The D-Minor Piano Trio of 1894 keeps Anton Arensky’s (1861-1906) name alive today. A follower of Tchaikovsky, who hired him at the Moscow Conservatory, Arensky was a good pianist and a technically impeccable composer whose growing reputation was cut short by his early death at age 45; in his last years, he even encouraged the young Igor Stravinsky. The BCMS program notes compare this expressive trio with Mendelssohn’s piano trio in the same key, but I hear more of Schumann and still more of Chopin in it; others might even call it Russian Brahms; but there’s no doubt about its expert construction and lovely melodic writing. Mihae Lee, pianist, joined Crow and Thomas in a deeply felt performance that reminded me of a fine reading of quite a few years back, by the venerable group of Heifetz-Piatigorsky-Rubinstein, a recording which you may still be able to find.

There is still controversy as to whether Schubert’s great Quintet in A Major, op. 114, D 667, known everywhere as the “Trout” Quintet, was composed in 1819 when Schubert was 22, as long assumed from indirect evidence, or in some later year like 1825, as might be surmised from the maturity of the style; the same question arises in connection with the A-Major Sonata for piano, op. 120, D 664. We might have a better appraisal of the situation if we had some documentary evidence, but the autographs of both works are lost.

The “Trout” performance on Sunday night was spirited and expressive, in every way delightful. Lee, Crow, and Thomas were joined by Marcus Thompson, viola, and Edwin Barker, double bass. The ensemble was particularly assured, relaxed and cohesive, and it’s a fair bet that all of the players had performed this famous music many times before. I will point out that the violinist played the high trills in the second half of the first “Trout” variation on octave lower than Schubert indicated; this is a wise expedient that makes for much easier playability and it injures the music not at all.

Arnold Schoenberg, in a lesson with Alban Berg, commanded him flatly: “Never write what a copyist could write for you!” The implication was: no matter what passages you might be repeating when you compose (for instance, in the recapitulation section of a sonata form, when the succession of events is able to be directly correlated with what happens in the exposition), be sure to make it different in some way. The “Trout” Quintet has to be considered an object lesson in how not to do what Schoenberg advised.

The quintet has five movements, three of which can be considered in sonata form. The first movement is formally the most complex; it actually has a development section (mm. 147-209), for the rest, the recapitulation section (mm. 210-317) is a virtually unaltered transposition of most of the exposition (mm. 25-146), with 14 bars removed. The second movement is simpler: it has an exposition (mm. 1-60) and a recapitulation (mm. 61-121) but no development, and the recap has one extra bar but is otherwise a literal transposition of the expo. The fifth movement is the simplest of all: the recap (mm. 237-472) is a transposition, unaltered except for a few octave placements, of the expo (mm. 1-236), and once again there is no development. How could a great composer like Schubert get away with being so formally lazy and irresponsible? The answer is simple: the melody throughout is so flowing and rich, the harmony so expressive, the rhythm so lively, and the music as whole so irresistibly fresh, that the formal oversimplification, if that is what it actually is, doesn’t matter in the least. The other two movements are a well-wrought scherzo and a set of six variations on Schubert’s own song Die Forelle (Trout), op. 32, D 550, the sixth variation making use of the piano accompaniment to the original song.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony (Pendragon Press). His website is here.

Leila Josefowicz and Esa-Pekka Salonen (Stu Rosner photo)

Esa-Pekka Salonen, who directed the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 13 years and in that time made it an orchestra of top quality, has come to Boston to exhibit his accomplishment as a composer — a rare enough capability for conductors today. In this way he continues a distinguished tradition of composers who made a substantial and even principal part of their living as orchestral conductors — Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss, and Mahler are the outstanding examples in the 19th century, while Britten, Bernstein, and Boulez are those of our own time. I was especially eager to hear Salonen’s three-year-old Violin Concerto written for Leila Josefowicz, who played tonight’s electrifying solo performance from memory.

The concerto is in four movements, alternating fast and slow, or more realistically, frantic and meditative. In the first movement, “Mirage,” the soloist is bowing fast 16th-notes at high speed almost throughout, occasionally relieved by orchestral answers in the form of widely-spaced chords full of open fifths with a lot of B-flat, “zoom in” and “zoom out” as the composer’s notes emphasize, eventually gravitating to an open D string. The second movement, “Pulse I,” has a slow, penetrating timpani beat, surrounded by rich divided strings in close-textured, complex, and elusive harmony, spread out over the entire range; here the solo violin is melodically expressive. There were 14 gongs in the percussion section, and I could see them moving, but from where I was sitting I couldn’t hear them at all. I wanted more of this relatively calm music, but the third movement, “Pulse II,” interrupts rudely with what the composer describes as “bizarre and urban” sound, heavily percussive with big crunch chords in orchestral tutti; the angry violin, with renewed rapid motion, seemed to be fighting every step of the way. Impossibly high notes in the horns — high G, I think — were like shouts in a crowd. And then bang! It ends suddenly.

