Franz SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
Piano Quintet Trout in A major D.667 (1820) [40:07]
Variations on Trockne Blumen for flute and piano D.802 (1824) [20:30]
Adagio from Piano Trio Notturno in E flat, D.897 (1828?) [9:44]
Martin Helmchen (piano); Christian Tetzlaff (violin); Antoine Tamestit (viola);
Marie-Elisabeth Hecker (cello); Alois Posch (double bass); Aldo Baerten (wooden
flute)
rec. Siemens Villa, Berlin, Germany, October 2008
PENTATONE PTC 5186334 [69:00]
When I met the pianist Martin Helmchen on an early afternoon in February of
2009 in the Mozarteum in Salzburg, he was about to practise for a concert
that evening. We had just missed each other earlier, and now the schedule
was threatening to fall apart. Without hesitation he sits down and apologizes
for a misunderstanding that was entirely mine. A slightly disorganized Mozarteum
employee interrupts our conversation, trying to arrange at least ten minutes
of pre-concert play-time, lest he would have to practise on an un-tuned piano.
Which, Helmchen agrees with very mildly enervated understatement, “would be
unfortunate”.
He speaks softly, in long, mellifluously twisting sentences. Although he might
come across that way, to describe Helmchen as shy would be missing the point.
He is merely not prone to boast, there is nothing ostentatious in the way
he acts, and he exudes genuine humility. Where colleagues of his have success
being ‘loud’, Helmchen succeeds quietly. I imagine it could be easy to underestimate
him and his playing, and concert audiences or record collectors casually familiar
with his work might wonder why he enjoys the relative prominence of being
Pentatone’s go-to guy for standard classical/romantic repertoire. But Martin
Helmchen’s interpretations are not pale or indistinct, they are subtle and
their value unfolds, inexorably, over time. Eschewing gimmick and fad, he
plays with understated feeling and authenticity.
“That’s one of my great ideals in music: to be authentic” he says, “and the
conviction that if you are, the result can still be interesting a hundred
years from now. If people involve themselves in standard works with their
own particular experiences and skill, and do so in an honest, profound way,
respectful of the music, then I think the result will always be different
and always new. Therefore the question whether it’s still interesting to perform
or record classic works doesn’t even come up. If you seek for the music to
become one with yourself, then such works will necessarily be always new again.”
I ask him whether he has the same mindset when recording as he does playing
a concert — or whether he thinks of other recordings, what others have done,
and he likes to or would do differently. In other words, how self-conscious
is the process of recording?
“I don’t really notice a difference between a concert and performance. It’s
always about finding your own way to the core of the piece and occupying yourself
with other recordings should never get to the point where you start copying
elements. But of course it’s impossible not to be influenced in some ways
by other interpretations and that will always be the case. It’s an ambivalent
relationship for me: You get enthused about certain interpretations and maybe
grew up with specific ones, but you have to emancipate yourself from that
so as not to repeat others’ views. Those views are in the back of your mind,
not unlike with composers. What Bach composed builds in some ways on what
Schütz or Monteverdi or Buxtehude had done, composers that knew and appreciated
each other but always created something new. Interpretations function similarly.
Do your own thing, find your own way and live it through playing. And if that’s
ingrained, the process is not conscious at all. I don’t sit down thinking
‘Oh, I should play this part in Haydn like pianist X or Y. Afterwards, of
course, it can happen that you listen to it and you realize that you found
similar solutions on your own as some other artist. But with works so abundantly
meaningful or sophisticated, that’s not likely to occur very often.” The process,
he agrees, is not unlike every-day language where phrases or terms are learned,
adopted, and adapted from others — parents, teachers, writers — but the tone
remains invariably one’s own.
Doesn’t this make CD reviews meaningless to the artist in musical territory
that’s so well explored since — barring technical imperfections and given
the impossibility of an “ideal performance” — the critique would be essentially
of Martin Helmchen’s personal approach to, say, Schubert? A critique would
essentially be a statement of agreement or disagreement with the way in which
your interpretation gels (or doesn’t) with the legitimately different expectations
of someone else.
“It’s subjective or relative, matter. It’s about my personal ideal as a musician:
To hit upon the truth in the music, to find what it’s about, and how I can,
with my abilities and limitations, express that. And if you have made your
way through a work like the D959 sonata, which needs years of grappling with,
and if you have had good conditions in which to record them, then the whole
process has become so big, that you become independent in your attitude. You
rely on, and maybe fear, your own judgment more than anything. What’s important
is whether I think that the recording can communicate what I see in the work
and what I wanted to express with it. And if that were not the case, it would
be bitterly disappointing. After so much preparation with so much work poured
into it and, more so than in concert, the claim for it to be a sort of stock-taking
of what I want to say with the work now.
