Fanfare
Intended as a tribute to pianist and pedagogue Seymour Lipkin (1927-2015) with whom Jenny Q Chai studied at the Curtis Institute, this album, Songs of Love (recorded December 18, 2020), invokes his guiding spirit and that of Beethoven, although the latter by way of allusion in the movement from Charles Ives’s 1920 “Concord” Sonata. The opening Aria from the Goldberg Variations, here fraught with ritards and pregnant pauses, stretches the contour of the piece to its limit, transforming the moment into a Romantic nocturne.
The music of Charles Ives (1874-1954) came to Chai by way of Seymour Lipkin, who encouraged explorations into contemporary composition. The “Concord” Sonata meant to convey the composer’s attraction to “the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Massachusetts of over half a century ago” (from “Essays Before a Sonata,” 1920). Typical of Ives, “The Alcotts” demands a large degree of commitment from the interpreter, since Ives deliberately omits bar lines and invites harmonic clashes and ambiguity, all in the spirit of free improvisation. For Ives, the only “lasting” performance occurred within his own mind, responding to music and life spontaneously, with each new day. “The Alcotts” invokes images of father Bronson and daughter Louisa May in a “fateful” conversation; thus, the obsessive quote from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Do we also detect an ironical hint of the Mendelssohn Wedding March? The lyrical mood soon assumes more dire impulses, with the “fate” motif in striking and dissonant chords, antiphonally wrought. The father’s stentorian discourse or the daughter’s ferocious temper? The Beethoven quote softens, and we imagine that Ives invokes the image of the character Beth in Little Women at the keyboard, playing folk songs from Scotland for the family’s pleasure. Ives commented that his serene beginning section depicted the father Bronson in conversation with Concord Sheriff Sam Staples, who had Thoreau arrested for civil disobedience. The piety of the affect perhaps evolves from the sanctity of the domestic habitat, the “home fires.” Chai’s last full minute of performance resonates with mighty, sweeping chords and richly tender arpeggios that fade into a literary utopia.
Schumann’s phantasmagorical 1838 suite Kreisleriana appears to be Chai’s calling card, and she lavishes equally forceful, Florestan-inspired articulation in concert with her poetical musings, a la Eusebius, Schumann himself referred to the suite, influenced by his reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann, as “intricate,” a labyrinth of juxtaposed, often confrontational impulses, an emotional response to Hoffmann’s unconventional, even revolutionary, approach to the novel form. Chai plays the opening movement with a ferocity that might characterize a meteoric Bach toccata. The dreamy, introspective second movement, meanders and colorfully drifts into passion, serene contemplation, and hints of lullaby. The third section invokes the epithet “wild” that Schumann often employed, especially considering that Hoffmann has a domestic cat’s writing for some of Kreisler’s memoirs in the novel. The
ascending and descending scales, in antiphon, create a Romantic haze, even a scrambling G-Minor gauze, that soars in its yearning quality. The four-voice harmonizations, richly endowed, nod their homage to Bach. The Sehr langsam fourth movement, already slow and pondering, almost bogs down in Chai’s molasses. More Bach contrapuntal stretto emerges in the ensuing Sehr lebhaft fifth movement, playful in a kind of parody of G-Minor variations that soon achieve a bravura character.
The sixth movement, Sehr langsam, truly demonstrates Schumann’s divided personality, moving through clear Bach impulses that possess chorale textures, into a brief, animated sequence that becomes once more subdued. Wild indeed, the Sehr rasch seventh movement poses a manic C Minor that injects elemental force from Bach and Beethoven. Just as suddenly, Chai intones a transcendent chorale sequence bearing little trace of the mortal storm preceding. The last movement, Schnell und spieland, quick and playful, opens with ostinato phrases over a drone bass, as though an eerie fairy tale were recited to the accompaniment of a hurdy-gurdy. The mood shifts to deep tones once more, in the manner of a ballad, with jabbing offbeats. The subsequent syncopations add a demonic element to the otherwise light, cavorting gestures, as the music descends to a chthonian depth far away
from reality. A love song for Clara Schumann, yes, but with thorns and thistles.
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