August 31, 2009: A virtual recital from Wigmore Hall

Last June I wrote about how Virgin Classics has provided a virtual concert-going experience with their two-CD release of the recital given by pianist Piotr Anderszewski at Carnegie Hall on December 3, 2008.  It turns out that Wigmore Hall in London has offered a series of such virtual recitals through their own Wigmore Hall Live label, the latest release of which comes from a performance given by pianist Jonathan Biss on May 12, 2009.  This should appeal to those who last June had attended either Biss' "Concert with Conversation" event at the Community Music Center in the Mission District or his subsequent recital in Herbst Theatre.  Indeed, those who enjoyed getting their first taste of selections from György Kurtág's  Játékok from Biss will probably enjoy the presence of two of those selections on this CD;  and those (like myself) who take as much pleasure in Biss' intellect as in his keyboard skills should take delight in having their "little grey cells" tickled by his decision to use those selections to frame the performance of two sonatas by Franz Schubert.  Biss sets those grey cells a-twitter with his own remarks in the booklet of notes:

It's not only that Kurtág responds to Schubert but also that the reverse is true.  Somehow Schubert's music is changed and affected, and its chemistry is altered by sharing a platform with Kurtág.  I find it very difficult to explain why it is that certain composers go well together.  There are these weird alchemies that exist between composers, and Schubert and Kurtág make a very natural pairing.  I also think that Kurtág, because he has such deep roots in the past and is the most sensitive of souls, is a natural partner for Schubert.

While I think the listener is served by reading these remarks in conjunction with listening to the CD, I would like to suggest that the alchemy of this particular recital is more a matter of its overall architecture than of the decision to pair these two composers.  This structure is appreciated through the two Schubert sonatas that Biss selected, the C major D.840 and the A major D. 959.  To explain why the listener is best guided by understanding this overall structure, let me begin with an anecdote I picked up in Japan.

The Japanese like to say that they are two kinds of fools in the world:  the man who has never climbed Mount Fuji and the man who has climbed Mount Fuji twice.  From that point of view, the Japanese must take a rather disparaging view of Schubert, since in that amazing final year of his life he produced not only two astonishing four-hand compositions but three piano sonatas, each of which was composed on the scale of Mount Fuji (which he probably never knew):  C minor D. 958, A major D. 959, and B-flat major D. 960.  (For Fuji-like scale we should probably then throw in for good measure G major D. 894, composed two years earlier.)  These all exhibit that "heavenly length" that Robert Schumann so admired, during which one encounters melodic and harmonic adventures in prodigious quantity.

This raises a point that the Japanese missed:  One does not undertake to climb Fuji-san without preparation.  Biss provided us with a "path" to D. 959 through which, as listeners, we could "get in shape" for the "major ascent;"  and that "path" was D. 840.  This is where we then encounter the alchemy, because the opening Kurtág selection, "Birthday elegy for Judit – for the second finger of her left hand," provides us with a "path" into D. 840.  Kurtág has Judit (and, subsequently, Biss) explore the sonorities of some very large intervallic leaps with that single finger;  and this prepares us for the intervallic leaps that serve as a foundation for the rhetoric of D. 840.

We encounter that rhetoric with the descending sixth that opens the first theme (all music examples taken from the IMSLP source):

By the time we get to the second theme, Schubert is declaiming those leaps with a vengeance:

Even in the following Andante movement, when a more "reasonable" composer might have decided to give those leaps a rest, Schubert persists in a passage that sounds as if he is determined to one-up the spirit of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Appassionata" sonata:

Is it any wonder that the remaining two movements of this sonata never made it beyond the stage of uncompleted drafts?  Indeed, the significance of the time between the composition of this sonata in 1825 and that of D. 894 the following year is that Schubert was beginning to get the proper grip on the overall "sonata scale" he needed;  and, by the time of D. 959, he was firmly in control of that grip.  Indeed, he is so confident of that grip that he can end the final movement of D. 959 by looking back with satisfaction on the opening gesture of its first movement.
It goes without saying that Schubert's confidence is matched by Biss' as a performer.  Having welcomed us with Judit's little elegy, he leads us with a sense of forward-looking determination through the leaping rhetoric of D. 840;  and, having done with the warm-up calisthenics, he scales the Fuji-like peak of D. 959.  Furthermore, he does all this in ways that make perfect sense to the listener.  As an encore he then concludes with Kurtág's "Hommage à Schubert," which offers us a final reflection on both the intervallic leaps and the homophonic chord progressions that are so emblematic of Schubert's rhetoric.  We have come a long way from Judit picking out some notes with the second finger of her left hand;  and the trip was certainly worth the weight of its "heavenly length" in gold!