Burkard Schliessmann: Live & Encores – Works by Bach, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann – Burkard Schliessmann, piano – Divine Art ddc 25755 (2 CDs: 93:35, complete listing below) (11/17/23) [Distr. by Naxos] ****:
This most recent release by German classical pianist Burkard Schliessmann appeals – via Schliessmann’s extensive liner notes – to an antique aesthetic dating back both to Plato and Boethius, an emphasis on proportion in artistic values that invokes the Quadrivium in Plato’s Classical Greece, which established rules for aesthetic balance. The question then arises whether, perhaps in imitation of the equally elaborate exegeses of Artur Schnabel for his studied edition of Beethoven piano sonatas, Schliessmann fulfills and realizes his ambitions or as, in the case of Schnabel, he abandons an elaborately wrought, intellectual exercise in favor of a purely emotional response. Or is some Aristotelian “middle way” at work, a chiseled fusion of ratio and eros that renders Schliessmann’s selected repertory in naturally organic proportion?
Schliessmann begins with Bach’s 1731 Partita No. 2 in C Minor from the set “Clavier-Übung I,” whose richly intoned Overture on the Paolo Fazioli instrument rings with alert authority. Moving from sinfonia to fugue, the movement sings first in arioso then contrapuntal texture. The succeeding Allemande in quadruple meter maintains the clear, vocal character in Bach’s especial polyphony. Fiery energy marks the Courante, its triple meter gallop invested with passing ornaments that will soon illuminate the various galanterie elements embedded in this dance suite. The emotive heart of the piece, the Sarabande, reveals its haughty, Spanish origins, the triple meter asserting emphasis on the second beat. Schliessmann urges the pace as an andante, a confident, walking tempo. The more intricate Rondeau offers a quick dance in sprightly triple time, one beat per measure. Lastly, the Capriccio, which likes to stress the second half of the measure, music rife with agogic possibilities. Schliessmann has not sacrificed Bach’s eminently dance-like impulses for anything like academia, and the recording (3-5 April 2023) has the immediate glow of a refreshed consideration of music of elder vintage.
Bach conceived his 1735 Italian Concerto in F after the style established by Corelli, Torelli, and Vivaldi, involving competing musical masses, the large ripieno group against a responsive, small concertino. Originally written for a two-manual harpsichord, the texture for the modern piano demands various, dynamic niceties from Schliessmann. The ritornello theme must sound palpably at different degrees of the scale and then undergo polyphonic treatment. The assertive Allegro that opens the concert posits tonic and dominant modes immediately, the solo part’s residing in the right hand, the left’s providing the larger (orchestral) body. Those auditors used to faster, fleeter renditions may find Schliessmann a trifle precious in his articulation of Bach’s active filigree in the outer movements, a desire to combine earnestness of purpose with brilliance of correct execution. For the marvelous Andante movement, Schliessmann’s approach renders an operatic, cantabile melody line touched by hints of the tragic muse. Bach eliminates any residue of musica ficta by having carefully provided every detail for ornamental realization in grace notes and turns. The last movement, Presto giocoso, asks Schliessmann to “cut the rope,” as Zorba would say it, to allow the sense of abandon to musical bliss have its way. Lively, but a touch reluctant, the Schliessmann rendition retains the high spirits of its inspiration.
The extraordinary Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D Minor (c. 1720) challenges Schliessmann’s capacity for intuitive improvisation, that balances a constant tension between thick, chromatic densities and disarming periods of parlando recitative. Schliessmann’s opening foray in toccata style reveals an impulsive confrontation with Bach’s often colliding effects, the urgent runs and meditative rhetoric of often enharmonic modulations and sustained pedal points. The approach we hear seems eminently Romantic in character, the sliding of harmonic shifts in dynamically altered hues having created a mist of erotic, lyrical, and spiritual tension. The studied entry of the Fugue invites “academic” or “contrived” epithets, but the evolution of the voice parts and their increased layering soon transcends the medium of the keyboard to accomplish a richly vibrant, instrumental motet. The influence of the Fazioli keyboard action contributes to the clear, gripping resonance of effect, the pungent sonority courtesy of Recording Producer and Sound Engineer Matteo Costa.
