Musical America Blogs

By Sedgwick Clark

Next week, for the first time as a citizen of New York County, I shall descend to the lower depths of Manhattan and perform my solemn rite of jury duty without the concomitant joy of combing through the record bins of J & R Music. J & R closed its classical department early last year, leaving Academy Records and CDs on 12 West 18th Street as the sole remaining retail store for New York’s serious classical-music record collectors. For shame!

The closing of a treasured book or record store is no less indicative of mortality than an obit page. Last week the esteemed Berkshire Record Outlet announced that it would close its retail store at the end of this month and henceforth operate solely as a fulfillment operation. A record-collector mecca since 1974, the BRO was a “must visit” whenever I went to Tanglewood in the summer (an increasingly rare pleasure in the past two decades). One saw Boston Symphony players, visiting soloists, concert-going friends from New York, Boston, and the outlying area, and, above all, bins of recordings on various labels that rarely reached these shores.

It was shocking when Discophile, on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, went out of business in 1984, not long after Tower Records blew into town from the West Coast. Discophile’s owner, Franz Jolowicz, angrily prophesied that it would wipe out all the City’s specialized record stores because they couldn’t compete with Tower’s huge stock and markdown prices. He was right, of course. And I was a turncoat customer because Lincoln Center’s Tower branch claimed to carry every record currently in the catalogue—and it was only a block from my apartment! How could I resist?

When Barnes & Noble opened a vast, four-story branch across the street from Tower in 1995, Lincoln Square seemed perfect. I was in pig heaven for a fleeting decade. But Tower bit the dust in late 2006 as the record industry faced its own customer crises. A Raymour and Flanigan furniture store currently occupies the building. The Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center had the same problem, bookwise, but its downstairs was a decent record and video department, and I spent a fair amount there in lieu of Tower. It closed in February  2011, destined to be a Century 21 department store. I avert my eyes when I walk by those stores.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

3/20 Carnegie Hall. St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/David Robertson; Katie Geissinger and Theo Bleckmann (vocalists). Debussy: Nocturnes. Meredith Monk: Weave (New York premiere). Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4.

3/21 at 8:30.  Iridium. David Chesky’s Jazz in the New Harmonic.

3/24 at 7:30. Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Inon Barnatan, piano. Salonen: Nyx. Ravel: Piano Concerto in G. Debussy: Jeux. R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite.

3/26 at 7:30. Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Leila Josefowicz, violin. Lyadov: The Enchanted Lake. Stravinsky: Petrushka (1911 version). John Adams: Scheherazade.2 –Symphony for violin and orchestra.

3/27 at 2:00. Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center, Philadelphia. Philadelphia Orchestra/Gianandrea Noseda; Carol Yantsch, tuba. Michael Daugherty: Reflections on the Mississippi, for tuba and orchestra. Mahler: Symphony No. 5.

By Sedgwick Clark

Thank heavens, at least this move on the musical scrabble board is settled. Local hero Simon Rattle will return home in 2017 from his 16-year Berlin odyssey to become music director of Britain’s foremost musical organization, the London Symphony Orchestra. He describes it as his “last job.”

He is indisputably an international star, with his recent Sibelius symphony cycle with the Berlin Philharmonic in London having sold out months in advance. His pop-culture image is right up there with that of Gustavo Dudamel and Lang Lang, and his magnetic personality and ability to talk about whatever music he performs is second to none, which should keep the box office teeming. He admirably declared in an interview in the Guardian that the LSO must act as evangelists rather than high priests for classical music “and spread the word right across the country.”

It remains to be seen, however, if he is the right man to advance the heritage of fellow Sirs Adrian Boult, John Barbirolli, and Colin Davis as representative of all that’s great in British music-making. His performances of 20th- and 21st-century music are most convincing, but those of the standard repertoire seem to me over-detailed and lacking a taut line. His admirers might call this expressive; I call it flabby. It’s nothing new: I recall a Mahler Second with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie in November 1997 in which a beaming Rattle seemed completely oblivious that the strings were rarely in sync (probably because they were unused to his left-right placement of first and second violins).

