A New Critic for the Cleveland Orchestra

As a fan of Nicholas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective which collected critical commentary from newspapers and journals from the days of Beethoven to Schoenberg (and, true to the title, all scathing), I often like to quote a review – for instance, “[it] sometimes sounds like a plague of insects in the Amazon valley, sometimes like a miniature of the Day of Judgment... and for a change goes lachrymose” – and then ask if you can identify the piece. What was it Pitts Sanborne was reviewing in the New York World Telegram in 1938?

Did you guess Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini?

Now, it’s easy to slam past critics who’ve panned great works and artists, hindsight aside. As if to avoid litigation these days, critics rarely write reviews like that any more.

When I conducted the Harrisburg Symphony in the premiere of my “Epiphanies” in 1983, Barker Howland of the Patriot-News, after quoting from my program notes describing the work, wrote “An interesting piece, it will be repeated tonight.” I often thought I should blurb that on my resume.

However, when you read frequent comments from critic Donald Rosenberg at the Cleveland Plain Dealer like “Welser-Möst never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” you begin to get an idea of the on-going relationship between critic and critiqued: since Welser-Möst became the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, Rosenberg has rarely had good things to say about his interpretations, no matter how good the orchestra plays. Since the maestro’s contract was just renewed until 2018, one wondered how long this dance could go on. Would Cleveland have to put up with ten more years of negative comments?

Still, it was a bit of a shock the other day, just as the orchestra’s new season was about to begin, to read that Rosenberg was being “re-assigned.” I know it’s better than a lot of cities, large and small, who’ve seen their newspapers drop arts critics completely: at least Mr. Rosenberg will still be covering other venues and a new critic has been up-graded to review the orchestra.

The good news is – at least for those of us in Central Pennsylvania who remember his insightful and well-written reviews – that new critic sent in to review the Cleveland Orchestra happens to be Zachary Lewis who, for too few years, covered the local classical scene for Harrisburg’s Patriot-News.

Here’s his first review, the opening night program that featured George Benjamin’s “Duet” for piano and orchestra and a Welser-Möst specialty, Bruckner’s 7th Symphony.

Zach left here around 2004, moving to Cleveland and hoping to free-lance his way into making a living. For a while, he maintained an on-line review-blog for the paper which, unfortunately, did not generate enough readers to maintain the site (or the writer). So it is great news to see that he has resurfaced in a major way. It may not be under the most enjoyable circumstances, walking in this way – politics being politics – and while Rosenberg may be thought of as one of the major classical music critics in the country (no pressure there for his successor, either), I am sure we’ll be reading many good things from Zach. I know I’m not the only one wishing him the best!

The issue of Rosenberg’s re-assignment, of course, is another matter entirely, and one verging on Freedom of Speech.

Years ago, I was never a fan of the great conductor, Eugene Ormandy, or of the great violinist Isaac Stern – many times, their recordings and performances left me cold. I can’t say I knew why, but I just wasn’t moved by them. I often wondered what I would do if I had become a critic and had to deal with those kind of personal versus professional reactions, whatever that means. I mean, if I continued to slam Ormandy, say, as being “ineffectual” and “distant,” who would take me seriously for very long?

It’s not that Rosenberg was alone. Many critics around the country said similar things when the orchestra was on tour: they often had to go to Europe to get glowing reviews from major cities.

I’d had similar misgivings about Lorin Maazel, a previous conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. My Eastman room-mate joined the orchestra during Maazel’s first season and so whenever the orchestra came to New York, I would drive down from the UConn to hear them play. It was embarrassing to tell my friend that I had trouble staying awake during the Brahms 2nd Symphony.

It’s not that the orchestra played badly, by any means. It’s that I couldn’t find anything in the conductor’s interpretation that made the work come alive for me.

Once, during intermission, Maazel had said to the orchestra back-stage he was checking his pulse to find out what the opening tempo would be for Brahms 1st, coming up next. It’s not that his blood-pressure was a little low that night, but it sounded like he’d checked himself after having watched the most boring TV show, ever.

Another concert included Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor. I knew from my friend that they had not rehearsed it much, in fact had not even run through the whole piece, checking only a few spots. On the stage of Carnegie Hall, they were actually going to “sight-read” the minuet. It’s not that they didn’t know the piece, but several in the orchestra (like my former room-mate) hadn’t played it with Maazel before. It’s not that I expected the piece to fall apart – after all, it was the Cleveland Orchestra – and while I wasn’t on the edge of my seat as much as many in the orchestra may have been, if the experiment had been meant to generate on-the-spot electricity, it still bored me. It didn’t help that I knew Maazel had told the orchestra during the sound-check that it wouldn’t make much difference: the critics would still hate it (and he was right).

So I didn’t feel too badly about my reactions: after all, I wasn’t alone. At least I didn’t have put my feelings about it in writing.

Many years and many bad reviews later, lo and behold Lorin Maazel is chosen as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic! There was much soul-searching going on as a few New York critics wondered how they would deal with him on a regular week-to-week basis. Fortunately, some things had somehow changed, certain strengths came to the surface with familiarity and, on the whole, while he hasn’t been getting unanimously rave reviews, they’re not the spiteful attacks they’d been. It’s unlikely the critics mellowed – and certainly the papers’ editors didn’t come down and say “write nice reviews or else!” Or at least, I rather doubt it.

(I have to chuckle, reading Allan Kozzin’s New York Times review of Maazel’s Mahler with the New York Philharmonic: “...though the playing was often strikingly beautiful, his interpretation was flat and emotionless: it might as well have been an ice sculpture.”)

Which makes the whole issue at the Plain Dealer a little more of a surprise: no one admits to pressuring anyone or to being pressured and it’s unlikely the paper’s integrity would be impugned just for the sake of appeasing the orchestra’s management.

But it probably does send chills down the spines of many critics across the land: it’s bad enough, now, a critic might be sued for a bad review, as happened in England this past summer. True, it was unlikely in another ten years Mr. Rosenberg would have any kind of epiphany about Mr. Welser-Möst’s interpretive abilities and suddenly become a euphoric cheer-leader, so perhaps the editor made the internal decision on the grounds that it was the best way to alleviate the situation. It was still better than eliminating the position, firing the critic and not replacing him at all which, frankly, has been known to happen elsewhere often enough.

When I worked for the Harrisburg Symphony back in the ‘80s, we often complained among ourselves about the reviews the orchestra received in the Patriot-News. Not that they were bad: usually, they were just badly written or not really reviews at all. Sending someone who likes music out to review a concert does not make them a “critic,” however one views the term.

Reading a complete plot-synopsis of Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman does not help someone who’d not heard the concert find out how the orchestra played the Overture, especially when you don’t say anything about how it was performed. The many grammatical howlers aside, telling us Charles Tomlinson Griffes’ Poeme for Flute & Orchestra was “a compendium of every style you could hear in the 20th Century” is an odd thing to say about such a mild and pretty piece composed before 1919, though it led some of us to say “yeah, I particularly liked that aleatoric section near the end.” How exciting it must have been for the two young singers who came from New York to sing in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, hoping no doubt to add to their resume reviews for their performance at the Forum, only to be mentioned in terms of what they wore, not how they sang!

Then there is the never-ending argument, “who are you writing for?” If you’d gone to the concert, you shouldn’t need to read a critic’s reaction to find out how it went. If you didn’t go, how is reading a review going to make up for not having been there? If you don’t know much about the music, does it matter how well the pianist brought out the triplets in the left-hand during the transition to the second theme? If you know anything about music, is it going to matter to you if the conductor “rode the tiger” during The Rite of Spring?

When there’s a concert weekend, is a review that shows up in Sunday morning’s paper going to motivate anyone to drop afternoon plans and get there by 3:00? What about a review for a concert series in a big city where, even if you decide to go at the last minute, are there going to be tickets available? Well, maybe it will happen, and maybe even getting a few more people in those seats makes it worthwhile. What is the point, some ask, of reviewing a one-night-stand of a concert if there are no further performances to attract new attendance? More than likely it may convince readers to try out the next concert. Or at least to know that the orchestra or the concert series even exists.

Ultimately, I guess, reviews are a kind of public relations venture which is why something that focuses on a negative aspect – even a small one at the expense of the over-all positive impression – can be viewed by certain vested interests as “bad publicity.” Yet movie critics who pan the latest block-buster don’t appear to have much of an impact on theater-attendance.

