Nikolaos
Samaltanos
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FEINBERG Piano Sonatas: No. 9; No. 10; No. 11; No. 7;1 No. 8;1 No. 121 • Nikolaos Samaltanos (pn); Christophe Sirodeau (pn)1 • BIS CD-1414 (79:57)
The life and career of Samuel Feinberg describes a compacted Shakespearean drama. Feinberg was, as a man, a rather modest and unheroic character, but his music, both as a composer and pianist within the context of the nightmarish world of Stalinist-Soviet culture, takes on a powerful resonance. Feinberg was among a group of supreme musicians who, until the fall of the Soviet world, were almost unknown in the West. From the 1930s until his death in 1962, he almost never left Russia. He came of age in that fantastic period in Russian art after the Bolshevik revolution and prior to the dictatorship of Stalin, the decade of the 1920s, when not only were Shostakovich and Prokofiev finding their voices, but also astonishing things were happening in the realms of painting, theater, poetry, and film.
When I first received this CD, I saw the name Feinberg and became excited at the prospect of hearing a rare recording of this sublime pianist. My disappointment at realizing that this is, in fact, a recording of his music by other musicians was quickly tempered by an audition of this mesmerizing material, which I have not heard before. Feinberg was an early admirer of Scriabin, and the influence of that Russian master’s mysticism and harmonic sensibility stayed with him to the end. In his excellent program notes, Christophe Sirodeau notes that after Stalin began controlling culture beginning in the early 1930s, “Feinberg moved towards greater simplicity, towards a diatonic style and a preponderance of melody—somewhat reminiscent of the development of Prokofiev or of Myaskovsky.” This is true in a relative sense, but even Feinberg’s last work, the Piano Sonata No. 12, completed in 1962, is still densely chromatic.
The earliest works on this recital, the Sonatas 7, 8, and 9, written between 1924 and 1939, are hugely complex in terms of harmony and structure, and yet like the music of Scriabin, the works cohere with powerful expressivity. These three sonatas, which the composer feared would be deemed overly “formalist” by the authorities, were never performed in his lifetime, and are given world premiere recordings here. Despite the daunting complexity of most of the music, there are moments of exotic beauty, as well as bristling energy. Feinberg was especially deft at pulling his ideas together into grand, massively constructed codas. He was not averse to experimentation, and was interested in the new ideas of his age, including serialism, but above all, Feinberg’s work as a pianist and composer was dedicated to the clear expression of elegance and wisdom. This is riveting and original material that, despite it’s previous obscurity, puts the composer in a class with the great composer-virtuosos such as Liszt and Rachmaninoff.
These performances are rich, powerful, and moving, although I have no basis for comparison. Samaltanos and Sirodeau deserve extreme credit for the Herculean efforts they bring to bear on this often-magnificent music. Peter Burwasser
FEINBERG Piano Sonatas: No. 9; No. 10; No. 11; No. 7;1 No. 8;1 No. 121 • Nikolaos Samaltanos (pn); Christophe Sirodeau (pn)1 • BIS CD-1414 (79:57)
This article originally appeared in Issue 28:2 (Nov/Dec 2004) of Fanfare Magazine.
SKALKOTTAS Concerto for 2 Violins (orch. Demertzis). Concertino for 2 Pianos. Characteristic Piece, “Nocturnal Amusement”1 • Vassilis Christopoulos, cond; Georgios Demertzis (vn); Simos Papanas (vn); Maria Asteriadou (pn); Nikolaos Samaltanos (pn); Dimitris Desyllas (xyl);1 Thessaloniki St SO • BIS 1554 (55:02)
BIS has lavished a great deal of attention on Nikos Skalkottas (1904–1949), a former student of Arnold Schoenberg, who, like Alban Berg, took dodecaphony in a somewhat different direction from that of Schoenberg’s or Anton Webern’s. Kostis Demertzis’s booklet notes describe Skalkottas’s efforts to combine the system with popular elements that would entertain its listeners. He did so, for sure, in his Concerto for Two Violins (an unorchestrated version of which appeared on BIS 1244), a piece from 1944 that he never completed (or heard performed) and that he apparently intended to finish after he had completed his Second Symphonic Suite in the last year of his life. The Concerto’s first movement integrates the two bustling violin parts into an orchestral web (not only that of Kostis Demertzis’s orchestration but that of the engineers) more in the manner of Bach’s Double Concerto than in that of, say, Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. As did Berg’s Violin Concerto, Skalkottas’s slow movement incorporates a borrowed tonal melody, this one, according to the notes, a rebetiko by Vassilis Tsitsanis that Skalkottas had chromatically enhanced. This popular-style melody slinks, if not as suggestively, in the sultry manner of the Blues from Ravel’s Violin Sonata, though the outer, fast, movements have been influenced by, and pay tribute to, a popular idiom of a different kind—folk music. The Concerto is substantial in both length (almost 38 minutes in this performance) and in substance, despite its emphasis on accessibility and entertainment. While the ardent violin lines in the slow movement emerge, as do those in the outer movements, from sonorous, highly colored tuttis, the third movement returns to the whirlwind manner of the first, with the violins emerging now in bands of melody reminiscent of Corelli’s trio-sonata textures, and now in sharply articulated folk-inspired thematic statements. A brilliant cadenza about two-thirds of the way through the finale showcases the two violins’ virtuosity. The soloists play with great energy and élan in the outer movements and an appropriate sultriness in the slow one; Christopoulos and the Orchestra provide highly colorful, enthusiastic orchestral support.
If anything, the Concertino for Two Pianos (from 1935) sounds even lighter and chattier in its first movement, affecting a boulevardier’s breeziness (as did Poulenc’s) but couched in the rigorous procedures of serialism. Demertzis’s notes trace some of the tone-row manipulations, while the lighthearted style will—especially in this engaging performance by Maria Asteriadou and Nikolaos Samaltanos—tempt a willing listener’s ear away from those compositional elements.
The Characteristic Piece (from 1949), almost—almost—firmly tonal, serves as a sort of fireworks display that brings the program to a close in an intoxicating performance with all the carnival appeal of George H. Green’s Fluffy Ruffles. It’s like musical licorice, and it’s hard not to listen again several times.
Charles Warren Fox, the Eastman School’s protomusicologist, used to insist in his classes on the 20th century that dodecaphony didn’t necessarily imply any particular compositional style. Skalkottas’s music, placed beside that of Webern, seems to reinforce the point of view upon which Fox so vehemently (and disdainfully) insisted. In any case, even in an era in which serialism’s sun may be setting, Skalkottas’s music, for its energetic forging of a novel, syncretistic, idiom, should appeal to a new generation of listeners.
Recommended. Robert Maxham