My guess is that the Berlin musicians were less bothered by Rattle’s programming of contemporary music than his meandering readings of the classics. His Beethoven has been most disheartening in this regard, but we’ll see how they do next season when he leads the BPO in a Beethoven symphony cycle at Carnegie. For those who recall Bernard Haitink’s energized Beethoven cycle with the LSO at Lincoln Center in October 2006, he’ll have a lot to live up to.

Originally, Rattle was said to demand that a new hall be built in London for him to accept the post, but he has denied it. Still, his ardor for a new hall is clear, as he stated in a BBC interview: “You have no idea how wonderful an orchestra like the London Symphony Orchestra can sound in a great concert hall.” The raising of money for such a project is daunting but crucial. When the New York Philharmonic returns from an international tour—playing in the likes of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw or Vienna’s Musikverein—the musicians sound renewed, especially the strings, which produce substantially greater tone and presence. Within a month, their collective sonority has reverted to its accustomed Fisher Hall coarseness, with strident violins, weak lower strings, and glaring brass. New York will get a new hall. London, at least, now will have a conductor determined to force the issue.

By Sedgwick Clark

By Sedgwick Clark

That’s a deliberately provocative question, of course. But when the best one can say about Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night Gala is that the scaffolding has been removed after three years, there’s a problem. The building’s elegant façade, glistening proudly in its new exterior lighting, looks simply gorgeous. It’s a necessary reminder that the beleaguered classical-music industry can still hold its head high. Lord knows such architectural stature is rapidly disappearing from 57th Street, what with that monstrous tin-foil phallus already erected across the street and more to come to the east and west.

In his review, the New York Times’s Anthony Tommasini referred to the Berlin Philharmonic, the evening’s band, as “great.” Who am I to disagree? But I have been hearing the Berliners for 35 years in this hall under the likes of Karajan, Abbado, Haitink, and its current music director, Simon Rattle, and I was shocked at the current state of the orchestra. The violas, cellos, and, to a lesser tonal extent, double basses—placed to the right of the conductor—had all the strength and projection of the BPO of yore, with total unanimity and purpose. But the rest of the stage was swimming in indirection. The violins were not obviously out of sync, but they rarely projected as a body, which is the same thing. The woodwinds played with character but rarely as an ensemble, and except for their biggest moments the brass may as well have not been playing. The Berlin timpanist used to be brutal, but the young fellow back there now mirrors the conductor’s indistinct beat.

For this opening week of October, the British conductor served up Schumann’s four symphonies, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, Anne-Sophie Mutter in Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Stravinsky’s complete Firebird, and a new work by Georg Friedrich Haas.

Opening night began with the Rachmaninoff, and I smiled in anticipation as the strings briskly invested their pp staccato eighth notes with wit and buoyancy. And then—and then—OMIGOD!—Rattle sat down on the first ff chords with elephantine emphasis, proceeding to eviscerate the outer movements’ rhythmic drive and hobble through the insinuating central waltz. The 1961 Kondrashin recording most successfully captures the demonic Romanticism of the composer’s nostalgic final masterwork. Rattle’s spongy accompaniment in the ensuing Bruch concerto was little help to Mutter, but she herself seemed unwilling to confront the music’s impassioned ardor. Gala programs are short these days, and Rattle led an abbreviated Firebird, beginning with a colorless Infernal Dance. One thing though: The Berliners can still play extraordinary pianissimos when asked, and Rattle asked for—and got—ridiculously ppppp strings leading into the horn solo that begins the finale. Ostentatious.

I also heard the concert that paired Schumann’s Third and Fourth with Haas’s dark dreams. To take the Berlin Philharmonic on tour and then reduce the strings to 12-10-8-6-5 takes a lot of nerve, and I found few moments to justify the dare. Rattle chose to play the original edition of the Fourth, which seemed in this performance, at least, more repetitive, structurally awkward, and amateurishly orchestrated than the version we know well. The Haas piece, commissioned by the orchestra and Carnegie Hall for this tour and placed on the program between the two symphonies, required the full BPO and could barely fit on the stage. It sounded fabulous, and Rattle, for a change, conducted with decisive gestures. What a difference!

And now, after all that, I was pleased to find Rattle’s leadership and the Berlin instrumentalists and vocalists exceptionally expressive in Peter Sellars’s controversial staging of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at the Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center’s initial White Light Festival presentation.

