CLASSICAL NET:
This CD dedicated to piano sonatas by American composers focuses on three very diverse musicians and their keyboard works, which are as stylistically different as their careers.
Elliott Carter celebrated his centenary last year, and amazingly enough his creative muse is still very active. He is today revered as one of America's greatest composers and his large corpus of works testify to his total dedication to his art. The magnificent Piano Sonata dates from 1945-46 and Carter's strong musical personality is as firmly embedded in this work as in anything he has written. In two movements, the music is either fast or extremely fast, although long slow lyrical sections punctuate the beginning and end of the second movement, which also includes one of the most monumental fugues in all 20 th century piano repertoire.
Miklós Rózsa (1907-1995) will always be remembered as one of the very greatest composers of film music, but his output includes many classical pieces such as the Violin and Viola concertos and the Hungarian Serenade. Rózsa always considered his piano sonata as the finest of all his concert works and although this judgment might be slightly amiss, the piece is full of vigorous sounds. The extremely fast "Bartok-goes-to-Hollywood" third movement is as impressive a finale as anything that Rózsa wrote for any of his concert oeuvre.
Edward Macdowell (1860-1908) embraced the ideals of German romanticism, but his Scotch-Irish roots led him to fall in love with the great Gaelic and Celtic legends. The composer insisted that the "Keltic" Sonata was not in any sense "programme music", but the second and third movements are unquestionably a portrait of the beautiful Deirdre and the heroic Warrior Cuchulin.
Seivewright's remarkable talent contributes immeasurably to the cause of these sonatas and his attention to detail is indeed faultless. Some "tough" repertoire zestfully performed and captured in clean balanced sound.
Gerald Fenech
AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE:
This varied program of American piano sonatas opens with Elliott Carter's early essay in the form to mark the composer's 100 th birthday, a granitic piece that should appeal to those who find his mature work rough going. Like Carter's orchestral music from the 40s, it has wide, open intervals, exciting fugal writing, and a dignified profile. It sounds a bit like modernist Copland. British pianist Peter Seivewright played it for the composer 25 years ago; Carter called the performance “breathtaking”, and so it sounds here. The recording is big and weighty but a bit dry. I like more reverberation after a loud chord, more sense of space.
Carter's sonata is often played, but Miklos Rozsa's is a fascinating rarity. Full of tension and yearning, it's an eloquent statement from a Hollywood master who, like Korngold and other Golden Age movie figures, longed to be taken seriously as a concert composer. It is more severe than his film noir scores but full of emotional urgency. As in the film scores, Rozsa favors an open sound and lots of parallel intervals. Does it have an “American sound” as well? Yes, as long as we qualify that by saying it is the sound of a homesick migrant. In addition to a strong melodic profile, it offers lively, barbed syncopation, especially in the rich finale, which Seivewright calls “Bartok goes to Hollywood”. Best of all is the eloquent slow movement, exquisitely lyrical but acerbic and unsentimental. Seivewright's performance is lucid, expressive, and a bit stark; the slight dryness is again a function of the recording. Rozsa's ringing, bell-like chords at the end are beautifully played but have little room to breathe.
MacDowell's Sonata 4 puts these modern American sonatas in perspective by showing us what came first. MacDowell was a fervid, unapologetic exponent of German romanticism, and that's what we get here. Again, Seivewright seems to revel in works with big, rolling sonorities, and he makes the most of the sonata's heart-on-sleeve directness. He also offers detailed, authoritative notes.
Sullivan
FANFARE (1):
This disc is titled American Piano Sonatas and offers a rich and intriguing mix of music.
There are nine versions in total listed on ArkivMusic of the Carter Piano Sonata, and Seivewright holds his head high given that Rosen and Oppens are among the competition. Seivewright is uncom promising in his approach, and it works well. Angularities are emphasized; obsessive repetitions make their rather manic point well. Seivewright is most tender in the Andante opening to the second move ment (of two). A pity the recording is rather thin, as Seivewright seems in tune with the unhurried mystery here. He has no problems holding the concentration in this long (17:29) movement, and pro vides some moments of stoic grandeur along the way. An eminently rewarding reading.
Leonard Pennario gives a fascinating, exciting performance of Mikos Rosza's Piano Sonata in the four-disc box Leonard Pennario: The Early Years 1950-1958 (MSR 1188, reviewed by Peter Burwasser in Fanfare 30:6). I agree fully with Burwasser's identification of Pennario's handling of counterpoint as one of the joys of this performance. The slow movement has real poignancy, while the finale almost out-Prokofievs Prokofiev in its relentless spikiness. Seivewright is more laid-back in the first movement, and this loss of rigor shows; the music seems less sure of itself. This charac terizes the difference between the two players, and the timings confirm it. Pennario's three move ments are 6:06-6:14-6:14, whereas Seivewright's are 8:26-7:46-740. Seivewright's central Andante is fine, full of climactic tensions. Only in the finale are honors fairly evenly divided, with Seivewright finding more of circus-mode Stravinsky than Prokofiev.
