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Visions and Prophecies: piano music of Ernest Bloch

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In 1990 Marco Polo published 2 CDs comprising the complete piano music of Ernest Bloch, played by the Hungarian pianist Istvan Kassai (see my reviews of Bloch: Complete Piano Works, Vol.1 and Ernest Bloch: Piano Works (Complete) Vol. 2). That collection came as a Godsend to the Bloch devotee, as until then Bloch's piano music had been difficult to find, seldom recorded (though the CDs didn't really claim credit for it, Kassai even boasted no less than five world premiere recordings - and one of those, the Four Circus Pieces, remains to this day the only one) and scattered on various LPs.

Disappointingly, this initial release did not really spawn a revival of interest in the piano music of Bloch and no flurry of recordings followed: other than two recordings of the magnificent Piano Sonata, which came in motley collections (see my reviews of John Jensen on Music & Arts Carl Ruggles, Ernest Bloch, Paul Reale, Larry Lipkis: Piano Sonatas and other works and Myron Silberstein on Connoisseur Silberstein plays Franck, Bloch and Giannini), and a few other pieces here and there, the "Blochite" had very little to feed on. This situation remains to me an enigma, as Bloch's piano music strikes me as one of the most original and hauntingly beautiful of the first fifty years of the 20th century. Some say that Bloch didn't write idiomatically for the piano and that his compositional thought and textures were too orchestral. But why should a composer avoid writing trills and tremolos and reduce the piano to a skeleton? Some influences can be heard - whiffs of Scriabin, Ravel and Debussy emerge here and there - but Bloch has integrated them in a highly personal style. He makes full use of all the coloristic possibilities of the instrument and puts them at the service of an intensely Blochian sound-world, in turn mysterious and sensuously "Jewish-Oriental", and starkly powerful, evoking (by Bloch's own admission) a fantasized world of the Old Testament.

Anyway, Fingerhut's selection, recorded at the end of 2001, is the only real competition to Kassai's two discs. Bloch's output for the piano was produced basically at two period of his life: in the early 1920s, as he was established in the US ("Nirvana", "In the Night" and the "Five Sketches in Sepia" date from that period), and then in 1935-6, with the Piano Sonata and the suite "Visions and Prophecies" (actually a reworking of his symphonic piece "Voice in the Wilderness"). Left out from Fingerhut's selection are the "Four Circus Pieces" (1922), the three "Poems of the Sea" (1922), the Sacred Dance (1923), and the early Ex-Voto (1914).

Interpretively, I feel that Fingerhut is at her best in the more atmospheric pieces. She excels in the short hushed and mysterious tone-poems "Nirvana" and "In the Night", where her finely controlled pianissimos (playing as if the music came from a distance) and resonance-producing pedalling convey a fascinating sense of mystery. Likewise in the "Five Sketches in Sepia" she is much more atmospheric and appositely moody than the here relatively leaden Kassai ("moods" was the title Bloch initially considered for the pieces). On the other hand, in "Visions & Prophecies" she gives an impression of agitation and misses the stark grandeur of the pieces, which in turn Kassai captures convincingly.

Whereas all these pieces are short or collections of short, evocative miniatures ("Nirvana", the longest, is 6:15), the Piano Sonata is the piece of substance, in turn sensuously evocative and angrily pounding. In the first movement Fingerhut's reading is similar to Kassai's to a fault (and to the second), with the same forward-moving and rather earthbound and perfunctory introductory "Maestoso ed energico" and the same moderately paced "animato" but with careful attention to the details of dynamics and articulation. But neither Fingerhut nor Kassai are a match here for the outstandingly poetic and passionate Myron Silberstein. In the central "Pastorale" Fingerhut displays more subtle nuances and more haunting atmosphere than the Hungarian pianist, but a comparison with Silberstein shows that she lacks a sense of dramatic animation in the passages where tension builds up. Like Kassai she takes the Finale at the metronome tempo indicated by Bloch, which imparts it the feeling of a grandiose solemn march rather than (as in Silberstein's more animated pace) a triumphant one. She doesn't quite have the muscle power of Kassai and blurs some coloristic details (like the grace notes at 0:08 into the movement). Later on she tends to press the tempo and saturate the textures. There is more stark grandeur at Kassai's steadier tempo.

All things weighted, the interpretive pluses and minuses are equally shared then between the Chandos selection and the Marco Polo complete traversal. For the Bloch completist like me the choice is easy: I have both. But the less committed and more discriminating music lover may be faced with a conundrum as to which one to go for. The inclusion in Fingerhut's selection of the 15-minute Enfantines - as its title implies, a collection of 10 pedagogical pieces for children, and hardly the most significantly Blochian work of its composer, instead of more typical and substantial stuff like the Poems of the Sea or Danse Sacrée, or even the mischievous and dazzling Four Circus Pieces, works against the Chandos release and in favor of Kassai, as do the invaluable notes from Suzanne Bloch, the composer's daughter and Bloch authority, which grace the Marco Polo survey. But the availability of these two discs seems to have become episodic. In their absence Fingerhut's offering is welcome as a serviceable introduction to the magnificent piano music of Ernest Bloch.

Another Amazon reviewer praises Fingerhut's treatment on this disc of Bloch's mood music ("more atmospheric pieces") but faults her performances of the bigger works (the sonata, Visions and Prophecies) for giving "an impression of agitation" where a steady hand is wanted and for lacking sufficient "muscle power."

This raises the question: Is Bloch basically for guys?

Bloch is one of those 'inner warrior' composers whose best music challenges performers to give everything they've got -- and then keep giving. You can't play with everything you've got if you're preoccupied with trying to sound like somebody else -- say, some guy.

Most, I'm sure, would agree that a warrior quality like courage, whether in the large death of armed conflict or the small death of artistic performance, need not come dressed in a male body or behavior pattern. Recently, on an Army base chock full of guys where a massacre was in progress, the person who confronted the killer and took a bullet was a young mother whose Twitters are full of mom talk.

Gender aside, it's possible to confuse an unfamiliar with an ineffective or inauthentic manner of playing. When Richter first came to this country, I heard a number of dismissive remarks about his pianism from musicians in the New York scene. It may have been that his way with music was not what they were used to. Yet.

Dane Rudhyar, a composer who, like Bloch, came to musical maturity in Paris and the U.S. in the nineteen-teens and twenties, once said he regretted the dearth of prosodic playing among contemporary pianists (this was in the 1960s). I recalled Rudhyar's comment when I first heard a recording of Bartok playing. Bartok's elastic rendering of his own music was nothing like the style I was used to hearing.

In short, what the above-mentioned reviewer hears as unstable agitation, I hear as a sensitively prosodic approach to musical utterance. Fingerhut comes to Bloch after having played such composers as Bax and Suk, and her experience in this repertory surely influences her approach to Bloch on this disc.

For myself, it's difficult to hear Fingerhut's searing, imaginative performance of the sonata without feeling that a fully finished artist is playing with substantial resources of power and touch and from a deep level of engagement and commitment. Hers is not the only possible realization of the score, but it is one well worth living with.