Another in the series of somewhat surreal stories from the collection, Stravinsky's Tavern.
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“Everybody’s talking about change but after they’re both done with us, that’s all we’ll have left in our pockets,” Beethoven muttered as Sarah the Serving-Wench brought them each another beer.
It was a windy night in late October: fall was definitely in the air. Lots of people had gathered in Stravinsky’s Tavern, including Beethoven who was sitting in one of the corner booths with his old friend, Johann Sebastian Bach, munching on peanuts and muttering about the election campaign that was heating up in the final weeks.
“Ja, it’s an odd thing, don’t you think?” Bach looked around at the crowded bar, though very few were paying attention to the TV monitor. “One wants to go back to the Good Old Days and reinvent the past while the other one wants to annihilate the world to rebuild it fresh.”
It was a slow night for sports – not much to show at the moment but the World Series was only a day or two away, now. With the election two weeks off, it was as if they were interrupting the political ads to bring you up-dates on some of the games.
They looked up and saw Mozart come in with a gaggle of young women, heading straight for the billiard room which was already fuller than usual. He waved blithely at The B’s and saw they were watching the TV. There was an ad urging people to go and vote on Election Day, extolling the patriotic pleasure one would receive after doing your civic duty, your aesthetic responsibility after pulling the lever for the composer of your choice.
He shrugged his shoulders playfully. “The Progressive Party? The Conservative Party? Who cares, as long as it’s a party, right, guys?” And with his loud obnoxious giggle, he disappeared into the crowd.
Everywhere you turned it was Brahms this, Wagner that. Even the political signs around town were becoming annoying.
It was an especially difficult decision for Bach and Beethoven, watching this campaign. They were constantly being bombarded by both candidates looking for last-minute endorsements that would signal yet another ad-blitz, more talk-show appearances and press releases.
They both agreed, though, that Wagner’s “Chief Spin-Doctor,” Karl Loewe, was behind a lot of this. He was the Erl-King personified. After he’d gotten Berlioz elected, he was intent on making sure Wagner and his futurist cronies would continue in power. Beethoven was convinced if it hadn’t been for that third-party ticket – Fine & D’Indy – no doubt Spohr would be President today. Not that Hector wasn’t a lot more entertaining.
When they had run for President and been elected the full number of terms they were allowed in each generation – just like Mozart – it wasn’t this big media extravaganza it is now.
“It’s more like a circus, today. We used to have fun with it, not so cut-throat,” Beethoven said after a long slow sip. The beer was not great but it was cold and wet. Beer was never as good as it was in the old days, either. Nothing was, especially the music.
Bach agreed. “And the money!” He adjusted his wig. “How many musicians and court house-composers could we support in our time with the kind of money they spend on these ads today! It’s disgraceful. I’m surprised Brahms” – he was well-known for being thrifty but secretly generous to his friends – “would even have anything to do with this.”
“And Wagner, spending it on something as silly as an attack ad, just because he’s behind in the polls.” Wagner was always raising money for lavish buildings and to support his luxurious life-style. He was the only composer ever to have had a whole hour on Robin Leach’s old show Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous, taking the world on a private tour of his opera house and that fancy villa he built for himself in Bayreuth, all champagne wishes and caviar dreams. “How else could such a man run the country, except into the ground?”
Bach looked deep in thought, oblivious to all the noise. “Brahms has a very sound sense of structure, you know – and he can write a good fugue. I like that in a President.”
Beethoven winced. Did Old Bach think he, the Great Beethoven, couldn’t write a fugue, himself? He couldn’t write one like Bach, no, but why would you want to do that? He let it pass.
“And Wagner,” the Old Pig-tail sighed with a dismissive wave of his hand as he took another sip, “he’s just noodling around. Noodle-noodle-noodle,” his hand wafting around in the air like a bird looking for someplace to land. “My sons tried that and look where it got them...”
Again, Beethoven glared at him: “Me, that’s where it got them, you old fool...”
Brahms was especially looking for their endorsements. After all, he was the Third B and after eight years of Berlioz as President, we needed a Different B in the White House. The Past was important to him – just not the Immediate Past.
“And how’re you going to negotiate with these terrorists if you can’t show them you can write solid counterpoint?” Bach thought everybody needed to know that but in fact very few schools did more than offer today’s students an introduction to what was now considered old, out-dated and academic technology.
“There he goes again,” he thought. Beethoven was once a terrorist, as far as Bach was concerned. “We all were, when we got started, except maybe Mozart and Mendelssohn.” He wasn’t sure about Brahms: his early stuff wasn’t that well known any more so he never knew what it was that turned Schumann on so. Today, though, terrorists were everywhere, tearing down the very idea of going to concerts and writing well-composed symphonies.
Who was that French guy who had said they should burn down the opera houses? Imagine burning down an opera house! What an affront to civilization! And now he’s conducting in them. “Boulez, ja – Boulez, that was his name. And he had a long association with Wagner’s music,” he pointed out, but the Conservative’s complaint that he ‘palled around with terrorists’ was silly compared to the name no one would mention, that house-painter with the mustache who was so fond of Wagner...
“Brahms ripped off my ‘Ode to Joy’ platform in his 1st Symphony,” Beethoven complained sourly. “Hah, took him long enough to figure it out, too. But you know, I really envy Wagner’s ability to write operas...” The initial reception for his only opera was still a sore-point with him, but it’s not like that was the only opera he wanted to write.
“Ja, but don’t forget,” Bach chuckled, wagging a finger at him, “it took him almost 25 years to write the Ring, too.”
Beethoven hated it when he needled him like that – needle-needle-needle. Bach, humbug!
He shrugged his shoulders. “But that was four operas – that’s not like just one symphony! I wrote all nine of my symphonies in the time he was trying to figure out how to write his first one!” He took another swig. “Still, it IS a good one, ja...”
“Ach, there – he said it again.” And Bach took a swig himself. The ad on TV was another one where Wagner was describing himself as a maverick.
“I,” Beethoven said, pulling himself up in his chair, “am the Original Maverick! Such night-soil...”
“I’m sorry, Herr Ludwig, but I think the Original Maverick was probably the guy who introduced major and minor thirds into the musical vocabulary during the Middle Ages.”
Then there was that guy Brahms had wanted to choose as his Vice-President, the Progressive Party’s Whipping Boy, Arnold Schoenberg, but you couldn’t go across party lines like that, they said, and just pick somebody who had some affinity with you. They were afraid he would really alienate the Conservative Bass and most of the Tenors, too. Now Schoenberg was trying to paint Brahms as a closet progressive, no doubt trying to win over some liberal-minded independent voters who were dismayed by Wagner’s political writings – especially his anti-Semitism – but who liked his music.
Then Wagner started saying in a recent ad, “If you hate Modern Music, don’t blame it on me – it’s Brahms the Progressive.”
Bach was afraid it would just turn off voters all together. He knew if it were just a write-in campaign, the winner would probably be Andrew Lloyd-Webber. He looked into the beer stein and wondered if maybe there was enough left he could drown in.
The newest ads were desperately focused on Brahms’ early days, playing the piano in brothels and snidely pointing out he wasn’t married, was he? Of course, Wagner’s camp couldn’t really defend the “Sanctity of Marriage” issue, could they?
“Why is Brahms’ NOT being married more of an issue than Wagner being married to a woman he stole from her first husband when she’s the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt in the first place?” Thinking back to his own happy domestic life, Bach continued to have enormous difficulty with what he considered the degenerate 19th Century lifestyle.
Of course, the whole Clara Schumann thing was just beyond him.
Beethoven agreed. Brahms had originally thought it was time for a Woman Composer on the ticket and had suggested Clara Schumann as his running mate but then what did you do with a husband like Robert Schumann hanging around the White House?
Just then, Stravinsky came over to their table to see how they’re doing. He often liked to make small talk with his customers whether they were regulars or not.
“So, who are you guys going to vote for, as if I need to ask?” Like most people in town, Stravinsky assumed they’d both be voting for the Third B.
Bach was pretty sure he would be voting for Brahms, but Beethoven still wasn’t entirely sure. There were things he liked about both composers.
They turned their attention to the TV monitor which now had another noisy ad. Wagner had attacked Brahms because he couldn’t write an opera. So now Brahms was countering by saying “When was the last time you heard a piece of chamber music by Wagner you actually liked?”
At the end came the tag line in that high squeaky voice which always amused them: “I am Doktor Johannes Brahmsss, und I approve zis message, ja?” Brahms always pulled out his doctorate – even if it was honorary – as if that would give him any real “culture cred,” as they liked to say.
Immediately after that was a Wagner ad in which they said Brahms was out-of-touch with modern life because his music was so old-fashioned, all those academic forms like fugues and that bone-dry passacaglia in his 4th Symphony.
Bach shook his head: like that’s a bad thing?
Beethoven argued if Brahms’ going on a pub-crawl to listen to Gypsy bands with his rowdy friends wasn’t a populist touch, how did that compare to Wagner’s living in plush villas and always hanging out with the aristocracy trying to bleed them for money?
Brahms often was very generous to his friends – like Clara Schumann or Antonin Dvořák – though he didn’t talk about it much. Still, Wagner’s idea of “redistributing the wealth” only went as far as himself.
Stravinsky added with a sly wink, “and what does Wagner write about in his operas, anyway? Incest? Old dead gods and magic swords? Hah – singing dragons!? What does that have to do with modern life?”
But Bach, who had no use for opera, knew it would all come down to the stupid economy, as Berlioz had called it during his first term. When they were asked what they’d cut from their music – since obviously they’d have to cut something – Brahms and Wagner just kept playing more and more notes. Wagner talked about adding more tubas to his orchestra and Brahms wanted to write more variations, maybe another symphony.
At the last debate when moderator Leonard Bernstein asked them about their educational policies, Brahms played his “Academic Festival Overture,” but Wagner started to play the fugue from Brahms’ “Handel Variations” then say, before he’d fall asleep, “why would you teach them old out-moded stuff like that? We need to cut the crap, that’s what we need!”
When they talked about the economy, Brahms played a bit of Tristan und Isolde, then something from the first movement of Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique and said, looking right into the camera, “why would you want to vote for the same failed harmonic schemes from the last eight years?” He was constantly harping about “the bridge passages to nowhere.”
Everybody knew Berlioz’ star had dimmed considerably after his sequel, Lelio, failed. Bach said he might as well have called it The Lame Duck Symphony. Beethoven thought more like The Dead Duck.
People were looking for change. But a change to what?
Beethoven had once suggested Stravinsky would make a good candidate. He wasn’t German, for one thing – and people were always going on about “The Teutonic Plague” in the White House all these years with Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and now this choice between Wagner and Brahms. They’d finally gotten a French composer in there, but then look what happened: chaos!
Unfortunately. Stravinsky turned out to be a bad candidate, always flip-flopping on the stylistic issues. People felt they’d go to a concert to hear Stravinsky but never knew what the Real Stravinsky was.
This time, Stravinsky said maybe they should’ve run someone like Erik Satie – “there’s an economical composer!” Or maybe one of the younger composers like Philip Glass or Jennifer Higdon. But people in the party rejected the idea of not nominating a Dead Composer.
When the Progressives talked about patriotism, they always played the Overture to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger in the background, then when the disembodied voice would ask “What does That One have to say about ‘Country First’?” switching over to Brahms’ “Tragic” Overture. Wagner’s new slogan was “Faster and Louder!”
When it came down to his choice, he told Stravinsky, Beethoven figured he might as well flip a coin. So he reached into his pocket and pulled out a penny, tossing it high in the air. With a ping, it hit the edge of the table and bounced off, rolling across the floor. Beethoven flew into a rage.
“Wait a minute,” Stravinsky said, “is anyone writing this down?”
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I'm Dr. Dick and I approve this story.
© 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Chamber Music & an Organ Spectacular Make for a Busy Sunday
Sunday would be a busy day at Le Maison du Train if Dr. Dick could be three or more people in order to attend all the events scheduled throughout the day. And though friends have accused him of having multiple personalities, he hasn’t yet figured out how to get each of them to be in different places at basically the same times.
Unfortunately, one of the events has presumably been canceled though you wouldn’t know that from their web-site. If nothing else, this will make staff-assignments a little easier.
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For me, the winner of the draw will be the violin recital of a friend of mine from way back. Carl Iba and pianist Randy Day will be performing in Schaefferstown, Lebanon County, part of the series of chamber music concerts at St. Luke Lutheran Church. While I’m looking forward to the music and the music-making, I’m also looking forward to the drive through the Central Pennsylvania countryside, taking the back highways which will pass through farmland and woods. For my readers outside the area – and one, living on DelMarVa, has said the fall colors were so much better during a recent excursion into south-eastern Pennsylvania (so apparently there’s more to the Mason-Dixon Line than just a state-of-mind) - the fall colors look like they are going to splendid this year.
Last month, I wrote about the first concert in the chamber music series Carl directs at the church, now in its 9th season (or is it nine seasons that he’s been running it?). Each season, Carl does a violin-and-piano recital. This year, there’s a Mozart sonata – a two-movement one in G Major, K.301 – plus lyrical favorites like the Meditation from Massenet’s Thaïs, one of the Gymnopedies by Erik Satie and Dvořák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me” along with William Bolcom’s “Graceful Ghost Rag” (Halloween costume not required) and the Cszardas by Vittorio Monti, a virtuosic impression of a Gypsy dance in the style of the great Gypsy violinists of the 19th Century, the kind that inspired Brahms and also the Hungarian-born Franz Liszt. They’re also playing the 1st Rhapsody by Bela Bartok which is based on some real Hungarian folk-dances in a more ethnically correct approach to the style than Liszt’s famous Hungarian Rhapsodies of the previous century.
Liszt and Brahms - in fact, practically anybody in the 19th Century who was writing in the “Hungarian Style” – used themes by Gypsy musicians in a style usually referred to as “a la zingarese” which correctly translates as “Gypsy,” not Hungarian. This isn’t really folk music, more a kind of urban popular music. Brahms made frequent trips to famous restaurants in Vienna where he’d go to listen to his favorite Gypsy bands play, much the way people in the 20th Century would go to smoky bars to hear jazz and blues.
It wasn’t until Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly in the early 20th Century started collecting actual folk-songs gathered out in the remote countryside of Hungary that the true folk-music came to light in the wider, more serious world of classical music, generations after the folk music of Bohemia or Russia were being incorporated into the nationalistic voices of composers like Dvořák or Rimsky-Korsakov. Bartok’s rhapsody is based on two dances, basically used in recruiting young men into the military (imagine that working today) – the first one is a slow dance, and the second one fast, nothing terribly complicated about that. When I was teaching at UConn, a colleague of mine, violinist Teddy Arm, said to me after we listened to a recording of the Bartok 1st Rhapsody, “now, that’s down-home music – if you’re Hungarian.”
Also on the program is a sonatina (or “little sonata”) by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu whose music may not be all that well known these days, which is a pity. He’s very tuneful and often light and airy, unlike a lot of music being written in the first half of the 20th Century. Carl played some of the “Madrigals” Martinu wrote for violin and other instruments – there’s a bunch with piano and some with viola, and I think he did the viola set a few seasons ago. By the way, Martinu’s Oboe Concerto is on the program with the Harrisburg Symphony and the orchestra’s principal oboist, Alicia Chapman on November 8th & 9th.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
One of the other programs scheduled for the same afternoon is a program at the State Street Academy in Harrisburg, just down from the Capitol building, featuring the school’s director, cellist Daniel Gaisford, playing the two solo cello sonatas by Michael Hersch. Though the web-site hasn’t been up-dated to reflect recent changes, for whatever reason – and there are a number of questions out there about all this – Daniel told me on October 9th that he had resigned as the academy’s director (effective immediately) and, in subsequent e-mail, that the entire Sunday series of recitals has been canceled. I have no idea what’s going on with the school right now but hopefully things will be straightened out soon: I assume otherwise it’s business as usual. But it would seem fairly unlikely anyone showing up at 4:00 on Sunday is not going to hear music by Michael Hersch played by Daniel Gaisford, whether they substitute another program or not.
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Sunday is also Organ Spectacular Day, an international event celebrating The King of Instruments in this “International Year of the Organ” with recitals being held on October 19th around the world. Here, Central Pennsylvania will be reverberating with four churches holding programs. They’re not designed to be a “progressive recital” where everybody could pack up from one before moving on to the next, but it would be possible to take in more than just one, not to mention taking advantage of lower gas prices, too. Since they’re scheduled every two hours, I suppose if the programs were kept between an hour and 90 minutes, that would allow some travel time from one to the other.
The celebration begins at 2:00 in Carlisle at the Second Presbyterian Church, 58 Garland Drive where various area organists will be performing.
