Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony: Up Close & Personal

This is part of a series of posts about Tchaikovsky's three most famous symphonies: you can read about the 4th here and here, and about the 6th, here.

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It’s one of the most popular symphonies in the repertoire but when the composer was writing it, he was unsure of its quality, in fact was having difficulty writing it. Even after it was done, having warmed up to it only as he was finishing the piece, Tchaikovsky wrote “There is something repellent about it... This symphony will never please the public.”

Tchaikovsky was always a fairly insecure composer. Four years after he finished law school, he quit his job as a government clerk and began to study at the new music school Nicholas and Anton Rubinstein founded in St. Petersburg. Though Tchaikovsky had been playing the piano for years and loved improvising for dances, he didn’t know very much about the simple details of music nor was he aware of how many symphonies Beethoven had written, since he’d not had the chance to hear any of them. One of the first graduates of the Rubinsteins’ school, he moved to Moscow where Nicholas Rubinstein recruited him to teach at the new music school he’d just opened there, feeling he was barely one step ahead of his students. Any confidence would have been severely damaged when his former teacher declined to premiere his first symphony, a refusal he never forgave, though he always thought highly of Anton Rubinstein otherwise (“it is just that he does not care for my music, that my musical temperament is antipathetic to him”).

There are certainly wonderful pieces in these early works, but the music we would consider his greatest began appearing when he was in his mid-30s: the 1st Piano Concerto, the ballet “Swan Lake” (a failure at its premiere), the opera on Pushkin’s “Eugene Onyegin,” the 4th Symphony, and the Violin Concerto (famously reviled at its premiere as music that “stinks in the ear”). All of these works, now considered masterpieces, were composed over a four-year span.

In the midst of composing “Onyegin,” Pushkin’s tale of a young woman who contemplated suicide after writing a love letter to an older man who patronizingly rejected her, Tchaikovsky received a love letter from one of his own students, Antonina Miliukova. He couldn’t even remember who she was but, perhaps feeling a bit like Onyegin, agreed at least to meet her. Even though he felt no love for her, he decided to marry her because, as a homosexual when it was against the law to be one, he felt it would please his family and stop any rumors.

The marriage turned out to be a disaster and it was the older man, in this case, who contemplated suicide. Only days into their honeymoon, Tchaikovsky realized this had been a huge mistake, that they had nothing in common: following a nervous breakdown, he waded into a freezing river hoping to catch pneumonia. His younger brother Modeste took Tchaikovsky away to Petersburg and then, after arranging a separation from Antonina, took him to Switzerland to recover. Technically, the couple never divorced but they also never saw each other again during the remaining sixteen years of his life (she would spend the last twenty years of her life in an asylum).

At this same time, however, Tchaikovsky met another woman. Well, not actually “met.” Nadezhda von Meck was the widow of a wealthy railroad tycoon who liked Tchaikovsky’s music (keep in mind, of that list of works I’d mentioned, only the Piano Concerto had been written so far) and wanted to subsidize him so he could quit teaching and devote himself entirely to composing. The only stipulation was that they should never meet, just write letters! He later described his 4th Symphony, already underway at the time of his marriage, as “our symphony” in a famous letter to her, describing it as a “musical confession” echoing the intense despair he felt at that time of his life. He detailed a story about how the opening fanfare represented fate, an invisible force you will never overpower. After detailed accounts of each movement, he ends with a P.S. in which he mentions how impossible it is to “put into words and phrases musical thoughts and ideas.” Clearly, he is looking back over the work – “I was down in the dumps last winter when the symphony was in the writing, and it is a faithful echo of what I was going through at that time” – and trying to find words to explain the music, rather than saying “these are my thoughts from which I composed the music.”

The 5th Symphony seems to have a similar program – instead of a fanfare, a whole full-blown theme that first appears as a dirge which later is transformed into a triumphant march – but he never quite put it into words. There exists in his notebooks a ‘verbal sketch’ for a new symphony he would begin a month later:

"Introduction. Complete submission before Fate, or, which is the same, before the inscrutable predestination of Providence. Allegro. Murmur of doubt, complaints, reproaches to XXX. To leap into the embrace of faith??? A wonderful program, if only it can be carried out". (In his private writings, “XXX” or “Z” appear frequently, usually referring to his inner secret – his homosexuality. )

While it’s possible the symphony may have begun with another personal crisis, the music that evolved from it, however intelligently designed, transcends the in-the-moment reality of the composer writing it as well as the people making or listening to it.

So what “personal crisis” inspired these thoughts in April of 1888?

First of all, it was now ten years after he completed the 4th Symphony. Despite the immense successes, the busy and often harrowing social schedule (always a trial for a shy person) and the acclaim he received from meeting the likes of Brahms (with whom he found little in common), Grieg and Dvorak (whom he liked a lot), he had not found much consolation in a three-month European tour in which much of his recent music – the piano and violin concertos, the Serenade for Strings, the 3rd Orchestral Suite, and the 1812 Overture – was performed to great acclaim. It was, however, not reported in the Russian press: no one at home knew how he and his music were being received in Germany or Prague, Paris or London, and yet he was representing all of Russian art for which no one at home cared a bit.

But before all that, he had spent a month with a dying friend, witnessing his deathbed struggles and feeling totally powerless to help, a time which the composer described to Mme von Meck as “one of the darkest periods” of his life. A sister and a niece were also mortally ill at the time and he felt “a sort of weariness with life... a sad apathy, the feeling that I myself must die soon, and because of this nearness everything that I had held to be important and essential in my life now appears to me trivial, insignificant and utterly pointless."

So he returned home where the effects of his success quickly wore off and thoughts of mortality continued to linger, settling into a period of quiet months at his country estate where nothing seemed to come to him. He was concerned about being “written out.” A month after sketching the idea about “submitting to Fate,” he began work on a symphony that did not progress smoothly. In his letters to Mme von Meck and his brother Modeste, he wrote more about his discussing poetry with Grand Duke Constantine, the tsar’s nephew, and about the enjoyment he got from planting flowers and watching them grow and blossom. He was approached with the possibility of an American tour which would bring in $25,000 (this, in 1888) which he considered a princely sum. But about the new piece, he remained despondent, proclaiming to Mme von Meck, "There is something repellent about it... This symphony will never please the public." In early August, he tells her that signs of age are beginning to bother him (he is now 48 years old), tiring easily and no longer able to read at night. Half of the new symphony, however, is orchestrated. That fall, in Petersburg to conduct the premiere, he was busy making corrections and changes in the score. It seemed to be a popular success though not well received by the critics. Other successes followed and he took it on another European tour which similar results, but still Tchaikovsky had doubts.

While finishing the new symphony, he had written to the Grand Duke disagreeing with him on his assessment of Brahms’ music: “in the music of this master (for one cannot deny he is a master) there is something dry and cold that repulses me.” But he had met Brahms on his tour the year before and liked Brahms the man. Now in Hamburg, he found that Brahms was staying at the same hotel – in the next room, in fact – and had stayed an extra day before returning to Vienna so he could hear this new symphony, something that greatly touched Tchaikovsky. Afterwards, Brahms was very frank about his reaction, liking everything but the noisy finale (earlier, a German orchestra asked to drop the 1812 Overture from the program because of its “noisy finale”). Tchaikovsky wrote to his nephew that the symphony was magnificently played and “I like it far better, now, after having held a bad opinion of it for some time.” The press was hailing him as a Second Wagner but he also notes that news of these successes were again ignored in Russia. The only disappointment, it seemed, was the fact the dedicatee was unable to attend the concert.

During the tour before he’d begun the 5th Symphony, Tchaikovsky met the director of Hamburg’s Philharmonic Society, Count Theodore Ave-Lallemant who was in his 80s. He told Tchaikovsky he could not understand his music, especially its noisy orchestration, but felt he had in him “the makings of a really good German composer” if only he would leave Russia and settle in Hamburg where classical conventions and traditions would correct his faults. They managed to part good friends. The following year, Lallemant’s frailty and illness kept him from hearing a symphony dedicated to him but one wonders what he would have made of such an un-German, untraditional and overall noisy piece!

The year after it was composed, Tchaikovsky’s 5th was performed in New York: "In the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony ... one vainly sought for coherency and homogeneousness ... in the last movement, the composer's Calmuck blood got the better of him, and slaughter, dire and bloody, swept across the storm-driven score." - New York City "Musical Courier" March 13, 1889

A few years later, still a piece of fresh contemporary music, it was performed in Boston: "Of the Fifth Tchaikovsky Symphony one hardly knows what to say ... In the Finale we have all the untamed fury of the Cossack, whetting itself for deeds of atrocity, against all the sterility of the Russian steppes. The furious peroration sounds like nothing so much as a horde of demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, the music growing drunker and drunker. Pandemonium, delirium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse confounded!" – Boston “Evening Transcript” Oct 24, 1892.

Really, they just don't write reviews like that any more...

Dr. Dick

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Photograph of Tchaikovsky, taken by Reutlinger for a "cabinet card" in 1888, the year he composed his 5th Symphony.

Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony: Part 2, "Art & Life"

This is part of a series of posts about Tchaikovsky's last three symphonies: you can read about the 4th here (with general background information) about the 5th here and the 6th here.
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Most people don’t pay much attention to Tchaikovsky's first three symphonies - #1 (“Winter Dreams”), #2 (the “Little Russian” or, more politically correctly, "Ukrainian" ) and #3 (“Polish” despite the fact it has a German dance in it, too); it’s probably just as well everyone ignores #7 since he didn’t finish it (he’d begun it right before he started the “Pathetique” then thinking it not very symphonic, started turning it into his 3^rd Piano Concerto but died before he officially gave up on this version of it as well).

