The Complete Mišek Sonatas, Courtesy of Szymon Marciniak
BY MARTIN ANDERSON
One of the chief delights of reviewing CDs and interviewing the musicians recording them is being brought into contact with music of composers that one might not otherwise know. One such is the Czech bassist Adolf Mišek (1875–1955) who studied in Vienna under Franz Simandl, perhaps the most influential of all teachers of the double bass. Mišek soon became an important bassist in his own right, moving back to the newly independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 and playing in the orchestra of the National Theater in Prague. Two CDs from the label Acte Préalable—a Polish independent despite the French name—from the bassist Szymon Marciniak and pianist Joanna Ławrynowicz present all three Mišek double bass sonatas and a handful of delightful miniatures for bass and piano. In a Skype conversation I asked Marciniak to tell me something of himself first before we discussed the Mišek project. He’s the principal bass of the Residentie Orkest in The Hague (sometimes known as the Hague Philharmonic); that’s home now, is it? “I live in Holland, yes. Originally I come from Poland, from a little town in the middle of Poland called Włocławek (it has nothing do with Wrocław, which is 300 kilometers away). I lived there until I was 18, so all my early education took place there. Then I went to Germany straightaway, so I didn’t do any conservatory or academy in Poland. I studied in Düsseldorf for five years before coming to Holland. The first place I lived there was Maastricht, which is a very charming and not very big town almost in Belgium; there I did some graduate studies. Then I started to take auditions and I got the job in The Hague, where I am today.” And was the double bass his first love, or did he start with something more conventional? “Very conventional—it was piano, when I was six. There were no musicians in my family, but first my brother started playing piano, and so since there was a piano at home, it was a very natural choice. But somehow, after a few years of playing, I was not an outstanding pianist: I always had to choose easy repertoire because I had some technical issues—I wasn’t really able to fulfill the level of playing that was expected from me at that grade at school, and so someone suggested that I should change instrument if I could find something. I don’t remember how it came out that it would be double bass, but I do remember my first fascination with it, because I was listening to the old guys who were gurus for me then (they were probably only about 20 and were graduating from school).” How old was he then? “I was 11.” So you were more or less the same size as the instrument you were trying to learn? “Probably! Actually, I started on a small bass, a semi-sized bass—the school had this instrument which was almost the size of a cello. I was very lucky because in Poland at the time instruments like this were not popular at all; nowadays you can find small basses for children as a standard everywhere. So that’s how I started the double bass. I’m 29 now, so this was in 1994.”
Was there adequate teaching in a town in provincial Poland for an instrument that’s slightly off the beaten path, like the bass? “I couldn’t complain that I didn’t have good teaching. I was very fortunate to become a student of Professor Wenancjusz Kurzawa. He’s the most famous of the old generation, at least in Poland—he’s not known very much abroad, but he was
the
name, and it was a really good school of bass playing, which you couldn’t have said of the time when he was young, in the ’60s. The methods of the time were of a much lower standard than they are today, so I was very lucky that my first two teachers, by coincidence, were both his graduates. So in a way it was the same school from the beginning, though of course with variations, because people are different. Then I was really lucky to become his student very early: I had been playing bass for three years, so I must have been 13 or 14 at the time, and then I also continued to be his student in Germany. It wasn’t planned that I should go to Germany. My teacher of the time got a contract to teach at the Robert-Schumann-Hochschule in Düsseldorf, and that’s how I came to Western Europe for the first time. It was in 2001, before we belonged to the European Union, so it was a big step, and at the age of 18 especially. But I was very fortunate to be his student from the age of 14. He improved my technique and solidified it step by step. After three years of playing an instrument it can go in any way if you don’t have the right person, and he was already a very experienced teacher, in his late-50s, early-60s, with a teaching career 40 years long behind him. Psychologically, too, he was very intelligent in approach: I always like to do some things my own way (through a certain arrogance, maybe)—but he let me do it, he didn’t force; he forced only up to the point where he saw a reason for it. And, of course, he developed in me a real passion and love for the bass repertoire. I have to say that when I left this environment and found myself surrounded by professional bass players, some of them tend to be very skeptical about the quality of the bass repertoire; they say it’s not as great as the great music you hear or play in the orchestra, or whatever chamber music you may have from the great composers, but I was very fortunate in that I never heard this kind of statement at the time I was growing up musically.”
