cresting at their peak like breakers on a beach.
A short transitional passage uses tightly interlocking phase patterns to move the music into a more active ambience and sets up the final part. In this finale, the “Hallelujah Chorus” kicks in at full tilt …
—John Adams
Now in his late 80s, Estonian-born composer Arvo Pärt has devoted his life to exploring the ramifications of the radically stripped-down musical language that grew out of his study of plainchant and early vocal polyphony. The bell-like tintinnabuli style that he developed in the 1970s is characterized by back-to-basics harmonies, textures, and meters, with independent melodic lines hovering around triads or sustained pedal tones. Pärt’s minimalist aesthetic is reflected in his belief that “it is enough when a single note is played beautifully.”
A tenderly Schubertian paean to New York City, Hymn to a Great City was first performed by Cheryl Selzer and Joel Sachs in an all-Pärt concert at Lincoln Center in 1984. (The composer had emigrated from communist Estonia four years earlier and eventually settled in West Berlin.) A steady peal of pinging G-sharps forms the backdrop for what is little more than a sequence of tonic and dominant triads rooted in C-sharp major. Pärt’s spare, hypnotically repetitive music illustrates his decades-long search for “the most intense concentration on the essence of things.”
Rachmaninoff’s prowess as a pianist has tended to eclipse his considerable compositional accomplishments. Yet as a 15-year-old wunderkind studying at the Moscow Conservatory, he was singled out for greatness by no less a judge than Tchaikovsky. Shortly after graduating in 1892, he composed the Prelude in C-sharp Minor for solo piano that became his signature piece on recitals. But this precocious success led to a prolonged period of debilitating lethargy and depression, during which Rachmaninoff found it almost impossible to compose. It was not until 1900, after he consulted a physician specializing in hypnosis, that his creative juices started flowing freely again. Reveling in the rediscovery of what he called “the joy of creating,” he produced a string of confidently outgoing works, including the Second Piano Concerto, the Cello Sonata, and
the 10 Piano Preludes, Op. 23. After emigrating from Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, Rachmaninoff concentrated on his lucrative career as a concert pianist, dividing his time between Europe and the US until the outbreak of World War II.
By the time he wrote his Symphonic Dances in 1940, Rachmaninoff’s dual career was winding down. Disheartened by critics’ cool reception of his recent works, he hadn’t composed anything new since the Third Symphony of 1935–1936. The impetus to break his self-imposed vow of silence seems to have been provided by choreographer Michel Fokine, who lived near him on Long Island. Fokine had created a successful ballet based on the composer’s scintillatingly popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in 1939. Although Fokine’s death in 1942 would scotch their plans for an encore, Rachmaninoff forged ahead with the “new symphonic piece” he had promised to Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra. The opulent orchestration that dazzled audiences at the 1941 premiere (including four horns, two harps, piano, and a battery of percussion) is prefigured in skeletal form in the composer’s two-piano version, which he reportedly performed with another Long Island neighbor—pianist Vladimir Horowitz—at a private party in Beverly Hills, California, the following year.
In the first of the three Symphonic Dances—somewhat cryptically marked “not allegro”—the second piano introduces Rachmaninoff’s compact theme, a swooping three-note motif whose jaunty swagger is reminiscent of Prokofiev’s ballets. Despite its comparatively monochromatic timbral palette, the music’s bracing kinetic energy survives intact in the two-piano version, though listeners familiar with the orchestral score will miss such untranslatable features as the brassy brilliance of the opening fanfares and the solo saxophone’s plangent arioso in the central slow section. On the other hand, the pianos’ brittle sound effectively highlights the nervous, throbbing pulse of the second-movement waltz, in which swirling chromatic passagework offsets the insistent lilt of the underlying 6/8 meter. The short, sharp shocks that herald the beginning of the propulsive finale unmistakably mark it as a dance of death, a reference that Rachmaninoff later makes explicit by quoting the famous “Dies irae” plainchant from the Orthodox Requiem Mass. Both here and in the first dance, he incorporates music written many years earlier, as if recognizing that the Symphonic Dances would be his swan song.
—Harry Haskell