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Stephen Hough - Alexander Scriabin, Leos Janacek: Sonatas & Poems (2015)

Posted By: newskl
Stephen Hough - Alexander Scriabin, Leos Janacek: Sonatas & Poems (2015)

Stephen Hough - Alexander Scriabin, Leos Janacek: Sonatas & Poems (2015)
Classical | MP3 320kbps CBR | 1 CD | 176 MB
Label: Hyperion | Catalog Number: 67895 | Rls.date: 30th Oct 2015

The music of Scriabin and Janacek - contrasting and highly eccentric composers dear to Stephen Hough’s heart - make for a perfect recital. The sensual perfumes of the one intertwine with the disruptive obsessions of the other, and Hough the magician tightens his spell.

Composer: Alexander Scriabin, Leos Janácek
Performer: Stephen Hough

Alexander Scriabin was born into a wealthy Russian family; he was of delicate build and health and full of mystical self-importance. Leoš Janáček was the son of a schoolmaster in Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire, and financial constraints hindered his musical education. The closest he came to self-delusion was his long-term infatuation with a woman thirty-eight years his junior—which hardly compares with Scriabin’s messianic pretensions. Scriabin published ten piano sonatas; Janáček one. Yet it would be difficult to find a more apt pairing of composers so surefooted in handling a style of their own forging.
Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No 5 is intimately linked with his twenty-minute orchestral score Le poème de l’extase. The two pieces share adjoining opus numbers (Opp 53 and 54 respectively), and Scriabin attached to the sonata part of the rather embarrassing literary poem he wrote to accompany the orchestral work. Despite the opus numbers, the sonata was written down after Le poème de l’extase had been composed and revised. However, parts of it had been sketched two years earlier, and Scriabin’s wife, Tatyana, wrote in a letter that the composer could play the sonata through before he came to put it on paper in December 1907. In the same letter she wrote: ‘I cannot believe my ears. It is extraordinary! That sonata pours out of him like a fountain. Everything you have heard so far is as nothing. You cannot even tell it is a sonata.’

The most obvious way in which No 5 differs from Scriabin’s previous sonatas is in its one-movement form—a pattern that the composer maintained for his subsequent five sonatas. Whether or not one can ‘tell it is a sonata’ might depend on whether one attempts to analyse it aurally or through study of the score. There is a slow introduction, an exposition, a development section and a recapitulation. Opposing key centres (principally F sharp and B flat) are utilized. Bookending this structure is an upward-rushing figure heard first and last in the work. But so fragmentary are the melodies, and so frequent the changes of time and key signature (along with specified rubato), that the architecture remains a background presence. What registers instead is the omnipresent tingle of dissonance, the twelve-minute approach to a cadence that never happens, the sensually ecstatic delay of a full climax. The return of the opening gesture brings the work to a close that is quite unexpected but immediately convincing; instead of crashing out a few major chords, Scriabin snatches the music away from our hearing and into another realm.

To attempt an alternative description of that ending, the music takes flight and disappears into the skies. The idea of flying preoccupied Scriabin—he and Tatyana reportedly undertook experiments in self-levitation, though the closest he seems to have come to achieving it is a curiously light-footed way of walking. The second and final movement of his Piano Sonata No 4 (1903) is marked Prestissimo volando (‘Flying as fast as possible’), so in a sense the upward rush with which the fifth sonata begins and ends is a logical progression from this. However, hearing No 4 after No 5 emphasizes how right Tatyana was to coo over the originality of the later work. The fourth sonata fits com­fortably into one’s picture of a Russian composer-pianist whose favoured repertoire comprised Schumann, Chopin and Liszt. Well, perhaps not so comfortably. Once again an accompanying poem makes clear that this is intended to be music of eroticism, transfiguration and ecstasy.

This time, though, the structure is a foreground presence. Although the fourth sonata is in two movements it is of shorter duration than the fifth, and is in fact the briefest of all Scriabin’s sonatas. Concision is achieved partly through the dominance of a single theme. This is heard awaking from a dream at the beginning of the opening movement and is ruminated on until the second movement takes flight without a break. The composer really meant his Prestissimo instruction: ‘It must fly at the speed of light right at the sun, straight into the sun!’, he exhorted one performer. The movement achieves its solar impact with a clangourous reprise of the first theme.

The Deux poèmes, Op 32, were written in 1903, the same year as the Sonata No 4. The first shares the key of F sharp major with the fourth and fifth sonatas—a favourite key signature for Scriabin, if for few other composers. It is a work of grace and liquid lyricism; the composer frequently included it in his recitals. Vers la flamme (‘Towards the flame’) is a late work, written in 1914. It was apparently intended to be an eleventh piano sonata, but was published as a poème. It has been suggested that Scriabin was short of income and did not have time to work it into finished form, but it is hard to think of it in these terms. Rather, it is Scriabin’s—and piano music’s—Rite of spring. Once again we are taken on a journey to conflagration, but the process is altogether more shattering than in the fourth sonata. Melody is reduced to its primitive minimum. There is no key signature because there is no key. In a crescendo from glowing quietude to vibrating violence, all we take for granted about pianism reaches meltdown.

