Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Sonata in G Minor, Op.19
Soloists: Harvey Shapiro (cello); Earl Wild (piano)
Nonesuch Records, printed in U.S.A.
Sonata in G Minor, Op. 19
1st movement: Lento: Allegro moderato
2nd movement: Allegro scherzando
3rd movement: Andante
4th movement: Allegro mosso
In case you missed last week’s missive, I welcomed a guest contributor to this blog to discuss Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the mysteries of the bassoon—please do check out the podcast episode with Juilliard Bassoonist Morgan Davison. And here’s the weekly shameless plug of my other little digital baby, smART Magazine, at www.smartbylighthouse.com. We’re just about wrapping up Issue #2 at the moment and I’m really proud of what we’re putting together—can’t wait to share it with you on December 4th—please and thank you for checking out Issue #1 in the meantime.
In 1901 the school of late-Romanticism was still very much the norm, the neutral center of a musical expression that was still dominated by Tchaikovsky and Brahms—both lately deceased but very much alive in musical terms. Wagner’s was still to an extent the “music of the future”, and the hot arguments between Wagnerians and the proponents of Brahms had not yet grown dated (even a Bernard Shaw—then a young sixties, ruled in France), and the pupils of the late César Franck were in the musical news; the young Debussy was between composing his orchestral Nocturnes and La Mer. The new Impressionist music was in full bloom. In Germany, there was that young firebrand Richard Strauss, nearing the end of his great series of controversially “modern” tone-poems. Mahler had completed four of his symphonies; Schoenberg had written his impetuously expressive Verklärte Nacht, for string sextet (he was still far from serialism). In the North, Sibelius was at work—and there was young Rachmaninoff. “” Edward Canby, notes for the recording
The month-long tour of Russian composers, to wrap up the year, continues this week with Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in G Minor. The main take-way for me is realizing that my absolute favourite piece of music on cello comes by way of a composer whose primary means of expression was on the piano. And by that I mean the fourth movement of this Sonata: a concentrated labour in beauty wrapped in long rhapsodic lines on cello. A fortuitous encounter, early in 2018, with the Alisa Weilerstein and Inon Barnatan recording, absolutely won me over and I’ve been searching for it on vinyl every since.
Once in a while I’ll hear a snippet, or be reminded of that closing movement’s main theme and get swept up in it. A heap of gratitude to cellist Arlen Hlusko who took up my suggestion about a month ago for a solo-cello excerpt of this theme as part of her truly impressive regimen of practise videos and short performance clips on Insta @celloarlen. Her rendition is a pure distillation of the cello’s part.
For every bravura piano passage in this sonata, there are pages of total pianistic cooperation with the cello—the piano figurations black and thick on the printed page, yet sounding, under a master’s hands, almost like the gentle murmurings of L’Après-midi d’un faune. It is, indeed, a very special kind of ensemble piano sound.
“” Edward Canby, notes for the recording
Because it’s Rachmaninoff and because the piano dispenses routine fireworks throughout, the critic’s spotlight is often on the piano’s part in this dialogue. Like other similarly-casted dialogues—here the music of Saint-Saëns comes to mind: The Swan, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Havanaise—the piano provides an intricate and spectacular scaffolding for the long marvelous pours of melodic lines on strings. Here the cello is a deep autumnal ochre, warm and withered, especially the way it yawns the above theme.
I really can’t find words to describe the feeling of fullness it brings. A description that begins to satisfy the feeling of the fourth movement—via musicologist Edward Canby—is a likewise evocation of colours: “Dark and moody as well as curiously sentimental. sullen and rhapsodic, passionate and yet strangely defensive, even dour, and often filled with a sombre preoccupation with death.” Dark, moody, curious, sentimental—would those not be rather fitting subtitles for the cello’s four strings (CGDA, in that order)? Which perhaps combine together in one word: blue.
SONG OF THE WEEK: ‘God’s Own Children’ — Obongjayar
This place is ugly
Don't let it rob you
Of your face
Of your grace
and of your body
Listening to Iron & Wine’s ‘Sodom South Georgia’ for the umpteenth time this week, I realized how relatively little I felt threatened by the repetitive "God is good” refrain. Sure I still wince a bit at that word, but that’s merely muscle memory. At bottom, the word ‘God’ has lost all its weight, a mere word along with all the rest: like kiwi, or dang, or applying leeches. I think that’s what it would mean to be a born again atheist, not to run an hide at the thought of religion, nor to fight it aimlessly and tirelessly, to instead see it in a cold clean light for what it is: a human—all too human—thing.
So why let a mere word get in the way of good music? I played the drums in my father’s church growing up, and I think that made me a much better atheist. I think an innate reverence of music is a very human thing, a predisposition for reverence that is merely hijacked for other usages.
Though it’s a bit dramatic for my taste, there is something to Nietzsche’s “Without music life would be a mistake,”—by extension of which it’s fair to say that, without art, atheism too would be a terrible mistake.
Throwback to: YR3, WEEK17 — YR2, WEEK17
Click here for the full 2020/2021 roster of selected recordings