For this week’s GBH’s All Things Considered Turntable series, Brian McCreath, director of production at GBH Music and host of CRB’s Boston Symphony Orchestra broadcast, is back with what’s on his classical music playlist.
He joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share his picks. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: Let’s get right into the first pick. What are we listening to?
Brian McCreath: I want to introduce you to a pianist named Yunchan Lim, and he is very young. At the age of 18, in 2022, he became the youngest-ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition — one of the biggest in the world — and he’s been a phenomenon ever since.
I mean, he’s beyond a sort of competition winner. He’s an amazing artist, and he just released a new recording of a piece called The Seasons by Peter Tchaikovsky. Not a piece that comes up too often, but it’s a piece that is a set of 12 very short little tone poems that are each for a month of the year. So you have January; it’s called “At the Fireside.” You have February: “Carnival.” March is “Song of the Lark.”
I wanted to bring this along partly because it’s a really beautiful, exquisite album that shows you what kind of a player Yunchan Lim is. Let’s listen to a little bit of April, which is called “Snowdrop.”
[“Snowdrop” — by Peter Tchaikovsky, performed by Yunchan Lim on piano]
McCreath: I just want to draw your attention to the subtlety and the gradations of tempo and soft and loud that Yunchan Lim is getting out of this music. It’s not terribly complicated music, but his artistry is infusing it with so much more nuance and beauty, and so it’s sort of a demonstration of what a special musician he is.
He came to the Boston Symphony last year, and he did Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which was just gobsmacking everyone in the hall. He’s going to be back, actually, this year. He’s doing the Goldberg Variations on a celebrity series coming up next month. And then, he’ll be back for the Boston Symphony doing Schumann’s Piano Concerto later in the spring.
So, that’s Yunchan Lim.
Rath: Wow. I’d somehow managed to miss him. That is beautiful, I love that. I have to confess, I’m actually not a Tchaikovsky fan, but I like that a lot. It seems like that kind of music, April — for some reason, his youth seems to be an advantage in playing that kind of music, right? It’s so pure and fresh.
McCreath: Here’s the interesting thing about this album, Arun: If our listeners can get a chance to actually look at the program notes that go with the album, and not just stream it, they’ll find this essay that Yunchan Lim wrote with it.
He does an entire interpretation of how this music represents an older person’s life, looking back on all the episodes of their life. It’s really a detailed narrative that Tchaikovsky did not write, and it’s sort of a window into the creative mind of a really great artist.
So, try to track down the actual program notes and read this essay that Yunchan Lim put together.
Rath: I’m going to. [We’re] off to a strong start — you and Lim have got me liking Tchaikovsky. Well, what do you have next?
McCreath: The next thing I want to bring up is a new recording — actually, it came out last spring, but I think it’s new enough for us — which is of two piano quintets.
This is a string quartet with solo piano in a chamber setting, so a small ensemble. The Takács Quartet, which has roots in Hungary, but now, for many, many years, has been based in Colorado. They teamed up with the pianist Marc-André Hamelin, who’s one of today’s greatest pianists. I mean, Marc-André Hamelin is capable of anything and tours the world constantly.
Rath: You turned me on to him.
McCreath: Oh, good! I’m glad.
So, what they did was they recorded two piano quintets: one by Antonín Dvořák, one of the cornerstone composers of classical music, and the other by Florence Price, who is an American composer of the mid-20th century. She was almost completely forgotten until her music was found — literally, discovered — in an abandoned house in Illinois that she used to use as a summer home. This is long after she died; someone found a box of music nobody knew had existed, and this piano quintet is one of them.
It’s a beautiful piece, this piano quintet, but also there’s a reason that Takács and Marc-André Hamelin put these pieces together. There’s a lot of what Florence Price gets musically from Dvořák, who came to the United States and helped to sort of seed the American sound of classical music.
Let’s listen to a little bit of the third movement of this piano quintet by Florence Price.
[“Piano Quintet in A Minor” — Florence Price]
McCreath: That’s a movement that’s called Juba, which is a kind of dance from the Deep South that the African American population would do at certain times when there are no instruments around or anything; it’s a form of dance.
What I love about the way that they’ve put this album together is that this holds the place of the third movement in Florence Price’s piano quintet. Just as in Dvořák’s third movement of his quintet, there’s what’s called a “furiant,” which is a Czech dance from his homeland.
There’s a lot of parallel here. Even though the sound of these voices — these compositional voices — is very different, you can hear some influence of Dvořák in Florence Price, but it’s thoroughly 100% American — and, especially, from the Black perspective.
Rath: And in the other direction as well. We know Dvořák took so much from American spirituals that were much of Florence Price’s milieu.
McCreath: Harry Burleigh was the one who really helped Dvořák understand the African American spiritual in the late-19th and early-20th century. So Florence Price was also, as you say, very influenced by Harry Burleigh, who was the one who brought that music out into the concert hall to bring it before a wider public.
Rath: This is a great lead-in to our last selection. And I have to say, this is actually my pick that I’m bringing in, which we do sometimes when there’s something I’m super excited about, like this record we’re going to talk about.
I have been playing this record a lot since it came out a few weeks ago. It’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The record is called Still & Bonds: Symphonies and Variations.
[“Montgomery Variations” — Margaret Bonds]
This beautiful music we’re hearing right now is Margaret Bonds. It’s the last movement of a suite called Montgomery Variations. Montgomery, Alabama, is what’s being referred to here, and this piece, which came out in 1964, it’s all about the Civil Rights Movement. It’s written by a Black woman who was in the thick of it at the time.
You can hear in the music — we were just talking about spirituals — the music is full of references to spirituals, [which was] something that Bonds was known for.
But Brian, I have to confess: Before this record, I knew practically nothing about Margaret Bonds, beyond the fact that she worked with Langston Hughes. I knew none of the music.
McCreath: Right. And Margaret Bonds knew William Grant Still, whose symphonies are also on this recording with Yannick Nézet-Séguin in Philadelphia. Also knew Florence Price.
So there’s a community, almost — I mean, we might even be saying that we’re thinking of a school of music in a way. These African American composers of the mid-twentieth century are expressing themselves through forms and structures of music that are based in European classical music, but deal in the language of the African American experience.
Montgomery Variations is very, very explicitly about the African American experience of the Civil Rights Movement. Like I said, it’s based on a kind of European model of classical music, as if Bach took a theme from a chorale and wrote variations on it, as he did in several pieces. But this is Margaret Bonds taking a spiritual of the American experience and writing her variations on it that literally depict a trajectory of the Civil Rights Movement from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s.
Rath: There’s a lot of dark history in there, but this piece is triumphant.
McCreath: Isn’t that the case, though, with the Civil Rights Movement? There’s so much dark in that story, and yet there’s this transcendence and there’s perseverance and there is resiliency, which is what makes that whole era to us so inspiring to look back on.