In the earlier post, I wrote about some things you might not normally read in your standard program notes, different aspects in the composer's background, particularly some of the cultural contradictions of being a Russian composer in the 2^nd half of the 19^th Century. Like any generalization, it has its problems but it also gives you some insights into the man as a composer

(Of these two photographs, the top left was taken in the last year of his life, when he composed his 6th Symphony; the one on the, right, dates from 1877, around the time he began work on the 4th Symphony).

But what about Tchaikovsky the Man? As most people who knew him would admit, it was obvious he was a very emotional man quick to respond to external impulses, often violently. There is no better example than those events that occurred around the time of his marriage: now in his late-30s and still unmarried, there were rumors about his homosexuality and in order to stifle them, a coincidence presented itself as a solution.

Most of the details come from Tchaikovsky’s letters to Nadezhda von Meck (see photo, left), a wealthy widow who adored Tchaikovsky’s music and wanted to offer him something of an allowance that would free him from having to teach to earn money, allowing him to concentrate all his time on composing. The only stipulation was that they must agree to never meet in person, only to write to each other in a voluminous correspondence that began in December of 1876 and lasted for 14 years.

The “other” woman in Tchaikovsky’s life was a former student, one he did not remember meeting when she was 16 and he was 25. But apparently she had had a crush on him: she signed up to take classes with him and two years after she left the school, in late March of 1877, Antonina Miliukhovna wrote him a letter, telling him of her love for him. His response was not intended to give her hope – he admitted the feeling could not be mutual – but after a series of further letters, he agreed to meet her. As he wrote to Mme. von Meck, “It seems to me as if the power of fate had drawn me to that girl.” In hindsight, he felt he was misleading the girl (she was 28 at the time, “no longer young” and past the age most women would normally have married) but by then it had gone too far. If he “turned his back on her… [he] should cause her real unhappiness and drive her to a tragic end.”

In May, just weeks after her first letter, Tchaikovsky began work on a new opera, based on one of the most famous works by a Russian author, the novel-in-verse Eugene Onyegin by Alexander Pushkin. It tells the story of a world-weary bachelor (Onyegin) and a young girl (Tatiana) who falls in love with him. She writes him a love-letter (the famous letter scene that ends the 1^st Act of the opera) which Onyegin returns to her, rejecting her because she is too young and innocent for him. Years later, an even more world-weary Onyegin rediscovers the now mature Tatiana (married to an old aristocrat in Petersburg) and falls in love with her. They meet. She now rejects him.

The parallel here is obvious. Of course, he knew Pushkin’s story long before he began turning it into an opera. Did he choose the story now because of the parallel similarity in his life or did it only dawn on him a few weeks later when he first met her that she was “his Tatiana” and he might prove to be a cad like Onyegin? Before the month is out, he agreed to marry her.

The wedding takes place in Moscow on July 6^th, 1877. (This photograph of the couple was taken at that time) After a week’s honeymoon in Petersburg, they move into an apartment in Moscow and a few weeks later, the composer – alone – leaves for his sister’s estate, Kamenka, in Ukraine where he spends 6 weeks composing. The day after he returns to Moscow, he has a “panic attack” and eleven days later he attempts suicide by wading into the river at night, hoping to catch pneumonia. With his brothers’ help, he arranges an end to the marriage – they do not divorce but they agree to separate and never see each other again. Tchaikovsky is taken off to Switzerland so he can recuperate from a stress-induced coma which left him unconscious for 48 hours, and Nadezhda von Meck offers him the annual allowance that will give him financial independence.

In January, 1878, Tchaikovsky finishes two works: his opera Eugene Onyegin, and the Symphony No. 4 in F Minor.

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It is tempting to think of both these works – two of his greatest – in the context of these events. But whether it is a matter of “Art Imitating Life” or “Life Imitating Art” is difficult to say.

It’s obvious, considering the timing, he chose to marry Antonina because he saw her as the innocent Tatiana and himself as Onyegin. It’s also no coincidence that none of Tchaikovsky’s earlier operas succeeded – for whatever reasons – like Eugene Onyegin because he clearly loved Tatiana (her Letter Scene is one of the finest moments in Russian opera) whether he loved Antonina or not. It was only when he realized that he could put Tatiana away when he was done composing but Antonina was a real person. Whatever she was like as a person, she was not Tatiana and clearly not the woman for Tchaikovsky. He writes to Mme. von Meck about his wife’s family – clearly dysfunctional in modern terms, how the mother abuses her late husband’s memory in front of her children, some of whom she admits to hating and how the sibling rivalries are like sisters having daggers drawn for each other – that is unlike his own loving family experience. While this marriage might mask his homosexuality (which in Russia then was a crime punishable by arrest and deportation to Siberia), it was not going to “cure” him: the question I’ve never seen asked was “would Tchaikovsky have been happy living with a male partner?” Probably not.

A side-note for those wondering whatever happened to Mrs. Tchaikovsky. The next three years were marred by letters and occasional meetings. At one point, she even moved into an apartment on the floor above the composer's. Tchaikovsky arranged an allowance for her through his publisher on the condition that she, essentially, leave him alone.

Between 1881 and 1884, she had three children by unknown fathers, each child given up and soon dying in an orphanage – the first died before her first birthday; a son born six months later lived to be almost 8; a daughter died at 2.

Considering the amount of correspondence he left behind, there is only one surviving letter written to his wife, dating from 1890.

Divorce in Russia was allowable only on grounds of infidelity which would have meant, initially, Antonina would have to perjure herself (von Meck even offered her 10,000 rubles to do so). Tchaikovsky, marrying her to mask his homosexuality, now feared even more what may have been revealed in a divorce trial. Even after her first child in 1881, he chose not to pursue a divorce in the courts. He wrote to von Meck that Antonina was not to blame in the failure of their marriage but later, in his letters to his brothers, he referred to his wife as “The Reptile."

She wrote her memoirs the year after Tchaikovsky died and even though she may come off very naive and superficial, she was also very coherent, unlike ones expectation after the image we have from Tchaikovsky’s correspondence (though her own letters were full of wild accusations especially about a conspiracy on the part of his brothers to quiet her).

Three years after Tchaikovsky’s death, Antoninia was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Petersburg for four years but was readmitted the following year, staying there until her death in February 1917, two weeks before the Tsar was forced to abdicate and eight months before the Bolshevik Revolution brought an end to Imperial Russia.

Considering all this and that she spent most of the last 20 years of her life in mental institutions, one wonders what her life might have been like if, like Tatiana’s, Tchaikovsky had played the cad instead and rejected her as Onyegin had done?

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The one thing that puts a bit of a crimp in our willingness to see the 4^th Symphony as his reaction to the nightmare of his marriage is the chronology.

The famous letter in which he describes the program of “our symphony” was written in February 1878, a week after its premiere. Of course, he had written to her about it long before it was finished, but the program – the explanation of the Fate Motive heard in the brass throughout the work as a “Sword of Damocles that hangs perpetually over our heads” – is all “after the fact.” Is that what was in his mind when he wrote it or something he used to explain it in hindsight?

But he writes on May 1^st, 1877 – before his fateful meeting with his future wife – “At the present moment I am absorbed in the symphony I began during the winter. I should like to dedicate it to you because I believe you would find in it an echo of your most intimate thoughts and emotions.” The fact he is working on this now is the reason he gives for turning down her very generous commission for a new work for violin and piano. “Just now any other work would be a burden – work, I mean, that would demand a certain mood and change of thought. Added to this, I am in a very nervous, worried and irritable state, highly unfavorable to composition, and even my symphony suffers in consequence.”

Following the wedding, the honeymoon and a week’s visit to his mother-in-law’s, Tchaikovsky writes to von Meck he is going on to his sister’s country estate so he can work on the symphony: “I leave in an hour’s time. A few days longer and I swear I should have gone mad.” A week later, he informs von Meck he is beginning to feel better, not quite returned to normal but annoyed that he is “absolutely incapable of taking up my work. Yet it would be the finest remedy for my morbid state of mind. I must hope that the hunger for work will return before long.”

Nine days later, he writes:

“I am much better… I must struggle against my feeling of estrangement from my wife and try to keep all her good qualities in view. For undoubtedly she has good qualities. I have so far improved that I have taken in hand the orchestration of your symphony. One of my brothers, whose judgment I value, is very pleased with such parts of it as I’ve played to him. I hope you will be equally pleased. That is the chief thing.”

The next day, he continues, after lamenting how difficult it is for him to work when around other people:

“Our symphony progresses. The first movement will give me a great deal of trouble as regards orchestration. It is very long and complicated; at the same time I consider it the best movement. The three remaining movements are very simple and it will be pleasant and easy to orchestrate them. The Scherzo will have quite a new orchestral effect, from which I expect great things. At first only the string orchestra is heard, always pizzicato. In the trio the wood-winds play by themselves and at the end of the scherzo all three groups of instruments join in a short phrase. I think this effect will be interesting.”

After returning to Moscow and his new wife and their new apartment, he writes “My wife has done all she possibly could to please me. It is really a comfortable and pretty home. All is clean, new and artistic.”

“The orchestration of the first movement of our symphony is quite finished. Now I shall give myself a few days to grow used to my new life. In any case the symphony will not be ready before the end of the winter.”

Twelve days later, he suffered a “nervous breakdown,” attempting suicide and fleeing to Petersburg where his brother Anatol (who had attended the wedding in July) could barely recognize him.

