The second in the series of Istanbul Recitals for the 2018–19 season
was given by the French pianist Alexandre Tharaud at the Sakıp Sabancı
Museum in Emirgan on November 13. For this recital, the usual concert
hall – ‘The Seed’ – was not available, so the performance had to take
place in a marquee. This meant that the acoustics were not up to
scratch, and the pianist had to compete with occasional bass-baritone
honks from the motor boats passing close to the shoreline of the
nearby Bosphorus. The flimsy walls of the marquee were, quite
naturally, unable to exclude external noise, and Monsieur Tharaud may
well have felt un peu gêné (‘a little put off’) by this, but to his
credit – and no doubt thanks to his professionalism – he certainly did
not show it. From my point of view, the auditory contributions from
the outside world did not in any way present a problem: indeed, I
thought the roar of the aeroplane that passed overhead right at the
beginning of the Beethoven sonata was a well-timed portent, and
therefore a plus rather than a minus.
Having ensconced myself in the front row, with a close-up view of the
performer’s hands – thanks to the good offices of Ms Nazan Ceylan, the organiser of the Istanbul Recitals (for whose thoughtfulness
and consideration I was once again most grateful) – I found myself
unable to take my eyes off a feature of the arrangements that was
quite unexpected: in the corner of the marquee to the left of the
stage stood a tree of extraordinary beauty. The structure had been
positioned so that it just managed to incorporate this tree, whose
elegantly-shaped leaves were in the process of turning every shade of
orange and brown. It was subtly lighted from below, and could easily
have been the star of a Japanese print.
And so we settled down to enjoy Alexandre Tharaud’s recital, the first
half of which consisted of works by two French composers of the
Baroque period: François Couperin (1668-1733) and Jean-Philippe Rameau
(1683-1764).
Couperin, who came from a family of musicians, became organist and
composer to the French court in 1717. He was also a virtuoso on the
harpsichord, and published a book on keyboard technique (L’Art de
toucher le clavecin); his fingering system was adopted by JS Bach,
who held him in high regard – as indeed did Johannes Brahms. Couperin
published four volumes of ordres (suites) for harpsichord between 1713
and 1730; these contain dance movements as well as descriptive and
‘mood’ pieces. Some of the ones we heard – a selection from all four
volumes – had interesting discords and odd suspensions; in the fourth
piece, there were chromatic chord progressions that reminded me of
those in Bach’s chorale Es ist genug (which was later quoted by Alban
Berg in his Violin Concerto).
Rameau learnt to play the violin during his teenage years in Dijon.
Having been removed from the Jesuit college there for neglecting his
studies, at the age of 18 he went to Italy and joined a travelling
French opera troupe as a violinist; subsequently, he worked in several
French cities as an organist (this being his father’s profession). His
Suite in A minor for harpsichord, which Alexandre Tharaud played to
us, was written in 1706. Rameau moved to Paris in 1722, and in 1745
was appointed composer of chamber music to Louis XV. In his day, he
was best known as a composer of operas (and was involved in a
controversy with supporters of the more conservative Lully), but his
books on the theory of music were also famous: these include a
landmark treatise on the harmonic basis of chords entitled Traité de
l’harmonie.
Both these composers favoured a highly-ornamented style with lashings
of trills, turns and mordents. The issue I have with their music is
that there is too little underlying content to provide a justification
for the never-ending twiddles: not much melody, and little or no
counterpoint. Devotees of French Baroque no doubt had a field day
during the first half of the programme: I, however, thought that the dose could profitably have been reduced a little. Karim Said got it about right when he devoted 15 minutes to pieces by William Byrd and the little-known British composer Thomas Tomkins during his recital in June (see Karim’s kaleidoscope of musical history). I must say that after prolonged exposure to courtly music of the Baroque period, one tends to feel like Candide in Voltaire’s eponymous novel must have felt when, having travelled to the country of Eldorado, he had just eaten his share of ‘a boiled vulture weighing about two hundred pounds’.
Joking aside, however, Monsieur Tharaud may well see himself as a
cultural ambassador for his country, and therefore have been eager to
introduce us to two of its cultural icons. Possibly, too, he just
enjoys playing Baroque music, and no-one can blame him for that – I do
too. One thing that occurred to me during his highly competent
performance of the Couperin and the Rameau was that it might have been
enlivened a little had it been accompanied by a Commedia dell’Arte
performance, with masked dancers pirouetting round the tree in full
costume. This might have rendered the music more meaningful by
providing it with an appropriately stylised dramatic context.
