The master tapes for this recording were produced with the revolutionary new Dolby Noise-
Reduction System known as the S/N Stretcher, by which all sounds not originally a part of
the microphoned signal are reduced a full 10- to 15-db below their normal levels. The residua!
effects of tape hiss, channel cross-talk, high-frequency flutter, and tape print-through are
itself, nor is there any ‘sacrifice of the full frequency spectrum. This results in a recorded
sound of utmost clarity and very wide dynamic range, unobtainable by conventional means.
This is the first recording produced with this system to be made and issued in the U.S.A., and
was engineered by Elite Recordings, Inc., New York.
‘Lhe two ‘cello sonatas on this record make good companions,
both in sympathy and in contrast. Both are youthful products
of their creators’ early maturity; both are from the tail-end
years of Romanticism in the early part of this century. Neither
yet reflects more than a hint of the “twentieth-century blues”’
—that mixture of pain, terror, and cynicism that has animated
much of the music written since that time.
Both works, too, were composed in their respective authors’
twenty-eighth year, at a time when each was at the turning-
point of his fame, moving from a local reputation out onto the
international musical stage. Both works date from a period of
stylistic consolidation in their composers’ lives, when student
pieces had been put behind or absorbed, when an “Opus 1”
had been safely published for posterity and succeeding works
were already pouring forth in the wake of youthful success.
At the same age (twenty-eight), Beethoven had completed his
piano sonatas of Opus 10, and would publish the “Pathétique”
the next year.
The Rachmaninoff Sonata, Op. 19, dates from 1901, the
year of the Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 18, which it strongly
resembles. The Kodaly Sonata, Op. 4, dates from December,
1909, to February, 1910. If those dates seem startling, we
must remember that while the two composers were born only
nine years apart, Rachmaninoff died at a mere 70, back in
1943, whereas Kodaly outlived him—and in a sense out-
composed him—by a full quarter-century. That Kodaly would
stand in the 1960s as a celebrated “contemporary” composer,
while Rachmaninoff would be thought of as a “classical”
master out of a dimming past, was, however, a development
still far in the future, as of 1901 and 1910.
And yet, a great deal happened in music between those two
dates—enough to make for sharp and interesting differences,
within the late-Romantic framework, between these two works.
In 1901 the school of late-Romanticism was still very much
the norm, the neutral center of a musical expression that was
still dominated by Tchaikovsky and Brahms—both lately
deceased but very much alive in musical terms. Wagner’s was
still to an extent the ‘‘music of the future”, and the hot argu-
ments between Wagnerians and the proponents of Brahms
had not yet grown dated (even a Bernard Shaw—then a young
music critic—could take them up). Saint-Saéns, in his late
sixties, ruled in France, and the pupils of the late César
Franck were in the musical news; the young Debussy was
between composing his orchestral Nocturnes and La Mer.
The new Impressionist music was in full bloom. In Germany,
there was that young firebrand Richard Strauss, nearing the
end of his great series of controversially “modern” tone-poems.
Mahler had completed four of his symphonies; Schoenberg
had written his impetuously expressive Verkldrte Nacht, for
string sextet (he was still far from serialism). In the North,
Sibelius was at work—and there was young Rachmaninoff.
Rachmaninoft’s brand of music was very seldom small-scale.
His tremendously muscular piano technique, the huge cave-
man hands and the long, lanky arms were the expressive tools
of the mind—dark and moody as well as curiously sentimental,
sullen and rhapsodic, passionate and yet strangely defensive,
even dour, and often filled with a sombre preoccupation with
death. The stark theme of the Dies irae appears often in
Rachmaninoft’s works. Not, however, in the ’Cello Sonata.
An earlier, much shorter work, the wholly typical Prelude in
C-sharp minor, had launched the composer-pianist on his
bleakly eloquent way at the age of twenty. Though he came
to detest that piece, its mood was often to return in works of
a sunnier nature, such as the Second Piano Concerto, and the
present sonata. Cast in the grand manner, it is nevertheless
neither strident nor strained. Inevitably, the piano part is of
the kind that fell naturally under the fingers of one of the
century’s prodigious pianists. Not that the Rachmaninoff
piano dominates the ’cello—far from it. As every virtuoso
pianist and every conductor knows, Rachmaninoff was one
of the most skilful writers of accompaniment music, the sort
that, in all its complexity, pours quietly from the piano as the
most perfectly discreet background for a solo melody. For
every bravura piano passage in this sonata, there are pages
of total pianistic cooperation with the ’cello—the piano figura-
tions black and thick on the printed page, yet sounding,
under a master’s hands, almost like the gentle murmurings of
L’Aprés-midi d’un faune. It is, indeed, a very special kind of
ensemble piano sound.