Tune in next week to read about an orchestra I heard the evening following the BPO Gala—an ensemble that played a truly “great” concert.

By Sedgwick Clark

Hearing Frans Brüggen’s recording of Mozart’s 40th and Beethoven’s First on Philips was a “eureka” moment: at last, someone from the authentic-performance school who was equally illuminating and individual to stand with Walter’s early-’50s Mozart, Szell’s Beethoven, and selected performances by Toscanini, Furtwängler, Monteux, Klemperer, and others from whom I first learned the classical repertoire. Soon I would be comparing Brüggen’s and Bernstein’s very different but equally joyous Haydn interpretations.

Brüggen, the eminent recorder player and conductor, died on August 13th in Amsterdam. For my money, he stood head and shoulders above all those period-instrument proselytizers who cropped up in the mid-1970s and ’80s—Norrington, Hogwood, Gardiner, et al. Perhaps because he already had a major career as a virtuoso recorder player and entered conducting as a fully formed musician, his style had acquired a freedom and character that eluded many of his fellow authenticists.

I got to know Brüggen and his artistry primarily through his recordings on Philips with the Orchestra of the 18th Century, which he co-founded in 1981. Fortunately, however, he and his players were frequent guests at Lincoln Center, usually at Mostly Mozart. He would walk quickly to the podium, bow nervously, and fire the downbeat at his players as if pursued by the furies. His music-making was electric, unpredictable, and, above all, expressive. Just announced on the Glossa label are his new recordings of Mozart’s last three symphonies, distributed by Naxos. I can’t wait to hear them.

Minnesotans Believe in Their Orchestra

Following mixed news from Atlanta (Musicalamerica.com, August 27)—that the new executive director, Stanley Romanstein, had reduced the $23 million deficit to $5 million but also reduced the size of the orchestra from 95 to 88 players and a 52- to 42-week season—there’s great news from Minnesota. A press release arrived yesterday from the Minnesota Orchestra, announcing a $10 million “leadership gift” from anonymous donors “in order to inspire others with the capacity for leadership gifts to support the Orchestra.” Subsequently, gifts totaling $3.2 million were donated as well.

May we assume, therefore, that after an 18-month lockout the Orchestra is on the road to recovery? With Osmo Vänskä back as music director, there can hardly be any doubt.

By Sedgwick Clark

Lincoln Center was once a place I avoided like the plague in the summer—staid programs, mediocre performances—but there’s no denying that the kinks have long been worked out of its two major summer festivals. One may have one’s likes and dislikes, as I expressed last week about three of this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival offerings, but this series’ events have been imaginatively concocted from the very beginning, in 1996, under directors John Rockwell for the first two seasons and thence by Nigel Redden.

Lincoln Center’s long-popular Mostly Mozart Festival has been in good shape for so long that many New Yorkers have forgotten that the orchestra was a scrappy band of sight readers before Gerard Schwarz was named its first music director in 1984 after two years as music advisor, during which he had transformed its performance level and previously formulaic repertoire immeasurably. But even he eventually succumbed to the straitjacket of box-office demand (“The first concert to sell out is the all-Vivaldi one,” he once groaned to me with exasperation) and was controversially eased out by LC Artistic Director Jane Moss. French conductor Louis Langrée was enlisted as MM’s new music director, and he and Moss have varied both artists and repertoire quite successfully, on a consistently reliable performance level.

Take, for example, last Saturday’s canny non-Mozart program conducted by Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä (MA’s Conductor of the Year in 2005). This was his first New York appearance since slaying the Tea Party union busters on the Minnesota Orchestra’s board of directors and triumphantly returning to his post as music director. All of the works were well known, yet together they seemed brand new. In Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto, and Beethoven’s Eighth, every instrumental choir spoke in perfect balance, revealing ear-opening details, sprightly rhythms, witty accentuation, and Vänskä’s trademark ability to coax feathery ppps from the strings. There were moments when more sound would have been desirable, but the results overall were so musical that complaints were minimal.

