Best of Turkish Piano Music
Idil Biret (piano)
rec. 1965-2015, Turkey
IBA 8.504058 [4 CDs: 298]
In the breadth of her artistry and the ‘reach’ of her recording activity the Turkish pianist Idil Biret (b 1941) can be compared with Takako Nishizaki, Raphael Wallfisch, Lydia Mordkovich and Jenő Jandó. It’s bootless to list even a sampling of the diversity of her catalogue coverage. Instead, just enter her name into an MWI, Google, Amazon or ebay search and sit back. Her label, the Idil Biret Archive (IBA) - which as Jens Laurson has commented is practically a sub-label of Naxos - reaches in immersive depth and breadth into the classical repertoire and beyond. You will notice that the familial Naxos connection is reflected in the IBA’s label numerology. A pupil of Nadia Boulanger, Cortot and Kempff (who is prominent in the accompanying booklet) her recording coverage has extended beyond the ‘mainstream’ greats to Ligeti and Boulez. With the present set her multitudinous support for the music of her native country can be sampled at length.
The MWI site has, before now, surveyed the CPO recordings of the symphonies and concertos of Saygun and Erkin. This IBA/Naxos four-disc set takes us on a yet deeper dive into music for piano and orchestra and for solo piano and adds a Turkish-related piece by Liszt.
The half-hour First Piano Concerto by Saygun is the first of several live concert recordings. The 1958 sound is tolerable but not ideal. Still, the intensity of this three-movement work communicates well and the composer himself conducts. The music is heavy with intimations of doom, striving heroism, disillusioned mystery and something occasionally close to ecstasy. There’s a touch of late Frank Bridge about this (Biret counts Bridge’s Phantasm among her repertory) and even some Ravel and Cyril Scott. Thorny sour tonality is part of the picture. Be ready for some audience noise - coughs and sneezes - especially in the second movement. This intriguing work can be heard in very good sound with the Second Saygun concerto on CPO. A far better recording is the six little preludes for solo piano from the slightly more dissonant, pierrot-strange and gangly Twelve Preludes on Aksak Rhythms
Op 45 (1967). These are somewhat in the Bartók folk-stream and rhythmic interest and dissonance predominate. No 4 flirts most effectively with melody but this is the exception. The fifth confirms that Saygun’s true North is again rhythmic and tangily dissonant. The sixth is in the nature of an Allegro Barbaro. To hear the complete work (all 12) and much else by Saygun you will need to go to another Naxos disc with pianist Zeynep Űçbaşaran.
The 30-minute Piano Concerto No 1 by Çetin Işıközlü is dedicated to Biret. This composer was a pupil of Saygun in Ankara. The recording here produces no difficulties and does not smack of the archive in the way that the Saygun concerto does. Nor should it; it was taken down in 2000 in Izmir. The music inhabits a contemplative, somewhat mid-Eastern world and is less cosmopolitan than the Saygun. There’s the occasional cough but nothing to detract unduly from this unfamiliar and attractive music. It is easier to assimilate than the Saygun, although it too has its protesting and attitudinising moments. The little Ballade
Op 11 is stark and hard-pressed yet lit with lambent colours.
Muammer Sun’s Country Colours is a tougher proposition that gravitates from heroic angularity to Bartók-like dances. Both the Sun and the Işıközlü Ballade would have been revelled in by John Ogdon.
On CD 2 the compact little four-movement Erkin Piano Concerto is brisk but more romantic and directly spoken than the Işıközlü and the Saygun. The second movement has an eerie conspiratorial Hispanic feeling to it. All in all, it’s a highly attractive work with its diminutive, jazzily kinetic Bernard Herrmann-style Scherzo and contrasting glumly contemplative then hurly-burly finale. Erkin will be known to some listeners from the Naxos orchestral disc from a couple of years back. The 17-minute Erkin Sonata also has its non-tonal moments but its mysteries for me recall John Ireland and his Sarnia cycle and Ballade. Again, in the finale we encounter Hispanic ‘pepper’, at times recalling de Falla’s Noches en Los Jardines de España. The Kodalli Pieces for Children are tart little evocations of the imaginations, fears and dreams (bad dreams) of childhood. Most assuredly these playful but unindulgent and frequently chilly scores are not for playing by children. Six Preludes by İlhan Usmanbaş reflect an exploratory but sober and sombre temperament in the same firmament as the pieces by Kodalli but minus the element of extroversion.
İlhan Mimaroğlu’s Sessions is a most eccentric piece from 1977 which overlays the reading of a contract between Biret and Finnadar (of which the composer was a producer in the 1970s) with other simultaneous narration (in French and English), a garrulous and thoughtful piano score, and electronic effects and tapes of choirs and orchestra. Mimaroğlu was an avant-gardiste who evidently freed himself from most familiar musical conventions or at least established new ones. This is the sort of phantasmagoria that in other times might have fascinated Scriabin or provided him a with a new mode of expression.
CD 3: Ates Pars, in common with most of the composers showcased in this set, studied in Paris; this time with Nadia Boulanger and Vlado Perlemuter. There are twelve symphonies and four piano concertos of which this is the first. This First Concerto is in three movements and its uproarious moments, especially in the first and last movements, are reminiscent of the second and third piano concertos by Malcolm Williamson.
