Four Centuries of Great Music February 9, 2024 New Releases from January, 2025

Today on Four centuries of Great music I am featuring new releases from January of 2025.  There were a number of new releases featuring the piano both solo and concertos.  I am opening with a performance of Aaron Copland’s Piano Sonata.

Copland’s teacher Rubin Goldmark was on Copland’s mind in 1939, when the playwright Clifford Odets commissioned a new piano sonata. “I always connect the Piano Sonata with my old teacher, Rubin Goldmark,” Copland wrote. “He thought of sonata form as music’s highest goal. It was what a composer aimed for, even more than the fugue. One thinks of the sonata as dramatic – a kind of play being acted out with plenty of time for self-expression. It seems to me that my Piano Sonata follows that idea. It is a serious piece that requires careful and repeated study. There is considerable dissonance in it, yet the work is predominantly consonant. Not as spare and bony as the Piano Variations, the themes in the Sonata are fuller and the chords more protracted than in the earlier piece. But every note was carefully chosen and none included for ornamental reasons.”

Copland did not finish this second sonata until 1941, however, and even then it was almost lost. As he was leaving to go to Tanglewood for the summer, he left two bags, one containing the manuscript for the almost completed sonata, unattended and they were stolen. The musical manuscripts were not recovered, but Copland was able to reconstruct the sonata with the aid of pianist John Kirkpatrick, who had been given previews of the work by the composer.

About the Sonata Copland wrote. “Its three movements follow a slow, fast, slow sequence and are separate in character, but with subtle relationships between them, so that each seems to grow from the preceding.

“The first movement is a regular sonata allegro form with two themes, a development section characterized by disjunct rhythms and a playful mood, and a clear recapitulation in which the opening idea is dramatically restated. The second movement scherzo is rhythmically American – I would never have thought of those rhythms if I had not been familiar with jazz…

“The third movement of the Sonata is free in form and further from the classic sonata than the previous movements. The British music historian Wilfrid Mellers, whose writings about American music I have long admired, pointed to the final movement of the Piano Sonata as ’the essential Copland… its relinquishment of the time sense… is a phenomenon of quite profound spiritual and cultural implication.‘ Mellers’ allusion to the sense of ’immobility’ in the Sonata seems to say in prose what I had in mind when composing the music. The Sonata does not end with the usual flash of virtuosic passages: instead, it is rather grand and massive.”

Here is a performance of
Aaron Copland:  Piano Sonata –  I. Molto moderato
Aaron Copland:  Piano Sonata –  II. Vivace
Aaron Copland:  Piano Sonata –  III. Andante sostenuto

Daniel Linder, piano
PIANO SONATAS
Navona Records
January 10, 2025

I expect that we will be seeing a number of new releases of the music of Maurice Ravel this year as March 7th marks the sesquicentennial of his birth.  And I will be celebrating that event on this program on March 9th.  There was a new release in January of the one of two new records by pianist Seong-Jin Cho featuring the music of Maurice Ravel – this one is Ravel’s solo piano works.  

Written the 1917 Le tombeau de Couperin, Ravel composed six movements each dedicated to a friend he had lost in the first world war.  In this work he expressed his modern sensibility in the accents of the 18th century. He described it as an homage “directed less in fact to Couperin himself than to French music of the 18th century.” Disregarding the philosopher (and would-be composer) Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1753 pronouncement that “there is neither rhythm nor melody in French music,” Ravel fused both rhythmic and melodic forms and cadences of Couperin’s time with those of his own. The work conveys a sense of the present as a perennially open dialogue with the past.

The 1919 orchestration stands out even among Ravel’s invariably superb orchestrations.  However, today we will be listening to the original piano version of the work.  Seong-Jin Cho

Maurice Ravel:  Le tombeau de Couperin, M. 68 – I. Prélude
Maurice Ravel:  Le tombeau de Couperin, M. 68 – II. Fugue
Maurice Ravel:  Le tombeau de Couperin, M. 68 – III. Forlane
Maurice Ravel:  Le tombeau de Couperin, M. 68 – IV. Rigaudon
Maurice Ravel:  Le tombeau de Couperin, M. 68 – V. Menuet
Maurice Ravel:  Le tombeau de Couperin, M. 68 – VI. Toccata
Seong-Jin Cho – Ravel:  The Complete Solo Piano Works
Deutsche Grammophon
(1-17-25)

This past Summer at Tanglewood, I heard Jean-Yves Thibaudet perform Khachaturian:  Piano Concerto in D-Flat Major, Op. 38 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra – specifically the July 27, 2024 concert with Tania León’s Stride and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony #6  Pathétique Symphony.

