Jolly's Dream House

Classical Records News

                                      

郎朗的最新CD：贝多芬的第一、四钢琴协奏曲的录音在5月17日全球发行。这次是郎朗第一次在唱片中与指挥大师Christoph Eschenbach合作，乐团是巴黎管弦乐团。这张专辑还附有一张DVD，包括郎朗的访谈、演出的片断等资料。专辑编号：CD & Bonus-DVD: 0 00289 477 6719。

德国DGG公司宣布，他们将启动一个大型的出版计划，Pletnev的贝多芬作品录音。第一批出版的是贝多芬的五首钢琴协奏曲。

去年，Mikhail Pletnev指挥俄罗斯国家乐团已经在录音室里面完成了贝多芬全部交响曲的录音。去年夏天，Pletnev和同一乐团在德国波恩的贝多芬音乐节上，演出了贝多芬的五首协奏曲，DGG出版的录音就是这次演出的实况。

 

   

All From：Wunderhorn.com

Mikhail Pletnev has recorded Beethoven's Symphonies and Piano Concertos. His interpretation is generating a new image for Beethoven: the composer as our contemporary.

Mikhail Pletnev thinks a bit like a chess computer: before he gives an answer, his brain first rattles through all the possibilities, weighing their significance and the supposed reaction. While his head is working, his eyes stare into the void or assess the person sitting opposite as he puffs on a cigarette and the air vibrates around him. His eventual reply usually consists of few words, delivered in a monotone as though he were announcing the winning lottery numbers. But what he has to say is unassailable and subtly differentiated. Mikhail Pletnev is a perfectionist.

Pletnev doesn't make a fuss over himself. His work doesn't take place among the classical jet set, but rather in seclusion - at the piano, when he searches for chords as yet unheard in compositions everyone knows, when he labours over variations and cadenzas, when he slowly moves towards a musical result which, in spite of all experimentation, is watertight and coherent. Or when he rehearses with his own Russian National Orchestra.

In collaboration with this orchestra he has now pulled off a gigantic coup: in only eleven days in Moscow, he recorded all nine Beethoven symphonies. The five piano concertos he undertook earlier with his ensemble under Christian Gansch's baton at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn. And now the whole project is about to be released and - it may safely be predicted - shake up the established image of Beethoven.

No Beethoven recording in recent years holds so many surprises in store. Seldom has the composer been subjected to such a fundamental re-examination as he is here. “The recordings concluded a long preoccupation with Beethoven," says Pletnev. While other Russian ensembles travel the world with Prokofiev or Rachmaninov, it was always Beethoven who featured in Pletnev's programmes: “We played his works everywhere we had the opportunity, year in and year out. We grew into them. By the end, every one of us could have been awakened in the night and sung every motif from every symphony. Only in this way was it possible to make the recordings so quickly."

Just as conductor-pianist-composer Pletnev ponders every musical detail, looks for something new in each encounter with a work, deepens his level of questioning, formulates his answers more strikingly and makes his interpretative chess moves more ingeniously, that's also how he reacts in an interview. He answers every question as though hearing it for the first time. His brain calculates every option. Pletnev knows no worse enemy than routine. His juxtaposition of experience and curiosity makes him one of the most exciting musicians of our time - one who doesn't merely gain command of music but also penetrates it, logically and emotionally.

Historical performance practice, he asserts, ultimately holds no real appeal for him: “Beethoven on a fortepiano - is that authentic? That's like playing Mozart and setting candles on the piano." Pletnev pauses, looks his interviewer in the eye, smiles, takes a drag on his Marlboro and continues: “But what about the fleas? Because people in those days didn't wash, they used to have small boxes for putting fleas in so as not to disturb others in the audience. Why do the historical reconstructors forgo the fleas?" A joke, of course, but meant in deadly earnest.

“It's not authentic just to play what the composer wrote down in notation. Beethoven was reaching for the limits of emotion and human existence - there isn't a single motif or theme of his that doesn't exhibit his genius, that doesn't have its place in the overall context. There are no hard and fast rules in Beethoven. You can't load his scores into a computer. They have to be lived, because they're organisms. With Beethoven you have to have the courage to take liberties."

