Hélène Grimaud BEETHOVEN Concerto No. 5 "Emperor" / Piano Sonata No. 28

The French pianist Hélène Grimaud is one of the most sagacious of today's keyboard artists - a philosopher at the concert grand. Now she has taken on one of the greatest works of the piano literature, Beethoven's “Emperor" Concerto. The result is a major event. Without pathos Grimaud delivers the contemporary update on a classic. She gives you thoughts, reflections and ideas instead of blood, sweat and tears. And yet the last piano concerto of the Bonn master, in her hands, is a work of musical extremes, a journey of the soul through the vales of worldly despair and over the peaks of ideologies. A musical journey to a world viewed from a melancholic interior, time-travelling from Beethoven's to ours. She makes music into one of the great struggles of our time.

Sound for Hélène Grimaud is space for thought - a place where everything is possible. It also means taking the world apart in order to put it back together in a new form. And that's precisely what she does, while remaining true to her idol Ludwig van Beethoven. There is no composer who described the current zeitgeist better than he did, none who went as far in extending existing formal boundaries in order to describe the struggle between the individual and the world order.
 Following a concert, the musician explains why the composer is one of her heroes: “He had to struggle with the problem of living at a time of discord, riven with disruption and contradiction. Truths that held one day were already passé the next. But none of that prevented Beethoven, ill, nearly deaf, from holding fast to his musical universalism. He was ready to overturn old forms and conventions in order to find new ones. It was not the world that was 'out of joint', but the language used to make sense of it." For Grimaud, this is the real challenge of Beethoven for our time: the doubting individual views a world gone awry. To bring it back under control Beethoven needed music.

“One can hear the struggle in Beethoven's compositions, his wrestling with every note, with every chord. He conceived the world in a way that I find absolutely contemporary, not to say modern. We too live in a world that we can hardly comprehend, one in which confusion exceeds our grasp of its overriding complexities. We too are desperately longing to give form to this world. Beethoven showed us that working to repair the fissures and flaws in human existence can result in beautiful music. He strove for a heaven on earth. He was always prepared to stand the world on its head."

For a long time, Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto was interpreted as a heroic battle painting. Of course, Grimaud also hears galloping horses and the carnage of battle in the “Emperor" Concerto, and of course it also represents for her a piece of contemporary history - not a historical illustration of the past but rather of “philosophy cast in music, a philosophy that sets out to neutralize human contradictions". And this calls for a show of strength.
“Beethoven is one of the most fascinating of all period-spanning composers", says Grimaud. “Of course he was formed by the classical figures of the Viennese School, he not only brought their ideas to culmination, especially in the Fifth Piano Concerto, but also broke new ground." This development can also be heard in the Sonata op. 101, dedicated to Beethoven's pupil Dorothea von Ertmann, which Grimaud has chosen to complement the concerto.

Beethoven in his symphonies and piano concertos has fused the private with the political, the internal with the external, and it is this individualized, almost literary view of the single human being in the world that fascinates the pianist: “When you read Beethoven's letters, you get to know someone with misanthropic tendencies, who often reacted brusquely and rudely, who was easily disillusioned and offended by others - but, at the same time, in his sensibility, developed an incredible strength. Even as questionable as Beethoven's behaviour may at times have seemed, he firmly believed that things could also be different - that they could be better. His music is marked by these assertions and disappointments, and by an endless sense of hope. He formulated the ambivalence of every individual - and because of that Beethoven's music reaches us."

Something genuinely new in her Beethoven interpretations is Grimaud's handling of the composer's effects, which for her are never an end in themselves but extreme pronouncements: “I think that the real idea of Beethoven's music is found where the extremes collide", she says. “It's not about hollow pathos or empty, unquestioningly marching heroism, not about misanthropic melancholy or a concomitant world-weariness." Grimaud in her interpretations prefers to listen for the overtones, to expound theses in order immediately to develop antitheses.

