Details

Field of Interest

American Music

Content Type

Music recording

Duration

30 mins

Recording Engineer

Bill McElroy, fl. 1955

Format

Audio

Sub Genre

Bluegrass

Label

Rebel

Producer

Virginia Squires

Date Recorded

1998

Release Date

1988

Review

The booklet for this release by hot young French pianist Vanessa Wagner is a masterpiece of Gallic rhetoric that almost completely avoids discussion of the music that's actually included in the program. When you have playing that's this interesting, though, an obtuse booklet may be an advantage: there's nothing that will dilute the experience to come. Wagner is not the first pianist to offer a recital made up entirely of variation sets, but she has produced an exceptionally absorbing example of the genre. First, she notes the consistent presence of variation sets across the eras of musical history, which is intriguing enough to begin with. Then she isolates the inherently diverse nature of the variation set: it is a means to virtuoso exhibit, it is a source of play, or of homage, and it is intellectual, "chemical," as one historical commenter put it, dissolving musical units into their constituent components. When everything gets put back together, it's quite a show. Wagner finds ways of playing against type. Haydn's Variations in F minor, Hob. 17/6, are an underplayed masterpiece of the composer's later years, with the playfulness you might expect being gradually replaced by a spirit of radical experimentation toward the end. Wagner sets a delicate tone and carries it through the entire program, even beautifully fitting Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42, into the pattern and setting the aspects of display and of interior structure against each other in that large work. The twelve-tone Five Variations for piano of Luciano Berio, a product of the composer's youth, are treated lightly and playfully, the Gavotte varié of Rameau dreamily and mystically. Wagner returns to the theme of homage for the final work: Brahms' Variations on a theme of Schumann, Op. 9, seems in her hands to take on quite a slice of the complex relationships between the two composers. In all, there's a lot to chew on here, and there's no shortage of surface beauty, either. ~ James Manheim, All Music Guide

Subject

American Music, Music & Performing Arts, American Studies, Bluegrass Music, Bluegrass

Keywords and Translated Subjects

Bluegrass