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Notes from the road, upcoming performances, thoughts on classical music
Review of my Beethoven “Pathétique” at the Beethoven Institute.
“The concert ended with a performance of Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata by the pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn. He’s a dear friend of mine—Ignat, I mean, though I consider Beethoven a dear friend as well—so I must not review. Still, he played the sonata with Beethoven-like strength, soulfulness, and vividness. Friendship or not, it’s true.”
New York Times review of my performance last week at the Beethoven Institute at Mannes College.
“Mr. Kannen joined the violinist Mark Steinberg and the pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn for Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C minor, which concluded the program in a rendition notable for Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s elegant touch and beautiful singing lines.”
The New Yorker says you should come to the Beethoven Institute at Mannes, where I am performing the C-minor Sonata, Op. 13 on 31 May, and then the C-minor Trio Op. 1, No. 3 on 3 June.
Another review of the Beethoven Triple in Philadelphia.
“Ignat Solzhenitsyn drew magically delicate sonorities from the piano, integrating his part perfectly with those of both his solo partners and the orchestra.”
A review of last Sunday's Beethoven's Triple with Marie-Elisabeth Hecker and Soovin Kim.
“Solzhenitsyn’s passagework was so elegant you wanted him to play Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto for an encore.”
A review of a recent Schnittke Quintet with the Brentano String Quartet at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia.
“Both as pianist and as conductor, Solzhenitsyn is an established master at interpreting music of such powerful emotional content. His playing, formidably sonorous and then, as the music’s demands evolved, caressingly lyrical, conspired with the equally intense and persuasive playing of the Brentanos to create a truly cathartic musical experience.”
Recently I joined my great friend and extraordinary violist Hsin-Yun Huang at the studios of WQXR to talk about Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Then I played the middle movement of Prokofiev's Eighth Piano Sonata—
—and together we performed the second movement of Shostakovich's Viola Sonata.
Music-lovers are familiar with the solemn and dramatic setting of the première of Haydn's Seven Last Words of Our Saviour On the Cross two hundred and thirty Good Fridays ago. In the words of Haydn himself,
“The walls, windows, and pillars of the church were hung with black cloth, and only one large lamp hanging from the centre of the roof broke the solemn darkness. At midday, the doors were closed and the ceremony began. After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced the first of the seven words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse thereon. This ended, he left the pulpit and fell to his knees before the altar. The interval was filled by music. The bishop then in like manner pronounced the second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra following on the conclusion of each discourse.”
The original orchestral version was soon arranged for string quartet and also for piano. This latter version was expertly executed by an arranger whose name is lost to history, but who met with Haydn's explicit approval:
“I am full of praise for the keyboard reduction, which is very well written and with special diligence.”
Still, this excellent arrangement today falls short in three key respects: One, it is not quite faithful enough to the original; two, it fails to take into account the subtle revisions of phrasing, dynamics, and register that Haydn brought to bear upon his own oratorio version (produced a decade later and therefore not yet unavailable to the contemporaneous arranger for keyboard); three, it falls short of communicating the range and power of the original by restricting itself to a technical level appropriate for 18th-century amateur pianists, but hardly for the professional pianists of today, or for the greater expressive and dynamic range available to us on our modern iron-frame pianos.
And so, in a modest effort to remedy these three shortcomings, I have revised this keyboard arrangement in a manner that I hope might meet with the approval of the nameless arranger and of Haydn himself, were they alive today. Here is how the closing Earthquake movement sounded in my performance at the December Evenings Festival.
Моя беседа с Сергеем Литовских во время январских гастролей в Екатеринбурге.
Anatoly Liadov was an important figure in Russian music at the turn of the last century—professor of composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire and the teacher of Prokofiev and Miaskovsky. Liadov's own output as composer is modest in scope but impeccably crafted and brilliantly orchestrated (one can imagine Stravinsky himself being inspired by such an unlimited sense of orchestral colour). Especially impressive are the tone poems Enchanted Lake, Baba-Yaga, and Kikimora, which you can hear me conduct in this recent performance.
