GEORGE ROCHBERG: Piano Music 3 = Partita Variations; Nach Bach; Sonata-Fantasia – Sally Pinkas, piano – Naxos 8.559633, 67:28 *****:
I discovered George Rochberg back in 1972 when his Third String Quartet appeared; at the time I knew nothing about him except that everyone was making a huge deal about this work, an apparent “conversion” from serialism and atonalism to what would become one of the first “neo-romantic” compositions to appear. Well, I am not sure how well that appellation described Rochberg—romantic-eclectic would be a better label if we must use them. But it was rather prescient in that a number of avant-garde bad boys began a midlife conversion to the good side of the force, Penderecki among them.
I began seeking out his other works, and in a few years a boxed set of three quartets (4-6) appeared on RCA, another prize acquisition. His Violin Concerto garnered much deserved praise and Isaac Stern’s recording sealed the deal. Since that time I have always been a fan, and his Naxos recordings have become events for me. It is interesting as a side note that one of my other heroes, George Crumb, taught at the same University of Pennsylvania together with Rochberg.
Crumb is still very much kicking while Rochberg died five years ago at the ripe age of 87, and would be proud of his recorded legacy today. This is the third volume of Naxos’s dedicated to the piano music, and one of the most important—its spans from 1956 (the Sonata-Fantasia) to Nach Bach (1966) to the Partita-Variations (1976). The last is the most important in my mind, a unique and very accessible (though still challenging) piece that begins with a Praeludium and ends with a magnificent fugue, yet the theme of the work is hidden right in the middle, the variations spanning out on both sides like the plumage of a beautiful peacock. Rochberg’s eclecticism works to wondrous effect here, seamlessly integrating old and new in such a way as to almost define a new idiom.
Nach Bach is a piece that takes as its center the Partita No. 6 in E-minor, BWV 830, letting it rise and desist from the tonal palate in a way that is not too terribly unlike Alfred Schnittke. But where that composer’s olden melodies appear as from a misty haze and dissipate again, Rochberg’s music is demonstrably a tribute to the music of Bach, albeit in a form where atonality and non-metric impulses coexist and oppose Bach’s rigid and classical structures.
If one can imagine a piano work like Night Fantasies by Elliott Carter with a little more traditional formal scheme in place, the Sonata-Fantasia by Rochberg might be the result. This highly expressive and darkly-colored work bespeaks tragedy as much as anything he wrote, though I am not certain he would have agreed at the time he wrote it. As time moved on, the limits of the twelve-tone system became all too apparent, and those who embraced it, with the exception of some, created music that almost by nature seemed destined to be thought of as anguished and repressed. Schoenberg was able to avoid this, as were his Second Viennese School compatriots, but most American composers were trapped (Donald Martino’s Notturno comes to mind). Though the notes by Sally Pinkas speak of this piece as “anguished” I am not so sure—perhaps a lifetime of absorbing this type of music has opened me up to the possibility of different moods and emotions present in a foreign tonal system. What I do find is the bearing of one’s soul in this music, very expressive but also intimate in the sense of someone making a public confession of their entire life—all is laid bare. Where Carter dazzles us with his through-composed ecstasy, Rochberg asks us to consider things in a much more sober light, and the challenges are both rewarding and troubling, This is not easy music, but well worth the effort to absorb its mysteries—but start with the Partita Variations first.
Sally Pinkas has mastered these work’s formidable hardships and is able to express them in a way that I think the composer would have been happy with, and the Naxos recording at the Spaulding Auditorium at Dartmouth University is everything one could ask for. Perhaps the Third String Quartet is still the best way to come to this composer, or the Violin Concerto—but oh, do come!
— Steven Ritter
