DSCH Journal
DSCH CD Review
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Symphony No. 5, opus 47 version for piano four-hands (world premiere recording); Franz Schubert: Sonata in C major, D 812 Grand Duo for piano four-hands. Grau Schumacher Piano Duo (Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher).
NEOS 20801. DDD.
Recorded at the Hans-Rosebaud-Studio, Baden-Baden, Germany, 21-25 November 2005.
Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony makes a stunning new appearance in a form we have never heard before: a reduction for piano four hands. Duo Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher take charge of this imposing score (presumably the one by Lev Atovmyan; the notes do not specify) and proceed to show how a single piano can convey the force and drama of this epic orchestral masterpiece. Some will regard the effort as a mere curiosity, while others will marvel at the grandeur of this realisation, the revelations in sonority and tonal architecture brought out in this unique representation.
The GrauSchumacher Piano Duo, as they style themselves, boast an impressive command of Shostakovich’s idiom. They display superb sensitivity to mood and lyrical flow, and are ever-conscious of maintaining the music’s forward motion, even in passages that are diminished to a spare one or two notes. While opportunities for added emphasis might have been taken in the various crescendi in the first movement’s exposition, they have no trouble evoking a sense of majestic expanse at the high points.
The most revelatory portions of the performance occur in the heat of the development section where the bustling texture is paired down to its essentials. Here one can delineate with unprecedented clarity the myriad tonal shifts and the reiterations of the three-note and two-note motifs as the music escalates toward its climax. Tempi are kept brisk and fairly steady. There remain moments when the duo seem to have overlooked the score’s inherent ironies. The march variant in the central crisis, for example, lacks the wrenching impact it should have as the section’s most conspicuous antagonistic agent. Otherwise, the duo builds plenty of excitement as they render these pages with fastidiously controlled drama and precision. It is in such passages that the joys of piano reduction are evident, when the cohesive logic of the symphonic building blocks and the genius that created them are exposed with bare boned clarity.
The peak passages in the slow movement are delivered with moving intensity. The gleeful contradictions of the Scherzo and the churning momentum of the Finale are exuberantly brought off with idiomatic authenticity.
The performance by and large never seems rushed. At the same time there are places, especially in the transitions from one thematic area to another in the slow movement, and in the passages of lyrical relaxation in the finale, where a little more doting over mood and phrase could be tolerated. One assumes there is a natural tendency on the part of the performers to compensate for the reduced forces with faster tempi, especially in passages that transcribe to but a few notes. This is borne out by the comparative timings of the first and third movements.
The Grau Schumacher Duo renders the first movement in an efficient 14:59, which is on the short side as compared to more than a dozen recent performances of the work, including Rostropovich/NSO’s 15:25 at the low end and Wigglesworth’s 19:29 at the high. One has to reach back to Kondrashin and Mravinsky to find tempi that are even quicker. The slow movement, clocking in at a brief 11:36, is possibly the shortest on recording (the span, in my survey, ranges from Kondrashin’s 12:05 to Haitink’s 15:45). As such the duo might have placed a little more faith in the ability of the notes to extend the line and taken just a little more time in order to flesh out the passages in question.
There are moments at the beginning and the end of the score where acoustic limitations imposed by the transcription itself leave something to be desired. The famed opening salvo lacks the curtain-raising muscle we are accustomed to hearing in the full scored version. Also, at the tail end in the Finale’s coda, the piano leaves a rather underwhelming impression of the percussive thunder originally sent home by timpani and bass drum (the same could be said of the timpani’s stampeding figure in the final movement’s opening measures). These are minor quibbles considering the bounty of riches that lie in between. Grau and Schumacher bring off a spectacular rendering that everywhere sheds light as it celebrates precision.
This is only the third ‘pianistration’ of Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies to appear on record. The classic rendition of the Tenth in Shostakovich’s own four-hand arrangement, performed by the composer and Weinberg in 1954 led the others by some four decades (LDC 278 1000, mono, reviewed in DSCH 9). That arrangement was revisited in 1993 in a robust interpretation by Folke Gråsbeck and Alexander Zelyakov that far exceeds its predecessor in technical accuracy and sound quality (Bluebell ABCD 049). In 2005 Rustem Hayroudinoff and Colin Stone took the music world by storm with their dazzling rendition of the phantasmagorical Fourth Symphony in the composer’s arrangement for two pianos (Chandos CHAN 10296, reviewed in DSCH 23). With more pianistrations on the recording horizon, the genre, as it pertains to Shostakovich, seems to have come of age.
Louis Blois
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