Concert Review: Soaring Through Lost Altitudes

Leif Ove Andsnes at Carnegie Hall.

Leif Ove Andsnes. Photo © EMI Classics

by Paul Pelkonen

This current season at Carnegie Hall celebrates the Hall's legacy of music making, 120 years presenting concerts at the corner of W. 57th and Seventh Avenue. On Wednesday night, Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes solidified his part in that legacy with an engaging program that spanned familiar composers of literature for his instrument.

The first half of this concert spanned three centuries of keyboard literature, from the classical experimentation of Haydn to the early 20th century works of Bartók and Debussy. Mr. Andsnes chose Haydn's C minor Sonata to start the evening.

Although he is one of the first important composers to write for the piano. Haydn's vast output is often ignored by soloists focused on the  heroics of Beethoven. Here, the soloist showed that the classicism of the 18th century could also express raw emotion. 

It was followed with Bartók's Op. 14 Suite. This is an early example of this composer, with the rhythms of the Hungarian countryside underpinning tonal experimentation and fearless playing from the soloist. The aural palette then shifted to bright, new colors for Debussy's Images, played in a shimmering kaleidoscope of sound.

The ways in which Chopin's piano writing can be interpreted are as diverse as the myriad forms which he invented for the instrument. And at first glance, a long Chopin recital, as offered in the second half of this concert, looks as if the various Waltzes and Ballades were chosen arbitrarily. 

But listening to Mr. Andsnes' cool, cerebral performance, an overall sense of structure emerged. The four Waltzes were played with a steady, pumping left hand and a delicate filigree in the right. Each work solves the problems of the dance rhythm through a different key and musical idea. Mr. Andsnes made each of these works flow naturally into the next.

That sense of structure continued into the second group of works: two Ballades flanking the late Nocturne in B. The Ballade form is a vehicle for heroic expression. Mr. Andsnes drove this work forward in a propulsive, yet engaging style. The more reflective Nocturne formed a slow central movement, the heart of a vast, pastiche sonata.

The concert ended with three encores. It started with a return to Chopin's waltzes, played with the same lyric grace and flow of musical expression as before. Mr. Andsnes then turned south for one of the Spanish Dances by Enrique Granados, which sounded a little like Liszt taking a holiday on the Costa Brava. He concluded with one of his strengths, an Etude-tableaux by Sergei Rachmaninoff. As the notes of this fellow virtuoso sounded in the arched confines of the Hall, one had a sense of this young Nordic artist taking his place among the great artists who call this vast, blonde-wood stage home.

Listen to a live-stream of the recital on WQXR.Org.

Contact the author: E-mail Superconductor editor Paul Pelkonen.

Concert Review: The Rites of Winter

Stravinsky Outside Russia at Carnegie Hall.

Conductor Leon Botstein. Photo © Bard College.

On Friday night, conductor and musical archaeologist Leon Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra and the Collegiate Choral in a program exploring the music written by Igor Stravinsky in exile from his Russian homeland. The program was  part of the ASO's annual subscription season at Carnegie Hall.

Dr. Botstein assembled a slew of unfamiliar Stravinsky, opening up the composer's repertory beyond the composer's most frequently heard works: The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. Instead, there was a wide-ranging survey of songs, liturgical music, choral pieces, and even a short opera. Like Stravinsky's catalogue, this concert was bewildering in its its diversity.

The concert opened with a recent discovery: Stravinsky's orchestration of the Song of the Volga Boatmen. According to the program notes, Stravinsky may have written this orchestration for  legendary Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin. It was sung by Keith Miller, the former NFL fullback turned bass-baritone. Mr. Miller sang the steady aquatic rhythms with steady, powerful tone.

Mr. Botstein then brought in the Collegiate Chorale for The King of the Stars, a choral work that finds the composer exploring the cosmos in with rich choral writing underpinned by the orchestra. Mr. Miller returned, joined by mezzo Ann McMahon Quintero for the Requiem Canticles, a funereal piece that the composer had performed at his own last rites.

The wrath of God yielded to comedy with a charming performance of Mavra, the composer's  last opera. This is Stravinsky at his most playful: The Rake's Progress freed from W. H. Auden's pesky moralizing. The score features a poke at Mahler--a funeral dirge as the Mother (Ms. Quintero) mourns her old cook. It opens with a tasty love duet for soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird and tenor Nicholas Phan, that would not be out of place in Smetana's Bartered Bride. 

Based on a short Pushkin farce, Mavra is about a suitor who resorts to cross-dressing to get a job as a cook in his girlfriend's mother's house. The singers made good impromptu use of the concert setting, with Ms. Bird's shoulder wrap becoming "Mavra's" headscarf. A shave kit was brought out for the climactic scene, and Mr. Phan made good his escape by running across the stage and hiding behind the organ.

The haunting, antiphonal Canticum Sacrum opened the second half. Mr. Phan and baritone Jonathan Beyer sang long melodic lines, originally written to sound across the vast Basilica of San Marco in Venice. Here, the singers engaged in call-and response with the chorus, organ and sparse orchestra, bringing an air of religiosity to the friendly confines of Carnegie Hall. That pious vein continued with Babel : a short retelling of the Old Testament linguistic crisis featuring the chorus and narrator John Douglas Thompson. 

The concert ended with the more familiar Symphony of Psalms a work that is exceptionally challenig for the chorus. The Collegiate Chorale responded ably, handling Stravinsky's tricky cross-rhythms and harmonics. With the odd melody and rhythmic quotations drawn from the score of the Rite of Spring, this symphony sounds as if the prehistoric Russian pagans of that famous ballet finally went and got religion.