The Composer Plays Enrique Granados, Sergey Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, George Gershwin

Four masters play their own music These remarkable Nimbus releases of Aeolian piano rolls by Granados, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Gershwin present the music lover with a compact disc of far more than musicological value and interest. They are stunning and important performances of their own music. Each of these composers left major contributions to the piano literature, each indelibly enlarging the piano's resources with distinct stylistic traits, and each asking for a great extension of nineteenth-century pianism. The earliest born of this quartet of greatness is Enrique Granados, a virtuoso pianist whose performances reveal marvellous technique, and a delectable sense of rubato. Listening to these performances indeed is an object lesson in how to perform this still rather neglected Spanish master. One's musical taste buds are whetted, and one wishes to hear his gallant playing in the whole of his national epic, the Goyescas. His friend and champion, the American pianist Ernest Schelling, describes hearing Granados in Coloquio en la Reja from Goyescas: "I heard him play it many times and tried to reproduce the effects he achieved. After many failures, I discovered that his ravishing results at the keyboard were all a matter of the pedal. The melody itself, which was in the middle part, was enhanced by the exquisite harmonics and overtones of the other parts. These additional parts had no musical significance, other than affecting certain strings which in turn liberated the tonal colours the composer demanded." Here described is the subtlety of Granados' ear for piano sonority. In fact, in Granados' most advanced music the piano is the pedal. Even today Granados' output, except for the fifth Spanish Dance and a few of the Goyescas, is not well known. His music conveys a highly Romantic imagery, ranging from Spanish nationalism to the ever-present influence of Chopin and Schumann. He had his salon side, and he was a master of small forms and of the various and intricate Spanish dances. The first major critic to appreciate him was Ernest Newman, who wrote, "The texture of Granados' music... is of the kind that makes you want to run your fingers over it, as over some exquisite velvet; the flavour of it is something for the tongue almost, as well as the ear... to play through some of these pages is like a joyous wading knee-deep through beds of gorgeous flowers - always with a sure way through and the clearest of light and air around us." Granados was first and foremost a pianist and he took teaching very seriously, founding in 1901 the Academia Granados in Barcelona. In a letter he wrote, "All my efforts of so many years have no other goal than to form a public with my pupils... a public receptive to the great works and the great interpreters, and discerning enough to reject any impostors." Granados' most important student and disciple was Frank Marshall (1883-1959), who took over the directorship of the Academy which was later renamed Academia Marshall. It was Marshall who was the only teacher of Alicia de Larrocha, who later became the third president of the Academy. Arguably the greatest of all Spanish pianists, Marshall saturated de Larrocha with Granados. Enrique Granados was born on 27 July 1867, at Lerida, and he died at sea on 24 March 1916. His father was an officer in the Spanish army. As with most musical children, Enrique's talent blossomed early, and music lessons were arranged for him from the military band-leader in Lerida where they were stationed. One year after his birth there was a revolution in Spain, and the family moved to Barcelona, where the boy had the good fortune to study piano with Juan Battista Pujol, who taught many of the finest Spanish pianists of the period, including Joaquin Malat and Ricardo Viñes, who premiered so many new compositions. By the time he was fifteen, he had won first prize in piano at the Barcelona Conservatory, and made contact with Felipe Pedrell, the musicologist and folk song collector who taught Albeniz and Falla. Granados studied with Pedrell until he was twenty, when he left Barcelona for the excitement of Paris. In the French capital he lived with Viñes for a while, both of them studying piano with Charles de Bériot, the son of the legendary mezzo Maria Malabran and the celebrated violinist de Beriot. Granados deeply missed Spain and returned to Barcelona in 1889, where he achieved local success, appearing in solo recital and chamber concerts with Casals and Thibaud. In 1891 he married Amparo Gal, by whom he had six children. By 1910, Granados, who was a gifted draftsman and painter, became immersed in Goya. He wrote, "Goya... has possessed and disturbed me." Once, upon viewing a Goya, Granados exclaimed, "I am not a musician, I am a painter," and began translating the atmosphere of the great painter in the piano cycle, Goyescas. A performance of his music at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1911 was a rousing success, and soon after he received the Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur. The Paris Opera requested him to