On Synergy and Sound

My name is Chris, and I have an addiction, not to alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, opiates, or prescription pharmaceuticals, but to music. The shaking of air as melody, harmony, and rhythm is one of the primary ways in which I experience the divine, a portal through which to glimpse the eternal; music stimulates my imagination almost instantly and speaks to that part of my spirit that dreams of heaven. And in this age of information, how fortunate that we should enjoy the ability to have music digitally enshrined in compact discs, iPods, and other media that allow for perennial accessibility with almost no generation loss. And yet, while media such as the commercial record, or album, have entered a period of either ensuing or latent obsolescence, I still
buy compact discs and tend to associate songs, tracks, and larger works of music with those collections. Perhaps a phrase such as “top five albums” makes no sense to today’s fifteen-year-old, but to those of us who still remember the era of vinyl and cassette tape, it still has some relevance, and the album to which I now refer is possibly among my top five, or at least, ranking alongside triumphs like U2's The Joshua Tree and a dearly-loved collection of Vince Guaraldi tunes recorded by George Winston called Linus and Lucy, it is certainly a favorite. This collection of piano concertos is among the first classical music CDs I ever owned, and it holds an important place in my heart not just because these works profoundly impacted the development of my musical and artistic sensibilities, but also because of the time of life during which I discovered and first loved them. This is absolute music at its best, music in the abstract but with a strong potential to trigger the imagination and have a serious emotional impact on the listener. Aside from the fact that all three pieces are concertos for piano and orchestra, which traditionally consist of various dialogues between the soloist and the orchestra, interludes for the pianist alone (known as cadenzas), and tutti passages for the ensemble, the concertos themselves are connected by a common tonal universe, a stylistic fusion that characterizes the album’s entire 73 minutes, lending further sensibility to treating it as an aesthetic whole.

The disc is a rerelease of material recorded in 1972, with the first two concertos performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Eugene Ormandy, who led the orchestra, throughout the 1950s and 60s, in solid recordings of much of the orchestral repertoire, and the last concerto performed by the Cleveland Orchestra under Pierre Boulez, who is still actively conducting and recording. The one constant is the soloist, the French pianist and conductor Philippe Entremont, who made a number of well-received recordings with Ormandy and even performed with the legendary conductor at his debut with the orchestra in 1956. And yet, despite the age of these recordings, the sound quality and the performances are quite good. There are certainly those who criticized Entremont’s interpretations, and I don’t claim to be an expert by any means. But I will say that I’ve heard all of these concertos performed by a number of other ensembles, conductors, and soloists, and to my admittedly untrained ear, none have been as satisfying as what are on this disc. Of course, that could simply be my own sentimental attachment to the subtleties of these performances. I’m sure that’s it, actually. Even so, I feel confident in saying that these are exceptional recordings of these works. Amazingly, despite the decline in classical music sales and the sizing down of classical music stock in stores during the last several years, this Sony reissue can still be ordered new through a variety of online vendors, including Amazon.com. Not sure how much longer that will be the case, but for now, it’s still available.

The cover shows a detail from Composition with Pouring, painted by Jackson Pollock in 1943. Of course, Pollock’s work seems a fitting complement to the musical locales depicted here in that it evokes an abstract and other-worldly quality that bleeds, at the same time, a variety of urban associations, providing a graphic or imagistic referent to the sonic “cityscape” we encounter as the album unfolds. It begins with a precocious achievement by the composer George Gershwin, whose contributions to the concert literature have the distinction of being the first to so deliciously infuse classical forms with the flavor of perhaps the only uniquely American art form—jazz. And in that synergy lies the character that unifies these three concertos. At the age of 17, as I journeyed the 73 minutes of this magnificent triptych, it generated in my mind a redolent tapestry of images and memories, an acoustic asylum to which I would retreat, lying on my bed at home, trying to transcend the petty fears and humiliations of adolescence, or slouching down in a bus seat with headphones on, riding home from a field show with the Simi High Marching Band. It became to me a world not only of solace and contemplation, but also of wonder, as I lounged at the shores of those lush interludes and gorgeous cadenzas, like a weary traveler warming his feet at a friendly hearth.