At the end of this first movement, then, consider what it might have been like inside Tchaikovsky’s head – having spent six months working on this music and dealing with the unraveling details of his life during that same time: which influenced which, Art or Life?

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With living composers, a conductor or a listener in the audience could ask them something about the music they'd written. However, Tchaikovsky died 116 years ago but in his correspondence with Mme. von Meck, he can still give us some insights into his creative process: shortly after completing the 4^th Symphony, he tells her,

“I write my sketches on the first piece of paper that comes to hand, sometimes a scrap of writing paper, and I write in very abbreviated form. The melody never appears in my head without its attendant harmony. In general, these two musical elements together with the rhythm cannot be conceived separately: every melodic idea carries its own inevitable harmony and rhythm. If the harmonies are very complicated, one must indicate the part-writing in the sketch….” (And the same with its orchestration.)

The next day he wrote again, illuminating some of this:

“What has been written with passion must now be looked upon critically, corrected, extended and, most important of all, condensed to fit the requirements of the form. One must sometimes go against the grain in this, be merciless and destroy things that were written with love and inspiration. Although I cannot complain of poor inventive powers or imagination, I have always suffered from lack of skill in the management of form. Only persistent labor has at last permitted me to achieve a form that in some degree corresponds to the content. In the past I was careless, I did not realize the extreme importance of this critical examination of the preliminary sketch. For this reason the succeeding episodes were loosely held together and seams were always visible. That was a serious defect and it was years before I began to correct it, yet my compositions will never be good examples of form because I can only correct what is wrong with my musical nature – I cannot change it intrinsically.”

In the months following the premiere, he wrote to her,

“You ask how I work regarding the orchestration. I never compose in the abstract – never does the musical idea come to me except with suitable exterior form. So I find the musical thought simultaneously with the orchestration. When I wrote the scherzo of the [4^th] Symphony, I imagined it just as you heard it. It is impossible if not performed pizzicato. If played with the bow it would lose everything. It would be a soul without a body and all its charm would disappear.”

“As regards the Russian element in general in my music (i.e. the instances of melody and harmony originating in folk-song), I grew up in the backwoods, saturating myself from earliest childhood with the inexplicable beauty of the characteristic traits of Russian folk-song, so that I passionately love every manifestation of the Russian spirit. In short, I am Russian in the fullest sense of the word.”

To us, this insistence would seem pointless: isn’t he Russian because he was born in Russia, because he is ethnically Russian? But he was often under attack from the Russian Nationalists who heard Germanic symphonies with Russian-like themes, some of them identifiable as specific folk-songs.

After she had asked him about the 4^th Symphony, especially if he sticks to established forms, he responded,

“Yes and no. In certain compositions such as a symphony, the form is taken for granted and I keep to it – but only as to the large outline and proper sequence of movements. The details can be manipulated as freely as one chooses, according to the natural development of the musical idea. For instance the first movement of our symphony is handled very freely.” He then describes how the key of the second theme is handled differently and how in the recapitulation, it doesn’t appear as it should in its entirety, only in part. “The finale,” he concludes this passage, “also deviates from conventional form.”

One of the obvious symptoms of this dichotomy between his European Cosmopolitan Training and his innate Russianness can be heard in the last movement of this 4^th Symphony, a different kind of deviation from convention.

The second theme is an authentic folk-song, generally entitled “In the Field there Stood a Birch Tree” which he writes in 4/4 like this:



Not being Russian and not having heard this tune in any other way than Tchaikovsky’s, I was surprised when years ago I first heard a recording of a little known work – at least in this country – by Mily Balakirev, the founder of the Russian Five who also worked hard to recruit Tchaikovsky into his circle. It’s in his Overture on Three Russian Themes (correction: generally known as the 1st Overture, not the 2nd as I'd noted previously), written 19 years before Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, that Balakirev uses the same folk-song – “In the Field there Stood a Birch Tree” – but in a way that is presumably closer to the original song (transposed here to the same key Tchaikovsky used):



Note the difference. Balakirev’s is notated in 2/4 with three measures to each phrase with a slight variation on the ‘repetition,’ along with an occasional 'improvisatory' flourishes to the basic line here and there.

Tchaikovsky, instead, writes it in 4/4 but places two beats of silence after each phrase (repeated exactly). Why?

The original folk-song moves in 3-bar phrases. German Classical Music moves in multiples of 2 and so Tchaikovsky forces this phrase into four-square units. He could, if he wanted to, write three-bar phrases or write it with a 3/2 meter or something to accommodate the tune. But he didn't.

Perhaps it’s not a major point or even a fault (unless you know and prefer the original – is there any law saying that Tchaikovsky had to maintain the original structure of the song? There’s no copyright infringement, here), but it compares one approach to the other: between Balakirev who was not bound by European Conventions no matter how often he used them in this or other works, and Tchaikovsky who, consciously or not, was something of a synthesis between the Russian Nationalist with a deep love of his heritage and the European Cosmopolitan intent on making Russian music understandable outside the realm of his own culture.

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One further quote, from a letter to Mme. von Meck after she had told him about her emotional, ecstatic response to his music, almost as if she was drunk on it.

“There is one thing in your letter with which I cannot agree in the least – your view on music. I particularly dislike the way in which you compare music with a form of intoxication. I think this is quite wrong. A man has recourse to wine in order to stupefy himself and produce an illusion of well-being and happiness. But this dream costs him very dear! The reaction is generally terrible. But in any case wine can only bring a momentary oblivion of all our troubles – no more. Has music a similar effect? Music is no illusion but rather a revelation. Its triumphant power lies in the fact that it reveals to us beauties we find in no other sphere; and the apprehension of them is not transitory, but a perpetual reconcilement to life. Music enlightens and delights us. It is extremely difficult to analyse and define the process of musical enjoyment but it has nothing in common with intoxication… But when all is said and done, this is only a matter of words. If we both look upon the enjoyment of music from opposite points of view, at least one thing is certain: our love of it is equally strong, and that is sufficient for me. I am glad you apply the word ‘divine’ to the art to which I have dedicated my life.”

- Dr. Dick

Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony: Up Close & Personal

It's often joked that Tchaikovsky wrote three symphonies: No. 4, No. 5 and No. 6. Or, as others put it, he wrote one symphony three times, since they're all Fate-dominated and similar in character and content.

This post is the first in a series about each of these three symphonies: this one, more of a prelude to the set, contains background information about the composer and his historical context at the time he was composing the 4th. You can read about the 5th Symphony here, and about the 6th, here.

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Neither Tchaikovsky nor his 4th Symphony really need much in the way of “explanation” for a concert-goer to be able to enjoy the music. In these “Up-Close & Personal” posts, I’m usually looking for something behind the music, something that was going on in the composer’s life at the time the music was written or maybe about the times it was written in, whether that impact is direct or seemingly indirect. You can always argue that a work of art stands independently of any of the extraneous and technical details involved in its creation, but you can also argue that a work of art is something you can come to time and time again and each time discover something new, something that may make you listen to it in a different way or appreciate it from a slightly different angle, that the more you know about it the more you can appreciate it.

If you’re not familiar with the events of Tchaikovsky’s life at the time he wrote this symphony – his disastrous marriage and the voluminous correspondence with the rather mysterious Nadezhda von Meck – you can read about that in Part 2 of this post. There are some other ideas I’d like to look at, for now.

Tchaikovsky is a Russian composer which, to an American listener, may seem obvious but actually implies a number of often conflicting ideas. It also implies a debate similar to that around Aaron Copland and the “American Sound” – how much of what we identify as the “Russian Sound” is really what we think of as being Tchaikovsky’s sound? What is it that makes Russian music sound Russian? When I asked a famous Soviet-era sociologist this question back in the ‘70s, she thought for a moment and said, “I don’t know – perhaps the long cold winters?”

Culturally, putting it into a glib nutshell, there are at least two Russias. As a political nation, it has been on the edge of Europe and never really a part of the general European culture. As a geographical entity, it straddles both Europe and Asia and much of its ethnic and social back-history is more Asiatic than European. While there are people who had always lived in the area we think of as Russia, much of its history was crystallized first by Scandinavian migrants who set up ancient kingdoms and converted to Christianity, then by Asians ranging from the Tatars and Mongols who conquered them. A long ingrained xenophobia aside, the lack of trade routes to connect them with Western Europe and the lack of a viable marketplace for European goods created little need for contact between these cultures until the 18th Century when one of these rulers – known to us as Peter the Great but not considered “Great” by the Russians themselves – forcibly turned his backward empire toward the West, imposing on them European attitudes and customs after conquering a miserable stretch of swampland where he built a grand city that, within a few generations, created a seemingly artificial world of wealthy aristocrats living in a mirror image of the royal courts of France and Germany while the greater percentage of Russians lived in a peasant culture of extreme poverty. There was little else, then, in between.

A century after Peter the Great built his new imperial capital St. Petersburg, Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. At that time, few if any aristocrats spoke Russian. The language of the court was French, the literature and theater they enjoyed was in French. Much of the architecture of Peter the Great’s brand new city was the result of Italian architects trying to encompass something that looked Russian combined with something they were familiar with. Much of the music the aristocrats listened to was written and performed by Italian-born musicians who began teaching Russian-born musicians how to write and play in a European style. Even in Tchaikovsky’s youth a generation after 1812, there were still no Russian music schools: everybody was an amateur who studied privately with musicians imported either from France or Italy.

The “first” Russian composer (or at least the first one to be recognized as one), Mikhail Glinka, generally referred to as the “father” of Russian music, learned the rudiments of music and composition by way of correspondence with a theory teacher in Berlin, not by studying with a composer first-hand or by attending a school. Another important composer with a national awareness, Alexander Dargomyzhsky, learned not directly from Glinka but essentially by borrowing his notes.