At 4:00, David Binkley will inaugurate the new Schantz Pipe Organ at Camp Hill Presbyterian Church, 101 N. 23rd Street in Camp Hill, with a special dedication concert.
Then at 6:00, Eric Riley offers a program at Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg.
The series concludes at 8:00 when various organists will perform at Derry Presbyterian Church, 248 East Derry Rd in Hershey where Helen Anthony will play a new piece, “Ornaments of Grace,” commissioned especially for this event (the composer’s name not credited on the web-site announcement). The program also feature Sally Cummings and organ duets performed by Shawn Gingrich and William Curry.
Like the Chamber Music at St. Luke program in Schaefferstown, these organ recitals are all “free-will offerings,” no tickets required.
So, certainly enough music to go around on Sunday, whether or not there is enough of you to take them all in. At least the day will be a crisp and sunny fall day even if, musically speaking, when it rains, it pours.
Unfortunately, one of the events has presumably been canceled though you wouldn’t know that from their web-site. If nothing else, this will make staff-assignments a little easier.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
For me, the winner of the draw will be the violin recital of a friend of mine from way back. Carl Iba and pianist Randy Day will be performing in Schaefferstown, Lebanon County, part of the series of chamber music concerts at St. Luke Lutheran Church. While I’m looking forward to the music and the music-making, I’m also looking forward to the drive through the Central Pennsylvania countryside, taking the back highways which will pass through farmland and woods. For my readers outside the area – and one, living on DelMarVa, has said the fall colors were so much better during a recent excursion into south-eastern Pennsylvania (so apparently there’s more to the Mason-Dixon Line than just a state-of-mind) - the fall colors look like they are going to splendid this year.
Last month, I wrote about the first concert in the chamber music series Carl directs at the church, now in its 9th season (or is it nine seasons that he’s been running it?). Each season, Carl does a violin-and-piano recital. This year, there’s a Mozart sonata – a two-movement one in G Major, K.301 – plus lyrical favorites like the Meditation from Massenet’s Thaïs, one of the Gymnopedies by Erik Satie and Dvořák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me” along with William Bolcom’s “Graceful Ghost Rag” (Halloween costume not required) and the Cszardas by Vittorio Monti, a virtuosic impression of a Gypsy dance in the style of the great Gypsy violinists of the 19th Century, the kind that inspired Brahms and also the Hungarian-born Franz Liszt. They’re also playing the 1st Rhapsody by Bela Bartok which is based on some real Hungarian folk-dances in a more ethnically correct approach to the style than Liszt’s famous Hungarian Rhapsodies of the previous century.
Liszt and Brahms - in fact, practically anybody in the 19th Century who was writing in the “Hungarian Style” – used themes by Gypsy musicians in a style usually referred to as “a la zingarese” which correctly translates as “Gypsy,” not Hungarian. This isn’t really folk music, more a kind of urban popular music. Brahms made frequent trips to famous restaurants in Vienna where he’d go to listen to his favorite Gypsy bands play, much the way people in the 20th Century would go to smoky bars to hear jazz and blues.
It wasn’t until Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly in the early 20th Century started collecting actual folk-songs gathered out in the remote countryside of Hungary that the true folk-music came to light in the wider, more serious world of classical music, generations after the folk music of Bohemia or Russia were being incorporated into the nationalistic voices of composers like Dvořák or Rimsky-Korsakov. Bartok’s rhapsody is based on two dances, basically used in recruiting young men into the military (imagine that working today) – the first one is a slow dance, and the second one fast, nothing terribly complicated about that. When I was teaching at UConn, a colleague of mine, violinist Teddy Arm, said to me after we listened to a recording of the Bartok 1st Rhapsody, “now, that’s down-home music – if you’re Hungarian.”
Also on the program is a sonatina (or “little sonata”) by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu whose music may not be all that well known these days, which is a pity. He’s very tuneful and often light and airy, unlike a lot of music being written in the first half of the 20th Century. Carl played some of the “Madrigals” Martinu wrote for violin and other instruments – there’s a bunch with piano and some with viola, and I think he did the viola set a few seasons ago. By the way, Martinu’s Oboe Concerto is on the program with the Harrisburg Symphony and the orchestra’s principal oboist, Alicia Chapman on November 8th & 9th.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
One of the other programs scheduled for the same afternoon is a program at the State Street Academy in Harrisburg, just down from the Capitol building, featuring the school’s director, cellist Daniel Gaisford, playing the two solo cello sonatas by Michael Hersch. Though the web-site hasn’t been up-dated to reflect recent changes, for whatever reason – and there are a number of questions out there about all this – Daniel told me on October 9th that he had resigned as the academy’s director (effective immediately) and, in subsequent e-mail, that the entire Sunday series of recitals has been canceled. I have no idea what’s going on with the school right now but hopefully things will be straightened out soon: I assume otherwise it’s business as usual. But it would seem fairly unlikely anyone showing up at 4:00 on Sunday is not going to hear music by Michael Hersch played by Daniel Gaisford, whether they substitute another program or not.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
Sunday is also Organ Spectacular Day, an international event celebrating The King of Instruments in this “International Year of the Organ” with recitals being held on October 19th around the world. Here, Central Pennsylvania will be reverberating with four churches holding programs. They’re not designed to be a “progressive recital” where everybody could pack up from one before moving on to the next, but it would be possible to take in more than just one, not to mention taking advantage of lower gas prices, too. Since they’re scheduled every two hours, I suppose if the programs were kept between an hour and 90 minutes, that would allow some travel time from one to the other.
The celebration begins at 2:00 in Carlisle at the Second Presbyterian Church, 58 Garland Drive where various area organists will be performing.
At 4:00, David Binkley will inaugurate the new Schantz Pipe Organ at Camp Hill Presbyterian Church, 101 N. 23rd Street in Camp Hill, with a special dedication concert.
Then at 6:00, Eric Riley offers a program at Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg.
The series concludes at 8:00 when various organists will perform at Derry Presbyterian Church, 248 East Derry Rd in Hershey where Helen Anthony will play a new piece, “Ornaments of Grace,” commissioned especially for this event (the composer’s name not credited on the web-site announcement). The program also feature Sally Cummings and organ duets performed by Shawn Gingrich and William Curry.
Like the Chamber Music at St. Luke program in Schaefferstown, these organ recitals are all “free-will offerings,” no tickets required.
So, certainly enough music to go around on Sunday, whether or not there is enough of you to take them all in. At least the day will be a crisp and sunny fall day even if, musically speaking, when it rains, it pours.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Critics in Cleveland: Further Thoughts
Today’s post was prompted by a recent e-mail exchange with a reader in Los Angeles, free-lance writer and critic Laurence Vittes researching an article about last month’s re-assignment of the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s chief music critic Donald Rosenberg from his long-held beat at Severance Hall where he covered the Cleveland Orchestra. I’d blogged about it before, mostly focusing on the critic newly assigned to replace Rosenberg, Zachary Lewis, who had once been a critic with the newspaper here in my home-town of Harrisburg, PA.
It’s not like enough cyberink hasn’t been wafted about already on the topic of “muzzling a critic” or however one wants to describe it. Rosenberg’s relationship with the orchestra’s conductor, Franz Welser-Möst, has been notoriously stormy, bringing up long-range questions both ethical and artistic. With the announcement of FWM’s extended contract renewal, apparently another question surfaced, as well: how long, oh Lord, can this go on?
Of course, from my standpoint as a non-critic occasionally writing what people would like to think of as reviews, I’m not sure how satisfactory it would be, going to work all the time and thinking “what’s the point? It’s never going to change, is it?” Oh wait... actually, I think many of us have asked that on a daily basis. But what I mean is, if you’ve written some pretty scathing reviews in the past, what’re the chances this night, compared to any other night, is going to be any different?
The standard formula in the arts world places the performer on one side, the critic on the other and in the middle, the listeners who may have heard the performance and the readers who may not have heard the performance or, having heard it, are curious what somebody who gets paid to write what they think about a concert might tell them what they heard or thought they heard.
How many times had I read reviews of concerts I’d attended and wondered if the critic and I were actually hearing the same performance? It’s not unusual for someone to like something and someone else to hate the same thing. We’re all wired differently.
Going back to Cleveland, it would be a problem if the critic in question was the only one with such a consistently negative opinion, though. When FWM and the orchestra toured in the States, they often received similar comments from local critics. But relentlessly, season in and season out, it begins to seem like there’s an axe to be ground.
But I was wondering if – presuming as has been stated there was no pressure from the orchestra – readers were beginning to tire of the one-sidedness of all this? Is it a bottom-line based decision, a concern for alienating the readers? As I said, at least they didn’t fire him (could they have gotten away with that?) or eliminate the position as has happened with other cities’ newspapers.
Now, I don't read the sports pages, so I don't know what a paper might do if, say, the city has a lousy team or a losing coach and the sports-writer is constantly browbeating them in the press. Do they expect their columns are going to get the coach or a player fired? Would the editor "re-assign" the writer if he continued in too negative a strain for too long a time? I don't know.
But if the team is doing well, makes it to the play-offs and the crowds are generally cheering them on, it seems the writer just doesn't like the coach or a certain player or possibly has a problem with the whole team: how long would it take for the editors to react then? Or the readers, of often irrational irasciblility, who might demand something a little more dire than mere “re-assignment” (a vat of oil near the boiling point, for starters).
Then I realized I hadn’t checked back to see what reviews Zach Lewis has written since that first concert, the one with the Bruckner 7th Symphony (a Franz Welser-Möst specialty) described as “deliberate,” “slow pace[d]”, “lopsided.” I figured he would not write an “all sweet and lovely” review, but I kept thinking what if he too keeps finding things to “criticize,” using the word in the negative sense?
In a more recent performance with Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Lang Lang playing the Chopin E Minor Piano Concerto, he described the concert as “setting one important score on fire and leaving another in ashes.”
In the Chopin, Lang Lang...
- - - - - - - - -
“...proves ideal. Sure, he often breaks the musical speed limit, but he does so at his blazing version of leisure, without sacrificing clarity or devolving into a single-minded sprint.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, as rendered by the orchestra and Welser-MÖst. Here, speed limits count for little, and the music suffers greatly.”
- - - - - - - - -
In the final movement, he remarks that a slightly slower approach to the tempo “is still too brisk for the musicians to round out Beethoven's portrait of order restored. Instead, one merely senses chaos minimized.”
With the orchestra’s role in the Chopin best described as “modest” and a war-horse like Beethoven’s 5th, how much rehearsal time did they actually allot for this concert?
I don’t know if anyone at Severance Hall is having flashbacks to Rosenberg’s reviews, but mine were going back to the Old Days of Lorin Maazel and the under-rehearsed Mozart G Minor Symphony I heard them play at Carnegie Hall in the late-70s, mentioned in my earlier post.
The previous concert included the other Mozart G Minor Symphony – No. 25, the one that featured so prominently in the opening of the film “Amadeus” and still sounds amazing when you consider Mozart was 17 when he wrote it. Their performance had good chamber-music-like qualities in the middle movements, but, he concludes,
- - - - - - -
“...in the bolder first and last movements, Welser-MÖst and the orchestra tended to substitute stateliness and articulate counterpoint for fire and urgency. Polish is always a virtue in Mozart, but in the exceptionally dark 25th Symphony, a little grit isn't out of place, either.”
- - - - - - -
Of one of two works played with the soloist, pianist Emanuel Ax, Lewis wrote that in Karol Szymanowski’s rarely heard “Symphonie concertante” (his Symphony No. 4 which is really a substantial work for piano and orchestra, more concerto than symphony),
- - - - - - -
“... the pianist joined ranks with Welser-MÖst and the orchestra to cut through the thickets of a dense, prickly score and expose music of both visceral intensity and sincere emotion.”
- - - - - - -
What it’s like working in the corner of the Plain Dealer’s office where the arts folk hang out, I have no idea, but I imagine the politics must be very difficult to navigate. Rosenberg was certainly a star writer on the staff: did they move him out of an office, too? At least they didn’t escort him from the building. If he decides to move on, if he prefers reviewing orchestras to chamber music and ballet programs, how would another newspaper view his application? “What if he doesn’t like our conductor?” Could be a confidence issue...
I rather doubt Zach was told, along with what his word-limit would be for a review, that he can only spend no more than 33% of those words making negative comments. But still, it makes you think: happy to have a job? wanna keep it?
Justifiable criticism is one thing. Whether Rosenberg’s constant commentary about FWM’s interpretations was viewed as “unjustifiable,” I can only imagine. He, meanwhile, continues to cover “other concerts” like this review of the farewell appearance of the Guarneri Quartet who will be retiring at the end of this season (they’ll be playing at Market Square Concerts here in April, one of their very last concerts as one of the great legendary quartets of the past 44 years). In Cleveland, they played two of Beethoven’s most introspective Late Quartets, Op. 127 and Op. 132.
- - - - - - -
“To say that the Guarneri has come far in its view of Beethoven in the four-plus decades the music has been on the players' stands would be an understatement. The ensemble made one of the great recordings of the complete Beethoven quartets in the 1960s for RCA. Those performances are probing, taut and invigorating.
Tuesday's concert revealed a different Guarneri. The playing has become increasingly introspective in recent years, with an emphasis on utmost subtlety of interplay and dynamics. The approach takes the term "chamber music" literally: these performances would probably best be experienced in a small room.”
- - - - - - -
This also brought with it another flashback, going back some 35 years to my Eastman days when I sat in the recital hall (seating around 600) listening to the Guarneri Quartet playing Beethoven’s Third “Razumovsky” Quartet. Speaking of speed limits in Beethoven, the finale began at such a clip, I was amazed they could keep it together, it was going by so fast. It hadn’t occurred to me, at the time, this wasn’t a good thing, hot-dogging Beethoven like that. But while the Music Police didn’t show up to give them a ticket for excessive speeding in the Fugue, it was amusing that as an encore, first violinist Arnold Steinhardt announced they would play the last movement of the Razumovsky again – at the proper tempo. Yes, much better!!
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
What power does a critic actually have, these days? In some cities – New York, certainly – a bad review by an important critic can ruin a young artist’s career or close down a play. Just the other day, I was reading New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley’s review of a new production of the play, To Be or Not To Be which he describes as a “walking corpse of a comedy” and mentions that it “has the spring, color and freshness of long-refrigerated celery.” Yum – just makes you want to run right out and buy a ticket, doesn’t it?
But I’m not sure there’s the same kind of life-or-death power when the object is a long-established ensemble or a conductor with a contract, the artistic equivalent of tenure. It’s unlikely that a single critic will single-handedly deep-six a famous maestro: at worst, the maestro might invest in the psychological equivalent of a can of bug-spray, the kind of repellent (or denial) that most artists use when confronted by negative criticism. They might publicly shrug their shoulders but I rather doubt they’re hurt much by it.
It’s not likely Mr. Rosenberg would have felt himself so powerful he could bring down Franz Welser-Möst.
Still, it would not be the first time critics lined up against the conductor. The constant nagging of many of London’s critics along with the animosity of the musicians and the ambiguity of the management eventually drove him out of town six years after he became the music-director of the London Philharmonic at the age of 30. The musicians dubbed him “Frankly Worse-than-Most” – and frankly, I was surprised to see him land in Cleveland in 2002 where, one assumes by the riper age of 42, he has improved with experience. At any rate, this past June the Cleveland Orchestra management renewed his contract through 2018. I suppose critics can write whatever they want to about him, now.
This, however, is interesting: from blog-comments by people presumably on the inside of the situation. A former employee of the orchestra’s management thought Rosenberg was biased whenever he reviewed FWM (who, keep in mind, is not the only conductor in front of the orchestra: he spends 18 weeks a season there). This former employee writes
- - - - - - -
“His editors were told several years ago that his view was biased when Franz was on the podium and he was issued a stern warning that he needed to be less biased. For a short while he was writing fair reviews and then he started in on the negativity again. ...[T]hey weren’t attempting to get rid of him because he wasn’t giving them glowing reviews all the time. They were trying to get a fair review off of someone who is a well respected critic who was showing an obvious bias.”
- - - - - - -
A violinist in Cleveland (and judging from the content, a member of the orchestra) writes
- - - - - - -
“The orchestra members are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship - for a REASON. Ellie and Dan didn’t leave to pursue other musical endeavors - they (and others) left because of the cruel, uncompromising egotism of the baton-wielder.
I didn’t always concur with Don’s reviews, but the fact remains - FWM is a horrifyingly mediocre conductor who found himself trying to fill impossibly big shoes...” [referring to former music director Christoph von Dohnanyi].
- - - - - - -
This, of course, brings to mind issues between musicians and maestros, most openly in the Seattle Symphony, but that’s a whole ‘nother story... Yet perhaps Rosenberg is sensing some underlying animosity in the lack of communication between the players and the audience (or at least, himself as a member of the audience), stemming from a lack of communication (and perhaps respect?) between the conductor and the musicians.