The astonishing 27-year-old pianist Yuja Wang was playing the concerto for only the fourth time, and she brought the house down midway in the concert with the parodic silent-movie burlesquerie of the Shostakovich concerto, scored for solo piano, strings, and trumpet (magnificently played by the London Symphony’s new first trumpet, Philip Cobb). Backstage afterwards I suggested that she should record the two Shostakovich concertos and she laughed, “The Second is too easy.” Well, he had composed it in the mid-Fifties for his young son, Maxim, but it’s a delightful piece, nonetheless. She had played the First at the Hollywood Bowl earlier in the summer along with Prokofiev’s saucily virtuosic First Concerto for the first time; seems to me that the two Shosta’s and the Prok First would make a great coupling. Then, as sales roll in, Deutsche Grammophon could pair her in Prok’s hugely virtuosic Second and Third concertos, and then finish the cycle with Prok’s Left-Hand (the Fourth) and Fifth and throw in Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto. What a great CD trio of 20th-century Russian piano classics!  Are you listening, DG?

The concert was short by current standards, and PK and I were strolling on Lincoln Center’s Plaza by 9:45. Happy visitors surrounded the fountain. A brilliant full moon was in perigee, and several members of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York were on hand with their telescopes to give onlookers the opportunity to view craters close-up. After taking a good look (the craters are most visible on the rim of the moon, we were reliably informed), we bought gelatos and settled down comfortably amidst the trees facing the Henry Moore sculpture in the reflecting pool and what Juilliard students have dubbed the “grassy knoll.” I must admit that the Center’s renovations have successfully opened up the original, clunky design of this part of the plaza, which is now more in tune with Eero Saarinen’s spacious Vivian Beaumont Theater design, which was always recognized as the most attractive building of the Center.

If regular readers suspect that I’ve lost my customarily jaundiced mind, all I can say is that such post-concert reverie must be the product of the music-making we had just heard.

By Sedgwick Clark

The Tsar’s Bride

What a night at the concert opera, primarily due to the conducting of Gennadi Rozhdestvensky! Returning to New York after far too many years for a pair of performances of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, he reminded listeners once again of the importance of character in a musical performance. A silly, self-evident observation, you say? Some complained of ragged attacks—in fact, the opening of Act III was so messy that Rozhdestvensky banged his music stand twice with his baton to get the Bolshoi players in tempo—but I couldn’t have cared less in light of the abundant warmth and beauty achieved at their maestro’s broad pacing. Moreover, the soloists inhabited their roles with extraordinary verve (with Agunda Kulaeva’s dark, dramatic mezzo as Lyubasha a knockout). Only the erratic subtitles detracted from the July 12 performance.

Rozhdestvensky is 83, and the Met, the Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, or Carnegie would do well to get this great conductor back to New York again before it’s too late.

The Passenger

Houston Grand Opera’s impressive production of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s opera at the cavernous Park Avenue Armory on July 13 was superbly produced, directed, and performed. The action takes place on two levels: Aboard an ocean liner bound for Brazil in the 1960s and inside the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. A tri-level set depicts the ship, and moving train cars on stage represent the Auschwitz scenes. The orchestra, well conducted by HGO Music Director Patrick Summers, was off to the right of the set. Too bad the music evanesced in one’s memory so quickly. Of all the subjects one might expect to be composed in a dissonant idiom, this is it. But such is not Weinberg’s style, and I found the music joltingly consonant as well as unmemorable. Equally disconcerting, the Auschwitz train was too damn clean. Did the Nazis hose them down after each trip? Frankly, my most lasting memory was that the music ended and the lights went down everywhere but the spot on the conductor, which remained for several seconds before dimming. Never underestimate a conductor’s ego.

Swan Lake

I expected more than facile beauty from the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake on July 15. The corps was lovely, Svetlana Zakharova (Odette/Odile) was obviously quite accomplished but seemed to me straight out of Dracula’s castle, and David Halberg (Prince Siegfried) seemed to be marking time until his next lift. The Bolshoi Orchestra sounded distant and wan in the David H. Koch Theater, perhaps due to my usual experience of the music on record by the world’s greatest orchestras in the finest recording venues. But about Pavel Sorokin’s inexpressive conducting and cloddy ritards at the end of many of the dances I can unequivocally say I loathed it.

