JÁNOS TAMÁS: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra; Lichtspiel; Improvisations; Eisblumen: 14 Miniatures for Piano – Tomas Dratva, piano / Basel Chamber Orchestra / Paul Goodwin – Oehms Classics OC 780 [Distr. by Naxos], 56:47 ***1/2:
ALBERTO GINASTERA: Glosses sobre temes de Pau Casals for Orchestra, Op. 48; Variaciones concertantes, Op. 23; Glosses sobre temes de Pau Casals for String Quintet and String Orchestra, Op. 46 – London Symphony Orchestra / Israel Chamber Orchestra /Gisèle Ben-Dor – Naxos 8.572249, 58:46 ****:
Here are works that pay homage in one way, or maybe more than one way, to the music of Bartók. In the case of Ginastera’s Variaciones concertantes, the influence is assimilative. On the other hand, János Tamás’s Concerto is unmistakably and unashamedly a Bartók knockoff; it could be the Bartók Fourth Piano Concerto, if that composer had been fortunate enough to live so long.
Hungarian-Swiss composer Tamás (1936-1995) was born in Budapest, where he studied at the Franz Liszt Academy, completing his music education at the Bern Conservatory. He held positions as pianist, conductor, and teacher in Switzerland, in addition to composing choral, vocal, and symphonic works plus a large number of chamber and piano pieces. In one way, Tamás’ Concerto is a surprise; he wrote it in 1965, when serial music was the dominant international style and Bartok’s influence on composers had waned. When I saw the date, I thought it was a misprint; 1945 made sense, even 1955—not 1965.
Tamás wrote the Concerto speculatively, giving the manuscript to pianist Karl Engle in hopes he might premiere it. Engle seemed enthusiastic but finally returned the manuscript to Tamás, who shelved the work. Tomas Dratva dug up the Concerto and premiered at a concert in 2009, when the work must have seemed even more a relic of long-gone modernism. Not that it isn’t fun to hear: even ersatz Bartók is invigorating, and Tamás is no slouch; the piece is well constructed, with ear-catching phrases, punchy orchestration (especially the busy percussion section), virtuoso writing for the piano. It’s punchily recorded too.
Dratva has the steely fingers and resolve to bring the work off, though the outer movements supply little chance for subtlety of expression. As in the Bartók concertos, that chance comes in the central movement, which has the same hushed mysterious air of the older composer’s night-music slow movements. Dratva’s able pianism is matched by the Basel Chamber Orchestra under conductor Goodwin; they seem to believe in the work and really lose themselves in its often wild primitivistic sound world.
The other pieces on the disc give a more rounded picture of Tamás’s compositional style. Lichtspiel (Display of Light, 1971) is sort of a Debussian prelude that exploits repeated short phrases, icy tremolos, and clattery chords at the very top of the keyboard for pictorial effect. Eisblumen (Ice Flowers, 1977) is a series of miniatures, mysterious, aphoristic in the manner of Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives. The Improvisations of 1959 again display Bartókian roots as well as some interesting individual touches. The last Improvisation sounds like a less uptight Hindemith and scurries along with determined energy and none of the German composer’s occasional squareness. The recording, less analytical than in the Concerto, seems to give a truthful picture of Dratva’s technically sound shapely pianism. This isn’t an essential disc, perhaps, but an interesting one just the same.
The Ginastera CD is a bit more recommendable since it contains an excellent performance of one of the Argentine composer’s finest works, a piece from Ginastera’s second, Bartók-influenced, creative period. The Variaciones concertantes of 1953 is an indirect tribute to Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra since like that piece it spotlights various instruments of the orchestra in solos and in combinations. The theme is atmospherically stated by the cello and harp with orchestral accompaniment. Each of the eight variations that follow are marked by distinct characteristics; there is a scherzo-like variation, a perpetual-motion variation, a canonic variation, and the finale is a variation in rondo form. It also has stomping Argentine dance rhythms in the manner of Ginastera’s Estancia ballet.
In his hard-driving rhythms, Ginastera takes his cue from Bartók, but there’s more to it than this. Variaciones concertantes comes from Ginastera’s period of “subjective nationalism,” when he learned, following the Hungarian master’s lead, to assimilate native elements into his musical style so thoroughly that he didn’t need to quote Argentine folk melodies directly anymore because the contours, colors, and rhythms of Argentine music had been internalized.
Ginastera called his third creative period “neo-expressionism.” It is a period characterized by an internationalization of musical influence, which translates to the adoption of serial technique. Some critics feel that during this period Ginastera became something of a sellout, a musical fashionista following the prevailing creative winds. I don’t agree, and Glosses sobre temes de Pau Casals could be Exhibit A in Ginastera’s defense. Actually, there are two works by this name, different enough in instrumentation and other ways that they carry two distinct opus numbers. The string version was commissioned by Puerto Rican Festival Casals to commemorate the centenary of Pablo Casals’s birth in 1976. The orchestral version was commissioned by the National Symphony and premiered two years later.
Glosses, drawing on music by Casals, covers a wide variety of scenic and emotional territory, from the first movement with its fireworks and celebrations to the fourth movement named Cant, with its strange, haunting nightscape with birdsong. The third movement, named Sardanes, celebrates the national dance of Casals’s native Catalonia.
In this movement, the more and less distant sounds of the sardanes coming from different places in an imaginary landscape are captured differently in the two versions of the work. In the string version, the dances have an eerie ghostly quality that makes them sound like a dance macabre, especially when taken up by the string quartet. In the orchestral version they have a much more whimsical quality, like the competing bands, sounding from a distance, in a piece by Charles Ives—maybe Central Park in the Dark. The same is true of the first movement. Ginastera has to work harder to create the atmosphere of religious celebration in the string version. In the orchestral version, he springs a pleasant surprise, quoting directly from Stravinsky’s early composition Fireworks. How better to evoke the air of celebration for a musically with-it audience, which we assume the first Kennedy Center audience was? Oh, another big difference between the versions—personnel. The orchestral version features huge forces, including 39 percussion instruments, many native to Latin America, played by four percussionists.
These recordings are taken from an earlier CD issued by Koch International. Thanks to Naxos for giving them new life. The performances by Ginastera specialist Gisèle Ben-Dor are lively and colorful in the extreme. The recordings of the London Symphony (Glosses) from the Abbey Road Studio are airier, more distant, brighter than that of the Israel Chamber Orchestra playing in the Mann Center in Tel Aviv; both are just dandy.
– Lee Passarella