Still, it is a rare orchestra that is free from such tension. Players in the Philadelphia Orchestra have been quite vocal about their dislike of their music director Christoph Eschenbach. A few of the concerts I'd heard with him conducting were mediocre, considering it was the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra. Eschenbach is now leaving, having served the shortest tenure of any of the orchestra's storied conductors, a mere five years. As the President of the orchestra's management told the maestro in 2006, according to Peter Dobrin of the Philadelphia Inquirer,
- - - - - - -
"- that 80 percent of the musicians did not agree with his artistic interpretations;
- that 80 percent of the musicians left concerts feeling great anger;
- and that the orchestra was a ‘ticking time bomb.’”
- - - - - - -
And just a few weeks ago, it was announced the National Symphony has named Christoph Eschenbach as its new music director, starting in 2010. Hmmmm...
So, trying to find some perspective in my assumptions, let’s say I think Rosenberg is probably not imagining things when he goes to a Cleveland Orchestra concert conducted by FWM whether he is biased or being honest. I don’t feel the Plain Dealer gave Rosenberg a fair deal when it chose to reassign him, though as an internal decision, how does one argue with modern-day American corpocracy?
But in all of this, since I have no personal stake in Cleveland, its newspaper, the career of Maestro Möst or of Daniel Rosenberg, I can only add I feel glad that, circumstances aside, someone I know and respect has landed in a position that will, hopefully, work to his benefit. After placing him between a rock and a hard place, I hope it will give him a different kind of work-out than his predecessor received. I wish him all the luck in the world.
It’s not like enough cyberink hasn’t been wafted about already on the topic of “muzzling a critic” or however one wants to describe it. Rosenberg’s relationship with the orchestra’s conductor, Franz Welser-Möst, has been notoriously stormy, bringing up long-range questions both ethical and artistic. With the announcement of FWM’s extended contract renewal, apparently another question surfaced, as well: how long, oh Lord, can this go on?
Of course, from my standpoint as a non-critic occasionally writing what people would like to think of as reviews, I’m not sure how satisfactory it would be, going to work all the time and thinking “what’s the point? It’s never going to change, is it?” Oh wait... actually, I think many of us have asked that on a daily basis. But what I mean is, if you’ve written some pretty scathing reviews in the past, what’re the chances this night, compared to any other night, is going to be any different?
The standard formula in the arts world places the performer on one side, the critic on the other and in the middle, the listeners who may have heard the performance and the readers who may not have heard the performance or, having heard it, are curious what somebody who gets paid to write what they think about a concert might tell them what they heard or thought they heard.
How many times had I read reviews of concerts I’d attended and wondered if the critic and I were actually hearing the same performance? It’s not unusual for someone to like something and someone else to hate the same thing. We’re all wired differently.
Going back to Cleveland, it would be a problem if the critic in question was the only one with such a consistently negative opinion, though. When FWM and the orchestra toured in the States, they often received similar comments from local critics. But relentlessly, season in and season out, it begins to seem like there’s an axe to be ground.
But I was wondering if – presuming as has been stated there was no pressure from the orchestra – readers were beginning to tire of the one-sidedness of all this? Is it a bottom-line based decision, a concern for alienating the readers? As I said, at least they didn’t fire him (could they have gotten away with that?) or eliminate the position as has happened with other cities’ newspapers.
Now, I don't read the sports pages, so I don't know what a paper might do if, say, the city has a lousy team or a losing coach and the sports-writer is constantly browbeating them in the press. Do they expect their columns are going to get the coach or a player fired? Would the editor "re-assign" the writer if he continued in too negative a strain for too long a time? I don't know.
But if the team is doing well, makes it to the play-offs and the crowds are generally cheering them on, it seems the writer just doesn't like the coach or a certain player or possibly has a problem with the whole team: how long would it take for the editors to react then? Or the readers, of often irrational irasciblility, who might demand something a little more dire than mere “re-assignment” (a vat of oil near the boiling point, for starters).
Then I realized I hadn’t checked back to see what reviews Zach Lewis has written since that first concert, the one with the Bruckner 7th Symphony (a Franz Welser-Möst specialty) described as “deliberate,” “slow pace[d]”, “lopsided.” I figured he would not write an “all sweet and lovely” review, but I kept thinking what if he too keeps finding things to “criticize,” using the word in the negative sense?
In a more recent performance with Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Lang Lang playing the Chopin E Minor Piano Concerto, he described the concert as “setting one important score on fire and leaving another in ashes.”
In the Chopin, Lang Lang...
- - - - - - - - -
“...proves ideal. Sure, he often breaks the musical speed limit, but he does so at his blazing version of leisure, without sacrificing clarity or devolving into a single-minded sprint.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, as rendered by the orchestra and Welser-MÖst. Here, speed limits count for little, and the music suffers greatly.”
- - - - - - - - -
In the final movement, he remarks that a slightly slower approach to the tempo “is still too brisk for the musicians to round out Beethoven's portrait of order restored. Instead, one merely senses chaos minimized.”
With the orchestra’s role in the Chopin best described as “modest” and a war-horse like Beethoven’s 5th, how much rehearsal time did they actually allot for this concert?
I don’t know if anyone at Severance Hall is having flashbacks to Rosenberg’s reviews, but mine were going back to the Old Days of Lorin Maazel and the under-rehearsed Mozart G Minor Symphony I heard them play at Carnegie Hall in the late-70s, mentioned in my earlier post.
The previous concert included the other Mozart G Minor Symphony – No. 25, the one that featured so prominently in the opening of the film “Amadeus” and still sounds amazing when you consider Mozart was 17 when he wrote it. Their performance had good chamber-music-like qualities in the middle movements, but, he concludes,
- - - - - - -
“...in the bolder first and last movements, Welser-MÖst and the orchestra tended to substitute stateliness and articulate counterpoint for fire and urgency. Polish is always a virtue in Mozart, but in the exceptionally dark 25th Symphony, a little grit isn't out of place, either.”
- - - - - - -
Of one of two works played with the soloist, pianist Emanuel Ax, Lewis wrote that in Karol Szymanowski’s rarely heard “Symphonie concertante” (his Symphony No. 4 which is really a substantial work for piano and orchestra, more concerto than symphony),
- - - - - - -
“... the pianist joined ranks with Welser-MÖst and the orchestra to cut through the thickets of a dense, prickly score and expose music of both visceral intensity and sincere emotion.”
- - - - - - -
What it’s like working in the corner of the Plain Dealer’s office where the arts folk hang out, I have no idea, but I imagine the politics must be very difficult to navigate. Rosenberg was certainly a star writer on the staff: did they move him out of an office, too? At least they didn’t escort him from the building. If he decides to move on, if he prefers reviewing orchestras to chamber music and ballet programs, how would another newspaper view his application? “What if he doesn’t like our conductor?” Could be a confidence issue...
I rather doubt Zach was told, along with what his word-limit would be for a review, that he can only spend no more than 33% of those words making negative comments. But still, it makes you think: happy to have a job? wanna keep it?
Justifiable criticism is one thing. Whether Rosenberg’s constant commentary about FWM’s interpretations was viewed as “unjustifiable,” I can only imagine. He, meanwhile, continues to cover “other concerts” like this review of the farewell appearance of the Guarneri Quartet who will be retiring at the end of this season (they’ll be playing at Market Square Concerts here in April, one of their very last concerts as one of the great legendary quartets of the past 44 years). In Cleveland, they played two of Beethoven’s most introspective Late Quartets, Op. 127 and Op. 132.
- - - - - - -
“To say that the Guarneri has come far in its view of Beethoven in the four-plus decades the music has been on the players' stands would be an understatement. The ensemble made one of the great recordings of the complete Beethoven quartets in the 1960s for RCA. Those performances are probing, taut and invigorating.
Tuesday's concert revealed a different Guarneri. The playing has become increasingly introspective in recent years, with an emphasis on utmost subtlety of interplay and dynamics. The approach takes the term "chamber music" literally: these performances would probably best be experienced in a small room.”
- - - - - - -
This also brought with it another flashback, going back some 35 years to my Eastman days when I sat in the recital hall (seating around 600) listening to the Guarneri Quartet playing Beethoven’s Third “Razumovsky” Quartet. Speaking of speed limits in Beethoven, the finale began at such a clip, I was amazed they could keep it together, it was going by so fast. It hadn’t occurred to me, at the time, this wasn’t a good thing, hot-dogging Beethoven like that. But while the Music Police didn’t show up to give them a ticket for excessive speeding in the Fugue, it was amusing that as an encore, first violinist Arnold Steinhardt announced they would play the last movement of the Razumovsky again – at the proper tempo. Yes, much better!!
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
What power does a critic actually have, these days? In some cities – New York, certainly – a bad review by an important critic can ruin a young artist’s career or close down a play. Just the other day, I was reading New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley’s review of a new production of the play, To Be or Not To Be which he describes as a “walking corpse of a comedy” and mentions that it “has the spring, color and freshness of long-refrigerated celery.” Yum – just makes you want to run right out and buy a ticket, doesn’t it?
But I’m not sure there’s the same kind of life-or-death power when the object is a long-established ensemble or a conductor with a contract, the artistic equivalent of tenure. It’s unlikely that a single critic will single-handedly deep-six a famous maestro: at worst, the maestro might invest in the psychological equivalent of a can of bug-spray, the kind of repellent (or denial) that most artists use when confronted by negative criticism. They might publicly shrug their shoulders but I rather doubt they’re hurt much by it.
It’s not likely Mr. Rosenberg would have felt himself so powerful he could bring down Franz Welser-Möst.
Still, it would not be the first time critics lined up against the conductor. The constant nagging of many of London’s critics along with the animosity of the musicians and the ambiguity of the management eventually drove him out of town six years after he became the music-director of the London Philharmonic at the age of 30. The musicians dubbed him “Frankly Worse-than-Most” – and frankly, I was surprised to see him land in Cleveland in 2002 where, one assumes by the riper age of 42, he has improved with experience. At any rate, this past June the Cleveland Orchestra management renewed his contract through 2018. I suppose critics can write whatever they want to about him, now.
This, however, is interesting: from blog-comments by people presumably on the inside of the situation. A former employee of the orchestra’s management thought Rosenberg was biased whenever he reviewed FWM (who, keep in mind, is not the only conductor in front of the orchestra: he spends 18 weeks a season there). This former employee writes
- - - - - - -
“His editors were told several years ago that his view was biased when Franz was on the podium and he was issued a stern warning that he needed to be less biased. For a short while he was writing fair reviews and then he started in on the negativity again. ...[T]hey weren’t attempting to get rid of him because he wasn’t giving them glowing reviews all the time. They were trying to get a fair review off of someone who is a well respected critic who was showing an obvious bias.”
- - - - - - -
A violinist in Cleveland (and judging from the content, a member of the orchestra) writes
- - - - - - -
“The orchestra members are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship - for a REASON. Ellie and Dan didn’t leave to pursue other musical endeavors - they (and others) left because of the cruel, uncompromising egotism of the baton-wielder.
I didn’t always concur with Don’s reviews, but the fact remains - FWM is a horrifyingly mediocre conductor who found himself trying to fill impossibly big shoes...” [referring to former music director Christoph von Dohnanyi].
- - - - - - -
This, of course, brings to mind issues between musicians and maestros, most openly in the Seattle Symphony, but that’s a whole ‘nother story... Yet perhaps Rosenberg is sensing some underlying animosity in the lack of communication between the players and the audience (or at least, himself as a member of the audience), stemming from a lack of communication (and perhaps respect?) between the conductor and the musicians.
Still, it is a rare orchestra that is free from such tension. Players in the Philadelphia Orchestra have been quite vocal about their dislike of their music director Christoph Eschenbach. A few of the concerts I'd heard with him conducting were mediocre, considering it was the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra. Eschenbach is now leaving, having served the shortest tenure of any of the orchestra's storied conductors, a mere five years. As the President of the orchestra's management told the maestro in 2006, according to Peter Dobrin of the Philadelphia Inquirer,
- - - - - - -
"- that 80 percent of the musicians did not agree with his artistic interpretations;
- that 80 percent of the musicians left concerts feeling great anger;
- and that the orchestra was a ‘ticking time bomb.’”
- - - - - - -
And just a few weeks ago, it was announced the National Symphony has named Christoph Eschenbach as its new music director, starting in 2010. Hmmmm...
So, trying to find some perspective in my assumptions, let’s say I think Rosenberg is probably not imagining things when he goes to a Cleveland Orchestra concert conducted by FWM whether he is biased or being honest. I don’t feel the Plain Dealer gave Rosenberg a fair deal when it chose to reassign him, though as an internal decision, how does one argue with modern-day American corpocracy?
But in all of this, since I have no personal stake in Cleveland, its newspaper, the career of Maestro Möst or of Daniel Rosenberg, I can only add I feel glad that, circumstances aside, someone I know and respect has landed in a position that will, hopefully, work to his benefit. After placing him between a rock and a hard place, I hope it will give him a different kind of work-out than his predecessor received. I wish him all the luck in the world.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Dr. Atomic at the Met - and Maybe a Theater Near You
Though the Metropolitan Opera’s new 125th Anniversary season began last month at their Lincoln Center home and the radio broadcasts do not begin until November 29th, the HD-Transmissions have already begun. These movie-broadcasts (perhaps not the most elegant way to refer to them) bring HD-quality live broadcasts directly to hundreds of movie theaters across the country and around the world.
The opening night Gala with reigning diva Renée Fleming (Eastman '83) was broadcast live on September 22nd - a young cellist whose blog I’ve been following responded enthusiastically to having seen it.
Richard Strauss’ Salome with Karita Matilla in the title role of this highly acclaimed production was broadcast last Saturday, October 11th. But in case you missed it, there is a rebroadcast on October 22nd!
When this opera was new in 1905, it became the greatest musical scandal of the age (at least until the Rite of Spring exploded in Paris in 1911). People thought it was disgusting (Salome kissing the lips of the severed head of John the Baptist), the music ear-wrenching. It was banned in London, it closed after a single performance in New York City at the Met and took 13 years before it censors finally allowed it to be performed in Vienna. The original Salome refused to do the now-famous “Dance of the Seven Veils” because she was “a decent woman,” and so began the tradition of having a ballet dancer (thereby implying she was not a decent woman but that was okay) who stepped in to dance it instead.
Things have changed. Karita Matilla not only did her own dance, she even, briefly after shedding the seventh veil, appeared nude on stage (though this was not to be included in the HD-Transmission, we were informed). Times change, in a mere 103 years...
The next transmission is a very special one – a new production of an opera still new, premiered only in 2005 in San Francisco and by one of the leading composers writing today. John Adams’ Dr. Atomic, like his earlier operas, explores more modern historical events than opera usually brings to the stage, but focusing on timeless conflicts: behind the story of the first atomic bomb is the personal struggle between science and spirituality.
There’s background information on-line here – on the opera itself, the libretto, even a rehearsal blog! The dress rehearsal was open to 1,000 high school and college students, many of them science majors for whom opera itself might have been a whole new experience – certainly the opera for all of them, even those familiar with opera as a musical medium, would’ve been new.
Meanwhile over at The Rest Is Noise – the book-of-the-same-name just came out in paperback, btw: if you haven’t read it already, what are you waiting for?? – Alex Ross posts a rehearsal clip with Gerald Finley singing Robert Oppenheimer’s pivotal aria quoting John Donne’s “Batter My Heart, Three-person’d God.”
The first Met performance is this weekend, Saturday evening, October 18th – but it’s on the HD Schedule for Saturday November 8th beginning at 1:00 EST, a live transmission of that day’s matinee performance – perhaps at a theater near you! Some of these may also be carrying an encore transmission on November 19th - I see my neighborhood cineplex is offering this one also, so maybe I’ll go see it twice!
Even though most of my readers at Thoughts on a Train are not just from Central Pennsylvania – unlike my previous, now-defunct station-related blog – I’ll mention that I’m going to go see the “movie broadcast” about 3 miles from my house. You can find out how to locate a theater in your area that might be close enough!
If you get a chance to see it live at the Met, it’s scheduled through November 13th, so there’s not much chance to wait and see it after the HD-transmission and you just have to see it live in the house...
Another reason to be excited about this performance of Dr. Atomic: it’s the first opportunity for many of us outside of New York and other symphonic hot-spots to see the young conductor Alan Gilbert who will become the new music director of the New York Philharmonic next season.
Then later in the month, on November 22nd, the next HD-transmission will bring you the Met’s staged production of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust (I’m sure the proximity of these two stories is purely coincidental) which will also open the radio broadcast season on the 29th of November, guaranteed to brighten up the ol’ family gathering for your Thanksgiving Weekend.
