Day: November 4, 2024

Nov. 3, Singleton Arts Center, Virginia Commonwealth University

The Russian school of piano playing, in which muscularity meets poetry, is an archetype of classical music dating back to Anton Rubinstein in the late-19th century and Sergei Rachmaninoff in the early 20th. The tradition sounds to be in good hands for decades to come from Alexander Malofeev, who performed in the latest installment of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Rennolds Chamber Concerts.

Malofeev, a young Russian pianist now based in Berlin, displayed both virtuoso technique and immersion in mood-painting and tone coloration in a program ranging from Schubert and Chopin to Rachmaninoff and Scriabin.

His performance was one of high contrasts, emphasizing the literal meaning of his instrument’s name – pianoforte, from the Italian for “soft” (piano) and “loud” (forte) – with less attention to the volumes in between.

This tendency was most pronounced in his treatments of Schubert’s “Three Piano Pieces,” D. 946, and Chopin’s “Andante spianato and Grand Polonaise brilliante,” Op. 22, brightening and enlarging the tone of music originally heard on early pianos with far less projective power and brilliance than the modern instrument.

The composers no doubt would be dazzled by a Steinway grand, and by this pianist’s emphatic yet fleet pianism; but they also might wish for firmer grounding in the tunes of these pieces, rooted in German and Polish folk song and dance. Malofeev’s exuberant, high-contrast, at times almost bel canto-operatic approach pushed those folk roots deeper underground than Schubert and Chopin might have desired.

He was audibly more attuned to the tonal and expressive qualities of Rachmaninoff’s “Morceaux de fantaisie” (“Fantasy Pieces”), Op. 3, and Scriabin’s four Op. 22 preludes and Fantasie, Op. 28.

Rachmaninoff’s set of five short pieces is the source of his greatest hit, the Prelude in C sharp minor, which Malofeev introduced monumentally in its crack-of-doom opening chords, subsequently exploring its moody depths to memorable effect. He brought similar contrasts of tonal power and expressive nuance to the other pieces in the set.

In the Scriabin selections, and several encores, Malofeev proved to be an unusually sensitive colorist and exponent of musical fantasy. Scriabin’s seemingly improvisational musical constructs clearly strike a chord with this pianist.

Malofeev is 23, past the prodigy stage (he first came to fame as a 13-year-old competition winner) but with full maturity and ripening as an interpreter still ahead of him. He’s got the chops – sensationally – and a keen ear for shades of tone color. It will be fascinating to hear what he makes of his talent in the future.

Quincy Jones, the jazz trumpeter turned composer, arranger, producer and facilitator for a wide range of artists and musical styles, has died at 91.

Born on the South Side of Chicago and reared in the Seattle area, schooled at what is now Berkelee College of Music in Boston, Jones went on to study in Paris with the great French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. (He was one of her last surviving pupils.) He worked as an arranger and trumpeter with a number of jazz musicians – Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis – and led his own band in the 1950s.

In 1961, Jones became musical director of Mercury Records, producing recordings by a number of artists in the pre-Beatles heyday of American popular music. He worked for years with Ray Charles, whom he had known since both were aspiring teenaged musicians.

Jones also wrote and arranged for musical theater productions and films. His scores for films, notably the Sidney Poitier drama “In the Heat of the Night,” established Jones as a go-to figure for music in Hollywood. His other film scores include those for “The Pawnbroker,” “In Cold Blood” and “The Color Purple.”

His most stellar production credit was Michael Jackson’s 1982 album “Thriller,” the best-selling pop recording of all time.

In later life, Jones worked with a number of hip-hop artists. And, while his career increasingly centered on arranging and producing records for others, Jones continued to perform and record as a bandleader.

From the 1960s onward, Jones was active in the civil-rights movement and in projects documenting and promoting Black musicians’ role in American music. He was the recipient of a National Medal of Arts and numerous other honors.

“Beyond his hands-on work with score paper, he organized, charmed, persuaded, hired and validated. Starting in the late 1950s, he took social and professional mobility to a new level in Black popular art, eventually creating the conditions for a great deal of music to flow between styles, outlets and markets,” Ben Ratliff writes in an obituary in The New York Times:

As we approach “Messiah” season, when orchestras, church choirs, community choruses and sing-along participants celebrate Christmas with George Frideric Handel’s sacred oratorio (never mind that it was first performed in Easter season), composer and musical biographer Jan Swafford, writing in The Atlantic, examines the work’s unique qualities, in its own time and ever since.

“Among the towering masterpieces of Western music, the ‘Messiah’ occupies a distinctive place: It is familiar to more people than any other work of its kind,” Swafford writes. “Bach’s B Minor Mass and ‘St. Matthew Passion’ and Monteverdi’s Vespers are comparable among supreme choral pieces, but they aren’t performed at your church or the high school down the street. . . . A fair percentage of the world probably knows the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus well enough to sing along.”

The oratorio’s wide and lasting appeal is “a tribute to the overwhelming effect of the ‘Messiah,’ which is a feat of sustained inspiration arguably unsurpassed in the canon of Western classical music,” Swafford writes. “ ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my People,’ the libretto opens, pulling us in at the beginning, its flow of compelling melody and stirring choruses enthralling us for the next two hours and leaving us singularly exalted.”

Swafford’s essay also will introduce many readers to Charles Jennens, the “rich squire and crabbily conservative political dissident” who assembled (and tinkered with) biblical texts to produce the oratorio’s libretto:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/handels-messiah-origins-western-music-classic/680398/

Swafford extensively quotes “Every Valley: the Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s ‘Messiah’ ” by Charles King, a historian at Georgetown University. King writes in The Washington Post that Handel’s oratorio “was born of — and built for — a world awash in political turmoil, social unrest and fear about the future. It has endured because every generation has found its own travails mirrored in the striking combination of ancient prophecies and irresistible songs and choruses. At its core is a hidden method for thinking our way toward hope.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/04/handel-messiah-political-turmoil/