Perhaps the idea of knowing in advance a review will be negative – did people read Rosenberg’s reviews because they wanted to check out his latest zingers? – was having a negative impact on the paper’s readership. But the paper hired an intelligent man who is paid to have an opinion to write intelligently about his opinion. Maybe it’s the result of a certain level of political correctness combined with the old Bambi-era philosophy (as Thumper’s mother imparted, “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”), not that many politicians have ever taken this to heart.

At the moment, I’m trying to read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled which is about (insomuch as it’s about something) a concert pianist who arrives in a Central European city for a very important concert. Every time he turns around there’s something surreal happening to him (I haven’t read enough to make sense out of it if sense is to be found), but one thing that intrigues me is Ishiguro’s depiction of the city’s arts scene.

Apparently this pianist, known only as Mr. Ryder, has come to town to support an aging, over-the-hill conductor named Mr. Brodsky who has been chosen as the city’s new “music champion,” despite their misgivings over his age and whatever talent he may have left. He replaces the acclaimed cellist Christoff who had been reluctantly thrust into this role-in-society almost 18 years earlier. But recently, one of the city leaders admitted to another one that he found Christoff’s last recital “functional,” to which another hesitated, “yes, I tend to agree with you. There was a certain dryness to it all,” and the first man added he thought the word was “cold.”

And so began the sudden disgrace of the man who for almost 18 years had been their shining beacon in the arts. Mr. Ryder is being told this, incidentally, against a backdrop of the movie he was trying to watch at the local cinema, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” particularly during the scene when the astronauts were beginning to suspect the motives of the computer HAL.

Comes Autumn Time - A Journal Entry

The transition from Summer to Autumn is one of my favorite times of year, especially now that I’m actually waking up early enough to see the sun come up and burn off the morning fog (unlike, after spending several of the last 18 years working until midnight or so, when I’d occasionally stay up late enough to see it from the other end). There’s something about the air, especially the sunlight, that is different even from cooler summer days.

So as the stock market tries to take deep breaths during its current roller-coaster of a ride and Washington is now poised to pump in $700,000,000,000 to shore up the banks that failed – I await the FBI investigation and charges of ENCO-like fraud that will no doubt be discovered – I sit on my garden bench in the late-afternoon sun on an Autumn day and realize (aside from what all this is doing to my poor bedraggled 401k Plan) it’s the corporations who are now getting bailed out, not the poor middle-class tax-paying schmucks squashed by home foreclosures who have been reeling toward bankruptcy for months. What would I like to say to those financial people who’ve always argued funding for the Arts is not the government’s responsibility when performing organizations cannot survive in a free-market economy?

Despite wondering if the White House is still pushing for its plan to turn Social Security into private accounts tied to the stock market and then reading the endlessly polarizing debates about Sarah Palin (if they thought she was an expert on Russia because you can see it from Alaska, why didn’t they just have her drive by the United Nations yesterday, instead?), I spent several hours during these past afternoons sitting on my little bench under the Japanese maple tree trying to read, though easily distracted by the activity around the bird feeder.

It took awhile for the birds to become less wary of me – the mourning doves never did, just sitting near the edge of the roof, craning their necks down at me questioningly before flying off into the tree – but eventually the family of cardinals came in, both the male and female adults as well as the pair of juveniles, the young male now just coming into his full red coloring (a week ago, they still sat there waiting to be fed by the adults even though they seemed bigger or at least fuller than their parents: by now, they might learn to feed themselves, you’d think).

Eventually, some nuthatches came by and a few chickadees, the first I’ve seen them in months (perhaps they’ve come down out of the mountain woods now that it’s cooler here). The juncos’ arrival will be the true harbinger of colder weather – “snowbirds,” they’re often called – fairly consistent with their first appearance but not as organized as the swallows of Capistrano (and a lot more attractive than the buzzards of Hinckley, Ohio). There were the little “chipping sparrows,” the tiniest birds I see here, more slender than the wrens who seem to live only out front, more often heard than seen. The blue jays were fairly wary but squawked mightily at me from nearby branches for a while before giving up and flying away. The crows stopped by, too, about six or seven of them this time. They’re not as bad as they used to be downtown, about seven miles away (as the crow flies) where for a while they had replaced starlings and pigeons as nature’s major urban nuisance: when we’d had more seagulls coming in along the riverfront, I swore we were living in an Alfred Hitchcock remake.

The chipmunks may have been more skitterish with me there, but that would not keep them away from the tailings for long. Every morning I put a scoop of bird seed out in the little St. Francis feeder at the edge of the porch – placed there over 40 years ago so my dad could watch them from the living room – and pour a little bit across the porch-floor for the chipmunks, as my mother had done decades ago. When I am late or forgetful, one will sit out on the rock underneath the feeder and scold me, setting up a repeated sharp “chirp.” One recent afternoon, I startled one who ran and hid in the rain-spout. I could see him peering out at me, cautious. After a while, he hopped out to stand on his haunches – there’s a low stump of a branch on the euonymus bush about two feet from me that makes a good perch – and then he began to scold me with these same sharp “chirps,” set up with metronomic precision. When I turned a page, he ran back and hid in the rain-spout again, still chirping: did he think he sounded more awesome, now, echoing through this metal tube, like someone singing in the shower?

My dad used to love watching them vacuum up the seeds till their cheek-pouches were nearly bursting: small wonder he nicknamed one “Dizzie Gillespie,” though how many of them we had then, who knows? Now on occasion I’ll see three different ones all at the same time, with the frequent scampering of territorial defense. One goes off around the back of the porch, another through the garden under the maple toward the neighbors behind me, a third one high-tailing it around the garage to the front of the house.

The squirrels do not come around when I sit outside. They are an unwelcome but unavoidable part of the garden, probably devouring more of the bird seed than the birds. They always seem to come up from the neighbors behind me, though I know there’s a nest in my other neighbor’s big oak on the east side (what my parents always called “the lower end,” where the hill recedes and the basement opens out, making the house looks like a two-storey). I see them less on the front yard: there, it’s too open and accessible to the passing hawk. Back in the spring, I saw a red-tailed hawk down on the grass being attacked by a squad of crows. Not sure if the hawk was wounded or maybe had gotten a baby crow, I ran out to scare it off: it flew off with the tail of a gray squirrel dangling limply from its talons.

The squirrels, of course, are a big draw for the cats inside, sitting on the backs of chairs, on the drum table or the old victrola, watching them for hours. Sometimes, the squirrels come up and peer in the windows, reminding me of the accusation once leveled at the Americans by Iran, that the CIA was training squirrels to be spies, then dropping them off undercover in Iran to blend into the landscape, not realizing squirrels were not native to that part of the world. Are these squirrels, then, trained by al-Qaida? When I see one digging in my lawn to plant a large black walnut – wherever that tree is located, they manage to come to my place to store them for the winter – I do a double-take, feeling I need to make sure it’s not a yard-side bomb that could injure the Lawn Guys when they come to mow.

Friends of mine are at war with the squirrels, whether it’s putting out poison or trapping and transporting them to more remote woods, as if their absence wouldn’t quickly be filled in by other squirrels in the neighborhood. Someone once told me there was a kind of squirrel contraceptive you could put out that would “render” them infertile. Fine, I thought, but I drew the line at having to put the little condoms on them. True, I don’t plant bulbs for spring flowers because I figure it’s too expensive to feed the squirrels that way – the birdseed is bad enough – but I’ve decided to give into them and just co-exist for now. I rather doubt what happens in my living room is of much interest to the Iranians, anyway.

The groundhogs, however, are another matter. They had taken up residence at this address probably before my parents built the house 50 years ago. Shortly afterward, there was a large hole dug alongside the back basement wall, hidden behind shrubs that have long since died. A few years later, we discovered a larger one on the opposite side of the house, out front near the Lower End, hidden behind a large arbor-vitae. We were convinced the two were connected and that they had now succeeded in building a vast warren of dens underneath the house that some day, the whole lower end of the house would just – phoom! – drop deeper into the earth a foot or two.

We would shovel the mound of dirt back into the holes but within a couple hours, the groundhog would have completely cleared the opening (who needs a back-hoe with paws like that?). My mother had caught one in a trap and transported it to the fields about a mile down the back road to town, but a neighbor was convinced the groundhog had managed to run back faster than my mother could drive. The next day, there it was, sitting on the back porch, calmly eating one of the neighbor’s tomatoes.

The guys who’d dug the wells for my geothermal installation this summer told me to toss an onion into the hole: groundhogs hate the smell of onions and would vacate the premises. So I did that (feeling like Bruce Willis yelling “fire in the hole!”) and a few days later, found the onion tossed out on the dirt about two feet from the opening.

