BRAHMS: 7 Fantasien, Op. 116; Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, Op. 24; SCHOENBERG: Suite for Klavier, OP. 25; 6 Little Klavierstuecken, Op. 19 – Shai Wosner, piano – Onyx 4055, 70:43 [Distr. by Harmonia mundi] ****:
Israeli pianist Shai Wosner (b. 1976) explores (12-14 January 2010) the angular, sometimes agonized relationship between the piano music of Johannes Brahms and Arnold Schoenberg, assuming that each composer, Janus-like, gazed backward and forward in his musical syntax. Wosner begins with Schoenberg’s 1923 Suite, Op. 25, his first full-fledged excursion into the twelve-tone idiom, despite their nominal concession to the Baroque style by way Prelude, Menuet, Gavotte, and Gigue. The foundation of the pitches lies in the BACH anagram that generates the series of progressions in which rhythm rather than tonality acts as the emotional glue binding any of the five brief structures together. Small tone clusters form an aggregate, moving in economical periods, of which the Intermezzo movement indulges the delicacy of registers of the keyboard while throwing ostinati at us like insistent shards of glass. At several points, the Menuet and Trio suggest a fugato, but the argument breaks off in surly, truculent figures, unwilling to extend any particular affect. The busy Gigue at moments might hint at contrapuntal or sparkling Prokofiev but without mirth. That piercing staccati and non-legato jabs suggest that something of Glenn Gould’s ethos permeates Wosner’s approach.
For Wosner’s next trick, he juxtaposes the set of Op. 116 Fantasien (1892) of Brahms against miniatures by Schoenberg, Op. 19 (1911). The Op. 116, No. 1 Wosner takes aggressively, a tumultuous performance of a work already concentrated in its emotional impact. The Leicht, zart, Op. 19, No. 1 condenses the intimacy even further, a distillation more gaseous than material. The first Brahms Intermezzo, Op. 116, No. 2 indulges chromatic raindrops in drooping figures, the declamations reminiscent of Chopin preludes in minor keys. The ensuing Langsam by Schoenberg comes and goes a diaphanous mist. The first Brahms Capriccio in G Minor hurtles forward, a catapult of shifting metrics and deep bass harmonies. Schoenberg’s angular sehr langsam, Op. 19, No. 3 might be his answer to Debussy’s Footsteps in the Snow, a moment of existential doubt. Brahms returns with the first of two Intermezzi in E Major, this an extended Adagio in wistful colors, also rife with presages of Debussy. Just as introspectively poetic but in broken pulsations passing dissonances stutters the E Minor Intermezzo, a clear finger pointed to Schoenberg and Webern. The last Intermezzo–another in E Major–poses more martial sentiments, its nostalgia a longing look to sentiments in Schumann. Schoenberg answers with the dancing clusters Rasch, aber leicht and the Etwas rasch duo, mere ephemera of experience. Brahms rounds off his set with another D Minor Capriccio, but here avoiding the tonic as Wagner evaded C Major in Tristan. The passion breaks loose, Allegro agitato, for the last page. Schoenberg, however, has the last word, Sehr langsam, Op. 19, No. 6, a distilled sound that hangs in anxious space like Resnais’ camera in Last Year at Marienbad.
The pearly symmetries of Handel’s B-flat theme for the Brahms Op. 24 wafts fresh air into the emotional hothouse we have occupied for the better part of an hour. We can again experience delight and not simply aesthetic or geometric awe at the manipulation of intervals and “distinct moments in time.” The exquisitely rounded phraseology of the various siciliani and plastic Hungarian style figurations testifies to a natural Brahmsian in Wosner – intelligent, alert, subtlety erotic. Gracious segues produce that string of pearls between the variants even as each retains its integrity and emotional density. The magic of the alla musette immediately stands out, a porcelain moment of chimes and incandescent mechanism. A fervent and ineluctable momentum then assumes hegemony, and Wosner renders a feral demonstration of the Brahms contrapuntal rhetoric, culminating in the four-voice fugue whose clarion authority rings in our ears long after the last note of this splendid recording (from Friedberg Hall, the Peabody Institute) decays.
–Gary Lemco
