Schumann Variations on the Name “Abegg.” Allegro, op. 8. Schnittke 5 Preludes and
Fugue (1954–5). Five Aphorisms
Yerin Kim (piano)
SHEVA 217
(62:30)
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New classical music releases reviewed in detail by Gavin Dixon
Tuesday, 15 October 2019
Yerin Kim First and Last Words Schumann and Schnittke
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Pianist Yerin Kim has chosen an
adventurous and notably unvirtuosic concept for her debut recording. First and
Last Words presents the earliest and latest piano works of Schumann and
Schnittke. The result is a curiously angled double portrait, charting very
different stylistic trajectories, and arguably doing both composers a
disservice by omitting their finest piano works. But the musical connections
that Kim draws are fascinating and make for satisfying listening, even if the
biographical and historical significance remains tenuous at best.
Stylistic connections between
Schumann and Schnittke are not obvious, and Kim makes no effort to trace
specific links in her liner note. Both composers used note ciphers in their
music, as in the Abegg Variaions that opens the recital. Also, Schnittke saw
his musical outlook as intrinsically Germanic (his father was from Frankfurt),
and there is a strong 19th-century Romantic element to much of his work as
well. In 1993–4, Gidon Kremer organized a festival of chamber music by the two
composers at the Philharmonie in Cologne. Hans-Joachim Wagner was given the
unenviable task of drawing connections in program notes for the recitals. Those
notes were published together in the volume Begegnungen: Alfred Schnittke und
Robert Schumann : Beiträge zu einer Kammermusikreihe in der Kölner Philharmonie
(Dohr, 1999), for readers who want to explore the connections further.
Yerin Kim is mostly happy to let
the music speak for itself. Her approach to both composers is emotive and
fluid. The readings are dramatic, although climaxes are rarely emphatic, and
the loudest sections, especially of the Schnittke, lack a sense of physical
presence. Perhaps the issue is one of taste, of Kim always making the piano
sing, rather than emphasising the physical, percussive aspect of the
instrument—something that both composers explore.
Schumann, both early and late,
sounds lyrical and elegant in Kim’s hands. In the early works, the Abegg
Variations and the Allegro, op. 8 (a first movement of an abandoned sonata),
she makes the most of the rhetorical gestures—the imposing introductions, the
consciously reticent transitions and developments—but also lets melodies run
freely. The Ghost Variations are more austere, and while Kim retains the
flexibility of phrasing, her flourishes are now limited to occasionally leaning
on melodic ornaments or subtle weighting of broken-chord gestures.
Schnittke’s Five Preludes and
Fugue is a student work, from 1953–54. The composer considered them juvenilia,
and they were not published in his lifetime. Since his death, the set has gone
under two titles (the manuscript has none). The first recording was released in
2010, played by Drosostalitsa Moraiti on the Toccata album Schnittke
Discoveries (TOCC 0091). There, the set was called Six Preludes for Piano.
Since then, Sikorski has published the set as Five Preludes and Fugue for
Piano, so that looks set to become the official title. The Preludes were not
included in the Simon Smith album of 2014 (Delphian 34131), Alfred Schnittke
Complete Piano Music (though that was before the Sikorski publication), making
this only the second recording. The Preludes play out as a series of stylistic
studies, though we probably shouldn’t read too much into that: They are more
likely composition exercises than early experiments in polystylism. But
whichever way, they provide an effective transition from the Schumann. Kim
mentions Chopin and Liszt as influences, and her performances locate the music
squarely in the 19th century.
The Five Aphorisms for piano and
reciter date from 1990. In performance, the short works are intended to be
interspersed with poems by Joseph Brodsky. The choice of poems is left up to
the performers, a clever ruse, given that Schnittke’s fame by this point had
spread across the Russian- and English-speaking worlds, and that Brodsky wrote
in both languages. The music is in Schnittke’s late style, ascetic and bleak.
Kim invokes this atmosphere well, with a fairly neutral performance style,
still legato, but now with only impulsive rubato at climaxes. Schnittke’s
notated dynamics occasionally go to extremes, but Kim retains a continuity
across each of the movements. That increases the sense of bleakness, although
it compromises the textural variety—the first-movement chorale in particular
could be more ethereal, and more separated from its context.
Kim’s notes for the Five
Aphorisms are a little misleading. She writes: “By this time in 1990, Schnittke
was mainly living in Hamburg Germany after being exiled from Russia. He had survived
a few strokes by this point and was physically remote and weak.” Schnittke was
not exiled from Russia: he was a dual citizen and dual resident, maintaining an
apartment in Moscow. And by 1990 he had only suffered one stroke, the next
would be in 1991. But Kim’s documentation is fully redeemed in the last two
pages. This is at least the sixth commercial recording of Aphorisms, after
Boris Berman (still the first choice for all of Schnittke’s piano music), Anna
Gourari, Denys Proshayev, Simon Smith, and Peter Martin. But all the previous
releases I have heard have ignored the stipulation that Brodsky’s poetry should
be recited between the movements. There is no reciter with Kim either, but she
has done the next best thing and selected five Brodsky poems, one for each of
the movements, and reproduced them in the liner—a nice touch that elevates the
whole project.
This review appears in Fanfare
magazine issue 43:3.
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