Stay in the Loop
BSR publishes on a weekly schedule, with an email newsletter every Wednesday and Thursday morning. There’s no paywall, and subscribing is always free.
Curtis Orchestra with Leon Fleisher
Robert Zaller
Wittgenstein and Fleisher: The comeback kids
ROBERT ZALLER
Paul Wittgenstein, the scion of a fabulously wealthy, talented, and neurotic Viennese family— his younger brother, Ludwig, was the great philosopher, and three other siblings committed suicide— was a budding concert pianist when he lost his right arm in the Great War. Unwilling to give up his career, he commissioned a raft of works for the left hand by prominent composers, among them Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Paul Hindemith. The results were all of interest, and Ravel’s Concerto in D is an acknowledged masterpiece.
Wittgenstein’s artists did not write down for their patron, and the one recording we have of Wittgenstein in performance, in which he fudges passages too difficult for him, suggests that his commissions served others better than himself. One beneficiary was Leon Fleisher, the eldest of the extraordinary but ill-starred generation of American pianists that emerged after World War II and included Van Cliburn, Gary Graffman and Byron Janis. Fleisher lost the use of his right arm to a neurological ailment, focal dystonia, at the height of his career, and Graffman was similarly afflicted. Both men played Wittgenstein’s repertory and taught at Curtis Institute. Fleisher became a conductor. Recently, however, medical treatment restored the use of his right arm, and, approaching 80, he resumed concertizing to great acclaim.
These stories are dramatic enough. Even more so, however, was the fate of the Klaviermusik mit Orchester, Hindemith’s commission for Wittgenstein: It was composed in 1923 but never performed.
Perhaps its difficulty offended Wittgenstein, because he possessed the only copy of the score and never permitted anyone else to play it. It wound up in a barn near Doylestown, where a battery of lawyers representing Wittgenstein’s widow kept it from the light of day until 2002. (For the whole story, see David Patrick Stearns’ article in the April 24 Inquirer.) Let us be grateful that Count Rasoumovsky was not similarly insulted when he found Beethoven’s Op. 59 quartets a bit beyond his talents.
A neglected master’s most neglected period
Fleisher, who gave the world premiere of the Klaviermusik in Berlin, brought it to the Kimmel Center last month with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra on a program that also included Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee, and Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Christoph Eschenbach, who had a busy week, conducted.
Why Hindemith gave the Klaviermusik its antique and classicizing title is unclear, because it’s a piano concerto in all but name, and a very fine one too. The fast outer movements are full of incident and wit, with washes of dissonant brass and a near-continuous piano line. The slow movement features an extended and quite beautiful dialogue for horn and piano. At just under 18 minutes, it’s about the length of the Ravel Concerto, and, like the Ravel, is played without a break. The young Hindemith of the teens and ’20s is hardly performed outside Germany, but there’s much exuberant music in the early canon, and one hopes that the Klaviermusik will not only find the repertory niche it deserves but will stimulate interest in a neglected master’s most neglected period.
Two men on the shelf
As for the performance, Fleisher dispatched his part with vigor and panache. It was a moving experience extramusically as well, to hear a piece composed in the 1920s performed by a pianist from the same decade, both after many years on the shelf.
Schuller’s Klee Studies (1959) is a spare and subtly colored work, eclectic in style in the manner of the ’50s (jazzy here, modal there, with touches of Webernian pointillism). It’s a fine showcase for the talents of the Curtis Orchestra, with many exposed solos, and, in the “Arab Village” movement, an offstage flute and a Moroccan-sounding viola.
Eschenbach led the orchestra through its paces with an elegant hand, and rounded the evening out with a vigorous and committed New World, the Largo movement being particularly well done. There are very few cities in the world that wouldn’t be happy to have the Curtis Symphony as their principal orchestra. Listening to these young but thoroughly professional musicians negotiate their way through a challenging modern work, a premiere performance, and one of the grand warhorses of the repertory, one felt as one seldom does that the future of classical music is in very, very good hands.