For more information about the radio broadcasts, you can find a station in your area scheduled to broadcast the Saturday matinees. In Central Pennsylvania, that would be either WITF-FM (89.5) or WJAZ-FM (91.7). You can also listen to Met performances on Sirius satellite radio.
Highlights of the broadcast season will include an “archive” broadcast of Dr. Atomic in January, since the performance-run concludes before the broadcast season begins, and a complete cycle of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung beginning in March ‘09. I’m only sorry they didn’t offer The Ring in HD. But since they say this is going to be the last outing for its current production, perhaps they’re going to save the HD version for a new production already in the works?
The opening night Gala with reigning diva Renée Fleming (Eastman '83) was broadcast live on September 22nd - a young cellist whose blog I’ve been following responded enthusiastically to having seen it.
Richard Strauss’ Salome with Karita Matilla in the title role of this highly acclaimed production was broadcast last Saturday, October 11th. But in case you missed it, there is a rebroadcast on October 22nd!
When this opera was new in 1905, it became the greatest musical scandal of the age (at least until the Rite of Spring exploded in Paris in 1911). People thought it was disgusting (Salome kissing the lips of the severed head of John the Baptist), the music ear-wrenching. It was banned in London, it closed after a single performance in New York City at the Met and took 13 years before it censors finally allowed it to be performed in Vienna. The original Salome refused to do the now-famous “Dance of the Seven Veils” because she was “a decent woman,” and so began the tradition of having a ballet dancer (thereby implying she was not a decent woman but that was okay) who stepped in to dance it instead.
Things have changed. Karita Matilla not only did her own dance, she even, briefly after shedding the seventh veil, appeared nude on stage (though this was not to be included in the HD-Transmission, we were informed). Times change, in a mere 103 years...
The next transmission is a very special one – a new production of an opera still new, premiered only in 2005 in San Francisco and by one of the leading composers writing today. John Adams’ Dr. Atomic, like his earlier operas, explores more modern historical events than opera usually brings to the stage, but focusing on timeless conflicts: behind the story of the first atomic bomb is the personal struggle between science and spirituality.
There’s background information on-line here – on the opera itself, the libretto, even a rehearsal blog! The dress rehearsal was open to 1,000 high school and college students, many of them science majors for whom opera itself might have been a whole new experience – certainly the opera for all of them, even those familiar with opera as a musical medium, would’ve been new.
Meanwhile over at The Rest Is Noise – the book-of-the-same-name just came out in paperback, btw: if you haven’t read it already, what are you waiting for?? – Alex Ross posts a rehearsal clip with Gerald Finley singing Robert Oppenheimer’s pivotal aria quoting John Donne’s “Batter My Heart, Three-person’d God.”
The first Met performance is this weekend, Saturday evening, October 18th – but it’s on the HD Schedule for Saturday November 8th beginning at 1:00 EST, a live transmission of that day’s matinee performance – perhaps at a theater near you! Some of these may also be carrying an encore transmission on November 19th - I see my neighborhood cineplex is offering this one also, so maybe I’ll go see it twice!
Even though most of my readers at Thoughts on a Train are not just from Central Pennsylvania – unlike my previous, now-defunct station-related blog – I’ll mention that I’m going to go see the “movie broadcast” about 3 miles from my house. You can find out how to locate a theater in your area that might be close enough!
If you get a chance to see it live at the Met, it’s scheduled through November 13th, so there’s not much chance to wait and see it after the HD-transmission and you just have to see it live in the house...
Another reason to be excited about this performance of Dr. Atomic: it’s the first opportunity for many of us outside of New York and other symphonic hot-spots to see the young conductor Alan Gilbert who will become the new music director of the New York Philharmonic next season.
Then later in the month, on November 22nd, the next HD-transmission will bring you the Met’s staged production of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust (I’m sure the proximity of these two stories is purely coincidental) which will also open the radio broadcast season on the 29th of November, guaranteed to brighten up the ol’ family gathering for your Thanksgiving Weekend.
For more information about the radio broadcasts, you can find a station in your area scheduled to broadcast the Saturday matinees. In Central Pennsylvania, that would be either WITF-FM (89.5) or WJAZ-FM (91.7). You can also listen to Met performances on Sirius satellite radio.
Highlights of the broadcast season will include an “archive” broadcast of Dr. Atomic in January, since the performance-run concludes before the broadcast season begins, and a complete cycle of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung beginning in March ‘09. I’m only sorry they didn’t offer The Ring in HD. But since they say this is going to be the last outing for its current production, perhaps they’re going to save the HD version for a new production already in the works?
Monday, October 13, 2008
Like a Patient Etherized upon a Table...
When you play a piece of music, there are many different ways of playing it – not to mention the distinction made between practicing, rehearsing and performing it (and for some lucky players, recording it). While you learn the notes, you come to terms with the technical aspects, beginning simply with getting the right notes, placing them in the right place, phrasing and articulating the notes, then the structure, then the connections and so on. Getting “what’s between the notes” comes with exposure and understanding. Sometimes, you discover “what’s behind the notes” which may give you some insight into what’s on the written page which in turn may give you different kind of interpretation than what you hear other musicians playing.
And meanwhile, you, the player, react to what you’re learning to play and then, once learned, coming to terms with it as a performer. And always listening.
And not every piece requires (expects - demands) the same level of attention: some pieces are harder to play, technically, or more difficult to put together than others. Others present other options to consider: some are fairly straight-forward while others present more questions than answers. One of the things you often hear about “great art” is that it allows you to constantly be discovering new things when you listen to or play a piece – and like people who grow and change with passing time, our listening to a piece of music we’ve heard or played in the past might be invigorated by perspectives that also grow and change as we do.
A pianist could take an “impressionist” approach to, say, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (the first movement’s dreamy night-time reverie sitting in a silver-tinged landscape under a full-moon; the finale’s thunderstorm), a “theatrical one” (the first movement’s contemplation of lost love, the middle movement’s nostalgic memories, the finale’s turbulent heart-break and violent passions) or a literal one (a moderate tempo in the first movement, a kind of song-without-words; a minuet that’s not really a minuet but a more realistic respite between these otherwise atypical outer movements; a finale that is agitato without going overboard, being sure to place the accents where they belong because they’re not always where you expect them or even where a lot of performers seem to put them), all of which still reflects what Beethoven left us, even if we ignore the nickname some critic (not the composer) gave it.
To bring those different kinds of possibilities to, say, the little “Facile” Sonata that Mozart wrote – the one in C Major, K.545, which every budding piano-player has to deal with at some point – is neither possible nor wise, though the structures behind the music might be very similar if not the same (in the Mozart, the trick for more advanced players is to remember the difference between “childish” and “child-like”).
And so Bruce Adolphe decided to approach a Beethoven string quartet from a slightly different perspective, offering another viewpoint that might allow a listener (or a player) to hear a familiar work in a new way.
I wasn’t sure what he was going to “do” with Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95 which the composer himself (not a critic, not the publisher) called “Quartetto serioso.” This is either the last of the “Middle Quartets” or the first of the “Late Quartets” in the progress of Beethoven’s development from a late-18th Century composer who idolized Mozart and whom Haydn tried to control to a composer who, even in his own time, must have sounded like an off-the-wall avant-garde composer writing modern music that went far beyond the boundaries of what his contemporaries considered “proper.” If you listen to Beethoven’s music today, you hear it filtered through all the music you’ve experienced, whether it’s Brahms and Wagner, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Elliott Carter and Philip Glass or Glenn Miller and Kurt Cobain without realizing how much of a shock this must have been to its first-time listeners in 1810, the year after Haydn died.
It’s easy to argue about whether art is cyclical (what goes around, comes around) or linear (the chronological progression from one composer, one era, to the next) and of course there are always exceptions. The people who created this art are perhaps even more complex that the art they created: we just tend to forget the details of the creators when we have, separated by so much time and context, just their art.
When I was teaching at the University of Connecticut, I asked some of my junior-level students to write down the first things that came to mind when they heard the name “Beethoven!” Most answers were easily anticipated – “Great Music” or “Hero” but also “deaf” and (back in the days when a comic named Steve Martin was everywhere) “a wild and crazy guy.”
In one of those moments where you realize why you teach, one of these students had written down the word “pain.” She said she was thinking of his constant suffering and struggling to survive. “Because he was deaf?” I asked as a kind of devil’s advocate. “No, not just that,” she said, going on to mention episodes in his life that can be telegraphed by his relationships – the Immortal Beloved, the Nephew – as well as how difficult his personality was in relation to the society he lived in. She heard this pain in a lot of his music – she mentioned the last movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata – or the “other side” when he was trying to ignore the pain, perhaps, surfacing in the manic energy of the 7th Symphony, what you might call “working through the pain” – one of my students, perhaps her, had once told me the slow movement of the 7th was some of the saddest music she’d ever heard.
Now, it’s always difficult to psychoanalyze the music or the composer because in many ways you can counter any argument by saying “all composers are different” just as “all listeners are different” – just as for every Democratic response to the economic issues we face politically and socially today can be countered by an equal and usually opposite Republican reaction to the same issue – and vice-versa (even if the response is no more grounded than just saying “it won’t work”). What every performer must do and what every listener should do is something every composer has to do before putting notes down on paper: make an honest committment to the moment. It doesn’t matter if it’s two- or three-hundred years old or brand new. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve heard the piece before or if you’re hearing it the first time. If you’ve heard it fifty times in your life – concerts, on the radio, listening to CDs – there’s someone nearby who may be hearing it for the first time.
Bruce Adolphe’s presentations tend to use humor seriously – like his turning the first movement of Mozart’s G Minor Piano Quartet into a murder trial at a Market Square Concert a few seasons ago – so when it was announced he was going to describe Beethoven’s “Serioso” as an example of “Tourette Syndrome in Music,” I was wondering if people might show up to picket the performance. True, you can look over a list of symptoms and find musical examples that might correspond to them – certainly, his sharp unexpected accents and swift changes of mood come to mind. And it’s not that everything has to be “humorous” even in a piece called “Serioso.” In fact, in addition perhaps to being a little better prepared with the examples he wanted the quartet to play and running back and forth from the raised platform down to the otherwise unused piano, the presentation might have benefited from a little less humor or maybe it was just, in the apparent lack of preparation with the players, the humor hit the wrong notes but “rightly played” could have been the kind of contrast between light and dark Beethoven himself could give you in his music.
The idea was not, it turned out, to “have fun” at the expense of people who suffer with this disease: he made that very clear at the beginning. The idea was not to imply that Beethoven suffered from this along with any other number of things that at the time were unnamed and just passed off as aspects of his personality. The idea was, in essence, to describe the piece – actually, to “diagnose” the piece – as if it itself suffered from something and it was up to the doctor to treat it as he would any other patient.
Part of this involved a little bit of surgery, removing something that a listener in 1810 would have thought a mistake on the second violinist’s part (minor cosmetic surgery) or an unpleasant transition from one point to another. By exploding a chord at one point, Beethoven veers off into unexpected harmonic territory only to resolve it to some expected place after all by means of a harmonic trick. To explain this, Adolphe had the quartet play the passage under the microscope as it’s written, then asked them to cut out a few measures. Unfortunately the resolution still sounded abrupt because it was now without any transition at all: a second-year theory student should be able to write a couple of chords as a “transplant” replacing the “cancerous cells” that would make a more pleasant modulation, and it might have helped make the point to hear how somebody less than Beethoven might have handled it.
But still, the point was clear: the question is, why was Beethoven doing this? Or, if you’re examining the piece of music like a patient, what was happening here to make this simple structure not function the way such structures were intended? Beyond identifying the symptoms and naming them, what could be done to help the patient?
Adolphe began by describing an incident that happened to him recently in a New York train station, a story that anyone who’s lived in New York City could have experienced, how this guy came up to him on the platform and just started cursing at him and gesticulating wildly – just as the quartet began to play the opening music, with its wild turning pattern and sharply articulated leaps. Then the man calmed down and started to walk away (the music calms down) but then suddenly he turned and came back at him again (as does the music, now, with equal suddenness and building of tension). He would go on to explain how intervals in this opening pattern found their way into other passages – most notably the odd-sounding cello solo that opens the slow movement. He also identified a “trigger point” which seems to set the music off into these unexpected tangents – a simple stepping up from F to F-sharp (or G-flat – on the piano, they’re the same note) sometimes with barely any preparation at all, sometimes even more suddenly by just picking up and dropping down into the new key of F-sharp (“whoa, what was that?!”) – which might cause the music to react the same way a friend of mine might react if you just mentioned the word “Hillary”...
The curious thing about this “trigger,” technically speaking, it’s simply another way of treating a harmonic progression, the movement of one chord to another. Several of my teachers over the years described this by writing three Roman numerals on the board:
I – V – I
This the musical shorthand for a tonic chord moving to a dominant chord moving back to the tonic chord again. In the white-rat garden-variety key of C major, a C chord to a G chord back to a C chord. This is the simplest progression – away from and back to the same sonority – and really nothing more than an automatic expectation.
Then they put another symbol in between the first two chords:
I – X – V – I
This “X” now represents a new chord that could become something to prolong the digression from the C chord before we get to the G chord, whether it’s one chord or a bunch of them. But sticking to the basic cadential formula, it could become
I – IV – V – I
or a C chord to an F chord to a G chord before ending satisfactorily on a C chord. There are different ways you can expand this – you can fool a listener who is expecting that final C chord by replacing it with an A Minor chord – which has two of the same pitches in it, but it sounds completely UN-final and therefore needs to resolve further in order to reach that expected C major chord:
I – IV – V – vi
If you want to really throw the listener for a loop, once the “deceptive resolution” to A minor sounds “so last year,” you switch it to an A-FLAT major chord which then allows you a ton of other expectations:
I – IV – V – ♭VI
Like any tangent, this now requires a little more work before you – aaaah! – finally get to where you expected to go in the first place – that last C Major chord.
You could also substitute another “almost-identical” chord for the IV, the original “X” chord. Instead of an F Major chord (built on the pitches F-A-C), you could insert a D Minor chord (D-F-A built on the 2nd degree of the C Major scale and therefore Roman-numeralized as a “ii”) but in its first inversion, putting the third note of the chord – the F – in the bass so it’s now an F-A-D chord (same chord, just a different ‘voicing’):
I – ii6 – V – I
Composers often played with the expectations a listener might have between major and minor chords – or by extension their tonalities – “inflecting” something from the minor world into the major one. This goes back to the uncomfortable generalization that “minor is sad” and “major is happy” kind of thing – one is dark, the other light – but like a shadow passing over the surface, hearing an A-flat in an otherwise C Major passage would be something to notice: it’s not expected.
Substituting an F MINOR chord for the IV – thus making it a “iv” chord (upper-case = major chord, lower-case = minor chord) – can bring out a new and different emotional response with this inflection of the A-flat from the parallel world of C Minor:
I – iv – V – I
If you go back to that “ii-chord” substitution and now work with the two common notes of F and A-flat, and switch the D to a D-flat, you have not only a minor “inflection” but also a note that does not belong to the scale of C Major OR C Minor. This is usually handled as a first-inversion chord, again, with the expected F in the bass – F - A-flat - D-flat – which then resolves to a G Major chord et cetera...
I – ♭II6 – V – I
Whether this “sound” was invented in Naples, Italy, or not, it’s become known as a “Neapolitan Chord,” one of a variety of geographically identified chords that have certain intrinsic structures and expectations of their own.
Beethoven is, however, often using the emotional response for this chord more directly, more “in-your-face” by NOT playing with the “oh, I’m just masquerading as a IV chord” kind of chord. And in his aggressive rhythmic and melodic patterns, it becomes startling – in 1810, possibly even frightening. It’s not what the listener expected and it’s playing with these expectations that opened up whole new worlds of sound and harmonic technique that may lead directly or indirectly to further confusions of expectations in Schubert or Wagner or Schoenberg.
As my teachers would explain it, “I-V-I is just a raw element of music, a cliche.” (In pop music today, perhaps it’s I-♭VII-I but the analogy is still there.) Pointing to the X in the “I-X-V-I” pattern on the board, he’d say, underscoring the X, “THAT’s composition.”
Looking for humor in Beethoven’s agitated “Serious” Quartet might have brought up the possibility of placing Op. 95 on prozac. By calming down the opening’s abrupt motive to become more acceptable, more of what listeners then expected, would it turn into just another faceless quartet in the crowd? Hoffmeister, perhaps? It wouldn’t take much to rewrite a few measure here and there to show what we would have lost if Beethoven were on medication...