Monumentality in her playing is entirely subjugated to the search for meaning. “The piano concerto is like a beast", says Grimaud, “for whom one has incredible respect. You study it - and in the end this beast reveals itself as a teacher. As a teacher who challenges you to consider things for yourself, who, through the overwhelming form the interpreter has to deal with, forces one to reflect on one's own contradictions and bring them into an individual form - to transcend one's own limits and toss old preconceptions overboard. Beethoven compels the artist to acquire knowledge, because in his music the emotional is developed out of philosophical logic. With emotion alone, one doesn't get very far."
 When you hear Grimaud's “Emperor", the work's heroic attributes take on a new significance. For this pianist, heroes aren't found on the battlefield. Her heroes attempt to bring order to the world as they find it. To save the world, they call themselves into question. Grimaud's new Beethoven also represents the birth of a wise new hero.

Gustavo Dudamel / Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra BRUCKNER - SIBELIUS - NIELSEN

Gustavo Dudamel met the Gothenburg Symphony by pure chance; he replaced an indisposed Neeme Järvi for concerts in Birmingham and at the London Proms in August 2005. Sibelius was of course on the bill, a composer closely associated with the orchestra ever since he conducted it over a 100 years ago. It was Dudamel’s first encounter with Scandinavian music and he developed a taste for it that led to further discoveries, including the symphonies of Carl Nielsen, when he started his tenure as the orchestra’s Music Director in 2007. During their years together, Dudamel and the Gothenburg Sym­phony have championed the two Nordic masters not only in Gothenburg but also in Stockholm, Bonn, Hamburg, Brussels, Amsterdam, Valencia, the Canary Islands and Vienna. The combination of Latin passion and a profound understanding of tradition have breathed new life into this wonderful music. The international audience in Bonn, Germany, was overwhelmed after a performance of Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony at the Beethoven Fest: “Conducting very precisely and without a score, Gustavo Dudamel charged the Adagio with enormous tension, and the following finale with its timpani duel was performed with great drive” (General-Anzeiger Bonn). Scandinavian recognition of the highest order was bestowed on Gustavo Dudamel and the orchestra by the respected critic Carl-Gunnar Åhlén after a Stockholm performance of Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony: “Neither on record nor in concert have I experienced his Fifth Symphony so boundlessly expressive, so clearly detailed, so dreaming in its introduction and so life-affirming in its final course of events” (Svenska Dagbladet).

It’s interesting to note that the symphonies in this compilation were actually created within a 30-year span. Bruckner’s last masterpiece, his Ninth Symphony, that fascinating block-built titanic culminant of his total production, was left unfinished at his death in 1896, while Carl Nielsen’s controversial and radical Fifth Symphony received its premiere performance in 1922. All works explore, in different ways, the seemingly endless timbral possibilities of the late 19th-century symphony orchestra, from Bruckner’s massive tutti chords and Sibelius’s mysterious wind and string passages to Nielsen’s innovative and sometimes almost manic use of percussion (timpani and snare drum) underlining his bold visions.

Sibelius and Nielsen may be obvious composers in the Gothenburg Symphony’s repertoire, but it is also an orchestra with a solid Bruckner tradition. Gustavo Dudamel has talked about the sonorous qualities of this orchestra’s way with the Austrian master, as have other Bruckner luminaries who have worked with the orchestra. Among them, Bruckner’s pupil Franz Schalk and late 20th-century Bruck­nerians like Rudolf Kempe, Heinz Wallberg and, above all, Otmar Suitner, who conducted fourteen Bruckner concerts with the Gothenburg Symphony. Dudamel has performed both the Seventh and Ninth symphonies with the orchestra, and after a performance of the latter he talked appreciatively about the Gothenburg Symphony’s dark, dramatic sound mirroring Bruckner’s intentions. The deeply religious composer worked on the symphony’s finale to the very end, but he was a slow worker. When finishing the Adagio, he wrote: “I have fulfilled my mission on earth, I’ve done it to the best of my ability, and I only wish one thing: that I would have been allowed to finish my ninth symphony! Three movements are almost finished, the Adagio is almost fully composed, only the finale remains to be concluded. May death not take this pen from my hand before that.” But it did. Bruckner died on 11 October, going over the sketches of the finale that very day. Several attempts have been made to finish the movement, and interesting as they may be, we will never know what Bruckner really had in mind. It is a three-movement torso – and a magnificent one at that – to be appreciated in all its unfinished glory.