Then I got an idea: I tried it first on the readily accessible one out back, dumping into both the main hole and its emergency exit about five pans of well-used cat litter, then covering them with a few shovelfuls of dirt. After a couple of undisturbed weeks, I figured perhaps this could be the answer, so I crawled behind the arbor-vitae out front and did the same thing there. I do not want to feel smug about this, should I have won this round, because I’m sure he’s planning his revenge, whether it’s reclaiming his old homestead (which has been in his family for how many generations, after all) or excavating newer and possibly larger digs in a less welcome spot, not that I am likely to run out of well-used cat litter. Three days later, there has still been no sign of the rodent but it can only be a matter of time. Having grown up on Bugs Bunny cartoons, I am well aware you don’t mess around with Nature.

And with the cooler weather, I have now turned on my heat to see how well the new geothermal system is working. I know the biggest test for the air-conditioning will come next summer after I’m able to compare those electric bills with this past summer’s. Though August’s bill contained the last three days of old-fashioned air-conditioning which I was running heavily during a 90-degree heat wave (if they were going to tear out the old system and I could be without a/c for a few days, I wanted to build up a well of cooler air in the house, as if that would help, and so it was running almost constantly, probably the heaviest use all summer), but it was also the first summer electric bill in years under $100 – in the past two years, they might range from $120-150 depending on the a/c use, and that was to keep it around 78-80°. I’ll have to go back through my mother’s files, though, to find out exactly (she kept everything: I could tell you how much she paid for fuel oil in 1960, the first winter we lived in the house – it’s all in this one box).

I already know how my fuel bills will compare to last winter’s, not including the $300 for the annual service check-ups and much-needed maintenance policies (especially for a furnace pushing 50), when I spent over $3,300 on oil. It was tough writing those checks for $16,000 once the geothermal project was complete, but in two or three years, it will have paid for itself, including what it would have cost to replace the existing fossil-burning system. In August, I could run the new air-conditioning to keep the house at 72-74° and the electric meter barely budged. So far, the heat has worked equally well, once I figured out the computorial complications of the thermostat which, eventually, I’ll keep at 68°. Of course, now they’re talking about removing the “rate-caps” on electricity – I guess it’s their turn, now: the oil companies have been raking in the profits as gas prices soar and there are struggling CEOs out there who see themselves losing out on the market – so now they say our electric bills may increase 40-43%. I’ll jump off that bridge when we get to it. Who knows what a barrel of oil will cost by then, anyway?

Despite the dire news, the depressing political campaign and its implications for the future, the on-going wars and the fact that seven years later Osama bin Laden is still at large, despite the fact I have no income at the moment (or certainly not enough so far to pay even one month’s health care coverage) and the composition I’m working on is going far too slowly, I sat on this garden bench in my back yard, enjoying the late-afternoon sun of a beautiful Autumn day, watching the birds and the chipmunks, almost oblivious of the dull, ever-present roar of the highway a quarter-of-a-mile away, and feel oddly contented with my life at this point and don’t really know why. True, I’m easily the happiest I’ve been in years and though not exactly healthy, healthier than I’ve felt in a couple of years as well, or less mindful of it.

One afternoon, I was reading about Brahms toward the end of his career, fearful his 4th Symphony could be a disaster because it was too intellectual for even his most intellectual friends, but yet not changing it, much less destroying it as he did two subsequent attempts at writing another symphony. Over the years, I have heard Elliott Carter doggedly following his own integrities in spite of critical reactions or his lack of popular acclaim, writing only to satisfy himself and hoping that, among the small elite audience interested in classical music there are, in the even smaller elite audience interested in contemporary classical music, enough listeners who would find a comfort level with his music to make it worth his while to bother picking up a pencil and putting notes down on paper, the daily struggle of any composer (or artist) worth the brain-cells it takes to be creative.

When I first began to understand that this subjective world of Art – especially music, particularly composing and performing it – was the application of something logical to achieve an illogical response, I never thought I would so easily accept such a balance in my own life. And yet, there it is. For now.

The Times of Their Lives: Concertante with Mozart, Britten & Brahms

Concertante opened their new season with a concert at the Rose Lehrman Center at the Harrisburg Area Community College Wildwood Campus Saturday night. The program opened with the Oboe Quartet by Mozart, then followed with another staple of the oboist’s repertoire but not one that well known, the Phantasy Quartet by Benjamin Britten. After intermission, we heard a rousing rendition of Brahms’ 2nd String Quintet, the G Major Op. 111.

Opening concerts are a bit like a home-coming, if not for the musicians playing them, then for the musicians and the audience gathering together for a whole new season. An oboist from Israel, Dudu Carmel, was to join them for the Mozart and Britten but unfortunately it was discovered too late he had not applied in time for his visa and so he was unable to join them. I’m not sure if “scrambling” was the word, but when you’re trying to find a “sub” a couple of weeks before the concert, hoping you don’t have to change the repertoire – fortunately the Mozart and the Britten are likely to be in any free-lance oboist’s play-book – it doesn’t make life easier getting things organized for the very first concert.

Fortunately, they found Robert Ingliss. In addition to playing with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and being the Acting Principal Oboist for the New Jersey Symphony, he also plays in the New York-based ensemble An die Musik (where I’d first heard Gerard Reuter back in the ‘70s and have more recently heard him with the Fry Street Quartet at Market Square Concerts’ Summermusics (in fact, at one of those concerts, playing the Britten Phantasy Quartet). He teaches at Columbia University among other universities in New York City and vicinity. He recently gave the world premiere of a new work by Charles Wuorinen at Carnegie Hall and has also premiered works by Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt and a French composer whose Violin Concerto I’ve found fascinating, Michel Dalbavie.

Two examples of the expression attributed to Henry James, “There are not enough people to go around in the world” –

(1) Ingliss is also a member of the Cygnus Ensemble which has a Harrisburg connection in its guitarist, William Anderson, whose parents, Dotty & Bill, are very active in the local arts scene.

(2) Ingliss attended the University of Connecticut, his last year at UConn being my first year there as a teacher of theory and composition (I mean, how many oboists in the country could be named Robert Ingliss, right? I had to ask...).

The Mozart Oboe Quartet – always too short – is always a delight to hear. The outer movements are some of Mozart’s most joyful, classical decorum (that powdered-wig stereotype we often associate with 18th Century music) held in abeyance for fifteen minutes you wish you could hang on to forever. The slow movement’s sorrowful aria gives way to what would, in the next generation, become emotional Romanticism. It’s the last movement that stays with me the longest, though, despite its brevity. This is music without a care in the world and it was clear the players were having a fun time playing it.

The quartet is really a mini-concerto for the oboist and it was great to hear Ingliss navigate its long lyrical lines as well as its more virtuosic flourishes. Only at the end of the slow movement was there a slight shadow: would his reed hold out for that last long sustained high note? Fortunately, yes.

Though the Britten is darker and the Mozart just sounds like a good concert opener, I’m not sure it would be better to have a chance to “warm up” on the Britten or get the hard work of the Mozart out of the way. Toss up.

Britten’s “Phantasy Quartet” is more of an integrated ensemble for the four players. For a while, I was trying to remember if the oboist plays at all in the more lyrical middle section. Where the string trio was primarily an accompanist in the Mozart, Britten uses his instruments independently and gave each player separate lines and often independent layers which everybody handled to make a convincing whole of the piece.

It’s hard to believe that Brahms considered himself “written out” when he composed this glorious romp of a quintet at what he thought would be the end of his career. The biggest challenge, once you’ve got all those notes down, is to maintain the volume level he requires: it’s a very loud piece! And just as you think it can’t get any louder or faster, he turns the dial up another notch. Clara Schumann called the ending “magnificent confusion” but there was no confusion in Concertante’s handling of the entire piece, from the wall of sound the cellist has to cut through at the opening, to the melting adagio, to the autumnal intermezzo before the mad dash of the gypsy band in the finale.

The opening is a famous example of stubborn composer versus practical musician: violinist Joseph Joachim told Brahms it would take three cellists to be heard against the other players all sawing away on these sixteenth notes that look clearly like they should be “behind” the theme, not covering it. But Brahms stuck to his guns and joked that he would leave it to the performers to work out. Everyone is marked to play at the same dynamic level – forte – though it struck me (literally as well as figuratively) more like fortissimo which leaves not much room to expand by the time they reach the fortissimo at the very end. Perhaps it’s a trick of the acoustic in the hall, what might sound okay to the players on the stage coming across louder to the audience. Perhaps they should’ve cut back a tad on the opening and not have to work so hard for the first 25 measures, that’s one thing, but if Brahms was honest about his inspiration for the piece – a friend said it reminded him of a night at the Prater, Vienna’s famous amusement park and Brahms told him he’d guessed right – maybe his intent was trying to depict overhearing someone talking in the hubbub of a crowd out on the town?

