This is a promotional disc, unnumbered, issued by the Gunnar
and Lorraine Johansen Charitable Trust and for more information
about their work, and the recordings they produce, I suggest
you contact the website above.
Johansen was a remarkable pianist. I’ve had the good
luck hear a few of the many recordings issued and also to have
managed
to hear a private recording of a Beethoven cello sonata he
gave with his eminent colleague C. Warwick Evans, cellist of
the London
String Quartet, in the early 40s at Wisconsin-Madison, where
they were both then resident. Johansen had been appointed artist-in-residence
there in 1939. This necessarily meant a diminution of his career
as a travelling soloist, something he did not especially miss.
One of the Great Danes, Johansen (1906-1991) studied with Lamond
in Berlin and then Petri, who considered Johansen the best
of his pupils. Through Petri, Johansen met Busoni shortly before
the latter’s death, and he performed his music extensively.
In 1929 he moved to San Francisco, broadcasting weekly, something
he continued for many years. He first recorded for Danish Columbia
in 1928 but his central undertaking, between 1950 and 1986, was
a total of 140 LP albums. His ‘home recording’ projects
were astounding and protean; between 1950 and 1961 he recorded
nearly the complete solo keyboard works of Bach. Over a somewhat
longer period he did the same with Liszt. In 7 albums he recorded
the mature solo works of Busoni, to whose memory he had remained
devoted. He was also a prodigious composer, having 551 piano
sonatas to his credit - he performs one in this disc - though
one should add that only 31 were notated, the remainder being
improvised onto tape, on which he recorded. He did nothing
by halves.
The recordings presented here are but a snapshot of this volcanic
productivity but they do nicely illustrate the most significant
facets of his recorded art, as preserved. There are two of
the 1928 78s. C P E Bach’s Rondo does indeed, as the notes
aver, contain Horowitzian elements in its pert syntax and playful
refinement. The Chopin Etude is a tantalising glimpse at his
playing of the composer. He remembered that at these sessions
his use of the pedal had been severely restricted by the recording
technicians. The Bach-Johansen Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor
BWV 582 is an astounding edifice, played on his double-keyboard
Bösendorfer. The use of the instrument imparts colossal
sonorities and this powerful, sublime reading demonstrates
awe-inspiring control, and poetry, and is hugely exciting.
It’s appropriate too that we can sample his Liszt in
the form of Après une lecture de Dante which
he recorded c.1946. The powerful conception is animated by
a composer-recreationist
mind, insights that reach into the vortex of the music with
unremitting passion and sweep. Though the sound is only so-so
it hardly matters
so graven and impactful is the musicianship to be heard. And
so it continues. The Busoni Variations and Fugue on Chopin’s
Prelude in C minor attests to his promotion of Busoni and his
acute structural imperatives when imparting such. The fugal
section is crisp and directional.
The example of his own work is the Pearl Harbor sonata,
completed a day before the attack in 1941. It’s
in three movements. The first is urgent, portentous whilst the
second is grim, the determined roulades persuasively placed,
lyric moments present but fugitive. The finale’s jazz elements
are gradually corralled into an increasingly terse argument,
as if the vernacular elements in the music were being squeezed
of life. Johansen apparently said of this movement that it was ‘dancing
on a volcano’. The live performance generates strong
applause. Finally we have the Strauss-Godowsky in which rubati
and rhythmic
charge are allied to panache.
My own hope is that the riches in this collection can gradually
be issued. One appreciates it may be unrealistic to hope that
all the recordings will be commercially available. But I do think
that representative chunks of the Bach, Busoni and Liszt recordings
- to begin with - should be available to admirers of this remarkable
musician.
Jonathan Woolf
Gunnar Johansen (piano) 