Finally, MacDowell, a master of the grand sweeping gesture. While in the other pieces one feels Seivewright is enjoying the challenges the composers throw at him, it is here that one senses that engagement with the music itself is at its highest. The indicator for the central movement, "With naive tenderness," is here perfectly caught. The finale is not really fierce, as MacDowell indicates (there are hints of studio caution), yet Seivewright clearly has something to say in this music.
A fascinating program delivered with style and flair.
Colin Clarke
FANFARE (2):
Miklos Rozsa's Piano Sonata dates from 1945, which makes it contemporary with Elliott Carter's substantial sonata (1945 —46), while MacDowell's Fourth Sonata dates from 1901. Yet the Carter sounds as far ahead of the Rozsa as that work does from the MacDowell. So, if nothing else, this is an illuminating juxtaposition of some important works in the American 20th-century piano repertoire. At well over half an hour, with much fast music, and played on a Bosendorfer Imperial concert grand (of which more later), the Carter is an exhilarating listen. Structurally, at the macro level, the music is deceptively simple. The first movement is in something like sonata form, while the second is a magnificent fugue flanked by a slow, Coplandesque opening (around the 3:00 mark) and a transcendent epilogue. However, at the micro level, the music is far more complex. Metrically, it is highly fluid. Tonally, Carter makes use of harmonics, asking the player to silently depress piano keys whose open strings are then resonated by other notes subsequently played staccato. Anyone drawn to this CD by the other works and perhaps squeamish at the thought of half an hour of Elliott Carter should rest assured this is highly approachable. One reason for this is that Carter's underlying thematic material is essentially a semicircle of fifths, starting at B and ending on Alt, so it often sounds highly consonant (because it is), the harmonic overtones adding a richness to the sound palette as well as reminding one coincidentally (?) of Copland, whose own piano sonata had been recently premiered (1943). And the way that the fugue grows organically out of the preceding five minutes or so of slow music can be felt intuitively even if not fully understood intellectually. In the final slow section, the music is gradually disassembled until all that is left is a halo of B.
Peter Seivewright is surely completely on top of the music. He prints in the CD booklet a glowing endorsement from the composer of a performance of this work that he gave in 1983 in the lat-ter's presence. His attention to detail, particularly regarding the harmonic overtones, is superb, and he has a piano and recording engineer (Andrew Graeme) able to do justice to his interpretation. The recording (for example, at 13:37 in the first movement, where there is a sudden pause) doesn't add any artificial reverb; that pause is a split second of dead silence. All the wonderful reverberations elsewhere are generated only by the piano. I only have one reservation, which crept in when I read on the Internet that, whereas Seivewright takes 31:38, Ursula Oppens needs less than 24 minutes to perform this work. I don't have her recording but, thanks to YouTube, one can hear it. Sound quality from my PC aside, this immediately shows the viability of much faster tempi, to the point where I have had to revise my opinion of Seivewright's interpretation (though not his performance). He himself says, "Much of the music is fast or extremely fast"; well, it isn't extremely fast in his reading and, if that is a necessary requirement of the composer, I should add that caveat.
Turning to the Rozsa, here is a work the composer felt was one of his best. Before the Second World War, Rozsa had been considered the successor to Bartok and Kodaly, and I feel that this work is essentially retrospective. As the first movement progresses, one is constantly reminded of these composers, and no bad thing; Rozsa is building on what he has learned and absorbed. But as the music progresses, I get a sense of the composer trying too hard. Whereas with the Carter work one is continually delighted, or at least intrigued, by what happens next, in Rozsa's sonata I felt bludgeoned too often (for example, in the passage from 4:35 in the first movement). I suspect that this is partly down to the choice of piano; what went so well in the Carter might now be a liability in this music, which is quite often exceptionally strident.
Although an American citizen, MacDowell had Scots-Irish roots, he was steeped in 19th-century German Romanticism, and his fourth sonata is inspired by Celtic mythology. In his day he was celebrated as the great American composer, though with all these European inclinations, his music is much more redolent of Liszt, Grieg, Wagner even than it is American. The style of the "Keltic" Sonata is highly declamatory in the outer movements to the point of parody and, in the first particularly, it is impossible at times not to see images from jerky melodramatic silent films in one's mind's eye. Of course, this music came first and it is as likely that both MacDowell and early theatrical improvisers were drawing on the same sources. Peter Seivewright gives the music an impassioned performance, rising to such markings as "With great power and dignity," and that Bosendorfer is suitably rich. The pianist, who also produced this disc, contributes lengthy, fascinating notes, mostly beside the point (for example, we learn virtually nothing about the Rozsa Sonata other than that it has no greater admirer than he), and the booklet cover is dire. I do admit an admiration for Seivewright's pianism, for the sonics, and for the piano. Recommended, with a few reservations.
Jeremy Marchant
GRAMOPHONE:
Bartók meets Hollywood in a score from a composer best known for film music. This CD is emblazoned with an ecstatic quote from Elliott Carter after he heard Seivewright play his Sonata (1946) at the Huddersfield Festival in 1983. “Almost never before has this Sonata received such a convincing and convinced performance” – and from memory too. That was 25 years ago and in the meantime John McCabe and the authoritative Charles Rosen have beaten Seivewright to the recording studio.