adapt Goyescas into an opera, which he did. However, the First World War intervened, and the opera had its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, the first opera by a Spaniard staged at the Met. Granados was invited to New York to assist in preparations for the production and, although the composer had a phobia of travelling by sea, he consented. The first performance, on 28 January 1916, was merely a succès d'esteme. Only days before he and his wife were to return to Europe, the composer received an invitation from President Wilson asking him to give a piano recital at the White House, with a reception in his honour. Though Granados and his wife were anxious to return to their children, such an invitation could not easily be refused. Cancelling their tickets on a neutral Dutch ship, he booked passage for Dieppe on the British steamer SS Sussex. The ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. It was reported that Granados was safely in a lifeboat. Frantically searching for his wife and seeing her in the water, he jumped in, struggling to save her. They perished in each other's arms in the freezing water of the English Channel. Ernest Newman wrote, "The death of Granados was the greatest loss the artistic world of Europe has sustained by reason of the war." His friend Pablo Casals called Granados, "a lovely man, and a lovely looking man, with large dark eyes, dark wavy hair and the face of a poet." His daughter wrote, "My father was more than a musician; he was a great artistic temperament: a poet, a romantic... He was noble, generous, of an exquisite sensibility, and knew neither pride nor envy..." Shortly after his death on 7 May 1916, a concert was organised at the Metropolitan Opera House for the benefit of the Granados children. Many important musicians participated, such as John McCormack and Fritz Kreisler. Casals recalled, "Towards the end of the concert, all the lights were turned out. A candle was placed on the piano. Then, with that solitary flame flickering on the stage in the great hall, Paderewski played Chopin's Funeral March." El Pelele (The Strawman) is a sort of pendant or appendix to the piano cycle Goyescas and was orchestrated for his ill-fated opera. It is a rhythmical and extremely taxing piece, technically worthy of the piano suite. Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruisenor (Lament, or The Maiden and the Nightingale). The fourth work of the Goyescas, a supremely elegant and romantic improvisation, and the most often performed of the cycle. In the final page, the nightingale bursts forth, in the words of the composer, "with the jealousy of a wife, not with the sadness of a widow." The piece is dedicated to his wife. The masterly Danza Lenta, with its elaborate growth of trilled figures and sad fatalistic ring, is a late piece, composed probably after the Goyescas. The twelve Spanish Dances, nearly fifty-five minutes of music, are some of his finest purely Spanish writing. They are seldom performed, although they rank high in the composer's output. The Spanish Dances are neglected by pianists as they need a certain rhythmic knack and the proper Spanish accent to realise the subtlety of the dance forms. Granados is here heard in Nos. 2, 5, 7 and 10 - in the first edition No. 2 is titled Oriental (in later editions the titles were left out as was the Op. 37 designation). No. 2, in C minor. This languorous piece, alludes to the Moorish influence on the life of Andalusia. No. 5, the most famous of the set, is marked 'Andantino, quasi allegretto', and in the first edition was titled 'Andaluza (playera)'. No. 7, dedicated to Cesar Cui, of Russian "Five" fame, and an admirer of Granados, is marked 'Allegro arioso'. It bore the title 'Valenciana', and evokes strumming guitars and castanets. One of the finest of the dances, it alternates between G major and G minor. No. 10 was titled Danza triste, and is marked 'Allegretto'. The 'Cantabile e rubato' section is the triste part of the dance, dedicated to the Spanish Infanta Isabel. Reverie (Improvisation) is unknown. An early Duo-Art Catalogue describes the creation of this beautiful piano roll: "Only days before he left America, Señor Granados came to Aeolian Hall to say farewell. He could not conceal his sadness. Drawing from his coat pocket a scrap of paper on which he had jotted down a musical phrase or two - a mere memorandum - he sat down before the piano and improvised this hauntingly lovely Reverie. When he had finished playing it, while yet his listeners were held silent by the weird but compelling beauty of what they had heard, Señor Granados said, 'That is Spain - this is my home - that is my very self.'" Sergey Prokofiev was born at Sontzovka in the Ukraine on 23 April 1891, and he died in Moscow on 5 March 1953. Both of Prokofiev's parents encouraged him in his career. After instruction from his mother, he was sent to St. Petersburg where he studied composition with Reinhold Gliere who prepared his young charge for the St. Petersburg Conservatory. There he studied composition with Anatol Liadov, and piano with the formidable virtuoso Annette Essipova, the former wife of Leschetizky. Prokofiev was often an unruly pupil. Liadov on one