There was enough of a pause to allow the soloist to tune again, surely necessary after such furious playing. But the fourth movement, “Adieu,” I felt was the most expressive and the most successful, in terms of what one expects from a violin concerto in which the orchestral complement often seemed to be too large even from the start. The composer’s notes state that he “tried to illuminate the harmony from within.” In this he surely succeeded, because the harmony is as well organized as it is rich and even lovely: widely-spaced chords of sevenths or ninths moving in parallel by whole steps, others in fixed position alternating with an E – B-flat bass, and an orchestra distribution that was often striking — I remember a fine texture that I think was three solo violas and three solo cellos. Often I heard the solo violin trading unison notes with solo winds in the orchestra, and I wondered whether Berg’s famous violin concerto had exerted some influence over this one. The harmonic shift at the end — Salonen’s program notes call attention to it — was luminous and I can’t wait to hear it again.

After the intermission came Stravinsky’s Zhar-ptitsa (I give the Russian for Firebird only to spite the many publications, including the old BSO program, that use the French title). For over 50 years, I have known the complete 1910 ballet from recordings, especially Antal Dorati’s remarkable London Symphony version (Mercury Living Presence), but I had never before heard the whole thing live. “The orchestral body of The Firebird was wastefully large,” Stravinsky wrote in 1962, and this is doubtless the reason for the infrequency of concert performances. The 1919 Suite is more practical, because its orchestra is smaller, but it omits a great deal of excellent music — the Supplication music, the Princesses and the Golden Apples (which Stravinsky claimed he could never get quite right orchestrally; but I think it’s perfect), the Magic Carillon (Salonen took this part too fast), the shattering trombone-glissando arrival of Kashchei the Immortal, the Firebird’s reappearance just before the Infernal Dance. I was interested recently to read, in the latest redaction of the Stravinsky-Craft conversations, that Sergei Rachmaninoff told others (but not Stravinsky) that he considered The Firebird to be the greatest work of music yet composed by any Russian. There’s no doubt that The Firebird brought Russian music fully matured into the 20th century, when its composer was only 28 years old.

The Boston Symphony coped with the orchestral difficulties as if they didn’t exist. There was some particularly fine solo playing, especially the first horn, first bassoon, and even the first harp, whose delicate harmonics were perfectly clear. The high-register F-sharp for piccolo is very difficult to play pp as marked in the Khorovod; here it was wonderfully soft and perfectly tuned. At Kashchei’s Death (no. 190 in the score), there is a vague instruction: “Rub the bass drum with a brush.” I think this is supposed to be done with a wire brush on the drumhead, rather than with a switch (Rute) on the shell of the drum — but I could very well be wrong.

Tonight’s performance of The Firebird was vivid confirmation of what the most brilliant young composer of his time could accomplish. Esa-Pekka Salonen doubtless chose it as a significant demonstration of what he can do as a conductor, and the audience reacted with an enthusiasm which was well deserved. If I thought that his conducting was sometimes excessively theatrical, I recognize that The Firebird is well suited to that excess and I enjoyed it heartily. Salonen’s conducting in his own work was much more restrained and precise, even when it called for big and complex gestures at times.

I haven’t even yet mentioned Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, the orchestral version of four of the original piano suite of six pieces, which opened tonight’s program. It was marked by some fine solo playing, especially by the first oboe; and from where I was sitting I could actually watch how the double basses play those tricky natural harmonics in the Musette of the Menuet. Salonen conducted this piece expertly without a stick, using his fingers with precise expression. This is possible when the orchestra is smaller (I counted six cellos and six basses, but the rest of the strings seemed full).

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony (Pendragon Press). His website is here.

Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire originated in a commission from Albertine Zehme, a diseuse and mime, who wanted musical accompaniment to her recitation of poems in rondeau form by the Belgian symbolist and mystic Albert Giraud (1860-1929), translated into German verse by Otto Erich Hartleben (1864-1905). Schoenberg chose 21 (“thrice seven”) of these texts and set them for Sprechstimme and individual combinations of five instruments, piano, violin (doubling viola), cello, flute (doubling piccolo), and clarinet (doubling bass clarinet). The poems themselves reflect various inspirations: exaggerated emotional states, nightmares, parodistic impulses and surrealist violence all hung on the peg of commedia dell’arte; one is reminded of the Gothic fantasies of Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror (1868-74) which startled the pre-Freudian world of Paris as much as the Blaue Reiter Almanac and Schoenberg’s own monodrama Erwartung excited psychoanalytical circles in Vienna before the Great War.

Walter Piston once described Pierrot Lunaire as an example of a composer “searching for a system.” A number of the separate pieces show an extraordinary concern with abstract structure, such as no. 8, Nacht (Night), which Schoenberg amusingly called a passacaglia but which is really a free invention on a three-note cell that permeates every measure. Another famous example is no. 18, Der Mondfleck (Moonspot), in which the piano projects the distorted outlines of an atonal fugue while the four other instruments hurry through a simultaneous double retrograde canon. Elliott Carter was said to have asserted that no. 4, Eine blasse Wäscherin (A Pale Washerwoman), with its thin chordal texture of flute, clarinet and violin managed to systematically include all possible interval pairs. These structures are fascinating and even marvelous to examine on paper; in their atonal complexity they are virtually impossible to hear even after close study. Other pieces are apparently assembled from spontaneous gestures that disappear as quickly as they are born, without any apparent connection to each other or to the text. In the final poem, O alter Duft (O ancient fragrance), Schoenberg acknowledges the tonality that he had abandoned with a farewell gesture in parallel thirds.

