Marc BLITZSTEIN (1905-1964)
Music For Solo Piano
Waterfall: Barcarolle, Op. 4, No. 1 (1918) [2:00]
Prelude in C minor (1922) [1:27]
Valse (1923) [0:36]
Children’s Dances (1924): No. 1 Pavane [1:10]: No. 2 Round [2:25]
Svarga: Suite (1924–25): No. 4. Belly-Ache (A Blues) [3:34]
Percussion Music for the Piano (1928–29) [11:47]
Scherzo: Bourgeois at Play (1930) [4:03]
Cain: Ballet (1930): Three scenes [10:32]
Piano Solo (1933): II Cantabile [2:55]
Le Monde Libre: March on a French Resistance Tune (1944) [0:47]
Show (The Guests): Ballet (1946–49) [19:24]
Innocent Psalm – for the Bernstein baby (1952) [1:05]
Slow March – for Kit’s Wedding (1953) [0:54]
Wedding Piece for Stephen & Joyce (1955) [1:00]
Lied – for Ben Cooper, and his women (1963) [1:16]
Sonata for Piano (1927) [7:22]
Leonard Lehrman (piano, speaker: The Show)
Helene Williams (speaker: The Show)
rec. 2005, Lefrak Auditorium, Queens College, CUNY, Flushing, NY
TOCCATA CLASSICS TOCC0438 [74:21]
That most of these pieces are heard in premiere recordings suggests that Marc Blitzstein’s music for solo piano has long lagged behind his well-known stage works. In fact, this appears to be the first album ever released that’s devoted wholly to his piano music and this may seem strange given that he was a well-regarded pianist and wrote for the instrument throughout his career. Indeed, the works span an almost half-century from 1918 to 1963.
Perhaps one reason for the neglect lies in the fact that juvenilia and occasional pieces make up a percentage of the works. The two-minute barcarolle called Waterfall was written when he was 13 and the surviving Prelude from 1922 – the other eight are lost – may or may not be representative but it’s hard to tell. Similarly, a Waltz of 36 seconds is not going to rewrite the Blitzstein songbook. The two Children’s Dances are all that remain of a cycle of four. The Belly-Ache (A ‘Blues’) from the suite Svarga is ballet music (the first of his six ballet scores) and it’s spelt Gershwin with a capital G, but it’s instructive to hear how rapidly Blitzstein responded to the medium as well as the message; this was the year Whiteman premiered Rhapsody in Blue after all.
It’s not until we reach the 1927-28 Sonata and Percussion Music for Piano, written in 1928-29 that we get to his Bad Boy days – hardly a niche reserved for Antheil alone. Here we encounter polytonality and playfulness, paradiddle and perplexity, lid-shutting percussion and driving vexatious excitement. In fact, the Toccata of Percussion Music is not especially troublesome, and the innocent sounding Air and the Rondino finale – he must have laughed when thus describing his movements in this drum-based piece – offer fabulously pugnacious harmonies and metre-changing.
The Sonata is a one-movement, seven-minute affair cast in eight very brief sections. The music is linked by silences and not by any development as such. It too caused a real stir but if Blitzstein did appropriate Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt’s piano lid-closing lark in Percussion Music – he had heard the German’s Piano Sonata in Berlin in May 1927 and it must have been fresh in his mind – who is to say he wasn’t aware of the daringly avant-garde use of silence in Erwin Schulhoff’s 1919 Fünf Pittoresken when it came to his own Sonata?
One of the best things about this disc is its archaeological function. Some of the pieces are simply as good as unknown. The 1930 ballet music from Cain, for example: three excerpts lasting ten minutes rich, once again, in polytonality. Or Piano Solo, which Copland called ‘harsh and repellent’; it’s a pity therefore we only hear the second section, Cantabile to which those words can hardly apply. The ballet Show (The Guests) is heard in a reconstruction by Leonard Lehrman. It was the only time the composer was to work with choreographer Jerome Robbins, but the seven tracked pieces here show a pleasing variety of expression. There’s a piece redolent of 20s Jazz ‘n’ Blues with torch song hues, another with Latino drive – a strangely forward-looking West Side Story number, perhaps? – and a splendidly calm cantabile cut. There’s a role for two speakers - Lehrman and Helene Williams, though they’re too distantly balanced, singly or together. This is well worth listening to, even in its more generic moments.
There are a few occasional pieces from the 50s and 60s, but these are really little more than musical haiku, in the circumstances.
All the pieces except the Piano Sonata were recorded live. The location was the same, the Lefrak Auditorium of Queen’s College, City University of New York in Flushing. It’s a rather distant sound throughout – not impossibly but somewhat distractingly. The contentious numbers are the primary focus here, but Show makes the most of its nineteen-minute length and should titillate the sympathetic listener, as should quite a bit else.
Jonathan Woolf