“And as far as reviews are concerned: It’s disappointing when intentions you
had are not heard (or noticed), but yes, when it is just a matter of taste,
then that doesn’t quite affect you. The whole ‘too much or too little rubato’,
‘it sounds too much like Beethoven or too romantic’, I don’t pay much attention
to, to be honest. But when essential things in a work are not picked up on,
I do pause and I will listen and figure if that’s right or how it could be
done. But my own judgment of whether that comes through what the piece means
to me, that’s rather more important to me.”
Martin Helmchen has a contract with the audiophile company Pentatone and at
the time he had two recordings out: the Schubert sonata referenced above and
a disc of Mozart piano concertos. Schumann and Dvorák concertos with Marc
Albrecht and the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra have been released since,
as has the first volume of Schubert’s complete works for violin and piano.
He shows me his digital recorder with a Schubert Trout on it, on which he
has been checking the edits. For this Trout recording, Helmchen was
given carte blanche to assemble musicians of his choice. He chose the
bright violinist Christian Tetzlaff, the vibrant violist Antoine Tamestit
(an ARD prize winner) and veteran double-bass player Alois Posch. The cellist
he picked is Marie-Elisabeth Hecker. “It’s simply a dream cast”, he laughs
at the question at why he picked exactly these musicians “They were the first
people I asked. Marie-Elisabeth (championed as a soloist by Valery Gergiev)
was an obvious choice since she is not just my girlfriend but also one of
the finest musicians I have ever heard and met.”
“With Christian and Antoine I’ve played on festivals several times and one
needn’t really add anything about them. They’re one-of-a-kind musicians and
have very similar ideals about music to mine. And Alois Posch was the first
double-bass player for the Vienna Philharmonic and is a very active chamber
musician who I think has already recorded seven Trouts in his career.
Once you start playing or rehearsing as an ensemble, you realize immediately
whether you all have the same goals. … getting to the core of the music rather
than using the music as a means to show what I’m capable of doing musically.
This ‘using’ of a piece to put myself forward in order to show how I can express
myself and my musical means is exactly the opposite of what these musicians
stand for. It’s like that old Brendel quote that if he comes of a particular
school of pianism at all, it’s the school that the composition teaches the
interpreter in how it ought to sound, not the other way around. I’ve since
met many friends in chamber music circles who share my enthusiasm for making
music in this way, and that of course includes those that I get to play the
Trout with.”
Where is the line between a more playful approach to the score — not necessarily
to please one’s ego but presumably for the benefit of the work or the listening
enjoyment — and treating the score as sacrosanct to the point where Rudolf
Serkin didn’t play a particular Beethoven sonata at all, because he could
not get Beethoven’s suggested fingering right?
“Well, I think liberties are wanted, by all means … and often enough they
are already part of the composition. But it probably depends on the framework.
In a Mozart concerto, there is so much room for taking joy in sheer virtuosity.
And when that’s the intention and takes place as part of this genial structure
of Mozart, contributing to the greater impression, it’s wonderful to improvise
with ornamentation as it was done back then. But when I do that in parts where
Mozart or Schubert wanted something else in the music, it becomes inappropriate.
“Schubert, for example, doesn’t strike me as suitable for that playful approach.
He even said himself: ‘Is there jolly music? I know of none’. Even when he
writes dances they’re infused with a good deal of seriousness. But Mozart
is a good example where you can be true to the spirit of the work without
slavishly following the text. If you listen to the older generation of pianists
who knew the score very well, too — Schnabel or Backhausen, for example —
they take so many liberties. Admittedly that was a very different way of making
music, then. Old recordings of Kempff sometimes make you think: what is he
doing there … added notes, instances of changed articulation and dynamics,
all things that are not in the text but perhaps express what that passage
means still better. That’s a fidelity to what the work denotes.”
That seriousness shows in the Trout at hand. The fourth movement of
the Quintet picks up the theme from Schubert’s song The Trout. It’s
a bubbly theme, usually sung (and played) with quick-witted buoyancy — but
the theme of betrayal (and incarceration) isn’t a particularly happy one.
Helmchen and crew pay tribute to that and deliver something altogether more
sober, though far from heavy or heaving. The entire recording has a touch
of the sober, with Helmchen setting the unfussy tone that serves as the base
for occasional dashes of brilliance by Teztlaff, brief but telling touches
of searing intensity from Tamestit, gamely common sense from Mlle. Hecker
and Posch. “Variations on Trockne Blumen for flute and piano” (Aldo
Baerten on a wooden flute) and the Notturno for Piano Trio D897 complete this
exceptional release.
Jens F. Laurson