AUERBACH: 24 Preludes for Violin and Piano. T'filah.  Postlude.  Vadim
Gluzman, violin; Angela Yoffe, piano.
BIS CD-1212  TT: 68:06

SZYMANOWSKI: 20 Mazurkas, op. 50.  Valse Romantique.  4 Polish Dances.  2
Mazurkas, op. 62.  Marc-Andre Hamelin, piano.
Hyperion CDA67399  TT: 71:32

Lera Auerbach is a polymath: composer, pianist, poet, novelist, and
belle-lettriste.  She's won acclaim in all these endeavors and has just
reached thirty.  I first heard of her when she studied at Juilliard
through a private tape of her playing one of her own piano compositions.
I heard a well-written, assured piece -- dark, Russian, and Romantic --
but very little grabbed me.  I searched in vain for something personal,
individual in the music and came up empty.  The 24 Preludes for violin
and piano are more of the same.  A bit of Shostakovich here, some Prokofiev
there.  Don't get me wrong: she does these folks very well and one finds
moments of great power.  However, I'd really like to hear what she has
to say for herself.

However, I certainly don't deny the brilliance or the artistic fearlessness
behind her 24 Preludes.  This is no arbitrary grouping of little pieces,
but a sustained totality.  You have a prelude in each major and minor
key, arranged unusually (Bach, for example, starts with C major and minor
and ends with B major and minor in his Well-Tempered Clavier) in
major-relative minor order and circle-of-fifths.  Thus, the first six
preludes are in the keys of C, a, G, e, D, b, respectively.  There's
also very often a key ambiguity, beginning with the very first prelude,
nominally in C major.  It comes across more as some weirdly modal g-minor,
although Auerbach easily re-establishes the "official" key by emphasizing
a tonic pedal point.  Also, many of the preludes play with the harmonic
ambiguity of relative major and minor.  Gestures and ideas carry through
from one prelude to another.  I haven't gone to the trouble of analyzing
the work in detail, but I understand at least this much from listening.
There are brilliant individual preludes and at least arresting moments
in each prelude -- moments where you say to yourself, "This girl is
good." However, there's always the feeling that she's about to break
through to something even better.  It just hasn't happened yet, even
though she's a hair's breath away.  Furthermore, she doesn't rhetorically
vary her devices enough to escape the charge of rehash, even in a work
nearly an hour long.  For example, there's an awful lot of violin
recitative over a low piano pedal point.  Even though Auerbach conceives
of the work as a large unit, I imagine that if players take this up,
they will likely make arbitrary small groups of individual items.  Unlike,
say, Rachmaninoff in the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, she fails to
provide a convincing overall narrative.  But what do I know?  Predicting
the future's a sucker's game.  The Hamburg State Ballet has already
staged the entire work.

Two morceau round out the disc.  T'filah ("prayer") for solo violin
takes the usual paths of writing "Jewish" music, but manages to avoid
the traps.  The soloist becomes, in effect, a cantor.  It's a nice piece,
but if the name at the top of the page had been "Bloch" rather than
"Auerbach," it wouldn't have jarred me.  Auerbach composed Postlude for
violin and piano on the death of a friend.  It's very beautiful, though
very short.  Actually, it seems to suspend time.

The 24 Preludes call for a virtuoso violinist and pianist.  Gluzman and
Yoffe certainly qualify.  They make a great effect in everything Auerbach
asks them to do.  I do miss, however, a comprehensiveness -- a shaping
of the work as a whole -- but, as I've indicated, I'm not convinced it's
their fault.

Three stages mark Polish composer Karol Szymanowski's output.  The first
leans very heavily on Richard Strauss.  The second brings in a kind of
hot-house late Romanticism, marked by languors and oriental exotica and
erotica.  Despite my affection for individual works, I have very little
sympathy with those periods.  To me, Szymanowski gets going, finds his
true self, only in his third phase -- the creation of a Polish Modern
musical nationalism.  Inspired by Stravinsky's example with Russian
folklore, Szymanowski hammered out a "Polish style," as he said, "in
which there is not one jot of folklore." That is, Szymanowski wrote
pieces that sounded Polish without resorting to folk material and without
approaching his job as a faux naif.  Anyone who hears the opening to his
Stabat mater, for example, feels the presence of a very sophisticated
composer indeed, who eschews no complexity and yet who reaches the
listener's heart directly and without any sort of hitch.

The 20 Mazurkas -- as everything else on the program -- from the
composer's final period, have the same general rhetorical goal as
Auerbach's 24 Preludes: individual pieces that nevertheless hang together.
The difference is that Szymanowski succeeds.  One thing that ties all
the individual items is the mazurka rhythm, and yet Szymanowski, mostly
with a prodigious sense of phrasing, mood, and architectural creativity,
varies that basic rhythm so one never feels a limiting sameness.  Every
one of these mazurkas surprises you, not only in themselves, but in
relation to their immediate neighbors.  I have no hesitation calling
this set of mazurkas the finest since Chopin.  To me, it inhabits at
least the same realm of merit and opens itself up to as wide a range
of individual interpretation.

Valse Romantique and the 4 Polish Dances work at only a slightly lower
level as primarily elegant entertainments, rather than the carving out
of a radically new music.  I wouldn't, however, mistake them for trifles,
any more than I would Bach's Italian Concerto.  These come from the pen
of a master.  The finale of the 4 Polish Dances, a polonaise, raised my
eyebrows over my ears.

The two op. 62 mazurkas are the last pieces Szymanowski managed to
complete before he died, a shockingly young 55, of tuberculosis.  They
ruminate more than the ones of op. 50.  The mazurka rhythm is almost
entirely obliterated in the evocation of improvisation.  Compared to the
op. 50 set, they seem to have far fewer notes, fewer lines of argument,
and consequently become more intense.  To quote Martin Anderson's excellent
liner notes, "virtually all that is left, like the grin of the Cheshire
Cat, are those sharpened fourths and flattened sevenths." Incidentally,
Anderson's Toccata Press has published an excellent collection Szymanowski
on Music, a collection of the composer's writings edited and translated
by Alistair Wightman.  ISBN: 0907689116.

Hand to God, I've heard people complain about Hamelin's playing here,
and that strikes me as ungracious, to say the least.  As I say, the
mazurkas, both the earlier and later sets, can take widely differing
interpretations, just like Chopin's piano music.  I consider Hamelin's
approach not only valid, but successful.  It features, of course, the
ungodly clarity of the fingerwork, but more than that, a great propulsive
energy.  Hamelin really knows how to move the music along.  I love the
variety of his colors and the unpredictability of his phrasing as well.
It's not just that the phrasing is merely unpredictable, but it avoids
self-congratulation and the bizarre.  It serves and works for the music.
However, Hamelin has always seemed to me an artistic extrovert.  I have
heard the op. 50 set played more intimately (and with less clarity) by
a Polish pianist (Hesse-Bukowska) on an old Artia LP.  If Hamelin isn't
your thing, you might try looking for the other.

Steve Schwartz