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Haskell Small: Renoir’s Feast Music for a Masterpiece
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition
(Haskell Small Website)
The Phillips Collection: Museum Music, 2006
(Museum Music Website)
Haskell Small, piano
Nikolas J. Lund
January 21, 2007
(See a Review of Haskell Small’s Renoir’s Feast)
This review represents the third installment of my three-part review of those works of Haskell Small on CD which have become recently available to me to review. For further observations on this singular composer-pianist, please see other reviews on CD Reviews. This CD essentially places a piano before paintings.
In both works featured on the disc—composer Haskell Small’s Renoir’s Feast and Mussorgsky’s long-beloved Pictures at an Exhibition—an interlinked series of piano miniatures is titled to represent one’s fleeting impressions of a painted landscape. And by pairing both of these works on the disc together, we are invited to ask ourselves why someone might be bringing a piano into the museum in the first place.
Mussorgsky’s supposed inspiration and/or formal scheme has always struck me as a curious way to present the series of sometimes highly strange musical departures interspersed with the always-varying Promenade theme, which manages inevitably to link these pieces into some sort of programmatic narrative. The suggestions which Mussorgsky’s gives us in the score are certainly provocative enough (“The Ballet of Unhatched Chick,” “Catacombae,” etc) but it is undoubtedly the singularity and yet immediate appeal of each piece which, I think, has long-since secured a place for this music in the repertoire. Again, it is a perhaps a personal lack of imagination which does not necessarily allow me to “follow the story” as it is laid out by Mussorgsky, but I have listened to the work no small number if times over the years, and am certainly happy to return to it here.
Mr. Small’s interpretation of Pictures on this disc joins any number of others in the catalog, and yet has a clarity and sensitivity all its own. Its reading begins that first Promenade at a fine pace and holds a strong line between each of the episodes. In listening to this work here again, I asked myself if the strange juxtapositions of strange music might in some way be analogous to the sometimes upsetting experience of moving between equally bizarre tableaux in a museum setting. One could expound at length upon these possibilities of artistic interplay, but should, perhaps, finally just take one’s iPod along to the MET and see for oneself. Mr. Small’s playing is refreshingly literal in some ways, and his recording here would be a fine accompaniment to any such synaesthetic venture.
In Haskell Small’s new work, a single painting serves as the program or “inspiration” of the music work: Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880). In this program we are left thus with the impression of the eye wandering idly but at length over the surface of a canvas which, in its sweeping passes, continues to find within this single unified space any number of details within a painted landscape which is unified in its own composition.
For Renoir this painting is undoubtedly a “masterpiece” in that it presents a consistent personal idiom. Every stroke certainly looks a lot like Renoir. Similarly, the music on this disc is reminiscent of Mr. Small’s other music for the piano, utilizing a harmonic language which is unique and yet familiar. I have no doubt that someone familiar with Mr. Small’s other works would not at least venture to guess his name upon a first hearing.
See Broadway shows this year such as the award winning Wicked Tickets, or other hot shows like Jersey Boys and Young Frankenstein which is coming soon. Or perhaps a concert is your fancy, better get your Hannah Montana Tour Tickets now before they sell out.
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