Compare any photographs of Scriabin and Janáček and you immediately know these are contrasting characters. Scriabin, with his haughty manner and waxed moustache, looks like a stage magician—or, more accurately, he was exactly the kind of eccentric aristocrat on which a conjuror might base his stage persona. Janáček, solid and bluff, with unruly hair and a scrubbing-brush moustache, looks more like the proprietor of a successful brewery, with a seat on the local council. Yet his music, too, could have visionary qualities. His piano music in particular is haunted by tragic recollections and anxious foreboding.

Whereas the piano was a central focus for Scriabin throughout his career, Janáček’s solo piano compositions were largely confined to the period 1900–1912. These years were a turning point for the composer personally and professionally. His 1904 opera Jenůfa was successfully premiered in Brno, but for the time being rejected by Prague. The bitterness Janáček felt about this was intensi­fied by the identification in his mind between the opera and the death of his beloved daughter Olga, aged twenty-one, in 1903. He had already lost a son thirteen years earlier. This second blow contributed to the breakdown of his previously happy marriage. Though he and his wife Zdenka stayed together, the bond between them was gone.

The cycle On the overgrown path cannot be separated from these circumstances. The picturesque titles were added late in the day at the request of a friendly critic; despite their gnomic quality they are keys to the heartache within the music. The origin of the work lies in contribu­tions to anthologies of harmonium music: three of the pieces appeared in this form in 1901, already with the ‘Overgrown path’ title, which is a Moravian equivalent of ‘down memory lane’. By 1911 the cycle had become a ten-movement piano work and was published as such. Without cataloguing the precise sequence in which the individual pieces were composed, it is worth noting that the first and last pieces—‘Our evenings’ and ‘The barn owl has not flown away!’—were written before Olga contracted typhoid fever. Therefore the anguish that disturbs the recollection of summer evening walks, and the ill omens associated with the appearance of the owl in folklore, were premonitions before they became memories.

Only one title needs further explanation. Frýdek was the home town of the composer’s grandfather, where the Basilica of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary was a place of pilgrimage, hence the hymn tune in ‘The Frýdek Madonna’. Other than that, one detail might be taken as emblematic of the chilling presence that dominates the cycle. In ‘The barn owl has not flown away!’ the harbinger of death, with its flapping wings and two-note cry, first appears separately from a calmer, consoling chordal theme. Within this tranquil second subject is a curious single-crotchet bar of silence. In subsequent reprises even this silent beat is invaded by the owl’s music.

We owe it to the pianist Ludmila Tučková that we can hear Janáček’s Piano Sonata ‘1.X.1905, From the street’ today. She gave its first performance, in Brno on 27 January 1906. When rehearsals began the sonata had three movements. But, racked with self-doubt, the composer ripped out the third movement, a funeral march, and burnt those pages. The premiere did nothing to assuage his depression, and after it he flung the remaining move­ments, torn to pieces, into the Vltava river. Regret at his own actions afflicted him even while his eyes retained the impression of the pages ‘floating like swans’.

However, Tučková had secretly copied the first two movements, fearing the worst after the destruction of the third. It was not until 1924, the year of Janáček’s seventieth birthday, that she had the courage to tell the composer. Fortunately he sanctioned publication and performance as a two-movement work. Its violent history befits its inspira­tion: on the date the work commemorates, a Moravian carpenter, František Pavlík, was bayoneted to death by the forces of the ruling Austrians for supporting the foundation of a Czech-speaking university.

The first movement (‘Presentiment’) opens with a plaintive treble melody that tries to rise free as rumblings in the bass threaten to engulf it. Bass and treble are briefly locked together in a panic-stricken trill that resolves into the chordal second subject, which becomes more emotionally disturbed than first impressions suggest. After an exposition repeat the development proceeds in eruptive fashion, its energies troubling the recapitulation’s opening. The final chord is a solemn bell toll.

The second movement (‘Death’) broods over a single melodic phrase. Though context and expression change, the sad truth it contains will not go away. In the central section, which grows to a tragic climax, this phrase develops into a coherent melody, jangling with the rhythms of Czech speech; musical characteristics of both these sections combine in the closing stanza. Finally, another eerie bell-chord brings the darkness.

Tracklist:

1. Piano Sonata No. 5, Op. 53
2. Our Evenings
3. A Blown-away Leaf
4. Come With Us!
5. The Frydek Madonna
6. They Chattered Like Swallows
7. Words Fail!
8. Good Night
9. Unutterable Anguish
10. In Tears
11. The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!
12. Poème in F Sharp Major, Op. 32, No. 1
13. Vers La Flamme, ‘Poéme’, Op. 72
14. Presentiment
15. Death
16. Andante
17. Prestissimo Volando