Orion Weiss: Arc I: Granados, Janácek, Scriabin
First Hand Records

Sample a few online videos of American pianist Orion Weiss (a 2015 rendering of Debussy's L'Isle Joyeux, for starters) and certain characteristics quickly become apparent. That he possesses impeccable technique is obvious, as is the commanding authority with which he executes. As important, the impression forms of a musician completely immersed in the piece being played and whose performance is informed by total comprehension of the material. One comes away from the videos convinced that even the most fiendishly difficult challenge could be met by Weiss.

We don't see him play the three works on Arc I: Granados, Janácek, Scriabin, obviously, but we clearly hear him realizing them with all of the precision and engagement seen in the videos. The recording is the inaugural part in a recital trilogy that is ambitious, imaginative, and inspired. Scheduled to appear later this year are the closing parts, the second featuring pieces by Ravel, Shostakovich, and Brahms and the third Schubert, Debussy, Brahms, Dohnányi, and Talma. Whereas the first volume presents material written between 1911 and 1913 just before World War I, the second features pieces composed during the world wars and the third material written after.

As Weiss himself notes, the trilogy forms an inverted arc: the first marks the plunge from hope to despair, the second inhabits the lowest level of grief, and the third signifies recovery, rebirth, and hope. He further identifies similarities between the state of the world prior to the first world war and our own era, with the pandemic having two years ago cast us into states of chaos and bewilderment that only increased as death totals climbed. For citizens before WWI, he argues, “the future became like a patch of absolute black, totally unknowable and threatening. The pain of our subsequent descent has surely been both personal and global.”

Weiss's characterization of the material on the first volume as “music of foreboding, tormented by premonitions of a horrific future” might suggest Arc I will be a tough and heavy slog. On the contrary, moments of sunlight break through whatever darkness is embodied by the three works, the result a programme that's tonally multi-dimensional and stylistically rich. One of the best things about the release is Weiss's selections. He could have opted for pieces that are comparatively more familiar; instead, he made bolder artistic choices, Enrique Granados' piano suite Goyescas, Op. 11 a particularly inspired selection. That he ceded two-thirds of the recording's seventy-five-minute running time to it is also noteworthy.

A programmatic story-line involving the romantic and ultimately doomed relationship between lovers guides the six-part Goyescas, what Weiss astutely deems “a masterpiece of motivic development” in the way it subjects a small number of melodies to constant transformation. Motives initially symbolizing love and hope gradually transform into death and loss, a trajectory that itself mirrors the descent into despair wrought by war's onset. However bleak the plot's downward movement is, the work's closing epilogue includes an intimation of hope in the re-emergence of the primary love theme. The work certainly starts out prettily with a buoyant Spanish-tinged figure imbuing “Los requiebros (Flattery)” with radiance, and if anything the romantic glow intensifies as Weiss moves into the expressive “Coloquio en la reja (Conversation at the Window).” Whereas a dance feel enlivens “El fandango de candil (Fandango by Candlelight),” darkness starts to seep in with the arrival of “Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor (Laments, or The Maiden and The Nightingale)” and “El Amor y la muerte – Balada (Love and Death – Ballade).” Weiss plays all of it, naturally, with the utmost sensitivity and attention to detail.

Following Granados' epic, Leoš Janácek's In the Mists progresses through its four short parts organically, with the tone alternating between intense drama and a pensive hush for the opening “Andante,” turning tender for the “Molto adagio” and “Andantino,” and finally forlorn for the closing “Presto.” Alexander Scriabin's Piano Sonata No. 9, Op. 68, “Black Mass” ends Arc I with a single-movement setting that, similar to Goyescas, ends in despair. Agitation infuses the opening minutes, though it's offset by a delicate passage suggesting hope. The moment doesn't last long, however, as the upward orientation's negated by darker tonalities that flood in to smother it. In keeping with the theme for the inaugural chapter in the Arc series, “Black Mass” concludes ominously.

April 2022