By Sedgwick Clark

That’s how Werner Klemperer described Aspen to me when he was performing at the town’s noted music festival in the early ’80s. When I arrived in Aspen to cover the Music Festival’s 1977 summer season for Musical America (December ’77), the town’s first stoplights had been installed recently, riling old timers who saw their community threatened by traffic and chain stores. Much had changed in Aspen when I dropped in for an all-too-short stay a few weeks ago. Stop lights are everywhere now, and dire warnings of “charging moose” dot the local papers. So we set out at dusk for the Maroon Bells mountain range, one of their favorite spots. One walked past us nonchalantly about 30 feet away to frolic in Maroon Lake. Seemed less dangerous than the bear my sister chased out of her kitchen down by the Roaring Fork River last year.

The festival had built a new chamber-music hall in 1993 and renovated its music tent in 1999 since I was last there. I attended a concert in each venue and was pleased to find that the solo artists were all Musical America honorees.

At first glance the programming seemed awfully tame compared with the more adventurous seasons of yore. But upon perusal of the program booklet I saw that the 2014 theme is “New Romanticism.” Fair enough—I have nothing against Romanticism, and there’s a reason it’s such an audience pleaser.

Pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel (MA Musicians of the Year, 2012) have been concertizing as a piano trio with Emerson String Quartet (MA Ensemble of the Year, 2000) violinist Philip Setzer for many years, but it took a visit to Aspen to hear them at last. Their performances of Beethoven’s Op. 1, No. 2, Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, and Dvořák’s Dumky Trio were up to snuff for these fine musicians, bathed in the 500-seat Harris Concert Hall’s well-nigh ideal balance of spaciousness and presence. Wu Han’s tone, in particular, had a pearly warmth not always evident in New York’s dryer Alice Tully Hall acoustic, where she often plays as co-director, with husband Finckel, of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Perhaps the difference also reflects Rocky Mountain mellow vs. Manhattan edge.

It’s hard to imagine that such excellent acoustics would be clothed in such an unappealing edifice, however. Whatever architect Harry Teague had in mind—blending into the mountains, rusticity, or the obvious, a half-sunken garage—it’s just perplexing. Start with the entrance: It’s a garage door! (Read that sentence in the exasperated tones of The Daily Show’s Lewis Black.) One descends two sets of stairs lined with gray fabric to a cramped, rectangular lobby, painted a queasy shade of yellow. Yuck. We’ll just call the building Nouveau Garage and be happy with the blissful acoustics.

The sound in the main music tent used to be distant and dessicated, so I always tried to find a seat down front. It’s still a mite distant from the middle of row P, but the sound is clear, warm, and tonally refulgent. Those Aspen Chamber Symphony double basses really projected. And the tent is pretty too. Bravo!

Festival Music Director Robert Spano (MA Conductor of the Year, 2008) led fine, well played, if a bit impersonal, performances of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and the Fifth Symphony. More crackling electricity in the overture and rhetorical tightening of tempo in the symphony’s coda would have been welcome. But there were many insightful touches along the way, including the positively spooky winds in the bridge passage connecting the third and fourth movements—perfect! In Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto, Gil Shaham (MA’s Instrumentalist of the Year, 2012) made much of the glissandos and, with Spano’s superb collaboration, coaxed innumerable fresh details and ravishing pianissimos from the piece. A great performance.

Okay, guys, how about plying your magic next season on the Hindemith Violin Concerto?

By Sedgwick Clark

Leon Botstein just ended his 20th season as music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, during which he led an opera-in-concert performance of Richard Strauss’s Feuersnot, Bruch’s oratorio Moses, a concert of English music that included Walton’s Symphony No. 2, which Botstein called “one of the great symphonies of the twentieth century” (I’d say that about his First, myself), an impressively conducted retrospective of the late Elliott Carter’s music, and an equally impressively conducted program of 1920s avant-garde music by Antheil, Griffes (hardly modern, but a lovely respite in a challenging evening), Ruggles, Copland, and Varèse. The latter two’s Organ Symphony and Amériques, respectively, were masterful. Need one add “rarely played” to modify any of these works?

