Robert Schumann’s final work — “Geistervariationen,” or “Ghost Variations” — is at the heart of the pianist and composer Joseph Havlat’s thoughtfully constructed new album, “Sinner, Don’t Let This Harvest Pass.”
“Geistervariationen” isn’t one of Schumann’s most celebrated piano works, partly because of its late publication. (Initially withheld by his family after his death in 1856, it was eventually published in 1939.) But it’s also just an enigmatic piece.
The work’s opening, inward theme carries the direction “leise, innig,” meaning soft and intimate, and intricate passagework in the first variation adds further churn. In the second variation, a canon, Schumann barely changes anything at all, opting to stay in the same register, atmosphere, key, speed and mood as the first. Things quicken in the third; the introduction of the minor key adds a Chopin-like feeling to the fourth (another canon); and, by the final movement, the texture has finally opened up from its starting point. But even then, Schumann’s big reveal shows a cluster of lines that sound as if they’re all accompanying an absent melody.
Havlat doesn’t try to shoehorn these unusual passages into traditional modes of interpreting Schumann. The top line rarely sings out, for example. That things seem blurred, with multiple lines battling for space, is to Havlat’s credit.
On the album, Schumann’s variations are followed by Michael Finnissy’s “RS Geistervariationen.” Ferruccio Busoni saw any written composition as a means of transcription, and thus was perfectly comfortable composing adaptations of celebrated composers like Bach and Brahms; Finnissy’s works take a similar approach, and — drawing from ideas around filmmaking and photography — he regularly composes through, against, on top of and around existing musical material. Where a project like his “36 Verdi Transcriptions” adds embellishments to more straightforward, less puzzling source material, “RS Geistervariationen” fulfills a different function. It’s a commentary on the Schumann, or even a musical explanation.
Though Finnissy’s piece begins in the same way, a spread chord changes the work’s direction. Later, a similar moment triggers a bluesy harmony, an upward thrust in register and a mysterious new ending. Finnissy separates what follows into variations made from transcriptions of Brahms’s Op. 23 (itself a set of variations on Schumann’s theme) and “tropes,” cloudy divertissements that newly tangle the threads that Brahms had worked loose.
Finnissy finishes with a section titled “Choir of Ghost Voices From Afar.” Schumann was experiencing hallucinations around the time he wrote the “Geistervariationen,” and spoke of hearing an “angel” theme that guided the work. Finnissy’s closing music is unsettling and suspended, like a marionette suddenly paralyzed.
Havlat’s most emotionally insightful playing occurs here. The close, gentle variation marked “Con Tenerezza” (with tenderness) begins like a torch song, travels through rhapsodic yearning, drifts into a disembodied register and arrives at something angrier by “Trope (c),” all in under three minutes. Havlat navigates these swift transitions smoothly, with an acute sense of line. He connects his disparate materials by drawing out all of their moodiest, most subdued hues.
Ideas around variation, whether written or conceptual, tie Havlat’s album together. Finnissy, the great transcriber, finds a kindred spirit in the composer Cassandra Miller, sharing credits on the piece “Sinner, Don’t Let This Harvest Pass.” They both create variations on the title song, as sung by Marian Anderson, and approach the material in contrasting ways. Miller’s opening is simple, modal, moody and rhythmic. Next, Finnissy brings the theme to the foreground, then thoroughly abstracts it. His third section has the suspended distance of “RS Geistervariationen,” and Miller closes with a slow, drawn-out sunset. It’s some of the sweetest music on the album.
Miller has been inspired by Simone Weil’s writing and Greek funeral laments, and once used a home recording of the guitarist Sean Shibe singing with the piper Brighde Chaimbeul as the basis for her guitar concerto “Chanter.” In her earlier work “Philip the Wanderer,” which closes the album, though, her obsessions are less interesting. When the second movement’s cascading, Tchaikovsky-esque chords are joined by an eerie high whistling, the effect is enthralling. But other choices are less engaging, even monotonous, like the four minutes of eventless, low-end rumbling that begin the piece or an attractive inversion of those cascades being swapped out for a single, dull, looping major scale at the close.
To conclude the album so neatly undersells Havlat’s otherwise ambitious corralling of voices ancient, modern, recorded and imaginary, to explore questions but never definitively answer them.
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