Pierrot Lunaire even after a century is a difficult and total experience that has not lost its power to shake and shock. For the musician accustomed to the rest of the 20th century, Pierrot Lunaire still impresses the listener with the variety and vitality of its individual musical ideas. One recognizes how so many listeners were baffled by it from the start. Stravinsky, whose personal and intellectual relationship to Schoenberg and his music went up and down and back and forth for many decades, wrote in his Autobiography (1934) about his first hearing of Pierrot Lunaire in 1912: “I did not feel the slightest enthusiasm about the aesthetics of the work, which appeared to me to be a retrogression to the out-of-date [Aubrey] Beardsley cult. But, on the other hand, I consider that the merits of the instrumentation are beyond dispute.” Thirty years later he would write: “The real wealth of Pierrot – sound and substance, for Pierrot is the solar plexus as well as the mind of early twentieth-century music – were beyond me as they were beyond all of us at that time.”

The Pierrot ensemble that performed at Tufts included Susan Narucki (soprano), Sarah Brady (flute and piccolo), Diane Heffner (clarinet and bass clarinet), Joanna Kurkowicz, (violin and viola), Emmanuel Feldman (cello), and director Don Berman (piano). The singer’s Sprechstimme, with a wide range of vocal expression that every performer has found a major challenge, was brilliantly supported by a sensitive and totally expert instrumental ensemble. Projected supertitles gave the poems in translation with notable success. This outstanding performance formed the second half of the program. The first half included arrangements and original settings by student members of the project; two of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire settings, in arrangements that included a solo horn and Sprechstimme parts executed by men, demonstrated a flexibility that Schoenberg himself might have approved. Original works included an Indifferent Elegy by Stefan Anderson, Eine blasse… by Kevin Laba, Response: Valse de Chopin by Michael Laurello, and Départ de Pierrot by William Kenlon. The student performers were well prepared and confident, and the performances were a credit to the composers no less than to the centennial of Pierrot Lunaire.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony (Pendragon Press). His website is here.

The Boston Conservatory Theater is a relatively small one, but it is of modern design, well equipped and comfortable.  The stage was big enough to accommodate seven principals and a chorus of 16, but not big enough to hold the two additional string orchestras that Mozart’s score calls for (playing in different meters and tempi), so we heard them playing in the pit amid the general ballroom confusion.  This would have been a likely reason also for the omission of the dinner music in Act II (Donna Elvira’s “L’ultima prova” following immediately after the tables are brought in); this was the only cut in the score that I detected.

We remember that this most famous of Mozart’s Italian operas is called a dramma giocoso, which we take to mean that it is a serious work, even a morality play, but one with plenty of buffo elements.  One can hardly call it a tragedy, although one regrets that Donna Elvira decides at the end that she must enter a convent when, if Gilbert had been the librettist rather than da Ponte, she could have been paired up with the repentant Leporello.  It seems right for the flighty Zerlina and the blundering Masetto to forgive each other in the final parabasis (I think that Ravel remembered this when he wrote L’heure espagnole), why should Donna Anna need a whole year to calm down before marrying her Don Ottavio?  (There’s a similar year of house arrest mandated at the end of Der Freischütz, but that is a decree of punishment.)   All of these roles were handled with good understanding by the singers, under Johnathon Pape’s careful and restrained stage directing.  Among the singers, I was struck by the especially fine vocal work of Katy Kelly (Donna Anna) and Salvatore Atti (Don Ottavio).

There is a certain amount of slapstick required in the staging, too, as well as the usual eighteenth-century penchant for masks and disguises, and these were handled well, without excess, as one could tell from the hearty laughter in the audience.  Scene changes were effected by the chorus members, swiftly and unobtrusively, with the curtain up on the partially darkened stage.   I have to mention also the refinement of the set design and costuming.  The sets were all simple panels or drop-down flats with Moorish outlines such as one would find in the Alcázar in Seville, and an absolute minimum of stage furniture.  Don Giovanni’s outfit was tight and rakish, almost a cowboy costume, and Leporello’s was 1960′s khakis basic — both very effective.  Leporello stood on stage center alone at the very end, with a shrug of perfect resignation as the curtain came down slowly; he was cheered.

Subsequent performances will take place on March 30, 31 and April 1.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony (Pendragon Press). His website is here.

The rest of the first half consisted of New England arrangements. Copland’s short and lovely Variations on a Shaker Melody is the last part of Appalachian Spring, well known on band programs. When Jesus Wept (1958) is William Schuman’s arrangement of one movement from his orchestral New England Triptych (1956), and it is dull indeed, almost as dull as one of Virgil Thomson’s hymn tunes; I suppose it shows what happens when a New York composer takes off from William Billings, who at least was a genuine Bostonian. On the other hand, Profanation, the scherzo movement from Leonard Bernstein’s Jeremiah, was exciting and beautifully played, and Harris handled the very tricky meter changes, full of fives and sevens, with effortless grace. This lively piece foreshadows the “Masque” movement of Bernstein’s second symphony, Age of Anxiety, and even the “rumble” music of West Side Story. Jeremiah is his first symphony, composed in 1942 when he was 24, and although it is rarely heard it sounds as full and sturdy as any American symphonic work of the period, and it wears well even in a band arrangement. I couldn’t remember whether it was this movement or another part of the symphony that contains Bernstein’s direction to beat the timpani with maracas; at any rate, I didn’t see it.

