WETA FM 90.9 Blog

"New Releases" posts are regular columns that feature reviews of new CDs that are, for one reason or another, truly outstanding among the many I come across every month.

The Pentatone recording of Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A—nicknamed “Trout Quartet”—around pianist Martin Helmchen is Classiccal WETA’s  CD Pick of the Week. The discussion of other “Recent Releases” follows after the interview at the bottom of this article (beyond the link).

I first met the pianist Martin Helmchen on an early afternoon in February of 2009 in the Mozarteum in Salzburg where he would play a concert that evening. He speaks softly, in long, mellifluously twisting sentences. Even though he still has to practice he doesn’t seem to mind that our interview becomes a conversation and lasts much longer than intended. He remains unfazed when we are interrupted by a slightly disorganized Mozarteum employee who tries to arrange at least ten minutes of pre-concert play-time for him, lest he would have to practice on an un-tuned piano. Which, Helmchen agrees with very mildly enervated understatement, “would be unfortunate”.

To describe Helmchen as shy would be missing the point. He isn’t, he only comes across that way. He is not prone to boast, there is nothing ostentatious in the way he acts or speaks, he possesses genuine humility, and where colleagues of his have success being ‘loud’, Helmchen succeeds quietly. I imagine it could be easy to underestimate him and his playing, and concert audiences or record collectors casually familiar with his work might wonder why he enjoys the relative prominence of being Pentatone’s go-to guy for standard classical/romantic repertoire. But Martin Helmchen’s interpretations are not pale or indistinct, they are subtle and their value unfolds, inexorably, over time. Eschewing gimmick and fad, he plays with understated feeling and authenticity.

“That’s one of my great ideals in music: to be authentic” he says, “and the conviction that if you are, the result can still be interesting a hundred years from now. If people who involve themselves in works like Schubert’s late Sonatas—with their own particular experiences and skill, especially when they are in the process of discovery, and do so in an honest, profound way, respectful of the music and with humility—then I think the result will always be different and always new.

“Therefore the question whether it’s still interesting to perform or record classic works doesn’t even come up. If it’s done in way true to oneself and the music, if one seeks for the music to become one with oneself, then such deep works will necessarily be always new again and one need not worry about whether one is being ‘original’ enough, or novel in some way. But of course one hopes that—without really being able to control that in a meaningful way—one somehow belongs to those interpretations that say something that resonates with listeners in a particular way… simply because one is, by necessity, different than any other pianist of the past or future.”

I ask him whether he has the same mindset when recording as he does playing a concert—or whether he thinks of other recordings, what others have done, and he likes or would do differently. In other words, how self conscious is the process of recording?

“I don’t really notice a difference between a concert and performance. It’s always about finding your own way to the core of the piece and occupying yourself with other recordings should never get to the point where you start copying elements. But of course it’s impossible not to be influenced in some ways by other interpretations and that will always be the case. It’s an ambivalent relationship for me: You get enthused about certain interpretations and maybe grew up with specific ones, but you have to emancipate yourself from that so as not to repeat others’ views. Those views are in the back of your mind, not unlike with composers. What Bach composed builds in some ways on what Schütz or Monteverdi or Buxtehude had done, composers that knew and appreciated each other but always created something new. Interpretations function similarly. Do your own thing, find your own way and live it through playing. And if that’s ingrained, the process is not conscious at all. I don’t sit down thinking ‘Oh, I should play this part in Haydn like pianist X or Y. Afterwards, of course, it can happen that you listen to it and you realize that you found similar solutions on your own as some other artist. But with works so abundantly meaningful or sophisticated, that’s not likely to occur very often.” The process, he agrees, is not unlike every-day language where phrases or terms are learned, adopted, and adapted from others—parents, teachers, writers—but the tone remains invariably one’s own.

Doesn’t this make CD reviews meaningless to the artist in musical territory that’s so well explored since—baring technical imperfections and given the impossibility of an “ideal performance”—the critique would be essentially of Martin Helmchen’s personal approach to, say, Schubert? A critique would essentially be a statement of agreement or disagreement with way in which your interpretation gels (or doesn’t) with the legitimately different expectations of someone else.

