Smörgasbord

Excerpts from the sleeve notes

smörgåsbord A medley; a miscellany; a variety; open sandwiches served with delicacies as hors d’oeuvres or a buffet. [Swedish, from smörgås ‘(slice of) bread and butter’ + bord (table)] The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Ninth Edition

After a recital of sonatas you return to the stage for an encore … there are expectations, a desire for more. It is your choice: do you dazzle them out there; do you charm them; or do you make them cry with you and count the seconds of silence after you have lifted the bow from the strings? This is the power of short pieces.

There is a short piece for every occasion, happy or sad, or for sheer entertainment. A short piece may be played to one’s mother in the living-room or at the inauguration of a president. The repertoire of short cello pieces is a well that never runs dry. One may choose to play Popper’s Gavotte, an arrangement of a Chopin mazurka, a set of variations on a Bellini aria, or one might want to play the Stravinsky Pastorale for violin and winds an octave down.

Bengt’s and my choice for this disc is a collection of pieces that bring different memories, some of them having been in our repertoire for a long time.

That we open our programme with music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) is no coincidence. He has played a major role in Bengt’s and my life for many years. Bengt’s love for Korngold is widely known through his records with Anne Sofie von Otter, but in his own recital programmes, too, Korngold is often present. I turned pages once when Bengt performed the Third Piano Sonata, and I always look back at that as one of my great musical experiences.

My own first contact with Korngold’s music happened through watching figure-skater Dorothy Hamill win the Olympics and the World Championships in 1976. I fell in love in front of the TV while the presenter informed us that Hamill’s choice of music was that of a composer called Korngold. I remember writing the theme down, since I wanted to play it with all my heart. It was from the music to the film Captain Blood, but when I had found that out I was already the happy owner of his Cello Concerto, Op 37. Thirteen years later, in 1989, I gave the concerto its Scandinavian premiere with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra.

It is easy to take Korngold to your heart: the many photographs of him show the sweetest person, with that wonderful mixture of modesty and genius. This, together with the skill of Richard Strauss, make powerful music. Pronounced a wunderkind at the age of nine by Gustav Mahler, Korngold was a famous composer before escaping the Nazis in 1934. He was brought to the United States by the theatre director Max Reinhardt and employed by Warner Brothers for whom he subsequently composed sixteen film scores, winning two Oscars. He used much of his income to support war refugees. The 1946 film Deception, starring Bette Davies and Claude Rains, incorporated the gorgeous Cello Concerto, but another piece intended for the film was never used: the Romance Impromptu in E flat major, recorded here. The Mummenschantz (‘Hornpipe’) is the third movement of his 1919 chamber orchestral suite for Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Korngold transcribed some of the movements for violin and piano, including the Hornpipe, which was premiered in Vienna on 21 May 1920. He was also the pianist for a performance at the Austrian Embassy in Paris on June 12 1949 with the cellist Jean Reculard. On the cello it is played an octave down.

Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961) was a folksong-collector rivalling Bartók and Kodály; also a virtuoso pianist; the composer of The Warriors with its huge orchestra including three pianos, The Jungle Book song-cycle for choir, and various salon titbits; he was also an arranger, musical theorist and pragmatist. About his ‘elastic scoring’, he wrote in 1929 that he didn’t care if his pieces were played by four or forty or four-hundred-and-forty players, or whether a trombone part was played on a sax or a string part on a ukelele. “Let us not snub budding music-lovers simply because they have chosen instruments unwritten-for in classical music!” His main concern was how the voices were balanced. “I wish to play my part in the radical experimentation with orchestral and chamber music blends, that seems bound to happen as a result of the ever wider spreading democratisation of all forms of music.” This spoken by a composer with the supreme virtue of never being dull! His request for his body to be displayed for eternity as a mummy at the Grainger Museum in Melbourne was denied by the Australian Government.

The Sussex Mummers’ Christmas Carol from 1905-1915 (!), dedicated to the memory of his friend Grieg, comes with an equally stunning version for piano solo or violin and piano.

Even though Johan (Jean) Julius Christian Sibelius (1865-1957) ceased to write symphonies thirty years before his death – a fact which the musical world never learned to cope with – he continued writing for his beloved violin. As a teenager he dreamed of becoming a virtuoso and would go for long walks in the countryside and by the sea with his violin under his arm. ‘Dreamt that I was twelve years old and a virtuoso’ he wrote in his diary in 1915, while composing the E major Sonatina.

