Short Timing, Clattery Piano, Undistinguished Playing
J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 12/18/2004
(2 out of 5 stars)
"Marco Polo is to be praised for bringing Ernest Bloch's piano music into the recording studio. But this, the second and last CD of the series comprising all of his piano music and containing his most important pieces, the Piano Sonata and the suite, 'Visions and Prophecies,' is marred by too-often clueless playing, mediocre sound, and a poorly tuned piano. Adding insult to injury, the tracks on the jewel box back-card do not match those on the CD itself.
The Sonata, written in 1935 and typical of Bloch's tendency to use small motifs that are sewn together in what may at first appear to be haphazard fashion but which really add up to a coherent and organic form, is a protest against what was going on in Europe at the time. As one writer puts it, it has 'the tang of wormwood, hardness and malice.' As such it is not a 'pretty' piece as it makes great use of hard open fourths, minor seconds, sforzando chords, savage rhythms. In three movements, but played without pause, the second section, 'Pastorale' is softer and tries for serenity but its cynical detachment makes it less than lovable and it leads into a brutal finale that is mauled in this performance by István Kassai. I wouldn't feel so strongly about this performance if there weren't the altogether better reading by Myron Silberstein on a Connoisseur Society disc with which to compare it.
The six-movement suite 'Visions and Prophecies,' arranged for piano from a marvelous piece for cello and orchestra, 'Voice in the Wilderness'--and in my book a better work that the popular 'Schelomo'--lasts only about nine minutes and receives a much more acceptable performance.
There are two other short pieces, neither of them terribly important, that fill out this disc that contains only 40 minutes of music.
Pass this one by.
Scott Morrison"
Despite some flaws in the interpretation, an indispensable a
Discophage | France | 02/24/2007
(4 out of 5 stars)
"The two CDs comprising this collection of Ernest Bloch's complete piano music came as a Godsend to the Bloch devotee back in the early 90s. Bloch's piano music was difficult to find, seldom recorded (there are even two world premiere recordings on this volume 2, though the disc nowhere claims credit for it: Ex Voto and Danse sacrée; the companion disc, Bloch: Complete Piano Works, Vol.1, has four), and scattered on numerous different LPs. Given the quality and originality of Bloch's piano music, that situation comes to me as an enigma. Some say that Bloch didn't write idiomatically for the piano and that his compositional thought and textures were too orchestral. But why should a composer avoid writing trills and tremolos and reduce the piano to a skeleton? Some influences can be heard - whiffs of Scriabin and Debussy emerge here and there - but Bloch has integrated them in a highly personal style. He makes full use of all the coloristic possibilities of the instrument and puts them at the service of an intensely Blochian sound-world, in turn mysterious and sensuously "Jewish-Oriental" and starkly powerful, evoking (by Bloch's own admission) a fantasized world of the Old Testament.
That said, if the Sonata (for which I have done a score-in-hand, detailed discographic comparison) may serve as a yardstick, Kassai appears to be serviceable but lacking poetry. While the "animato" section of the first movement is suitably muscular (though not very animated in tempo and sometimes giving the impression of plodding) and shows good attention to all of Bloch's details of articulation, Kassai's reading lacks sensuousness and atmosphere in the passages that call for them. He is perfunctory and earthbound as well as metronomic in the "Maestoso ed energico" opening of the first movement and also, given his forward-moving tempo, curiously jaunty (the 1:41 it takes him to get through the section, compared to Myron Silberstein's 2:07 on a Connoisseur CD, are quite telling). In the middle Pastorale he lacks nuance and tempo flexibility and hence, sensuousness and atmosphere. In the finale Kassai follows exactly the metronome marks of Bloch and carefully observes the composer's "pesante" and "marcato" indications, playing with impressive power and muscle - but Silberstein shows that adopting a slightly more animated tempo than the composer prescribes and playing the music as a triumphant rather then a grandiose and solemn march can pay dividends, at least superficially, by producing more hair-raising tension, but at the cost of some clarity of detail. Contrary to what the CD back cover claims, the Sonata's movements are not indexed, and the timing given for the first and second movement are wrong, attributing to the first 20 seconds that belong to the second (the two movements are linked without interruption).
Visions and Prophecies inhabit the same stylistic world as the Sonata - no wonder, as they was written a year after, a reworking in fact of the Orchestral suite with solo cello "Voice in the Wilderness". From a more superficial listening than with the Sonata, I find Kassai quite convincing in his rendition of their stark grandeur.
With a thrifty 40', the disc's timing appears very short, but then, totalling an hour and forty minutes, Bloch's complete piano works simply require these two CDs. The two Marco Polo discs also come with authoritative notes by Suzanne Bloch, the composer's daughter, with invaluable personal anecdotes and perceptive analyses of the compositions. The competition is represented by a better-filled Chandos disc by Margaret Fingerhut (Visions and Prophecies: piano music of Ernest Bloch), with a marginally better interpretation of the Sonata, but without the 1914 Ex Voto, a wistfully simple prayer-like melody that was rediscovered in Bloch's papers after his death, and (more regrettably) of the 1923 Danse sacrée, an etude in Scriabin-like trills. Fingerhut is also short of the three 1922 Poems of the Sea and the Four Circus pieces, which are on volume 1 of Kassai's collection.
So, despite the interpretive shortcomings, this is an indispensable acquisition for the serious Bloch devotee, but it needs to be completed with the outstanding recording of the Sonata by Myron Silberstein (Silberstein plays Franck, Bloch and Giannini).
"
Track Listings (8) - Disc #1