Music - Dermot Clinch on how Murray Perahia makes the piano seem to sing
The most recent CD from the pianist Murray Perahia is called Songs Without Words. It features Schubert songs arranged by Liszt, Bach vocal music arranged by Busoni and a group of "songs without words" by Mendelssohn. Of course, the piano can't sing. It is a bunch of wood, wires and heavy metal. But Perahia makes it seem to sing, and this recital is one of the most fastidiously beautiful he has yet recorded.
Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words are deeply unfashionable. Queen Victoria used to demand them when the composer wasn't already improvising on "God Save the Queen" for her, but the pieces no longer cut the critical mustard. They "neither provoke nor astonish", wrote the pianist Charles Rosen.
Rosen is a critic who likes - in the modern way - his music to shake and stir him if it's to have lasting value. If we could be "satisfied with a simple beauty that raises no questions and does not attempt to puzzle us", he says, the Songs Without Words might get played more often.
Perahia's recital contains passages of devastating beauty. A bouncing staccato figure dances upwards in the left hand while sketching a harmony that skips downwards; in the air above, a wistful melody echoes the accompaniment's contours: the F-sharp minor Lied ohne Worte from Op 67 is simply conceived, heartbreakingly harmonious and entirely typical, in its simple combinations of texture and colour, of the pieces as a whole.
A touching "duetto" represents Mendelssohn in the tenor singing with his fiancee in the soprano; it is achingly sweet, never merely pretty. A Venetian Gondola Song, with its trills on the wrong note, its dark harmonies, its melody coming out of the cold halfway through its opening phrase, seems to approach Rosen's ideal of provocation while remaining beautifully civilised.
According to Rosen, Mendelssohn was "the greatest child prodigy the history of western music has ever known"; but Rosen makes the point to increase our sense of an artist defecting from his duty in order to surprise us and to turn simple things into clever ones. Mendelssohn was clever; he was an intellectual, though never so you'd really notice. His grandfather was a central figure of the German Enlightenment. What is this novel business of "songs without words", he was once asked. He replied, with a clear talent for evasion, that since music was a precise language and words were ambiguous, he had thought it sensible to dispense with words altogether.
Perahia's CD is respectful; the composers respect each other, and he respects them. But it is Schubert arranged by Liszt that brings the issue of vocal music on the piano to its head. "Softly my songs cry to you through the night" go the words of "Standchen" from Schubert's Schwanengesang. In Liszt's arrangement, the words are removed. Liszt adds embellishments and echo-effects of his own, and the pathos inherent in so much piano music of the Romantic era is thrown into stark relief. The voice, being stifled, yearns all the more; lyrical expansion being frustrated, the song seems contained all the more explosively.
A century later, the composer Harry Partch, for whom the voice was the all-important inspiration, complained that the piano keyboard was "twelve black and white bars in front of musical freedom. Twelve black and white stiflers." But he was also paying unwitting tribute to the piano's power.
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