As for the title of this post, whether the members of Concertante had “the times of their lives” or not, I can’t say – they certainly had a good time – but for this program, my pre-concert talk – attended by about 20 people which I thought was pretty good, considering we didn’t have a lot of publicity about the talk beforehand – was entitled from the viewpoint of the composers, “The Times of Their Lives.”

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Britten had been playing the piano since the time he could walk and improvising almost immediately, trying to write things down before he even learned the rudiments of notation, becoming more sophisticated by the time he was 9. He often played the piano to his mother's singing and attended rehearsals of the choirs she sang in – she had a fine mezzo voice that one friend of the composer’s later described as being surprisingly close to the tone color of tenor Peter Pears’ voice (Pears would later become Britten’s life-partner). He also studied viola with a family friend who played in a string quartet in a nearby town.

At 11, he heard his first live orchestra concert which included “The Sea” by Frank Bridge which, in Britten’s own words, “knocked me sideways.” In the year before he turned 14 and started studying with Bridge, the boy composed two overtures, five Poemes, the Suite fantastique for piano and orchestra, a Symphony in D Minor for an orchestra that included eight horns (according to David Matthews’ 2003 biography, apparently Britten wrote 117 pages of full score in five weeks during school term plus two of the Poemes), and a large scale symphonic poem, Chaos and Cosmos!

A fan of the music of Beethoven and Brahms, much of which he could play from memory, he also discovered Ravel’s String Quartet. On his 16th Birthday, his parents gave him a score of Beethoven’s Fidelio and he referred to this as a “red-letter day in my life.” It was at that time, also, he discovered the music of Arnold Schoenberg, hearing a radio concert that included Pierrot Lunaire and shortly afterward he composed a piece for him and his friends to play that was atonal in several places. He went to London to be interviewed for the Royal College of Music a few months later, and the panel (which included the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams) thought it wasn’t ‘decent’ for a schoolboy to be writing such music. Still, they offered him a scholarship. He chose a score for Pierrot Lunaire as one of his prizes at school graduation and then wrote what Matthews calls the “ne plus ultra of his modernist pieces,” which Britten, leaving it untitled, referred to as a “not-too-nice piece for viola solo.”

During his first year at the Royal College of Music, Britten wrote a String Quartet in D Major (which he revised and published near the end of his life) – there had been several smaller quartets and quartet-movements before – and a Sinfonietta which would become his Opus 1. His Op. 2 was the “Phantasy Quartet” for Oboe and Strings which, at least in part, sounds more like the mature Britten, not that there weren’t recognizable fingerprints in many of these earlier works. Though his fondness for Beethoven was waning – Brahms, soon, became “solid & dull” – it seems Mozart was becoming more of an influence, at least in the sense of his linear clarity and sense of formal control. Britten tired of the “turbulent” music he had been writing, full of “gestures” and this shift of style was obvious in these recent works.

There was a fellow named William Wilson Cobbett who championed the idea of composers writing “Phantasies” – distinguished from the more traditional “Fantasies,” however one distinguished them in pronunciation – because he felt it harkened back to the glorious days of Elizabethan England and free-form works written then for what were called “consorts of viols.” Vaughan Williams had written one – either commissioned by or at least requested by Cobbett – in 1912. Britten wrote two Phantasies when he was 18, the first one a quintet for strings alone which won him the annual “Cobbett Prize,” one assumes for works with the word “Phantasy” in the title. Adding an oboe would not be “hoyle” according to Elizabethan standards as that would be called a “broken consort” (a mixed ensemble of strings and winds): it was performed at the school – badly, according to the composer, though he expected worse – but did not win a prize. It was also publically performed on a concert series founded by an all-women’s quartet and the composer Elizabeth Lutyens to showcase the latest English composers (rather than the staid “pastoralists” like Vaughan Williams).

Interestingly, I found reference to a 1975 publication by psychologist Melanie Klein which described Phantasy as a state-of-mind of an infant stemming “from genetic needs, drives and instincts. They appear in symbolic form in dreams, play and neuroses. They are constructed from internal and external reality, modified by feelings, and emotions, and then projected into both real and imaginary objects. Phantasies are the means by which infants make sense of the external world and hence relate to it through projection and introjection.” This is somehow different from the adult Fantasy which is more of a day-dream, an imagined un-reality in which we may try to imagine a future reality.

Usually in music, a “fantasy” means merely something that is free-formed and perhaps dreamy in nature (Mozart’s almost nightmarish Fantasy in C Minor, K.475) , or built on impressions of someone else’s music (as in a “Fantasy on Themes from Bizet’s Carmen”) more loosely than, say, a set of variations.

Britten’s Phantasy, regardless of its psychological or historical implications, is the first piece he wrote with a processional and recessional, figuratively if not literally. The opening section is a rather shadowy march that begins quietly with the cello, then adding the other parts in layers, each with different material. At the end, this process is reversed until the cello repeats its little march-like rhythm, alternating on two notes, each time shortened until it evaporates. This section sounds the most like “mature” Britten, full of ideas and sonorities that would become hallmarks heard in his most familiar works. He would use this processional / recessional in works like the Church Parables of the 1960s, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn & Strings (where the solo horn opens with a kind of fanfare that, at the end, is then played off-stage) and most famously in The Ceremony of Carols.

The middle part is something Britten did not return to, stylistically. It is more lyrical and harmonically more Beethoven-ish compared to the sparer March. Whatever his reasons were for not pursuing this style – just one of many a young composer might explore – I have no idea, but it struck me listening to this Saturday night (and I’ve heard the Phantasy live three times in the past two years or so, now) how much it reminded me of Michael Tippett, fellow British composer who, after Walton, would become regarded internationally as the major English composers of their generation. Tippett, I knew, grappled with Beethoven’s influence directly (as in his 3rd Symphony, quoting whole passages from Beethoven’s 9th) or indirectly (in all of his five string quartets) so it was interesting, the next day, to listen to Tippett’s 1st String Quartet (the earliest work of his I know) which he began about two years after Britten wrote this Phantasy: it’s not likely Britten could have influenced him because it’s unlikely Tippett would have heard much of his music. His recollections confused a concert in 1934 where he saw Britten for the first time when a work of his was on the program, with a concert a year later that was the premiere of his own 1st Quartet. Even though Tippett left the Royal College four years before Britten arrived but continued studying privately with one of its major teachers for the next few years, it’s more likely this aural similarity in styles stems from their admiration of Beethoven rather than an imitation of each other: these same fingerprints can be heard in music Britten wrote years earlier before their paths could have possibly crossed. Perhaps it was just something in the air at the time...

Anyway, the year after writing the Phantasy Quartet (when this photograph was taken), Britten won a travel scholarship from the RCM which he wanted to apply to going to Vienna so he could study with Alban Berg. It’s interesting that, having put Beethoven and Brahms behind him, he should find himself more attuned to the emotional music of Berg rather than the more intellectualized, classically-lined style of Schoenberg – he had heard Schoenberg conduct his Variations for Orchestra and found them lacking, mentioning in his diary that he’d met Schoenberg then but said nothing more about it, one way or another. He found Pierrot fascinating (perhaps it’s that dream-like state the work concocts, Phantasy or Fantasy) but “could not make head or tail of” the nightmarish world of Erwartung.

Now, serialism, still relatively new, was frowned upon in England where the attitude even to someone as “contemporary” as Mahler was extremely negative. (Keep in mind, England meant Elgar to the wider world: composers like Holst and Vaughan Williams were still very insular products – Richard Strauss, perhaps reacting to this lack of international acclaim for British composers, had referred to England as “the country without music”...) Britten’s hopes to study with the composer of Wozzeck foundered on the school’s concern that Berg would not be “a good influence.” His parents interpreted this not as musical influence but as a moral influence – after all, this is the man who wrote Wozzeck: what would they have thought of Lulu? – and so the plan was dropped.

Ironically, not long afterward, Britten and his mother, traveling on the Continent, went to Vienna which Britten loved, but unfortunately Berg was out of town then and they never met. Not much later, on Christmas Eve, 1935, Berg died unexpectedly at the age of 50 (from blood-poisoning following an insect-bite). Four months later, Britten went to a contemporary music festival in Spain to hear the premiere of Berg’s last completed work, his Violin Concerto, which he found to be “shattering.”