Here is some Couperin played on the harpsichord by Alexei Lubimov, one
of the last students of Heinrich Neuhaus (1888-1964), a famous teacher
at the Moscow Conservatory; Lubimov, by the way, is justly celebrated
for his performances of modern piano works. The following recording
begins with Couperin’s Suite in D minor. The sound is well engineered,
and in my view very satisfying:
Now, here is Alexandre Tharaud playing some Rameau on the piano with
commendable sensitivity, subtlety and restraint. At 56:15, he performs
Debussy’s Hommage à Rameau. I wish he had played this to us – and, of
course, some or all of Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin – at the concert
in Emirgan, but then you can’t have everything:
During the interval, I had the opportunity to look around the garden
outside the marquee. Here, there was a magnificent array of trees of
various shapes, sizes and autumnal hues to look at, and a sliver of
moon overlighting us. I noticed from a poster on a nearby wall that
the Sakıp Sabancı Museum is currently mounting an exhibition of
paintings by Osman Hamdi Bey, the Ottoman culture hero responsible for
the foundation of the Istanbul Archeological Museum – the institution
which occupies the building that graces the hillside between the
grounds of Topkapı Palace and Gülhane Park. This imposing edifice was
designed by Alexandre Vallaury, the Levantine architect who
co-operated with the Italian Raimondo D’Aronco over the drawing up of
plans for the Ottoman Imperial School of Medicine, featured in the
latest edition of Cornucopia. I found the informative article
by Paolo Girardelli, and the excellent accompanying photographs by
Monica Fritz, particularly rewarding as I myself used to live at the
back of Botter Han in Beyoğlu, a building designed by D’Aronco.
The exhibition is entitled Görünenin Ötesinde Osman Hamdi Bey (‘Osman
Hamdi Bey Beyond Vision’), and focusses on the materials and
techniques he used in his paintings, these being features that were
brought to light during recent conservation procedures. It is
scheduled to run until the end of December.
The first piece in the second half of Alexandre Tharaud’s recital on
November 13 was Anton von Webern’s Variations, Opus 27, a
three-movement work composed in 1936, when the composer was well into
his tone-row period. I heartily congratulate the pianist for putting
Webern on the menu, although I am aware that atonal music is not to
everyone’s taste. Whatever else might be said about it, it certainly
wakes you up, and that is just what we needed before listening to some
late Beethoven that demanded full concentration. Monsieur Tharaud gave
a creditable performance of the Webern, and successfully brought out
the weirdness of the off-the-beat crotchets in the third movement. The
second movement has some extraordinarily fast leaps and hand-crossings
(especially in the first bar of the second half, which begins halfway
between 02:10 and 02:11 in the video to which a link is given below
the next paragraph), and I cannot blame him for not getting all of
them dead right.
In the next video, the Variations are being played by Maurizio
Pollini. A word of warning: Glenn Gould plays the piece woodenly, so
if I were you I would not bother to watch the YouTube video of him
performing it. Pollini plays it with far more sympathy and
sensitivity, and his performance has the added advantage of being
accompanied by the score:
This was followed by Beethoven’s two-movement Sonata No 32, Opus 111,
written in 1822. Here is a link to a BBC critique by Artur Pizarro.
Now, a link to a talk on the work by Andras Schiff from the Guardian website
Opinions on who plays this sonata best are divided. My own personal
favourite is Sviatoslav Richter, who seems to me to be really putting
his heart into it in this live performance in Moscow in 1975. The
recital had been organised in memory of Heinrich Neuhaus, who was
Richter’s teacher as well as that of Alexei Lubimov, mentioned
earlier. The performance begins at 0:51, after a short introduction in
Russian. The sound quality is not all that good, but in my view
watching Richter perform makes up for it – and what a magnificent
instrument he is playing! The piano’s tone is absolutely superb. At
14:52, he jogs about in his seat as he plays a part some wags have
claimed shows that Beethoven invented ‘boogie-woogie’ (an opinion
Andras Schiff would strongly disagree with, by the way, and so would
I). Personally, I think the tinkly bits that start at 17:13 and 18:10
demonstrate that Beethoven might be said with greater justice to have
anticipated ‘New Age’ music:
Now, here is a cleaned-up version of the same Richter performance with
slightly better sound quality but no visuals. The introductory talk
has been omitted, so 50 seconds need to be subtracted from the time
values given for the previous video.
I think the following performance by Mitsuko Uchida, which is
accompanied by the score, is particularly good in the quiet bits:
Alexandre Tharaud performed the sonata without any obvious technical
difficulty, and managed the transitions between the many sections of
the second movement seamlessly. However, he played it from the music
with a page-turner. At the time when the concert took place, the
planet Venus, which rules the arts, was retrograde – that is, it
appeared to be moving backwards when seen from the Earth: perhaps it
was this obscuration of my artistic perceptions that explained why my
reaction to the performance was not altogether a positive one. Granted
the long and complex second movement must be extremely hard to
memorise, but nevertheless I feel that a work like a late Beethoven
sonata needs to be played from memory if the performer is to manifest
a sufficient degree of emotional commitment.
For the encore, Monsieur Tharaud played us a zappy Scarlatti sonata
with great skill and obvious enjoyment, managing the repeated notes
with ease: he is in any case widely regarded as a consummate Scarlatti
player.
And so to the future. The next in the series of Istanbul Recitals is
due to be given by Claire Huangci on December 15. I myself will be in
salubrious Manchester on that date, and so will not be able to attend.
I notice that in the blurb below the heading of my article (entitled
‘Sound Management’) in the latest edition of Cornucopia magazine, one
adjective used to describe the general tone of my blog is ‘waspish’. I
freely confess that on seeing myself characterised as a person whose
literary manner is a trifle robust, I was somewhat disconcerted:
however, on further reflection I decided that any totem animal (or, in
this case, insect) is better than none. So if members of the audience
on December 15 see a small winged creature flying around the concert
hall making a buzzing noise, they are hereby asked to refrain from
swatting it, and gently guide it towards a location from which it will
be able to hear the performance.