Bestiary on Ivory: Music from the Animal Kingdom
Hsiang Tu (piano)
rec. 2020, Blacksburg, USA
Bridge 9544 [72]
This is a delightful and thought-provoking disc, providing an imaginatively programmed disc of brief pieces ‘about’ animals (mammals, birds, fish and insects), played with poetry and, where appropriate, wit. To add to the listener’s pleasure, the recorded sound is excellent. The ‘creatures’ depicted range from those usually thought of as beautiful, such as the swan (Saint-Saëns) to the humble and largely unpopular fly (Bartók); Hsiang Tu ranges from the explicitly Christian, such as Liszt’s St. Francis of Assisi, preaching to the birds and Bolcom’s ‘The Serpent’s Kiss’ – the third of four ragtime variants making up the sequence The Garden of Eden – to the romantic ‘revelation’ of Schumann’s ‘Vogel als Prophet’. If listened to consecutively this disc creates a kaleidoscopic celebration of the natural world, but it also invites the listener to hear individual pieces in ‘isolation’, as it were.
Of course, not all of the sixteen pieces making up the recital were originally written for the piano. Indeed, the programme is book-ended by two transcriptions: ‘Le cygne’ from Saint-Saëns’ Le Carnival des animaux is heard in the version by Godowsky, while Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’ is heard in Rachmaninov’s transcription for piano. ‘The Swan’ was originally scored for cello and two pianos, while the ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ is for full orchestra, in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Sultan.
Godowsky’s transcription of ‘Le Cygne’ is particularly attractive, for reasons well described in Hsiang Tu’s booklet notes (which are uniformly excellent): “Godowsky knew better than to have the piano compete with the incomparable singing tone of the cello … Instead, he circles the melody with arabesque figurations, tasteful, bitter-sweet dissonances, and fragmented reverberations of the tune. Where Saint-Saëns’ original shines a bright spotlight on the snow-white swan, Godowsky paints the color of the foliage and the rippling waters that surround the graceful bird”. It is worth remembering that as a teenager Godowsky studied with Saint-Saëns.
Piece after piece on this disc deserves to be discussed at length, but I will restrict my comments to just a few of them. In Ravel’s ‘Noctuelles’ an insistent right-hand figure perhaps suggests the quickly repeated movement of the moths’ wings (‘Noctuelles’ is a rarely used term for nocturnal moths). The whole is a vivid image of something sensed in the darkness of night and Hsiang Tu gives us an alert and compelling reading of this fascinating piece. He is equally impressive in Bartók’s ‘From the Diary of a Fly’, which registers the creature’s movements and – through clever use of dissonance – its buzzing sound. There is humour as well as technical inventiveness in Bartók’s brief piece (1:39 in this performance) – after all, how many other compositions carry in their score a marking such as “Ouch! A cobweb!”?
Very different from Bartók’s subtleties, as the creature it celebrates is from the fly, we have Henry Cowell’s ‘Tiger’. Cowell uses tone clusters and other then-innovative techniques to explore the resources of the piano; the result speaks of the tiger’s ferocity as well as the volatility of its behaviour. The result is startling, but perhaps not as startling as an unanticipated encounter with a tiger would be! In a skilful piece of programming, Cowell’s savage beast is immediately followed by the elegant lilt of William Bolcom’s ‘Tabby Cat Walk’. The contrast with the previous piece is vivid – and it says much for the talent of Hsiang Tu that he is equally convincing in both (his timing of the pauses in Bolcom’s rag is utterly delightful).