The possibilities in this influence – had Britten actually gone to Vienna to study with Berg – are just another of those great “What If?”s – how different would Britten’s style have become? What kind of works would he have written if he had not composed the ones he did, or how different would they have sounded?

A few years ago, I was at a “composers’ workshop” performance at Susquehanna University where a work of mine (as Class of ‘71) was being performed along with a work by a more recent graduate, David T. Little, a very fine composer. The students on the program were asking us questions like “When did you find your own voice?” I said, then in my mid-50s, I was still looking for it, having not composed for 16 years and facing my piece on the program written in 1979. David, then in his early-20s, said he hadn’t found what he thought might be his voice yet, either. We both agreed that it’s not something a young composer should be worried about: a student’s job is to write lots and lots of music, explore lots and lots of whatever catches his or her fancy (or perhaps “phancy”) and let the voice, consciously or unconsciously discarding these bits or absorbing those bits, eventually present itself over time.

That is what Britten was doing around the time he wrote his Op. 2 – some of it he kept, and some of it he rejected; influences came and went but he learned a little something from each of them and absorbed them into what we then recognize as Benjamin Britten.

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By the time Mozart wrote his Oboe Quartet, he was 25 and had been composing for about 19 years. While many of his earliest works would show the influence of his contemporaries (except for J.C. Bach, mostly unknown to us, today), he very early found a voice that not only defines Mozart for us today but the whole Classical Era (roughly 1750-1800). Mozart turned 25 in Munich where he’d been “on leave” from his post with the Archbishop of Salzburg. His primary job in Munich was to compose and produce the opera Idomeneo which, however successful it became, was not enough to land him the court composer’s position he was hoping for.

Around that time, he wrote the oboe quartet for the orchestra’s principal oboist, Friedrich Ramm, but finding himself with no reason to stay longer in Munich, he was forced to obey the Archbishop’s summons to join his court in Vienna. He arrived in the Imperial capital on March 16th and immediately began complaining about what he could be doing there if it weren’t for his meager responsibilities with the Archbishop. Now, he couldn’t just quit because it was a more feudal set-up than that: he had to have the Archbishop’s written release – otherwise, if he just ‘ran away,’ the Archbishop could send the police after him: he quite literally “owned” Mozart as a servant. But the Archbishop saw no reason to release Mozart. Months of negotiations led to nothing until finally, apparently in exasperation, the Archbishop’s chamberlain (not the Archbishop himself) gave Mozart “the boot” – also quite literally, giving him a swift kick in the butt on his way out the door.

Mozart was now free and on his own: he would pursue a livelihood as a pianist and teacher - and composer, the first major free-lance musician in an age when most successful musicians were either employed or wanted to be employed by some aristocrat. A month later, he received the libretto for an opera to be written for the Emperor’s court, The Abduction from the Seraglio, the one the Emperor thought had “too many notes.”

(By the way, this whole concept of employment vs free-lancing is an interesting topic: Beethoven, in Vienna during the decades following Mozart’s death, was also a free-lancer but survived on considerable financial support from various aristocrats, not the least of which was the Emperor’s younger brother. The distinction was, he was not “in servitude” to them. Today, we might call this patronage “underwriting.”)

But who knew that Mozart would only have ten more years to live? If the Oboe Quartet is K.370 and the Requiem left unfinished at his death about 7 weeks before his 36th Birthday is K.626, that means he wrote about 255 more works after the Oboe Quartet, among them most of his piano concertos, his greatest operas, the best of his chamber music and the last six symphonies. If he had written another 255 works in the next ten years, what else might we be listening to today?

Speaking of “What if?”, Haydn, who was 24 years older than Mozart, had gone off to London when he was almost 60: the assumption was, as he felt, he could die in England and never see his friend Mozart again. Who would have expected Haydn would return to Vienna to find Mozart had died at the age of 35? If Mozart had even outlived Haydn by one more year, he would’ve been only 54, but would have heard Beethoven’s first six symphonies and all of his concertos.

If he had lived to be as old as Haydn, dying instead in his mid-70s five years after Beethoven died, what might Mozart’s reaction have been to hearing Beethoven’s Late Quartets or his 9th Symphony... or for that matter, Schubert’s C Major String Quintet (if it had been played in public then) or, perhaps, Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique which was composed in 1830? If Mozart died at the same age as Haydn, he would have died the same year Brahms was born.

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If Brahms had died before his 36th birthday, he would not have completed his 1st Symphony or written any of the string quartets. That means he would have died a year after the German Requiem and a year before the Liebeslieder Waltzes.

Blessed with a few more years than Mozart, Brahms wrote his 2nd String Quintet when he was 57, the age Beethoven had been when he died. Brahms, he figured, had his whole life behind him, it seemed. It had taken him some 20-25 years to finish a first symphony but only a year or two to write each of his next two. The 1st did not have an easy success, especially in pleasure loving Vienna (too dramatic, too intellectual). When the 2nd Symphony, a more immediate success in Vienna, was first performed in Leipzig, it was criticized for being too “pretty” which might have been okay for Vienna, the critics wrote, but the good Germans of Leipzig preferred something with a little more to chew on than just pleasant tunes.

While his 3rd Symphony had been well received everywhere, he knew the new symphony he’d finished when he was 52 was going to be a challenge, maybe even a disaster. It was even too cerebral for his intellectual friends, the Herzogenbergs. Having passed 50, Brahms was now concerned perhaps he was “written out.” The reaction to his 4th Symphony was cool at best, even cooler for his next orchestral work, the Double Concerto (which, incidentally, the Harrisburg Symphony will play on its first concert of the new season, October 4th & 5th, with Kurt Nikkanen and Daniel Gaisford). So it was with some trepidation he began his summer holiday in 1890: he decided that perhaps this would be his last work – he would retire from composing.

He had found it difficult to get anything started in those years after the Double Concerto. Jan Swafford, in his biography of Brahms, says that Brahms had sketched TWO symphonies, one of which was apparently advanced enough to be played as a piano duet for his friends – the standard Brahmsian try-out. TWO symphonies – imagine what it might be like to have SIX symphonies, not four, by Johannes Brahms? But he was a very strict composer who never let anything go he wasn’t sure of: he said one of the most important things a composer could own was a wastebasket.

Brahms was a summer composer and he preferred to write in vacation spots away from the distractions of Vienna. In 1890, at Bad Ischl, he “tormented” himself by trying to write chamber music and a symphony. He came back to Vienna with the G Major String Quintet, Op. 111. Before he left Ischl, he wrote to his publisher and said he had thrown reams of paper into the river – usually he consigned his sketches and rejected works to the flames – and mentioned this quintet would be the last work he would compose.

It’s difficult to listen to this music and think he felt himself “dried up.” When a friend thought the opening reminded him of the Prater, the great amusement park in Vienna and a favorite haunt of Brahms’, the composer replied “You guessed it! And the beautiful girls are there!”

It’s possible the opening cello theme (all but lost under all those sawing 16th notes in the violins and violas) was intended for the symphony that otherwise never took shape. How much of the other ideas were originally intended for the symphony, who would know, after Brahms destroyed all the sketches. But it’s still tantalizing to hear this joyous work and wonder what those two symphonies or the other pieces that never came to fruition might have been like?

Here is Brahms, looking back on his career - but fortunately, he met a clarinetist whose sound he found inspiring and so he came out of retirement the following year to write a trio, a quintet and eventually two sonatas for the clarinet. And, by the way, three more sets of piano pieces, some choruses, the Four Serious Songs and a set of chorale preludes for organ.

I’ll leave you with these images.

This famous photograph was taken the summer of 1894, the summer of those Clarinet Sonatas, with Brahms standing on a porch beside Johann Strauss Jr, the “Waltz King” (of whom Brahms was a big fan – in Strauss’ daughter’s autograph book, he wrote out the theme from “The Beautiful Blue Danube” and underneath it, “alas, not by Johannes Brahms”). Strauss is slim and elegant, his curly black hair and mustache very dashing beside the rumpled Brahms, short and overweight with his long gray hair and beard. Strauss was eight years older than Brahms.

But earlier that year, at his 61st birthday celebration, as Swafford describes it, he and his friends went to a restaurant at the Prater to hear the gypsy musicians play – many of his finales were inspired by the gypsy style, not just all the Hungarian Dances: most famously, there’s the G Minor Piano Quartet, the Violin Concerto and the Op. 111 Quintet. They in turn gave Brahms a rousing chorus of Hoch soll er leben (the German equivalent of Happy Birthday). Then after dinner, Brahms and his friends went off to the amusement park, ending before midnight “at the slide and the haunted house.”

