Andrew Rangell - A Private Recital (2022)

Pianist Andrew Rangell releases a new album that includes contemporary sonatas which brilliantly inhabit the style of Domenico Scarlatti, intimate selections by Stefan Wolpe, and Scriabin’s virtuosic Fifth Sonata. Finally, a warmly sonorous birthday gift by Jan Swafford.

On September 2, 2022, Steinway & Sons releases A Private Recital / Andrew Rangell (STNS 30205). Rangell relects on the album: "This modest program, something of a departure from my other recordings, has come into being not by design, but by chance. The Wolpe and Scriabin pieces were recently (11/2021) recorded. The others were recorded, separately, some years earlier, not for commercial release but as a private gift, so to say, for the composers, both long-time friends. It will be noted that the Wolpe pieces (excepting the rambunctious wedding dance) share an extremely intimate and private quality. Standing out from its surroundings is the ever-astonishing Scriabin Fifth Sonata, a masterpiece of compositional ingenuity and groundbreaking pianistic virtuosity.

Long ago, as a freshman at Colorado University, I met Toby Tenenbaum, age 10 and a budding composer. (I had a crush on one of his older sisters.) More than 40 years later I was to become aware of a new Tenenbaum opus, a collection of 18 sonatas in the style of, and in celebration of, Domenico Scarlatti. From this wonderful production I recorded several of my favorites. (All 18 can be found on YouTube performed by the composer.) I feel justified in offering two different versions of the meditative G minor sonata, whose journey becomes a far different, and evolutionary, experience when enlarged with repeats, particularly after the intervention of two brilliant sonatas! (Yet, a case remains for the compact version…!)

Jan Swafford, composer, teacher, biographer (and who lately has been known to call himself a "recovering biographer"…) composed his Andante for our dear mutual friend, Mordicai Gerstein, now gone. Mordicai was one of America's finest author-illustrators of children's books. (His remarkable story about Ives, called What Charlie Heard is a special favorite of mine and of Jan's!) The quiet radiance of Jan's 80 bars, in Scriabin's aftermath, provides a welcome restorative space, it seems to me.

Stefan Wolpe (1902-72), a German Jew by birth, fled Berlin in 1933, as the Nazis seized power, arriving in New York city in 1938, after having lived and taught in Jerusalem for a 4-year period. He became an American citizen in 1945. Early involvement with Bauhaus and Dadaist artists, politically revolutionary groups, Berlin's agitprop theater, and the mentorship of Ferrucio Busoni all contributed to Wolpe's evolving musical personality, which he described as embodying "extreme innovations, suddenness, shocks, simultaneities, and dissociations".

Exile later added the profound influences of Semitic musics and of bebop jazz. Again, in America, Wolpe mixed freely with avant-garde musicians, painters, dancers, and poets at New York's Eighth Street Artists Club and during summers at Black Mountain College.

The bristling intensity and eclecticism of Wolpe's music is not easy to describe. One his fiercest piano pieces, the 1936 Passacaglia, has held me in thrall for 4 decades, and I haven't yet given up on recording it. But I welcome the chance to offer listeners a family of intimate and fascinating miniatures showing Wolpe at his tenderest.

The craft, in each, is at the highest level. All but the Vocalise show nostalgic traces of the Near East. The subtle two-part polyphony of the Pastorale opens unexpectedly into poignantly harmonized song. To hear these small creations together is, for me at least, a rich and moving experience.

Alexander Scriabin’s Fifth Sonata is, by design, an ecstatic work, and is even prefaced by a short invocation from the composer's Poem of Ecstasy. It embodies extremes of exhilaration, joy, flight, tumult, punctuated by periods of voluptuous languor. Scriabin was himself enthralled by this sonata, calling it a miracle, and expressing amazement at its creation! In hindsight we can say this: among Scriabin's sonatas this one was his last full-throated and radiant affirmation of life, the later sonatas (the Ninth in particular) projecting a darker, more unsettling musical world.

The Fifth Sonata’s short introduction opens with a jolt: a subterranean rumble, erupting into frantic upward flight, almost the length of the keyboard. Then, marked Languido, a floating assortment of wispy chromatic and whole-tone fragments, gradually leading to the opening of the exposition. Importantly, at least four different motifs from this introduction will be heard and developed throughout the work, along with an abundance of exposition material. The development section itself is long and elaborate, but the fairly literal recapitulation grounds the listener otherwise swept away by the manic extremes of this music. The work's climactic arrival involves the feverishly grandiose restatement of a tiny fragment from the opening Languido – followed by a concluding reprise of the mad upward dash at the work's beginning. Among the most memorable conclusions in piano literature."

Tracklist
01. Tenenbaum Piano Sonata No. 2 in G Minor (In the Style of Dominico Scarlatti)
02. Tenenbaum Piano Sonata No. 4 in A Major (In the Style of Dominico Scarlatti)
03. Tenenbaum Piano Sonata No. 3 in E Major (In the Style of Dominico Scarlatti)
04. Tenenbaum Piano Sonata No. 2 in G Minor (In the Style of Dominico Scarlatti) [Alternate Take]
05. Wolpe Pastorale for Piano
06. Wolpe Lied, Anrede, Hymnus, Strophe zarteste Bewegung, C. 81b
07. Wolpe Vocalise for Piano
08. Wolpe Palestinian Notebook (Excerpts) No. 3, Lullaby
09. Wolpe Palestinian Notebook (Excerpts) No. 2, Yiddish Wedding
10. Scriabin Piano Sonata No. 5 in F-Sharp Major, Op. 53
11. Swafford Andante amoroso