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An essential tribute to Leon Kirchner - an esteemable but ma

Discophage | France | 09/01/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This is an essential tribute to Leon Kirchner, published in honor of his 80th Birthday in 1999. It reissues historic recordings of works composed from 1948 to 1973, all originally recorded (between 1952 and 1973) and released by Columbia or its associated label Epic. Outstanding liner notes, documenting the circumstances of both composition and recording, precise and complete production information (performers, dates and places of recordings, recording and release dates, producers when known). The compositions are appropriately given on the two discs by increasing date of composition, starting with the 1948 Piano Sonata and ending with "Lily" for Sprano and Chamber Orchestra from 1973, which affords a good overview of Kirchner's compositional development, but also entails the slight disadvantage of having the Piano Concerto divided on two discs, with the cut between second and third movement.



And what about the music? Interesting more than essential, I would say, and also serious and rarely seductive. A pupil of Schoenberg, Bloch and of Schoenberg's pupil Roger Sessions, Kirchner went through a variety of styles. The Piano Sonata displays furious digital activity in its outer movements and mysterious Scriabinian harmonies in its middle Adagio (also recalling Bartok's Out of Doors suite). The production notes apologize for "excessive tape hiss" on the 1962 recording by Leon Fleisher (which on the original Epic LP came with Copland's Sonata and Rorem's Barcarolles, reissued in Philips Great Pianist's volume devoted to Leon Fleisher Leon Fleisher Plays Copland, Liszt, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, and with Roger Sessions' From my diary, still unreissued to the best of my knowledge), but I do not hear anything excessive or obtrusive, on the contrary: I find that the recording has remarkable timbral and stereo definition.



On the other hand the 1952 recording of Kirchner's 1st Quartet from 1949 sounds its age: hollow mono. As everybody knows, Bartok wrote Quartets 1 to 6, and he wrote only one of each, which makes 6 in all. But there must have been hundreds of Bartok's 7th Quartet, and Kirchner's first is one of those, by the composer's own admission.



The raw Sonata Concertante for Violin and Piano from 1952 is somewhere between Schoenberg's Fantasy and Bartok's Solo Violin Sonata. 1956 mono recording, dry.



The Piano Concerto (1953) is Kirchner's response to Schoenberg's own Concerto and some of that influence can be heard: in its outer movements it is pounding, muscular, rhythmically vigorous, angular in a way reminiscent of Schoenberg's, but it is also more raw and busy in its piano activity, relentlessly forward-moving, less classically-molded than his teacher's. At 4:20 in the first movement, a schoenbergian andante section sets in, culminating in an increasingly agitated piano cadenza introducing the nervous and dramatic return of the orchestra (7:37) and at 5:29 in the Finale begins a dreamy piano cadenza of Ravelian delicacy. Kirchner called the central adagio his response to the slow movement of Beethoven's 4th, and one does hear that model in the alternation of solo piano calls and orchestral responses, while some passages of pure orchestral recitative played by bass strings bring to mind the finale of the 9th Symphony. The mood is brooding to dramatic, often favoring the low registers of piano and orchestra. The orchestra contains some surprisingly Romantic-tonal gestures (and one striking similarity with the beginning of Shostakovich's 5th Symphony at 8:10), but I also find the movement too long for its basic material. Distant mono sound of the 1956 recording (released only in 1969 according to the production notes - but I think this is an error. It first came out on LP as Columbia ML 5185, paired with William Schuman's Credendum recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy circa 1955, so the LP must have come out somewhere in the late '50s. 1969 may be the year of the reissue of Kirchner on a New World LP, now paired with Piston's 6th Symphony performed by Munch and the BSO in '56).



"Expressionism" is a word often used to describe music, especially composed in the Austro-German world after World War I, but rarely defined. My definition of it in relation to Kirchner's style in general and especially his 1954 Piano trio and his 2nd String Quartet from1958 would be a mixture of Bartokian rhythmic drive and of high-strung, vehement and stern atonal lyricism that can be traced back to the New Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. The Piano Trio was recorded in 1957 in distant and dry mono sound with traces of saturation, while the recording of the Quartet by the Lenox String Quartet dates from 1973 and comes in good stereo. The compositions are serious and not particularly seductive, despite some interesting coloristic effects in their respective 2nd movement.



It is his 3rd Quartet with electronic tape from 1966 and "Lily" for Soprano and Chamber Orchestra (1973), that I find the most interesting: in the Quartet Kirchner's expressionism is now married and peppered with a fascinating taste for sound color and manipulation, not only through the tape sounds but also through the instrumental writing, using unusual registers and timbres. The result is eerie, apparently disjointed, and it can drive you nuts as it can fascinate you as it did me. In "Lily" - a concert piece anticipating the opera Kirchner completed only in 1977 after Saul Bellow's "Henderson, the Rain King" - that same fascination with color is manifested through a subtle and delicate filigree of percussion and traditional instruments mixed with a highly original and mesmerizing treatment of voices, both"straight" or electronically altered, sung (haunting soprano coloratura melismatas) or spoken (including Kirchner's own as Henderson). This is as advanced as anything that was written in those days, but also both dramatic and highly seductive. I find that Kirchner's style has remarkably matured and acquired a new richness and depth.

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