After the intermission came Awakening: In Recognition of the Arab Spring, by Jamshied Sharifi, composer in residence at MIT and himself an alumnus of the class of 1983. This expressive work in three movements received a warm welcome from the large audience. The first movement, “Maghreb / Bouazizi / The Uprisings, began with an ornamented oboe melody in dialogue with a group of flutes, supported by a warm G-minor chordal background, followed a while later by a piccolo solo with vibraphone tremoli, and a horn melody with dotted accompaniment punctuated by percussion in slow harmony. The second movement was titled “Reflection: Let Each One Hear Her Own Thoughts.” This was appropriately reflective, in F-major/minor with light textures in a slow six-beat, and a good deal of accompanimental ostinato. The final movement, “Ahead: The Real Transformation Has Barely Begun,” wavered between D-minor and F-major modal harmony, with shifts of triple and quadruple meter, coming to a big fortissimo that ended with a sign of hope.

“For those of us with Persian heritage who watched the earlier political protests in Iran, initially with hope and then with bitter disappointment, the success of the civil movements in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya were especially gratifying,” the composer wrote in his program note. I congratulate the composer also on his well-differentiated use of colors within the ensemble, including plenty of solo writing. Too many composers for the symphonic wind ensemble and concert band use too much tutti too often. Here, the composer kept the tutti in reserve only for the necessary moments.

I am aware that MIT has made a special effort to put all of its lecture courses on line, which means a special video effort. This was over-abundantly evident at last night’s concert, with three manned stationary cameras on tripods at the rear and sides, and a roving cameraman on stage throughout, whose constant changes of location (at one point even bumping into the percussion players who were only trying to do their job) were exceedingly annoying, at least to this spectator. I suppose this is part of the technological wave of the future, but I don’t like it. But despite the visual distraction, the concert was very good indeed.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony (Pendragon Press). His website is here.

John McDonald, T. J. Anderson and Mark DeVoto in 2003 (BMInt staff photo)

T. J. Anderson was for years a beloved professor at Tufts University, where he brought the Music Department into the modern era. Now 83 and retired from Tufts since 1990, he returned to Medford for a symposium, a reception, and a concert for himself and his friends. His successor on the Tufts composition faculty, John McDonald, led off an assembly of T. J.’s music and that of his friends in Distler Performance Hall at the Granoff Music Center at Tufts on Monday evening. T. J.’s Boogie-Woogie Fantasy, composed in 1997, is a sectional piano solo with explosive gestures alternating with classical boogie-woogie patterns — dotted rhythms, arpeggiated bass octaves in eight-bar segments. This was a long piece, but one that connects its episodes well, and McDonald played it with great skill and expression.

After T. J. retired from Tufts he moved to Chapel Hill in North Carolina, soon becoming connected with nearby Duke University in Durham. His colleague there, Stephen Jaffe, was on hand for two performances. Jaffe’s Designs II, composed 2010-2011, is in two movements, 23 minutes long, for clarinet, guitar, and percussion. The first movement, Teneramente, is episodic, lyrical, and mostly with prominent solos for the clarinet, including some expressively bent pitches. The accompaniment is light, but the combination of amplified acoustic guitar with marimba is effective. The second movement, Vivo e ruvido, changed the clarinet to a bass clarinet and the guitar to an electric guitar, and featured short melodic figures with a lot of relentlessly repeated notes, often in jazzy bursts that focused my attention throughout. The BeatCity Ensemble, with Amy Advocat (clarinets), David Fabris (guitars), and Robert Schulz (marimba, vibes, glock, woodblocks, tomtom, tambourine, cabaça, and much else), kept up the driving textures fearlessly and expressively. I especially liked the high clarinet cantilena that wasn’t shrill, and the last chord, ending with a surprising note on the triangle.

Paul Siskind, a former student of T. J. at Tufts, came for his Andere Klänge (other sounds), composed in 2001. John McDonald confidently handled the extensive inside-the-piano plucking and scraping, which alternated with whole-tone and diatonic filigrees on the keyboard. This built to a big upward-sweeping treble climax that was answered by a comical bass-register cluster. T. J.’s own In memoriam Gerald Gill, a short, hushed solo, paid a deeply moving tribute to another Tufts colleague, a much-loved member of the History Department who died five years ago. The piece began with two haunting bass-register Gs.

After the intermission, we heard a vibraphone solo, Paul Siskind’s Suite: 75 for T. J., in four short movements. Like Andere Klänge, this attractive work inclines to the whole-tone scale, with the third piece ending on an augmented triad and the fourth on a French sixth. The motor remained off throughout, and Robert Schulz shifted from soft mallets to hard for the fourth piece.