In the mid-19th Century, the Russian musician Anton Rubinstein was one of the greatest pianists of his day, usually placing 2nd to Franz Liszt, but as a composer he was too German for the Russians and too Russian for the Germans. He was too much of a Futurist for the Conservatives and, for the Futurists like Liszt and Wagner, too conservative. As a Jew who’d converted as a child to the Russian Orthodox church, he was also regarded as a Christian by Jews and as a Jew by Christians, therefore, as he put it, “neither fish nor fowl – a pitiful individual.”

In 1862, Rubinstein and his brother Nikolai opened the first music school in Russia – first in St. Petersburg and then another in Moscow – making a point that courses would be taught in Russian, not in French (one grand lady retorted “Music in Russian? That’s a novel idea!”).

Tchaikovsky, who had discovered classical music as a child through a music-box reproduction of some Mozart pieces, wanted to become a musician but lacking any chance of good training ended up going into law. After becoming a law clerk, he decided it was too boring and he joined Rubinstein’s newly opened conservatory as one of its first students. He did well enough upon graduation, grounded in solid European-style training but without much practical experience, he was immediately set up as a teacher in the new Moscow school.

This was all happening around the same time young composers gathering around Mily Balakirev began formulating ideas about creating an authentic Russian musical style. They became known as “The Russian Five” or “The Mighty Handful” and their attitude about what Russian music should be was directly opposed to Rubinstein’s.

In Western music there are often extreme opposites among contemporaries – Brahms’ Classicism (building on the past) versus Wagner’s Romanticism (looking into the future) or the Serialism-vs-Tonality argument of much of the 20th Century. In Russia, this became a musico-political argument between those following European (and by then, mostly German) ideals against those looking for a more authentic Russian identity – Cosmopolitans vs. Nationalists. This aesthetic argument was going on in all aspects of Russian life, not just the Arts.

It’s curious that what we think of today as the Age of Russian Music encompasses basically two generations: the prominent composers in Western minds are Tchaikovsky & a few of the “Russian 5” followed by the next generation of Rachmaninoff & Skryabin (or Scriabin as he’s usually spelled in the West). In 1917, even the notion of “Russia” came to an end with the Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union. After 70 years of Communism, Russian music is not the only thing still trying to reestablish its identity.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Basically, we’re told Glinka’s solution to this question of Russian-ness had been to turn to “the music of the people” for inspiration. His setting in 1848 of two folk dances in the orchestral rhapsody Kamarinskaya (which is usually mispronounced Kamarinskáya but which I was told should be pronounced Kamarínskaya though several sources say it’s Kamárinskaya…) was considered “the acorn from which the mighty oak of Russian music grew” by no less than Tchaikovsky.

But it wasn’t just a matter of listening to Russian folk songs and transcribing them. They realized Russian folk-songs did not organize themselves the same way German ones did: uneven metric patterns with uneven phrase structures could move freely between tonal centers so, to us, it might sound like it’s in E-flat Major but the phrase cadences in C Minor.

What Glinka and many of his followers also did was to create something that would sound noticeably different from European music, giving it an exotic quality which could then be perceived as non-Western and therefore Russian. Glinka used the tonally ambiguous whole-tone scale to create a magical fairy-tale world half-a-century before Claude Debussy used it in France to create an “impressionistic” counter-balance to German harmonic rigidity. Rimsky-Korsakov, in addition to using melodic inflections reflecting that Central Asian exoticism of Russia’s oriental heritage which we hear in Scheherezade, created a synthetic scale rarely found in folk music but which became the norm for that folk-like sound we Westerners are now so used to.

Many ethnomusicologists might refer to this not as folk-lore but as “fake-lore.” Stravinsky would later use it in The Firebird, his first fairy-tale ballet but also later in Les Noces, a ritualized setting of a Russian folk wedding even though he says he never actually saw nor heard one. However much actual folk-lore is behind his third great ballet, the Rite of Spring could not exist musically without these artificial solutions.

Tchaikovsky often used folk songs in his music – whether it’s the beautiful Andante Cantabile, the Kamarinskaya-like finale of his 2nd Symphony or his use of “The Little Birch Tree” found in the last movement of the 4th Symphony. His colleagues in the Mighty Handful considered this as mere decoration: it didn’t get to the heart of the matter, or rather to the soul of the matter. Quoting folk songs was, in a sense, lip-service unless the essence of the folk idiom permeated his music.

But Tchaikovsky used them within Germanic forms like the symphony and the concerto. Part of the Mighty Handful’s problem, though, was not just to create a melodic and harmonic dialect that sounded Russian: they needed to come up with a way of using them in a larger, structural context – what we call “form” – beyond rhapsodies and symphonic poems, because they were unable to overcome one of the innate limitations of folk music.

Folk songs are usually self-contained and don’t provide much in the way of expansion, what classical musicians call “development.” No better example would be the bizarre appearance of a Russian folk-song “Slava!” in Beethoven’s E Minor String Quartet dedicated to the Russian ambassador, Count Razumovsky. As Glinka showed in Kamarinskaya, there were many amazing and wonderful ways you could treat these tunes he found, but basically all he did was repeat the tune over and over, each time in a different orchestral color, maybe with different accompaniment or a change in the harmony (many of these tunes could be quite chameleon-like in ways you could harmonize them). But to get more mileage out of them? Not likely. Beethoven takes his round peg of a Russian folk song and pounds it into the four-square hole of Germanic structure.

Without spending another 3,000 words on it, let’s just say that Tchaikovsky as a Russian was full of the dichotomies of his era: he idolized Mozart but had no concept of Mozartean form; he wrote Germanic symphonies and concertos but tried to make them sound Russian by using native Russian melodies (but unlike the Handful, not Russian harmonies); he tried to come to terms with classical structure (the left-brain aspect of music) while living in the hyper-emotional world of romantic sensuousness (the right-brain aspect of music). His symphonies – at least the three famous ones – heave under the weight of these intense emotions while his ballets reflected the dazzling aristocratic fairy-tale world of the imperial court that still defines what we consider “classical dance.” American audiences familiar with his Violin Concerto may find no great contrast between the Mozart-like clarity of the first movement’s opening and the wild Cossack dance of its finale (is it any different from Brahms ending his violin concerto with a wild Hungarian dance?).

Even one of his own students, Sergei Taneyev (whose music is virtually unknown in the West) accused him of writing a symphony full of ballet music. It’s not easy to figure out exactly what he meant by that – is he equating ballet music with drivel or is it just that this is music incapable of further development that could easily be danced to? One of the complaints about Tchaikovsky’s ballets was that the music was often more symphonic – more developed – than the usual string of pleasant dance tunes audiences (and dancers) expected.

Taneyev refers specifically to the middle of the 2nd Movement, the trio of the 3rd and to a “little march” in the finale where his “inner eye sees involuntarily our prima ballerina… and spoils [his] pleasure in the many beauties of the work.” Perhaps he means these spots relax the emotional impact of the European-style development for something more accessible?

Here’s what Tchaikovsky said about how he saw his own problems as a composer:

“All my life I have been much troubled by my inability to grasp and manipulate form in music. I fought hard against this defect and can say with pride that I achieved some progress, but I shall end my days without ever having written anything that is perfect in form. What I write has always a mountain of padding: an experienced eye can detect the thread in my seams and I can do nothing about it.”

The symphonies that Tchaikovsky’s European contemporaries were writing – with the exception of Brahms who was regarded as old-fashioned by most followers of contemporary music then – were not like the symphonies of Haydn or Beethoven. Even Beethoven’s 6th and 9th Symphonies are not typical of what a symphony was considered to be, then. Symphonies were abstract architectural forms and composers approached them in a technical sense much the way a poet might write a sonnet: while the form allowed you some flexibility, there was still a “default definition” that had to be adhered to. If you started a sonnet that turned itself into a limerick with added syllables per line and perhaps no coherent rhyme scheme, was it any longer a sonnet? Did that make it bad? Should it be called, perhaps, something else?

With the composers writing after Beethoven – beginning with Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique written three years after Beethoven’s death – this technical ideal of something easily defined and strictly adhered to (more or less) was swept up in the Age of Romanticism with its emotional response from the senses rather than from the rational, Classical mind – the irrational right-brain taking precedence after the 18th Century’s emphasis of logical left-brain issues.

In this sense, music began moving from the abstract – music as form – to the subjective with its idea of telling a story through music. Berlioz’ “Episode from the Life of an Artist” (his Symphonie fantastique) went deeper into the senses than Beethoven’s 6th Symphony with its “Pleasant Impressions Upon Arriving in the Countryside.” Rather than write symphonies, now, composers began to focus more on “symphonic poems,” an aesthetic concept attributed to Franz Liszt. Ironically, because the concept of “sonata form” was inherently dramatic in terms of its tonal scheme, the contrasting nature of its themes made it attractive to musical characterizations of a story’s cast list or plot synopsis. By reflecting the nature of a personality or the mood of a scene or its setting, composers found they could superimpose their subjective interpretations of music onto the basic premise of sonata form (used in the standard first movement of a symphony). And so now, instead of individual one-movement symphonic poems, composers could write several movements that might serve to augment the initial “story.” This became known as “program music” – music that tells or implies a story.