The sound of  Armenian bards was an important influence on Khachaturian, an influence apparent in the rhythmic and metrical games, instrumental color, and sheer virtuosity of his Piano Concerto. The piece is cast in the three fast-slow-fast movements of concerto tradition, but each movement is sectional itself, with clear motivic relationships developed across all the movements. 

The dynamism and spiky “wrong note” harmony—A-natural against A-flat, for example—that characterize the Concerto are immediately apparent in the orchestral introduction, and the three notes of the piano’s entry form the foundation motive. Woodwinds introduce several important subjects, one of which is developed in a lyrical cadenza. The opening movement’s second cadenza contrasts strongly with the earlier one in decibels and speed, though not in motives. 

The not-so-slow second movement—Andante con anima—opens darkly, with a characterful theme from the bass clarinet against the muted upper strings. Where the first movement was clearly based on D-flat, this one finds a quiet home in A minor, the inevitable explosive contrasts notwithstanding. There is no cadenza, but the movement’s sections suggest a sort of rondo form, with a clear sense of rounded recapitulation at the end, as the bass clarinet returns with a variant of its opening theme, over the same gently pulsing string texture.

The last movement holds all the dash and sparkle one could ask for in a concerto finale. It begins firmly on C, with aggressive energy and more “wrong” notes, vigorously at play in a field of shifting meters. This movement does have a kaleidoscopic cadenza, which tails off softly with a chromatic plunge to the bottom of the keyboard. From there, it is mainly a matter of gathering momentum again for a mad drive to D-flat and a thunderous, over-the-top coda that dramatically recalls the first movement.

Khachaturian:  Piano Concerto in D-Flat Major, Op. 38 I. Allegro ma non troppo e maestoso
Khachaturian:  Piano Concerto in D-Flat Major, Op. 38 II. Andante con anima
Khachaturian:  Piano Concerto in D-Flat Major, Op. 38 III. Allegro brillante

Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel / Khachaturian – Piano Concerto (01-31-25)
Deutsche Grammophon

Next is a recording of Ruth Gipps horn concerto Op. 58

Ruth Gipps music is receiving a bit of a renaissance over the last couple of years with the series of releases by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Rumon Gamba  entitled Gipps: Orchestral Works.  This last fall Keitaro Harada performed with the Savannah Philharmonic her Death on the Pale Horse, Op. 25 tone poem, which was the North American premiere of this work.  And just this last month on January 12th on Evening Eclectic I featured a conversation with oboist Juliana Koch about her album of the oboe music of Ruth Gipps.

Ruth Gipps horn concerto Op. 58 is the last of six concertos that Gipps wrote, including the clarinet concerto (Op. 9), the oboe concerto (Op. 20),  the violin concerto (Op. 24), the piano concerto (Op. 34), and a concerto for violin and viola (Op. 49). All of these works were dedicated to family members or close friends.  Gipps wrote the Horn Concerto in 1968 for her son, Lance Baker. The piece was later championed by Frank Lloyd, who gave a BBC broadcast in 1982.  And it was first recorded mid-1990s, by British horn soloist David Pyatt on his album, British Horn Concertos.

The first movement is largely reflective but with scherzando episodes framing a slower middle section. The closing Cadenza does not depend on virtuoso display and reinforces the overall mood.
The lively Scherzo second movement might best be described as ‘thistledown’, the fast music embracing an expressive middle section but concluding with sparkling fairy textures. The Finale is the high point of the concerto, the rhythmic material of the opening returning and, again, framing romantic writing for the horn. There is an exquisite passage of enchanting duet between muted horn and celesta towards the end, before the full orchestra quickly brings the concerto to its close.

Ruth Gipps: Horn Concerto, Op. 58 –  1. Con moto
Ruth Gipps: Horn Concerto, Op. 58 –  2. Scherzo
Ruth Gipps: Horn Concerto, Op. 58 –  3. Allegro ritmico

Martin Owen, horn and BBC Philharmonic conducted by  Rumon Gamba
Gipps: Orchestral Works, Volume 3
Chandos Records
(01-03-25)