Marciniak has touched on a subject I wanted to ask him about anyway—one reads of the Ševčík and Auer schools in violin playing (to take two of the best-known ones); is the tendency to group round prominent teachers more pronounced with a less commonly adopted instrument? And is there, then, a prominent Kurzawa School in bass playing, with another distinct approach in Denmark, say, or in Italy? “It’s an interesting point. With those instruments that established themselves as solo instruments—like piano or violin or cello, let’s say, and singing, too, of course—they developed certain standards; there are different approaches, but it’s never that you hear 10 cellists and they sound completely different. Actually, you hear a lot of cellists who sound very much alike. With the bass it’s different—if you hear any bass playing on a really outstanding level, as far as musical technique is concerned, each of them is really something different.” To the point where you could tell where someone comes from by the way he plays? “If you know about it, yes. Of course, there are plenty of outstanding bass players today and the level is so much higher that there’s also a certain standardization in the bass today. But if you look at the great virtuosos of the bass, like [François] Rabbath, like Edgar Meyer, Gary Karr, people who are not just virtuosos or fine players but people who develop their own style, they are all completely different. Actually, they all play completely different music, but technically, musically, sound-wise, there’s just so much variation compared to violin or cello. And you can also translate that to those teacher-schools. Of course, to some extent they overlap with one another, but everyone has a very individual idea about things.”
Time to move on to the object of Marciniak’s affections on the two CDs at hand, the music of Adolf Mišek. It’s clear from Marciniak’s booklet notes with the recordings that Mišek has a far more prominent place in the bass repertoire than we outsiders might have realized. “Yes, and it also depends from country to country. In the place where I’m originally from, it was very fashionable to play Mišek; indeed, you had to play some of his sonatas. But that’s true only of the two sonatas that were always played—the A Major and E Minor, the First and Second; the F Major was written much later, discovered much later, and only properly edited much later.” It was written by an 80-year-old man and yet it was his op. 7? Something odd there. “We don’t know for sure, but in the Hoffmeister edition there’s a comment by the editor, who writes that Mišek actually offered this sonata to Hoffmeister Verlag only a few months before his death in 1955. We can assume that he was probably just finishing the piece when he was 80 years old, while those other two sonatas he wrote when he was still a young man. Anyway, as I was saying, the repertoire varies from country to country: In some countries people prefer to play other things because they think Mišek’s old-fashioned, not original enough—which I always disagreed with, strongly disagreed with. I don’t know what the problem with Mišek’s music is, but they’re relatively difficult pieces to ‘sell,’ especially in concert. I don’t really know why, but it has a very specific style; it has a very specific language; it was written in a specific time. The first two sonatas and the miniatures were written at the beginning of the 20th century, in Vienna, but at a time when Czechoslovakia was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before it was independent. There was a very strong school of double bass, and I assume that they were trying at the time to prove that the bass is a solo instrument. Today, of course, you don’t need to convince people as much anymore, and since the Second World War many composers who are not bass players have been writing for the instrument—which was not the case then.” Well, the bass now also has a century of jazz to call on as well, so that it has a prouder profile now than it had then. “Exactly. Even guys like Frank Proto who are balancing between classical and jazz—he wasn’t born then [he was born in 1941] and all the tons of pieces he wrote for double bass didn’t exist. And, of course, 100 years ago you didn’t have the Internet and such a quick exchange of information between people, and so each country was a bit more closed. They lived in a certain environment. In Czechoslovakia they used to have a very intellectual and perceptive education—when you look at Mišek’s piano parts, for example, they are very well written.” I must admit that I found the music on these two CDs a little shy—a tad featureless at first, but on subsequent listening its personality emerges more strongly. “That’s interesting. For every piece it certainly helps if you can listen with the score in your head (of course, we mostly don’t do it), because Mišek is very precise about how he wants things. He puts a lot of remarks, and not just the typical
forte, piano
, crescendo—there are quite a few remarks for the pianist on how it should be articulated, which gives you a kind of idea of what to do. I’ve known these pieces for so long that it’s interesting to hear a remark like that from someone who is listening to them as new music.” Does Marciniak now know the music so well that he can’t stand back from it, or does he remember what he thought of these pieces when he first encountered them? “Yes, I do remember. The first time I played them was when I had just started my studies in Germany—I must have been 18—and my experience was completely different: I was very young and I didn’t have much experience of the orchestral literature at the time; it was just the next piece I learned, and so I simply approached the music unpretentiously and enthusiastically. I hadn’t performed any of the Mišek pieces for five years before the recording—it’s true!—and in the meantime, of course, my musical experience had grown much wider and deeper. So it would probably be more difficult to impress me now than it was then, but still I returned to this music with just as much enthusiasm as before; indeed, I now appreciate it even more.”