Breaking the pattern for a moment, Biret is joined by Ruşen Güneş, a violist whose career was etched deep in the London music scenes in the 1970s and 1980s. I recall especially his part in BBC broadcasts of Arthur Benjamin’s Romantic Fantasy and Franz Schmidt’s Quintet in A major alongside Thea King (clarinet), Jose-Luis Garcia (violin), Thomas Igloi (cello) and Clifford Benson (piano). The Pars Viola Sonata is brisk and brusque, angular and obviously virtuosic. Critics with backbone would say that Pars on this occasion wrote music that is awkward and all elbows. Pars’ harmonic world here is tough and majors on rhythmic satisfactions rather than melodic ones.
Variations on a Theme of an İstanbul Song 'Kâtibim' by Cemal Rey has a Lisztian sheen both brilliant, active and mystic. Clearly Rey is preoccupied with beauty - not a bad preoccupation. He follows an old-fashioned template in casting this work as a continuous set of variations without movement divisions. The template may be old-fashioned but some of the variations do push the boat out into unusually plangent waters.
The last disc opens with Ertuğrul Oğuz Fırat‘s Six Movements for piano. These are extreme and hieratic with atonality pushed to the Nth degree. Everything is then jammed into the blender with Liszt. Movement titles such as Ecstatic Black Sea Fisherman, Scorpion Wedding, On the Frontier of the Unknown and Waiting for the Barbarians. Allegro barbaro hint at Firat’s predilections. Again, this music with its protesting demonstrations and fulminating statements would have been relished by John Ogdon. Court judge, poet, painter and composer, it comes as no surprise to find Firat aligned with and working alongside his friend İlhan Mimaroğlu. Six Movements is a big 50+ minute work and its last segment begins with a sharp whack-slap of wood on wood. I mentioned Liszt and Firat earlier on. Firat’s A Tribute to Franz Liszt takes Liszt’s Totentanz and its ‘Dies Irae’ (both indelibly memorable to me as a 1970s BBC broadcast by Ronald Smith with the BBCNSO conducted by Norman Del Mar) as an Eintritt. Biret piles it high with the most feral difficulties which are arpeggiated and stacked high on the stilts of shock and awe. Firat, who died in 2014, really should have met Conlon Nancarrow. What Firat could have done with one of Nancarrow’s super-engineered player-pianos, we will never know but we can speculate. Biret finally gives us rare real Liszt unenamelled, in the shape of the Grande paraphrase de la Marche de Donizetti pour le Sultan Abdul-Medjid Khan, S403. It’s also to be found on CD29 of Heward’s Liszt traversal (Hyperion). Biret’s account toils magnificently and, I would expect, takes the listener to worlds distant from Donizetti’s original. In fact, its Aida-style march at 3:30 certainly links arms with the Italian composer’s bel canto so it’s not all terra incognita. It’s another fantastic and phantasmal fun piece; pretty too.
The notes are essential in a set with this type of coverage. They are good at telling us about Biret and about each of the ten composers although so far as the ten are concerned the narrative amounts to a cherry-picked kernel which is enough further to whet the curiosity. The 20-page booklet is purposefully decorated with attention-holding photographs from Biret’s career. Over the years she played with orchestras conducted by Monteux, Stokowski and Scherchen among many others.
Biret immerses the listener in the very largely unknown world of Turkish music of the last century and amply rewards those prepared to take the deep plunge. The set’s national orientation is uncompromisingly confirmed by the box-cover being adorned by a photograph of Kemal Atatürk A brave choice, and it is eloquent testimony to the integrity of IBA and the questing spirit and the high virtuosic and poetic skills of Idil Biret. Perhaps we could dwell in a moment of regret that we get to see so few of the Turkish composers whose music we will be hearing probably for the first time on these four discs.
Rob Barnett
Contents
CD 1 [75]
Ahmed Adnan Saygun (1907-1991)
Piano Concerto No 1, Op 34
Orchestre de l'Association des Concerts Colonne/Ahmet Adnan Saygun (live)
Excerpts from 12 Preludes on Aksak Rhythms, Op 45
Çetin Işıközlü (b.1939)
Piano Concerto No 1, Op 15
İzmir State Symphony Orchestra/Rengim Gökmen
Ballade, Op 11
Muammer Sun (1921-2021)
Sun: Country Colours Bk II
CD 2 [72]
Ulvi Cemal Erkin (1906-1972)
Piano Concerto [23:52]
Cumhurbaşkanlığı Senfoni Orkestrası/Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (live)
Piano Sonata [16:36]
Nevit Kodallı (1924-2009)
Ostinato - Five Pieces for Children
İlhan Usmanbaş (b.1921)
Preludes (6) for Piano
İlhan Mimaroğlu (1926-2012)
Session
Arthur Levy (narrator), Steve Goldstein (narrator), John Kalodner (narrator),
CD 3 [75]
Cemal Reşit Rey (1904-1985)
Variations on a Theme of an İstanbul Song 'Kâtibim'
Orchestra conducted in Munich by Hikmet Şimşek
Ateş Pars (b.1942)
Piano Concerto No 1, Op 64
Antalya State Symphony Orchestra/Burak Tüzün
Viola Sonata, Op 57 (live)
Ruşen Güneş (viola)
CD 4 [76]
Ertuğrul Oğuz Fırat (1923-2014)
Movements (6), for Piano, Op 86
A Tribute to Franz Liszt, Op 77
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Grande paraphrase de la Marche de Donizetti pour le Sultan Abdul-Medjid Khan, S403
Published: October 11, 2022