The Gothenburg Symphony first played the Second Symphony by Sibelius in 1907. The work had absolutely mesmerized the orchestra’s principal conductor at the time, the composer and pianist Wilhelm Stenhammar, who led the orchestra from 1907 to 1922. He wrote to Sibelius about the “won­ders you have fetched from unconscious and inexpressible depths”, and the composer repaid the compliment by conducting the Second Symphony on all three occasions when he visited Gothenburg in 1911, 1915 and 1925.

When Sibelius conducted the symphony on his second visit in 1915, disaster was close at hand. He had rehearsed the orchestra successfully in the morning and afternoon of 24 March, and was in an excellent mood. The concert was set at 8 pm. As the hour approached Sibelius was nowhere to be found. A desperate search was organized and the composer was found at one of the city’s choice restaurants, devouring oysters and wine. He was brought back in time for the concert. His wife Aino sat in the audience, fearing the worst, and a few seconds after the first upbeat Sibelius tapped the music stand with his baton signalling a restart, somehow believing he was still in rehearsal. The music moved on, however, and the concert turned out to be a formidable success with standing ovations and resounding hurrahs. Yet, Sibelius was aware of the mishap, and when he left the concert hall he suddenly took out a whisky bottle from his inside pocket and threw it down the stairs where it shattered into a thousand splinters.

The Second Symphony has since become something of a signature piece for the Gothenburg Symphony. The orchestra has performed it 136 times to date, the last five under Gustavo Dudamel.

Carl Nielsen had a long and intimate association with the Gothenburg Symphony. He was invited to conduct his own works by Stenhammar and introduced the Fourth Symphony, “The Inextinguishable”, to the Gothenburg audiences on 5 April 1918, two years after its first performance. This vital and powerful music, a hymn to life – “music is life”, stated Nielsen in a comment on the symphony –, scared and seduced the listeners in equal measure, but they were impressed by the grand design and some beautiful episodes. Stenhammar and Nielsen became close friends. They discussed aesthetics and musical matters, and shared experiences as composers and conductors. When Stenhammar needed time to compose in 1918, he called on Nielsen to stand in as deputy conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony. Nielsen held this position in the autumn of 1918, and conducted the orchestra for several weeks annually until 1922. Altogether, Nielsen conducted 48 concerts with the Gothenburg Symphony from 1914 to 1930. On 21 October 1919 he wrote to his wife: “Now I’ve had a rehearsal with the orchestra and it is truly artistically rewarding to play with these people, because they are sensitive to my smallest intention and show me such great respect that I’m almost embarrassed.” He conducted his controversial Fifth Symphony on 8 March 1922, and the reviewer was somewhat baffled: “Surprises are to be expected from Carl Nielsen, but his latest symphony, the Fifth, almost presents too many . . . but the purely lyrical passages were so beautiful that one has to express great admiration for the composer” (Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning).

These live recordings capture the commitment, energy and joy of the original concerts with Gustavo Dudamel and the Gothenburg Symphony, but they also transcend to something else, which Dudamel has noted: “A recording is like a picture, you know, for memory.”

OSVALDO GOLIJOV La pasión según San Marcos

La Pasión Según San Marcos by Osvaldo Golijov transports us to an imagined world where different styles of music, languages, singers and dancers intermingle to create a vibrant musical drama infused with many elements of Latin America's diverse cultures. This unique Pasión is set in the form of a Brazilian or Caribbean Lenten celebration taking place in the streets. News of the drama that is unfolding is passed on by voices and drums, the traditional instruments of those who were carried off from Africa to be slaves in the Americas. Golijov's Pasión evokes Brazilian samba, Cuban salsa, Spanish flamenco and Argentine tango through its creative use of percussion, brass, guitar and accordion. It is a highly innovative composition in an artistically stylized form, but it clearly draws its inspiration from the hybrid character of today's Latin American cultures. 

