Arc II

Album review

The Arc II in the title of this release by pianist Orion Weiss indicates that it is the second in a set of albums pertaining to war; the first album was subtitled "From Before World War I" and contains works from that era. Arc II has the subtitle "From During World War I World War II, During Times of Grief," rather unwieldy, but suggesting an innovative feature of the album (and of the coming Arc III), namely that Weiss includes 19th century works that are emotionally relevant. Thus, his Shostakovich Piano Sonata No. 2 in B minor, Op. 61, has as its counterpart the emotionally turbulent Variations on a Theme of Schumann, Op. 9, of the young Brahms, in which Weiss seems to suggest that Brahms depicted the disordered mind of the mentally ill Schumann. The Shostakovich is probably the best thing here, a rare non-Russian performance that captures this sonata's violent grimness (and its profoundly chilly slow movement) exceptionally effectively, but the album is not unrelievedly dark. Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin was composed in memory of Ravel's dead war comrades and also of his mother, but it is a quiet, delicate, slightly melancholy work, not a somber one (Ravel remarked that "the dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence"). Weiss's performance is entrancing, and he does well to end with two of Brahms' Eleven Chorale Preludes, Op. 122, the last things he ever wrote, and beautifully closing his lifelong engagement with the recently deceased Clara Schumann.
© James Manheim /TiVo