Ruthanne Schempf’s intelligently planned program juxtaposes the European-sounding  piano music of several New England composers active at the turn of the 20th century — Nevin, Foote, Beach, and MacDowell — with the more progressive styles of Griffes and Copland from a few decades later.  The shorter, more conservative works are sandwiched between the two larger pieces.

MSR’s title “American Mirage” is confusing.  Schempf points out in the booklet that Amy Beach, who lived until 1944, spent six seasons at the MacDowell artists’ colony, sometimes at the same time as Copland.  Did Mrs. Beach appear to Copland as an “American mirage” from an earlier era?  Or is the idea that an American classical style is so elusive as to be a mirage?  Title aside, the program easily stands on its own merits.  (Its subtitle, “Exotic Piano Images” makes sense, but doesn’t really apply to the non-programmatic Griffes, Nevin, and Copland pieces).

Griffes’ turbulent piano sonata is a late work whose originality underscores what a great loss it was to American music that he died at age 35 in 1920.  It’s an experiment in form and harmonic language that creates a scary, unsettling effect, influenced, as was Elliott Carter in his 1945 piano sonata, by the later, visionary piano music of Scriabin.  I love Wilfred Mellers’ description of the 1st movement’s swirling textures and lack of harmonic movement: “the effect is that of a bird frantically beating its wings against a cage of harmonic obsession.”

Ruthanne Schempf gives a strong account of the piece, but like every other performance of it that I have heard, hers lacks the full sense of abandon that would make the music really take off.  (According to music historian Joseph Horowitz, a great champion of American piano music, William Masselos, recorded such a performance in the 1950s, but none of Masselos’ recordings have been issued on CD).  It requires the imagination and technical risk-taking of a Horowitz or Richter performing say, the Scriabin 5th Sonata, to transform Griffes’ notes into fully extravagant colors and gestures.  Schempf’s tendency, and the tendency of modern recordings (with close miking and hundreds of edits to make everything “perfect”) is to clarify textures where some blurring, more pedal, greater dynamic extremes and even rushing might be more interesting.  The 3rd movement’s coda, for example, marked “presto” sounds restrained at Schempf’s slighly cautious tempo.

In between the Griffes and Copland works, Schempf has chosen some very attractive and less often heard American piano pieces that escape the sentimentality that prevails in this literature.  The selections by Nevin, Foote, and Beach make up the most enjoyable part of her recital.  Nevin’s rather extended études are indebted to Liszt and early Fauré in the elegant style of their melodies and their enjoyably flamboyant and capricious piano writing.  After the stern, modern-sounding Griffes, it’s a pleasure to hear Schempf switch gears and play these romantic works with charm and flexibility.

Arthur Foote’s 5 Poems After Omar Khayam from 1898 is a fascinating rarity.  It’s a large-scale piano work that he also orchestrated in which each movement is based on specific quatrains from the 12th century Persian epic, the Rubáiyat.  The subject is exotic, but the musical style is standard German or Slavic Romantic.  Foote’s drawn-out, impassioned melodies sound a little like early Rachmaninoff and the more powerful passages have real rhythmic interest and conviction.  A few measures in the first piece “Iram indeed is gone…” uncannily resemble part of the famous duet “Viens, Mallika” from the “exotic” opera Lakmé by Léo Delibes.

Beach’s two darkly impressionistic pieces, “A Hermit Thrush at Morn” and “A Hermit Thrush at Eve”, composed in 1920 and based on transcriptions of birdsong, are musical gems that suggest that she had the finest ear for musical color of all of the composers sampled here.  Schempf plays them exquisitely.  Macdowell’s Woodland Sketches is less ambitious in scope and texture than the other works and it creates a pleasing musical palate-cleansing effect before the Copland Piano Variations.  Schempf’s admirably direct performance almost makes me like the familiar “To A Wild Rose.”

Copland’s well-known Piano Variations is his very deliberate attempt at writing in what was a very modern, hard-edged style in 1930, employing modified serial procedures and an often percussive approach to the piano.  Its severe theme, which makes use of harmonics and expectant silences, sounds not unlike Hebrew chant and is the most interesting part of the piece.  The succeeding 20 variations are methodically composed, concise and clearly linked to the theme.  Copland’s directions in the score are so thorough and specific that, if they are followed, a good performance will result, as is the case here, but different performances of the Variations tend to all come out the same way.

After playing and teaching the piece for decades, I have reached the (minority) opinion that it is an effective but rather shallow work, 2-dimensional in comparison to Copland’s 1939 Piano Sonata.  If a musical masterpiece is a work whose content always invites further interpretation, the Piano Variations is no masterpiece, but merely an example of its composer’s ability to adopt a “modernist” guise, a direction that he would reverse in the 1940s.

© 2009 Paul Orgel