In addition to the surprising mix of musical styles, different singers and dancers, both male and female, portray the roles of the main characters--Jesus, Judas, Mark and Peter. The role-switching by different soloists might be confusing at first, but it is also an intriguing device that makes the piece unique not only for its music but for its new interpretation of the biblical story itself. Golijov's conception and his music are quite original, but the cultural context of his creative team of performers--it is the Schola Cantorum chorus from Venezuela and the other Latin American musicians, drummers, and dancers--that gives his Pasión its transforming force. The use of drums and dance infuses this Pasión with Afro-American expressions and the spirit of Latin America's syncretic form of Christianity. The role of the performers, either in music, song or dance, is an affirmation that African beliefs are still surviving there. 

Because of its large black population Brazil is very close to its African roots, despite the racial mixing that has taken place. Afro-Brazilians, like their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas, were very quick to adapt their native religious practices and beliefs to Christianity during the colonial era, combining the Lucumi-Yoruba religious rites, for example, with Catholic ritual. In Brazil those religious practices have different names, Condomblé in Bahía, Macumba or Umbanda in Río de Janeiro, and Xangó in Recife, but they are all variants of the Condomblé. Historically Condomblé was not only a spiritual practice, but also a form of resistance to the dominant white society. Despite strong opposition by civil and religious authorities, the creative acts of self-conscious African slaves and their descendants made possible the emergence and growth of these Afro-Brazilian religions. In time those practices went beyond social class and ethnicity and became popular among the general population. 

In Condomblé, as in the Catholic Church, you have a spiritual guide or priest, named babalåo-orishá or pai de santo or mae de santo (father or mother of the saint) who acts as the intermediary between the orishas, or gods, and their followers. In their syncretic form, the orishas are often a combination of African gods and Catholic saints. However, the orishas are very different from the concept of Catholic saints because they have more earthly human characteristics. They are considered to be superior to humans, but not necessarily morally superior. In the African tradition human beings and gods lived in the same world. The physical world is as important for the orishas as it is for the humans. Good and evil are not conceived in absolute terms but rather are related to each other since they express different aspects of the essential life force. Even the divine forces have destructive and constructive possibilities in this conception. The interplay among these forces is dramatized in religious rituals by dancers playing the role of different orishas. 

In Condomblé the supreme god and creator of the world is Olofi-Olorún, who can be identified with the Crucified Christ. However, the life force of the creator is thought to be in all creatures and things. When Olorún-Olofi was tired of ruling the earth, he turned his kingdom over to Obatalá, the king of purity and whiteness. Obatalá in Brazil is a major Yoruba deity and the father of the gods, who is sometimes identified with one of the Catholic virgins. Traditionally either a woman or a man can dance this double-sexed orisha, who is maternal and kind, but also can be an old man, a knight, a cripple or a wise man. 

In Golijov's Pasión different soloists, including both men and women, portray Jesus as if the performers were representing his different sides, much as they would do with the orishas. We also see the same performers portraying Mark, Peter and Judas, and, at one point, there is a dialogue between Jesus and Peter played by the same soloist, the Cuban singer and dancer Reynaldo Gonzalez. Another striking example of this role switching is the attempt by the singers or dancers to portray the human side of both Jesus and Judas. In this drama Judas is represented as a human in conflict and Jesus as a man with different human characteristics, perhaps demonstrating the lack of clear-cut boundaries between the sacred and the profane in the African tradition. 

"The Aria of Judas," a flamenco song sung by the Brazilian jazz singer Luciana Souza, expresses the wish of Judas to "renegar" or reject the world as it is, and to return in the future to a more truthful one. The same soloist sings "Agonia," an aria by Jesus just before his betrayal by Judas. Later, during Souza's tender rendition of Jesus' "Confession," Reynaldo Gonzalez appears in a white robe elevated above the chorus, dancing as if possessed by the holy spirit. Toward the end of the drama, Souza portrays Jesus again in his suffering, uttering his cry "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 

At the beginning of Golijov's Pasión, Deraldo Ferreira, a capoeira dancer from Brazil, plays the berimbau, a Brazilian stringed instrument, while portraying the fishermen caught in a net. After the arrest of Jesus, Ferreira performs a break dance called the "Dance of the White Sheet." Who is the dancer here? From the scriptures, we only know that he is a follower of Jesus who did not run away when the other disciples fled. Capoeira was originally a martial art form used by the slaves to defend themselves from their masters, but here it is a dance, and we need to keep in mind that the goal of dancers in the African tradition is to be possessed by the "gods" or spirits. 

