Someone at San Francisco Performances is keen on completeness. After last season's three big Brahms recitals, the all-Stravinsky program that violinist Anthony Marwood and pianist Thomas Adès presented at Herbst Theatre Saturday night seemed almost an intermezzo, particularly with Pacifica Quartet's three solid hours of Elliott Carter just over the horizon next month.
Stravinsky's violin-and-piano music may occupy a similar-sized chunk of time to, say, Brahms' string quartets. But there's a difference. Brahms is sufficiently "of a piece" that if you dislike one of his quartets, you can safely assume you dislike 'em all. Stravinsky is another matter. It would take a superhumanly cosmopolitan dislike to encompass everything on Saturday's recital — and maybe a similarly unusual power of charity to admire all of it.
The program collected the fruits of Stravinsky's recital partnership with the violinist Samuel Dushkin. After Dushkin approached him in 1930 about possibly writing him a violin concerto, Stravinsky followed that commission (1931) with the
Duo concertant for violin and piano the following year, and then with an array of arrangements of earlier, mainly orchestral, music so that both of them would have enough playing material to concertize with.
The resulting body of music is inevitably a hodgepodge, but in some ways that's more a feature than a bug. Saturday's recital had the flaws that any 90-minute grab-bag of a couple of decades' worth of Stravinsky would have — too much of this relative to that, and not nearly enough of anything. All the same, the program conveyed both the wild variety of the composer's music over those years and the music's slender common threads, in ways that a more conventionally "representative" program drawn from the same time period might not have. Certainly this recital packed into it things calculated to startle anyone whose knowledge of Stravinsky wasn't already comprehensive.
Take the little Pastorale, for example: originally a vocalise for soprano and piano written way back in 1907, fitted out with a wind-quartet accompaniment in the 1920s and then expanded and arranged for violin and piano at Dushkin's behest a decade further on. It's a brief, faintly exotic, rather sultry thing, decorated with frilly little turns and bearing, in the bumptious left hand of the piano, the seeds of the bassoon part that Stravinsky eventually made of it. It's utterly charming, and great "guess-the-composer" material, to boot.
The 1934 Divertimento — based on the 1927 ballet
The Fairy's Kiss, which in turn draws its thematic material from odds and ends of Tchaikovsky — is in some ways an even better stumper. Neither the parent ballet nor its source pieces are well-known, and once you take away the orchestrational clues of the full score, the combination of high-octane Tchaikovskian melody and Stravinskian acerbity is mighty puzzling to the ear. It's not difficult to imagine someone unfamiliar with the piece wrestling to "place" it for most of its 20 minutes, though near the end there's a passage that gives the game
right away to anyone who's heard Stravinsky's
Apollon musagète.
Strikingly New-Sounding
For me, the big surprises were elsewhere. I've never heard
Le Rossignol, the opera Stravinsky began in 1908 and finished in 1914, and I've only heard the orchestral piece he made of its material (
Chant du Rossignol, 1917) a couple times. The two violin-and-piano transcriptions from the opera that Marwood and Adès played were entirely new to me. I should have anticipated their striking character — part Karol Szymanowski, part
Petrushka, with a dollop of cartoon chinoiserie added in the "Chinese March" — but I didn't.
And Marwood threw me for a loop with the announcement that the duo would replace the scheduled
Suite italienne, the familiar Dushkin-inspired 1933 collection of music from the 1922 ballet
Pulcinella, with the Suite of music from the same source Stravinsky had made back in 1925 for the Polish violinist Paul Kochanski.
Suite italienne is not lacking in tricky bits, but any violinist will tell you that it's tolerably user-friendly violin writing, avoiding hand-crunching contortions for the most part and generally having that happy quality of sounding more difficult than it is.
The 1925 Suite for Kochanski is a whole 'nother can of worms. The material is almost entirely the same (the
Suite italienne includes one more movement), but the violin writing is murderous. Kochanski seems to have had a special flair for artificial harmonics, which are all over this piece exactly as they are all over the copious music Szymanowski wrote for him. Worse, from the player's perspective, are the incessant double-stops, which, unlike the ones in
Suite italienne, are willfully nasty on the left hand, without sounding particularly impressive even when flawlessly played, as they were here.