Now there’s an image to ponder as you listen to the Quintet Op. 111 – not the autumnal Brahms we associate with his “late music,” but the Brahms who could wrap up his birthday party by going down a playground slide...

The Cypress Quartet at Lebanon Valley College

Thursday night was the first time I’d heard the Cypress Quartet outside the old Next Generation Festival concerts. The first time had been twelve years ago at the very first “Next Gen” when they played the Brahms Piano Quintet and gave an amazing performance of Beethoven’s A Minor Quartet, Op. 132. During the years in between, there were maybe two other performances I heard and many that, because of my work schedule, I missed, though there were also a few recordings to savor as well.

So while I’ve heard them grow over the full extent of their career, it has not been a consistent sampling. But one thing has certainly been consistent: their continued growth as an ensemble. I don’t know how many times they’ve come back to Lebanon Valley College to perform, a relationship that also began as part of the Next Generation Festival, but people around me last night were saying “they get better every year.” I may not be able to vouch for the “every year” part but I would certainly agree with the “get better” part.

This concert included three works – Haydn’s last completed quartet which, I discovered, I was actually hearing live for the first time (even with recordings, I don’t think I’ve heard it more than once or twice: I certainly wasn’t familiar with it); Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge (very familiar), the original finale to one of the Late Quartets; and Debussy’s only quartet (which, frankly, I’d heard so often before, I was not looking forward to hearing it again).

What I enjoy about this ensemble is the way they get “into” the music and bring out more of it for us to listen to, not just “wow, they’re really INTO it” (though, yeah, that, too).

How is that different from any other string quartet? It’s just four people, right: you put two violinists, a violist and a cellist together in the same room, have them play a piece of music and there it is, right?

Well, not exactly...

Contrary to what people may think, groups like this don’t always just get together when they’ve got a gig: some ensembles may spend a week getting a program ready; others play together full-time. When you play with the same people every day, year after year, and often play the same basic repertoire on your programs, you become familiar with how your colleagues are going to think and you have the luxury of getting beyond “just playing the notes.” This is the luxury of a full-time professional quartet, but also a challenge.

Talking with second violinist Tom Stone after the performance last night – our first conversation twelve years ago had been over an after-concert drink, talking mostly about Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite” – he mentioned how they were not like a lot of quartets who were put together in school or at a summer music festival (or, for that matter, like the Ying Quartet, three brothers and a sister who all grew up together in the same family). They were free-lance musicians who needed to make a living but decided to make the commitment to making this quartet work by dedicating lots and lots of time – like rehearsing six hours a day – to reach that goal. And this is, after all, their “day job.”

The Debussy Quartet was on their very first program twelve years ago, he said in remarks before they played it. There was so much in the piece they discovered while first working on it – though he said jokingly, looking back at his colleagues, “that first performance was... uh, was kinda rough...” And ever since they’ve kept coming back to it and discovering more.

However many times they’ve played it in the years in between - and recorded it - this was the first time I’d heard them play it. It sounded to me like they were approaching it with the same excitement they’d have after having just discovered it for the first time. Except for one thing: they weren’t playing it like everybody else. They were bringing to this overly familiar war-horse something that often gets lost in the “yet-another-performance” syndrome that affects many performances and listeners – the “here-we-go-again,” “dig-out-the-tried-and-true” approach that, regardless of technical flawlessness, never manages to get beyond the surface of the music.

It’s not one of those things you can easily put a finger on, much less describe in words (not that that’s going to stop me). Without a score in front of me, could I say they were doing it correctly when others were not? Or were they adding things not in the composer’s written-down intentions that other groups hadn’t thought of? How much of this was their own interpretation – and how much “interpretation” is beyond what the composer called for or, at least, implied?

Ever since I was a kid learning to play the piano, I’ve heard the expression “the music lies between the notes.” It’s not just getting your fingers in the right places at the right times, playing the right notes in the right rhythms. Learning how to make music out of all that, finding what’s between those notes, is the performer’s real challenge, and then completing the equation by communicating that to the listener.

A lot of this, a would-be musician learns by listening. The problem is too often young musicians imitate what they hear rather than thinking it out for themselves. And too often this is reinforced by teachers or other performers. If it’s one option, that’s fine, but even as a conducting student I was told the tempo I was taking at the beginning of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture was too fast. “But,” I argued, “Beethoven writes in the score Sostenuto which is not a tempo” (it means sustained). “The real tempo comes in later – the beat pulse here should be the same.” “Yes,” he countered, “but I’ve never heard anyone take it that fast.” He indicated what he thought was a suitably slow tempo. “But that’s not what Beethoven wrote in the score.” Fortunately, I found a recording – by Toscanini, for better or worse – that took the faster tempo I was arguing for. “Well,” he said begrudgingly, “okay...” Was it Toscanini, today often held up as a bad example, who declared “tradition is only the last bad performance”?

Rather than examine the score (the printed music, what the composer wrote), too many performers today listen to recordings (how what the composer wrote is interpreted) and then pick and choose what they feel best suits them. Imitating a performance might let a student know how it could go – since there’s really no single way it SHOULD go – but it doesn’t help a student figure out WHY it could go that way.

That’s what I liked about what I heard the Cypress Quartet doing with the Debussy.

Too many performances and recordings I’d heard play the piece as a lushly romantic wash of pretty sounds: Debussy, after all, was an Impressionist, a pigeon-hole he never liked but since it reminded people of those Impressionist painters of the day, there was no way to avoid it.

Debussy was also a slow, painstaking composer who agonized a long time over whether to use this chord or that chord. It’s got to be more than he was just unwilling to make a commitment: he was probably looking for the best sonority for that moment, not just slap-dashing notes down on the page because “oh, that sounds nice!”

Debussy has never been an easy composer for me to love: certainly, I like a lot of his music but it never really spoke to me. Part of this may be because he is, despite his dislike of the painterly term, a composer inspired by the visual element. Most of his pieces have titles that suggest or prompt certain images in the listener’s mind, whether it’s a garden in the rain or a child’s toy. I am not a visually oriented person so it’s quite possible that’s why much of his music eludes me. As a like-minded friend of mine once put it, “I like La Mer: every time I hear it, it’s like hearing it for the first time,” but in the context and tone of voice implying it is also immensely forgettable.

But his only String Quartet, written in 1893 (the same year Brahms was writing his last piano pieces, Op. 118 & Op. 119, by the way) is simply that – an abstract string quartet where the movements are indicated by tempos like Animé et très décidé, not “Reflections of Moonlight on the Steps of the Temple.” But then, this is considered “Early Debussy” despite the fact he was 30 – making, I guess, derivative juvenalia like his Piano Trio written at 17 “Pre-Early” – yet all that is fairly relative when you consider when he wrote two of his more famous pieces: the piano piece Clair de lune from the Suite Bergamasque predates the quartet by four years; the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was written the following year. Between these picturesque pieces, a string quartet, considered a German form in late-19th Century France, could seem the Odd-Piece-Out.

The Sonata Form was also essentially a German Form. And French composers felt, perhaps out of patriotism as much as anything, that it needed to be adapted their own way. French taste shied away from such Germanic things as fugal counterpoint (what Satie called “sauerkraut”) and the obsessive development one finds in so much German music: they preferred melody and color, perhaps, over rigidity of form and harmony.

But this is also part of the French Personality, more laid back and laissez-faire compared to the German (and specifically Prussian) attitude toward detail, exactness and promptness (a friend of mine from Berlin would be pointing excitedly at his watch because we were now two minutes late) . Ned Rorem would break everything down to be either French or German along similar guidelines, even other national stereotypes: the Japanese, to him, are German and the Chinese, French! (Think about it...)

So the French took their Sonata Form and put less emphasis on the development section and crafted memorable melodies that would come back in other movements – forgetting that Beethoven had done the same thing in a few key works like his 5th and 9th Symphonies – something they called “cyclical form,” even though it’s not really a form but a structural device to unite a multi-movement work. Part of the problems Germanic listeners have with this technique is that “it’s just the same tune!” They expected something to have “happened” to the theme by then, becoming transformed – you know, the way Mahler does in his symphonies (“good German symphonies, Mahler,” you could almost hear them adding).

So it’s surprising to realize that Debussy builds almost everything in this four movement work out of four basic pitches – G -F - D- F# – a motive which lies behinds the themes. Consciously or not, these various themes will all sound different but still connected. There’s a subtly here that manages to create a great deal of variety while using the same material – things keep coming back in slightly different ways but it all sounds like something cut from the same cloth.