The Concerto in F is Gershwin’s prodigious contribution to the literature of the piano concerto. It is not a work of jazz. Rather, it is uniquely Gershwin, drawing upon the tonality and many of the improvisatory principles of jazz, but invoking the classical principles that govern thematic development and framed in the classical sonata form. A similar accomplishment was achieved in the late 1970s by the rock band The Police, who found a wholly original voice—amidst the burgeoning New Wave and synthpop of the 80s—by fusing so adeptly and so seamlessly the stylistic legacies of punk and reggae. In fact, their second studio album was aptly titled Regatta de Blanc, or “White Reggae.” The result was a sound that could only be The Police. But what Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copland did was braved single-handedly by George Gershwin, whose Concerto in F rivals any concerto of the Classical or Romantic eras. With no formal training in music theory, composition, or orchestration, he composed the concerto at the request of the conductor Walter Damrocsh, who had heard Gershwin premiere his Rhapsody in Blue at Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924.

The first movement begins bombastically with a four-note theme for timpani and a series of energetic phrases for woodwinds and percussion, followed quickly by an opening theme that, in typical Gershwin fashion, has the delicious flavor of car horns on a city street. What unfolds beyond these rousing and vehement passages is a world that truly turns the classical genre on its jazz-infused ear. And to a 17-year-old thirsty for something genuinely unique, listening to this infectious tonal synergy on a little Sony Walkman, as the peers around me pondered the rock phenomena of the early 90s (Primus, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and so forth), was a veritable sanctum of the mind, an alternative, if you will, to what seemed so comparatively unimaginative about modern music, which still had not been able to transport me in the way I had suddenly been by the music on this disc, of which the Concerto forms a thrilling and dynamic first half.

The landscape of the central movement is one of nostalgic contemplation. I don’t think nostalgia was ever so potent as when I was a teenager, though this perhaps makes sense given the precipice of sudden self-awareness and impending maturity faced by an adolescent. I think the blues-infused crooning of the passages for solo trumpet that wind through this movement were like a sanctuary where I felt not only the sense of escape for which an angst-ridden teen is so eager, but also a sense of solace and melancholic understanding. The trumpet itself felt like a friend imparting its own sweet tale of sadness that had the effect of making mine feel somehow more bearable. I would imagine myself standing at a window, looking down on some bustling urban thoroughfare, reflecting on the hesitations and infatuations that plague the life of a high school boy like me.

The concerto concludes with an exhilarating rondo that recapitulates many of the themes from the previous two movements. In the final pages of the work, this melodic reunion becomes a palpable celebration. The coda is stirring and lofty, filled with shimmering chords from each section of the orchestra, after which the piano delivers a swaggering ascent before a crescendo of the aforementioned chords are swallowed by a satisfying flourish of cymbals, snare, and bass drum.

The slightly longer second half of this disc is occupied by the resplendent and poignant music of French composer Maurice Ravel, who is perhaps best known for his balletic, 15-minute, Spanish-themed crescendo known as Bolero. In fact, the tastes and temperatures of Spanish culture infuse the majority of his popular works, which makes these two jazz-tinged concertos not only a remarkable counterpoint to the rest of his output, but also excellent companion pieces to the spirited Gershwin concerto. Ravel wrote two piano concertos, both toward the end of his life and around the same period, from 1929 to 1931. His Concerto in G could almost be considered a large-scale chamber work. And since Ravel was primarily a miniaturist, the fact that both concertos are of short duration is not surprising. But what I discovered was that every minute of both concertos is densely packed, evoking a rich tapestry of textures and emotions. In truth, I don’t believe Ravel ever wrote anything so inspired as these two concertos, occasionally exotic, frequently heartfelt, always unique. In fact, the Ravel concertos seem to be even more synergistic than the Concerto in F, which relies heavily on the tonal rhetoric of jazz, which Gershwin, in many ways, simply adopted and filtered through his own unique voice. By contrast, with the Concerto in G and the Concerto for the Left Hand, Ravel’s use of jazz rhythms and harmonies is less prevalent, encompassed within the larger circle of device and invention from which he drew his artistic fluency, producing music that seems to ignore any traditional mood. Rather Ravel borrows deftly from a variety of traditions to give us something of almost incomparable flavor, making the tone somewhat elusive, but always intriguing. I felt as if I had entered a world of profound ingenuity and emotional breadth, a space of being that had never been described by any artistic tradition and was now being revealed in the sounds that had suddenly traversed the 61 years between Ravel’s pen and my ears.