Tchaikovsky hated “program symphonies” – he complained as much in his letters – yet he wrote three symphonies that he admitted had specific programs even though he never divulged their details, especially in the last one. After writing several one-movement symphonic poems based on Shakespearean plays, he composed a vast four movement work based on Byron’s “Manfred” which he even called “a Symphony in four movements” but which was never numbered as his Symphony No. 5, reminding us that musical terms and definitions may be fairly vague and subjective but sometimes they can be too specific as well.

Perhaps one reason the last three symphonies have succeeded in the popular canon and “Manfred” has not has more to do with the subjective reaction to the music in each work rather than how he handled its form. By Beethoven’s standards, Tchaikovsky’s symphonies are structurally speaking not very good symphonies. By text-book analysis, it’s possible “Manfred” (written in 1885) might be a better example of a Symphony but its music is inferior to those symphonic works he composed before and after it (the 4th in 1877, the actual 5th in 1888). For some, it would be a right-brained response to say “this is great music” where a left-brained response might say “this is not great music.” It is, however, a no-brainer to say “this is music that has proven popular through the ages.” Does that make it great? Does it matter?

- - - - -

You can read Part 2 of the post about Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony here.

- Dr. Dick

illustration at top: Photograph of Tchaikovsky taken in 1877, the year he composed his Symphony No. 4.

A New Symphony: Beethoven at 240

Today is, if not exactly his birthday, the day the world generally observes as Beethoven’s Birthday. From the historical record, we know he was baptized on December 17th, 1770 – he was more than likely born the day before but there is nothing that tells us that specifically.

Since I wrote last Saturday about Elliott Carter celebrating his 102nd birthday with a new work given its world premiere in Toronto, I thought today I’d tell you about a new work that received its world premiere this past summer, a brand new symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven.

The only difference is – this is fiction.

Well, it might seem obvious, but I just wanted to be sure we’re all on the same foot (bunions aside).

This is an excerpt from The Doomsday Symphony, a music appreciation thriller which I began sketching over the summer and started writing in mid-October. During the month of November, it was my NaNoWriMo project where the goal was to write an additional 50,000 words by the end of the month (piece of cake). Even at 90,000 words, it’s not finished yet and, though friends have asked me about it, it’s also not ready to be posted at Thoughts on a Train.

Unlike my earlier attempts -- The Schoenberg Code and The Lost Chord – this one is not a parody of anything written by Dan Brown. While it would be difficult to say it is entirely “original” – now, there’s a philosophical red-herring – despite the occasional parody, let’s just say in The Doomsday Symphony, I’m on my own.

First of all, to explain – most of the story takes place on Harmonia-IV, one of a series of parallel universes that is neither exactly Heaven nor Hell where, our hero Dr. T.R. Cranleigh [later changed to T. Richard Kerr] discovers, the population consists mostly of dead musicians or people who once considered themselves musicians, even some music critics (though for these latter it’s probably the equivalent of Hell).

This is the after-life home of many of the great composers – others may reside on Harmonia-V, some fewer on Harmonia-ii6 while others ended up, through some kind of cosmic deception, on Harmonia-vi but I digress – who, contrary to what we might assume, continue to compose and occasionally hang out, discussing music over their beers, at Stravinsky’s Tavern. In these various parallel universes, by the way, interlopers from The Other Side (like Cranleigh) are called Trespassers though the popular slang is Zoombies, from the Greek word ζωή (zoe) meaning “life.”

The plot involves two villains, each with their independent villainies. In the one that initially draws our hero (a know-it-all musicologist who knows a great deal about very little) to Harmonia-IV, Dr. Klavdia Klangfarben, a trained forensic musicologist, has been hired as an agent by SHMRG’s CEO, N. Ron Steele and his Director of Office Supplies and Classical Music, the would-be composer Manfred (or “Man”) Kaye. They want to “kill off the great composers of the past” in an attempt to corner the market in the music licensing business.

Through her thesis advisor, the great Danish musicologist Frøkken Bohr, Klangfarben has discovered that a legendary parallel universe where dead composers go exists and can be accessed through a time-gate located in a field outside the abandoned mining town of New Coalton in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Once there, with the help of a lawyer and former musician named Abner Kedaver who counted among his clients Brahms and Mahler, she manages to find the hand-held time-traveling devices the Harmonians use to travel back in time. This way, she can affect the lives of composers like Bach, Wagner, Mozart and Beethoven not by killing them before their prime but by in some way altering their lives so they never achieve the greatness that we revere them for.

Without them, other composers would not have been influenced by them because, as we know them, they would never really have existed. What would Brahms be without Beethoven, for instance? And so it affects music in a more long-range way than it might initially seem.

In this way, then, by talking a 20-year-old Bach into accepting Dietrich Buxtehude’s job offer to stay in Lübeck as the resident organist – an offer which included marrying his eldest daughter, ten years his senior – Bach might never have gone to Leipzig, would be unlikely to have fathered some twenty children, and would probably have developed into a very fine composer on the level of Buxtehude but probably only one as well known today as Buxtehude – a great composer, perhaps, but not a Great Composer, if you get my drift.

The second plot involves a mild-mannered assistant conductor named Rogers Kent-Clarke (who once studied with conductor Louis Lane) who, following Cranleigh, finds himself in the middle of Harmonia-IV, meets Gustav Mahler and hears him telling people about his latest symphony in which (a kind of counterpart to his 2nd Symphony, the Resurrection) he describes the End of the World.

With a series of increasingly dissonant chords – similar to the three fateful chords of his 6th Symphony which some call the Tragic – carefully placed structurally throughout the course of this ninety-minute-long work, Mahler is convinced the last chord will bring about the destruction of the universe. A philosopher and apocalyptic cult-leader named Siegfried Schweinwurfer (translated literally from the German as War-Peace Pig-Thrower) therefore dubs it the Doomsday Symphony. Kent-Clarke makes up his mind to steal the score, return to Earth with it and become famous for discovering and premiering a new Mahler symphony – in essence, becoming a SuperConductor.

The rather serious side effect of his ambition, unfortunately, could bring about the destruction of the world in 2012, another plot that Cranleigh and his associates - now including Harmonian Detective Milo Smighley and the detective from Pennsylvania who got involved in investigating something completely different at the beginning of the story, Jenna Sainte-Croix - must solve before the novel's end.

Hence, the title of the novel – since I thought Bach to the Future wasn’t quite as effective.

Anyway, at this point, early in our story, the Universal Philharmonic – under the direction of a conductor whose name I have not yet chosen – is preparing the premiere of Beethoven’s latest symphony, his 39th. This is the opening sequence from (quite coincidentally) Chapter #39, at the first rehearsal held in Einstein Hall.

= = = = = = =

The DOOMSDAY SYMPHONY - CHAPTER 39

The music was so calm, so self-assured and, above all, so beautiful. From the expansive opening, magisterial yet thoroughly human, there was no doubt on any of their faces this would be Beethoven at his best. Here was a new masterpiece and this orchestra was the first to bring it to life. Every one of them sensed the honor.

And the responsibility.

They followed [Maestro] implicitly, watching the years melt away from him. The crotchety old man, frail yet still in his prime, became the music – likewise calm, self-assured and even, in a way, beautiful.

They knew that Beethoven had been working for over a decade on this symphony, starting the sketches even before he had begun the last one. That one had disappointed many, though the composer held his ground.

"What is it with critics bad-mouthing my even-numbered symphonies," he continually groused. "Can't they tell they're all good, each in their own way?"

Even if you considered his posthumous career, now over 180 years and thirty symphonies later, Beethoven still managed to come up with different responses each time he came face-to-face with what he called "the Symphonic Question." He'd gone much farther than Haydn – even a thousand symphonies later – had ever done. Mahler himself would be much affected by this one.

And how he hated sitting there in Stravinsky's Tavern having to deal with Mahler and those endless discussions about "What is a Symphony?" It was enough to make him miss the old days of the conversation books!

What started out like a slow introduction, despite the tempo indication of Allegro non troppo (not too fast), gradually unfolded as the first theme, the violins playing the notes of a triad – slowly undulating arpeggios – which the solo horn then picked up and, playing them in faster rhythms, turned into a gradually unwinding melody supported by flutes and clarinets. This melody, more than just a triad, served as its own harmony. What sounded like a chord progression turned into sequences of this melodic-harmonic cell flowing so seamlessly, you could overlook how simple it really was.

But that was Basic Beethoven. A common device from his mortal symphonies, he expanded it to greater and more complex lengths in his 13th, 27th and 35th symphonies, yet never losing that sense of sublime simplicity. His famous small cells, the building blocks opening his 5th or 21st symphonies, became larger, like durable structural beams spun out of diamonds.

And it wasn't only his own works where you sensed this. Without Beethoven's examples, the symphonies of Brahms and Bruckner, Mahler, Shostakovich or Sibelius would all have been very different works, each finding significant influences there. Even those "anti-symphonies" by Berlioz and Liszt found inspiration in Beethoven's "Pastoral," at least metaphorically, implying some dramatic story told across its surface.

But Beethoven argued these were only "surface elements." You needed to dig down to find the structural architecture that supported the surface: in lesser composers, symphonies like that usually fell flat because it lacked this support.

It didn't matter whether listeners could "hear" this or not – and by that he meant "hear it and consciously point it out," talking technically the way a composer might talk about it – that wasn't the point. It was something subconsciously understood, a realization satisfying the listener without necessarily knowing why; unsatisfying, much the same way, when it was lacking.

Studying the latest music written over the past century, Beethoven had become disturbed by the sound of some trends composers were following but he understood them as direct reactions – pro or con – to his own ideas.

If Schoenberg ordered pitches in the technical way serialism implied, he was doing so because he understood the organic importance of inner structure.