occasion shouted, "I suppose I should be studying with you, not you with me - why don't you go to Richard Strauss or Debussy?" Prokofiev complained that Essipova "wanted to fit all of her students into the same mould." Essipova declared, "He is very talented, but crude." However, Prokofiev developed into an outstanding virtuoso pianist, as this Grand Piano release amply attests. In 1915, for his concerto requirement at the Conservatory, he caused a commotion, choosing to perform his own First Concerto instead of a traditional choice. While listening to it, Glazunov (director of the Conservatory) put his hands over his ears. Most of the grey beards at the Conservatory agreed that Prokofiev's music was ugly and confused. None of this fazed the young musician, who enjoyed his status as an enfant terrible, and there were quite a few, such as Diaghilev, who took serious notice of the young composer. After the 1917 Revolution, Prokofiev, uneasy about the political climate, decided to leave Russia. Making Paris his headquarters, he began concertising, performing in Europe and as far as Japan. In 1918 he made his American debut performing his Second Piano Concerto, which one critic called "brutal and barbaric." But audiences were especially delighted with his Classical Symphony. His years in the West were productive, and Prokofiev found himself to be one of the most frequently performed of contemporary composers. But, like many others who left their native Russia, he felt lonely and rootless, yearning to return home. But, by the early 1930s, his music no longer sounded ugly or strident, its surface shock had evaporated and the jarring, ragged, motoric rhythms of his earlier years were now merely biting and exciting. Poulenc had even called Prokofiev "the Russian Liszt." Surely his country would herald him as their prodigal son. In 1933 he optimistically returned to the Soviet Union. But, within the confines of the collectivist tyranny of Stalin's dictatorship, he found life to be more complicated and tricky than he had anticipated. He was, however, glad to be home, and for more than a decade his creativity soared. During this time he composed the Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 7 and 8, the Alexander Nevsky Cantata, the great ballet scores to Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, the Fifth Symphony and much more. After the Second World War, he was riding high. It seemed the Soviets were more than pleased to have him as a prime cultural hero. The crash came in 1948. Prokofiev, along with such eminent colleagues as Kabalevsky, Miaskovsky, Shebalin, Khachaturian and Shostakovich, was brutally and publicly condemned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for practising "decadent creative procedures." Prokofiev, who had been politically naive, publicly repented. His first wife had been sent to Siberia for reasons unknown. Prokofiev was frightened and dismayed. Soon after, his health began to decline, as did the quality of his work. On New Year's Eve, to inaugurate the coming year of 1953, his wife wrote to a friend, "at midnight we raised our glasses, and then read aloud some letters written by Chekhov, who had recently become very important - even necessary - to Sergey Sergeyevich." By 5 March, Prokofiev was dead, passing away one hour before the death of the seventy-three-year-old Stalin. It took the world several weeks to realise that one of the century's great artists was dead at the age of sixty-two. Prokofiev once stated the principal elements of his art: "(1) classicism - an affinity for forms indigenous to the Baroque and Classic periods; (2) innovation - a striving for a new harmonic language and the means for expressing stronger emotions; (3) the toccata or motor element - where rhythmic vitality plays an important role; (4) the lyric element; (5) an element of either grotesqueness, testing or mockery." Prokofiev composed his Ten Pieces or Episodes, Op. 12, in 1913. The twenty-two-year-old Prokofiev had already written a great deal of piano music including his First Concerto, the Piano Sonata, Op. 1, the Four Etudes, Op. 2, the Four Pieces, Op. 4, of which No. 2 is the famous Suggestion Diabolique, the Second Sonata, Op. 14, and the Toccata. Not only is it a formidable list, but these scores contain an often percussive pianism which required a new type of virtuosity and pianistic endurance. Of the Ten Pieces, Op. 12, Prokofiev is here heard in No. 1, March, nimble and ascerbic, No. 2, Gavotte, with its neo-classic mocking flavour, No. 3, Rigaudon, capricious and compact, No. 7, Prelude, which is the best-known of the set, frequently heard in an adaptation for harp, and sounding harp-like on the piano, and No. 10, a Scherzo of striking originality. The Sarcasms were finished in 1914, being a cycle of five pieces of varying moods. For the Aeolian Duo-Art, Prokofiev recorded No. 1, marked 'Tempestoso', and No. 2, 'Allegro rubato'. The Toccata, Op. 12 (1911), after nearly ninety years, remains a devastating challenge of double notes, chords, and skips. Indeed the Toccata, with its age of steel, motoric energy, was one of the very influential piano pieces of the century. In every land composers wrote their