The electrifying effect of introducing drums, dancing and popular songs into the biblical story is what gives Golijov's Pasión its transforming power. While most of us perceive rhythm by hearing, Afro-Americans often perceive it by movement, and rhythm is the forceful element in this musical drama that opens up new ways of understanding the crucifixion. No wonder audiences who have experienced Golijov's Pasión have jumped up from their seats at the end of the performance to applaud. It is hard to sit still when you are moved by these new rhythms and possessed by the spirit of the gospel reborn.

Maurizio Pollini 20th CENTURY

Maurizio Pollini was born in Milan on 5 January 1942. His father was the famous architect Gino Pollini, one of the leading representatives of Italian rationalism and also an expert violinist. His mother, Renata Melotti, studied piano and singing and was the sister of the well-known sculptor Fausto Melotti, who had a lasting influence on the young Pollini. In 1948 Maurizio Pollini received his first piano lessons from Carlo Lonati. From 1955 until 1959 he continued his studies with Carlo Vidusso and in 1958 he began to study composition with Bruno Bettinelli. In 1960 he was awarded first prize at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw and appeared at La Scala playing Chopin’s First Piano Concerto under Celibidache. Since then Pollini has become one of the most admired and respected pianists of our time and has appeared all over the world with leading orchestras and conductors. He is particularly renowned for his innovative concert programmes which champion works by contemporary composers and contrasts these with those of the Classical and Romantic eras. An exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist for four decades, his recordings have won innumerable awards, including Gramophone and Echo Awards, Diapason d’or, Record Academy Prize, Tokyo, and Stella d’oro as well as two Grammys.

 

More than any other leading pianist of the second half of the 20th century, Maurizio Pollini has made a point of championing radical new music. One of his principal aims in life has been to introduce new audiences to works by Nono, Boulez, Stockhausen and Sciarrino. Passionately opposed to the idea that art is a meditative medium conducive to rapt contemplation, he prefers to offer his audiences the sort of programmes whose fare is regarded by many as unpalatable or at least as taxing. The first new work he performed was Giorgio Federico Ghedini's masterly Fantasia for piano and strings, which he premiered at La Scala, Milan, on 11 October 1958 under the direction of Thomas Schippers. During the following decades he made a name for himself as a technically impeccable performer with rare powers of objective analysis and a remarkably cultured tone in a repertory extending from Bach, Beethoven and the Romantics to the most modern works. Since the 1990s he has appeared at every major music festival performing programmes of new works that he himself has planned in the form of special projects. Among the awards he has received in consequence are the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize and the Japanese Praemium Imperiale.

From the outset of his recording career, Maurizio Pollini has championed modern music - in benchmark accounts of Bartok, Boulez, Manzoni, Nono, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Webern, to which can be added his later recordings of Debussy and Berg. Here are his complete recordings of 20th-century music, brought together on a 6-CD set for the first time.

CD 1
STRAVINSKY: Three Movements from Petrushka
PROKOFIEV: Piano Sonata No. 7 in B flat major, Op. 83
WEBERN: Variations for piano, Op. 27
BOULEZ: Piano Sonata No. 2
Maurizio Pollini, piano

CD 2
NONO: Como una ola de fuerza y luz for soprano, piano, orchestra and tape
Slavka Taskova, soprano
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks / Claudio Abbado
.....sofferte onde serene... for piano and magnetic tape dedicated to Maurizio and Marilisa Pollini
Maurizio Pollini, piano
MANZONI: Masse: Omaggio a Edgard Varese for piano and orchestra
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Berliner Philharmoniker / Giuseppe Sinopoli
Live recording

CD 3
SCHOENBERG
Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11
Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19
Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23
Suite for Piano, Op. 25
Piano Piece, Op. 33a
Piano Piece, Op. 33b
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 42
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Berliner Philharmoniker / Claudio Abbado

