Music and Memories - Bonus Album
Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750)
Arioso from Cantata 156 [4:29]
Henryk WIENIAWSKI (1835-1880)
Violin Concerto No.2 in D minor Op.22; Romance (1870) [4:50]
Maurice RAVEL (1875-1937)
Pièce en forme de Habanera (1907) [2:56]
Kaddish (1914) [5:07]
Anis FULEIHAN (1900-1970)
Theremin Concerto; Pastorale (1945) [4:21]
Pyotr Ilyich TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
Sérénade mélancolique Op.26 (1875) [7:38]
Berceuse, Op.72 No.2 [4:10]
Valse sentimentale, Op.51 No.6 (1882) [2:02]
Sergei RACHMANINOV (1873-1943)
Six Romances; Song of Grusia, Op.4 No.4 (1890-1893) [4:13]
Gaspar CASSADÓ (1897-1966)
Requiebros (1931) [3:38]
Clara Rockmore (theremin)
Nadia Reisenberg (piano)
rec. May 1964, WBAI Radio
ROMÉO RECORDS 7333 [44:28]
My most recent encounter with the theremin recordings of Clara Rockmore, the instrument’s greatest exponent, came in a recent release on Roméo Records twofer (7330-1: see review). The instrument’s encroachment into filmic grand guignol has tended to mark it as an example of colouristic camp but in the hands of a true exponent of the classical repertoire it retains a power of expression that can prove enriching. Too often listening to Rockmore’s preserved recordings, the combination of limited home recorded sound quality and unsuitable repertoire – the slow movement of Bach’s Double Concerto is a case in point, either overdubbed or with a sympathetic colleague like Erick Friedman – has made me decidedly queasy. The High Priestess of the Theremin quality that, unfairly or not, clings to her name is also – sometimes – an excuse for the kinds of oscillatory exaggerations on the instrument that disappoint and terrify in equal measure.
But this 44-minute ‘bonus disc’ is cut from another cloth and enshrines the best examples of Rockmore’s theremin playing I’ve heard. 2020 marks the centenary of the theremin’s invention and so the recent flurry of releases is well-timed though this one is something of an afterthought; indeed Rockmore’s nephew, Robert Sherman, issues a mea culpa for its appearance so soon after the previous twofer, when he had assumed all Rockmore’s performances had been rounded up and released.
The new disc contains a radio broadcast performance given over WBAI in May 1964 which contained, inter alia, a 40-minute recital taped in Rockmore’s apartment a few weeks earlier. The programme was presented by John Corigliano, later to become one of America’s leading composers. She was now 53 years old and introduced the items, with some small traffic noise being audible. Though her public career had ended a decade or so earlier she remained technically in control, much more so than those later quavery examples of her art.
This time she runs through the instrument’s specific ranges. She employs the cello range for the Bach Arioso, the violin range for Wieniawski’s Romance form the Second Violin Concerto – it’s a torrid reading emotively – and the different tone colours employed in Ravel’s Habanera, where she comes closest to using a kind of mute effect. Kaddish was a favourite of hers especially for its expressive quality, plainly evident here, though not as exaggerated in this performance as elsewhere. Very valuably she plays the central movement of the concerto that Anis Fuleihan wrote for her and which she premiered with Stokowski, an index both of her status as an interpreter and the theremin’s potential on the concerto stage. There is a sequence of slow, languid, legato-rich Russian pieces by Tchaikovsky and also her favourite Rachmaninov Song of Grusia, from the Six Romances. Cassadó’s Requiebros makes a vibrant closer to a delectable programme.
Jonathan Woolf