T. J. himself was honored with the premiere performance of his Cornerstones, composed last year on five poems by the Vermont poet Elye Alexander. These ranged over a variety of moods, with the first poem/song, “Cedar,” repeating a two-bar melodic figure; the second, “Spider-Silk Riddle,” a three-note motive; the third, “The Flying Squirrel” with chattering repeated notes and a piano cadenza in between; and the last poem/song, “Dancing With Her,” with a slow and sad waltz. Even more ineffably sad were the simple chords accompanying the fourth and shortest poem, “Dovey Junction.” Louise Toppin sang, and John McDonald accompanied, with rich expression and loving care. (For those who are traveling south next week, Toppin will host a 20th-anniversary festival in Chapel Hill, honoring two decades of VIDEMUS, a new-music group founded at Tufts by Vivian Taylor and loyally supported by T. J.)

Stephen Jaffe’s String Quartet no. 2, in five movements, expertly played by the Borromeo Quartet, concluded the concert. The movements have whimsical titles that accurately reflect the styles. “Scherzino chickadee” had no chickadee figures that I could discern, but it had harmonics and sul ponticello that sounded well. “Homage to the breath (syrinx)” was particularly eloquent, with slow, acerbic but diatonic sostenuto chords supporting an expressive upper melody. I didn’t hear any reference to Debussy, either, but maybe this was a bird piece too, because the syrinx is the singing organ in most songbirds. “Push me pull you” began with false starts but soon branched out into rapid triplets, sometimes frantically accompanied by strummed pizzicato chords alternating between different instruments. The composer told me that he had gone to some expense to have parts copied for this quartet, only to find that the players preferred to play from his “scribbled” full score displayed on four Apple notebook computers (in fact, I thought the score was very neatly written).

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony (Pendragon Press). His website is here.

Vasily Primakov is a 32-year-old Russian pianist of formidable sound and skill. He chose a big Romantic program at Rockport yesterday afternoon that could easily have slaughtered a less-gifted musician and carried it out with an aplomb that brought the capacity audience to its feet. If I sound excessively critical in this report, it is because I think this young man has exceptional promise.

He began with 15 Schubert waltzes chosen from different collections compiled and published in Schubert’s lifetime. The chronological composition of these lovely dances is often impossible to determine, because many of those published under a single opus number or D number might have been composed years apart. Primakov selected them with attention to close key relationships, beginning and ending with no. 1 of the Valses nobles, D 969, and including the beloved “Zart” waltz in A major, D 779 no. 13, which dates from before 1825; this is one of the waltzes chosen by Liszt for his Soirées de Vienne. My one cavil with Primakov’s otherwise excellent performance of these pieces was his often excessive rubato. Schubert wrote these pieces for dancing, in which one would naturally find less flexibility of tempo; in the concert hall, of course, there should be more freedom of tempo — but from piece to piece, and not so much within each piece.

Schumann’s “Third Grand Sonata” in F minor, op. 14, which he called Concerto without Orchestra, has always puzzled me when I have studied it in score. It was a rare treat to hear this seldom-performed work live. It is a work of sprawling dimensions in four movements; I timed it at 31 minutes. The Allegro brillante first movement and the Molto commodo Scherzo are all over the place with extra notes and not nearly enough thematic or tonal contrast; the Rondo finale, Prestissimo possibile, is shorter but still insufficiently varied in texture. History’s judgment on this work seems to have been that Schumann aimed high in this work and missed; he took even more risks in the Kreisleriana op. 16 and the Phantasie op. 17, but hit the mark right on; so maybe this less successful venture was a necessary step for him. One thinks of other “concerto without orchestra” solo pieces, including the 25-minute-long G-sharp minor movement in Alkan’s op. 39 Etudes, as well as Chopin’s Allegro de concert, op. 46, from the A major Concerto that he never completed. But Schumann learned a lesson, too, as shown by his next actual Sonata for piano, the one in G minor, op. 22, which is more successful simply because of its workable proportions.

The second half of Primakov’s program was Chopin, and the centerpiece, interspersed with three mazurkas and a waltz, was all four of the Scherzos. These represent a bold and even dangerous choice for any pianist, because they require a perfectly finished and perfectly smooth technique such few pianists acquire even in a lifetime. The Scherzo in B minor, op. 20, composed in 1831 when Chopin was 21, is a work that made history; like Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, composed one year earlier, this Scherzo represents a kind of music utterly unlike any previously written, and that one could never have imagined only four years after the death of Beethoven. The improvisatory spirit is a main characteristic of all of Chopin’s Scherzos, but the tone is perfectly set in this first one. The pianistic gestures seem so randomly assorted that one has the impression of Chopin picking up a fistful of notes and flinging them in fury onto the paper, where they land in a perfectly organized pattern. The speed is dizzying; this is the only one of the four Scherzos to carry a metronome marking, which, “Presto con fuoco,” is 120 to the 3/4 measure, or 12 eighth-notes per second. In a well-tuned pre-concert lecture by Mark Randall, we heard Schumann’s remark about this work (remembering that scherzo is an Italian word meaning “jest”): “How is gravity to clothe itself, if jest goes about in such dark veils?” Or, in the words of a later writer, this is “dynamic, boiling music.” For all that raging sensibility in this Scherzo, there is a middle section of ineffable tenderness, based on a Polish Christmas carol, “Sleep, baby Jesus,” one of the very few times Chopin ever used a pre-existing melody.