CD 4
BARTOK
Piano Concerto No. 1 Sz 83
Piano Concerto No. 2 Sz 95
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Claudio Abbado

CD 5
DEBUSSY: 12 Etudes
BERG: Sonata for Piano, Op. 1
Maurizio Pollini, piano

CD 6
DEBUSSY:
Preludes
L'Isle joyeuse
Maurizio Pollini, piano

Gustavo Dudamel ADAMS City Noir

City Noir was first suggested by my reading the so-called “Dream” books by Kevin Starr, a brilliantly imagined, multi-volume cultural and social history of California. In the “Black Dahlia” chapter of his Embattled Dreams volume Starr chronicles the tenor and milieu of the late Forties and early Fifties as it was expressed in the sensational journalism of the era and in the dark, eerie chiaroscuro of the Hollywood films that have come to define the period sensibility for us:

“...the underside of home-front and post-war Los Angeles stood revealed. Still, for all its shoddiness, the City of Angels possessed a certain sassy, savvy energy. It was, among other things, a Front Page kind of town where life was lived by many on the edge, and that made for good copy and good film noir.”

Those images and their surrounding aura whetted my appetite for an orchestral work that, while not necessarily referring to the soundtracks of those films, might nevertheless evoke a similar mood and feeling tone of the era. I was also stimulated by the notion that there indeed exists a bona fide genre of jazz-inflected symphonic music, a fundamentally American orchestral style and tradition that goes as back as far as the early 1920’s (although, truth to tell, it was a Frenchman, Darius Milhaud who was the first to realize its potential with his 1923 ballet La création du monde, a year before Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue premiered in New York).

The music of City Noir is in the form of a thirty-minute symphony. The formal and expressive weight of its three movements is distributed in pockets of high energy that are nested among areas of a more leisurely—one could even say “cinematic” – lyricism. The first movement, “The City and its Double,” opens with brief, powerful “wide screen” panorama that gives way to a murmuring dialogue between the double bass pizzicato and the scurrying figures in the woodwinds and keyboards. The steady tick of a jazz drummer impels this tense and nervous activity forward – a late-hour empty street scene, if you like. After a broad and lyrical melodic passage in the strings, the original scorrevole movement returns, charged with increasingly insistent impulse and building up steam until it peaks with a full-throttle orchestral tutti. A surging melody in the horns and celli punctuated by jabbing brass “bullets” brings the movement to a nearly chaotic climax before it suddenly collapses into shards and fragments, a sudden stasis that ushers in the second movement.

The title, “The City and its Double” is a backward glance to the French playwright Antonin Artaud, who in his writings is said to have “opposed the vitality of the viewer’s sensual experience against [a conventional concept of] theater as a contrived literary form.” Hence my “city” can be imagined not just as geographic place or even as a social nexus, but rather as a source of inexhaustible sensual experience. As a child watching the early days of television I remembered well the program that always ended with the familiar tag line, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one.”

As a relief to the frenzy of the first movement’s ending, “The Song is for You,” takes its time assembling itself. Gradually a melodic profile in the solo alto sax emerges from the surrounding pools of chromatically tinted sonorities. The melody yearns toward but keeps retreating from the archetypal “blue” note. But eventually the song finds full bloom in the voice of the solo trombone, a “talking” solo, in the manner of the great Ellington soloists Lawence Brown and Britt Woodman (both, fittingly enough, Angelinos). The trombone music picks up motion and launches a brief passage of violent, centripetal energy, all focussed on a short obsessive idea first stated by the sax. Once spent of its fuel, the movement returns to the quiet opening music, ending with pensive solos by the principal horn and viola.

“Boulevard Night” is a study in cinematic colors, sometimes, as in the moody “Chinatown” trumpet solo near the beginning, it is languorous and nocturnal; sometimes, as in the jerky stop-start coughing engine music in the staccato strings, it is animal and pulsing; and othertimes, as in the slinky, sinuous saxophone theme that keeps coming back, each time with an extra layer of stage makeup, it is in-your-face brash and uncouth. The music should have the slightly disorienting effect of a very crowded boulevard peopled with strange characters, like those of a David Lynch film—the kind who only come out very late on a very hot night.