Like Gershwin’s concerto, the Concerto in G follows a classical plan, with the bookending of two quick movements around a thoughtful and tender central adagio. In fact, Ravel claimed to have composed the concerto in the spirit of quintessentially classical composers such as Mozart or Saint-Saens. He asserted once, “Indeed, I take the view that the music of a concerto can very well be cheerful and brilliant and does not have to lay claim to profundity or aim at dramatic effect” (Kraemer, 6). And yet, the concerto goes well beyond the expressive qualities of classicism. From the very outset, Ravel imparts an almost dizzying parade of Basque-themed passages—not the least bit surprising given the character of his other oeuvre—punctuated so tastefully by alternation of temperate reflections and vibrant exclamations for piano and instruments from various sections of the orchestra (including a delicious, swaggering theme for brass and woodblock, which, I remember, my dad found just too cool for words) that reveal his natural fluency with the language of jazz and his ability to invoke its languid and cavalier tenors in a way that is wholly distinct from the rhetoric of that language. This is one of those rare cases in which a composer manages to invoke a very specific genre in a way that is stylistically unique, consistently reflecting his own musical sensibilities. It doesn’t sound like a jazz piece. Rather the jazz motifs are interwoven with the rest of the musical narrative in a way that is characteristically Ravel, consistently defying classification, at least in terms of the tonal realm inhabited by the piece. Ravel was, of course, a masterful and ingenious orchestrator, and I believe one of the reasons this concerto holds such a special place in my heart is because of his exquisite use of percussion (my instrument(s) of choice since I was 12). Indeed, he seems to draw heavily and imaginatively on the percussive qualities of the piano itself throughout.

The second movement is one of the loveliest and most tender reveries in all of the literature for piano, which was quite a painstaking endeavor for Ravel, who tried to model the movement after the larghetto of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. The beauty is palpable as the piano’s melodic lines wind like garland about the accompaniment, which basically constitutes an enormously slow waltz, though the listener is unlikely to hear it over the hushed mood Ravel has created through the juxtaposition.

The third movement is a vigorous presto that revives many of the same devices from the first movement, including a host of choruses and glissandi, from just about every section of the orchestra, that playfully imitate chords and choruses characteristic of the Big Band music of the time. The themes and percussive dialogues between instruments culminate in an exuberant and witty close to the piece.

The Concerto for the Left Hand is the crown jewel of this disc, a single-movement work full of modulations in tempo and key. Darker and more confessional than its sibling concerto, it is certainly, in my opinion, the most wonderful music Ravel ever wrote. In its 18-and-a-half minutes, he takes the listener on one of the most diverse, most personal, most evocative journeys in all of music. Even more, he accomplished sublimity in a way that no composer had ever done before. The concerto was commissioned by and written for the famed Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm during the First World War. Several composers wrote one-handed works for Wittgenstein, though it is generally agreed that none did so with such imagination like Ravel. Remarkably, he disguised Wittgenstein’s use of a single hand and created the illusion of a two-handed performance through ingeniously expressive writing that requires incredible endurance on the part of the soloist.