The three sonatas seem to offer a kind of pocket biography of Mišek, perhaps of a composer or artist in general: The First Sonata is rather finding its way, the Second is much more confidant and assertive, and the Third suggests an old man looking back on a life in music. “There is certainly more depth to the F-Major Sonata, also concerning its form, because it’s much longer, and also because the last movement is this huge fantasy and flash-from-the-past, from previous movements, which he didn’t do in the earlier sonatas. But in a more general sense, his style didn’t change so much—the meaning, the expression of the music is deeper, but he remained very faithful to his style, where you can hear a lot of the Czech spirit and some dance elements.” One gets the impression from the Smetana Fantasy—
Fantasy on Opera Themes by Bedřich Smetana
, to give it its full title—that he is enjoying himself, taking a degree of delight in working with the material. “That’s exactly it. It’s a piece we learned for this recording, and I’m very happy with what we captured in this piece. I could see that this piece wasn’t meant to be serious—it’s not a big form; it’s just a collage through a couple of Smetana operas. And yet you can still feel that it’s not a young composition of his—there are intimate places; he’s never trying to show off the bass. You could think, OK, a fantasy would be like those virtuosic violin pieces, or even those Bottesini pieces, but he’s not trying to prove that the bass can play flashily; he’s just singing out those arias, and even though the piano is more accompanying in this piece, there’s still a lot of correspondence between the two instruments.”
Mišek’s style could be summarized as relaxed lyricism—his principal concern seems to be to write music that people might enjoy. “Yes, he always wants the bass to sing. And, of course, there’s a strong dance element to this music also. You hear it clearly in some movements of the sonatas: There’s a furiant, and a dumka in the last sonata; and there’s a very short polka section in the Fantasy as well. There you can hear very directly that there are dance elements, but also in other places too. He spent half of his life in Vienna, before he went to Prague, and you can sometimes hear something from the Johann Strauss era in Vienna—not a direct quote or inspiration, but you can hear a bit of that.” And, of course, there’s a
Concert-Polonaise
—did Marciniak, as a Pole, respond to it especially strongly? “Oh, yes, definitely! I knew that this piece existed, because I read Mišek’s biography years ago, but the only miniature I knew was the
Legende
, because people used to play it a lot. Then I heard it two or three years ago for the first time and I said: ‘What
is
that piece?’ because I thought I knew everything from the bass repertoire and I realized I didn’t! They told me: ‘This is a Mišek polonaise’ and then I thought: ‘I want to play this piece.’ It’s so delicious! It has this virtuosity. It’s a very young composition of Mišek, and it’s dedicated to his mentor, Franz Simandl, and maybe has a sense of what he learned from him as a bass player, but there’s also so much elegance of the Polish dance. I don’t know why he chose the polonaise: I think he might have taken some examples from Chopin, maybe.” Actually, not “maybe”—the influence of Chopin is clearly audible in the piece. Anyway, if Marciniak discovered the
Concert-Polonaise
only two years ago, it suggests that a two-CD project of Mišek’s music was a relatively recent decision. “Yes and no. The recordings took place in two days in August and two days in December 2011. When I was first planning this recording, I didn’t know in which form exactly: I didn’t know at the beginning that I would include those miniatures, but eventually I did. The first time I talked to Jan Jarnicki of Acte Prélable was in 2006, but in the years after, several things happened: I changed where I lived, I changed my place of study, I was playing for orchestral auditions, and so the project had to take second place. And for a long time I wasn’t sure which pianist I could ask. I was living with the thought that it had to be someone I know, because that would give me the most comfort, but at some point I thought I had to let it go and take a risk. And it was a risk: I knew that Joanna [Ławrynowicz], who plays with me on these recordings, was great but we had never worked together. What convinced me to ask her is that she is a veteran recording artist of Acte Préalable and she was involved in many recordings of unknown Polish music, which is really the mission of this label. I thought: ‘She is really interested in this kind of unknown repertoire and so probably doesn’t judge music too soon before deciding if she will do it—some people reject this kind of music without knowing it well enough. There was no problem with her at all. She regarded it as seriously as any other project. She’s such a fine pianist, and a very fine chamber musician.”
How much of Mišek’s music do these two CDs account for? Is this more or less it, or is there another disc or two further down the line? “I think that’s pretty much everything. The project took shape step by step. I was sure I wanted to record the three sonatas, but I didn’t know if they would fit on one CD or two. At some point we realized that the program would be too long for a single CD, and then I thought, if we are planning two recording sessions, why shouldn’t we fulfill the project and present a portrait of Mišek which would then include those other pieces.” I see that the Smetana Fantasy is the only piece billed as a first recording, but is this the first time that all these pieces have been brought together under one roof, or two? “There was one CD [on Ambitus] of Josef Niederhammer playing all three sonatas about 20 years ago, but it was before the F-Major Sonata was published in the Hoffmeister edition; that was about 15 years ago. I don’t know whether it was because of that or some personal choices but there are some cuts—the piece is not complete. So that was another factor—there was no complete recording of the Mišek sonatas.”