As Adolphe concluded, whether we think it’s the pain that Beethoven experienced that he put into the music or the piece of music itself that bears the pain – after all, he said, “Beethoven is dead” (unless of course you believe in a weird kind of parallel universe, whether or not they continue to live through their music) – we have the piece and we can hear its pain. And the pain becomes ours.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
While I’m not in the mind-set to write reviews of performances I hear, though some people expect it – let me repeat, I am not a music critic despite whatever opinions I may have or whatever other people think of them – it’s impossible not to comment on the performance of the Beethoven “Serioso” Quartet given by the Daedalus Quartet at Saturday night’s opening performance with Market Square Concerts.
This is a group I’d heard a little over three years ago playing Sibelius’ underrated String Quartet with a more enigmatic nickname, “Intimate Voices,” a work that figures on their first CD release from the Bridge label. For one reason or another, I hadn’t listened to this disc: even without listening to it when we got it at the station, I automatically ordered a copy for myself. It was odd, driving in to hear them play at Market Square Church and listening to their performance of the Sibelius on the ride in and the ride back. Of course, the listening conditions in my car were not as good as hearing a live-performance anywhere, one reason why sitting in a concert hall in quasi-religious confinement listening to music is better for the experience (unless you’re just looking for pretty wall-paper). By concentrating your focus on the music, you absorb more of what the composer wrote and how the musicians interpreted it. Some of it, also, is just the “communal experience” of sharing this concentration with the rest of the audience as well as communing with the music. Granted, I should’ve listened to it in my living room, if the Kittens of Mass Distraction would allow the ability to focus (of course, there, if the phone rings, I feel more obligated to answer it than to hurl silent curses to the idiot with the cell phone two rows down...).
But I was still wondering why this piece isn’t heard more often. I don’t recall it being programmed locally before, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t play it more than three times the whole 18 years I was working at the radio station, once to promote the Daedalus’ performance with the Next Generation Festival that year.
Beethoven’s Op. 95 is in a different category. Listeners have the opportunity not only to hear this one work frequently, it’s not unusual to hear it on an all-Beethoven program with two other quartets – or even in the context of a Complete Quartet Cycle.
Whether or not the Daedalus Quartet was influenced by the image of the music being laid out on an examining table – reminding me of that cadaverous exhibit going around called “Our Bodies” – they certainly gave it a very visceral performance. By pushing what would have sounded unexpected in 1810 (or whenever it was first performed: Beethoven didn’t publish it for another six years), they made it sound fresh and frightening today, not belabored by what most audiences expect after two more centuries down the road. For some listeners who like their music clean, this may have been an over-the-top performance, pushing the tempo to a risk-taking breaking-point. Regardless, it was a clean performance, note-wise at least, even if at times the emotions got a little messy.
The Haydn that opened the program, the second of the Opus 20 set known as the “Sun Quartets,” was appropriately all light and sunshine, not to sound too perky about it. I love this quartet, mostly because the cello actually has something to do beyond just kicking out the bass-line. This was a clean performance in all respects. The second movement is a curious “slow” movement called a Capriccio which one could argue, in terms of diagnosing the Beethoven, suffers a bit from ADD: before you know it, what sounds like it could be another episode turns out to be the next movement. Papa Haydn and his jokes, always playing with your expectations! And the last movement was so well controlled, starting off hushed before ending with a bang, it didn’t dawn on me (no pun intended) it could be called the “Crescendo” Quartet.
It might have been beneficial to hear the Beethoven immediately after this very nice work by his teacher, written only 38 years earlier (If the Beethoven were new today, that means the Haydn would've been written in 1970 - how old is that?). Keeping in line with the prognosis on the second half (given a concert-series sponsored in part by a health insurance company), the slot usually reserved for the less familiar, more challenging and generally new piece was a work written in 1992 by Bruce Adolphe. Being there to set up the Beethoven, he said a few words about his own piece – better than reading the program notes, if you did: it wasn’t quite like having somebody doing a power-point presentation and then reading everything to you as if you can’t understand it, yourself – that helped put the music in a more subjective context.
While he was working on the idea for a new quartet, a relative was diagnosed with a serious illness. Since music cannot tell a story, it can till imply one but it can also imply any number of similar stories or different details, often none of which the composer had in mind – even in words, reading Moby Dick is one thing, figuring out what it means is something else.
After describing how the first movement describes the personality changes between shock at hearing the news and the attempts (with humor) at trying to keep your mind off it; how in the second movement there is a slow tick-like motive in the 2nd violin and viola with the 1st violin cast as the patient and the cello, as the disease; how in the final movement, a double canon, we feel trapped in this kind of never-ending texture - after all this, he says someone remarked to him that it could just as well be a story about gazelles being stalked by a hunter. True, he thought, there’s no way to control the listener to think specifically of this relative, that disease and those thoughts – but in hindsight, it’s still the same story where the gazelles (at times playful) are the patient, the hunter (ever persistent) is the disease. One assumes from the open-endedness of the last movement (no real finale in the wrapping-up sense), the cousin may have survived to hear the work since the music is more about ones thoughts on mortality rather than on death, dying and mourning.
That being said, there were a lot of things to listen for in this piece – and grateful for the composer’s insight to have many of them pointed out, whether one would hear them without it or not. There were gentle passages like a minimalist cushion for whatever may have been happening on the surface – the ticking motive that came from the title given the work, “Whispers of Mortality” (as opposed to T.S. Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality”) or a kind of rhythmic rising-and-falling (breathing?) that reminded me of something I heard by Scott Pender back in the mid-1980s, a touch of Steve Reich as one of many dialects absorbed into a composer’s own language.
Whether they have performed this piece before or learned it for this concert, paired with the composer for his Beethoven presentation, it’s hard to tell. Their individual playing was impressive as well – the cellist, so pristine-sounding in the Haydn now taking on the role of villain; the 1st violinist’s virtuosic outbursts that recur (often repeatedly) throughout the piece – but still blending into a cohesive unit as a single quartet of different but equal components.
On first hearing, there’s nothing I could fault the quartet or the composer for except for feeling the ending something of a let-down, proportionally, not that it needed a more dramatic turn or even a last minute reprieve like the buck-and-wing that ends Beethoven’s Op. 95. This ending – if it can be called that – came primarily as a surprise when it stopped, begging for a second hearing to make more sense out of it. After all, how much great art can you truly absorb in one encounter?
There was one curious thing that happened during Bruce Adolphe's quartet, “Whispers of Mortality” - it was as if an off-stage conversation (more of a growing argument) were taking place somewhere else in the building with doors slamming and occasional laughter. At first, I thought I was imagining things but eventually, especially during the short last movement, I noticed other people looking around uncomfortably, too. It almost seemed part of the piece (Quartet for Strings and Off-Stage Theatricals? More Whispers than You Bargained For? The Grim Reaper Coming to Take You Away?) . In the end, I was reminded of another T.S. Eliot reference:
“ In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.”
...and I had this odd hankering for a peach...
And meanwhile, you, the player, react to what you’re learning to play and then, once learned, coming to terms with it as a performer. And always listening.
And not every piece requires (expects - demands) the same level of attention: some pieces are harder to play, technically, or more difficult to put together than others. Others present other options to consider: some are fairly straight-forward while others present more questions than answers. One of the things you often hear about “great art” is that it allows you to constantly be discovering new things when you listen to or play a piece – and like people who grow and change with passing time, our listening to a piece of music we’ve heard or played in the past might be invigorated by perspectives that also grow and change as we do.
A pianist could take an “impressionist” approach to, say, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (the first movement’s dreamy night-time reverie sitting in a silver-tinged landscape under a full-moon; the finale’s thunderstorm), a “theatrical one” (the first movement’s contemplation of lost love, the middle movement’s nostalgic memories, the finale’s turbulent heart-break and violent passions) or a literal one (a moderate tempo in the first movement, a kind of song-without-words; a minuet that’s not really a minuet but a more realistic respite between these otherwise atypical outer movements; a finale that is agitato without going overboard, being sure to place the accents where they belong because they’re not always where you expect them or even where a lot of performers seem to put them), all of which still reflects what Beethoven left us, even if we ignore the nickname some critic (not the composer) gave it.
To bring those different kinds of possibilities to, say, the little “Facile” Sonata that Mozart wrote – the one in C Major, K.545, which every budding piano-player has to deal with at some point – is neither possible nor wise, though the structures behind the music might be very similar if not the same (in the Mozart, the trick for more advanced players is to remember the difference between “childish” and “child-like”).
And so Bruce Adolphe decided to approach a Beethoven string quartet from a slightly different perspective, offering another viewpoint that might allow a listener (or a player) to hear a familiar work in a new way.
I wasn’t sure what he was going to “do” with Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95 which the composer himself (not a critic, not the publisher) called “Quartetto serioso.” This is either the last of the “Middle Quartets” or the first of the “Late Quartets” in the progress of Beethoven’s development from a late-18th Century composer who idolized Mozart and whom Haydn tried to control to a composer who, even in his own time, must have sounded like an off-the-wall avant-garde composer writing modern music that went far beyond the boundaries of what his contemporaries considered “proper.” If you listen to Beethoven’s music today, you hear it filtered through all the music you’ve experienced, whether it’s Brahms and Wagner, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Elliott Carter and Philip Glass or Glenn Miller and Kurt Cobain without realizing how much of a shock this must have been to its first-time listeners in 1810, the year after Haydn died.
It’s easy to argue about whether art is cyclical (what goes around, comes around) or linear (the chronological progression from one composer, one era, to the next) and of course there are always exceptions. The people who created this art are perhaps even more complex that the art they created: we just tend to forget the details of the creators when we have, separated by so much time and context, just their art.
When I was teaching at the University of Connecticut, I asked some of my junior-level students to write down the first things that came to mind when they heard the name “Beethoven!” Most answers were easily anticipated – “Great Music” or “Hero” but also “deaf” and (back in the days when a comic named Steve Martin was everywhere) “a wild and crazy guy.”
In one of those moments where you realize why you teach, one of these students had written down the word “pain.” She said she was thinking of his constant suffering and struggling to survive. “Because he was deaf?” I asked as a kind of devil’s advocate. “No, not just that,” she said, going on to mention episodes in his life that can be telegraphed by his relationships – the Immortal Beloved, the Nephew – as well as how difficult his personality was in relation to the society he lived in. She heard this pain in a lot of his music – she mentioned the last movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata – or the “other side” when he was trying to ignore the pain, perhaps, surfacing in the manic energy of the 7th Symphony, what you might call “working through the pain” – one of my students, perhaps her, had once told me the slow movement of the 7th was some of the saddest music she’d ever heard.
Now, it’s always difficult to psychoanalyze the music or the composer because in many ways you can counter any argument by saying “all composers are different” just as “all listeners are different” – just as for every Democratic response to the economic issues we face politically and socially today can be countered by an equal and usually opposite Republican reaction to the same issue – and vice-versa (even if the response is no more grounded than just saying “it won’t work”). What every performer must do and what every listener should do is something every composer has to do before putting notes down on paper: make an honest committment to the moment. It doesn’t matter if it’s two- or three-hundred years old or brand new. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve heard the piece before or if you’re hearing it the first time. If you’ve heard it fifty times in your life – concerts, on the radio, listening to CDs – there’s someone nearby who may be hearing it for the first time.
Bruce Adolphe’s presentations tend to use humor seriously – like his turning the first movement of Mozart’s G Minor Piano Quartet into a murder trial at a Market Square Concert a few seasons ago – so when it was announced he was going to describe Beethoven’s “Serioso” as an example of “Tourette Syndrome in Music,” I was wondering if people might show up to picket the performance. True, you can look over a list of symptoms and find musical examples that might correspond to them – certainly, his sharp unexpected accents and swift changes of mood come to mind. And it’s not that everything has to be “humorous” even in a piece called “Serioso.” In fact, in addition perhaps to being a little better prepared with the examples he wanted the quartet to play and running back and forth from the raised platform down to the otherwise unused piano, the presentation might have benefited from a little less humor or maybe it was just, in the apparent lack of preparation with the players, the humor hit the wrong notes but “rightly played” could have been the kind of contrast between light and dark Beethoven himself could give you in his music.
The idea was not, it turned out, to “have fun” at the expense of people who suffer with this disease: he made that very clear at the beginning. The idea was not to imply that Beethoven suffered from this along with any other number of things that at the time were unnamed and just passed off as aspects of his personality. The idea was, in essence, to describe the piece – actually, to “diagnose” the piece – as if it itself suffered from something and it was up to the doctor to treat it as he would any other patient.
Part of this involved a little bit of surgery, removing something that a listener in 1810 would have thought a mistake on the second violinist’s part (minor cosmetic surgery) or an unpleasant transition from one point to another. By exploding a chord at one point, Beethoven veers off into unexpected harmonic territory only to resolve it to some expected place after all by means of a harmonic trick. To explain this, Adolphe had the quartet play the passage under the microscope as it’s written, then asked them to cut out a few measures. Unfortunately the resolution still sounded abrupt because it was now without any transition at all: a second-year theory student should be able to write a couple of chords as a “transplant” replacing the “cancerous cells” that would make a more pleasant modulation, and it might have helped make the point to hear how somebody less than Beethoven might have handled it.
But still, the point was clear: the question is, why was Beethoven doing this? Or, if you’re examining the piece of music like a patient, what was happening here to make this simple structure not function the way such structures were intended? Beyond identifying the symptoms and naming them, what could be done to help the patient?
Adolphe began by describing an incident that happened to him recently in a New York train station, a story that anyone who’s lived in New York City could have experienced, how this guy came up to him on the platform and just started cursing at him and gesticulating wildly – just as the quartet began to play the opening music, with its wild turning pattern and sharply articulated leaps. Then the man calmed down and started to walk away (the music calms down) but then suddenly he turned and came back at him again (as does the music, now, with equal suddenness and building of tension). He would go on to explain how intervals in this opening pattern found their way into other passages – most notably the odd-sounding cello solo that opens the slow movement. He also identified a “trigger point” which seems to set the music off into these unexpected tangents – a simple stepping up from F to F-sharp (or G-flat – on the piano, they’re the same note) sometimes with barely any preparation at all, sometimes even more suddenly by just picking up and dropping down into the new key of F-sharp (“whoa, what was that?!”) – which might cause the music to react the same way a friend of mine might react if you just mentioned the word “Hillary”...
The curious thing about this “trigger,” technically speaking, it’s simply another way of treating a harmonic progression, the movement of one chord to another. Several of my teachers over the years described this by writing three Roman numerals on the board:
I – V – I
This the musical shorthand for a tonic chord moving to a dominant chord moving back to the tonic chord again. In the white-rat garden-variety key of C major, a C chord to a G chord back to a C chord. This is the simplest progression – away from and back to the same sonority – and really nothing more than an automatic expectation.
Then they put another symbol in between the first two chords:
I – X – V – I
This “X” now represents a new chord that could become something to prolong the digression from the C chord before we get to the G chord, whether it’s one chord or a bunch of them. But sticking to the basic cadential formula, it could become
I – IV – V – I
or a C chord to an F chord to a G chord before ending satisfactorily on a C chord. There are different ways you can expand this – you can fool a listener who is expecting that final C chord by replacing it with an A Minor chord – which has two of the same pitches in it, but it sounds completely UN-final and therefore needs to resolve further in order to reach that expected C major chord:
I – IV – V – vi
If you want to really throw the listener for a loop, once the “deceptive resolution” to A minor sounds “so last year,” you switch it to an A-FLAT major chord which then allows you a ton of other expectations:
I – IV – V – ♭VI
Like any tangent, this now requires a little more work before you – aaaah! – finally get to where you expected to go in the first place – that last C Major chord.
You could also substitute another “almost-identical” chord for the IV, the original “X” chord. Instead of an F Major chord (built on the pitches F-A-C), you could insert a D Minor chord (D-F-A built on the 2nd degree of the C Major scale and therefore Roman-numeralized as a “ii”) but in its first inversion, putting the third note of the chord – the F – in the bass so it’s now an F-A-D chord (same chord, just a different ‘voicing’):
I – ii6 – V – I
Composers often played with the expectations a listener might have between major and minor chords – or by extension their tonalities – “inflecting” something from the minor world into the major one. This goes back to the uncomfortable generalization that “minor is sad” and “major is happy” kind of thing – one is dark, the other light – but like a shadow passing over the surface, hearing an A-flat in an otherwise C Major passage would be something to notice: it’s not expected.
Substituting an F MINOR chord for the IV – thus making it a “iv” chord (upper-case = major chord, lower-case = minor chord) – can bring out a new and different emotional response with this inflection of the A-flat from the parallel world of C Minor:
I – iv – V – I
If you go back to that “ii-chord” substitution and now work with the two common notes of F and A-flat, and switch the D to a D-flat, you have not only a minor “inflection” but also a note that does not belong to the scale of C Major OR C Minor. This is usually handled as a first-inversion chord, again, with the expected F in the bass – F - A-flat - D-flat – which then resolves to a G Major chord et cetera...