His final concert of this season, on May 30, was downright exhilarating. The ASO is shipshape these days, the program featured neglected works by Reger, Bloch, Ives, and Szymanowski during World War I, and performances were largely successful. As always, Botstein’s program essay was enlightening. He still resists taking the bull by the horns and interpreting the music, apparently believing that an accurate presentation of the notes is sufficient. Max Reger’s hymn to German supremacy, A Patriotic Overture (1914), complete with nods to Bach, Haydn, Bruckner, and Brahms, was properly broad in tempo and solemn in demeanor. I might have welcomed a touch more vigor and variation, but for all I know the performance was right on the metronome mark.

Whatever happened to the music of Ernest Bloch? Perhaps his attempt to capture what Botstein calls “Jewish national aspirations” in his music has caused conductors to think that it lacks universal appeal. Not even the once-popular cello concerto, Schelomo, gets played with any frequency these days. Well, I’m as W.A.S.P. as they come, and I enjoyed Bloch’s seldom-played Israel Symphony (1912-16)—and Botstein’s performance—immensely. Okay, the second movement (Allegro agitato, “Yom Kippur”) lacked atonement to my goyish ears. But in the outer movements, Botstein proved the Israel a moving experience.

Charles Ives composed his knotty Orchestral Set No. 2 in horrified response to the sinking of the British liner Lusitania by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 1,200 passengers and led to the U.S. entrance into World War I. However noble its aspirations, I’ve always found it less engaging than the sensuous, pictorial First Orchestral Set, better known as Three Places in New England, or the wild mish-mash of the Fourth Symphony. Botstein calls No. 2 “a startlingly courageous essay in musical form, one that in its third movement highlights America’s exceptional status and dramatic entrance into a transformative historical event.” This Ives fan remains unconvinced, but not even Stokowski made much sense out of the piece.

Szymanowski’s steamy Symphony No. 3 (“The Song of the Night”) made for a resounding finale. Suffused with Scriabin, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, and Szymanowski’s own personal brand of sensual orientalism, the Third is one of his most alluring works. The composer’s advocates have been predicting imminent acceptance for decades. Performances of this caliber are certainly in the right direction.

Glenn Dicterow’s NYPhil Heritage

How well I recall Glenn Dicterow’s initial concert in 1980 as the New York Philharmonic’s new concertmaster. I weaseled my way backstage, where I found him, shook his hand, and exclaimed, “At last we have a concertmaster!”

The Phil had had 14 years of six concertmasters or acting concertmasters since the retirement of John Corigliano, Sr., in 1966 after 23 years. His successor, David Nadien, who died only six weeks ago at age 88, had lasted for four years before returning to his previous, more lucrative pastures of recording studio commercials. I used to see him walking near Lincoln Center; he was the unhappiest looking man I’ve ever seen. Three of his successors were at the tail end of distinguished careers, one had very suspect pitch, and another hated playing in the Phil so much that he quit midterm to become concertmaster in Dallas and, later, a highly praised teacher.

The 31-year-old Dicterow was already a born leader when appointed to that position by Zubin Mehta. Thirty-four years later he is leaving the Philharmonic to join the faculty of the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music as the Robert Mann Chair in Strings and Chamber Music. A lot of West Coast violin students will thank their lucky stars.

The Philharmonic has thoughtfully released three well-chosen albums of Dicterow’s invariably musical solo concerto performances. The first, available on CD and download, contains Bruch’s No. 1 (Maazel, 2009), Bartók’s No. 1 (Gilbert, 2012), the Korngold (Robertson, 2008), and John Williams’s Theme from Schindler’s List (Williams, 2006).

The second and third albums are available on download only. The second contains Aaron Jay Kernis’s Lament and Prayer (Maazel, 2005), Bernstein’s Serenade (Bernstein, 1986), the Barber (Masur, 1996), and Waxman’s Carmen Fantasie (Mehta, 1990). The third album contains Prokofiev’s No. 2 (Mehta, 1985), Szymanowski’s No. 1 (Masur, 2004), and Shostakovich’s No. 1 (M. Shostakovich, 1982).

Superb Chamber Music at ERC

ERC? That’s the Ensemble for the Romantic Century, which has been mounting “theatrical concerts” since 2001 under the artistic direction of pianists Eve Wolf and Max Barros. The concerts “interweave dramatic scripts based on letters, memoirs, diaries, and other literature with music, reinforcing the music’s historical context through its connections with history, politics, philosophy, and the other arts.” Purists may sniff at such conflation, but the company’s thoroughly entertaining “The Trial of Oscar Wilde,” heard at Symphony Space on June 20, was also one of the best chamber-music concerts I heard this season.

