A few words
about a pianist who will be little known. Johanna Margarete
(Grete) Sultan was born in Berlin in 1906 and studied with
Leonid Kreutzer in the Hochschüle fur Musik, continuing
studies with Richard Buhlig and Edwin Fischer, who remained
a lasting influence. She was as devoted to contemporary
music even then – Schoenberg, Krenek, Stravinsky – as to
Bach and Beethoven and built a solid career before the rise
of the Nazis. She escaped extremely late, in 1940, and the
details of her visa complications make for hair-raising
reading - she left Europe via Lisbon with fifteen minutes
of her visa time remaining. She made a new career in New
York where her teaching and performing were extensive though
not without difficulty. It’s here that she became best known
and if she achieved a measure of renown – and if you recall
her name – it will doubtless be because of her promotion
of the music of her pupil John Cage. He wrote Etudes
Australes for her, a work she performs in this edition
of her live performances.
Her joint piano
recitals with the likes of David Tudor were also important
features of her New World status but she maintained a strong
interest in presenting series of classical concerts of the
eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, performing
the Goldberg and Diabelli variations as well, at a time
when programming them in concert recitals was rare – both
are included in this four disc tribute of two double albums,
available separately. She died, having happily lived to
see the release of these discs during the later 1990s, at
the advanced age of ninety-nine in July 2005.
Her Goldberg
Variations was recorded in concert in 1959 and is the earliest
item here. She takes all repeats, an unusual enough procedure
then, and she used to demonstrate her “schema” for this
work on a board for the audience to see; it’s reproduced
in the booklet notes and is a structural diagram of her
conception of the variations (keyboard etude/canon/free
imitation/overture/fughetta and the like). She takes a generally
steady approach and when one bears in mind that it was recorded
live the achievement becomes plainer. There are times when
she is contrapuntally clear but also moments of muddied
voicings (variation.3) and a certain stolidity enters into
her playing. Variation 9 is certainly slow, even for the
time, and 11 not ideally clarified in left hand or right.
Later she becomes rhythmically unsteady but the variations
from Landowska’s so-called Black Pearl on are excellently
realised and buoyant.
On this first
disc we have a contrasting selection of her pioneering work
on behalf of her contemporaries. Her Schoenberg was recorded
as late as 1990, when she was eighty-four, and though she
can still rise to something of the ferocity of the second,
the sheer animation of her younger years was clearly some
way in the past. Cage’s Music of Changes wasn’t written
for her but it’s still of some importance to hear her play
his music, so allied with his name has she become, and so
influential a figure was she in propagating some of the
piano works. This is equally true of the 1969 The Perilous
night, for prepared piano. The selections of Debussy Etudes
from Book II sits rather oddly here.
The second disc
follows the formula of the first; here it’s the Diabelli
Variations that represents her classical credentials. This
is to me a rather hard-bitten traversal dating from a 1969
Town Hall performance, rather heavy and textually thick
though not without its moments of real illumination. On
balance though this is a forcefully conceived, rather craggy
and relentless conception, occasionally exploring moments
of Beethovenian tonal crudity to good effect though too
often ironing out dynamic contrasts – which may be, at least
in part, a product of the live recording.
Of more significance,
despite her reputation as a pioneering “variation” recitalist,
is the music of her contemporaries. Her Copland is again
rather hard though tonally effective and the Weber has some
outsize Mussorgskian chording in the second Episode though
the moments of expressionist contrast are ear catching as
well. There’s a single, very slight example of her way with
Wolpe and Hovhaness’s six-minute 1951 Yenovk whose
fascinating sonorities survive the rather sub-fusc recording.
It was good to hear Tui St George Tucker’s Bachian Tantum
Ergo for piano – plenty of limpid and grave nobility here
though the recording accentuates a clangour in Sultan’s
approach. Finally we have a timely and valuable offering
in the shape of a selection from Cage’s Sultan-dedicated
Etudes Australes. Written in 1974 and performed by
her at an unidentified location some time in the late 1980s
there are only four but they make an invaluable contribution
to Cage studies.
The booklet
notes are full of detail and though the recordings fluctuate
they’re never less than perfectly adequate. Sultan’s playing
as preserved here is variable, though at its finest it has
a powerful sense of authority and its intellectual strengths
can’t be gainsaid.
Jonathan
Woolf
Grete Sultan (piano) 
