Friday 30 March 2018

Dancing to Death and Destruction

Sergei Rachmaninoff ended his compositional career with his Op. 45, the Symphonic Dances.  I've just been to a concert performance of this amazing work, and have been forcefully reminded that it truly baffles many music lovers.  I've no doubt that many people came to yesterday's concert expecting something easily relatable to the most popular of Rachmaninoff's works, the second and third piano concertos.

Well, you can forget that idea right away.  Symphonic Dances bears some resemblance to the fourth piano concerto (the least-often heard), but far less that ties it to the composer's earlier, lusher, more romantic style of music.

Instead, what we get is the classic Rachmaninoff world heavily infiltrated -- or even invaded -- by the harmonic and especially the rhythmic innovations of Stravinsky found in The Rite of Spring and Petrouchka.

No doubt in my mind, though -- Symphonic Dances ranks as one of Rachmaninoff's finest and most powerful achievements, a work which deserves the widest currency.  In a way, I'm surprised that he chose not to call it a "symphony."  I suspect many other composers would have done just that, both because of the scale and scope of the music (it lasts about 35 minutes in performance) and because of its weight and degree of thematic integration.

I've been fortunate in one respect.  Since I first fell in love with Symphonic Dances, I've managed to hear it performed live three times by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, for whom this challenging and complex work has become a definite calling card.  Even better, one of those performances was preserved in a fine live-to-disc recording, paired with The Rite of Spring, and this CD is a firm favourite in my collection.

The first movement opens with a persistent rhythmic figure which sounds for all the world like the ringing of sleigh bells, although no bells are in use.  A series of emphatic staccato chords launches the main theme.  If this indeed is a dance, then it's a weighty and ponderous one, with its obsessive descending triad figure rapidly played over and over.  Much of the music is written in the low registers, especially for the strings, which increases the sense of heaviness.  The central section of the music brings relief in a lyrical melody for alto saxophone, a melody which begins with a rising triad figure.  The opening then returns and the dance is repeated fortissimo before dying down into a slow coda of celestial-sounding chords and melody high up in the registers of the instruments.  A few last reminiscences of the main theme quietly end the movement.

The second movement is an undoubted dance, but plainly (to me, at least), a dance of death.  A series of thematic fragments form an introduction, and out of this gradually emerges a waltz.  The waltz theme is made up of numerous wide leaps from high to low notes (or vice versa); the leaps give the music a disjointed and uneasy character.  As the movement progresses, the waltz is accompanied or elaborated with a series of wildly skirling counterpoints on various wind instruments.  It all seems to me to be the perfect illustration of a haunted ballroom full of spectral ghosts swirling about.  At the end, the waltz speeds up, the rhythms fall apart, and the last wisps of music vanish into thin air.

The three-part finale opens with an emphatic full chord, followed by a series of descending minor thirds.  At once, the outline of a rapid movement in 9/8 time emerges, with tolling bells.  Very soon, we hear the descending outline of the Gregorian plainchant Dies irae, a musical motif of great emotional power in several of Rachmaninoff's works.  The dance that now emerges is a frantic whirlwind of a scherzo, with descending lines full of dotted rhythms and much use of the percussion, all driven onwards by the fast tempo.  A frantically energetic coda ends with a sudden silence. 

The music then relaxes into a middle section with the last, and perhaps greatest, of Rachmaninoff's lush, slow melodies.  Then the dance returns, punctuated frequently by the Dies irae motif.  But now another theme begins to emerge in snippets.  An Easter hymn of the Russian Orthodox Church, it was set for choir by Rachmaninoff in his early masterpiece, the All-Night Vigil (commonly called Vespers in the English-speaking world).  The text of the hymn describes the emotions of those who arrived at the tomb of Christ on Easter morning and found it empty, because the Lord had risen.

The Dies irae and the hymn engage in an uproar of battle between darkness and light while the incessant scherzo races onward, until the hymn emerges triumphant.  To aggressive snare drum rhythms, we now hear the hymn complete, with the theme nudged by frequent dotted notes.  Emphases and phrase breaks fly all over the map, as the demonic rhythmic scheme breaks into fragments at the assault of the Easter hymn.  As the Orthodox melody reaches its end, the orchestra again erupts into the frantic chordal coda, and the work ends in an uproar of off-beat chords and heavy percussion, with a massive stroke on the tam-tam having the final word.

