Music Review: Lang Lang - The Chopin Album

This article was first published at Blogcritics

If, like me, your earliest image of Frédéric Chopin comes from Hollywood's A Song to Remember. If the first thing the composer's name suggests is a handsome young man seated at a grand piano on a series of concert stages growing paler and sicker as he plays, wiping the sweat from his brow, and eventually coughing up that one ominous spot of blood on the piano keys, the gorgeous music he was playing has likely embedded itself in the depths of your psyche just as it has in mine. Of course Cornel Wilde playing Chopin was not the virtuoso playing the piano. That was Jose Iturbi certainly one of the most popular of the classical pianists of the period, a man that was to put his recording of Chopin's "Polonaise  in A-Flat" on the charts for a reported four years. And when probably the most popular classical pianist of the current day, Lang Lang, releases his first album devoted entirely to the solo piano works of Chopin, it promises perhaps another classical chart topper.

Lang Lang is nothing if not a charismatic performer, and if there are those that find his playing a bit too flamboyant for their taste, their voices are generally lost in the pianist's overwhelming success with the public. Audiences love him. Besides Chopin's music as much as the music of any of the great composers lends itself to flamboyance, Lang Lang and Chopin would seem a match made in heaven. The Chopin Album is the proof of the pudding.

The album begins with the second set of Chopin's Études (op.25), a dozen studies that the pianist suggests not only provide "training for . . . many elements of technique," but help "develop how your mind works, and how you control the different layers of your emotional response." They are not simply finger exercises, exercises in technique; as the liner notes point out, they are musically sophisticated studies sitting at the "center of Chopin's repertoire." Lang Lang plays them with patented skill and panache.

The album includes three nocturnes, the Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise (op. 22), the famous Grande Valse Brillante in E-Flat Major (op.18), and one of the best known show pieces in the Chopin canon, the two minute, one "Minute Waltz." The nocturnes demonstrate that the pianist is capable of restraint when he wants it. The waltzes get the more showy treatment.  As a bonus, for crossover fans there is an encore of Tristesse in duet with Danish singer/songwriter Oh Land. If one needs something to complain about, perhaps another solo piano piece would have been preferable.

In general like Lang's previously released  two disc set,Live In Vienna, The Chopin Album is likely to please those of us who were at first naïve enough to believe that it was Cornel Wilde playing that piano and thrilled to  the playing of Jose Iturbi when we knew better, if not always the critics with finer palates.

A note to those of you too young to have been around in 1945 to see Wilde, Merle Oberon and Paul Muni in that faux Chopin biopic A Song to Remember (indeed for those of you who want to look back on the days of your youth), you can see it complete on YouTube, albeit with Spanish  subtitles. It's worth watching if only for the music.

Music Review: Eyran Katsenelenbogen and Andrei Ivanovitch-Classical Meets Jazz:Pictures at an Exhibition

Article first published as Music DVD Review: Eyran Katsenelenbogen and Andrei Ivanovitch - Classical Meets Jazz: Pictures at an Exhibition, American Premiere in Jordan Hall on Blogcritics.

I can't remember when I discovered that Modest Mussorgsky's masterpiece Pictures at an Exhibition was written as a suite for the piano. The recording in my family's collection, the recording that was played with some regularity was the version recorded by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. It was the version famously orchestrated (although I didn't learn this until later) by Maurice Ravel. My youth may have been some excuse for my ignorance, but it is probably a good possibility that I was not alone in that ignorance. I would venture to guess there were a good many listeners who had never heard the work as anything but a suite for the entire orchestra whether in Ravel's orchestration or one of the others—Stokowski's for example. In many respects, it was the orchestral version that made the 1874 suite famous.

Now while there are those purists who may well object to such "tampering" with the original, there is something to be said for one artists reimagining of another artist's work. There is something to be said for artistic innovation that uses one great work as a springboard for the creation of something new, something that has enough reverence for that great work to try to honor it with a new creative act. Ravel and Stokowski have not been alone in taking a look at the Mussorgsky suite. Check out Emerson, Lake and Palmer on YouTube (http://youtu.be/pncBNp5xmPg). Such innovative approaches may or may not work as well, but when they do, they may both invigorate the original work and produce a work of significance in its own right.

Arguably Classical Meets Jazz: Pictures at an Exhibition, a concert piece, arranged and performed by Israeli jazz virtuoso Eyran Katsenelenbogen and Romanian classical pianist, Andrei Ivanovitch based on an idea from Gerhard Hummer is an example of just such an innovation. Using the Mussorgsky suite as a foundation the two pianists improvise with wit and gusto, creating an energetic new look at the classic. Their collaboration had its world premiere in October of 2007 in Hamburg, Germany, and it has been performed a number of times in Europe. Its American premiere was hosted by the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston on May 24, 2009, and an exciting DVD recording of this premiere is now available.

The thirteen movements of the suite are played in order, each movement giving the pianists an opportunity to explore Mussorgsky's musical ideas and improvise upon them in different ways. There are echoes of jazz keyboard greats like Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk. There are moments that remind the listener of George Gershwin and his use of jazz elements in works like the Concerto in F and the Rhapsody in Blue. There are even quotations from "Summertime" and Beethoven's Fifth. But always there is the classical foundation to build upon, the "Promenade," "The Great Gate of Kiev." The thirteen movements of the suite are played in order, each movement giving the pianists an opportunity to explore Mussorgsky's musical ideas and improvise upon them in different ways. There are echoes of jazz keyboard greats like Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk. There are moments that remind the listener of George Gershwin and his use of jazz elements in works like the Concerto in F and the Rhapsody in Blue. There are even quotations from "Summertime" and Beethoven's Fifth. But always there is the classical foundation to build upon, the "Promenade," "The Great Gate of Kiev." Katsenelenbogen and Ivanovitch have created a unique blend of styles and ideas that is both truly worthy of its source and can stand alone on its own merits. It is a magical reworking that will find an audience with lovers of classical music and jazz enthusiasts as well.