Chausson’s Concerto for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet was the main work, its four movements spaced out throughout the evening among well-chosen pieces and movements by Satie, Fauré, Franck, Vaughan Williams. Interspersed between the musical selections, Oscar Wilde (Michael Halling) pleads innocent of his indiscretions with many of the famous witticisms for which he was famous, all for naught against the supercilious prosecutor, Lord Queensbury (Robert Ian Mackenzie), and Britain’s strict laws against “the love that dare not speak its name.”

One would think that the ERC’s young musicians had performed together for years. Violinist Susie Park, veteran of the group, hails from Australia and has many credits to her career; she was violinist of the Eroica Trio from 2006-12 and becomes concertmaster of the Kalamazoo Symphony next season. Russian pianist Daria Rabotkina has a Masters from Mannes and a Doctorate from Eastman, but such gorgeous tone and natural rubato doesn’t come from teaching alone.

ERC’s next program is entitled “Beethoven’s Love Elegies,” about his search for the perfect wife. It’s in the Berkshires, July 16-August 3, at The Stables Theatre at Edith Wharton’s The Mount, 2 Plunkett Street, Lenox, MA.

By Sedgwick Clark

I have a soft spot for the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra of Munich. It played the first concert I ever heard in Carnegie Hall, on October 17, 1968. Rafael Kubelik conducted the BRSO in the first performance I ever heard of Janáček’s Sinfonietta and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony. The next evening he conducted Weber’s Overture from Die Freischütz, Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, and the first Mahler symphony I ever heard live, the First. Unforgettable.

So was Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique under the Bavarians’ then-Music Director Colin Davis on April 28, 1986. So sonorously rich was the orchestra’s tone—especially the lower strings—that one could have mistaken Avery Fisher for Carnegie Hall.

Few works bring out an ensemble’s (and conductor’s) mettle more effectively than the Fantastique, as Mariss Jansons proved once again on May 16 on the BRSO’s latest New York appearance at Carnegie. The stupendous sweep and instrumental virtuosity of the performance caused me to miss the first- and fourth-movement repeats and the cornet that Berlioz added later in the second movement (A Ball) more than I ever recall. The extraordinary character and assurance of the winds and brass make it unfair to single anyone out, but I’ll be unfair and note the incredible dexterity of bassoonist Eberhard Marschall. The crucial drums at the end of the third movement (In the Meadows), ingeniously placed left and right offstage, perfectly evoked distant thunder, and the ferocity of the onstage timpani in the March to the Scaffold was hair-raising. Jansons didn’t roar through the last-movement’s Witch’s Sabbath and levitate at the end like Bernard Haitink (yes, Haitink!) with the Concertgebouw at Carnegie on October 8, 1982—my most memorable live Fantastique ever—but the creepy instrumental detail unearthed by his steadier tempo was no less effectively goose pimply.

Ligeti’s eerie Atmosphères on May 18 produced all the necessary shivers, especially the jolting fortissimo double bass entrance about halfway through, and Jansons’ revelatory accompaniment in support of Gil Shaham’s spellbinding performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto was masterful.

Susanna Mälkki’s Schoenberg

Friends are surprised when I say that I don’t like Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, Op. 9. It’s an early work, not yet expressionist or 12-tone, and it has recognizable tunes. But although scored for only 15 instruments, it has always seemed so damned clotted in texture, ugly and unwieldy. Until, that is, I heard Susanna Mälkki conduct a performance with the Ensemble ACJW at Zankel Hall on May 10. She’s another of these very talented Finns, a cellist turned conductor who was music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain from 2006-13, and now she is making the rounds of the big orchestras and opera houses.

But back to the Schoenberg, her performance of the First Chamber Symphony glistened with transparency—open, welcoming, and friendly for the first time in my experience. And, mind you, I’ve heard at least two Boulez performances in concert and his two recordings. She also conducted a raunchy, jazzy, witty performance of John Adams’s Chamber Symphony, one of his most enjoyable pieces.

Keep your eyes out for her—she will be at your orchestra soon.