Though he wasn't pleased initially with Alex Ross's statement, "Beethoven got it wrong," in his otherwise wonderful book, The Rest Is Noise, he understood it was all a reaction to him, impossible if he'd never been.

First, the orchestra "ran" each movement through non-stop to get a sense of it before going back to fix some technical details. Basically, for a first rehearsal, everything was progressing smoothly, nothing requiring them to stop. They might need to clear something up that hadn't come across quite so clearly, but on the whole he was feeling pretty confident.

Used to having the composers sitting in on later sessions of the rehearsal process, Maestro [Name] was even more nervous than usual. Beethoven was quite well known as a notorious stickler, not one he'd risk disappointing.

If his musicians weren't "on the needles and pins of extreme anxiety," as he put it, he himself was feeling close to nausea, ready to break out in a sweat at the least chance of complication. While it was deemed an honor to premiere a major new work by Beethoven, many conductors often wondered, "was it worth the aggravation?"

The one trumpet player missed his cue and came in a beat late but managed to catch himself, making the necessary correction so that he, the conductor and Beethoven were probably the only ones who noticed. Otherwise, the first movement's read-through had gone splendidly, only a few other things needing touched up here and there, but otherwise quite impressive.

There was that spot leading up to the scherzo's trio they'd have to go back and work on – something in the cross-rhythms between winds and strings before the trombones entered – but the second movement went surprisingly well.

Throughout the rehearsal, [Maestro] expected to be interrupted by the composer at any moment, but there was nothing – not even a cough. Was it possible that Beethoven had already left? Hadn't he liked it at all?

Then from the darkness of the auditorium, there was enthusiastic applause from their lone audience. Beethoven, usually quite reserved, was shouting, "Bravo! Superb!"

"So with that, everyone – good job! Let's take a break," he smiled, "ten minutes. No, we're ahead of schedule – make it twenty."

Stepping down from the podium, [Maestro] looked like a much younger man than before.

Very few rehearsals in recent memory had gone this well. [Maestro] was often reticent with his praise so between that and hearing Beethoven yelling "Bravo" from the hall was enough to put smiles on everybody's faces.

Marsha Funebre, the personnel manager, was clapping everybody on the back, wishing she had champagne to pass around backstage instead of plain soda.
= = = = = = =

From there, the plot continues.

Two members of the orchestra are secret agents working for the Security Division of BHUIA, the Bureau of Harmonian Universal Intelligence Agency (formed from two previous but redundant organizations, the Bureau of Harmonian Intelligence and the Universal Intelligence Agency).

Agents Rondo Sharrif, the principal horn player (a young Palestinian musician who had been killed in an attack by a suicide bomber on his way to a rehearsal with the West-East Divan Orchestra), and violist Roger Babbitt (whose initial appearance, running late for the rehearsal, is very much like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland) are summoned to appear as witnesses in the trial where Judge Willa Fortune will preside over the case against Dr. Cranleigh and his associates, Trespassers wrongly charged with the plot to kill the Great Composers (who, of course, wonder what’s the point, since they’re already dead) while Klangfarben runs free to next attack Mozart.

Incidentally, like many names in The Doomsday Symphony, Rondo Sharrif, such a fine player his friends call him “Horn Solo,” is an anagram, in this case of Harrison Ford (who, of course, was Han Solo in the original Star Wars).

But there is more to this excerpt than meets the eye – just as there is usually more to the music than meets the ear – but I’ll get into that in another post.

Update: In the spring of 2011, I completed the novel, The Doomsday Symphony, and posted it on the installment plan (making it a serial novel) which you can read, beginning with this introductory post. If you've already read this post, you can just click on ahead to the first installment.

Dick Strawser

Elliott Carter: Music at 102

Elliott Carter turns 102 years old, today. His plan had been to attend a celebratory all-Carter concert in Toronto that featured works all composed in 2008-2009 including a world premiere.

According to this article in the Toronto Star, the New Music Concerts ensemble, led by flutist and long-time Carter advocate and collaborator Robert Aitken, Carter was unable to attend the performance but for what reasons, I'm not sure.

Talking with Aitken several weeks ago, the composer had said "If I feel then as well as I feel now, I'll go anywhere!" But many things can happen at this time of year – weather, transportation as well as health issues. (I'm also trying to imagine Carter dealing with the TSA scans and pat-downs...)

This past June, Carter attended the world premiere of his recent song cycle, setting poems of Marianne Moore, "What Are Years?" at the Aldeburgh Festival.

The world premiere in Toronto last night was the Concertino for Bass Clarinet and ensemble, written late last year for his long-time assistant, Virgil Blackwell.

Here is an interview recorded with Carter a month ago – Blackwell is also present for some of it. The production uses a lot of un-Carteresque ambient sound as well as clips of works by other composers who've influenced him as well as tantalizing snippets of his own works plus a kind of time-line where you might hear a bit of a piece Carter wrote in a certain year followed by something from Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" written that same year, or a historical speech or announcement about some major news event.

In all, it's a very good introduction for people who are not familiar with his style, may not in fact like his style but could understand his approach to his music – how he writes it but more importantly how he thinks about it as he's writing it.

Despite its legendary complexity, his music does not start out to be "complicated." As I've tried to explain to people who are put off by the fact you can't tap your toe to it, the "complexity" is a way of approximating what he's hearing – how the instruments, for instance, are expressing their personalities (he often talks about how the players are characters who have ideas and reactions, who may discuss things and who may change their ideas and opinions over time), how these elements overlap in time and how their rhythms interact with each other sometimes by seeming not to interact, the way we normally think of it, but often exist on separate planes simultaneously.

And if you think about it, despite his well-known way of expressing himself which often sounds much like his music – playful, often tangential, sometimes stuttering to find the right word or idea – he doesn't sound bad for a man a month shy of turning 102!

That fact alone is enough for people to take notice of him – "wow, the man's 102 years old, imagine that!" – but the fact he's also busy composing and looking forward to the next piece is also amazing. Since his late-80s, he has become even more prolific than he had been when he was considered on the tail-end of his career after 70.

His earliest music reflected a lot of what was going on around him in New Music before World War II. The "Holiday Overture" and the two ballets "Pocahontas" and (for me, especially) "The Minotaur" as well as his "Symphony No. 1" would all be typical of the American Scene between the wars – sounding like a mix of Copland and Ives, perhaps – but there are lots of fingerprints of the more mature composer already in these works.

After the war, with the Piano Sonata – to me, a work that would fit into any recital program as well as Liszt's monumental sonata – things started taking on a different turn. The Cello Sonata plays off this "time-counterpoint" where the cello is flexible but the piano more rigid and often moving at a different "pace" than the sound of the cello. Also, in one sense, the cello is "romantic," emotional and varied, while the piano is more "classical," stricter sounding and structural, the bones of the piece whereas the cello is the skin, the heart, the soul of the piece.

It wasn't until the First String Quartet that Carter reached his "true voice." This work, composed famously in the isolation of the Arizona desert where the sense of time – an all-important facet of his style – is very different from living in New York City. Not only is it his most expansive work, the quartet flows with an organic quality that is like life itself.

By this time, he was in his early-40s, considered a "late-bloomer" compared to other composers who'd found their voice at a much younger age.

The music he wrote in the '60s and '70s – like the Concerto for Orchestra or the Third Quartet (which is really two duos playing two often different but simultaneous pieces, each duo even playing a different number of movements) – is his most complex and was viewed at the time as "Late Carter." The man, after all was in his mid-60s. Most commentators, looking for a pigeon-hole description, referred to these pieces as his "Late Period," as Beethoven's "Late Quartets" are Beethoven at his most complex.

I met Carter by accident standing on line to get tickets for a performance celebrating his impending 70th Birthday which included all three of the string quartets. He was there to pick up some tickets for friends of his – rather than calling and having them reserved. We talked briefly – when I told him I had been teaching at the University of Connecticut, he said "Oh, UConn – Charlie Whittenberg teaches there. He's a very fine composer." (When I told Charlie that, later – he was always having severe self-esteem issues – I remember him sitting back and sitting up straight with an expression that really struck home with him. I can only hope it helped him in his final years – he died not long after that.)

So the general attitude was, Carter, now 70, would do what most composers do when they reach retirement age – write less, rest on his laurels, and perhaps focus more on teaching or being an Elder Statesman in the New Music World.

But not so with Carter. Since the 1980s, when he was 75, he began a whole new wave of creativity, probably the most prolific period of his life. While many of these may be "miniatures" and solo pieces, there are several concertos, a few large-scale orchestral works, two more string quartets, songs and song-cycles, and, most surprisingly, his first opera, "What's Next?" which he composed for performances during his 90th Birthday celebrations!

Carter's biographical entry at Wikipedia has a partial list of works, of which over 75 were written after he turned 75.

Not many composers have a "Post-Late" Period...

Elliott Carter has long been a favorite composer of mine and his birthday is something I celebrate the way other music-lovers might observe Beethoven's or Mozart's birthdays. Today and over the next few days, I will be listening to several recordings – some of them, with scores – starting with another of my favorite works, his "Variations for Orchestra" – the full score I ordered last week through Barnes & Noble On-Line arrived in the mail just an hour ago, just in time to help me celebrate the composer's 102nd Birthday.

In the next few days, I will try to post some video-clips (the wonder of YouTube) of some of his works, including an exciting performance of his Cello Concerto (written in 2001) by Dane Johansen, a Juilliard student who chose it for his Concerto Competition Diploma, recorded at a dress-rehearsal with the Juilliard Orchestra conducted by a long-time Carter champion, James Levine.