Does Marciniak have any other recording projects up his sleeve? “I do have some ideas, but they are not precise at the moment. I might record some unknown Polish music, because the main mission of Acte Préalable is to record Polish music but they’ve extended it to unknown music in general. There are some unrecorded Polish works for bass, also from the 20th century. Jan Jarnicki [founder of Acte Préalable] is always interested in picking up anything unknown—that’s the great thing about him, because with this recording each of us had a different idea but we kind of fitted each other. Finding a label interested in recording Mišek sonatas would probably not be so easy today!”
MIŠEK
Sonatas for Double Bass and Piano: No. 1 in A,
Op. 5;
No. 2 in e
, Op. 6;
Concert-Polonaise
•
Szymon Marciniak (db); Joanna Ławrynowics (pn)
•
ACTE PRÉALABLE AP-257 (57:22)
MIŠEK
Sonata for Double Bass and Piano: No. 3 in F,
Op. 7;
Fantasy on Opera Themes by Bedřich Smetana; Legende,
Op. 3
•
Szymon Marciniak (db); Joanna Ławrynowics (pn)
•
ACTE PRÉALABLE AP-258 (53:42)
With seemingly all his music for bass assembled on these two CDs, Adolf Mišek emerges as an attractive but unemphatic personality, content to write well-crafted music that doesn’t aim at originality or profundity. That said, his three sonatas grow gradually more ambitious: No. 1 (1905) comes in at 24 minutes, No. 2 (1911) at 27, and No. 3 (c. 1954) at 32. As I remarked to Szymon Marciniak, they seem to articulate chapters of a biography, the first being buoyant and outgoing but perhaps a little shallow, the second more assertive and decisive, and the third the product of a man who has seen much and doesn’t have to prove it.
The First Sonata throws itself into action with a catchy, march-like theme, soon replaced by a very lovely second subject, and a movement that is part-Biedermeier, part-classical mainstream emerges—there are echoes of Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, among others. The slow movement, marked
Andante religioso
, rises from introspection to an impassioned climax and dies back to contemplation. There’s no scherzo; instead, the work ends with a good-natured rondo that has more than a hint of the 19th-century operatic paraphrase. The music never tackles anything of any depth, but by the same token it is never anything less than charming. Mišek treats the bass as a bass, not an
ersatz
cello, so that he gives the instrument the full run of its register—it can sing but can also leap down to produce a tremendous rumble. The Second Sonata instantly makes clear its expressive ambitions, being darker, more concentrated, more intense than the First: Brahms is an obvious
spiritus rector
. The extensive
Andante cantabile
lightens the mood a little before the lusty Furiant puts both bassist and pianist through their paces. And with the
Allegro appassionato
finale we are back to the stern and earnest manner of the first movement. The two sonatas are separated by the six-and-a-half minute
Concert-Polonaise
(1903), where, in pursuit of the energy Mišek wants to impart, he sets the bassist what sound like some tricky tasks—which Marciniak dispatches with apparent delight; and neither musician forgets that this is dance music.
If Mišek’s Third Sonata was indeed written in the mid 1950s, then you’ll need to listen to it out of context—put out of your mind the fact that (for example) Stockhausen’s
Gesang der Jünglinge
was composed at around the same time. In its own mildly late-romantic terms the Third Sonata is a considerable qualitative advance on the earlier two: Mišek is now writing as someone who is, as the French say,
bien dans sa peau
, at ease with himself. As a result, instead of the amiable gaucheries of the First Sonata, or the more effortful Second, the Third gets content and structure just right, in spite of its half-hour duration. The opening
Allegro ma non troppo
is spontaneous and charming, effortless and unforced, the second-movement Dumka is not a feisty dance but an intimate and gently troubled
Largo lamentabile
, immediately offset by a sparkling Scherzino, with some Dvořákian cross-rhythms in the witty trio; the finale, marked “Quasi una fantasia” rambles most appealingly and then just stops. The
Fantasy on Opera Themes by Bedřich Smetana
apparently dates from 1937 if a copy of the (now missing) manuscript can be relied on. It’s an uncomplicated stroll through tunes from
Libuše, The Bartered Bride
, and
Dalibor
, some of which are instantly recognizable, some less familiar. And the
Legende
(1903) is another essay in lyricism, allowing Marciniak’s bass to soliloquize sweetly.
In neither recording has any attempt been made to hide the bow-clatter Marciniak generates in negotiating Mišek’s fearsome demands—but it’s not at all obtrusive; the effect is rather to make the music-making more natural, as if you were sitting in the front rows of a concert-hall. Together Marciniak and Ławrynowicz communicate a real sense of enjoyment in what they are doing, an impression enhanced by the natural sound. I’d be exaggerating if I suggested that there was unsuspected gold here—but nor is it base metal (if you’ll forgive the pun); what these two discs do is shine a light on a small but not unattractive corner of musical history.
Martin Anderson