There are characteristic Rachmaninoff trademarks every-
where in this music. There is the “big theme” (recognizable,
but here somewhat subdued), that grandiloquent melody in
pulsing octaves that rises and falls in long-drawn spans of
sheer sensuousness until it subsides in a shower of brilliant
technical fireworks; it is the sort of theme that often bursts
out of the classical into popular music. There are the explo-
sions of huge resounding chords and massive arpeggios to
make the piano tremble (yet never drowning out the ’cello).
And there are the frequent dramatic pauses—the ensuing
music relaxing into a pensive ritardando, only to burst forth
anew.
In these pauses we have a major clue to Rachmaninoff’s
thinking in this rhapsodic chamber music. Beethoven—follow-
ing Haydn’s example—made frequent use of such pauses at
moments of supreme structural importance. In Rachman-
inoff’s music they represent no more than a renewed start—
an intake of musical breath. Rarely do they serve to introduce
a significant structural feature such as the development, or
the recapitulation in the tonic key. And yet all of those
structural points are to be found in the music. Indeed, Rach-
maninofi is remarkably conventional; the music follows the
most traditional outward laws of sonata form, from the open-
ing sonata-allegro (with slow introduction), to the slow
movement in song form, ABA, the scherzo-trio-scherzo third
movement (even to the sectional ABA CDC ABA shape),
and on to the brilliant, rondo-like finale. Everything is in its
place—the tonic-key allegro theme of the first movement,
with its transition from tonic to dominant (over a charac-
teristic Rachmaninoff pedal point) ; the central development;
the proverbial chain of harmonies in flux (Rachmaninoff
harmonies, between long pedal points, are always in flux);
the home-key recapitulation, inclusive of first and second
themes. There is no veering away from the outwardly ortho-
dox, here or in the succeeding movements.
‘The structural skeleton stems, 1n fact, from the classic forms
crystallized by Haydn and Beethoven, well over a century
before. But the special shape of this music reflects the 1840s
and the world of Robert Schumann—the first Romantic to
adapt the defining elements of the academic sonata to that
sensuous dream-fantasy that is the soul of Romantic expres-
sion. Schumann often floundered into near-shapelessness in
his sonata format, though rescued by the same immediacy of
expression that holds our attention in Rachmaninoff’s music,
where the structure is as smooth as oil, yet wholly unobtrusive.
It was a skilful art, of which the moody Russian was the last
great exponent, and echoes of it still exist in present-day
music. It refashioned the older conventions of sonata form
into a wonderfully convenient, soft skeleton on which to drape
the fluid emotional improvisations of Romanticism. In this
school of thought, all the key moments of tension and resolu-
tion—the essential girders of the compositional structure so
elegantly employed by Haydn and so solidly by Beethoven—
are merely passing episodes, just significant enough (and no
more) to hold the music in one piece within the long Roman-
tic plane of expression.
By 1910, a scant nine years after Rachmaninofi’s, Kodaly’s
Cello Sonata appeared—in a greatly changed age. If Rach-
maninoff bowed to the Romantic tradition of Schumann,
Kodaly was in the midst of newer things. His “sonata form’
is indeed far removed from Schumann’s, as are the twin poles
of his expression in this early phase of his career: the assim-
ilated influences of Debussy and, oddly at odds, the brand-
new echt-nationalism of Hungarian folk music, which Kodaly
and Bart6k (pioneers of the present-day interest in folk
music) had been studiously collecting in the field for some
five years before this work was composed. No more gypsy
tunes a la Liszt and Brahms: now it was genuine ethnic village
song. Its influence, still curiously related to the lighter side
of Debussy, is felt throughout the faster second movement of
the pair that constitute the sonata. Those who know Barték
will recognize this influence quickly.
The first movement is sheer mystic Impressionism, of a late
variety. By 1909, Impressionism had hardened and deepened,
yet still heid its power as a contemporary expression. Kodaly’s
is more passionate, less ethereal than that of the early
Debussy (though no more musically expressive); this was
a transitory phase in the long-living Hungarian’s prolific
output. But the very conscious avoidance of clear-cut themes,
of sectional divisions, the deliberately floating texture of rip-
pling pianistic arabesques and moonlit ’cello décor, indicate
the new and further breakdown of the classic sonata structure.
There is not even an intuitable sonata shape here, though the
elements are there for the studious to uncover — ever so
expertly hidden from the public gaze. And note the dark,
shadowed return of the slow opening of the sonata at the very
end, a foreboding sound and yet still an echo of that purely
sensuous return to sleep of Debussy’s L’Aprés-midi d’un
faune—set to the very same notes as the opening of that
familiar work. While he was at it, Kodaly was a thoroughly
expert Impressionist.
EDWARD TATNALL CANBY
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