Tempo e Tempi
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas – No. 31 in A flat, Op. 110; No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111; E Carter: Night Fantasies; Two Thoughts About The Piano; Mumford: Two Elliott Carter Tributes Pina Napolitano (piano)
Odradek ODRCD 378 79:41 mins
Pina Napolitano is an intellectual – witness her impressive achievements as scholar and translator of Slavonic literature – as well as a formidable pianist. Juxtaposing Beethoven’s supreme works for piano with pieces by Elliott Carter, she issues a warning. Contemporary classical music, she says, is difficult: ‘it needs careful listening, sometimes toilsome and repeated – it is not “background” music.’ Carter wanted his Night Fantasies, which is the fulcrum of this programme, to describe the activity of the mind suspended between slumber and wakefulness, ‘fragments of thoughts, memories, neuronal activity, firing connections and disconnections, REM states of sleep and dreams’.
On a first listen, it seems rebarbative, but on a second I get the point. It really does feel like musical free-association, with smouldering and desultory passages periodically bursting into flame. Some effects on the canvas are painted with the finest brush, others come with massive force: the playing has both driving energy and fastidious precision, and everything has a bright and bracing freshness.
My first reaction to Napolitano’s approach to Beethoven’s Op. 110 was negative – too brisk to allow the work’s mystery to come through – but on a second listen it felt right, because this is essentially a tight piece of musical argument: she wants us to register the correspondences between Beethoven’s fantasies and Carter’s, both of which exemplify a pioneering modernism. With Beethoven’s Op. 111 and Carter’s
Two Thoughts the story is the same. Mumford’s 86-second Carter tribute is a mere breath of wind, and a second one which we are promised on the Odradek website proves unreachable. But this is a provocatively brave album.
Michael Church
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★