John Adams

Yuja Wang / Gustavo Dudamel RACHMANINOV # 3 - PROKOFIEV # 2

Deutsche Grammophon's dramatic pairing of Sergei Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor with Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor makes this CD a brilliant showcase for pianist Yuja Wang and maestro Gustavo Dudamel, two of the biggest sensations on the label. Wang previously released Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Piano Concerto No. 2 with Claudio Abbado conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble that seemed nearly ideal for accompanying her delicate and often intimate style of playing. However, the usually robust sound of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela is reined in somewhat on this recording of the Third, if not to be more subdued for Wang's playing, then perhaps to control the effect of Rachmaninov's thick orchestral writing. For whatever reason, Wang's playing is clear and generally well-balanced in the audio mix, though there is some artificial boosting of the volume. In terms of clarity and orchestral density, the Prokofiev Second is a different matter entirely, for the solo part is always audible, and the accompaniment is, for the most part, quite transparent. Wang is shown to better advantage here, and Dudamel has more options to work with, so this exciting performance really deserves top billing, despite the overwhelming popularity of the Rachmaninov work. (Blair Sanderson)

Michelle Makarski & Keith Jarrett JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Six Sonatas for Violin and Piano

Johann Sebastian Bach began work on his six sonatas for violin and harpsichord (BWV 1014-19) while at the courts of Weimar and Köthen and returned to the compositions over several decades, revising and polishing until the years before his death. C.P.E. Bach would later pronounce the pieces “among the best works of my dear father.” Prefiguring the classic duo sonata, violin and keyboard meet on equal terms in this music, and both are challenged by Bach’s compositional demands. The group of sonatas was conceived as a set – six sonatas in six keys, three major and three minor. Bach’s first biographer Forkel wrote that the six sonatas “may be reckoned among Bach’s masterpieces in this genre. They are fugued throughout, and even contain characterful natural canons in dialogue between the two instruments. A master is required to play the violin part, for Bach knew the possibilities of that instrument and spared it as little as he did the harpsichord.”

Michelle Makarski is the violinist here. A player of exceptionally broad interests, committed to ‘classical’ repertoire from the pre-Baroque to New Music, but also experienced in jazz and improvisation, Makarski first came to ECM via Keith Jarrett. She appeared on his New Series album “Bridge of Light”, recorded in 1993. It featured Makarski as soloist on the “Elegy for Violin and String Orchestra” and as Jarrett’s duet partner on the “Sonata for Violin and Piano”. That recording led to other discs with Makarski at ECM ranging from a series of recital discs – beginning with the solo album “Caoine” – to experiments with Tomasz Stanko, John Surman and Dino Saluzzi on the prize-winning “From The Green Hill”, and playing alongside the Hilliard Ensemble in Stephen Hartke’s “Tituli”.

Through the years, Makarski and Jarrett have remained in contact. They first played the Bach sonatas together at Christmas 2008, and returning to the music became a theme of their weekend meetings over the next two years. “Every time she visited we played it again.” Jarrett tells Ethan Iverson in the September 2013 issue of Down Beat.

As Makarski has noted, the approach was the opposite of ‘casual’. “Think of it as the musical equivalent of a time-lapse exposure,” Makarski suggests, “with the camera focused on a process in Nature; planets moving, wrinkles appearing, trees leafing. You don't need to decide anything; you just watch. In our case, we just listened.”

One thinks here also of Jarrett’s early statement when recording Book 1 of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier: “This music does not need my assistance.” The intention, then as now: not to inflict interpretive ‘personality’ on the work. “It’s nutritious because it’s not me,“ Jarrett says. “I’m just throwing myself to the other guy, and asking him ‘Show me something I still don’t know about music’.”

The idea of documenting the music came late in the process: in November 2010 Makarski and Jarrett recorded the sonatas at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. “Even after deciding we’d like to record, the process didn’t much change,” Makarski notes. “What you have is a window on an organic long-term process of exploration and deep listening. It’s a kind of momentary document of a joyously renewed friendship – not a strategically planned project.“