Ukraine born in 1892 or 1893 Ornstein studied piano in Kiev
with Vladimir Puchalsky, Horowitz’s teacher, on the explicit recommendation
of Josef Hofmann. At the age of twelve he was sent to St Petersburg to
study further (including composition lessons with Glazunov) before escaping
the 1906 pogroms and a new life in America. He gave his official concert
debut in 1911, made a select number of now exceptionally rare acoustic
78s – much prized by piano collectors, never reissued so far as I know
– but gave up a public career as a soloist very early, in 1922. His compositional
aesthetic was unyielding with a pounding astringent modernity that saw
him lauded as a leading member of the avant-garde. Grainger, no less,
bracketed him with Debussy, Ravel, Strauss, Stravinsky and Schoenberg.
There is certainly something in Ornstein’s powerfully propulsive, often
unforgiving muse, with its powerful piano clusters, that foreshadows aspects
of Futurism – hard not to think not of the Italian Futurists here but
Mossolov – but there is a remarkable admixture, too, of other elements
that co-exist with the abrasion – stasis, romanticism, impressionism,
laconic distance.
Appointed head of the Philadelphia Music Academy in
1925 he subsequently set up, with his supportive wife, his own school
of music and saw out his working life, before his extended and bountiful
retirement, as a pedagogue. The Ornstein Problem relates not only to
the kind of music he wrote but also to its accurate dating and provenance.
Manuscripts were often left undated, he frequently had to be cajoled
into writing his music down at all – it had been simmering in his mind
for a long time – and his stylistic plurality meant that it has remained
difficult, retrospectively, to assign a particular piece to a particular
time. He frequently worked on a number of works simultaneously. It’s
a distinctive feature of "Ornstein Studies" that definitive
dating of works turns out, on closer inspection, to be provisional dating
– or even hypothetical or reconstructive dating. To this end I have
followed the dates of composition provided by Ornstein’s son, Severo,
in his excellent notes but should note that a rival Ornstein disc -
on Hyperion CDA 67320 and played by Marc-André Hamelin – affixes
opus numbers to the compositions whereas the Naxos does not and that
when shared pieces are played Hyperion is a little more circumspect
about definitive dating than is Naxos.
Naxos’s disc in any case ranges widely to catch the
prodigious essence of Ornstein. A Morning in the Woods, which begins,
dates from 1971 and is deceptively pliant, impressionist and tonal.
The Danse Sauvage which follows delves back nearly sixty years to 1913;
vicious, barely tonal, with a ferocious primordial drive it takes a
waltz as its musical premise and subjects it to an assault of dramatic
abandon. This is in turn followed by the Fourth Piano Sonata of 1924,
a work of more immediate appeal written after a period of retrenchment
following the earlier savageries of his early twenties. The first movement
is freely romantic and gestural late nineteenth century whilst the Semplice
second movement hints at the dualities of Ravel and popular song. The
Lento is impressionistically unsettled but the finale a winning and
powerful affair, employing intriguing rhythms and strong on technical
demands, not least for the warring left hand. The agile and insistent
melodies exist in profusion and if the work as a whole never quite measures
up to its profile – it is inconsistent or at least, perhaps deliberately
disharmonious – it’s still a welcome retrieval.
Impressions of the Thames – otherwise known by the
French title, for some reason (maybe musical ethos) of Impressions de
la Tamise – opens with ominous bell chimes before a series of distinctly
unpastoral attacks, dissonant but brooding, afflict the score; gradually
moments as reflective as water seep through, suffusing the piece with
an elusive depth as evocative as an Alvin Langdon Coburn collotype.
The Tarantelle of 1960 is saturated with Ornstein’s gift for gorgeous
melody undeflated by irony, whilst A Long Remembered Sorrow from four
years later moves from beautiful lyricism to questing and unsettled
recall. The Seventh Piano Sonata dates from 1988, the most recent work
recorded here – Hamelin gives us the Eighth on his rival disc - and
brings us back to the oppositional, paragraphal nature of Ornstein’s
art; a first movement has a motoric, barbaric section immediately leading
on and relaxing inexorably into delicious lyricism, propelled onward
by rhythmic drive. The slow central movement – this is a sonata on classical
three movement lines, Molto con moto, Andante, Allegro – is unsettled,
with repeated ominous bass notes increasingly tapering out – inconclusive,
puzzled, not getting anywhere. The finale sweeps onwards but still with
jagged unresolved hesitancy – toward a conclusion admirably brittle
and with violent, ambiguous conclusiveness. And not inappropriately
then, the recital concludes with another locus classicus of modernist
ambiguity, Ornstein’s Suicide in an Airplane. As the engine drone recedes
into the distance – is the aviator a suicide or not? – and Ornstein’s
quasi-representational work concludes we return to the shock of his
modernist youth.
On the three occasions where their recitals overlap
– Suicide in an Airplane, Impressions of the Thames and Danse Sauvage
– both Weber and Hamelin evoke equally plausible responses. She is generally
brisker, more abrupt though receives a somewhat less sympathetic acoustic.
Both are superb guides and the Sonatas don’t overlap – Ornstein admirers
obviously will need both. And not just Ornstein admirers either – this
is music on the cusp and whilst not always likeable it is always compelling.
Jonathan Woolf
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Janice Weber, piano