Barber / Bartók / Jarrett
| Barber / Bartók / Jarrett | ||||
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| Keith Jarrett's live album | ||||
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| Label (s) | ECM records | |||
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Format (s) |
CD |
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Title (number) |
7th |
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running time |
58:41 |
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Barber / Bartók / Jarrett (full title: Barber: Piano Concerto; Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 3; Keith Jarrett: Tokyo Encore ) is an album by Keith Jarrett , which was released on June 3, 1984 in Saarbrücken and on January 30, 1985 in Tokyo was recorded at two of the pianist's concerts and was released on ECM Records on May 12, 2015 on the occasion of the pianist's 70th birthday . According to the Irish Times, "his instinct leads him to play exactly where other pianists might bend."
background
Keith Jarrett, who initially enjoyed success as a jazz pianist , began to be heavily involved in classical music in the early 1980s. Since 1982 he has repeatedly performed piano concertos by Bartók and Barber, along with other works. However, his plans to publish his interpretations of these works were thwarted by a skiing accident and subsequent problems with chronic fatigue syndrome. The documentation of corresponding recordings under the title Barber / Bartók / Jarrett , published only 20 years later, is one of two ECM publications that appeared in 2015 on the occasion of Jarrett's 70th birthday. The other is a collection of shorter improvisations recorded in 2014 called Creation .
The album contains a recording of Samuel Barber's Piano Concerto (op. 38) , in which Jarrett was accompanied by the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies . The recording was made in the Congress Hall Saarbrücken on June 3, 1984. This is followed by a recording from January 30, 1985 from the Kan-i Hoken Hall, Tokyo; the pianist played the 3rd piano concerto (sz. 119) by Béla Bartók with the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra under Kazuyoshi Akiyama . The end of the album is the encore ( Tokyo Encore ) “Nothing but a Dream” from the concert in Tokyo.
Track list
- Keith Jarrett: Barber / Bartók / Jarrett (ECM 2445)
- Samuel Barber: Piano Concerto Op. 38
I. Allegro Appassionato 12:32
II. Canzone Moderato 6:16
III. Allegro Molto 7:55
- Bela Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 3 Sz. 119
I. Allegretto 7:42
II. Adagio Religioso 10:16
III. Allegro Vivace 9:08
- Tokyo Encore - Nothing but a Dream 4:52
reception
Kate Molleson reviewed the album in the UK Guardian ; she only gave the album two (out of five) stars and said that both Creation and Barber / Bartók / Jarrett “are far from the best of the pianist […]. Jarrett can do the nimble fingerwork and quick attack that Barber and Bartók demand, and it's easy to hear why he was drawn to these jazz-tuned composers. In the end, however, the results mostly sound like Jarrett. His path with rhythm - spiky, yielding - works for the opening of Bartók's Third Piano Concerto, but Barber's Concerto has none of the color gradations of a great Jarrett. […] Dennis Russell Davies and the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra never relax so completely in Barber's softer grain. The record ends with the five-minute 'Tokyo Encore', pure Jarrett, where he sounds the most informal ”.
In The New York magazine, Russell Platt compared Jarrett's Barber interpretation with earlier recordings of the piano concerto (for example by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1991). Therefore, it is "particularly disappointing that a new take on the work of Keith Jarrett (via ECM) is so irrevocably problematic". In the Barber recording, the author sees the general problems with the conductor, “the minimalism expert Dennis Russell Davies, who does not master the style [Barbers] so well, and an orchestra, the venerable, but secondary radio symphony Saarbrücken, which does the technical The requirements of the plant are only timidly under control. "
Platt criticizes the resulting results for the interpretation: “There is a lot of sloppy articulation and unsatisfactory intonation. Second, there is the shape problem. Extraordinary classics like Browning and Szell - and from our own time - pianist Stephen Prutsman and conductor Marin Alsop with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for Naxos - manage to balance the contradicting moods of the piece between the two and within the movements. But with Jarrett and Davies, the disparate elements of the first movement - the passionate E minor main theme, the intricately lyrical second theme, and a series of wild solo flights on the keyboard - remain like broken dishes on the floor, but temptingly incoherent. The canzone is more successful. The sluggish, […] eroticism of barber music has a certain jazz element: you can turn it romantic, towards Rachmaninov or towards Satie and Bill Evans , and Jarrett's relaxed demeanor makes the latter approach perfect. "
“The best thing that can be said of the musicians in the percussive, persistent finale is that their playing is immediate and competent,” continued Platt, characteristics that also describe the reproduction of the Bartók recording. In contrast to Prutsman, Jarrett sounds “despite all his dazzling dexterity comparatively like a dilettante , his playing lacks color and interpretive nuance. He clearly loves classical music , but in the course of his great jazz journey he has gone too far and too deep to really get back [to classical]. The last track on the album, an encore to the Tokyo performance entitled Nothing But a Dream , makes this clear. After about fifty minutes of pale pianism, my stereo speakers were flooded with soft and golden sonic light - where was this guy twenty minutes ago, I wondered? There was magic, there was miracle. Here a man did what he was born to do. ”.
James Manheim was able to gain more from the album in his review in Allmusic : “The program itself is Jarrett's most inspired choice.” In this way, he avoids the obvious preferences in jazz as for Gershwin , preferring instead works “in which the jazz presence is more subtle Part of the background against which the music takes place ”. In the piano concerto Op. 38 by Samuel Barber, “a dense and technically insidious work from the composer's late years”, Jarrett succeeded in creating a “characteristic fluid tone in the difficult external movements”, although he was moving through a work which, according to Paul Griffiths, “ Post- Romanticism and Post - Serialism ... on a common basis ”. The Bartók Piano Concerto, recorded in Japan, is perhaps less distinctive, but remains "a solid performance without the cautious academicism that sometimes accompanies the work of jazz artists when they penetrate the classical sphere". Even if live sound is not the specialty of ECM, the analog recordings would transmit what happened with reasonable accuracy, the author sums up. The album is "a must for Jarrett fans".
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Dervan: Keith Jarrett: Barber / Bartók / Jarrett. Album review. Irish Times, August 15, 2015, accessed March 10, 2019 .
- ^ Samuel Lipman Music and More: Essays, 1975-1991 . Evanstone: Northwestern University Press 1992, p. 124
- ↑ a b c d Review of the Barber / Bartók / Jarrett album by James Manheim on Allmusic (English). Retrieved March 10, 2018.
- ↑ a b Barber; Bartók; Jarrett CD review - miles from the pianist's best. The Guardian, May 21, 2015, accessed March 10, 2019 .
- ↑ Jarrett had previously performed this work in New York City in 1983 with the American Composers Orchestra under the same conductor. See New York Magazine, Nov. 7, 1983, p. 127
- ↑ Album information at ECM
- ↑ Album information at Discogs
- ↑ a b Keith Jarrett: Barber / Bartók / Jarrett. The New Yorker, June 5, 2015, accessed March 10, 2019 .
- ↑ Liner Notes for the album