own version of Prokofiev's Toccata and none is better than the original played to the hilt by its creator. Igor Stravinsky was born near St. Petersburg, 17 June 1882, and died in New York City on 6 April 1971. The son of a famous bass singer, his first important musical impression was seeing Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre when he was eight-years-old. The next year he started piano lessons and developed into a solid pianist capable of playing the Mendelssohn G minor Concerto. The youngster enjoyed improvising but said, "I was often accused of wasting my time instead of devoting it to proper practising." At the age of fifteen he presented Alexander Glazunov with a piano reduction of one of the composer's string quartets. Stravinsky was sadly discouraged when Glazunov declared him "unmusical", nor was there encouragement either from his parents who expected him to become a lawyer. Law meant nothing to him but, in 1901, he enrolled in the law programme at the University of St. Petersburg. Though seldom appearing in class, he somehow received a degree in jurisprudence in 1905. All of his energy had gone to private studies with Rimsky-Korsakov, who equipped Igor with fine compositional technique. He was now composing a symphony derivative of Tchaikovsky, as well as marrying his first cousin in 1906. Sergei Diaghilev heard his orchestral Scherzo Fantastique and Fireworks and was impressed, commissioning the twenty-seven-year-old composer to write the ballet Firebird. The impresario was delighted, telling everyone to "take a good look at him. He is a man on the threshold of fame." On 25 June 1910, with the celebrated ballerina Karsavina and the Russian Ballet, the most important ballet since Tchaikovsky was premiered. Stravinsky became famous overnight. With his next ballet Petrouchka with Nijinsky, the greatest male dancer of the age, in the title role. Stravinsky was to remark, "As Petrouchka he was the most exciting human being I have ever seen on stage." His next work Le Sacre de Printemps, premiered in 1913, was greeted by a riot of booing, whistles, hissing and policemen. The primitivism of the score jarred all established sensibility. It seemed as if the first-night audience sensed, in this revolutionary music, a civilisation on the brink of disaster, and the end of Paris's la belle époque. Debussy was there and thought it, "an extraordinary, ferocious thing. You might say it is primitive music with every modern convenience." During the war years Stravinsky moved to Switzerland. His musical style was becoming leaner, more neo-classic. The seminal works of the next years would be Les Noces and Pulcinella. In 1924 he first visited the United States appearing as a pianist and conductor. By the middle of the 1930s there was no doubt that the Russian was now a household name, the most famous living composer. However, he complained that the musical public still cared mainly for his earlier ballets. "They are astonished," he wrote, "to hear me speaking in another idiom. They cannot and will not follow me in the progress of my musical thought. What moves and delights me leaves them indifferent, and what still continues to interest them holds no further attraction for me." This would indeed be the situation throughout his life. However, if the public could not follow him, composers would. No body of music since Wagner's had such a potent effect on composers everywhere, excepting Schoenberg and his disciples. In 1940 he settled in Los Angeles, not far from where Arnold Schoenberg had been living. For eleven years the two leading composers of the time lived in close proximity without ever meeting. Leaders of rival camps, Schoenberg, the creator of the twelve-tone technique, and Stravinsky, a staunch upholder of tonality, had little in common. Stravinsky loved compositional limitation and restriction. "My freedom," he wrote, "consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings... the more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit." Late in life he said, "By temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God." After his death it was decided he would be buried in Venice. At the service his close friend Robert Craft conducted Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles. Afterwards by funeral gondola the procession took Stravinsky to his final resting place on the Island of San Michele, near Diaghilev who had died in Venice in 1929. Stravinsky once stated, "composing begins for me as the feeling of intervals in my fingers." Stravinsky left few piano works, but each covers a wide range of his stylistic traits. The 1924 Piano Sonata is a masterpiece, ten precious minutes in three movements. The first movement is Bachian counterpoint. The second is an ornate aria. The third is subtle toccata writing, the essence of Stravinskian neo-classicism. The composer said, "I have used the term sonata in the original sense, deriving from the world sonare, to sound. George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, New York, 25 September 1898, and died in Hollywood, California on 11 July 1937. Gershwin grew up in several New York neighbourhoods. Those were the great days of ragtime and the parlour