The second Scherzo, op. 31, in B-flat minor or D-flat major, depending on your point of view, is the most popular of the four and is widely massacred by collegiate pianists with little realization of how difficult it really is. Primakov had considerable trouble with it, too, chiefly in the extensively developed leggiero of the Trio and the agitato and sempre con fuoco that follow. It is most important in these places to control the tempo carefully and not let the strong dynamics go overboard; the result can be messy, and it seemed that Primakov didn’t really know how to control this section, winding down to the reprise of the scherzo proper. In the last two pages, the più mosso was so fast it just didn’t make any sense; some of Chopin’s wildest dissonance is on display here and it has to be exquisitely set off.

The C-sharp minor Scherzo, op. 39, is dedicated to Chopin’s pupil Adolphe Gutmann, whose arms were said to be so strong that he could “knock a hole through the table.” This muscularity is evident in the double octaves that dominate the outer sections of the piece. The inner section is famous for its filigreed arpeggios, which clearly point to a radiant, expansive piano sound such as could be obtained from large, iron-framed instruments that were only just being developed in the 1830s. Primakov handled this piece well, especially in the mystical E minor section, but I would have preferred a more careful buildup to the Coda, and final measures that were less frantic.

I have heard several pianists describe the E major Scherzo, op. 54, as the most difficult of the four, simply because of gossamer touch that isn’t at all like a jeu perlé but ranges all over the keyboard with utmost fleetness. (I was present at Vladimir Ashkenazy’s Boston debut in Symphony Hall in 1958, when he played this scherzo with such effortless elegance that I could only think of Artur Rubinstein’s 1949 recording.) Chopin wrote careful fingerings for mm. 17-24, all quarter notes, which are hard enough in Presto, but left very few fingerings for the leggiero at mm. 66-72, which I still think of as almost impossible, at least for me. (The left-hand part at mm. 69-70 is only an accompaniment here, but Chopin soon develops it into a principal motive.) And what’s the joke in this delightful piece? I think it’s the unabashed parallel perfect fifths at mm. 55-56, which I have yet to hear discussed by any theorist.

This was the last piece on Primakov’s program and one could tell he was getting tired, because the dynamics were very assorted, especially in the Più lento middle section. And this would be my principal complaint with Primakov’s approach to this music, but not by any means confined just to him, for I hear it from many younger players today: the tendency to exaggerate forte dynamics even in a soft melodic line, for the purpose of in-your-face emphasis. Primakov also played Chopin’s slow A minor Waltz, op. 34 no. 2, and on the last page there is a hushed E major excursion of empyrean subtlety, with a soaring left-hand melody that never rises above pianissimo. Primakov stamped out this melody with such overbearing emphasis that one might have thought of trombones, instead of what most of us would have imagined as a solo cello by comparison.

Our pianist gave us one encore, Chopin’s Mazurka in C-sharp minor, op. 63 no. 3, with its well-known subtle canonic melody at the end. This was perfect.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony (Pendragon Press). His website is here.

Your correspondent spoke about Debussy’s absolute pitch and the choice of keys in his different works, but this was only 20 minutes in the four days that included no less than 42 formal papers, 19 of them in French. Most of today’s leading authorities on Debussy’s life and work were present. For some decades, the main efforts in Debussy studies have been put forward by scholars in England and the United States, and most of that elder generation were on hand to assure musicology that Debussy studies are more lively today, 150 years after the composer’s birth, than ever before; at the same time, one could find reassurance in the large number of younger scholars carrying on the work of the older. There were some notable tributes to notable pioneers, such as Edward Lockspeiser (1905-1973), whose two-volume study, Debussy: His Life and Mind (1962, 1965), remains a landmark work of biography enriched by a wide-ranging analysis of Debussy’s cultural background and literary and artistic influences; and François Lesure (1923-2001), a later biographer (Claude Debussy, 2003) and a prime mover 30 years ago in the founding of the Debussy Œuvres complètes. Nearly all of today’s ongoing documentary research is centered in this edition, the first critical edition of the works of any composer ever to be published in France under modern standards of scholarship.

The academic side of the conference was augmented by some notable live music. Particularly outstanding was a performance on Thursday evening, in the handsome Salle Claude Champagne at the Faculté de Musique, of Pelléas et Mélisande with student cast and orchestra, impeccably sung and played by all hands. (There was one guest performer, Joseph Rouleau, 83 years old, who has sung the role of Arkel ever since 1955.) This production was semi-staged, but very little scenery is essential for this opera, and the scrim and the lighting took care of what was needed. Another operatic surprise, in the same hall, was Diane au bois, Debussy’s first operatic attempt, in the form of two scenes from Théodore de Banville’s droll “comédie lyrique” that Debussy had set in 1885; this 15-minute fragment was staged on Friday night, accompanied by piano, from Debussy’s carefully-notated particelle. A performance is scheduled later this year in Paris, using Robert Orledge’s orchestration. The Friday concert also featured another of Orledge’s reconstructions from Debussy’s scattered sketches, a Sérénade for violin and small orchestra; the degree of authenticity, or faithfulness to Debussy, hardly seemed to matter, because this short, lyrical piece was above all else a lovely work that violinists surely will welcome to the repertory. On Tuesday, in a smaller hall a mile away, at the Centre des Arts Crowley, Orledge’s reconstruction of Debussy’s Le diable dans le beffroi, in part the composer’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s strange story, received a first performance anywhere. As Orledge explained, Debussy, in writing out a few sketches in 1905, was determined to make this new opera as utterly unlike Pelléas as possible. It is hard to give a just account of a single hearing of a completely new work that is full of parodistic elements, but this was convincing enough to make one want to hear it again several times, and there were some good melodies in it, too.

