Anton RUBINSTEIN (1829-1894)
Le bal (The ball), op. 14 (1854, rev. 1871) [81:52]
Two pieces, op.30 – no. 2 allegro appassionato (1856) [5:51]
Warren Lee (piano)
rec. 22-23 November 2019, Wyastone Concert Hall, Monmouth
NAXOS 8.574216 [87:49]
As we all know, musical compositions can go in and out of fashion. Among those that were more popular in the past than today, when the market for what we might call light classics seems virtually to have disappeared, is Berlioz’s felicitous orchestration of Weber’s 1819 piano piece Invitation to the dance. An early example of the concert waltz – one composed not for dancers on a ballroom floor but to be listened to by a seated audience in the concert hall – it’s a musical depiction, about nine or ten minutes in length, of an encounter at an elegant soirée. A gentleman approaches a lady, asks if she’d care to dance, receives an affirmative answer and, for a couple of minutes before they take to the floor, engages her in polite conversation. A vivaciously catchy waltz then gets underway. After its conclusion, the final minute or so of the piece depicts the gentleman escorting the lady back to her seat as, no doubt, he tells her what a pleasure it’s been to partner her.
Written 35 years after Weber’s Invitation, Anton Rubinstein’s Le bal follows a similar trajectory in telling the story of a ballroom encounter but goes somewhat further – and on a far more ambitious scale - in exploring the idea. If Weber might be said to have taken a single step back to observe and depict a dance objectively from the periphery of the action, Rubinstein’s intention is, I think, rather more ambitious and he takes two. Writing at a time when the ideas associated with Romanticism had significantly changed the way in which composers perceived their own – and, indeed, music’s – role, he attempts to show us not only what’s going on with a dancer’s body but also what’s transpiring in her head. [Although there’s no specific indication that the music’s subject is a woman, mid-19th century cultural convention would suggest it – and for the purposes of this review I will assume that to be the case.] Most obviously, at two points Rubinstein takes the story off the dancefloor entirely and focuses his attention not on his protagonist’s physicality but on her feelings: an opening number Impatience depicts the young lady’s excited yet apprehensive emotions as she prepares for her outing, while the closing Le rêve gives her the opportunity for a few final reminiscences of the evening’s events. However, even the eight numbers in between, all ostensibly labelled simply as dances, are ambitiously delivered. Several of the longer, elaborately developed ones have, indeed, rather more to them than first meets the eye. The polonaise, mazurka and galop, for instance, include substantial sections where the tempo becomes more reflective and we seem to be temporarily abandoning the ballroom jollifications altogether in order to explore the dancer’s innermost thoughts. Naxos’s indefatigable booklet essayist Keith Anderson rightly terms Le bal a miniature drama.
After the opening few moments of Impatience – a skittish allegro that’s appropriately tagged agitato and is occasionally reminiscent of Schumann, the series of dances gets underway. An opening polonaise is suitably grand, though arguably too long. A six-part contredanse follows, though once again the composer’s inconsistent level of invention means that interest occasionally flags. Similarly, the succeeding waltz, the longest single number, is stronger in atmosphere than in melodic memorability. That sequence of three substantial dances necessitates a short break for the exhausted participants (intermezzo) before proceedings resume. A characterful polka, more than occasionally bringing to mind that jauntily strutting man-about-the-Caribbean Louis Moreau Gottschalk, is the sequence’s undeniable success: indeed, it soon proved so attractive to vintage virtuoso pianists that, taking it out of its original context, they glamorised and colourised it into a stand-alone party piece (it may be heard via Youtube, played to enjoyable excess by Josef Lhévinne on a 1906 piano roll). The succeeding polka-mazurka, mazurka and galop are all appropriately rhythmic and, if once again less than memorable, are at least fit for purpose, while the final section, Le rêve, depicts a dancer’s pleasurable recollection of the delightful evening’s events, building to a heady moment or two before she subsides into sleep.
Sadly, it’s clear that, as both Rubinstein’s contemporaries and subsequent commentators have observed, his ambitions were not matched by his ability. Le bal is simply too long overall and its sequence of dances is unimaginatively presented. Many of its individual numbers are, moreover, unmemorable and essentially amount to little more than a composer’s overworked spinning of notes. The performance on this disc does, though, do a fine job of presenting Le bal in the best possible light. Even if ultimately unable to turn thin water into robust wine, Warren Lee – a past winner of first prizes at both the Stravinsky Awards International Piano Competition and the Grand Prix Ivo Pogorelich – demonstrates not only considerable technical skill but also a sophisticated sense of style. He is constantly aware of the piece’s structure and the need to maintain its overall balance, even if that clearly wasn’t the composer’s own strongpoint. Lee emphatically eschews Josef Lhévinne’s performance style as his model – but that’s something for which to be grateful, for a similarly exaggerated performance of Le bal in full would not only undermine Rubinstein’s original artistic concept but surely bring both performer and listeners to the verge of a nervous breakdown.
With Berlioz’s orchestration of Weber’s Invitation in mind, I increasingly found myself imagining Le bal as it might be played by a full orchestra. That interesting exercise made me wonder in turn whether the score might make the basis of an effective danced ballet. It already has, after all, its own cogent storyline and, at 80 minutes in length, might neatly form half of an evening’s double bill (paired, perhaps, with the half-hour long Les patineurs?) Moreover, even if Rubinstein’s tempo designations appear, on paper, as a pretty relentless succession of allegros, allegrettos, polkas, mazurkas and galops, there are, as I have already noted, plenty of other moments where the atmosphere becomes more contemplative or even sufficiently romantic to mount a pas de deux or two. There’s certainly an encouraging precedent, for in 1911 Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes turned Weber’s Invitation into the highly successful Nijinsky vehicle Le spectre de la rose, a brief work that is still occasionally revived as an exhibition piece.
Incidentally, apart from Warren Lee’s praiseworthy performance of such rarely encountered repertoire, this new disc, recorded in very acceptable sound, is also notable in one particular technical respect. Its final duration, had it just offered Le bal, would have been almost 82 minutes. With the generous addition of one more track – an allegro appassionato dating from 1856 – that overall length comes in at 87:49. I recall that, when CDs were first introduced, we were assured that durations of more than 80 minutes were either unachievable or else that, even if such discs could be produced, they would certainly be unplayable. This release is not the first to demonstrate that neither of those assertions was true. Have we, I wonder, been regularly short-changed for the past 40 years by a gigantic con-trick?
Rob Maynard
Previous review: John France
