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By JOHN BELL YOUNG
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 5, 2001
NIGHT SONGS, RENEE FLEMING and YVES THIBAUDET (DECCA) If anything brought together the worlds of music and literature at the turn of the 20th century, and enchanted the world in the process, it was the French chanson. This is music that concerned itself with moods, metaphors, dreams and symbols.
No doubt the cultivation of the chanson by Debussy, Ravel, Bordes and especially Faure held special interest for Strauss, though his songs follow more loosely the German tradition that evolved from the lieder of Schubert and especially Wolff. Unlike the chanson, the romantic lied conveyed extreme psychological states and exalted bucolic landscapes.
Renee Fleming brings her stellar soprano to each of these styles. What a pity then that she relies on her razor-sharp technique and perfect intonation to carry her through music that demands far greater subtlety and intelligence than she demonstrates here. She is most compelling in the German literature; indeed, her survey of five songs by Strauss is often exemplary. In Strauss and the Wolff-inspired Marx, her diction is flawless.
But Fleming betrays the limits of her imagination in the French and Russian works on this disc which, with a few exceptions, are set to poetry that deals with the twilight. For her, there is no difference whatsoever between Rachmaninoff and Faure, or Strauss and Debussy. As she sings them one song sounds pretty much the same as the next.
Her delivery is often shrill, unnaturally coy and interpretively forced. While superficially elegant, she is totally out of her depth in Rachmaninoff. That is not only because her Americanized Russian diction is unintelligible, but also because she fails to grasp the specific traditions indispensable to bringing the music to life.
Thibaudet's fetish for annoying stacatissimos, an anemic and invariably wooden tone, doesn't help. But he is at least an able accompanist and blossoms into a fine one in the Strauss and Marx. Even so the piano is poorly miked, becoming little more than a blur, especially in the French songs. B
-- JOHN BELL YOUNG, Times correspondent
SCHOENBERG: PIANO CONCERTO, MITSUKO UCHIDA AND THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA CONDUCTED BY PIERRE BOULEZ (PHILIPS) Those who believe that the serial compositions of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, were indictments of the status quo are only partly right. Schoenberg and his contemporaries, the so-called Second Viennese School, radically altered the tonal musical vocabulary that had relied on a harmonic center. But they also took pains to preserve the centuries-old traditions that made serial composition possible.
Thus what to untrained ears may seem like the murky and chaotic strains of music gone mad is precisely the opposite. In this ultra-rational music the principles of rhythmic and structural organization that inform the works of late Beethoven, Berlioz and especially Brahms come full circle.
Pierre Boulez, always in his element where Schoenberg is concerned, illuminates these connections in his survey of the composer's only piano concerto, making of its angular syncopes and fragmented phrases a succinct but powerful dialogue that intensifies cumulatively with the presentation and re-organization of each tone row.
Were it only so for Mitsuko Uchida, who brings her wooden pianism to bear on works that demand far greater depth than she musters here. Her pointillist approach, which disparages inflection and obscures Schoenberg's Viennese roots, is additionally compromised by a hard, callous tone that degenerates into banging.
In Uchida's black and white musical world, where legato has been banished entirely, not even a few shades of gray have been given leave to humanize the interpretive terrain. She is a mismatch for the savvy Boulez.
Though it is precisely the demands that serial composition make on the listener that have alienated mainstream audiences for a century, those who care to make the effort to explore it will be richly rewarded. Unfortunately, Uchida is hardly a worthwhile protagonist. Better leave it to the leading recorded interpreters of this music: Pollini, Brendel, Dammerini and Yudina. B
-- J.B.Y.