The whole affair in Montreal was a real festival, one that demonstrated convincingly to all of those present who have known Debussy’s music thoroughly and for decades that his incomparably rich and varied works still need to be better understood. Yet I would go so far as to say that the conference and its performances constituted yet one more confirmation, if any were needed, that Debussy, who died in 1918 at age 55, leaving behind dozens of unfinished works as well as the masterpieces that we all know, remains the greatest of all French composers. In the depth, breadth, and originality of his accomplishment, he surpasses every one of his predecessors in 10 centuries – composers from Machaut to Berlioz, from the Burgundian masters to our own century’s Ravel, another master whose fame has perhaps been even greater, but who admired Debussy to the core. In the 110 years since the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande, no composer has been more influential than Claude Debussy, and today, as more of his substantial legacy is heard everywhere, we are more than ever understanding why.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony (Pendragon Press). His website is here.

Stéphane Denève leading the BSO (Stu Rosner photo)

After writing about Ravel’s operas here last week, I was delighted to find the Mother Goose Suite on the BSO program last night. Ma mère l’Oye, five children’s pieces, were written for piano four hands in 1908, and some of Ravel’s very greatest works come from that same very productive year — Rapsodie espagnole, Gaspard de la nuit, and much of the opera l’heure espagnole as well. Ravel had finished the orchestration of the piano-duet original by 1910; this is what we heard last night. One normally thinks of Ravel as a large-scale orchestrator, but Ma mère l’Oye is a fine exception. It has a very full sound, with plenty of impressionist divided strings and a full complement of woodwinds; but the entire brass section consists of just two horns. (In 1911 he was persuaded to rearrange the order of the pieces in a ballet, adding two more pieces and some interludes; by that time, he had heard Stravinsky’s Firebird, premiered in Paris in 1910, and been dazzled by its orchestral color. The ballet Ma mère l’Oye is almost never heard on concert programs, although it would be perfectly suitable; the reason is that the orchestral scores remained unpublished for decades.)

I knew nothing about Stéphane Denève but his credentials are obviously excellent. His baton style is graceful, though a little hard to follow from the audience. He certainly won my heart with the Ravel, in which he added some fine subtleties of tempo that were quite convincing, and in the opening piece, which translates as “Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty,” with its ultra-thin texture in only 20 measures, he brought the full divided strings in at the end, pianissimo, with a haunting delicacy I wouldn’t have thought possible. We heard some fine solo work in “Hop o’ my thumb” with Robert Sheena’s English horn and Malcolm Lowe’s solo violin squeaks (the birds eating up all the crumbs on the forest trail). “Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas,” the third piece, is a black-key pentatonic piece similar to Debussy’s Pagodes for piano. “Beauty and the Beast,” which follows, is marked as a waltz, but has been called “the fourth Gymnopédie” after Satie’s three slow dances in similar rhythm. The final movement, “The Fairy Garden,” is an apotheosis for the suite, in a stately, hymn-like C major that builds to a full fortissimo. In all the 20th century there is no lovelier music than this short suite.

Peter Serkin after Stravinsky Concerto (Stu Rosner photo)

Peter Serkin expertly played the solo in Stravinsky’s seldom-heard Concerto for piano and winds, composed in 1924 with a few revisions in 1950. This work, composed when Stravinsky was finding his way in full-blown neoclassicism and also discovering American jazz, is the antithesis of a big romantic concerto. It begins with a stately chorale chiefly in the four horns, rather like a funeral march in pungently dissonant A minor (returning again just before the end of the third movement); this serves as a prelude to the entrance of the piano with the full ensemble, Allegro, percussive, brittle and even harsh. But the piano really moves between chords that peck at the total sound and Bach-like melodic lines in clear counterpoint, and at the climax of the movement, note-values are cut in half but the tempo speeds up anyway. The first movement concludes with an abbreviated repeat of the opening chorale, with the piano included — but one can hardly hear it over the winds. The meter changes are quite complex, but Stéphane Denève had no trouble with them at all.

The Largo in C major is a cantilena slow movement, such as in Bach’s keyboard concertos; indeed, the spirit of Bach seemed to have been a significant inspiration. There are two big cadenzas for the soloist that have always seemed oddly placed to me. The rest of the movement, as well as the finale that follows attacca, continues the neo-Baroque sound without diminishing either the percussive articulation or the bittersweet harmony. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Stravinsky had learned something from Prokofiev, the better pianist, in this work; later, Poulenc, younger than either, would learn from both in his piano style.

