SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Schubert, Quintet in C 956 with two cellos
Mendelssohn, Octet Op20.
Gabriele Pieranunzi, Santi Interdonato, Daniela Cammarano, Elena La Montagna (violins), Francesco Fiore, Daniel Palmizio (violas) Luca Signorini, Gabriele Geminiani (cellos) Restored Antique Infirmary, Fossanova Abbey 05.07.2009

Handel, Suite no 2 in F,
Bach, English Suite no 6 in D minor BWV811
Mendelssohn, Prelude and Fugue in E minor Op35 no1, Variations Sérieuses in D minor Op 54
Haydn, Sonata in E flat Hob 52.
Angela Hewitt (piano) Courtyard of the Caetani Castle, Sermoneta 11.07.2009

Mendelssohn, Sonata for cello and piano in D Op 58 and early sonata for violin and piano, Trio in D minor Op 49
Mendelssohn / Merk Variazioni Brillanti for cello and piano. Sonig Tchakerian (violin), Steven Isserlis (cello) and Roberto Prosseda (piano). Restored Antique Infirmary, Fossanova Abbey 12.07.2009


When I was growing up in north-east Lancashire in the 1940s there were two distinct uses for Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words (SWW): Mrs Sergeant would hand out these volumes to her pupils for sight-reading practice while Mr Casson of Accrington Market Hall ripped them up to use as wrapping paper for Bless This House and other sheet music he could sell. My childhood mind would slot the sight-reading into one of three categories: (1) Too damned difficult, so best move on to try the next. (This must have been before the indefatigable Miss Banks of York published simplified arrangements in Banks’s sixpenny editions – collectors’ items, by the way now, should you find any in your grandma’s piano stool.) (2) Charming and with a few repetitions, even musically interesting. (Recalling this makes me realize what a monstrously patronizing brat I must have been.) (3) Dull, and in extremis, frightening, like one of those machines which once you’ve started, won’t stop.

Fast forward now to the 2009 bicentenary of Mendelssohn’s birth and some 2000 miles south of darkest Lancashire into the Mediterranean sun-baked garden of Eden of Ninfa. Frolicking there, back to the camera, hands rhapsodically, loosely held behind his head, is a blithe young man, whose very spirit seems to reflect the energy of the garden. That back to the camera is important. The Decca photographer has captured in a click, the essence of an amazingly dedicated pianist whose playing is so perfectly focused on the music as to be self-effacing. Roberto Prosseda has spent years in the Mendelssohn archives, excavating songs without words, the likes of which, Mrs Sergeant and Mr Casson never saw and he brings to these pieces (the complete SWW on a Decca double CD) world premieres with an enviable pianism that blows the dust off these jewels; but the dusting is so delicately handled that it is always the jewel and not the dusting which emerges.

In a life of only thirty-eight years, Felix Mendelssohn seems to have had something like a genius for friendship. Maestro Prosseda ensures that he is still collecting friends now. In his lifetime, Queen Victoria was among them. The Queen, of course, had German blood herself, married a German and produced so many children that no schoolboy has been able to name them all at first count. Such was the spirit of the age.

Moreover, Mendelssohn was a composer’s composer, in possession of an enviable technique and facility, equalled only by Bach or Rossini. Though technically eminent, all three couldn’t be stylistically more different. Befitting someone with so brief a life, Felix Mendelssohn was producing masterpieces early. If you don’t believe me, just listen to the technical aplomb of the fugue in the finale of the Octet. He was sixteen when he wrote it. And I haven’t yet mentioned the maturity of the inventive lyricism which accompanies this technical feat. The little lad said he wanted the eight strings (double string quartet) to sound like an orchestra.

And so they did at the Fossanova Abbey on 5 July. At least three of the players belong to the upcoming generation, but chamber music depends for the quality of its delivery on the affection and respect of the players for one another. I have never heard such a perfectly nuanced group of virtuoso strings, magically integrated and playing as one, with no seeming sacrifice to individuality. I would also be amiss if I didn’t single out for praise Gabriele Pieranunzi’s warm tones in the first movement, which the composer seems to have conceived as a violin concerto.

Poor Schubert, who had an even shorter life than Mendelssohn, never managed to hear the C major quintet 956, which is probably his finest chamber work and which completed the programme of the Fossanova concert. The distinguished violist, Alfonso Ghedin, was enjoying his privileged position in the audience for the first time; he said he had previously only enjoyed this piece from the inside. Like me, he was pretty well bereft of words for the sheer beauty of sound in the delivery of this posthumous masterpiece.

Prosseda presented and played a hugely entertaining programme of Mendelssohniana (mostly SWW) in the Caetani castle courtyard on Saturday 4 July, interspersed with pieces in homage to Felix from living composers. The SWW are, of course, miniatures which played with Prosseda’s loving care, do indeed sparkle as jewels. His secret seems to be – very little polish but plenty of breathtaking musicianship - which certainly illuminates the inventiveness in the works. Alessandro Solbiati (1956) begins with a few Webern-style notes, sparsely scattered across the keyboard, then increasing in density in Interludio X!V (Fuga Felix 2006); Marcello Panni (1940) owes much to French humour in general and Saint-Saëns in particular in Senza Parole (2008); Gilberto Bosco (1946) uses rondo form with Mendelssohn responsible for the binding theme and some episodes which sound loosely serialist in Ohne Worte mit Mendelssohn (2008). I was delighted to be introduced to Mendelssohn’s own Fantasia op. 28 in F sharp minor, which calls for two melodies of different pianistic colours to be played simultaneously, all dispatched with Prosedda’s admirable virtuosity. So ended the first part of the programme.