“It’s subjective or relative, matter. It’s about my personal ideal as a musician: to be truthful with everything I know and can learn, feel, and find in its honest core. To hit upon the truth in the music, to find what it’s about, and how I can, with my abilities and limitations, express that. And if you have made your way through a work like the D959 sonata, which needs years of grappling with, and if you have had good conditions in which to record them, then the whole process has become so big, that you become independent in your attitude. You rely on, and maybe fear, your own judgment more than anything. What’s important is whether I think that the recording can communicate what I see in the work and what I wanted to express with it. And if that were not the case, it would be bitterly disappointing. After so much preparation with so much work poured into it and, more so than in concert, the claim for it to be a sort of stock-taking of what I want to say with the work now.

“And as far as reviews are concerned: It’s disappointing when intentions you had are not heard (or noticed), but yes, when it is just a matter of taste, then that doesn’t quite affect you. The whole ‘too much or too little rubato’, ‘it sounds too much like Beethoven or too romantic’, I don’t pay much attention to, to be honest. But when essential things in a work are not picked up on, I do pause and I will listen and figure if that’s right or how it could be done. But my own judgment of whether that comes through what the piece means to me, that’s rather more important to me.”

“What if the opposite happens”, I ask: Have you ever played a concert where you noticed while playing that you are not able to express what you  really want, but critics were wowed by it?”

“Yes… unfortunately that happens regularly to me with concerts. It almost seems as though that my own impression is the exact opposite of the reaction I get. Earlier I said that there is no difference in interpretation between concert and recording for me, but in the sense of how the interpretation works out, there is a huge difference. In a recording I can constantly control myself and I know how it sounds and I have the opportunity to really make the work your own over a couple of days. But on stage, when it has to be called upon in the moment, there are so many mechanisms at work that I don’t even grasp, or could, or have to… But in any case it happens all the time that in concerts in which I felt comfortable and where I thought the performance was very fine, the response is rather lukewarm, giving the impression that attendees thought that everything was fairly good and well controlled and correct, but no more. But those concerts where I can’t find my way into the work at all, where I have to struggle and fight and wrestle for every note in order to compensate for the feeling that I’m not getting to the core of the work, that seems to be something that creates much greater tension and intensity and often it is after such concerts, when I’m exhausted and a little down, that I get the most enthusiastic responses. So many things that happen on stage can’t be understood analytically… what makes a concert good or one evening better and another less so.

“The problem with recordings is that once it’s out there, it remains unchanged for years and while you don’t have the factor of the ‘moment’, you have to be more conscious of what you want and do. In a concert however, assuming you can trust your intuition, you can build on spontaneous moments in concert and leave room for them to develop.

Martin Helmchen has a contract with the wonderful audiophile company Pentatone with whom he had two recordings out at the time: the Schubert sonata referenced above and a disc of Mozart piano concertos. Schumann and Dvořák Concertos with Marc Albrecht and the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra were planned for the following month and have been released since, as has been the first volume of Schubert’s complete works for violin and piano. He shows me his digital recorder with a Schubert Trout on it, of which he has been checking the edits. For this Trout recording, Helmchen was given card blanche to assemble musicians of his choice. He chose the bright violinist Christian Tetzlaff, the vibrant violist Antoine Tamestit (an ARD prize winner), veteran double bass player Alois Posch. The cellist he picked is Marie-Elisabeth Hecker. “It’s simply a dream cast”, he laughs at the question at why he picked exactly these musicians “They were the first people I asked. Marie-Elisabeth (championed as a soloist by Valery Gergiev) was an obvious choice since she is not just my girlfriend but also one of the finest musicians I have ever heard and met.”