Several of Sibelius’s violin pieces come in an alternative version for cello. I heard the Rondino from the Op 81 collection for the first time as a teenager, when the great Arto Noras played it on television. The way it ends always takes the audience by surprise! The Berceuse, the last of six pieces Op 79, is very much a violin piece, but the beauty of its eccentricity proved irresistible; the need to play it came with listening to Bengt’s recording for BIS with our friend Nils-Erik Sparf. Here it is played an octave down.

Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938), the ‘pianist’s pianist’ of the twentieth century, was worshipped by Rachmaninov, Busoni, Friedman and Hofmann, among many others. A piano intellectual and the composer of personal, fascinating works for the piano, he also arranged twelve pieces for violin and piano from his own works and dedicated them to Fritz and Harriet Kreisler. These Twelve Impressions date from 1916, while Kreisler was a busy soldier in the First World War. The material is borrowed from his 1911 Walzermasken and the 1912 Piano Sonata. Later, Godowsky selected four of the Impressions to be published for cello and piano. The Larghetto Lamentoso from the Piano Sonata – music of intense beauty – was performed by the cellist Joseph Schuster at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City in 1930, during the celebrations for Godowsky’s sixtieth birthday.

The Belgian composer Joseph Jongen (1873-1953) holds a special place for Bengt and me. We salute his memory. The First World War brought him to England where he enjoyed chamber music with Ysaÿe, Tertis and Casals. In 1919 he returned to his native Liège, eventually becoming head of its conservatory (a post in which he was succeeded by his brother in 1949). Jongen’s music is of great interest to cellists, adorning the repertoire with some fabulous compositions. There is a highly romantic Concerto in D major Op 18 from 1900, dedicated to Jean Gérardy (who generated several fine works for the cello – besides being Godowsky’s duo partner). The Valse was published in 1909, dedicated to J Gaillard, and is a charming example of his Parisian influences.The Habanera from 1928 I have always found quite seductive.

Canto Negro is the last song from the cycle Cinco Canciones Negras (1941) by the Catalan composer Xavier Montsalvatge, born in 1912. I heard it for the first time when it was sung at Bengt’s wedding party, and have loved it ever since. My transcription from 1992, dedicated to André Previn when he left the RPO, is an attempt to make a cello piece out of a song where the vocal line is very much based on the rhythm of the text. I have added a virtuoso element and elaborated around the harmonies, possibly inspired by the transcription technique of Heifetz. For the first two bars, sing ‘Yam-bam-bo’, yam-bam-bé’.

Ernesto Halffter was born in Madrid in 1905. He won the Spanish National Prize for a Sinfonietta when twenty years of age. It took him to Paris where he was befriended by Maurice Ravel. He is said to be inspired by Stravinsky, Les Six, and his friend Manuel de Falla (working many years to complete the latter’s cantata Atlántida); yet his style is individual and full of grace. Of all the pieces in my music library, nothing sounds so genuinely Spanish as this Habanera. Originally an orchestral piece from 1931, it was transcribed by the great cellist Maurice Gendron, who has published numerous highly imaginative arrangements.

Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950) – ‘Jack’ to his friends – wrote lots of beautiful music. The quality is that of Vaughan Williams, Delius, Walton and Britten, and yet he is not heard as often as they are. In 1917, at the age of nineteen, Moeran received a severe head injury while at war in France. With shrapnel embedded too close to his brain for removal, he underwent surgery that was to affect him for the rest of his life. He married a cellist, Peers Coetmore, and wrote for her a sonata and a concerto. The very first piece for her, however, was this Prelude written in November 1943. In one biography we learn that the piece is ‘doomed to a humble place in grade examination lists’ and that the piano part is ‘dull’. Wow! Maybe it is the naked romanticism that makes some people uncomfortable? And Bengt has never found the piano part dull, just as he doesn’t find the piano part dull in another piece in E major of a similar structure: Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus from Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps.

Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962) composed his Liebesleid (‘Love’s Sorrow’) in 1910. It is a sentimental and emotional description of a Vienna about to be lost in the Great War. Its tremendous success inspired Rachmaninov to write a transcription for piano solo, which was published by Schott in 1922. The harmony, chromaticism and counter-voices that we love from the symphonies and the piano music are added here. One of the privileges of working with Vladimir Ashkenazy in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was that I could always go backstage in a break and listen to him play the piano. We went through the Kreisler/Rachmaninov before a concert in Cardiff in May 1992, I remember. On the bus back to London with the orchestra, I transcribed it for cello and piano. A few sections proved too pianistic for sharing with the cello, like the middle section and the end of the piece. For those I have composed an extra voice, even managing to squeeze in a quote from Kreisler’s Liebesfreud. This transcription is dedicated affectionately to Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) is one of those ‘what if’ composers. What if Beethoven had lived till the age of 75 instead of 57 – fourteen symphonies? What if Brahms had lived until 1912 – a cello concerto? Not even daring to think of the five cello concertos by Mozart, had he lived until 1830. With Scriabin continuing the explorations beyond his unfinished Mystères (a philosophical opera designed to make practical his dream to have art satisfying all the senses at once) one can only guess how music as an art form may have developed. Where would it have taken Scriabin by 1950? Where would that have placed Schoenberg, and would it have given Charles Ives the self-confidence to continue composing?

