David Green

David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.

Tuesday, 28 January 2025

Emmanuel Bach and Jenny Stern in Chichester

 Emmanuel Bach and Jenny Stern, Chichester Cathedral, Jan 28

Rodolphe Kreutzer never played the Sonata for Piano and Violin no.9, op.47, dedicated to him by Beethoven. That's gratitude. He said he didn't like it, or anything else Beethoven had written for that matter, but perhaps it was too demanding for him. Gladly, Emmanuel Bach and Jenny Stern don't share his view.
In an interview last year, Andrew McVittie referred to sonatas, or at least some of them, as 'big'. That changed my conception of what constitutes size. I'd thought it depended on how many instruments were involved but it's not, is it. It's about length, range, scope, depth and such things. Thus a sonata for one or two musicians can be potentially 'bigger' than, say, a Haydn symphony and the Kreutzer is such a thing. 
You'd think it was a violin sonata, really, but without having kept count I'd estimate there are more notes for the piano in it and Jenny Stern fluently took the lead part as often as Emmanuel's violin sometimes or at least took part in exchanges of phrases. It is properly billed as for two instruments, requiring two frontpersons, not one.
In the Adagio sostenuto- Presto, Emmanuel was delicate in what at times, in 1802, was already retro baroque. The Andante is gentle variations on a song-like theme, gaining in decorousness, its serenity moving into a passage of trilling and pizzicato charm. One is never left feeling short-changed by Beethoven variations but, unlike what Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost, that nobody ever wished it longer, maybe we do in his case. The Presto was necessarily more spirited and spritely but in Emmanuel's hands here still tended towards more elegance than outright dash.
Fritz Kreisler's La Gitana, programmed but almost by way of an extra like an encore, was a short poem evoking romance. The programme notes cited praise for Emmanuel's Brahms Concerto from Maxim Vengerov, no less, and the 'superb...very deep and emotional performance'. I wouldn't have said quite that about his Kreutzer but we can more than get by on immaculate, precise and thoughtful. We go to Chichester confident of top quality performances and never go away disappointed.

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