It can never be easy being a composer for, as historian Jacob Burckhart
points out, to achieve immortality a composer's music needs to be played
after his death while an artist's paintings remain in museums for the public
to see forever. Since new composers will always understandably want their
time on the stage the result is that fewer composers from the past get to be
heard by future generations. Perhaps that was the fear behind the agonised
outpouring of Rachmaninov when he said 'I feel like a ghost wandering in a
world grown alien' adding that 'I cannot cast out the old way of writing,
and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense efforts to feel the
musical manner of today, but it will not come to me'. He obviously felt that
while his compatriots Stravinsky and Prokofiev were 'moving with the times'
he couldn't and therefore after his death his music would fall out of
fashion and be forgotten.
Over seventy years after his death we can say that his fear has not been
realised and that his immortality seems assured. Perhaps it is perverse then
to consider that Medtner's position is more precarious when he was far less
troubled by the same fears that stalked his friend. He resolutely and
fearlessly stuck to his ideas on composition which he defended in his
writings. One can easily imagine him in musical terms embracing the
sentiment behind the statement that Lillian Hellman made concerning her
appearance before the HUAC (House UnAmerican Activities Committee) in 1952:
'I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions
...' As David Fanning points out in his booklet notes this led to those who
were not enamoured of his music to regard him as being 'hopelessly out of
touch'. This, coupled with his not becoming the champion of his own music in
the same way as Rachmaninov by pursuing the same kind of performing career,
also did him no favours. It was only the improbable intervention of the
Maharajah of Mysore that initially assured the appearance on disc of some of
his works. Fortunately his music is steadily becoming more widely known
these days but it still has a long way to go before it achieves a status
similar to that enjoyed by Rachmaninov's works. Once you have entered
Medtner's world it is difficult not to recognise his style though there are
often considerable similarities to those of his friend.
It is well documented that Russians who are forced to go into exile
experience a particular longing for their native country. That can often be
discerned in the music though the famous 'Russian soul' is imprinted in so
much of its music anyway as it is in the first of Medtner's Skazka from his
op.20 that opens this disc. David Fanning notes that Medtner suggested to a
pupil that it should be played 'as if appealing to someone with a fervent
entreaty' and indeed that is the sentiment that strongly comes across. The
second is also highly descriptive with the bell in its title clearly ringing
throughout its length.
As well as around three dozen Skazki, a genre Medtner was particularly
fond of, he wrote fourteen piano sonatas; his Sonata Romantica is the
twelfth of them. He composed it in 1930 and dearly wished to record it; a
wish that unfortunately was never realised. The overriding impression
Medtner's music leaves is its deceptive simplicity which is the feature that
is most appealing to me. Here the waltz-like opening theme is soon taken to
darker places. The second movement is a fast-paced scherzo that has
suggestions of a Cossack dance while the third, slow movement, though
shorter has a lot going on within its 200 second span. The long final
movement seeks to summarise what has gone before by determinedly
intertwining the various themes, making for dense passages demanding a great
deal from the soloist. It was a revelation to me when I 'discovered' Medtner
and I love everything of his I've heard.
Rachmaninov, as noted above, was full of self-doubt and when it was not
concerning his inability to grasp the 'new' way of writing it was about the
music itself. He suffered terribly following the catastrophic reception of
his First Symphony which caused a kind of writers' block for some time. When
it comes to the
Variations on a theme of Corelli, the only piano
work he wrote after leaving Russia shortly after the Revolution in December
1917, he was equally dissatisfied with it. When he performed it he often
omitted some of the variations. In fact as the booklet notes remind us the
theme, though used by Corelli in his violin sonata no.12, is not his own
composition but the old dance melody La Folia which over the course of 300
years crops in as many as 150 composers' works, including those of Lully,
Marin Marais, Alessandro Scarlatti, Geminiani, Handel, Bach and Liszt. That
aside Rachmaninov's set of twenty variations is a brilliantly inventive one
that extracts so much of the essence of the original that each variation is
an absolutely unique piece in which the listener seems to be hearing echoes
of the source for the first time every time.
A further example of Rachmaninov's lack of self-confidence is his mighty
second piano sonata in B flat minor. He wrote it in 1913 but conducted a
major revision of it in 1931 cutting a great deal of what he considered to
be repetitive or over-elaborate. As David Fanning says, there has been a
great deal of discussion among performers and musicologists as to the
relative merits of each version and different performers select which they
prefer playing. In addition they can opt for Horowitz's own conflation of
the two versions or even, as pianist Steven Osborne has done, they can
create their own which he has done here. It was fascinating to read Steven
Osborne's explanation as to why he felt driven to make his own performing
edition saying he felt that Rachmaninov's 1931 version created more problems
than it solved. He also remarks that Horowitz's conflation was a more
satisfactory distillation of the composer's ideas than either of the
composer's own but that it still contained things which could be improved
upon. Another really interesting point Osborne makes is that doing so seemed
'like a natural extension of the interpretive process'. He points out that
performers used to do so a lot more. He puts that down to the fact that
there were a lot more composer-performers like Rachmaninov (and to a lesser
extent Medtner) than there are today when composers perform their own works
publicly a lot less than in the past and regard their works as sacrosanct
and not to be tampered with. In fact there are plenty of examples where
works would benefit greatly from such a process and might even help increase
their popularity.
What one can say is that Steven Osborne has made his performing edition
out of love for the work, one of his favourite pieces to play, and has
created a fantastically thrilling and ultimately enjoyable version of which
one feels that Rachmaninov would have thoroughly approved. It is also, as
you listen to it in the kind of detail one has to in order to review it, a
profound experience and justification for Rachmaninov's music in spite of
his own self doubt - if it were ever needed. It is indeed fortunate that he
did not find ways of 'casting out the old way and acquiring the new'; that
could be left to the likes of Stravinsky and Prokofiev who were brilliant in
their own right but who couldn't have created the fabulous music Rachmaninov
did any more than he could create works similar to theirs. If he were able
to know what people feel today he would find that his music has not only
passed the test of time but is appreciated more widely and performed more
often than he could ever have imagined. This state of affairs will remain so
well into the foreseeable, and likely into the unforeseeable, future. The
sonata is pure emotion and, as David Fanning sums it up, full of 'desperate
passion and transcendental sadness' and no one could express than better in
music than the composer personified by Stravinsky as the 'six and a half
foot long scowl'. While the music speaks for itself Osborne plays everything
on the disc magnificently making the best and most cogent case for the music
of these two not dissimilar composers who remained friends for all their
lives despite their living so far apart.
Steve Arloff