Even a cursory look at Mlle. Hecker suggests a host of good reasons why Helmchen should be delighted to have her as a girlfriend, but his sincerity about the musical point suggests that it was indeed her musicality that made him chose her for his Trout and perhaps even as his girlfriend. “With Christian and Antoine I’ve played on festivals several times and one needn’t really add anything about them. They’re one-of-a-kind musicians and have very similar ideals about music to mine. And Alois Posch was the first double bass player for the Vienna Philharmonic and is a very active chamber musician who I think has already recorded seven Trouts in his career.” (The fine and seasoned musician Posch is, if he were to get tired of being the default trout-man, musicians should look to double bass players of their generation like the excruciatingly musical Oliver Thiery.)

“Once you start playing or rehearsing as an ensemble, you realize immediately whether you all have the same goals. … getting to the core of the music rather than using the music as a means to show what I’m capable of doing musically. This ‘using’ of a piece to put myself forward in order to show how I can express myself and my musical means is exactly the opposite of what these musicians stand for. It’s like that old Brendel quote that if he comes of a particular school of pianism at all, it’s the school that the composition teaches the interpreter in how it ought to sound, not the other way around. I’ve since met many friends in chamber music circles who share my enthusiasm for making music in this way, and that of course includes those that I get to play the Trout with.”

Where is the line between a more playful approach to the score—not necessarily to please one’s ego but presumably for the benefit of the work or the listening enjoyment—and treating the score as sacrosanct to the point where Rudolf Serkin didn’t play a particular Beethoven sonata at all, because he could not get Beethoven’s suggested fingering right?

“Well, I think liberties are wanted, by all means… and often enough they are already part of the composition. But it probably depends on the framework. In a Mozart concerto, there is so much room for taking joy in sheer virtuosity. And when that’s the intention and takes place as part of this genial structure of Mozart, contributing to the greater impression, it’s wonderful to improvise with ornamentation as it was done back then. But when I do that in parts where Mozart or Schubert wanted something else in the music, it becomes inappropriate.

“Schubert, for example, doesn’t strike me as suitable for that playful approach. He even said himself: ‘Is there jolly music? I know of none’. Even when he writes dances they’re infused with a good deal of seriousness. But Mozart is a good example where you can be true to the spirit of the work without slavishly following the text. If you listen to the older generation of pianists who knew the score very well, too—Schnabel or Backhausen, for example—they take so many liberties. Admittedly that was a very different way of making music, then. Old recordings of Kempff sometimes make you think: what is he doing there… added notes, instances of changed articulation and dynamics, all things that are not in the text but perhaps express what that passage means still better. That’s a fidelity to what the work denotes.”

That seriousness shows in the Trout at hand. The fourth (of five) movement of the Quintet picks up the theme from Schubert’s song “The Trout”. It’s a bubbly theme, usually sung (and played) with quick-witted buoyancy—but the theme of betrayal (and incarceration) isn’t a particularly happy one. Helmchen & crew pay tribute to that and deliver something altogether more sober, though far from heavy or heaving. The entire recording has a touch of the sober, with Helmchen setting the unfussy tone that serves as the base for occasional dashes of brilliance by Teztlaff, brief but telling touches of searing intensity from Tamestit, gamely common sense from Mlle. Hecker and Posch. “Variations on Trockne Blumen for flute and piano” (Aldo Baerten on a wooden flute) and the Notturno for Piano Trio D897 complete this exceptional release.

Recent Releases

I might have skipped this release—all the Brahms’ Symphonies with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic—because the EMI recordings with Rattle and his band have been a mixed bag in the last years, vacillating between civilized boredom and indistinct, haphazard blandness. They rarely felt fully thought through, much less labors of love. That may not apply to all of them, but to enough for that general impression.

I love Brahms’ Symphonies—but Günter Wand’s cycle with the North German RSO (re-mastered on RCA) so satisfies my every Brahms-craving that I never felt the need to go out of my way exploring every other possible recording, too. The emergence of a Rattle-Berlin recording wasn’t going to change that. But when I was in Amsterdam recently, several musicians from the Concertgebouw raved about that recording. Musicians hear recordings differently than the passive listener—especially, but not only, when their own recordings are concerned. And while I don’t think their opinion is necessarily the measure of all things (mine is, of course!), is there a better, more persuasive recommendation for Berlin’s new Brahms than hearing from RCO players—members of the alleged ‘world’s best orchestra’: “That’s how we would love to sound like. This is Brahms for the 21st century”?