I – ♭II6 – V – I
Whether this “sound” was invented in Naples, Italy, or not, it’s become known as a “Neapolitan Chord,” one of a variety of geographically identified chords that have certain intrinsic structures and expectations of their own.
Beethoven is, however, often using the emotional response for this chord more directly, more “in-your-face” by NOT playing with the “oh, I’m just masquerading as a IV chord” kind of chord. And in his aggressive rhythmic and melodic patterns, it becomes startling – in 1810, possibly even frightening. It’s not what the listener expected and it’s playing with these expectations that opened up whole new worlds of sound and harmonic technique that may lead directly or indirectly to further confusions of expectations in Schubert or Wagner or Schoenberg.
As my teachers would explain it, “I-V-I is just a raw element of music, a cliche.” (In pop music today, perhaps it’s I-♭VII-I but the analogy is still there.) Pointing to the X in the “I-X-V-I” pattern on the board, he’d say, underscoring the X, “THAT’s composition.”
Looking for humor in Beethoven’s agitated “Serious” Quartet might have brought up the possibility of placing Op. 95 on prozac. By calming down the opening’s abrupt motive to become more acceptable, more of what listeners then expected, would it turn into just another faceless quartet in the crowd? Hoffmeister, perhaps? It wouldn’t take much to rewrite a few measure here and there to show what we would have lost if Beethoven were on medication...
As Adolphe concluded, whether we think it’s the pain that Beethoven experienced that he put into the music or the piece of music itself that bears the pain – after all, he said, “Beethoven is dead” (unless of course you believe in a weird kind of parallel universe, whether or not they continue to live through their music) – we have the piece and we can hear its pain. And the pain becomes ours.
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While I’m not in the mind-set to write reviews of performances I hear, though some people expect it – let me repeat, I am not a music critic despite whatever opinions I may have or whatever other people think of them – it’s impossible not to comment on the performance of the Beethoven “Serioso” Quartet given by the Daedalus Quartet at Saturday night’s opening performance with Market Square Concerts.
This is a group I’d heard a little over three years ago playing Sibelius’ underrated String Quartet with a more enigmatic nickname, “Intimate Voices,” a work that figures on their first CD release from the Bridge label. For one reason or another, I hadn’t listened to this disc: even without listening to it when we got it at the station, I automatically ordered a copy for myself. It was odd, driving in to hear them play at Market Square Church and listening to their performance of the Sibelius on the ride in and the ride back. Of course, the listening conditions in my car were not as good as hearing a live-performance anywhere, one reason why sitting in a concert hall in quasi-religious confinement listening to music is better for the experience (unless you’re just looking for pretty wall-paper). By concentrating your focus on the music, you absorb more of what the composer wrote and how the musicians interpreted it. Some of it, also, is just the “communal experience” of sharing this concentration with the rest of the audience as well as communing with the music. Granted, I should’ve listened to it in my living room, if the Kittens of Mass Distraction would allow the ability to focus (of course, there, if the phone rings, I feel more obligated to answer it than to hurl silent curses to the idiot with the cell phone two rows down...).
But I was still wondering why this piece isn’t heard more often. I don’t recall it being programmed locally before, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t play it more than three times the whole 18 years I was working at the radio station, once to promote the Daedalus’ performance with the Next Generation Festival that year.
Beethoven’s Op. 95 is in a different category. Listeners have the opportunity not only to hear this one work frequently, it’s not unusual to hear it on an all-Beethoven program with two other quartets – or even in the context of a Complete Quartet Cycle.
Whether or not the Daedalus Quartet was influenced by the image of the music being laid out on an examining table – reminding me of that cadaverous exhibit going around called “Our Bodies” – they certainly gave it a very visceral performance. By pushing what would have sounded unexpected in 1810 (or whenever it was first performed: Beethoven didn’t publish it for another six years), they made it sound fresh and frightening today, not belabored by what most audiences expect after two more centuries down the road. For some listeners who like their music clean, this may have been an over-the-top performance, pushing the tempo to a risk-taking breaking-point. Regardless, it was a clean performance, note-wise at least, even if at times the emotions got a little messy.
The Haydn that opened the program, the second of the Opus 20 set known as the “Sun Quartets,” was appropriately all light and sunshine, not to sound too perky about it. I love this quartet, mostly because the cello actually has something to do beyond just kicking out the bass-line. This was a clean performance in all respects. The second movement is a curious “slow” movement called a Capriccio which one could argue, in terms of diagnosing the Beethoven, suffers a bit from ADD: before you know it, what sounds like it could be another episode turns out to be the next movement. Papa Haydn and his jokes, always playing with your expectations! And the last movement was so well controlled, starting off hushed before ending with a bang, it didn’t dawn on me (no pun intended) it could be called the “Crescendo” Quartet.
It might have been beneficial to hear the Beethoven immediately after this very nice work by his teacher, written only 38 years earlier (If the Beethoven were new today, that means the Haydn would've been written in 1970 - how old is that?). Keeping in line with the prognosis on the second half (given a concert-series sponsored in part by a health insurance company), the slot usually reserved for the less familiar, more challenging and generally new piece was a work written in 1992 by Bruce Adolphe. Being there to set up the Beethoven, he said a few words about his own piece – better than reading the program notes, if you did: it wasn’t quite like having somebody doing a power-point presentation and then reading everything to you as if you can’t understand it, yourself – that helped put the music in a more subjective context.
While he was working on the idea for a new quartet, a relative was diagnosed with a serious illness. Since music cannot tell a story, it can till imply one but it can also imply any number of similar stories or different details, often none of which the composer had in mind – even in words, reading Moby Dick is one thing, figuring out what it means is something else.
After describing how the first movement describes the personality changes between shock at hearing the news and the attempts (with humor) at trying to keep your mind off it; how in the second movement there is a slow tick-like motive in the 2nd violin and viola with the 1st violin cast as the patient and the cello, as the disease; how in the final movement, a double canon, we feel trapped in this kind of never-ending texture - after all this, he says someone remarked to him that it could just as well be a story about gazelles being stalked by a hunter. True, he thought, there’s no way to control the listener to think specifically of this relative, that disease and those thoughts – but in hindsight, it’s still the same story where the gazelles (at times playful) are the patient, the hunter (ever persistent) is the disease. One assumes from the open-endedness of the last movement (no real finale in the wrapping-up sense), the cousin may have survived to hear the work since the music is more about ones thoughts on mortality rather than on death, dying and mourning.
That being said, there were a lot of things to listen for in this piece – and grateful for the composer’s insight to have many of them pointed out, whether one would hear them without it or not. There were gentle passages like a minimalist cushion for whatever may have been happening on the surface – the ticking motive that came from the title given the work, “Whispers of Mortality” (as opposed to T.S. Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality”) or a kind of rhythmic rising-and-falling (breathing?) that reminded me of something I heard by Scott Pender back in the mid-1980s, a touch of Steve Reich as one of many dialects absorbed into a composer’s own language.
Whether they have performed this piece before or learned it for this concert, paired with the composer for his Beethoven presentation, it’s hard to tell. Their individual playing was impressive as well – the cellist, so pristine-sounding in the Haydn now taking on the role of villain; the 1st violinist’s virtuosic outbursts that recur (often repeatedly) throughout the piece – but still blending into a cohesive unit as a single quartet of different but equal components.
On first hearing, there’s nothing I could fault the quartet or the composer for except for feeling the ending something of a let-down, proportionally, not that it needed a more dramatic turn or even a last minute reprieve like the buck-and-wing that ends Beethoven’s Op. 95. This ending – if it can be called that – came primarily as a surprise when it stopped, begging for a second hearing to make more sense out of it. After all, how much great art can you truly absorb in one encounter?
There was one curious thing that happened during Bruce Adolphe's quartet, “Whispers of Mortality” - it was as if an off-stage conversation (more of a growing argument) were taking place somewhere else in the building with doors slamming and occasional laughter. At first, I thought I was imagining things but eventually, especially during the short last movement, I noticed other people looking around uncomfortably, too. It almost seemed part of the piece (Quartet for Strings and Off-Stage Theatricals? More Whispers than You Bargained For? The Grim Reaper Coming to Take You Away?) . In the end, I was reminded of another T.S. Eliot reference:
“ In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.”
...and I had this odd hankering for a peach...
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Beethoven Listens to His Financial Adviser
Now that we’d had our token first frost to make it feel officially like fall, Beethoven sat quietly at the sidewalk café nursing his cup of pumpkin-spice latté with a twist of cinnamon, his eyes glazed over, not too unlike the little pastry he had made the mistake of calling a donut sitting so far untouched on the little plate beside it. He was oblivious to everyone sauntering by in the afternoon’s sunshine, as if watching his 401k drop in ever-downward, slow-motion free-fall like so many autumn leaves.His train of thought shifted quickly from one sore topic to another. As if the election weren’t bad enough – whom should he vote for: Brahms or Wagner? It was bad enough he’d been getting badgered by both of them for an endorsement – having decided to quit his job as WLVB’s station manager over the current trends in programming classical music on the radio meant he now had no income. That tempting offer he read the other day, the e-mail from some Nigerian general, didn’t sound like it was the wisest thing to invest in, though some other ones who’d been sent to him by total strangers gleefully informed him he could be making tons of money while working from home. But since there weren’t many music jobs around town a composer could apply for, he began thinking perhaps that job as a WalMart greeter might not be so bad...
But mostly his thoughts focused on the meeting he’d just had with his financial and spiritual advisor, Brother Ken Yasperidyme [see photo, left], going over all the different points trying to make sense out of the latest crisis in the stock market.Sure, there had been bad times before – back in 1809 when Napoleon occupied Vienna or the stock market crash in 1873 which had taken a few years before everything got sorted out, something both Brahms and Wagner keep saying but which wasn’t exactly making people feel very comfortable today.
“All they talk about is symphony this versus opera that and Wagner just starts calling Brahms names, bringing up all that old stuff about his having played piano in whore-houses when he was under-aged. Can’t they talk about the real issues, why we listen to music and what great art can do for us in these troubled times?” He always tended to get huffy when he thought about the politics of art.
He was amazed by the government’s so-called Wall Street Bail-Out Plan. He thought the next time some banker turned his nose up at the idea of government funding for the arts, going on about how it was unfair to reward something like art that can’t survive in today’s free-market economy, he would do more than just bop him one across the back of the head.
“I mean, how many people will continue to sit here and drink a $3.50 cup of coffee every afternoon,” he asked himself as he took another sip. He had decided it would be his last little luxury before he would go shopping to find a tighter belt.
“While we basically have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Brother Ken had told him, adding parenthetically (because he too liked to talk in parentheticals) “(if you think Hallowe’en is scary, wait till the last week before Election Day) – the constant fluctuation of the stock market is no reason to panic and pull your money out of your diversified accounts since there’s really no place else safe enough to put them, anyway,” though he was warily eying the substantial new hole being dug out in the front yard, something about trouble with the well but perhaps it was just a metaphor.
“There will,” he continued, “be several rainy days in the weeks and months ahead but you can be sure that, aside from always being darkest before the dawn (if not the coldest), we’ll be able to weather the storm because at the end of the day we can stay on track if we keep everything steady-as-she-goes. You'll just have to hang in there.”
Something like that.
Beethoven tended to nod in agreement for lack of any better response, having not a clue what he was talking about. There was also something about the economic version of the Chinese Butterfly Affect in Chaos Theory: because a homeowner defaults in California, a CEO in New York City decides it’s time to ramp up some million-dollar bonuses before asking the government to bail out his company which then causes Iceland to go bankrupt and so on. Whatever.
“I can write a symphony. I know the ins-and-outs of Sonata-Allegro form. I can even write a fugue, kind of, but frankly I feel like an idiot when people go spouting off about the economy,” he thought, frowning into his coffee. Of course, being deaf didn’t help but he couldn’t blame everything on these new improved hearing aids. (That was another sore point: he had to remember he’s not supposed to put them in the same glass with his dentures overnight. “It’s not easy,” he’d told his doctor last week with a great sigh for the ages, “being a timeless classic at, what, 238 now? People forget there’s more to life than just writing great music.” And soon, he would have to face his family at yet another Thanksgiving Day dinner, as if he needed to see his brother Johann and that good-for-nothing nephew of his again. And again, he frowned.)
The coffee had cooled off too quickly, the flavor a little too “foo-foo” for his liking – he missed the good strong coffee of his first hundred or so years in Vienna. He knew Americans had no idea what a good cup of coffee tasted like. Apparently they felt the more you paid for it, the better it had to be. “So typical,” he sighed, “so typical...”
Beethoven already knew there was a lot of bull involved in the stock market, but these days somehow it was all being eaten by bears. He had this image of large homeless bears running amok on Wall Street, devouring everything in sight. Judging from what he was reading in the papers lately, he assumed a CEO was a company’s “Chief Embezzlement Officer” and that “P/E Ratio” was something about the percentage of investors who were wetting their pants right about now. Why this guy was called a “broker” now began to make sense to him, since that’s how he was feeling day after day: what could you expect when they called it “Standard & Poor”? That was his life in a nutshell, he thought, his cash flow flowing right down the toilet.
He looked up to see a beautiful young woman with long blonde hair and 3-inch heels walking by. As if on cue, she looked at him just as he looked at her. He said to himself, “Hey, baby, how about some piano lessons?” She frowned back at him and walked on. To the world, he was the great Beethoven, composer of some of the greatest music every written - to her, he was just another old man with bad hair in a rumpled suit nursing a cup of coffee at a side-walk café with nothing better to do with his time.
Brother Ken had mentioned “value investing” which seemed to be the art of buying low and selling lower. By the end of the meeting, though, he agreed with him and decided to just ride-it-out, whatever that meant. He kept thinking of the time he and Copland had gone to that bar down the street, the one that used to have one of those bucking bronco machines – what had he called it, Rodeo-in-a-Box? – and how he’d only lasted a few seconds before he found himself on the floor, dusting himself off with great effort afterward.
With any luck, at the end of whatever day it might be, there would still be something left to dust off. He took one last gulp, finishing his coffee, and then sauntered off down the street, pulling his jacket a little closer around him.
“Ja,” he thought, “it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
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From a collection of short stories called Stravinsky’s Tavern by Dick Strawser
© 2008
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Become a DaedHaed
Another one of those award-winning young string quartets is coming to town – and there are many out there, these days, all worth checking out. Who knows which ones will survive the free-market arts economy to become one of that elite group of Great American Quartets that unfortunately then become a little too expensive for many chamber music presenters around the country.
In that sense, this is a good season for Market Square Concerts whose series will wrap up in April with an appearance by the legendary Guarneri Quartet in what is one of the very last concerts they’ll give on their final tour.
It’s also a great weekend, right now, because the Guarneri Quartet will be playing Friday night at the new home of the Pennsylvania Academy of Music in Lancaster, playing the Dvořák “American” Quartet on their program.
And then Saturday night, Market Square Concerts’ new season opens with a group that last year won the Guarneri Quartet Award from Chamber Music America, the Daedalus Quartet. Their program will include Haydn’s C Major Quartet, Op. 20 No. 2 (one of the set called the “Sun” Quartets), the 4th Quartet by Bruce Adolphe, written in 1992 with the evocative title “Whispers of Mortality,” and then Beethoven’s F Minor Quartet, Op. 95, nicknamed the “Serioso” which will be prefaced by another of Bruce Adolphe’s insightful and humorous presentations.
A few seasons ago, Adolphe (who is the companion of one of the most famous parrots in classical music, Polly Rhythm) did a similar presentation
with the first movement of Mozart’s dramatic G Minor Piano Quartet which he ingeniously translated phrase-by-phrase into a murder trial. The opening theme became the prosecutor’s “You... are... a murderer!” followed by the damsel’s distressed disavowal. At one point in the proceedings a cell-phone in the audience went off, playing out its ring-tone of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” If I’d been quick enough, I would’ve shouted out from the balcony “Beethoven Objects!” to the opening notes of his 5th Symphony...
So now it’s Beethoven’s turn. What Adolphe has in store for Beethoven’s “Serioso” Quartet, I have no idea – he calls it a “diagnosis” of Tourette Syndrome in Music – hey! – and the season is appropriately sponsored by Capital Blue Cross.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
The Daedalus Quartet formed in the year 2000. Violinists Kyu-Young and Min-Young Kim, brother and sister, grew up on Long Island with cellist Raman Ramakrishnan and met violist Jessica Thompson at the Marlboro Music Festival and decided to form a quartet. The next year, they won one of the most coveted prizes in the Chamber Music World, the Banff International String Quartet Competition. Beginning in the fall of 2005, they spent two seasons as the resident quartet for Chamber Music Society II, which led to numerous performances at Lincoln Center. Their first CD was released in 2006 by the Bridge label which includes the quartets by Sibelius and Ravel and Stravinsky’s 3 Pieces for String Quartet. Last year, they won the Guarneri Quartet Award from Chamber Music America.