I can't help wondering if Rachmaninoff knew that this would be his final complete work.  If so, that might explain the incredible intensity of the battle between darkness and light in the last movement, a battle which still ends unresolved as the music explodes apart.  Whatever the truth of the matter, I remain completely convinced that Symphonic Dances is one of the greatest, and most unsettling, masterpieces of twentieth century music.

Monday 26 March 2018

Symphonic Fantasy

Recently, I met an old friend who I had not seen for some years, and he mentioned that I had been rather neglecting this blog.  He was absolutely right.  And here I am again.

My subject today is a work which is well-known to lovers of piano music, but rarely heard by others unless they go to some trouble to seek it out.  For one thing, there aren't too many pianists out there who are rushing to dive into the repertoire for piano duo (4 hands at one instrument) or for 2 pianos.

A few years back, I wrote about Joseph Joachim's orchestration of Schubert's largest masterpiece for the piano duo, the so-called Grand Duo sonata in C major. (read it here: Was It Or Wasn't It...?)

Today's work has never, as far as I know, been orchestrated by anyone, but I know that I am not alone in feeling that it cries out for orchestral treatment.  Details will follow.

This work is but one of the many miracles accomplished by Schubert in the last year of his life, prior to his passing at the untimely age of 31.  I'm referring to the Fantasy in F Minor, again composed for piano duo, and one of the supreme masterpieces -- not just of the duo repertoire, but of all music.  Any music lover who has not yet encountered this work is missing out on a remarkable experience.

The form almost exactly echoes that of the earlier Wanderer Fantasy for solo piano.  Four movements, arranged as fast-slow-scherzo-fugue, are linked together to be played as a continuous unit.  But it's not just a question of physical linkage.  The musical cells from which the themes are constructed carry across from movement to movement, and the slow, pensive opening theme returns as a motto several times through the first movement and again in the finale.

That description scarcely hints at the entire world which Schubert brings to life in this masterly composition, which lasts barely 20 minutes in performance.  Again, I am not alone in feeling that the grand scale of the ideas suggests a much longer work.

The work opens with a pensive theme in a characteristic dotted rhythm, set against a murmuring accompaniment.  Contrasting musical ideas alternate between the many reiterations of the opening, set each time in a different key.  One of the contrasting ideas is an angrier rising and falling melody played in contest with repeated octaves hammered out in falling pairs, and then turning into a triplet melody in octaves. 

And it is the octaves which lead into the dark world of the slow movement.  Here a typical "French overture" dotted rhythm in slow time thunders its way chordally along, erupting from time to time into cascades of triplet octaves.  It ends on a cadential pause -- and the completion of the cadence comes in the opening chord of the scherzo.

This third section is a little brighter in mood, but it always strikes me as the kind of Olympian jollity that's explosive and dangerous to handle -- Jove in one of his more playful moods, perhaps.  Quieter phrases are set side by each with bigger eruptions of energy, and the characteristic octaves appear again -- at the top of the harmony to "accompany" a theme heard in the lower registers.  Another furious ascent in octaves leads to yet another cadential pause, played very loudly.

This time, a total surprise, the completion is the gentle opening of the first movement, which leads us by familiar paths up to the point where the angry rising and falling melody had previously appeared.  What we get now is a powerful fugue, based on a 3-note motif from the opening pensive melody.  This fugue is densely structured (theme and counter-subject are played simultaneously at the outset), and filled with purposeful energy despite its moderate tempo.  Despite quieter passages, it never for a moment loses sight of its role, which is to provide the crown and glory of this huge edifice.

The fugue builds up by degrees to a magnificent peroration which -- surprisingly -- introduces two brand new musical ideas we have not heard before.  As the fugue approaches its conclusion, the modulations grow more and more startling until the music hurtles to a dead stop on the strangest and strongest suspended cadence yet.

After a pause, the main theme resumes, but at once turns into the short but dramatically intense coda, in which one player strikes and holds the first chord of the final cadence while the other plays an astounding chain of four modulations, almost shocking in context.  Only then can the music settle gently through the cadence onto the completed chord of F minor to bring this musical epic to its appointed end.