ROBERT ZALLER
Paul Wittgenstein, the scion of a fabulously wealthy, talented, and neurotic Viennese family— his younger brother, Ludwig, was the great philosopher, and three other siblings committed suicide— was a budding concert pianist when he lost his right arm in the Great War. Unwilling to give up his career, he commissioned a raft of works for the left hand by prominent composers, among them Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Paul Hindemith. The results were all of interest, and Ravel’s Concerto in D is an acknowledged masterpiece.
Wittgenstein’s artists did not write down for their patron, and the one recording we have of Wittgenstein in performance, in which he fudges passages too difficult for him, suggests that his commissions served others better than himself. One beneficiary was Leon Fleisher, the eldest of the extraordinary but ill-starred generation of American pianists that emerged after World War II and included Van Cliburn, Gary Graffman and Byron Janis. Fleisher lost the use of his right arm to a neurological ailment, focal dystonia, at the height of his career, and Graffman was similarly afflicted. Both men played Wittgenstein’s repertory and taught at Curtis Institute. Fleisher became a conductor. Recently, however, medical treatment restored the use of his right arm, and, approaching 80, he resumed concertizing to great acclaim.
These stories are dramatic enough. Even more so, however, was the fate of the Klaviermusik mit Orchester, Hindemith’s commission for Wittgenstein: It was composed in 1923 but never performed.
Perhaps its difficulty offended Wittgenstein, because he possessed the only copy of the score and never permitted anyone else to play it. It wound up in a barn near Doylestown, where a battery of lawyers representing Wittgenstein’s widow kept it from the light of day until 2002. (For the whole story, see David Patrick Stearns’ article in the April 24 Inquirer.) Let us be grateful that Count Rasoumovsky was not similarly insulted when he found Beethoven’s Op. 59 quartets a bit beyond his talents.
A neglected master’s most neglected period
Fleisher, who gave the world premiere of the Klaviermusik in Berlin, brought it to the Kimmel Center last month with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra on a program that also included Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee, and Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Christoph Eschenbach, who had a busy week, conducted.
Why Hindemith gave the Klaviermusik its antique and classicizing title is unclear, because it’s a piano concerto in all but name, and a very fine one too. The fast outer movements are full of incident and wit, with washes of dissonant brass and a near-continuous piano line. The slow movement features an extended and quite beautiful dialogue for horn and piano. At just under 18 minutes, it’s about the length of the Ravel Concerto, and, like the Ravel, is played without a break. The young Hindemith of the teens and ’20s is hardly performed outside Germany, but there’s much exuberant music in the early canon, and one hopes that the Klaviermusik will not only find the repertory niche it deserves but will stimulate interest in a neglected master’s most neglected period.
Two men on the shelf
As for the performance, Fleisher dispatched his part with vigor and panache. It was a moving experience extramusically as well, to hear a piece composed in the 1920s performed by a pianist from the same decade, both after many years on the shelf.
Schuller’s Klee Studies (1959) is a spare and subtly colored work, eclectic in style in the manner of the ’50s (jazzy here, modal there, with touches of Webernian pointillism). It’s a fine showcase for the talents of the Curtis Orchestra, with many exposed solos, and, in the “Arab Village” movement, an offstage flute and a Moroccan-sounding viola.
Eschenbach led the orchestra through its paces with an elegant hand, and rounded the evening out with a vigorous and committed New World, the Largo movement being particularly well done. There are very few cities in the world that wouldn’t be happy to have the Curtis Symphony as their principal orchestra. Listening to these young but thoroughly professional musicians negotiate their way through a challenging modern work, a premiere performance, and one of the grand warhorses of the repertory, one felt as one seldom does that the future of classical music is in very, very good hands.
Sign up for our newsletter
All of the week's new articles, all in one place. Sign up for the free weekly BSR newsletters, and don't miss a conversation.