And so it is. This is Brahms with racing stripes—not so much for speed (Rattle is very flexible and not out to set new records), but for full-bodied, sleek, high tuned performance. If the opening of the First puts a smile on your face with Günter Wand, this one wrings tears from your eyes, for its intensity bordering sophisticated brutality. It’s not cold Brahms, either. Certainly not where Rattle evokes Elgarian plush in the second movement of the Fourth Symphony. The way the discernable string waves enter beneath the brass and flute solos in the fourth movement is enough to make one joyously wince, so movingly are they played and so well captured. Rattle’s Brahms bristles, puts effective but not ostentatious spotlights on his excellent soloists and does create a sound that reminds again why the Berliners are such a special orchestra. In case those who can only judge by recordings should have forgotten. The recording (live) from the Berlin Philharmonic is magnificent: rich, present, detailed.

Where Christoph Eschenbach goes—Paris, Philadelphia, Hamburg, soon Washington—he brings his record deal with ONDINE. That’s an asset from which the NSO should benefit handsomely, because the recordings (most of them) are not just superbly played and interpreted, but they’re even more imaginatively put together: chamber music next to large orchestra pieces, sometimes showcasing Eschenbach as a pianist, sometimes select musicians from his orchestra. Or his special friend, pianist Tzimon Barto, as he does on his latest disc, a studio recording with the North German RSO. The disc is all-Schumann, but with a program that reflects Eschenbach’s willingness to turn his back on standard programming and let a little fantasy reign. The two “Introduction & Allegros” for piano and orchestra (opp.92 and 134) are—literally—joined by Schumann’s last complete composition, the “Ghost Variations” for solo piano as a middle slow movement.

I rarely cry listening to a CD. I did here, gladly, and without guilt for any of those tears. The Ghost Variations were written in the late, torn hours of Schumann’s presence on the here-side of sanity, created under heart-wrenching circumstances in his last last lucid, intermittently hallucinatory moments. The Variations work perfectly to join the two Konzertstücke to a new, complete piano concerto. Barto plays them with muscular romanticism of someone who can relate to the light and dark of late Schumann—and indulge in it, too.

Bringing the disc to over 73 minutes playtime is another painfully gorgeous Schumann rarity: the Six Etudes in Canonic Form, op.56. If you haven’t heard them, or heard of them, it’s probably because they were written for the pedal piano that was only briefly en vogue. With the demise of that contraption (originally intended to facilitate practicing organ-playing at home by attaching the pedals to an extant grand piano), the works written specifically for it sank into obscurity, too. Debussy caught a glimpse of these Etudes, though, and duly mesmerized (I imagine) transcribed them for two pianos. Eschenbach and Barto sit down to play them… and what a substantial little wonder they are: The stringency of Bach infused with all the romantic essence of Echt-Schumann continues to leave me speechless every time I hear them. The entire disc is a clear contender for inclusion among the “Best of 2010”.

Hans Gál (1890-1987) wrote music that didn’t belong to his time—even in his early years. Violinist Annette-Barbara Vogel has recorded his three sonatas (two sonatas, one suite, technically) for violin and piano from 1920, 1933, and 1935 and she finds the right words to describe his music: “genuine and pure, nostalgic, elegant, innocent, generous, melodic, assertive, rhythmically driven, emotionally rich… never trivial or superficial, nor aiming to please.” The string of adjectives seems formulaic but it’s spot on. This isn’t the first CD dedicated to he music of Hans Gál—the last five, six years have seen about ten, fifteen releases. But it is perhaps the finest introduction, with passionate, absolutely adroit playing by Mme. Vogel and pianist Juhani Lagespetz. The booklet is exemplary; the sound leaves nothing to be desired: Avie has given us a superb excursion into the less travelled paths of chamber music. Sure to be a “Music You Didn’t Know You Loved” candidate.