concert review: San Francisco Symphony

[calimac]

Herbert Blomstedt was the conductor, but the first half belonged to pianist Leon Fleisher. First he took us in a genially bumptuous manner through a melancholy early Mozart concerto (K.414), which featured a truly amazing fortissimo intermezzo for audience coughers in between the second and third movements.

Then, a rare treat: Paul Hindemith's Piano (Left Hand) Music With Orchestra of 1923. The clumsy title's evasiveness was unnecssary: it is a genuine piano concerto, one of many commissioned around that time by wealthy but one-armed WWI-vet pianist Paul Wittgenstein (brother of Ludwig). The problem was that Paul W. didn't care for much of the music of his time, and when you commission works from people like Hindemith, Ravel, and Prokofiev, you'll get works by Hindemith, Ravel, and Prokofiev. Wittgenstein consented to play the Ravel, which became a standard modern classic, but the Prokofiev remained unplayed for thirty years, and the Hindemith score lay buried, literally, among other papers in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania for decades after everyone involved was dead, and was first played last fall. This was its North American premiere.

Very typical of early Hindemith, it's great fun. In the fast movements, staccato tuttis alternate with passages for the piano to rumble around, hardly sounding as if only one hand is playing it. The first movement sounds most like the Hindemith to come (he had a wonderful way with trombones); the finale reminds me of nothing so much as the then-unwritten Shostakovich First Concerto.

The slow movement in between is totally different, quiet and subdued. The piano dances decoratively around an extraordinarily long solo for English horn, followed by a shorter one for flute. The only other instruments playing are one desk of celli and a single double bass, providing subdued pizzicato harmonies.

And after intermission ... Beethoven's Fifth again, the second time I've heard it live in the past week! Offered a good chance to compare different interpretations. Flynn with the SSV was full of coiled aggressiveness; Blomstedt went straight for the power. His tempos were more moderate, he didn't draw out the fermatas as Flynn did, he even slackened a bit during the finale and barely got away with it. But the strength of the ensemble was something to behold, and they are a world-class orchestra, there's no getting around that. William Bennett did not have to invent a new oboe cadenza.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I have heard that Wittgenstein tried to sue Ravel for making it too hard, and was shamed into learning the piece when a two-handed pianist learned it (one-handed). I've never heard his recording of the piece, but I understand it's not stellar.

He learned something from it, though. I have a volume of arrangements for left hand that Wittgenstein did as part of his "School for the Left Hand," and you can see those Ravellian figurations all over it. I'd be tickled if someone would record his version of the Bach-Brahms Chaconne, because he filled it in with all these measures that look like they're out of the Ravel.

The way he does the pieces in the book, he merely expects you to strike notes five octaves apart -- usually three sets of them -- simultaneously, or nearly so. That's his answer to every technical challenge of adapting two-handed pieces for one hand. (And from what I've heard, he wasn't really up to it, so it seems to have been an exercise in self-delusion.) I am fascinated by some of the things he chose for his book -- like the Wagner-Liszt Liebestod, and the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria, which seems almost playable. Actually, I use his transcription of the Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly, because it just sounds better than the two-hand version I found in another book. Especially if you have a middle pedal. By merely dispensing with one or two or his most absurd stretches, it turns into a pretty decent transcription. (Playing it with both hands, of course, makes an even better one.)

Hmmm. Pet subject of mine. I've got a lot of left-hand stuff. I figure if I ever lose my left hand, I'll concentrate on art, and if I lose the right one, I'll work on my piano more. Well, it's a kind of plan, anyway.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

He got some pleasant chamber music out of some of the Viennese Romantics - Franz Schmidt did him a quintet for piano and wind, and I think there is a piano and strings quintet in a left-hand version, and Korngold did a suite for the same combination. Leon Fleischer did a record of some of this stuff a few years ago.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

When you said "Schmidt," I thought you must have meant Florent -- turns out they both wrote left hand stuff. I need to hear the ones you mention here; they're all on my "to find some day" list.

Have you heard Richard Strauss's pieces for piano left hand & orchestra? I have both of them in a volume of his complete orchestral works, and they're not bad. I also have Fleischer playing a concerto by Ned Rorem, as well as an album of solo pieces that has a hair-raising Strauss waltz arranged by Godowsky. Hans Kann recorded an album of the most normal left hand pieces for Musical Heritage. Sosa (blanking of the first name) recorded a two-CD set of pieces that includes Moszkowski and Lipatti, as well as Sosa's own arrangements of Bach's "Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue" and a surprisingly good one of Ravel's "La Valse." Also Saint-Saens and ten of Godowsky's Chopin etudes. (The Chopin-Godowskys are also found in with his two-hand versions of the etudes. Hobson has recorded a selection of them, and Madge did the whole thing in two volumes -- I got one of them home before realizing I only had half of the etudes, and not the half I would have chosen.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Florent is spelled Schmitt, which may help to tell them apart.

R. Strauss's "Parergon" and "Panathenaenzug" were written for P. Wittgenstein too, as you perhaps know. A search of catalogs produced a couple solo piano works for left hand by Saint-Saens (Etudes Op. 135) and Scriabin (Op. 9), predating Wittgenstein but played by him.