By its use of the word ‘Bestiary’, the title of the disc invites us to approach its contents in ways which transcend the mimetic. A bestiary was, in the medieval period (and with modifications beyond that age), a catalogue of creatures, which summarised their (supposed) characteristics, which were “moralized and used as a vehicle for revealing Christian truths” (David Salter, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, 2012, p.138). In their less specifically Christian way, Romantic artists used birds and animals in an analogous fashion. This is evident in Schumann’s ‘Vogel als Prophet’, from the sequence Waldszenen. There is little or nothing in the music which allows one to be specific about which particular bird is here thought to have prophetic powers. It is, I would suggest, better to have in mind some words by Richard of St. Victor, a 12th century Scottish theologian, philosopher and mystic: ‘In avibus intellige studia spirituale, in animalibus exercitia corporalia’ – sentiments translated as follows by Ezra Pound in 1956: ‘Watch birds to understand how spiritual things move, animals to understand physical motion’. Something essentially similar, but perhaps more reductive, is said in a modern reference work on symbolism: ‘The bird stands in opposition to the serpent as a symbol of Heaven as opposed to Earth’ (Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrandt, translated by John Buchanan-Brown, Penguin, A Dictionary of Symbols, 1994, p.87). The structure of Schumann’s piece is simple but profound in its significance. Ternary in nature, the two outer sections are full of arpeggiated writing which may ‘refer’ to the flight of an unspecified bird, presumably invisible amongst the trees. These sections set, as it were, in the forest, frame a central chorale in G minor, which breathes stillness and wisdom, as if in a glimpse of heaven. Here we have, I think, an example of what Beryl Rowlands discusses in her superb book, Birds with Human Souls (University of Tennessee Press, 1978), writing of the bird as a symbol of the human soul, an archetype which embraces the composer and the listener alike.
Elsewhere in Hsiang Tu’s programme such a symbolic bird is named more explicitly – as in Messiaen’s ‘La Colombe’ (The Dove). There are moments when one catches aural glimpses, as it were, of the dove’s song and it isn’t, I think, fanciful to find the music of the Catholic Messiaen suggestive of some of the values Rowlands (pp. 41-2) identifies as the meaning of the dove in Christian thought: “in the Christian world the white dove was the symbol of the Holy Ghost, of Christ, of the Church, of the Virgin, of the souls of the redeemed, of spiritual love, of innocence” and much more.
Throughout a programme which is, in places, technically demanding, the young Taiwanese pianist Hsiang Tu plays with authority, sensitivity and a wide expressive range. Highlights I have not yet mentioned include a glittering account of Debussy’s ‘Poissons d’or’, a powerful reading of Granados’ ‘Quejas ó la Maya y el Ruiseñor’, doing justice both to the plaintive cry of the maiden and the closing song of the nightingale, and, finally, a dazzling performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ which closes the disc.
My joy in this disc has, I hope, been made clear. I would add only that, as human behaviour condemns to extinction many of the creatures with which we share the earth, it is a rich celebration of, and plea for, what we are destroying.
Glyn Pursglove
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Contents
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
‘Le Cygne’, from Le Carnaval des animaux (1866)
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
‘Poissons d’or’, from Images II (1907)
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
‘La Colombe’, from Préludes pour piano (1930)
‘Le Loriot’, from Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956
Enrique Granados (1867-1916)
‘Quejas ó la Maya y el Ruiseñor’ (from Goyescas, 1914)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
‘Noctuelles’ (from Miroirs, 1906)
William Bolcom (b.1938)
‘Butterflies, hummingbirds’, from 12 New Etudes for Piano (1977-1986)
Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
‘From the Diary of a Fly’, from Mikrokosmos, vol. 6 (1940)
‘The Night’s Music & the Chase’, from Out of Doors (1926)
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
‘Vogel als Prophet,’ from Waldszenen (1850/1)
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
‘St. Françoisd’Assise. La prédication aux oiseaux’, from Deux Légendes (1863)
Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)
‘O Boizinho de chunbo’, from A prole do bebê, II (1921)
Henry Cowell (1897-1965)
‘Tiger’ (1928)
William Bolcom
‘Tabby Cat Walk’
‘The Serpent’s Kiss’, from The Garden of Eden (1969)
Nicolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)
‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’, from The Tale of Tsar Sultan (1899/1900)
