Talk about chalk and cheese! Both composers are Russian, but
Stravinsky left Russia for purely artistic (or maybe business)
reasons and never even contemplated going back, whereas Prokofiev
left out of fear but eventually returned because homesickness
overcame his fears. Both could be said to have astringent idioms,
but Stravinsky traversed a goodly portion of the length and
breadth of musical history seeking grist for his mill, whereas
Prokofiev, one little excursion apart, ploughed his own furrow
through the Twentieth Century. Both worked with Diaghilev, but
with markedly different results. Both composed a lot of ballet,
but ...
The
list goes on, right down to the chalk ‘n’ cheesiness of these
two violin concertos. Both were written to commissions, but
whereas Prokofiev’s is a mainstream “virtuoso” work written
during the comings and goings of his protracted return to Russia,
Stravinsky’s is more a “concertante” piece written in the comfort of
his established cosmopolitan lifestyle - and paradoxically a
much tougher nut for performers to crack. I feel another list
bubbling up, so maybe I’d better move on!
I’ve
had the CBS LP of Isaac Stern playing the Stravinsky
concerto, conducted by the composer, on my shelf since around
1963. I still consider it a benchmark. This concerto is one
of those rare works where the old CBS “spotlighting” habit is
actually a benefit, though the reason for this is surprisingly
complicated.
Stravinsky
was initially diffident about accepting the commission: according
to the booklet note in the Elatus
recording, he was both unsure of his ground technically and
he “did not trust virtuosos”. It took the encouraging words
of Hindemith, a reassuring meeting with Samuel Dushkin, the virtuoso for whom the work was commissioned,
and a lot of study of the great concertos to convince him that
he could give it a shot.
At
the time, Stravinsky was in the “neo-baroque” leg of his travels
- this was a stroke of luck because it immediately pointed him
at the Concerto Grosso model. He could thus write for the violin
more as the “leader” of a concertino group, letting himself
off the hook insofar as modern virtuoso pyrotechnics were concerned.
Scoring his work for a fairly large orchestra, the small body
of strings defined the overall scale of the sound, and within
that defining frame the multitudes of wind instruments were
used, together with “the” soloist, as a kaleidoscope of chamber-scale
concertino combinations.
The
problem with this, for recording engineers who try to set the
music in a “natural” environment as much as for “live” performances,
is that the space needed to contain the orchestra tends to be
larger than the optimal “performing space” required by any given
combination of players. Hence the need, in a recording at least,
for some creative microphony. QED!
This
is apparent soon after the start. In Stern’s CBS recording,
the growling bassoon trills are right under your nose. Turn
to Kyung Wha Chung with the LSO and
Previn on Decca, a recording set in
a reverberant large-hall acoustic (Kingsway Hall, London), and
those bassoon trills - reduced to a vague and muffled groan
- may as well not be there. On the more closely recorded Elatus
disc, you do at least hear something, though it still doesn’t
sound like bassoon trills!.
The
same holds for the balance of the violin soloist. Stravinsky’s
stream of concertinos requires the violin soloist to be in, rather than in front of,
the orchestra. Stern is, as near as dammit,
part of the ensemble, alternately emerging from and blending
with the textures - which is surely just what Stravinsky intended,
and as conductor you can bet your bottom dollar that, regarding
the recorded balance, his word was law! Chung stands well to
the fore, always “the” soloist even when her part is clearly
one of accompaniment. More damagingly, in some places, effects
that have ear-catching charm in Stern’s recording simply do
not happen with Chung and Previn. For example, there is a particular point just before
the finale’s coda, where violin and flute intertwine - or, rather,
they should do. Perlman
comes between these two extremes but, as he rarely becomes fully
absorbed into the texture, stands nearer to Chung than to Stern.