For a second visit to the Scriabin Museum in central Moscow, I arrived just after closing time. The guide gave me “cinq minutes!” to see the apartment, which is on the second floor. Alone in Scriabin’s home, intact since 1915, I listened for old sounds. I looked at his piano and the bundle of electrical chords and coloured light-bulbs lying on top – his ‘keyboard of light’. How he would have loved the famous scene from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind when contact is made between humans and aliens via music and colour!

The early Romance in A minor was originally written for French horn and is Scriabin’s only non-piano instrumental piece. When published, most likely by Belayev, it came with a cello part. I have known about this piece since I was fifteen, but it is thanks only to the pianist and music collector Martin Eastick that I finally got hold of the music.

The F sharp major Poème Op 32 No 1 belonged to Scriabin’s favourites. He almost always included it in his recitals. For cellists it is well known from a transcription by Piatigorsky (1903-1976). However, comparing this transcription with the original, one finds simplifications of rhythmic patterns that are typical for Scriabin, as well as octaves added in the left hand in order to suit new and louder nuances. Therefore I have made my own transcription. Again, some parts are too pianistic to share with the cello. For those sections I have added fragments from the Poème Op 32 No 2 as well as from the Poème Satanique Op 37. My transcription is dedicated to the memory of the singer Anders Melander, who possessed the type of charisma that made any stage he entered too small. I expected him to become another great opera personality of my country. Instead he died from cancer in 1994 at the age of thirty-six, leaving behind his wife and their two-month old son.

Born in a church tower in the Bohemian village of Poliãka, Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) moved to Paris in 1923. In 1940, with the German armies approaching, he left for America with the help of Koussevitsky. There he taught himself English by spending the daytime in the cinema watching westerns. He did not return to his homeland after the war, but chose to spend the rest of his life in Switzerland.

Martinu composed a bewilderingly large amount of music. For cello and orchestra there are two concertos, a Sonata de concert and a concertino; for cello and piano, three sonatas and several other works, including the popular Slovak- and Rossini Variations. The Sept Arabesques, composed in Paris in the early 1930s, are seven rhythmic studies. The one played here is No 1.

‘To breathe life into music is more important than to prove respect for it.’ One of the great cellists and cello personalities of the twentieth century, Paul Tortelier (1914-1990) is also a composer of many imaginative works for the cello, including concertos for one and two cellos, a Sonata Breve, Bucephale (to the memory of Alexander the Great’s horse), Giro di Tonalità in homage to Copernicus, and Circus for cello solo. Pishnetto, Recital Etude No 5 published in 1975, is unique in the cello repertoire.The bow is not used at all. Instead Tortelier ask for ‘pishnetto’, which in orchestral circles would be called ‘Bartók pizz.’ – i.e. pizzicato. Whenever I come on stage to play it, as an encore for instance, the audience soon feels for me when they realize that I have forgotten my bow!

With his love for Swedish folk music and his musical training on the continent, Jakob Adolf Hägg (1850-1928) could have become for Sweden what Grieg became for Norway. His Opus 1 is a most beautiful cello sonata in E minor, which he premiered with the cellist Friedrich Grützmacher in Dresden while still a student of Niels Gade. Hägg produced only a few works on this scale before poor mental health prevented him from developing his talent, even though he never lost his pianistic powers. He was known for his improvisational skills as well as for being able to transpose any piece into any key. The Albumblatt remains unpublished, and I thank the conductor Finn Rosengren for providing me with the music. Finn has for many years fought for Hägg’s music. The Andante may be a short piece, but it reveals a great composer.

The Andantino by Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) dates from 1955 and is a piece that has been with Bengt and me from the start. It is a gem. There is also a cello concerto (discovered by his son only recently) and a duo with piano, but here as much is said in just a few lines. Berkeley’s mother was French and so his musical education was completed in Paris under the guidance of Nadia Boulanger and Ravel. He was a professor in composition at the Royal Academy of Music and was knighted in 1974.

