A falcon, not a duck

There’s not much duck in Guy Yehuda, the latest top-drawer musician to join the faculty of MSU’s College of Music. Yehuda imbues his tube with a purity, nobility and lofty distance that calls to mind a falcon’s flight.

Yehuda’s dark, muscular sound is on tightly controlled display in a new double-disc collection of sonatas by Johannes Brahms and Max Reger on Sergei Kvitko’s Blue Griffin label.

Yehuda flies on this recording with a formidable partner: Ralph Votapek, a legendary MSU pianist decades his senior.

Votapek is a big star who can fly high on his own, but, on this recording, he rolls along like a rippling, grounded shadow, following every twist and turn of his younger colleague.

The interplay between Yehuda and Votapek is one of this recording’s many delights. They negotiate sudden shifts in mood and tone with a conversational ease, finishing each other’s thoughts and even trading riffs like jazz musicians when it’s called for. The dance reaches a graceful peak in the quietly miraculous set of variations on a theme that ends the second Brahms sonata. As the variations unfold, the pair stroll through a dozen different rooms and gardens, never losing the thread of conversation, before calling it a day.

The concept behind the recording calls for a brief explanation. Any chance to drift through the lyrical world of Brahms in such fine company is worth taking, but why dilute the experience with two sonatas by the lesser-known German composer Max Reger?

The short answer is that it’s a sweet-andsour thing.

One story goes that Reger heard the Brahms sonatas and said something like, “I’ll do two of those, too.”

But Reger, who straddled the late romantic music of the 19th century and modern stuff of the 20th, is a much slipperier bird than Brahms.

The opening melody of Reger’s first clarinet sonata starts out like one of those “ladeeeee-da” Brahms tunes that make you want to sit back, pipe in hand, and close your eyes in bliss. But three or four seconds in, the tune squirts off in several odd directions, darting above and below the waterline like a recalcitrant albatross. It’s fun to hear Reger alternately give in to Brahms and fight him off, especially after listening to some straight-up Brahms to get the baseline.

It’s hard to read Reger sometimes, with his half-playful, half-wistful reserve, but that suits the dignity — opacity, even — of Yehuda’s and Votapek’s music making. These musicians are not heart-on-sleeve types. They both bring steel and glass into their reading of Brahms and Reger, and that’s not a bad thing.

A lot of music history has gone down since Brahms, and that’s part of the benefit of hearing him played by modern-day musicians.

Votapek’s facility with impressionist composers like Ravel and Debussy helps him bring out the proto-impressionist in Brahms.

For his part, Yehuda has a lot of cred in the contemporary and modern music world, having worked with legends like maverick conductor/composer Pierre Boulez and minimalist god Steve Reich. His superhuman steeplechase through John Corigliano’s house-of-horrors clarinet concerto will leave spider tracks on the back of your neck. (Corigliano called Yehuda “awe-inspiring.”) That feel for modern music accounts for the lack of wobble, vibrato and schmaltz in Yehuda’s tone. He never tips his hand about what he’s feeling, or what you’re supposed to feel.

That’s not to say this is a robotic, emotionless recording. It just doesn’t poke or prod. The listener’s emotion is an honest response, not to whipped-up “passion,” but to sheer beauty and a feeling of being included in a civilized conversation. In the middle movements of Brahms’ first sonata, Yehuda and Votapek evoke a limpid pool of pure melody. They just don’t quack about it.