piano. The sheet music of popular songs was becoming big business. After the First World War, jazz was emerging. George, a true New York street kid, loved it all. His first encounter with 'classical' music only happened when he was nine. Standing outside of a Harlem penny arcade he became filled with emotion listening to Anton Rubinstein's Melody in F, one of the popular salon pieces practised by countless students at the time. It was not until 1910 that Rose Gershwin decided to buy a second-hand upright piano, and it was in order to give lessons to George's brother Ira. In no time, however, the instrument was appropriated by George, and with it, his life began. He later told his brother, "I was a rough, street kid, until piano lessons made a good boy out of me." Gershwin was never far from the piano, and would play for anybody. An inveterate party-goer, his mother once chastised him for always monopolising any occasion with his playing. George responded, "Ah, Ma, if I don't play at these parties, I'm bored stiff." Leaving high school at the age of fifteen, he became a 'song plugger' in Tin Pan Alley, publishing his first song in 1916. Irving Berlin noticed him as a 'hot talent', and, before he was twenty-one, he composed his first Broadway hit, La La Lucille. The legendary Al Jolson propelled Gershwin on the national scene by singing his Swanee, which quickly sold over a million copies. The rest is theatrical history. From 1920 he wrote song after song to sophisticated lyrics by his talented lyricist brother Ira who, it seemed, was born to set words to George's beguiling tunes. Because of the frenzied success of his musicals, Paul Whiteman, the famous band leader, asked Gershwin to write a concert piece for piano and orchestra on the jazz and blues idioms which were sweeping the country as well as France. The composer Erik Satie said, "I love the blues, it makes me feel so blue." On 12 February 1924, in New York's Aeolian Hall with Gershwin at the piano, the Rhapsody in Blue was rapturously received. Suddenly the uneducated song writer had entered the domain of serious music, and for the rest of his life he wrestled with his genius and technical limitations. Soon his stylisation of jazz into classical forms inspired composers from all over the world to try their hand in the jazz style. Ravel, Walton, Copland, Krenek, Tansman, Weill, Milhaud and Lambert are just a few who composed music stimulated from jazz and its derivatives. He next turned to a Piano Concerto in 1925, three Piano Preludes in 1928, An American in Paris that same year, a Second Rhapsody in 1931, the Cuban Overture in 1932, and his last work and magnum opus, the opera Porgy & Bess, composed between 1934-35. While performing as soloist in the Piano Concerto with the Los Angeles Symphony in February 1937, he suffered a fifteen-second blackout. His close friend, the pianist and celebrated wit Oscar Levant, worried, ran backstage. "Did I make you nervous, or did you think Horowitz was in the audience?" quipped Levant. But it was serious to the extreme, and Gershwin's health declined alarmingly. A malignant brain tumour killed him at the age of thirty-eight. His death was mourned as the passing of an era. Gershwin, the all-American boy, the 'regular guy' was a classic rags-to-riches story. His personality and music represented complex and powerful aspects of the polyglot American landscape. As a composer he represented the transfixed jazz age as did no other American artist; the Rhapsody in Blue sounding the note of a vanished sweetly sad, brashly energetic and optimistic time in America. We listen to it with an almost unbearable nostalgia. For admirers of Gershwin this Nimbus release of the solo version of the Rhapsody in Blue is an exciting event. Gerald Stonehill explains the history of Gershwin's involvement with the Aeolian firm: Gershwin began hand-playing non-reproducing piano rolls in 1916 as part of his effort to earn a living while hoping to make his mark as a composer. He joined Aeolian in 1917, still hand-playing pianola rolls. From 1919 to 1921, sixteen of these were issued in the form of Duo-Art rolls for the popular market, but were not apparently taken too seriously by the Aeolian company as genuine recordings, as evidenced by the fact that in the 1927 main catalogue only one of these popular rolls was listed under "Gershwin", along with the Rhapsody in Blue. He recorded the Rhapsody at the same time onto a true Duo-Art roll, and while it was played back, recorded a duet addition to extend its range, which was added to the roll. Part two of this was published in May 1925, since he was unhappy with the first part, which was revised and re-recorded for eventual publication in January 1927. The whole piece was anyway too long for presentation on one roll with the technology then available on reproducing pianos. But, by 1933, after the introduction of new technology into a very few, rare Duo-Art reproducing grand pianos, the complete performance finally became available on a single roll, P-301. The Robot, which includes this new technology, transfers the P-301 version for the first time, for the Nimbus CD. © 1997 David Dubal

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