Flying home from Japan recently I checked the earphone music, expecting not much. Bitterly disappointing was an offering by Vox Luminis, uncharacteristically accompanied by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. You could hardly hear a thing except trumpets, what with the organ blaring a constant wall of sound. Just as well, given all the rushing going on, but also a great pity, because the choir is always fine. The CD is entitled „Himmelfahrt“, because of the Ascension oratorios it contains. „Himmelfahrtskommando“ — German military slang for a suicide mission — would be more appropriate.
Listening to the first movement of the „Eroica“ for the first time in years, it became crystal clear why it was Beethoven‘s own favorite among his symphonies. What a cornucopia of ideas! — even when they are propounded by a conductor who shall remain nameless, who led the worst St. Matthew Passion I ever played in, and who doesn’t have his own orchestra remotely under control.
Luckily there were some bright points: for one, Poulenc‘s brief Concerto for Two Pianos, with his usual potpourri of the trite, the ironic and sudden epiphany. But the title of another CD was „Nostalgia“, and one track of it applies to me to a degree I thought worth mentioning here.
„Nostalgia“ is an odd title for an album of Moussorgsky and Brahms songs, but that kind of thing seems de rigueur in these decadent times. Anyhow, the contents are excellent. Magdalena Kozená is joined by Klavierlöwe Yefim Bronfman, who turns out to be a superb accompanist. As the tracks of Brahms floated by, my thoughts drifted back to the summer of 1970, when I was studio accompanist for Janice Harsanyi at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. It was a deep plunge into the infinite world of art song. One Lied by Brahms remains etched in my memory because of the girl who sang it with me when I was 18, between two years at Juilliard. I was trying to remember how the text went after the first lines: „Dunkel, wie dunkel in Wald und in Feld, Abend schon ist es, nun schweiget die Welt.“ And then of course the next track was the very song. („Von ewiger Liebe“, Op. 43 no.1)
Deep memory is a strange thing. I hadn’t heard the song in over half a century, and I can‘t say I even knew what was coming from bar to bar. But the sense of familiarity, as the song swept along from somber intensity to its glowing conclusion, the feeling of: yes, I played that magnificent piano part, I can still feel it in my fingers (those ringing right hand octaves…), I remember her face as she sang the words in a then totally unfamiliar language — all that was overwhelmingly…nostalgic.
I can‘t remember her name, but I recall how she would softly sing, „Dunkel, wie dunkel“, as we walked along the dark shore of one of the lakes, hand in hand. The relationship didn’t go far or last long. It was tentative, but I wouldn’t call it a failure. We worked together for a week or two on one of the finest utterances of a great master, under the guidance of an excellent artist.
|