<< -- 2 -- John Bell Young A COLLECTOR'S ITEM
The competitive dimension, wherein two soloists in tandem compete for
attention as a measure of just how great each of them is, is missing
here. For some listeners, especially Rachmaninoff devotees, that might
be viewed as eviscerating a performance of its tension and energy. But
that is a view that attributes to the performers a kind of magical aura
that is not necessarily identical to the substantive content of the
music itself. In fact, when music is as cogently and lovingly surveyed
as it is here, the net result is just the opposite.
Witness, for example, Mr Isserlis's revealing exploitation of pitch
relations and pedal points in the soaring melisma of the Rachmaninoff
sonata's poignant Andante. Only a musician who is intimately familiar
with the aesthetics of an earlier historic period, particularly the
Affektenlehre of the baroque era, could survey Rachmaninoff's
polyphonically dense landscape so transparently and with such an
unerring grasp of its compositional teleology. Mr Hough's savvy
manipulation of the work's even thicker piano textures convert the
generalized sonic sheen that most pianists see fit to make of it into a
silken, even febrile web of contrapuntal filaments. That may not be,
where pianistic tradition is concerned, the customary and usual approach
to Rachmaninoff, where white-hot passion and bravado can combine to
overwhelm the senses. On the contrary, it betrays a cooler disposition,
where intimacy, codified in the smallest motivic figurations and the
manner in which these are articulated, is valued in favor of overtly
rhetorical declamation.
In other words, what interests both Mr Hough and Mr Isserlis are not
explosive climaxes, where phrases erupt and spew forth Vesuvius-like,
but something more quiescent, thoughtful and indeed, implosive. Climaxes
are never imposed exogenously, but develop organically from inside the
text as the consequence of rhythmic energy, cumulatively distributed,
that has been allowed to fulfill its own destiny. Such precocious
aforethought is likely anathema to those who covet the crash and burn,
if admittedly cathartic pyrotechnics of larger-than-life Rachmaninoff
interpreters like Horowitz and his imitative mignons. Which is to say
that, for ears unaccustomed to, or worse, intimidated by a performance
that respects without compromise the integrity of the work itself, Mr
Hough and Mr Isserlis are bound to disappoint
[listen -- track 6, 8:15-9:17]. There's irony in that,
as the very name Rachmaninoff bears something in common with the
beneficent, ethereal posture these musicians invest in it, and is in
turn legitimized by its etymological esotericism: the composer's name,
traced to the cultural spoils of the campaigns of Alexander the Great in
India, comes from the Russian for Brahman.
Indeed, here and again in the overtly rhetorical Franck Sonata (which no
musician is beyond referring to, in the classical music locker room, as
the Frank Sinatra), Mr Isserlis and Mr Hough prove persuasive
protagonists for the musical aesthetics of Georg Gervinus (1805-1871).
Gervinus's principal obiter dictum -- accentus mater musices (accent is
the mother of music) -- seems particularly apropos, in that both artists
demonstrate a genuine understanding of musical grammar and its
organizing principals. Theirs is music making which speaks as much as it
sings; it gives weight to the notion of the Empfindungsaccent, wherein
affective accentuation and shading displace rhetorical gesture as the
principal means of conveying the reservoir of expressive nuances
associated with speech. Like a skilled actor who communicates textual
intent through vocal inflection, body language and facial expressions as
much as he does through his words, what matters is not what is said, but
what is meant.
Of course, in the world of music, such things are abstractions that
could mean just about anything. As musical semioticians would be first
to point out, music is nothing if not a field rich in signifiers. Just
a wink of an eye or a downward turn of the corner of the mouth can
suggest just the opposite of what a speaker is actually saying. In
music, these visual clues find their contextual counterpart in affective
inflection. For example, where compositional conflict is codified
harmonically through dissonance, or rhythmically by means of
accentuation (and the subsequent evacuation from the tension these
elements create), even the slightest stress of a motivic particle can
affect the symbolic climate. Musical prosody depends just as much as
poetry does on the contextual elaboration and organization of meter;
any mutation of a syllable or, in the case of its musical
equivalent, a motivic fragment can and will alter the sense of the
phrase and its meaning -- linguistic or compositional, literal or
symbolic -- and how these are perceived by the listener, too. While this
is an area best left to the critical scrutiny of reception theory, it is
also one that the savviest musical minds, such as Mr Isserlis and
Hough, are compelled to contemplate; it's absolutely de rigeur.
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Copyright © 30 November 2003
John Bell Young, Tampa, Florida, USA
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