There
is another pitfall. In his “neo-baroque” works, and his “neo-classical”
and “neo-serial” stuff for that matter, Stravinsky aims for
a clarity that’s as sharp as a stropped razor - he often demands
needles, never mind hairpins, and this affects the quality of
the instrumental sound: not exactly desiccated, but definitely
well on the dry side of damp. Previn’s
LSO, beautifully as they play, sound as if all the sharp edges
have been chamfered, sanded and polished, certainly when set
alongside Stravinsky’s or Barenboim’s alert ensembles. Even so, Barenboim
still manages to miss several textural tricks, notably in the
Toccata where the twice-occurring downwards-bouncing
phrase lacks the requisite trombone “rasp”, which is one sound
that hardly depends on help from any sound engineers. Stravinsky’s
trombonist fair lifts my hackles here!
That
brings us to the vexed question of interpretation, “vexed” because
of Stravinsky’s dictum that “There should be no ‘interpreters’
of my music, only ‘executants’”. He claimed that, as he had
notated the music exactly, all that was required of the “executants”
was to follow his instructions to the letter. With all due respect,
this was one occasion when he was talking out of the back of
his head - and to see why you need look no further than the
first page of the score of Le Sacre du Printemps. Stravinsky’s 50
crotchets per minute is qualified by tempo
rubato. In the fifth bar there’s poco
accelerando, in the seventh in
tempo, and in the eleventh in
tempo again. OK, how
flexible - not only how much, but also in what way? How
much acceleration? Do you return to the “proper” speed with,
or without, the rubato?
What’s the point of the second in
tempo, when nothing has changed in between? As if this wasn't
already vague enough, the bassoon is marked ad
lib.(!), and other instruments are asked to play “a bit
out of tempo”, and “expressively” and,
in all this, loudness and dynamic gradations don’t even rate
a mention.
I’m
not suggesting a recipe for anarchy - perish the thought! -
just saying that there is always room for manoeuvre, no matter
how supposedly “exact” the score. The main interpretative criterion
for the Violin Concerto
must be the “baroque” flavour, which implies that the fast outer
movements should flow without let or hindrance and the two arias
should be played in a relatively detached manner or, if you
prefer, “cool”. In this respect, Stern and Stravinsky - bless
his cotton socks - come up trumps. Playing it as straight as
a die, they let their basic tempi do all the work, restricting
rubato and portamento to telling minima,
and channelling all their emotive energies into touch and dynamics.
Chung’s
powerful personality seems resistant to the kind of self-effacement
demanded by the nature of the music: her view, reflected in
her very forward placement, is simply too insistently virtuosic
and riddled with romantic expression. She can’t resist inflecting
the tempi of the outer movements, and overcooks the arias with
sensually throaty tone and Tchaikovsky-like angst. The up-tempo
core of Aria I, for
example, ends up sounding like Prokofiev.
To
a lesser extent, Perlman also falls
prey to the same temptation to over-tighten the emotional screws
but, at least some of the time, he does remember to efface himself.
This makes all the more bemusing his mad rush of blood in the
Capriccio, where he
slaps soupy slurs seemingly everywhere there’s even the hint
of a hook to hang one on. Oh, it sounds fabulous,
but is it sympathetic to the character of the music? I think
not, and should you need convincing, just listen to Stern, whose
slurs are nowhere near as profligate and are applied, with supreme
circumspection, like gloves to the music’s grateful hands.
Overall,
if you want to hear this concerto played just as it ought to
be, a “Stravinskian take on the baroque”, then please seek out the
Stern/Stravinsky recording. Stern’s considerate approach to
the music, in spite of a couple of minor intonational
glitches, is a wonder to behold. Stravinsky’s direction is unique
in my experience. Amongst the innumerable nuances, I would especially
mention his “layering” of the orchestral accompaniment to the
singing violin in Aria II, floating and diaphanous where others,
however gently, merely “chug-chug”. My old LP, much played,
still sounds marvellous if I ignore the surface noise. I can’t
vouch for the CD remastering of this
particular work, but the parts of this series that I have acquired
on CD are all re-mastered to a highly acceptable standard. Otherwise,
you will find so much to enjoy from Perlman and Barenboim, who come
within shouting distance of Stravinsky’s special “neo-baroque”
quality and are, to my ears, preferable to Chung and Previn,
who don’t. The recording, although necessarily quite close,
suits the music well whilst the sound quality won’t disappoint
any except die-hard audiophiles (who shouldn’t be wasting their
time listening to stuff like this, anyway!).