In and among all these events, I had a chance to hear them at the 2005 Next Generation Festival where they appeared on the second week of the series organized by Awadagin Pratt for a program held at Susquehanna University’s Stretansky Hall. I’ll just quote from the review I’d posted at the time on my other blog.
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Awadagin Pratt always manages to bring with him some incredible performers, usually including a new string quartet. I had never heard of the Deadalus Quartet before which is the sort of thing that makes you think, “well, this could be one of several things, couldn’t it?” There are so many young quartets out there and so few opportunities to hear them, it’s easy to be dismissive. I’ve heard a few groups that impress as likely to become this generations answer to great ensembles of the past, like the Juilliard, the Guarneri, the Cleveland and the Emerson Quartets. I’ve been especially impressed by the Ying, the St. Lawrence and the Pacifica Quartets all of which have performed live in the area on several occasions courtesy of Market Square Concerts and Gretna Music. Add to that list, now, the Daedalus Quartet.
First of all, Sibelius’ lone string quartet alternates between the spare style of what would become his 4th Symphony and the more traditional style of his recently finished 3rd. The only way I’ve ever heard it was through the Juilliard Quartet’s recording. With nothing to compare it to, I just figured the pieces wasn’t all that interesting [to me] and I even wondered why this younger group had programmed it. I know Awadagin loves Sibelius, and so do I – his symphonies and tone poems, the violin concerto are all wonderful works – so I figured this going to be the discovery-of-the-evening. As it turned out, on several levels.
By the second measure of the Daedalus’ performance, I knew I was going to be rethinking this piece. Within a minute I was thinking “okay, you’ve sold me on this piece, I’m going to love it!” But I kept thinking, “why didn’t the Juilliard impress me the same way?” You’d think it’s the same piece of music, but in the hands of the Daedalus it hit me squarely as something completely different. Maybe the Juilliard approach caters more to the asutere side while the Daedalus play it with a mix of fire and guts and, when needed, a certain aloofness (but never dispassionate), the same kind of involvement that distinguishes a good performance from a great one. Not that the Juilliard were “phoning it in,” but their view of it didn’t hit me – in fact, it missed me by a mile. The Daedalus hit me between the ears and stayed there the entire performance.
There are passages where Sibelius’ trade-mark string-noodling, rolling by like quiet but often troubled waves, serve as a bed for a melodic fragment that ought to buuild. These noodlings are fine when played by a whole string sections where they create a texture, but my jaw dropped when I heard the violist begin one of these segments, where you could cleanly hear every note, only to have the others one by one join in, all playing in perfect tune and rhythm (no fudging) as you ride to the crest of the wave and then are thrown over the top into its resolution. The middle movement, however, is the miracle: this is a mixture of harmonic writing and meditation that gives the quartet its nickname: Sibelius scribbled over three hushed repeated chords the Latin phrase “voces intimae” but what Intimate Voices means remains an enigma. Did something happen to him at the moment he was writing those austere chords? Had he just received some bad news? Was there a sudden but maybe unmusical epiphany when, in the middle of something else, these chords, sounding so unexpected, came to him out of nowhere? There were so many details unheard before, I wouldn’t have minded if they’d played this movement again or, for that matter, the whole piece.
By the end, the audience in Stretansky Hall burst into applause like they were hearing a great performance of a beloved masterpiece... [The quartet has] been chosen to work with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for the next two seasons, I can now understand why: it would be worth a trip to New York just to hear them again. Consider me a DaedHaed!
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
Well, this time you don’t have to drive to New York to hear them. They’ll be playing this Saturday night at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg at 8:00. I’m sure you’ll be able to pick up their recording of the Sibelius at the concert (probably not any boot-leg concert tapes, though) – most people would probably get it for the Ravel – but I’m also sure hearing their Beethoven “Serioso” will be an ear-opener as well.
By the way, I’d recently written about a chance to hear another quartet I first heard at the very first Next Generation Festival, before the Cypress Quartet was even a year old. That was almost 12 years ago and the performance I just heard of the Debussy Quartet which I blogged about here was another revelation, turning a work I never cared for into something riveting to listen to. I would also add them, now, to the list of young quartets I hope to hear a lot more from in the future. In fact, Ellen Hughes, the new director of Market Square Concerts and a long-time friend of Cypress, told me the quartet will be appearing during the NEXT season, perhaps in January of 2010 as they work out the dates, probably playing a work by Jennifer Higdon.
In that sense, this is a good season for Market Square Concerts whose series will wrap up in April with an appearance by the legendary Guarneri Quartet in what is one of the very last concerts they’ll give on their final tour.
It’s also a great weekend, right now, because the Guarneri Quartet will be playing Friday night at the new home of the Pennsylvania Academy of Music in Lancaster, playing the Dvořák “American” Quartet on their program.
And then Saturday night, Market Square Concerts’ new season opens with a group that last year won the Guarneri Quartet Award from Chamber Music America, the Daedalus Quartet. Their program will include Haydn’s C Major Quartet, Op. 20 No. 2 (one of the set called the “Sun” Quartets), the 4th Quartet by Bruce Adolphe, written in 1992 with the evocative title “Whispers of Mortality,” and then Beethoven’s F Minor Quartet, Op. 95, nicknamed the “Serioso” which will be prefaced by another of Bruce Adolphe’s insightful and humorous presentations.A few seasons ago, Adolphe (who is the companion of one of the most famous parrots in classical music, Polly Rhythm) did a similar presentation
with the first movement of Mozart’s dramatic G Minor Piano Quartet which he ingeniously translated phrase-by-phrase into a murder trial. The opening theme became the prosecutor’s “You... are... a murderer!” followed by the damsel’s distressed disavowal. At one point in the proceedings a cell-phone in the audience went off, playing out its ring-tone of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” If I’d been quick enough, I would’ve shouted out from the balcony “Beethoven Objects!” to the opening notes of his 5th Symphony...So now it’s Beethoven’s turn. What Adolphe has in store for Beethoven’s “Serioso” Quartet, I have no idea – he calls it a “diagnosis” of Tourette Syndrome in Music – hey! – and the season is appropriately sponsored by Capital Blue Cross.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
The Daedalus Quartet formed in the year 2000. Violinists Kyu-Young and Min-Young Kim, brother and sister, grew up on Long Island with cellist Raman Ramakrishnan and met violist Jessica Thompson at the Marlboro Music Festival and decided to form a quartet. The next year, they won one of the most coveted prizes in the Chamber Music World, the Banff International String Quartet Competition. Beginning in the fall of 2005, they spent two seasons as the resident quartet for Chamber Music Society II, which led to numerous performances at Lincoln Center. Their first CD was released in 2006 by the Bridge label which includes the quartets by Sibelius and Ravel and Stravinsky’s 3 Pieces for String Quartet. Last year, they won the Guarneri Quartet Award from Chamber Music America.
In and among all these events, I had a chance to hear them at the 2005 Next Generation Festival where they appeared on the second week of the series organized by Awadagin Pratt for a program held at Susquehanna University’s Stretansky Hall. I’ll just quote from the review I’d posted at the time on my other blog.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
Awadagin Pratt always manages to bring with him some incredible performers, usually including a new string quartet. I had never heard of the Deadalus Quartet before which is the sort of thing that makes you think, “well, this could be one of several things, couldn’t it?” There are so many young quartets out there and so few opportunities to hear them, it’s easy to be dismissive. I’ve heard a few groups that impress as likely to become this generations answer to great ensembles of the past, like the Juilliard, the Guarneri, the Cleveland and the Emerson Quartets. I’ve been especially impressed by the Ying, the St. Lawrence and the Pacifica Quartets all of which have performed live in the area on several occasions courtesy of Market Square Concerts and Gretna Music. Add to that list, now, the Daedalus Quartet.
First of all, Sibelius’ lone string quartet alternates between the spare style of what would become his 4th Symphony and the more traditional style of his recently finished 3rd. The only way I’ve ever heard it was through the Juilliard Quartet’s recording. With nothing to compare it to, I just figured the pieces wasn’t all that interesting [to me] and I even wondered why this younger group had programmed it. I know Awadagin loves Sibelius, and so do I – his symphonies and tone poems, the violin concerto are all wonderful works – so I figured this going to be the discovery-of-the-evening. As it turned out, on several levels.
By the second measure of the Daedalus’ performance, I knew I was going to be rethinking this piece. Within a minute I was thinking “okay, you’ve sold me on this piece, I’m going to love it!” But I kept thinking, “why didn’t the Juilliard impress me the same way?” You’d think it’s the same piece of music, but in the hands of the Daedalus it hit me squarely as something completely different. Maybe the Juilliard approach caters more to the asutere side while the Daedalus play it with a mix of fire and guts and, when needed, a certain aloofness (but never dispassionate), the same kind of involvement that distinguishes a good performance from a great one. Not that the Juilliard were “phoning it in,” but their view of it didn’t hit me – in fact, it missed me by a mile. The Daedalus hit me between the ears and stayed there the entire performance.
There are passages where Sibelius’ trade-mark string-noodling, rolling by like quiet but often troubled waves, serve as a bed for a melodic fragment that ought to buuild. These noodlings are fine when played by a whole string sections where they create a texture, but my jaw dropped when I heard the violist begin one of these segments, where you could cleanly hear every note, only to have the others one by one join in, all playing in perfect tune and rhythm (no fudging) as you ride to the crest of the wave and then are thrown over the top into its resolution. The middle movement, however, is the miracle: this is a mixture of harmonic writing and meditation that gives the quartet its nickname: Sibelius scribbled over three hushed repeated chords the Latin phrase “voces intimae” but what Intimate Voices means remains an enigma. Did something happen to him at the moment he was writing those austere chords? Had he just received some bad news? Was there a sudden but maybe unmusical epiphany when, in the middle of something else, these chords, sounding so unexpected, came to him out of nowhere? There were so many details unheard before, I wouldn’t have minded if they’d played this movement again or, for that matter, the whole piece.
By the end, the audience in Stretansky Hall burst into applause like they were hearing a great performance of a beloved masterpiece... [The quartet has] been chosen to work with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for the next two seasons, I can now understand why: it would be worth a trip to New York just to hear them again. Consider me a DaedHaed!
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
Well, this time you don’t have to drive to New York to hear them. They’ll be playing this Saturday night at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg at 8:00. I’m sure you’ll be able to pick up their recording of the Sibelius at the concert (probably not any boot-leg concert tapes, though) – most people would probably get it for the Ravel – but I’m also sure hearing their Beethoven “Serioso” will be an ear-opener as well.
By the way, I’d recently written about a chance to hear another quartet I first heard at the very first Next Generation Festival, before the Cypress Quartet was even a year old. That was almost 12 years ago and the performance I just heard of the Debussy Quartet which I blogged about here was another revelation, turning a work I never cared for into something riveting to listen to. I would also add them, now, to the list of young quartets I hope to hear a lot more from in the future. In fact, Ellen Hughes, the new director of Market Square Concerts and a long-time friend of Cypress, told me the quartet will be appearing during the NEXT season, perhaps in January of 2010 as they work out the dates, probably playing a work by Jennifer Higdon.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Connections: Brahms' Double Concerto in Harrisburg
Saturday night’s concert with the Harrisburg Symphony was more than just a fine performance: there was an unexpected connection that made the experience beyond just hearing the music.
I’ve known cellist Daniel Gaisford for a few years, now, and in addition to several recitals had heard him play the Elgar Concerto with the orchestra in 1997 under their previous music director, Richard Westerfield. Violinist Kurt Nikkanen played the Brahms Concerto in 2003 and before that, Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnol with Stuart Malina. As long as Kurt and Daniel have known each other, having met as students at Juilliard, it’s odd they’ve never had the chance to play Brahms’ Double Concerto together,
In an earlier post, I wrote (and wrote) about Brahms, this concerto, his friendship for Joachim and his attempt to rekindle the friendship after a major falling-out. I also hypothesized about the reason this work was a concerto for violin and cello rather than just for the violin, for Joachim himself.
Ever since I first heard the work back in the mid-60s when I bought an Angel LP with David Oistrakh and Pierre Fournier (recorded in 1956), it sounded more like a cello concerto with an additional violin solo part - not exactly tacked on like an afterthought, but not quite of equal stature. If Joachim had been counting notes the way Heifetz did when he and Piatigorsky rehearsed Miklos Rozsa’s Double Concerto, Brahms would probably have been taken to task for not treating them equally to the same number of notes. And since Brahms had just written Haussmann a cello sonata the year before, who’s to say the germ for this new concerto wasn’t a Cello Concerto that failed to get off the ground? Since Haussmann was the cellist in Joachim’s quartet, it might seem like an affront to his old friendship with Joachim, one that went back 34 years, so perhaps the germ mutated into something else entirely, much the way his first attempt at a symphony turned itself into his D Minor Piano Concerto?
All of that aside, it was fun to watch these two friends enjoying a work so closely involved with friendship – and to have Stuart Malina on the podium, a mutual friend who frequently plays piano trios with them whenever they’d all be in town. Stuart started his 9th season with the orchestra and has been an active part of the community ever since, a genuine bonus for Harrisburg in an age when many orchestras have drive-by music directors. Daniel has called Harrisburg home, where he and his wife have settled to raise their two sons, trundling off to New York or other points here and abroad for concerts. In recent years, he has taken on the directorship of the State Street Academy of Music which hopes to develop a pivotal role in the present and future musical life of Harrisburg. In order to benefit some of the community’s gifted string players, he asked his friend Kurt Nikkanen to come in for some master classes and lessons and to perform at the school’s center at State Street’s St. Lawrence Chapel. So it’s much more than just two soloists on the road whose paths converged for a weekend’s concerts.
--- --- ---
Update: As of Thursday, October 10th, Daniel Gaisford resigned as director of the State Street Academy. He informed me that the Sunday afternoon concert series has been canceled for the season.
--- --- ---
One of the problems in performing the Brahms Double, of course, is finding two soloists of like temperament so that it, in fact, DOESN’T sound like two great artists, each trying to play it his way, slapped together to play a great piece. Though I haven’t heard it in years, the Oistrakh & Fournier recording was probably not one to convert me to the piece, a work that’s often described as the “least” of Brahms concertos (considering there are only four). It’s more than just players being on the same level, more like the same wave-length.
There were things happening in this performance that could only happen between musicians who really know each others’ playing, how they’ll respond to a phrase, how they’ll respond to each other. It would certainly only get better – telepathic or otherwise – when Kurt can free himself by memorizing the music, too, though it certainly didn’t seem to inhibit him, here.
Another problem with performing the Brahms Double – and I’ll try not to sound like Michael Palin (no relation) in Monty Python’s “The Spanish Inquisition” – is balancing the orchestra with the two soloists. Brahms’ textures tend to the “thick” side which can easily become stodgy. A few years ago, I talked with a cellist who had recently recorded the Brahms Double in Europe with a conductor he said sounded as if he’d eaten too much bratwurst, conducting Brahms as a composer who had eaten too much bratwurst himself. I remembered hearing that recording: I liked the cellist’s playing but didn’t really like the piece. That wasn’t the problem here: everybody was able to keep it light enough, Brahms had no trouble dancing.
If the energy between the two soloists was clearly the result of their chamber music experience, Stuart Malina and the whole orchestra were able to respond in the same manner – listening to the soloists and to each other, not just playing their parts and counting measures’ rest in between. Not to mention, as Malina joked afterward in the talk-back, “watching the conductor,” something that would seem obvious but is not always the case. By keeping in tight communication with the podium, the whole orchestra could stretch a phrase or push toward a cadence if the soloists felt like doing so – and this is something that, frankly, one player who isn’t paying attention can ruin very easily.
This kind of back-and-forth involvement was evident all evening, from the Liszt tone poem, Les Preludes, that opened the program to the Hanson “Romantic” Symphony on the second half. It’s all the more surprising when you consider at least seven key principal players were missing: because the Lancaster Symphony’s opening concerts were the same weekend (as their schedules often collide), that means one orchestra or another is going to be without its principal winds – the 1st flute, clarinet, and bassoon each play in both orchestras. For other reasons, the principal oboist, the principal hornist and the timpanist were all “subs,” too – musicians hired from the substitute players’ list. Even the crucial role of the Concertmaster was filled by the second-chair player, Peter Sirotin, while Odin Rathnam recuperated from a shoulder injury.
Incidentally, if you heard either performance, there's a poll over at Stuart Malina's blog - and you can read his post about the weekend's concert, too.