Or this performance by Pierre-Laurent Aimard of a brief solo piano piece, "Catenaires" which Carter composed as one of many works to be premiered during the world-wide celebration of his 100th Birthday.

The vitality of this music is stunning regardless of its complexity – and then when you consider Carter was 92 when he composed the Cello Concerto and 97 when he wrote "Catenaires," it is even more stunning.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Carter – and ||: many happy returns :||

- Dick Strawser

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Photo credit: The header photo of Elliott Carter, which I found unattributed on a few different internet posts, was probably taken during a pre-concert interview, I suspect from the DVD accompanying Naxos' 100th Birthday Celebration disc featuring Robert Aitken and members of the Toronto-based New Music Concerts Ensemble.

The Classical Grammy Nominees for 2011

The Grammy Award nominees were revealed tonight – music's answer to the Oscars and the Tony Awards – during a concert telecast on CBS.

Not that I have anything against LL Cool J (he's great on NCIS: Los Angeles) but there isn't enough Benadryl in the house for me to sit through even two minutes of Justin Bieber, so I'm just scouring the web-site waiting for the list of nominees to be posted because, like, I rather doubt Hilary Hahn's going to be playing the 3rd Movement of Jennifer Higdon's Violin Concerto on the TV show (wouldn't that be great!).

Anyway, the winners will be announced on February 13th, 2011, at 8pm – about 73 days from now, if you're counting down.

(UPDATE: for the Winners, follow this link.)

Here are the nominees in the Classical Division: congratulations to everyone whose recording was nominated!

= = = = = = = = = = = = =

95. Best Engineered Album, Classical – An Engineer's Award. (Artist names appear in parentheses.)

Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony; Deus Ex Machina -- Mark Donahue, John Hill & Dirk Sobotka, engineers (Giancarlo Guerrero & Nashville Symphony Orchestra) [Naxos]

Have You Ever Been...? -- Robert Friedrich, engineer (Turtle Island Quartet, Stefon Harris & Mike Marshall) [Telarc]

Mackey, Steven: Dreamhouse - David Frost, Tom Lazarus, Steven Mackey & Dirk Sobotka, engineers (Gil Rose, Rinde Eckert, Catch Electric Guitar Quartet, Synergy Vocals & Boston Modern Orchestra Project) [BMOP/sound]

Porter, Quincy: Complete Viola Works - Leslie Ann Jones, Kory Kruckenberg & David Sabee, engineers (Eliesha Nelson & John McLaughlin Williams) [Dorian Sono Luminus]

Vocabularies - Steve Miller, Allen Sides & Roger Treece, engineers (Bobby McFerrin) [Emarcy]

- - - - -

96. Producer Of The Year, Classical – A Producer's Award. (Artist names appear in parentheses.)

Blanton Alspaugh

• Corigliano: Violin Concerto 'The Red Violin' (Michael Ludwig, JoAnn Falletta & Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra)

• Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony; Deus Ex Machina (Giancarlo Guerrero & Nashville Symphony)

• Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 2 (Leonard Slatkin & Detroit Symphony Orchestra)

• Tower Of The Eight Winds - Music For Violin & Piano By Judith Shatin (Borup-Ernst Duo)

• Tyberg: Symphony No. 3; Piano Trio (JoAnn Falletta & Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra)

• Wind Serenades (Gregory Wolynec & Gateway Chamber Ensemble)

David Frost

• Britten's Orchestra (Michael Stern & Kansas City Symphony)

• Chambers, Evan: The Old Burying Ground (Kenneth Kiesler & The University Of Michigan Symphony Orchestra)

• Dorman, Avner: Concertos For Mandolin, Piccolo, Piano And Concerto Grosso (Andrew Cyr, Eliran Avni, Mindy Kaufman, Avi Avital & Metropolis Ensemble)

• The 5 Browns In Hollywood (5 Browns)

• Mackey, Steven: Dreamhouse (Gil Rose, Rinde Eckert, Catch Electric Guitar Quartet, Synergy Vocals & Boston Modern Orchestra Project)

• Meeting Of The Spirits (Matt Haimovitz)

• Two Roads To Exile (ARC Ensemble)

Tim Handley

• Adams: Nixon In China (Marin Alsop, Tracy Dahl, Marc Heller, Thomas Hammons, Maria Kanyova, Robert Orth, Chen-Ye Yan, Opera Colorado Chorus & Colorado Symphony Orchestra)

• Debussy: Le Martyre De Saint Sébastien (Jun Märkl & Orchestre National De Lyon)

• Dohnányi: Variations On A Nursery Song (JoAnn Falletta, Eldar Nebolsin & Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra)

• Harris: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 6 (Marin Alsop & Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra)

• Hubay: Violin Concertos Nos. 1 And 2 (Chloë Hanslip, Andrew Mogrelia & Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra)

• Messiaen: Poèmes Pour Mi (Anne Schwanewilms, Jun Märkl & Orchestre National De Lyon)

• Piazzolla: Sinfonía Buenos Aires (Daniel Binelli, Tianwa Yang, Giancarlo Guerro & Nashville Symphony Orchestra)

• Ries: Works For Flute And Piano (Uwe Grodd & Matteo Napoli)

• Roussel: Symphony No. 1 (Stéphane Denève & Royal Scottish National Orchestra)

• Shchedrin: Concertos For Orchestra Nos. 4 & 5 (Kirill Karabits & Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra)

• Stamitz: Flute Concertos (Robert Aitken, Donatas Katkus & St. Christopher Chamber Orchestra)

• Strauss, R: Josephs-Legende; Rosenkavalier; Die Frau Ohne Schatten (Orchestral Suites) (JoAnn Falletta & Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra)

Marina A. Ledin, Victor Ledin

• Brubeck: Songs Of Praise (Lynne Morrow, Richard Grant, Quartet San Francisco & The Pacific Mozart Ensemble)

• Cascade Of Roses (Janice Weber)

• Gnattali: Solo & Chamber Works For Guitar (Marc Regnier)

• If I Were A Bird (Michael Lewin)

• Kletzki: Piano Concerto (Joseph Banowetz, Thomas Sanderling & Russian Philharmonic Orchestra)

• Porter, Quincy: Complete Viola Works (Eliesha Nelson & John McLaughlin Williams)

• Rubinstein: Piano Music (1852-1894) (Joseph Banowetz)

• Rubinstein: Piano Music (1871-1890) (Joseph Banowetz)

• 20th Century Harp Sonatas (Sarah Schuster Ericsson)

James Mallinson

• Mahler: Symphony No. 2 (Bernard Haitink, Duain Wolfe, Miah Persson, Christianne Stotijn, Chicago Symphony Chorus & Chicago Symphony Orchestra)

• Prokofiev: Romeo And Juliet (Valery Gergiev & London Symphony Orchestra)

• Shchedrin: The Enchanted Wanderer (Valery Gergiev, Evgeny Akimov, Sergei Aleksashkin, Kristina Kapustinskaya, Mariinsky Chorus & Mariinsky Orchestra)

• Strauss, R: Ein Heldenleben; Webern: Im Sommerwind (Bernard Haitink & Chicago Symphony Orchestra)

• Strauss, R: Eine Alpensinfonie (Bernard Haitink & London Symphony Orchestra)

• Tchaikovsky: Rococo Variations; Prokofiev: Sinfonia Concertante (Gautier Capuçon, Valery Gergiev & Orchestra Of The Mariinsky Theatre)

• Wagner: Parsifal (Valery Gergiev, Gary Lehman, Violeta Urmana, René Pape, Evgeny Nikitin, Alexei Tanovitski, Nikolai Putilin, Mariinsky Chorus & Mariinsky Orchestra)

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97. Best Classical Album – Award to the Artist(s) and to the Album Producer(s) if other than the Artist.

Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4 - Mariss Jansons, conductor; Everett Porter, producer; Everett Porter, mastering engineer (Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) [RCO Live]

Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony; Deus Ex Machina - Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor; Blanton Alspaugh, producer; Mark Donahue, John Hill & Dirk Sobotka, engineers/mixers (Terrence Wilson; Nashville Symphony Orchestra) [Naxos]

Mackey, Steven: Dreamhouse - Gil Rose, conductor; Rinde Eckert; Catch Electric Guitar Quartet; David Frost, producer; David Frost, Tom Lazarus, Steven Mackey & Dirk Sobotka, engineers/mixers; Silas Brown, mastering engineer (Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Synergy Vocals) [BMOP/sound]

Sacrificium - Giovanni Antonini, conductor; Cecilia Bartoli; Arend Prohmann, producer; Philip Siney, engineer/mixer (Il Giardino Armonico) [Decca]

Verdi: Requiem - Riccardo Muti, conductor; Duain Wolfe, chorus master; Christopher Alder, producer; David Frost, Tom Lazarus & Christopher Willis, engineers/mixers (Ildar Abdrazakov, Olga Borodina, Barbara Frittoli & Mario Zeffiri; Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Chicago Symphony Chorus) [CSO Resound]

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98. Best Orchestral Performance – Award to the Conductor and to the Orchestra.

Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4 - Mariss Jansons, conductor (Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) [RCO Live]

Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony; Deus Ex Machina - Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor (Terrence Wilson; Nashville Symphony) [Naxos]

Mackey, Steven: Dreamhouse - Gil Rose, conductor; Rinde Eckert (Catch Electric Guitar Quartet; Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Synergy Vocals) [BMOP/sound]

Salieri: Overtures & Stage Music - Thomas Fey, conductor (Mannheimer Mozartorchester) [Haenssler Classic]

Stravinsky: Pulcinella; Symphony In Three Movements; Four Études - Pierre Boulez, conductor (Roxana Constantinescu, Kyle Ketelsen & Nicholas Phan; Chicago Symphony Orchestra) [CSO Resound]

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99. Best Opera Recording – Award to the Conductor, Album Producer(s) and Principal Soloists.