Right:
Prokofiev No. 2!
No “special considerations” required: this is a concerto in
the good, old-fashioned romantic virtuoso manner. The self-same
Chung/Previn disc again serves as
a comparison, and has one immediate advantage over the Elatus CD: it includes both
the Prokofiev concertos. In this respect, the cash-conscious
will have to do their sums: the Decca CD contains more music,
but the Elatus is less expensive!
Chung’s
recordings of these concertos have long held sway, largely for
the exact same reasons for which I marked her down in the Stravinsky.
Equally, whilst Previn is hardly the “conductor of choice” for Stravinsky,
he’s right at the top of the pile for Prokofiev. It’ll come
as no surprise when I admit that I bought this CD for their
superb Prokofiev, and regarded their Stravinsky as merely an
“interesting” bonus.
Chung
and Previn’s basic tempi are spacious,
but rather than just being slow, they are in fact giving themselves
some headroom to accommodate the first movement’s extreme changes
of tempo: when required they get a real shift on, traversing
those wide tempo variations with poise and fluency. Perlman
and Barenboim adopt tauter basic tempi
throughout, and consequently their first movement accelerandi are less daringly vertiginous. However, “safety
first” does not seem to “rule, OK?” because a couple of their
decelerandi rather tend to slither untidily down the slippery
slope. The Chicago orchestra is also hard-pressed to match the
LSO, partly because Barenboim doesn’t
seem to have Previn’s sure grasp of Prokofiev’s weird and wonderful palette,
but also because Perlman’s violin
is now even further
to the fore than Chung’s, and when feeling effusive tends to
overshadow the orchestra. To be fair, this remains the case
with Chung, though to a noticeably lesser extent.
Of
course, this is an old problem, dating right back to the days
of acoustic recording, when technical limitations dictated you
had to get the soloist, and let the accompaniment take care
of itself. As Andrew Keener says, the correct setting for any
“spot mic.” is obtained by pushing
up the fader until you can just detect its effect on the sound-picture,
then easing it back half a notch. This applies
equally for a soloist spot or an orchestral spot. For some reason,
engineers seem to have a tendency to overlook that italicised bit or - particularly when spotting a Really Big Name -
they may even reverse the direction of that final adjustment.
Whatever, I wish they’d stop doing it, and be a bit more mindful
of the importance of the orchestral contribution - especially
when it is as significant as Prokofiev’s.
The
second movement is a tricky one for performers, as it’s marked
“andante assai”. What exactly does that mean?
Well, “andante” literally means “going”, though musically
it is generally taken to mean “going slowly”, at a walking pace
compared with allegro’s jog-trot. “Assai” means “fairly”, as
in “fairly windy”, a qualification that implies “not so ‘windy’
as just plain ‘windy’”. So, what is “not so ‘going slowly’ as
just plain ‘going slowly’”? Is andante
assai slower than andante,
or not so slow as andante?
Is the “assai” exhorting performers to relax a bit more, or
keep things moving along a bit more? “Is this nit-picking?”
you may ask. Well, let’s look at these two performances.
Chung
takes 9'52 compared with Perlman’s
9'09, a substantial but not unduly alarming difference of 8%.
