Schubert: Piano Sonatas D. 850 & D. 960
Anne-Marie McDermott, piano.
Bridge 9550 A/B
Disc One: Total Time:  39:35
Disc Two: Total Time:  43:28
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Schubert’s piano sonatas are fascinating works that merge the sublimity of Mozart with an increasing Romantic passion found in Beethoven’s works in the genre.  They may be less intense in that way, but Schubert’s lyricism and harmonic language are what often make the pieces attractive.  For this recent release, pianist Anne-Marie McDermott has chosen to of the larger sonatas, stretched to near-symphonic length.  Schubert was a quite competent pianist himself, but not of the growing virtuoso variety that were appearing as the 19^th Century was underway.  His performances tended to be in more intimate salon settings which lent their own aura to the music.

When the energy burst forth in his D-Major sonata, D. 850 (1825), one is at first caught off guard.  This is a rather fast-paced, and technically-challenging “Allegro” belying its composition for the virtuoso pianist Karl Maria von Bocklet (the dedicatee also named on the 1826 publication).  McDermott’s performance lends an immediacy to the music with crisp articulation that gives the music a further sense of forward motion.  In the second movement, she moves things along well taking some time at cadences for a little romantic dalliance before moving on in the set of rondo-variations here which gradually fade away.  The scherzo then presents a bit more playful contrast with a gorgeous central waltz section.  The technical challenges then return for the finale but the bluster of the opening is gone and all ends with a sense of poise.  Overall, McDermott’s performance finds a nice balance with the sort of Beethoven-like intensity with touches of grace and moments of reflective romance.  It makes for a quite compelling performance.

Unusual harmonic ideas and key relationships help increase the emotional intensity of Schubert’s last sonata, D. 960 in Bb-Major composed just a few weeks away from the end of his life in 1828.  There is a mysteriousness that hovers in the opening “Molto moderato” that also has moments of reflective lyricism that seems to exist in spite of whatever lurks beyond.  McDermott brings out these aspects quite well in her performance.  It is a rather lengthy opening running half of the sonata’s total playing time.  With the thoughts of it lingering over us, Schubert moves on to the slow movement where the material seems to diverge between the hands creating two different soundscapes.  It feels like a good jumping off point for whatever might come next in Romantic piano music with Brahms on the horizon.  After some of this almost darker exploration, the tone shifts for the scherzo which still maintains a sense of delicacy (it is even in the tempo marking to be so).  The finale finds several thematic ideas that feel like Schubert must get as many of these in before time is up.  Something seems to be distracting as well with the way things seem to shift from one depth to another.  Here is where Beethoven’s later sonatas also have their echo but this feels less a summation than an anticipation of what may lie ahead.

What is striking about McDermott’s performance is that we get a sense of where Schubert’s style falls in that bridging gap of the Classical Era and the Late Romantic.  There is nothing genteel about these works that have extensive technical demands that she more than meets.  Often the stream-of-conscious appearance of lyrical melodies can be disjointed in these sonatas, but everything moves well through these transitions with a performance that helps guide the listener and signals that we are moving into new realms.  Bridge has captured the sound here quite well making for a recording that places us well in the soundspace with just a right touch of ambience to the hall.  Usually these works are not paired together and they could not squeeze onto a single disc so there are no additional shorter piano works to fill out things here.  Still, this is a highly recommendable set of performances that can sit alongside those in more complete cycles by Andras Schiff and Mitsuko Uchida who both have interesting approaches as well.

Crumb: Metamorphoses, Books I & II
Marcantonio Barone, piano.
Bridge Records 9551
Total Time:  75:59
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

There are two “great” American composers whose last names start with the letter “C” who could not be more polar opposites sonically.  The more popular of the two, Aaron Copland, found most of his music entering the common repertoire and, apart from his later works, tended to generally be in accessible musical language (though one could argue his early modernist works stretch that generalization).  The other is the noted avant-garde experimental composer George Crumb (1929-) who is admired and noted for his stretching of musical notation and sound. The latter often also results in creating new sonorities and timbres within traditional instrumentation and vocalization.  His most famous work that exemplifies most of these techniques is Ancient Voices of Children (1970).  Crumbs keyboard explorations for “amplified piano” appeared as well in the early 1970s in a series of pieces collectively called Makrokosmos (a sort of Bartokian nod that in Crumb’s explorations further transformed perceptions of sound and musical materials).

In some respects, his more recent sets of Metamorphoses for piano are both a bit of reflection as well as an expansion upon those earlier piano works.  There are two “books” of ten brief pieces each that make up this significant new contribution to the piano literature.  They were composed between 2015-17 and 2018-20, respectively.  They are inspired by visual art (by artists Klee, Van Gogh, Chagall, Whistler, Jasper Johns, Gauguin, Dali, Kandinsky, Wyeth, Dinnerstein, Klimt, Picasso, and O’Keefe) and it is the names of these paintings that serve as the titles for each of the works.  In this way, they create a contemporary journey to parallel that of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.  In these works, Crumb finds interesting ways to interpret these images in musical sound.  Sometimes it will include unusual effects of playing on the strings of the piano; other times other objects are used to create effects, vocalizations, or spoken text.  The latter is most telling in “Crows Over the Wheatfield” where Crumb creates the effect of cawing birds.  Equally fascinating is Crumb’s inclusion of more traditional folk music which brings a more tonal palette to his music.  This comes to the forefront in The Fiddler.  Throughout these individual movements, Crumb also explores blues, some quotation, and more intriguingly a host of harmonic approaches that provide a further aural foothold to tonal music and practice.  The music thus becomes a sort of composer’s mind that has found a way out into the world as the paintings work their vivid imagery into the imagination.  The pieces move well from intense drama to reflective and lighter moments in music that feels a lot more accessible than one might suspect.

Pianist Marcantonio Barone is a critically-acclaimed performer of contemporary music and interpreter of Crumb’s music.  He is the perfect choice for bringing to disc these world premiere recordings of Crumb’s most recent body of piano music.  It might be well to locate the actual paintings referenced in these pieces to gain a more connected feel to the music that accompanies them, though it might be best to first absorb them on their own terms.  The sound is well-captured in this release which requires careful miking to pickup some of the inner piano technique.  It is equalized well though that these feel less gimmicky and really a part of the fabric of the music.

These two books of Metamorphoses are still too recent to tell how they will be perceived in the overall oeuvre of Crumb’s music.  They feel like a catalogue of his compositional style as well as a sort of homage to and collage of the techniques pioneered in the 20^th Century.  Bridge’s release is a must and one wonders if anyone might take up the challenge of an orchestral version of some of these pieces down the road.