Pletnev has worked his way through both pertinent and digressive writings on Beethoven, for example, a report by the composer's pupil Carl Czerny, who meticulously documented an evening on which Beethoven played his own sonatas: “His playing was absolutely 'sophisticated'," says Pletnev. “It introduced ritardandi and incorporated sudden crescendi. He was after one objective above all: to surprise. You can see that in his works. In the C major Piano Concerto op.15, following a rather quiet and classical introduction, he rouses us with an astonishing Eminor chord. In his Fifth Symphony, the first three notes - the “da-da-da" - have the sole purpose of yielding to the fourth and final “da" - the rest is a variation of this opening. Beethoven was a great improviser, and improvising with the notated score is an important constant when you're dealing with his music. That's something quite different from later composers like Brahms and Mahler."

And so Pletnev's Beethoven interpretations are, on the one hand, deeply idiosyncratic, but, on the other, always in accordance with the composer emotionally. He transports the effects with which Beethoven must have shocked his contemporaries into the present but doesn't rely explicitly on history in reconstructing them. His playing achieves the true secret of classical music: the perpetual revitalization of earlier scores in the present-day context. This present day is embodied personally by the musician - he becomes a sort of human filter, a time machine through which old music is revived, through which his own thoughts and feelings are interfused with those of Beethoven. This is what makes his readings so modern.

For Pletnev this process always has to do with the logical form posited by the music's framework, but also with its conscious disturbance by sudden surprises, by the search for incredibly modern chords that he ferrets out or produces. Even for Beethoven experts, his Beethoven is never predictable. Instead, concealed in every bar there is a moment of revelation, a quietly muttered “Of course! Why didn't anyone do it that way before?"

The truly spectacular thing about Pletnev, however, is that in his interpretations he's never merely striving for effect - every disruption is, sooner or later, subsumed in the musical order - and that he never does violence to Beethoven but is simply thinking along with the composer when he performs - making the non-obvious seem obvious.

When Pletnev himself sits at the keyboard in the piano concertos, he seems also to be hovering ten centimetres above the score. His technique is so polished that he never has to worry about tricky spots, nor does any such spot betray a straining for virtuosic sophistication. His Beethoven doesn't sound interpreted; it sounds, plainly and simply, natural. In achieving that, Pletnev turns his back on virtually all previous interpretations - whether Furtwängler's or Karajan's, Harnoncourt's or Rattle's.

In the familiar third movement of the First Piano Concerto, for example, his technique enables Pletnev to vary the tempi as he deems appropriate; even in the racing solo passages he manages to find moments of stillness, without sacrificing any of the work's nuances. He uncovers everywhere Beethoven's revolutionary potential, his rejection of old listening habits and his mode of virtuosity charged with meaning.

In the symphonies as well, the liberties that Pletnev takes as a conductor are in the service of Beethoven alone. The quick tempi, the abrupt twists and turns, the roaring and blustering, the playful breathing spaces and emotional eruptions conform to a state of agitation that contains its own form, its own aesthetic.

Pletnev transports one to a cosmos in which the normal no longer applies, even though everything is familiar. He makes music like a chess computer with a human heart; he's an excellent logician who loves unhinging his own logical construct by means of spontaneous, emotional surprises in order to collect and recombine the individual components. The end result is a new image for Beethoven. A heart begins to beat in the marble bust of the composer - Pletnev makes Beethoven our contemporary.

Axel Brüggemann


Beethoven Releases:
Piano Concertos nos. 1 & 3 in March 2007
Piano Concertos nos. 2 & 4 in September 2007
Symphonies nos. 1 - 9 in September 2007
Piano Concerto no. 5 “Emperor" in May 2008


1/2007

http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/webseries/?ID=pletnev-beethoven

【作者: 白色的蓝】【访问统计:】【2007年05月7日 星期一 06:32】【注册】【打印】