The title The Sea of Flowers is Rising Higher is taken from the front page of the London Evening Standard of 1 September 1997, the day after Princess Diana’s fatal accident in Paris. That day my two sons and I found our way to Buckingham Palace with thousands of others who, like us, had brought flowers. It felt good to be with other people. While just walking around looking at each other, counting the television stations assembled across the street from the Palace, and resting in St James’s Park, this Elegy shaped itself in my head. Back at home I wrote it down. It is dedicated to Princes Charles, William and Henry.

I believe that in perhaps forty or fifty years’ time it will be generally appreciated that Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) is one of the great composers. His name will be mentioned in the same breath as Mozart, Brahms and Bach. If Bach is universal, then Rameau makes us touch eighteenth-century Paris. His music is exceptionally vital and self-confident, and yet he perceived that his works would not maintain their position in the repertoire of the Opéra beyond a few years. “If I were twenty years younger I would go to Italy, take Pergolesi for my model and abandon something of my harmony.” Throughout his life he wrote books and treatises on music theory which shaped much of the theory of today. But with opera he waited until he was fifty. Great operas followed: Castor et Pollux, Les Indes Galantes, Pygmalion, Platée, Dardanus …. Immensely productive, he supplied the Académie de Musique with thirty-four operas and ballets between 1737 and 1764. His success never disarmed his critics. Rousseau, of all people, let himself be the mouthpiece of those who favoured Lully to Rameau, the ‘new’ opera composer.

Les Boréades (or Abaris) is a tragedy in five acts. Rameau wrote it at the age of eighty-one in 1764. The Air vif (called Torture d’Alphise) is an instrumental movement from Act 4 for strings, two oboes and bassoon. There is an incredible drive to this music, and the colours Rameau creates are staggering. When I listen to it, I wish I played the bassoon. And it is as far removed from Peter and the Wolf as you can get! The colours are lost with my transcription, but I look at it as one way to approach a genius.

François Lucas Tille (1712-1772) worked as concertmaster at the Académie de Musique during the last ten years of Rameau’s life. Les Boréades was rehearsed for a period of ten months (!) up to Rameau’s death, but despite his position Tille was unable to persuade the Académie to go ahead with the project. The Violin Sonata in E minor, titled ‘Le Tombeau de Rameau’, was written in 1764 and forms Tille’s tribute to his master. The ‘Courante’ is the fourth of six movements. Here it is played an octave down.

A superstar in his lifetime, Offenbach was born Jakob in Cologne in 1819 and died as Jacques in Paris in 1880. He is as interesting to cellists as he is neglected. The Tales of Hoffman and Orpheus in the Underworld have certainly diminished the role of cello virtuoso which he played for a major part of his life. For his concert tours he wrote numerous short pieces as well as four concertos. In 1844 he appeared in London with Joseph Joachim and Felix Mendelsohn, a trip which also included an invitation to play to Queen Victoria and her guests the Czar of Russia and the King of Saxony at Windsor Castle. Offenbach’s charm is also evident in the Souvenir du Val. It is the first piece of four from Op 29. The subtitle is ‘Romance’, but the piano introduction makes me smile every time I hear it. It takes a lot of persuasion before Bengt will play music of this kind!

The success of the Elégie, Op 24, from 1883, prompted Gabriel Fauré’s (1845-1924) publisher Hamelle to commission a work for the cello in virtuoso style. Fauré called it Pièce pour violoncelle but in the contract of 14 September 1884 it is named Libellules – ‘Dragonflies’. Later, Hamelle insisted on the title Papillon, which Fauré refused to accept. Because of this title dispute the piece did not appear until 1898. (“Papillon ou Mouche à merdre, mettez ce que vous voulez!” – “Butterfly, or Dungfly. Call it what you want!”.) This means that the imitation of a fluttering butterfly is not necessary. Instead one is given other possibilities. For instance, to treat the text lyrically rather than making it into a virtuoso number.

Bengt’s collaboration with Anne Sofie von Otter goes back a long time. It has been my privilege to be given an insight into their phenomenal repertoire. The Adagio by the Swedish composer, pianist and conductor Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927) comes from a collection of five songs Op 20 to the text of Bo Bergman. Stenhammar asks for ‘quietissimo’ as preparation for the voice. The first verse is played an octave down on the cello, the second verse loco. The wind plays with the water. The clouds sail like white swans across the lake of the sky. But the swans stay silent. They only sing when they die. “I want to set out with the swans to where you are.”