Sometimes you find something out about a performance only afterward that makes the whole experience a little different from what you thought you were listening to. Years ago, in 1985, I remember catching a telecast of Verdi’s Aida, back in the days when it was not unusual to see something like this on TV, with Leontyne Price in the title role. Now, I had heard the opera many times, seen it a few as well, but there was something about this performance that was riveting and I couldn’t take my ears off it, tuning in late during the third act aria “O patria mia.” Only during the wild ovation at the end did I understand why: this was going to be Leontyne Price’s last performance at the Metropolitan Opera, in fact from any operatic stage.
Saturday night’s performance with the Harrisburg Symphony had nothing quite so dramatic about it – no impending farewells, at least – but there was a shiver of after-the-fact recognition during the post-concert “talk-back session” when someone asked Daniel Gaisford about his instrument’s pedigree. Sometimes, musicians sound like people talking about the cars they drive – “my first car was a 1969 Corvair” – and we forget, sometimes, that Stradivarius was a man, not a brand-name. I had known that Gaisford plays a 1706 Goffriller known as the “Ex-Warburg,” made by the Venetian luthier Matteo Goffriller. But only when he rattled off a list of past owners, many of whom I missed due to the bad miking in the Forum, did I hear one name that made my ears sit up: Robert Haussmann.
This was the cellist who played the first performance of Brahms’ Double Concerto, the cellist Brahms composed it for. Is it possible that this very instrument was the one Haussmann played the night of its premiere?
If not, the fact that this cello was even played by the cellist for whom Brahms wrote his 2nd Cello Sonata and who often played with him in chamber music concerts, it’s very likely, at the least, Brahms might have heard him play it.
The question, however, is when did Haussmann own the 1706 Goffriller now known as the Ex-Warburg? If he purchased it after 1887, then it might not have been the one he played with Joachim at the first performance of Brahms’ new concerto. If he came to own it only after 1897, that would be after Brahms’ death (and Haussmann continued to play in Joachim’s quartet until 1907, two years before his own death). If he owned more than one instrument, maybe he played the other one? Things are further confused, Daniel told me after the talk-back, because Haussmann owned two Goffrillers, both apparently made in 1706.
The description of Haussmann’s cello – with its dark finish – would very likely make it the cello in this undated photograph (see below) with Haussmann (erroneously labeled as Richard, not Robert) seated next to Brahms, a photo that probably coincided with a private performance at the house of Dr. Richard Fellinger and his wife Maria, who’s standing behind the piano.
Other house-concerts took place there with clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld whose mellifluous sound brought Brahms out of retirement. Haussmann had been the cellist at the premiere of the Clarinet Trio in 1891, two years after Brahms made the famous Edison cylinder recording at Fellinger’s piano in 1889 (is this the voice of Johannes Brahms? it’s definitely him playing the piano). In 1886, Brahms had composed the 2nd Cello Sonata for Haussmann and the Double Concerto pairing Haussmann with his Joachim in 1887. Judging from other photographs, I’m assuming Brahms is older, here, so I’m also guessing he’s probably already in his 60s by then, taken around 1893 or later. So unless both 1706 Goffrillers have the same dark finish, this is probably Daniel Gaisford’s cello, just a few feet from Johannes Brahms.
Whether it’s one or two degrees of separation from the first performance of the work I had just heard played by this instrument – placing the instrument, the performer, the composer and maybe the concerto all in the same place at one point in time – it is a connection with the past that gives me musical goose-bumps, proving that composers like Brahms are not just marble busts but, somehow, human beings who just happened to write all this great music long ago.
Incidentally, speaking of being human, the painting on the easel behind Brahms and Haussmann is a portrait of Clara Schumann. Returning to Jan Swafford’s biography of Brahms, Maria Fellinger was a painter, sculptor and photographer who took many candid shots of Brahms – I had actually cropped this photo in the earlier post, cutting off Frau Fellinger standing behind the piano. Brahms had known the family since 1881 and Sunday dinners at their house “became one of his most reliable rituals.” There is also a famous portrait (otherwise uncredited) of the usually tie-less Brahms that Swafford captions “The cravat he is wearing may be one of those Marie Fellinger made for him.” She was also responsible for finding him the house-keeper who would look after him and his apartment during his last decade. Though it turned out not to be in danger, it was Dr. Fellinger who ran back into the burning building when the carpenter shop on the ground floor where Brahms was staying one summer caught fire: he rescued the score of the just completed 4th Symphony while Brahms, staying in line at the bucket brigade, said later “these poor people needed help more than I did..”
Kurt was playing a violin by Guarneri del Gesu, one of the greatest violin-makers, easily second to the best-known name of Stradivarius. It too has a fascinating story – or lack of story, in a way – but I’ll save that for later, perhaps. The amount of money you can spend on instruments like these is mind-boggling - even bows that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars - so it was amusing that Stuart then said “and my baton cost $6.00,” to which Kurt replied, “but what a sound!” Joking about this afterward, when I mentioned that may explain why so many violinists have been taking up conducting, Stuart added “and flutists.” If I’d been quicker, I would’ve responded, “Sarah Palin’s taking up conducting?” (Well, if she’s seen an orchestra from across the street, I guess she’d be experienced enough, right?)
On Sunday, both Kurt and Daniel were going to be playing different instruments, both made by a maker who’s still living – it would be interesting to have been at both of concerts (or have them both recorded) to be able to compare these recent instruments with those that are 300 years old. As for me, I’m glad, if there was only one concert I could attend, that I heard Saturday’s concert if only because of that possible connection between that cello, Brahms and his Double Concerto.
Well, that’s about 2,100 words... so I’m outta here, for now.
I’m sorry I missed the Lancaster Symphony’s opening concerts. Market Square Concerts opens their new season on Saturday with the Daedalus Quartet, so I hope to get something posted between now and then about this young quartet I’d heard a few years ago at a Next Generation Festival. But Tuesday morning brings with it a quick reality check as my front lawn continues to be dug up, this time to replace a water-well pump that is only 46 years old... Onward!
I’ve known cellist Daniel Gaisford for a few years, now, and in addition to several recitals had heard him play the Elgar Concerto with the orchestra in 1997 under their previous music director, Richard Westerfield. Violinist Kurt Nikkanen played the Brahms Concerto in 2003 and before that, Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnol with Stuart Malina. As long as Kurt and Daniel have known each other, having met as students at Juilliard, it’s odd they’ve never had the chance to play Brahms’ Double Concerto together,
In an earlier post, I wrote (and wrote) about Brahms, this concerto, his friendship for Joachim and his attempt to rekindle the friendship after a major falling-out. I also hypothesized about the reason this work was a concerto for violin and cello rather than just for the violin, for Joachim himself.
Ever since I first heard the work back in the mid-60s when I bought an Angel LP with David Oistrakh and Pierre Fournier (recorded in 1956), it sounded more like a cello concerto with an additional violin solo part - not exactly tacked on like an afterthought, but not quite of equal stature. If Joachim had been counting notes the way Heifetz did when he and Piatigorsky rehearsed Miklos Rozsa’s Double Concerto, Brahms would probably have been taken to task for not treating them equally to the same number of notes. And since Brahms had just written Haussmann a cello sonata the year before, who’s to say the germ for this new concerto wasn’t a Cello Concerto that failed to get off the ground? Since Haussmann was the cellist in Joachim’s quartet, it might seem like an affront to his old friendship with Joachim, one that went back 34 years, so perhaps the germ mutated into something else entirely, much the way his first attempt at a symphony turned itself into his D Minor Piano Concerto?
All of that aside, it was fun to watch these two friends enjoying a work so closely involved with friendship – and to have Stuart Malina on the podium, a mutual friend who frequently plays piano trios with them whenever they’d all be in town. Stuart started his 9th season with the orchestra and has been an active part of the community ever since, a genuine bonus for Harrisburg in an age when many orchestras have drive-by music directors. Daniel has called Harrisburg home, where he and his wife have settled to raise their two sons, trundling off to New York or other points here and abroad for concerts. In recent years, he has taken on the directorship of the State Street Academy of Music which hopes to develop a pivotal role in the present and future musical life of Harrisburg. In order to benefit some of the community’s gifted string players, he asked his friend Kurt Nikkanen to come in for some master classes and lessons and to perform at the school’s center at State Street’s St. Lawrence Chapel. So it’s much more than just two soloists on the road whose paths converged for a weekend’s concerts.
--- --- ---
Update: As of Thursday, October 10th, Daniel Gaisford resigned as director of the State Street Academy. He informed me that the Sunday afternoon concert series has been canceled for the season.
--- --- ---
One of the problems in performing the Brahms Double, of course, is finding two soloists of like temperament so that it, in fact, DOESN’T sound like two great artists, each trying to play it his way, slapped together to play a great piece. Though I haven’t heard it in years, the Oistrakh & Fournier recording was probably not one to convert me to the piece, a work that’s often described as the “least” of Brahms concertos (considering there are only four). It’s more than just players being on the same level, more like the same wave-length.
There were things happening in this performance that could only happen between musicians who really know each others’ playing, how they’ll respond to a phrase, how they’ll respond to each other. It would certainly only get better – telepathic or otherwise – when Kurt can free himself by memorizing the music, too, though it certainly didn’t seem to inhibit him, here.
Another problem with performing the Brahms Double – and I’ll try not to sound like Michael Palin (no relation) in Monty Python’s “The Spanish Inquisition” – is balancing the orchestra with the two soloists. Brahms’ textures tend to the “thick” side which can easily become stodgy. A few years ago, I talked with a cellist who had recently recorded the Brahms Double in Europe with a conductor he said sounded as if he’d eaten too much bratwurst, conducting Brahms as a composer who had eaten too much bratwurst himself. I remembered hearing that recording: I liked the cellist’s playing but didn’t really like the piece. That wasn’t the problem here: everybody was able to keep it light enough, Brahms had no trouble dancing.
If the energy between the two soloists was clearly the result of their chamber music experience, Stuart Malina and the whole orchestra were able to respond in the same manner – listening to the soloists and to each other, not just playing their parts and counting measures’ rest in between. Not to mention, as Malina joked afterward in the talk-back, “watching the conductor,” something that would seem obvious but is not always the case. By keeping in tight communication with the podium, the whole orchestra could stretch a phrase or push toward a cadence if the soloists felt like doing so – and this is something that, frankly, one player who isn’t paying attention can ruin very easily.
This kind of back-and-forth involvement was evident all evening, from the Liszt tone poem, Les Preludes, that opened the program to the Hanson “Romantic” Symphony on the second half. It’s all the more surprising when you consider at least seven key principal players were missing: because the Lancaster Symphony’s opening concerts were the same weekend (as their schedules often collide), that means one orchestra or another is going to be without its principal winds – the 1st flute, clarinet, and bassoon each play in both orchestras. For other reasons, the principal oboist, the principal hornist and the timpanist were all “subs,” too – musicians hired from the substitute players’ list. Even the crucial role of the Concertmaster was filled by the second-chair player, Peter Sirotin, while Odin Rathnam recuperated from a shoulder injury.
Incidentally, if you heard either performance, there's a poll over at Stuart Malina's blog - and you can read his post about the weekend's concert, too.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
Sometimes you find something out about a performance only afterward that makes the whole experience a little different from what you thought you were listening to. Years ago, in 1985, I remember catching a telecast of Verdi’s Aida, back in the days when it was not unusual to see something like this on TV, with Leontyne Price in the title role. Now, I had heard the opera many times, seen it a few as well, but there was something about this performance that was riveting and I couldn’t take my ears off it, tuning in late during the third act aria “O patria mia.” Only during the wild ovation at the end did I understand why: this was going to be Leontyne Price’s last performance at the Metropolitan Opera, in fact from any operatic stage.
Saturday night’s performance with the Harrisburg Symphony had nothing quite so dramatic about it – no impending farewells, at least – but there was a shiver of after-the-fact recognition during the post-concert “talk-back session” when someone asked Daniel Gaisford about his instrument’s pedigree. Sometimes, musicians sound like people talking about the cars they drive – “my first car was a 1969 Corvair” – and we forget, sometimes, that Stradivarius was a man, not a brand-name. I had known that Gaisford plays a 1706 Goffriller known as the “Ex-Warburg,” made by the Venetian luthier Matteo Goffriller. But only when he rattled off a list of past owners, many of whom I missed due to the bad miking in the Forum, did I hear one name that made my ears sit up: Robert Haussmann.
This was the cellist who played the first performance of Brahms’ Double Concerto, the cellist Brahms composed it for. Is it possible that this very instrument was the one Haussmann played the night of its premiere?
If not, the fact that this cello was even played by the cellist for whom Brahms wrote his 2nd Cello Sonata and who often played with him in chamber music concerts, it’s very likely, at the least, Brahms might have heard him play it.
The question, however, is when did Haussmann own the 1706 Goffriller now known as the Ex-Warburg? If he purchased it after 1887, then it might not have been the one he played with Joachim at the first performance of Brahms’ new concerto. If he came to own it only after 1897, that would be after Brahms’ death (and Haussmann continued to play in Joachim’s quartet until 1907, two years before his own death). If he owned more than one instrument, maybe he played the other one? Things are further confused, Daniel told me after the talk-back, because Haussmann owned two Goffrillers, both apparently made in 1706.
The description of Haussmann’s cello – with its dark finish – would very likely make it the cello in this undated photograph (see below) with Haussmann (erroneously labeled as Richard, not Robert) seated next to Brahms, a photo that probably coincided with a private performance at the house of Dr. Richard Fellinger and his wife Maria, who’s standing behind the piano.
Other house-concerts took place there with clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld whose mellifluous sound brought Brahms out of retirement. Haussmann had been the cellist at the premiere of the Clarinet Trio in 1891, two years after Brahms made the famous Edison cylinder recording at Fellinger’s piano in 1889 (is this the voice of Johannes Brahms? it’s definitely him playing the piano). In 1886, Brahms had composed the 2nd Cello Sonata for Haussmann and the Double Concerto pairing Haussmann with his Joachim in 1887. Judging from other photographs, I’m assuming Brahms is older, here, so I’m also guessing he’s probably already in his 60s by then, taken around 1893 or later. So unless both 1706 Goffrillers have the same dark finish, this is probably Daniel Gaisford’s cello, just a few feet from Johannes Brahms.
Whether it’s one or two degrees of separation from the first performance of the work I had just heard played by this instrument – placing the instrument, the performer, the composer and maybe the concerto all in the same place at one point in time – it is a connection with the past that gives me musical goose-bumps, proving that composers like Brahms are not just marble busts but, somehow, human beings who just happened to write all this great music long ago.
Incidentally, speaking of being human, the painting on the easel behind Brahms and Haussmann is a portrait of Clara Schumann. Returning to Jan Swafford’s biography of Brahms, Maria Fellinger was a painter, sculptor and photographer who took many candid shots of Brahms – I had actually cropped this photo in the earlier post, cutting off Frau Fellinger standing behind the piano. Brahms had known the family since 1881 and Sunday dinners at their house “became one of his most reliable rituals.” There is also a famous portrait (otherwise uncredited) of the usually tie-less Brahms that Swafford captions “The cravat he is wearing may be one of those Marie Fellinger made for him.” She was also responsible for finding him the house-keeper who would look after him and his apartment during his last decade. Though it turned out not to be in danger, it was Dr. Fellinger who ran back into the burning building when the carpenter shop on the ground floor where Brahms was staying one summer caught fire: he rescued the score of the just completed 4th Symphony while Brahms, staying in line at the bucket brigade, said later “these poor people needed help more than I did..”
Kurt was playing a violin by Guarneri del Gesu, one of the greatest violin-makers, easily second to the best-known name of Stradivarius. It too has a fascinating story – or lack of story, in a way – but I’ll save that for later, perhaps. The amount of money you can spend on instruments like these is mind-boggling - even bows that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars - so it was amusing that Stuart then said “and my baton cost $6.00,” to which Kurt replied, “but what a sound!” Joking about this afterward, when I mentioned that may explain why so many violinists have been taking up conducting, Stuart added “and flutists.” If I’d been quicker, I would’ve responded, “Sarah Palin’s taking up conducting?” (Well, if she’s seen an orchestra from across the street, I guess she’d be experienced enough, right?)
On Sunday, both Kurt and Daniel were going to be playing different instruments, both made by a maker who’s still living – it would be interesting to have been at both of concerts (or have them both recorded) to be able to compare these recent instruments with those that are 300 years old. As for me, I’m glad, if there was only one concert I could attend, that I heard Saturday’s concert if only because of that possible connection between that cello, Brahms and his Double Concerto.
Well, that’s about 2,100 words... so I’m outta here, for now.
I’m sorry I missed the Lancaster Symphony’s opening concerts. Market Square Concerts opens their new season on Saturday with the Daedalus Quartet, so I hope to get something posted between now and then about this young quartet I’d heard a few years ago at a Next Generation Festival. But Tuesday morning brings with it a quick reality check as my front lawn continues to be dug up, this time to replace a water-well pump that is only 46 years old... Onward!
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