The concerto begins with a cryptic collage of arpeggios in the double basses that has the wondrous ambiguity of not only revealing a great deal of thematic material, but also the meditative illusion that the orchestra is still tuning. When the piano finally enters, it develops a series of deep and resonant melodic lines, a fluid and intricate sarabande any listener could hardly guess were being played with a single hand. From this point, the concerto moves organically through a variety of moods and rhythmic spectra, at times wild, at others subdued, wherein the jazz tonality is explored to such a colorful and startlingly alien degree that to me, the concerto seems to encompass a musical category all its own, truly transcending genre and drawing out of me images and emotions with no discernable connection to any memory or experience. And yet, this place of the imagination is rather vivid, and the richness of its design is still as intimidating and awe-inspiring as when I first heard it half my life ago. It produces in me the feeling of entering a variety of different rooms in a strange and beautiful dwelling, a landscape of sound in which I feel somehow a foreigner and somehow at home. A fanfare of almost Spanish character leads to an exquisite and plaintive section for piano and woodwinds. This builds to an abrupt transition to the faster central section, during which a contagious scherzo unfolds, and a cleverly disguised Blues scale soon reveals its jazzy roots, leading up to a series of wave-like, majestic fanfares, punctuated by dark trills in the piano. This spills into the concerto’s final section, an absolutely gorgeous lento. In these transcendent final moments before the buoyant conclusion, an expansive and meditative delirium of lower-register notes are unraveled by the piano, during which I feel as if wandering a great hall—the last room of this aberrant and astounding journey—in which I imagine grand columns built by a series of dark yet redolent textures in the piano’s lower octaves, sweetly buttressed by the hesitant accompaniment of the orchestra. Amidst this grandeur, my soul pauses, awestruck, given over to every note. Truthfully, if I hadn’t seen it performed live some years later by the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, I might never have believed that those passages could be accomplished with a single hand.

There is nothing like this concerto. It is a masterpiece, a nonpareil tour through a ghostly realm of mysterious joys and sorrows. If one piece of classical music ever gave me the sense of being carried through an intimate and mystical region of the heart by every single note, it is Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand. At 17, I felt like a musical pilgrim, whose spirit was dwelling somewhere new and uninhabited, majestic and mystical. After the delicate pantheon of textures in the piano that pervades the final minutes of the piece, the glorious coda arrives in giant orchestral bursts, like plumes of sonic light, after which the brass and cymbals spiral upward, and the concerto disappears. My dad loved that ending, I remember, just loved it. I can recall listening to the concerto with him on a couple of different occasions when he reversed that last track a few seconds on the CD player just for an encore of the ending, and did it two or three times, I believe, almost as if he were having seconds and thirds of some delicious candy. That’s probably where I got it from. I love that he did that. I love that memory of him.

When I first began this entry, I don’t think I fully realized what I was trying to tackle. I certainly know I didn’t realize how big a task it would be to capture the excellence of this album alongside the images, feelings, and associations it inspired in me. Truthfully, this disc is far more vast and rich than I could ever capture and its impact too significant to be done justice in just a few pages of writing. I realize only now that some images and memories live in the heart like secrets, never hoping to be shared or fully understood by another person. In retrospect, I’m really unable to tell if what makes this album so resonant to me is due to the music itself or simply because of the emotional maturity I was lacking when I first encountered it, the heightened sensitivity of youth and lack of experience that makes it difficult to process feelings within a broader frame of reference, a state that would naturally cause music to feel even more impactful to one’s spirit than in later life. Likely, it is both, I imagine. Regardless, however, in the wasteland of my adolescence, I was moved beyond words, in astounding admiration of both Gershwin and Ravel, two masters whose synergistic creativity left me awestruck by the sheer breadth and cohesive perfection of the pairing. It still does. And God willing, may it always.

Work Cited

• Kraemer, Uwe (translated by Gery Bramall). Gershwin/Ravel: Piano Concertos Entremont liner notes. Sony Classical, 1990.