Oscar Levant as Concerto Soloist

I decided to make a slight departure from my plan for covering the recordings made by pianist Oscar Levant for Columbia Records, collected in the eight-disc anthology A Rhapsody in Blue; the extraordinary life of Oscar Levant, by devoting a single article to the fifth and sixth CDs. The “titles” of these discs simply enumerate the composers included, which misses the significance of their contribution. What is important is that these discs present the only recordings of Levant’s concerto performances other than his classic record of George Gershwin’s concerto on the very first CD.

This “concerto collection” offers an intriguing mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The fifth CD offers two of the long-standing warhorses in the piano concerto repertoire, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 23 (first) in B-flat minor and Edvard Grieg’s Opus 16 in A minor. The sixth CD contrasts these “standards” with concertos one is unlikely to encounter at concert performances (or, for that matter, on recordings), Aram Khachaturian’s Opus 38 in D-flat major and Anton Rubinstein’s Opus 70 (fourth) in D minor. The fifth CD also includes a performance of Arthur Honegger’s E major concertino, his only composition for piano and orchestra, which he composed in 1924 after his career as a composer had been established.

The conductor for both the Khachaturian and Rubinstein concertos is Dimitri Mitropoulos. The recordings were made relatively early in his career with the New York Philharmonic (then the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York). The Khachaturian recording was made in 1950, when Mitropoulos was co-conductor with Leopold Stokowski, while the Rubinstein recording was made in 1952, after he had become Music Director. The “New York band” also appears in the recording of the Grieg concerto, made in 1947 with Efrem Kurtz conducting. Levant plays the Tchaikovsky with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1947, while the Honegger is conducted by Fritz Reiner. That recording was made in 1949 when Reiner was conducting at the Metropolitan Opera. The ensemble for the concertino is given as the “Columbia Symphony Orchestra,” which was probably a pickup group that may have included members of the Met orchestra familiar with Reiner’s conducting style.

Photograph of Fritz Reiner from the time of his recording with Oscar Levant (from Amazon.com)

Nevertheless, that short Honegger selection stands out as the jewel in the “concerto crown,” so to speak. Levant certainly gives competent accounts of Tchaikovsky and Grieg; but there is not the sense of his own “personal spin” than one encounters in many of his solo Chopin performances. The Honegger performance, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air; and that freshness probably has a much to do with Reiner (a fearless advocate of modernism past and present) as with Levant. To be fair Mitropoulos was also an adventurous conductor. (His Columbia recording of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck may have had obvious flaws; but he never short-changed the uncompromisingly visceral rhetoric.) However, there is little adventure than can be mined from either Rubinstein (Tchaikovsky’s composition teacher) or even the Armenian vigor behind much of the Khachaturian score. On these two CDs the best things come in the smallest package.

Beach Chamber Music: A First Taste

My first impression of Amy Beach's Opus 67, her F sharp minor piano quintet, was that my study of her Opus 15 Sketches did very little to prepare me for the experience. I should not have anticipated otherwise. The four Sketches, composed in 1892, fit nicely into a repertoire of short poetic works for solo piano whose origins can probably best be placed in the shorter piano works of Franz Schubert. Within that repertoire she is chronologically a contemporary of Ferruccio Busoni (about a year younger) and most likely shared with him the influences of Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and Anton Rubinstein. 1892 happens to be the publication year of Busoni's Opus 31a Konzertstück for piano and orchestra, the work with which he won the 1890 Anton Rubinstein competition in Moscow. However, while Antony Beaumont identifies Busoni's inspirational sources for this work as Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Max Reger, Beach's Sketches are more a product of exposure to nineteenth-century American salons, where many of the compositions in John Gillespie's Nineteenth-Century American Piano Music anthology were performed.

Another interesting point of chronological orientation comes from Charles Ives, who was about seven years younger than Beach and composed his set of organ variations on "America" in 1891. Ives could never seem to resist the opportunity to express his contempt for that nineteenth-century piano repertoire, whether in text or in his own approach to composition. It is therefore at least slightly ironic that, in last night's performance of Beach's piano quintet, pianist William Wellborn was joined by the Ives Quartet, so named, according to the program, out of inspiration "by the passionate, artistic commitment and unique temperament" of that composer.

The chronology of the Beach piano quintet puts it in 1907, a time when Ives was just beginning to find his own rebellious way. Beach had come a long way from the short works of 1892 and the influence of light salon entertainment. This is serious chamber music on the scale of the other piano quintets and quartets that constitute its legacy (the same legacy that Ives would later take on in beginning work on his only piano trio in 1909). However, while I felt I had a comfortable sense of context for the Sketches, I was less sure of how to establish context for this particular piano quintet (as opposed to my first encounter with Ernő von Dohnányi's Opus 1 piano quintet, which clearly used Brahms as its point of departure). Perhaps the most important thing about Beach's approach is that she seemed after a way to compose a work for five "equals," as opposed to the frequent domination of the piano resulting in a "concerto for piano and very small orchestra." One might even say that she was anticipating later twentieth-century composition with a sensitivity for the sonority of each instrument that tends to occupy the ear more than her strategies for counterpoint and harmony. (Perhaps at least some of that interest in sonority grew out of her interest in documenting bird songs.)

Most important is that there is more in this composition than could be grasped by the single occasion of last night's performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. This is a work that deserves more attention. As I mentioned on Saturday, it occupies a somewhat culminating position in the history of piano quintets and quartets; and it is also a significant contribution to the repertoire of American music at the beginning of a new century. It deserves further listening, and we would do well to strive for a better understanding of the context in which it was situated. Saturday's conjecture that Wellborn had structured the first half of his program as a gradus ad Parnassum to Beach by way of Domenico Scarlatti, Joseph Haydn, and Franz Liszt turned out not to be the case. Liszt may have been an influence for the Sketches, but the piano quintet was cut from quite another cloth. Recent concerts have done much to expand our "listening comprehension" of compositions (particularly American) from the middle of the twentieth century; we all need to learn more about what was happening at the beginning of that century.