Samuel Barber
At its best, I think Samuel Barber’s neo-romantic style was very successful. Lately, in these changeable times of spring, one of my favorite woodwind quintets other than the Schoenberg (which I consider one of that master’s greatest works) and the Hindemith Kleine Kammermusik has been in my head. Barber’s Summer Music is a challenging work to play not only because it has difficult fast passage-work and tricky rhythmic and articulation ensemble issues, but also because it has to feel like summer. The basic character, as noted by the composer in the score, is indolent, and you cannot sound indolent if you are audibly worrying about your notes. I therefore really like this recorded performance by Berlin Counterpoint, who cover the basics, like playing very much in tune with each other, and also really get across the feeling of a lazy, hot summer’s day. By taking some slow tempi, they accentuate the lyrical character of the piece, and then that sets up a greater contrast with the faster sections that include more staccato and accented playing.
Another favorite Barber work of mine – or rather, part of one – is the second movement of his Piano Concerto, marked “Canzone: Moderato.” This is another example of Barber at his lyrical and melodic best, but if anything, it is even more colorful than the Summer Music. This is a much more serious movement – an elegy, as Barber apparently subtitled it in his arrangement for flute and piano (more about that in a minute) – and definitely much more melancholic and mournful than indolent. But above all, like many of the most touching works for instruments, it is a genuine instrumental song – in the sense of singing (or indeed, the word canzone, which is Italian for “song”), not the generic sense in which any piece of jazz or popular music is called a song – with expressive big rising intervals that are ultimately unable to resist the downward motion of finality. I don’t know anything about the career of pianist Anny Hwang, and I’m not too familiar with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, but I love the feeling they put into this performance of the movement.
We flutists are lucky that Barber wrote a beautiful arrangement of this movement for flute and piano. A truly appropriate performance of the Canzone for flute and piano needs to suggest some of the very vivid orchestral colors absent from the comparatively sparse scoring of the arrangement, while maintaining the expression of the large intervals and the dissonant, crying chromatic harmonies. A particular technical challenge for flutists is to make sure the numerous C-sharps in this C# minor movement are low enough, and many fail to achieve this. But an interpretation by Jennifer Stinson on flute and Malcom Martineau on piano succeeds where many others fall short.
One thing that’s interesting to me is that the Canzone, though written in 1961, is not too distantly related to the coloristic French style of several decades earlier. It’s neo-romantic music that sounds best when played with phantasy, as Barber might have spelled it.
panaudio 