PORTRAITS AND ELEGIES
•
Frank Almond (vn); Brian Zeger (pn)
•
INNOVA 763 (59:02)
LASSER
Vocalise. Berceuse fantasque.
ROREM
From
Day Music:
Pearls; Extreme Leisure; Bats; Billet Doux; Another Ground
. From
Night Music:
Gnats; The Lighthouse; Saying Goodbye, Driving Off.
LIEBERSON
Elegy.
PLATT
Autumn Music
Sooner or later every violinist is urgently summoned to see the Stradivari someone just found in grandma’s attic. You feel so hurtful pointing out that while the label inside is indeed quite yellowed, and clearly says Stradivarius, it also says Sears Roebuck and Company. Faces fall; hopes are dashed. When Frank Almond, highly respected concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony, got a “we’ve got this Stradivari” e-mail, for once the attic Strad was no fake: It was the ex-Lipinski from 1715, from the master’s Golden Period. After passing through the hands of such famous names as Tartini, Karol Lipinski (a friendly rival of Paganini’s), and Joachim, it became the concert instrument of Estonian virtuoso Evi Liivak in 1962, but even before her death in 1996 it began to be referred to as among the “lost Strads.” As it happens, the violin was here in Milwaukee, and on the death of Liivak’s widower it was offered on loan to Almond, who had just had to return the ex-Dushkin Stradivari to its owner. Almond and Zeger have selected repertoire by living American composers for the violin’s recorded debut.
Juilliard composition professor Philip Lasser (b. 1963) wrote his
Vocalise
in 1999 and it’s gained quick and justifiable popularity with string players, in numerous versions. Almond’s smooth, sweet tone spins out beautiful melodic lines openly styled on Rachmaninoff’s. As agreeable as the
Vocalise
is, I find the quiet, introspective tension between violin and piano in the
Berceuse fantasque
more striking: diffident yet decisive, and very much in the spirit and manner of Fauré. Ned Rorem (b. 1923) wrote his two suites, of eight brief pieces each, in 1971–72; Almond and Zeger have sensibly selected from both. The studied inconsequence of such titles as “The Lighthouse” and “Extreme Leisure” can be belied by the richly expressive content of the music, some of it worthy of Rorem’s best songs. “Bats” and “Gnats” are the liveliest pieces on the disc, droll explorations of instrumental color, while “Another Ground” provides a compact survey of the ex-Lipinski’s sound, from throaty low notes and slightly covered middle, to liquid top notes—in Almond’s hands, a Leontyne Price of Strads.
Elegy
from 1990 by Peter Lieberson (b. 1946) touches on the sorrow, anger, and acceptance stages of grief so reservedly as to nearly hide in plain sight in the company of so much elegiac music. The two pieces, each about nine minutes (
adagio, amoroso; lamentoso/ chaconne
) that make up
Autumn Music
by Russell Platt (b. 1965) are the final movements of a sonata composed in 2005; missing is what Platt calls a “bravura” first movement that lends thematic material to the Adagio. This is the most harmonically dense music here, yet not much more dissonant than Hindemith, and with enough reminders of the searching phrasing and harmonic progressions of Brahms to justify an “autumnal” title. Although Platt cites Handel sonatas as an influence in the Lamentoso, the hymn-like chaconne theme is more likely to bring César Franck, or the Respighi Violin Sonata’s finale, to mind, giving Zeger plenty of rich material to dig his fingers into. It is successful and engaging enough, but given the slow tempos and restrained moods that predominate on the disc, the absence of that missing “bravura” sonata movement is keenly felt. It might have provided a welcome change of pace—the one reservation I have about this elegantly played and cleanly recorded recital.
David K. Nelson