Mendelssohn’s contribution, his 1842 Variations sérieuses, extends Schliessmann’s explorations of organic unity of musical design, the key of D minor now evidently an extension of the affektenlehre the pianist considers crucial to the architecture of his recital. That the music shares with the Schumann Fantasie the same, venerating impulse to celebrate Beethoven in a fund-raising campaign for a monument to the titan in Bonn, cements an extra-musical consistency to the program. Mendelssohn has sublimated his own impulse to virtuoso ostentation with a theme, seventeen variants, and a Presto finale that culminates a huge canvas balancing melodic beauty and structural integrity. Each of the variations arises directly out of the harmonic and rhythmic motions of its predecessor, a strategy that adumbrates procedures common to Brahms and Schoenberg. Bach’s influence resonates in Variation 10: Moderato, made lucidly apparent in Schliessmann’s tempered realization. Yet, the call to variations brillantes endures, and several of the sections reveal Schliessmann’s natural bravura when required, as in Variation 16: Allegro vivace, Variation 17 and the breathless Finale-Presto.
Schliessmann turns to his pièce de resistance, Robert Schumann’s 1836 (rev. 1839) Fantasie in C Major, whose passions embrace the gamut of tonal expressivity from Bach and Beethoven to Wagner. A hybrid work in sonata-form, the Fantasie fuses Schumann’s innate musicality with his equally ardent pursuit of the poetic impulse, its spontaneous seizure of the transcendent intuition, or what might be termed the “nostalgia for the dream.” Given its etiology as part of the scheme to raise in Bonn a monument to Beethoven, the work’s allusions to the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, to the Moonlight Sonata, and to the A Major Sonata, Op. 101 impress, rather than embarrass, us. Schumann called his Fantasie “a profound lament” to Clara Wieck, his intended, from whom he suffered a forced separation in 1838; so, the intimately personal nature of the music seeks an exaltation, an apotheosis, in Classical, epic terms.
Schliessmann addresses the opening chords of the rhapsodic first movement with the ardent rapture of cosmic yearning, even beyond the quoted lines from Schlegel. The counterpoints well hint of the nexus of love and death, the height of passion confronted with the paradoxical abyss of erotic denial and fulfillment. The three-note motto in the “Legend” achieves a potent series of stretti, often leaving off on an unresolved cadence that lingers at an emotional precipice, soon to beckon for salvation way of the A-flat’s appeal to the “distant beloved.” The ruminative passages offer moments of poetic transport, brief islands of relief between fateful urgings of the grandly sweeping landscape that feels conversant with Shelley’s synoptic West Wind.
The E-flat Major second movement, played Moderately as directed, proffers a stoic march in dotted rhythm that might have sent the League of David in search of kindred spirits, inhabiting as it does the same universe as the second movement in Beethoven’s Op. 101. The oncoming syncopes, however, drive the music forward to the middle section, a brief intake of bliss before the relentless rush to judgment of the coda’s leaping, neurotically insistent figures.
Schliessmann conceives the entire last movement as a dream-scape, an ardent love-song worthy of the music’s dedicatee, Franz Liszt and its spiritual inspirator, Clara Wieck. The poetically improvisational character of the music Schliessmann conveys through his restlessly searching left hand, as the music rises to the level of a long-sought chorale. The repetitive structure of the music suggests Nietzsche’s “Eternal Return,” rife with the spiritual resolve of his equally potent notion of Amor fati, love of one’s predetermined fate. The sense of freedom Schliessmann invokes at the coda reminds me less of the Moonlight Sonata than of the last pages of Beethoven’s Great Fugue, a liberation after the most strenuous of rhythmic and structural directives.
Schliessmann, to conclude his recital proper, addresses the “iconoclastic Classicist,” Frédéric Chopin, in only one piece, his ever-popular Valse in C# Minor, Op. 64/2. Here, the fusion of freedom-in-necessity crystallizes in the application of controlled rubato, exercising a fluid, singing line within a strict pulsation. Expressively nuanced, the music accelerates and retreats in coy, salon gestures, both bemused and subtle in their tragic lilt. In its last incarnation, the motto theme seems to skitter away into the aether.
Schliessmann’s two encores return to the poetic muse as it inhabits Schumann: his “portrait” of Chopin from Carnaval, an invocation of lonely nobility of spirit; then, the unanswered question, “Warum?” from the Op. 12 Fantasy-Pieces, whose series of rising and imploring figures might tempt Silenus to respond in his tragic wisdom: only that we may pass away. Schliessmann’s recital, however, will endure.
—Gary Lemco
Burkard Schliessmann: Live & Encores
BACH: Partita No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 826; Italian Concerto, BWV 971; Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 903;
MENDELSSOHN: Variations sérieuses, Op. 54;
SCHUMANN: Fantasie in C Major, Op. 17; Carnaval, Op. 9: “Chopin”; Fantasiestücke, Op. 12: “Warum?”
CHOPIN: Valse in C# Minor, Op. 64/2;
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