Debussy was famous for having flunked his harmony class at the Conservatoire – giving generations of students, including mine, the courage to say “if Debussy could do it...” What these same students forget is that his teacher, after marking up his papers with tons of corrections and comments, could still admit “everything is wrong but he is talented, there can be no doubt about that,” a qualification that could not always be made about my students who also forgot that at the time Debussy was 12. He had, certainly, even then, his own ideas about things, but that doesn’t mean he discarded the use of Rules completely, just Those Rules.

People sometime object, consciously or not, to the “impressionistic” music of Debussy because it doesn’t sound like the music they’re more familiar with, not that it’s “ugly and dissonant,” just “unsettling.” Dissonant, perhaps, but in the sense that chords that (according to the old rules) need to resolve in certain expected ways do not. When you are using a scale that is not the same as the traditional major or minor scale, you create harmony that does not move in the same expected ways: if it’s the whole-tone scale which doesn’t include that interval, the perfect fifth, that is at the root of all Classical Harmony, you create chords that don’t even sound like they need to go ANYwhere. And so performers create a sound that becomes static and directionless, as if “forward motion” in music could not be accomplished in other ways.

What the Cypress Quartet does, examining the printed music in front of them, is find the ways that Debussy replaces these traditional “classical” expectations with his own, how he moves the harmony forward by creating certain consistencies (whether or not he’d think of them as “rules”) and how he builds toward climactic points, using rhythm, tempo, texture, even the register the instruments are playing in and of course elements of contrast. Suddenly I’m hearing “structure” where before it was just pretty shapes and images, as if this “skin” were not held together by muscles and bones.

And I’m sitting there thinking, “huh, Debussy with structure! Who knew?!” This is the first time I’ve heard the piece where I thought it was worth listening to. (But then, there may have been some “French” listeners in the hall who were squeamish because to them it was too pedantic, too... German!)

It’s not like this is a revolutionary way of looking at music. “Analyzing” is a term I dislike because it implies the psychological obsession with detail (as in “he’s so totally anal” which is not to imply he’s necessarily being an ass-hole) that so often loses the overall picture to focus on the minuscule. It’s not like other groups don’t do this: they just find something different or maybe, if they find nothing compelling, they just play it the way they’ve heard other people play it.

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When I was talking with Tom Stone after the concert about the Late Beethoven Quartets they’re in the process of recording, I asked how you deal with such saturation in a work that is as emotionally draining as, say, the C-sharp Minor Quartet, Op.131. In several of his last works, Beethoven creates a whole different world that is both universal and intensely personal, absorbing everything we experience and chewing it up in ways that don’t always get put back together. Finding the music between these notes often takes a heavy physical toll (playing that intensely for that long a period of uninterrupted time) as well as an emotional toll. He said, “it was like getting knocked down, emotionally, then pack up your instrument, go home and try to get some sleep. But eventually there comes a time when you realize, after a performance, you’re still standing and you begin to come to terms with this music. You begin to find other things in it that didn’t strike you before” (pun not necessarily intended). It’s not always this granitic, monolithic Beethoven – they’ve found humor in the midst of the turmoil (just as you might in real life) that could make their interpretations, here, kind of controversial when the recordings come out. We’ll see – the first in the series could be released this spring.

Not to ignore the fact they also played on this program, as I joked with them on Facebook, “a little Beethoven.” The Grosse Fuge is hardly “little” even though it’s ‘only’ a single movement. Originally it had been the finale of the B-flat Major Quartet, Op. 130 an already long and taxing work – for both players and audience – and somehow Beethoven, a stubborn man, was talked into replacing it with a new, easier finale, publishing the Fugue by itself as Op. 133. (As an encore they joked about playing the rest of Op.130, but then played just a short movement from it, the “alla tedesca” dance movement that balances the even briefer scherzo – which they said they chose just for me).

Even by itself, the Fugue is monumental. It still sounds very “contemporary” today, certainly atypical for 1826: what did listeners and performers make of this music then? What would the course of 19th Century Music have been like if this piece had become the standard that other composers imitated? It might make you think of Wagner or Brahms, but their music was 30-50 years down the road!

I’m listening to this and thinking more Ives and Carter, myself. One of the hallmarks of their very 20th Century styles was a “conversational” approach to the music, as if four people are sitting around the table, talking and arguing, more than a traditional “call and response” statement of themes, where a melody in the violin might be answered and expanded by the cello. Certainly, Beethoven’s players state, argue, re-state and expound on the opening theme, stated in unison at the outset like an agreed-on Topic-for-Discussion. And there’s humor here, too, for so dramatic a piece – after a long stretch of furious fortissimo followed by another long stretch of, by comparison, almost static pianissimo, you think an agreement has been reached and it’s about to wrap up but then suddenly someone adds a little something more and once again, bang, they’re off. Even the conclusion, once you finally get there, takes a while to conclude: and when it does it’s almost like they all agreed “enough!” and stop.

Another hall-mark of Ives’ and Carter’s styles is the juxtaposing of tempos, where one strand of the music moves as if at one speed and another moves at a seemingly different speed. You might hear almost clock-like ticking in a theme that sounds like it’s all quarter notes, but those quarter notes have nothing to do with the written beat. Beethoven does this by placing the “audible downbeat” off-the-beat which you’re not aware of until the other players come in, playing ON the beat. This is an old trick, perhaps – theorists of previous centuries called it “arsin and thesin,” where something you’d heard on the strong beat now gets placed on a weaker beat. If you’re in 4/4, the strong downbeat is on “1” but if you restate the phrase and begin it on “3" it has a different feel about it, especially if the other parts stick to the standard “strong-beat-on-1." Brahms might do this for a whole musical paragraph, placing that strong beat now on “4" or maybe even “4½” so that you feel you’ve dropped a beat somewhere: as it progresses, your sense of the downbeat has shifted aurally to what you hear (and you’re wondering what the hell’s wrong with the conductor), and then, bang, everything comes back to the standard “downbeat-on-1" and your toe-tapping is thrown off all over again. Beethoven is doing the same thing throughout this fugue and it makes the work rhythmically exciting because it’s full of these unexpectancies.

This theme in what sounds like square-cut quarter-notes is played against an almost convulsive backdrop of propulsive dotted rhythms that threaten to overwhelm the topic of discussion. The harmony associated with this – and the theme almost defies anything easily harmonizable – is also dissonant and hyperactive: at times, it’s like Beethoven is challenging you to “Find the Tonality.” What key are you in? Think so? Guess again - and off he goes. If people had trouble hanging on to old-fashioned tonality when Wagner wrote Tristan und Isolde 30 years later, this must have sounded like a wall of noise to people who still remembered when Mozart and Haydn were new!

When these great stretches of argument finally come together, the sense of everybody playing in the same chords on the same beats must have sounded like a great relief. But the quartet brings to these passages a sly wink, knowing in a second things will turn on a dime: just when you think it’s safe to relax, once more they’re off, dragging you right along with them. Even today, it sounds “really wild,” as I overheard someone say about it at intermission.

It amazed me, thinking back to that first encounter with this group, playing Late Beethoven (Op. 132) twelve years ago. They were about 8 or 9 months old as a quartet playing together, and yet they played that challenging work with a sense of depth and excitement that would have convinced they’d been playing together for years.

I still remember vividly from that concert back in 1997, a young boy (possibly not even 10 years old) sitting in the front row leaning forward in rapt attention, fully focused on the players during the long slow movement – the famous “Heiliger Dankgesang” or “Holy Song of Thanksgiving” – which, at some 20 minutes, has been known to test the attention span of even seasoned adult concert-goers. When it was over, he sat back in his seat and looked over at his mother with a wide-eyed expression that was clearly “Wow!”

Now, part of the appearance with the Cypress Quartet at Lebanon Valley College – it’s a residency, not just a recital – is their playing and talking to students and not just those at the college. Many in the audience were from high schools and middles schools who’d heard them earlier in the day: about a half-dozen came backstage with their teacher and were clearly very excited about having heard the concert, too. Friday’s events were to involve 500 kids (mostly middle school, from what I gathered) with a concert, lessons and “a practice seminar.”

This was one of the few classical music concerts I’ve ever attended – whether it was on a campus or not – where the average age was easily under 21. There were a lot more kids than middle-aged and senior adults. Would it ever be possible that might become the norm for the future?

With a group like this, with their commitment to reaching young listeners and with their compelling performances, it might just work.