But the main interest here is the Sonata (1948) by the composer of classic film scores such as Ben-Hur and El Cid . Miklós Rózsa was born into a land-owning family in Hungary, trained in Germany and worked in Paris and London before moving to the US in 1940. Seivewright's informative booklet essay laments the neglect of Rózsa's concert music. The composer himself rated the Piano Sonata at the top of his output. The Hungarian influence is there along with the kind of busy continuity familiar in Hindemith but Rózsa has his own type of dissonant harmony that brings the second movement to the lacerating climax. What Seivewright calls the “Bartók-goes-to-Hollywood” style of the last movement is brilliantly brought off.
Throughout Seivewright exhibits a prodigious technique but unfortunately he is let down by the close and rather metallic recorded sound.
Peter Dickinson
INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW:
Peter Seivewright has issued a number of discs featuring unusual piano music and this collection of American piano sonatas is one such. His pianism is fully up to their very different though equally formidable demands, making it unfortunate that the recorded sound – or is it more the relatively confined acoustic – gives his Bösendorfer Imperial an unattractively hard, even brittle edge above forte . Having heard the disc on several players, this seems inherent to the recording rather than the means of playback.
The inlay features an eloquent endorsement from Elliott Carter, following a performance Seivewright gave of his Piano Sonata (1946) a quarter-century ago, and the present account confirms that his identity with this piece remains undimmed. At over 31 minutes, it is surely the most spacious on record – enabling Seivewright fully to elucidate the first movement's powerful sonata design, then set out its successor's fugue with admirable clarity. If the fugue itself lacks a degree of propulsive energy, the postlude endows the converging of motivic threads with a raptness unique on disc. Even more than on Ursula Oppens's authoritative if more conventional reading, the sound places insufficient emphasis on the harmonic resonance which underlies the work's formal unfolding -- and in which Charles Rosen remains unsurpassed – though the sheer conviction of Seivewright's approach cannot be gainsaid.
The other two works are less frequently encountered these days but equally revealing of their creator's concerns. Of the composers who found fame in Hollywood, Miklós Rózsa left the most enduring concert legacy, largely because his ‘abstract' and film music wre not in the least indebted to each other. The Piano Sonata (1967) is a work Bartók might perhaps have written had he kept to the Dance Suite as a compositional template, its searching Andante flanked by movements of tightly woven textures informed by an unstoppable rhythmic energy. Seivewright does the piece full justice, and is hardly less persuasive in the Fourth Piano Sonata (1901) by Edward MacDowell, the last (but not necessarily the finest) of his large-scale instrumental works. The present account maintains a tight rein on the rhapsodic excess of its first movement and finds the right degree of pathos in its successor, before a finale whose fatalistic apotheosis is the more telling for its understatement. In this latter work, Donna Amato (on a set of MacDowell's sonatas) has the benefit of more alluring sound, though Seivewright makes rather more of the music's emotional ebb and flow.
The pianist contributes an informed booklet note, though a little less on Rózsa and more on his sonata would have been welcome. This disc is well recommended overall, the qualification over the actual piano sound notwithstanding.
Richard Whitehouse
FANFARE (USA):
This is an intriguing collection of so-called American piano music. My qualifier refers to the fact that Miklós Rózsa was born and trained in Hungary, even though his classic Hollywood film scores ( Ben Hur, El Cid , et. al.) make him seem like a red-blooded American. In any case, his excellent Sonata is decidedly old world, completely drenched with the spirit of fellow Hungarian Bartók. This is not to say that he is being imitative, but that they draw from the same Magyar folk sources. Pianist Seivewright, in his informative notes, writes that Rózsa's “serious” music deserves greater attention. If this powerful, tautly conceived Sonata is a good representative of that output, I would agree.
The 1945 Elliott Carter Sonata is a pivotal work in the creative life of our centenarian master, American in a kind of Ivesian way, but pointing towards the more prickly modernism that would mark the vast range of his career. Seivewright approaches the work from a contemporary perspective, emphasizing the angularity and abstraction of the work. It is an interesting contrast to the much more lyrical approach of Charles Rosen, on his essential collection of Carter piano music on the Bridge label. Rosen makes the music more accessible, but both ways are valid. Seivewright certainly has the imprimatur of the composer, who called an earlier performance of his Sonata by the pianist “most remarkable, breathtaking.” My personal touchstone for this great music is the reading of the outstanding young American pianist Jeremy Denk, whom I have heard play it in concert twice, each time absolutely flooring his audience with the power and comprehension of his vision. He has not recorded it yet, but it is just a matter of time.
Edward MacDowell's music strikes me as pompous and bangy, qualities exacerbated by Seivewright's metallic tonality (or is it the recording?). As a period piece, exemplifying American art music in a formative time, it is interesting and even somewhat touching. It works well as a companion to the contrasting music on the riveting and energetic program.
Peter Burwasser