Boosey & Hawkes, Stravinsky's longtime publisher, recently put all his violin music to which they hold the copyright into one handy volume, and priced it below what they charge for the (still in print) separate editions of any of the larger works. As a result, the cheapest way for a violinist interested in playing
Suite italienne to acquire a copy is now in a book where it appears side by side with the 1925 Suite, a piece that players are most unlikely to run across any other way.
Will they take it up? Marwood argued, Saturday night, that it's much more interesting than the later arrangement, and in some ways that's certainly true; there's a kind of forcedness, an extra layer of effort and artifice, that's arresting in the Kochanski version. But the amount of work involved is formidable. I think most violinists will blanch, turn a dozen pages ahead, and play
Suite italienne, where the fatigue is less and the rewards are more immediate.
Also on the program were other scraps from Stravinsky's earlier theatrical music: three outtakes from
Firebird, the "Danse russe" from
Petrushka, and that haunting "Chanson russe" from
Mavra that lately seems to be violist Yuri Bashmet's favorite encore.
I'm not sure how well these transcriptions wear in recital, especially in quantity. The problem's not their slimness so much as the loss of orchestral color, and the means Stravinsky uses to make up the deficit. Solo-violin tremolo, for one thing, can't help but sound feeble if you're imagining orchestral tremolo; the end of the "Berceuse" from
Firebird (and for that matter the beginning of the "Song of the Nightingale" from
Le Rossignol) only put you in mind of the colors you
weren't hearing.
The "Danse russe" (which has solo violin and piano parts embedded in the original orchestral score) worked better, and maybe best of all was the brief "Scherzo" from
Firebird — a scampering moto perpetuo that had the Herbst audience bursting into applause before the
Firebird set was over. But set them alongside the
Duo concertant, the one original work here, and the comparison isn't helpful.
Nimble, Suave Violinist
This was Anthony Marwood's San Francisco Performances debut, and I think his first appearance in the Bay Area. Having heard him only on disc and in considerably older music, I was curious how he would handle such a great, jumbly heap of styles as on this program. He turns out to be a lovely violinist, suave in the light-toned English manner, capable of insouciant little inflections under the bow in legato. Things like the Pastorale, the "Chanson russe," and the
Firebird's "Berceuse" displayed an appealing, understated sultriness.
He's nimble, too. I was most impressed with the "Gigue" of the
Duo concertant, where I don't think I've ever heard the left-hand pizzicati sound so cleanly, and so well in balance with the bowed notes they're paired with. Artificial harmonics gave him some trouble, which is too bad, given how many of them there were. Even the most egregious double-stops in the Suite, though, rang out true.
If he has an obvious technical fault, it's his spiccato. In seriously fast
sautillé (bouncing on the strings), like that
Firebird "Scherzo," he was in tight, well-nigh perfect control, but anything much slower got far off the string, far up the bow, and splatty-sounding. It was puzzling, given his fine bow control elsewhere, and it gave the impression that he was trying to crank out more sound, but wasn't quite sure how.
Adès, meanwhile, was superb. His voicing is uncanny; he has the ability to make everything audible without making anything unnaturally dry, separating skeins and phrasing them individually so as to make the whole clear even when there's a lot going on. "Ah, that's the composer's ear," you say. Well, sure it is, and, for all I know, there may be any number of composers who can understand a piano part and parse it as intelligently as Adès does. Vanishingly rare are the ones who can also make what they hear audible to the rest of us.
The program had a built-in double encore, so to speak: the giddy end of the Divertimento, followed by the "Danse russe." But Marwood and Adès had a last arrow in their quiver: an arrangement of Stravinsky's 1940
Tango. Compared to the blistering Tango-Waltz-Ragtime in
L'Histoire du soldat, this is tame stuff, especially without the pungent orchestration (heavy on the clarinets and guitar) that Stravinsky clothed it in it soon after he wrote it. But Marwood lit into it with a fiercely biting bow, Adès rumbled, and we went out into the night one Stravinskian data-point richer.