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Following their second Lunar Tour, they’ll be back at Lebanon Valley College next year. However, if you don’t want to wait that long and you’re in the Baltimore area, the Cypress Quartet will be playing this same program to open the concert series at the Catonsville Presbyterian Church, Sunday (tomorrow) at 3:00!

Two Concerts This Week - and some Social Security

Two concerts are on my radar this week – 7:30 tonight with the Cypress Quartet who’ve flown in from San Francisco for their annual residency at Lebanon Valley College; and Concertante with the opening of their new season, Saturday night at 8:00 at the Rose Lehrman Center at Harrisburg Area Community College (I’ll be doing the pre-concert talk at 7:15).

I first met the Cypress Quartet at the very first of WITF’s Next Generation Festivals with Awadagin Pratt, way back when. They played the Brahms F Minor Piano Quintet (of course) with Awadagin but my strongest memory of that concert was their Beethoven A Minor Quartet, Op.132, especially the long slow movement known as the “Heiliger Dankgesang” (Holy Song of Thanksgiving). Since then, they’ve been back in the mid-state several times and I’ve never had much chance to see them – unless it was, like, a more recent Next Generation Festival. They’ve recently established an annual residency at Lebanon Valley College: I missed last year’s, of course, because I was working but hey, this time, I’m not working!! So I’m definitely looking forward to hearing - and seeing - them again.

They’ll play Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” the original finale of another Late Beethoven Quartet – which cellist Jennifer Kloetzel told me still sounds very contemporary – it’s even in the spot on a program where you might program a more recent contemporary work.

About Beethoven’s “Great Fugue” (as it officially translates), Alex Ross wrote on his blog, The Rest Is Noise, that
— — — —
Arnold Schoenberg heard it as a premonition of atonality, a call for freedom from convention. (“Your cradle was Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge,” Oskar Kokoschka once said to Schoenberg.) Benjamin Britten... was heard to complain that Beethoven’s late works were at times willfully bizarre, prophetic of avant-garde, obscurantist tendencies.
— — — —

With Haydn before and Debussy after, it will certainly sound more contemporary in that context – something to consider when you realize Beethoven wrote it 182 years ago, only 26 years after Haydn wrote his last complete quartet, the work that opens the program. It’s a whole different world!

The Cyrpess Quartet frequently goes out into the schools, playing for and working with students across the country. Watch their video of an excerpt from the Debussy Quartet here (no fire sirens, unlike their performance earlier this week in Elmira, NY, marred by passing firetrucks: they must’ve been really smokin’!).

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Concertante opens their new season with guest oboist Robert Ingliss, stepping in for the originally scheduled performer who lives in Israel but forgot to apply for a visa in time to make the concert. There are two works on the program for oboe and strings: the Oboe Quartet by Mozart (K. 370, what we’d call “Mature Mozart:” he was 25 when he wrote it), and the “Phantasy Quartet” by Benjamin Britten (Early Britten, his second published work, written when he was 19). The program concludes with the G Major String Quintet by Johannes Brahms (he was 57 and saying he was going to retire from composing). Again, the concert’s at Harrisburg Area Community College this Saturday at 8 and I’ll be doing a pre-concert talk back in the Black Box (I guess) at 7:15.

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This past Saturday night, we had tickets for Theatre Harrisburg’s opening of the season, a production of a play called “Social Security” which I’d seen before. Contrary to what might be your first impression, it is not a primer for the Middle-Aged on the verge of Medicare. It’s a delightful family comedy about two very different sisters contending with caring for their elderly mother. It begins with her as a cantankerous stereotype, demanding and uncaring, hiding half-eaten gumballs all over the house; it ends quite differently with a transformation that can be heart-warming as well as thought-provoking.

The play runs through this Sunday at the theater’s “uptown campus” (read “the old building”) at 6th & Hurlock Streets. This is the Krevsky Center which had been redesigned more for rehearsal use after the company took up residence at Harrisburg’s downtown Whitaker Center. Recently, they began holding smaller productions there that would otherwise be lost at the Sunoco Performance Theater. They still have their big musicals – like next month’s “Sound of Music” – at Whitaker, but there’s a more intimate feel to the plays and productions uptown.

For those unfamiliar with the current space, it’s not just walking back into the old theater. It’s a small stage and a small but malleable seating area. Usually, it’s very straight-forward, but one of the productions last season was done “in the round” (sort of) which they never would’ve been able to do at Whitaker. On the other hand, elaborate productions like the excellent Mikado that ended last season – which I’d blogged about shortly before the demise of my other blog – would be impossible uptown. While they’d done some very impressive musicals at the Old Theater in the past – Sweeney Todd comes immediately to mind – seeing The Sound of Music in the present bare-bones space would probably test ones “suspension of belief.”

Andrew Bergman (no relation, theatrically, to Ingmar) wrote “Social Security” in the mid-80s. There are two sisters who seem polar opposites: Barb, hip art dealer living in Manhattan and Trudy, a prim suburban housewife from Long Island (here played as if she were a librarian who’s lost her calling) and each appropriately married. Barb’s husband David is an equally hip art dealer and Trudy’s husband Martin is a methodically low-key accountant. Into Barb and David’s hectic New York life thumps Mom and her walker – the widow Sophie Greengrass, verging on dementia – when Trudy and Martin, who’ve been caring for her in their home for several years. , drop her off unexpectedly.

It is certainly inconvenient to have Mom living with them in their busy lives – the age-old dilemma of mature adults now caring for their aging parents – especially when they’re expecting for dinner one of the great artists of the day who is planning a major exhibit for his impending 100th birthday. Just as Barb is arguing with her mother about changing for dinner and succeeds in getting her out of her house-dress, though not quite the way she had planned, her husband arrives with the artist. Without giving too much away, the ensuing change for dinner is more than just her clothes. At first, it didn’t make sense, just as it doesn’t make sense to Barb & David.

Which is only the start of their “suspension of belief” as this chance meeting blossoms into the kind of romance you don’t normally find in Romantic Comedies. By the final scene, Mom has moved in with the artist and is planning on going to France with him. Perhaps Sophie just grew tired of acting like everybody expected her to act and decided to be herself, one last time, if nothing else just to prove that “old people” have feelings – even sex! – as well as even having hope.

The cast was well-suited to their roles: Lisa Werner and Edward Cohn handled the extroverted Barb and David with their various ups and downs with the kind of ease that makes you forget you’re watching people act (each making their debut with the company, it will be good seeing them in future roles), and while Grace Gross and Craig Stouffer as Trudy and Martin may have at timed seemed a little uncomfortable when things got emotional, it was easy to accept the more introverted characters would not have handled it better themselves in their natural habitat. Only Charles Smith was a little wooden as the artist Maurice Koenig but then he’s playing a 98-year-old man, so perhaps it could also fit the character rather than the spryer kind of artist I was expecting (perhaps I’ve been thinking too much of composer Elliott Carter at 99).

Nancy Krevsky only joined the cast as Sophie, the walker-thumping mother, the week before the show opened, a last-minute replacement, ready to roll (or walk, as the case may be) by Friday night’s opening. Her sudden transition was more in character than another production I had seen last year, still frail but ready for whatever adventure life still had in store for her.

The biggest surprise for me, though, was after walking into the lobby and talking to Sam Kuba, the theater’s executive director and an old friend from back in the days when we both worked at the Harrisburg Symphony, when this guy comes up to me and puts his face so close to mine, all I could see was the nose, a beard and these eyes. When he stood back, I recognized my cousin, Kevin Strawser, whom I’d seen back in the winter of 1993-94 on stage in this very theater, a production of Lion in Winter. We’ve run into each other only occasionally but not in the past two years or so. He had been directing the musicals at Lower Dauphin High School since 1997, I believe, but here he was directing tonight’s show, his first time at Theatre Harrisburg.

When Sam asked me when I found out Kevin was directing the show, I said “just now!” Granted, I’ve been keeping a low profile over the summer and I don’t see the newspaper – just checking the Patriot-News on-line where it’s mostly some top news stories of the moment and everything you need to know about Penn State football – but still, how did I miss this?

Afterward, it was good to talk about the production which I genuinely enjoyed. Like a pianist who plays some virtuoso showcase but manages to make it look easy, the play unfolded without the look of having been directed – as if it just happened. Of course, a director is like a conductor, shaping everything in the rehearsals and toning the nuances and interpretation “just so” but then stepping away from the podium, leaving the performers on their own, unable to intrude even in an emergency. A play doesn’t play itself, just like a violin doesn’t, either: you find out what makes the string vibrate and that brings it to life. A director works with his cast to bring the characters to life and with any luck, it works.

And this time, it did. And I don’t think that’s just family pride!