Aldo Clementi (1925) is almost as famous as a chess player as a composer. He had a continuing game with John Cage, which they picked up at every encounter. He was one day having a drink at my house when he stood up suddenly and cracked his head against a low beam. O God! he declared, And that’s the bit of the head that plays chess! Games are very much part of Aldo’s mindset and unsurprisingly they are to the fore in Barcarola for Four Hands (2006). All the notes are by Mendelssohn, but the order is by one of music’s great comedians – Aldo Clementi. In Mendelssohn (2006) Paolo Castaldi (1930) gives us five fragments interconnected with a promenade alla Pictures at an Exhibition. For the final encore to a highly responsive audience, Roberto Prosseda permitted himself a bit of Horowitz fun in taking the best known SWW – the so-called Spring Song - at breakneck speed.

No one has yet sold me fish and chips wrapped up in the SWW, but you may be sure that when these miniatures are served by Roberto Prosseda you are tasting the food of the gods.

It’s hard to know where to begin when considering the pianistic merits of Angela Hewitt (Caetani castle courtyard, 11 July). Two qualities shine out to my ear and also furnish her many other gifts: purposefulness and luminosity. There will be those who hear the purposefulness as bossy or even aggressive. I am not among them. I have a feeling of relaxed confidence when Hewitt is in the driver’s seat. Even when the speedometer goes way over what I expect, I know that she has memorised the map and is going to show me landmarks which I hadn’t previously seen in this musical terrain. That brings us to the luminosity. In the most complex music – and the more complex, the better - her playing takes on a see-through, reveal-all, transparent quality. That is unique. It is somewhat like the complex, transparent sentences of Virginia Woolf. But Mrs Woolf underwent countless rewrites to arrive at this virtuosity. I am not suggesting that Miss Hewitt has not done the musical equivalent. As I’ve said, she has familiarised herself with every detail of the map to the degree that it has become part of her breathing and circulation before she gets into the driver’s seat.

She began with what she is perhaps best known – the Baroque. And finally, here is a keyboard player of Handel (Suite no 2 in F) who has thoroughly grasped that he is fundamentally an opera composer, even in his instrumental works. She brought a beautiful Bellinian singing tone to the opening adagio, though the trills of the second adagio did come uncomfortably close to sounding like an epileptic attack, as uneven trills will. Was she striving for a dramatic effect here? Bach got much more elegant trill treatment (English suite no 6 in D minor, BWV811) when her agile fingers were appropriately transformed from song to dance.

After the interval it was the turn of the bicentenary boys – Mendelssohn’s birth and Haydn’s death. A polished performance of Mendelssohn’s Prelude and Fugue in E minor, Op 35 no 1, introduced us to the Variations Sérieuses. So often, variations are music for idiots. And Mendelssohn seems to share this view here. I hear a strong element of pastiche – Paganini in his underpants, say. Not Miss Hewitt. She delivers these variations “ straight on “, which of course, brings out the parodistic elements more clearly than ever.

Franz Joseph Haydn has often suffered in comparisons with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Like Handel, Mozart was an opera-minded composer and opera found its way into what he wrote, regardless of the instrumentation. Haydn, in this respect, was inferior. However, when it comes to pure musical inventiveness, he is Mozart’s equal, and frequently, his superior. Nowhere more so than in the glorious and shamefully neglected E flat sonata Hob 52, which Angela Hewitt delivered with all the ease and charm of her virtuosity – every phrase turned with a profound understanding of Haydn’s highly original sense of musical direction.

More music for idiots – Mendelssohn/Merk Variazioni Brillanti appeared in the programme at Fossanova on 12 July. But this is where I have to stand up for idiots’ rights. Not even Steven Isserlis (cello) and Roberto Prosseda (piano) could camp up as a circus romp this vacuous, awful trash. They certainly tried. Is there anyone out there with a fish and chip shop? You have your wrapping paper here.

Isserlis and Prosseda were switched into a distinctly Schummanesque mode for the Mendelssohn Sonata no 2 in D Op 58. For the most part the sweep-you-off-your–feet delivery worked, though some of the audience were gasping for ventilation by the end. In fairness, I had better add that the air-conditioning had also stopped working. The same dense strokes were to the fore in the D minor trio, Op 49, where the two men were joined by Sonig Tchakerian (violin),who noticeably introduced a lighter breathing into the proceedings. She also came into her own lyrical charm in the early violin sonata.

Roberto Prosseda has recorded for Decca, Mendelssohn’s Songs Without words –Lieder ohne Worte (double CD), Mendelssohn Rarities and Mendelssohn Discoveries. All four CDs contain world premiere recordings.

Jack Buckley

Note for Travellers to Italy: The Pontino Festival runs until 28 July. Full programme at www.campusmusica.it There is a regular train service from Rome Central Station (Stazione Termini) to Latina Scala, from which there is a bus service up the hill side for the remaining 12 kilometres, except on Sunday, when there are taxis. The stop for Fossanova is further down the rail line.