In isolation, neither sounds particularly uncomfortable at its
chosen pace. Set them side by side, though, and Chung starts
to feel on the adagio side of andante, taking the more relaxed
option for “assai”. The on-the-beat “Albertski
bass” accompaniment is inclined to plod somewhat, this tendency
held at bay only by Previn’s sensitive shading. Comparatively, Perlman takes his “assai” as a prohibition on loitering, with
or without intent, drawing the successive notes into closer
proximity, and thereby eliciting from the melody a more songful
quality that you don’t often hear. His instrument’s voice reinforces
the feeling: soft-grained, earthy, rosiny
and “Russian” where Chung’s is burnished and more “cosmopolitan”.
If only Barenboim had possessed Previn’s
sense of shading! However, Barenboim is fully alert to their chosen tempo: thus, in the
fulsome statement of the theme just before the faster central
diversion, he puts Previn in the shade
with the impulsion he wrings from the bass strings.
At
the start of the finale, Chung sounds a mite laboured where,
in line with his strategic tempo scheme, Perlman
is more propulsive and more immediately exciting. However, in
his choice of speed he may be too hasty, as Prokofiev’s ben marcato hints that he has something up
his sleeve. This main theme is not all that steady on its feet,
and the secondary subject has a slightly bibulous edge. As the
movement proceeds this becomes more pronounced, while the main
subject shows an increasing tendency to break down into drunkenly
careening figurations. What we have is a vivid impression of
increasing intoxication, a drunkard’s walk underlined by some
delirious lurches of pulse as well as harmony! The ending sounds
just like a drunk lurching along the street in the general direction
of a lamp-post. Try as he may, lurching this way and that, he
simply can’t avoid
walking smack into it!
Chung
and Previn project this with a conviction
sufficient to have me wondering what they’d put in their coffee
during the recording session. It must have been something, because
they forgot to tell the offstage castanets to play with the
door open - you can
hear them, just about, if you press your ear to the loudspeaker.
Sadly Perlman, whose tone is far better suited to the scenario,
seems to miss the point: his drunk doesn’t even try to dodge
the lamp-post, simply walking straight on into it. By way of
compensation, he and Barenboim at least remembered to open the door on their offstage
castanets, and at their faster tempo the clarinet roulades sound
more thrilling. In case you’re wondering, the castanets are
not actually “offstage” - I’m just expressing my consternation
that such an unusual percussion effect should be so ridiculously
remote!
So,
in the Prokofiev the final score seems to be Chung 2, Perlman
1½, though perhaps the gap between the two teams isn’t quite
as wide as the score-line suggests. Certainly, if you haven’t
heard Chung and Previn, you’d be happy with what Perlman
and Barenboim have to offer - especially
if you’re looking for this particular coupling. The sound is
fine, although the slight dryness that suited the Stravinsky
does Prokofiev’s succulent timbres fewer favours.
You
also get an added “bonus”: the end of the Prokofiev is greeted
with half a minute’s worth of ecstatic audience approbation.
Unfortunately this is instantaneous, not separately banded,
so you’re always going to get some of it. Surely, when this
is unavoidable, it isn’t beyond the wit of the recording team
to do a quick take of the last bar during rehearsal, then edit
in the conclusive ambience and leave the applause as a separately
banded option?
These
are indeed “live” recordings, the good news being that while
the music’s playing, the audience emulates a crowd of church
mice. The bad news is that Orchestra Hall sounds like it was
a day short of a visit from the air-conditioning maintenance
man, as there is a hiss with a hint of mechanical rumble in
the background. There’s an idea, though - a digital recording
with built-in surface noise, for the delectation of analogue
audio fans!
Phillip
Huscher’s well-written booklet notes
are concise but informative, a useful background to anyone lucky
enough to be trying these wonderful works for the first time.
Packaging is less satisfactory. The Elatus “brand design” is hardly inspiring, and the playing
times shown on the back are in minute print, white on black.
For those with less than 20-20 vision, it’s just as well that
the same information is presented better within.
All
in all, not an exceptional disc, but one with a number of interesting
things to say, particularly in the andante assai of the Prokofiev,
and the sheer sound of Perlman’s playing
is a pleasure in itself.
Paul
Serotsky
Itzhak