I couldn’t stay for the second half and thus didn’t hear the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony. Shostakovich is one of the most uneven composers of the 20th century, but at his infrequent best he shares top rank among his contemporaries, and the 20-minute-long first movement of this famous work, with its Mahler-like development and irresistible drive, is surely an example of how good he can get. I suppose everybody knows now that this was the symphony — widely known as “A Soviet Artist’s Response to Justified Criticisms” — that redeemed Shostakovich and saved him from being thrown into the gulag. I wanted to hear some of the particularly memorable moments — the canon (at the fifth) between flute and horn, the solo violin, trumpet, and celesta near the end of the first movement. I’ll try to listen on the radio on Saturday.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

James Yannatos was a composer, violinist, conductor (for 45 years) of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and a good friend to most of the musicians in Boston; he lived into his 83rd year. Kenneth Radnofsky, one of the best saxophone players alive and certainly the best-known worldwide since Sigurd Rascher and Bill Clinton, was lucky enough to commission what turned out to be Jimmy’s last work — and was able to discuss the completed concerto with him three days before the composer died of cancer last October. What we heard last night, with so many of Jimmy’s friends present, was a three-movement concerto of warm tonal harmony and orchestral vividness, with plenty of expression for the soloist, and a wide range of moods slow and fast; Radnofsky’s performance was as heartfelt as it was flawless. Julian Pellicano conducted with expert attentiveness to detail. I didn’t hear the Dies irae that the composer put in at the beginning; I did hear a bit of “Old Hundredth” well concealed in the web of string countermelody that engaged so frequently in dialogue with the saxophone. The concerto is scheduled for further performance at Bard College, in connection with the Bard-Longy partnership, during the coming spring. There’s no better way to pay a tribute to a composer than by performing his work, and all of us who were there were enriched by the opportunity to remember a dear friend, with a new work that will be widely heard.

I have been part of the Longy School community since 1946, but I never heard a Longy orchestra before this evening. Longy doesn’t have space in the Follen Street mansion to field a group of more than 20 players, which would quite fill the stage in Pickman Auditorium; this group, as I learned, rehearses in the Congregational Church behind the nearby Sheraton Commander. From the moment I heard the beautifully balanced and perfectly tuned woodwinds in Alexander Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia, which began the program, I recognized that this is a first-rate student orchestra. It was a great pleasure to see the players so unified and so attentive at every moment, and the results sounded exactly as one would hope. In the Steppes is a short but exquisite work that is seldom heard, and it displays Borodin’s remarkable melodic and harmonic gift that establishes him as the most elegant of the Russian “Five”; and of that venerable group of accomplished amateurs, only Musorgsky [now the accepted spelling] was more of a pioneer. I’d love to hear Borodin’s Second Symphony played by this orchestra.

I mention Borodin, because it is not he, but Tchaikovsky, who is the most famous Russian composer of symphonies. (“Tchaikovsky’s was the largest talent in Russia,” Igor Stravinsky wrote a century later, “and with the exception of Musorgsky’s, the truest.”) Tchaikovsky wrote six of them, all of them original, ambitious and accomplished; and the Sixth, the famous “Pathétique,” is unquestionably one of the great symphonies of all time, a peak of drama and tragic depth in the years between Schumann of the 1840s and Mahler of the 1890s. Thus it is all the more puzzling that Tchaikovsky in his over-the-top Fifth Symphony (1888), which rounded out the program last night, attains excesses of expressive exaggeration and distortions of form even to the point of vulgarity. It is as though Tchaikovsky had decided that he had not been bombastic enough in the finale of his Fourth Symphony, which had begun with three daringly proportioned but nicely polished and melodically rich movements. The Fifth Symphony has all that bombast and more, and hammers home the cyclic “motto” theme far beyond normal endurance. I counted 30 times in the score where Tchaikovsky writes fff (and twice ffff, in case anyone misses the point). There are good orchestral ideas in the Fifth Symphony, but these are too often obscured by the dynamics and especially by the thickness of the texture, with everybody playing most of the time.

I shouldn’t complain about these things, because the Fifth Symphony (“Tell me you love me”) has always been popular, even the favorite of many listeners, and the orchestra last night gave it their best, which was excellent overall, and everybody had a good time. But I for one would like to see Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony withdrawn from the concert stage for at least a couple of decades, and fine, less-often performed works like the Second Symphony (“Little Russian”) or the orchestral suites take its place on programs. I have complete admiration for Pellicano, who led the Longy Orchestra with total authority and affection. I spoke to him afterward, and asked him to play sometime the First Symphony by Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev (the organizing force behind the “Five”), an excellent though not flawless work (did I say the Tchaikovsky Fifth was without flaws?) that to my knowledge has never been performed in Boston. It was a favorite of Beecham and of course is well known in Russia. This should be part of the job of the conservatory and community orchestras: to bring forth some of the lesser-known worthy works and to avoid flogging the warhorses. We obviously have groups who can play these works and play them well — the Longy Orchestra being only the latest confirmation of this rich resource in musical greater Boston.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.