Berg: Lulu - Antonio Pappano, conductor; Agneta Eichenholz, Jennifer Larmore, Klaus Florian Vogt & Michael Volle; David Groves, producer (Orchestra Of The Royal Opera House) [Opus Arte]

Hasse: Marc' Antonio E Cleopatra - Matthew Dirst, conductor; Jamie Barton & Ava Pine; Keith Weber, producer (Ars Lyrica Houston) [Dorian Sono Luminus]

Saariaho: L'Amour De Loin - Kent Nagano, conductor; Daniel Belcher, Ekaterina Lekhina & Marie-Ange Todorovitch; Martin Sauer, producer (Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; Rundfunkchor Berlin) [Harmonia Mundi]

Shchedrin: The Enchanted Wanderer - Valery Gergiev, conductor; Evgeny Akimov, Sergei Aleksashkin & Kristina Kapustinskaya; James Mallinson, producer (Orchestra Of The Mariinsky Theatre; Chorus Of The Mariinsky Theatre) [Mariinsky]

Sullivan: Ivanhoe - David Lloyd-Jones, conductor; Neal Davies, Geraldine McGreevy, James Rutherford, Toby Spence & Janice Watson; Brian Pidgeon, producer (BBC National Orchestra Of Wales; Adrian Partington Singers) [Chandos]

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100. Best Choral Performance – Award to the Choral Conductor, and to the Orchestra Conductor if an Orchestra is on the recording, and to the Choral Director or Chorus Master if applicable.

Bach: Cantatas - Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conductor; Erwin Ortner, chorus master (Bernarda Fink, Gerald Finley, Christian Gerhaher, Werner Güra, Julia Kleiter, Christine Schäfer, Anton Scharinger & Kurt Streit; Concentus Musicau Wien; Arnold Schoenberg Chor) [Deutsche Harmonia Mundi]

Baltic Runes - Paul Hillier, conductor (Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir) [Harmonia Mundi]

Haydn: The Creation - René Jacobs, conductor; Hans-Christoph Rademann, choir director (Julia Kleiter, Maximilian Schmitt & Johannes Weisser; Freiburger Barockorchester; RIAS Kammerchor) [Harmonia Mundi]

Martin: Golgotha - Daniel Reuss, conductor (Judith Gauthier, Marianne Beate Kielland, Adrian Thompson, Mattijs Van De Woerd & Konstantin Wolff; Estonian National Symphony Orchestra; Cappella Amsterdam & Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir) [Harmonia Mundi]

Verdi: Requiem - Riccardo Muti, conductor; Duain Wolfe, chorus master (Ildar Abdrazakov, Olga Borodina, Barbara Frittoli & Mario Zeffiri; Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Chicago Symphony Chorus) [CSO Resound]

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101. Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (with Orchestra) – Award to the Instrumental Soloist(s) and to the Conductor.

Daugherty: Deus Ex Machina - Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor; Terrence Wilson (Nashville Symphony) Track from: Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony [Naxos]

Dorman, Avner: Mandolin Concerto - Andrew Cyr, conductor; Avi Avital (Metropolis Ensemble) Track from: Dorman, Avner: Mandolin Concerto; Piccolo Concerto; Concerto Grosso; Piano Concerto [Naxos]

Kletzki: Piano Concerto In D Minor, Op. 22 - Thomas Sanderling, conductor; Joseph Banowetz (Russian Philharmonic Orchestra) Track from: Kletzki: Piano Concerto [Naxos]

Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 23 & 24 - Mitsuko Uchida (The Cleveland Orchestra) [Decca]

Porter, Quincy: Concerto For Viola & Orchestra - John McLaughlin Williams, conductor; Eliesha Nelson (Northwest Sinfonia) Track from: Porter, Quincy: Complete Viola Works [Dorian Sono Luminus]

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102. Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without Orchestra) – Award to the Instrumental Soloist.

Chopin: The Nocturnes - Nelson Freire [Decca]

Hamelin: Études - Marc-André Hamelin [Hyperion Records]

Messiaen: Livre Du Saint-Sacrement - Paul Jacobs [Naxos]

Paganini: 24 Caprices - Julia Fischer [Decca]

20th Century Harp Sonatas - Sarah Schuster Ericsson [Dorian Sono Luminus]

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103. Best Chamber Music Performance – Award to the Artists.

Beethoven: Complete Sonatas For Violin & Piano - Isabelle Faust & Alexander Melnikov [Harmonia Mundi]

Gnattali: Solo & Chamber Works For Guitar - Marc Regnier (Tacy Edwards, Natalia Khoma & Marco Sartor) [Dorian Sono Luminus]

Ligeti: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2 - Parker Quartet [Naxos]

Porter, Quincy: Complete Viola Works - Eliesha Nelson & John McLaughlin Williams (Douglas Rioth; Northwest Sinfonia) [Dorian Sono Luminus]

Schoenberg: String Quartets Nos. 3 & 4 - Fred Sherry String Quartet (Christopher Oldfather & Rolf Schulte) [Naxos]

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104. Best Small Ensemble Performance – Award to the Ensemble (and to the Conductor.)

Ceremony And Devotion - Music For The Tudors - Harry Christophers, conductor; The Sixteen [CORO]

Dinastia Borja - Jordi Savall, conductor; Hespèrion XXI & La Capella Reial De Catalunya (Pascal Bertin, Daniele Carnovich, Lior Elmalich, Montserrat Figueras, Driss El Maloumi, Marc Mauillon, Lluís Vilamajó & Furio Zanasi; Pascal Bertin, Daniele Carnovich, Josep Piera & Francisco Rojas) [Alia Vox]

Trondheimsolistene - In Folk Style - Øyvind Gimse & Geir Inge Lotsberg, conductors (Emilia Amper & Gjermund Larsen; TrondheimSolistene) [2L (Lindberg Lyd)]

Victoria: Lamentations Of Jeremiah - Peter Phillips, conductor; The Tallis Scholars [Gimell]

Whitacre, Eric: Choral Music - Noel Edison, conductor; Elora Festival Singers (Carol Bauman & Leslie De'Ath) [Naxos]

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105. Best Classical Vocal Performance – Award to the Vocal Soloist(s).

Ombre De Mon Amant - French Baroque Arias - Anne Sofie Von Otter (William Christie; Les Arts Florissants) [Deutsche Grammophon]

Sacrificium - Cecilia Bartoli (Giovanni Antonini; Il Giardino Armonico) [Decca]

Turina: Canto A Sevilla - Lucia Duchonová (Celso Antunes; NDR Radiophilharmonie) [Haenssler Classic]

Vivaldi: Opera Arias - Pyrotechnics - Vivica Genaux (Fabio Biondi; Europa Galante) [Virgin Classics]

Wagner: Wesendonck-Lieder - Measha Brueggergosman (Franz Welser-Möst; The Cleveland Orchestra) Track from: Wagner: Wesendonck-Lieder; Preludes & Overtures [Deutsche Grammophon]

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106. Best Classical Contemporary Composition – A Composer's Award. (For a contemporary classical composition composed within the last 25 years, and released for the first time during the Eligibility Year.) Award to the librettist, if applicable.

Daugherty, Michael: Deus Ex Machina - Michael Daugherty (Giancarlo Guerrero) Track from: Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony [Naxos]

Henze, Hans Werner: Appassionatamente Plus - Hans Werner Henze (Stefan Soltesz) Track from: Appassionatamente Plus Lulu-Suite [Cybele Records]

Lindberg, Magnus: Graffiti - Magnus Lindberg (Sakari Oramo) Track from: Lindberg: Graffiti; Seht Die Sonne [Ondine]

Pärt, Arvo: Symphony No. 4 - Arvo Pärt (Esa-Pekka Salonen) Track from: Pärt: Symphony No. 4 [ECM New Series]

Shchedrin, Rodion Konstantinovich: The Enchanted Wanderer - Rodion Konstantinovich Shchedrin (Valery Gergiev) Track from: Shchedrin: The Enchanted Wanderer [Mariinsky]

- - - - -

107. Best Classical Crossover Album -- Award to the Artist(s) and/or to the Conductor.

Meeting Of The Spirits - Matt Haimovitz (Amaryllis Jarczyk, Jan Jarczyk, John McLaughlin, Dominic Painchaud, Leanna Rutt & Matt Wilson) [Oxingale Records]

Off The Map - The Silk Road Ensemble [World Village]

Roots - My Life, My Song - Jessye Norman (Ira Coleman, Steve Johns, Mike Lovatt, Mark Markham & Martin Williams) [Sony Classical]

Tin, Christopher: Calling All Dawns - Lucas Richman, conductor (Sussan Deyhim, Lia, Kaori Omura, Dulce Pontes, Jia Ruhan, Aoi Tada & Frederica von Stade; Anonymous 4 & Soweto Gospel Choir; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra) [Tin Works Publishing]

Vocabularies - Bobby McFerrin [Emarcy/Universal]

= = = = = = = = = = = = =

While I'm happy for those that were nominated, I am especially bummed to see Jennifer Higdon's Violin Concerto with Hilary Hahn absent from this list. Oh well... It's a great work and a very fine recording -- it's a winner in my book... for what that's worth...

Anyway, there they are -- tune in Feb 13th, 2011, to find out who the Grammy Winners are!


- Dick Strawser