March 29, 2019

  • Exploring Schoenberg's Fragments and Piano Music

     Schoenberg: Piano Music

    Yoko Hirota, piano.
    Navona Records 6214
    Total Time: 53:41
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Pianist Yoko Hirota has garnered a great deal of critical attention for her performances of contemporary piano literature.  On the Canadian Centrediscs lable, she has released collections of modern works by Canadian composers.  Here though it is the music of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) that has captured her attention.  Schoenberg’s attempt to liberate our ears from traditional harmony might best be likened to the exploration of the major-minor system in the work of Baroque composers.  It is perhaps no coincidence that many of the keyboard genres of that period worked well to explore serial writing early in its development.  At the core of this though is also an exploration of sound, harmony, and color whose result is more often far more dissonant than similar explorations by Debussy.  Both approaches though grow out of the ultra-romanticism and chromaticism of the 19th Century.  One leads us toward an expansion of romanticism, the other, heard here, moves us to atonal realms.  For this release, that sense of sound and harmony, and the exploration of the timbre of the piano is quite integral into appreciating these often harsher works in new ways.  Hirota’s program is designed to give us a glimpse into these thought processes of Schoenberg, first through two more familiar works and then through a collection of experiments.

    Hirota’s attention to articulation and line really aid the detail needed in the Drei Clavierstucke, Op. 11 (1909).  The music’s edge is still there, but the ideas seem less clinical in her hands with a sense of thematic connection that might otherwise sound absent.  The central piece also has a decided tenderness, an almost painful caress of these lines that seem tortuous but have their own inner beauty.  Here she is perhaps more in line with Paul Jacobs’ classic interpretations of these pieces and not as clinical as Glenn Gould.  In the Funf Klavierstucke, Op. 23 (1920-23), Hirota’s attention to articulation works quite well to bring out some of the edges of this music with her use of pedal matched to when Schoenberg’s lyrical qualities need to come to the foreground.  One might say the same of her performances of the Op. 33 piano pieces as well.

    The primary interest in this release for Schoenbergians though will be the Seventeen Fragments.  The pieces were written between 1900 and 1933 and show the composer exploring expressiveness and color.  In some sense, it was a means to help continue to provide that link of his own style with that of his more Romantic predecessors.  Early fragments suggest the pianism of Brahms and continue the Late-Romantic style.  Others are ideas that are not quite fully formed.  Throughout there is this additional exploration of chromaticism and where it might lead (this from the composer of the ultra-romantic Pelleas und Melisande) that perhaps gives us a sense of a more emotional side.  Articulation experiments can also be discerned here with how notes and phrases can grow and decay through organized use of crescendo and decrescendo markings.  There are moments when adherence to the row seems to also feel a bit tenuous as if Schoenberg’s impulse for expressiveness needed to take precedence over a strict serial technique.  All of these aspects and more can be explored in Hirota’s careful performances of these fragments which give us another window into Schoenberg’s creative process.

    This Navona release is a re-release of an earlier album available on the Phoenix label recorded in 2005.  It certainly warrants a wider release for music that tends to be fairly well represented on disc.  Those who prefer the likes of Pollini, Jacobs, or Uchida will also want to explore Hirota’s own interpretations of this music.  The fragments giver her a further opportunity to demonstrate her virtuosity as well as the technical skill and detailed nuances that she brings to the more familiar works.