Musical America Blogs

By Sedgwick Clark

One of Yuri Temirkanov’s goals when he became music director of the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Philharmonic in 1988 was to give it a more “international” sound—to smooth over the deliberately edgy sonority cultured by the ensemble’s long-time maestro, Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988).

Why, I wondered? The orchestra’s four concerts of Russian music under Gennady Rozhdestvensky at Carnegie Hall in October and November 1973 had been among the most exciting I’d ever heard. The hair-raising performance of Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini (at a time when I had some hair to raise) was unbelievably terrifying. The incredibly precise torrent of strings as literature’s most perfervid adulterers writhed in eternal punishment remains equaled in my memory solely by my one and only viewing of the film Fatal Attraction. I couldn’t even think of sex for days. The laser-beam brass cut through but never overwhelmed the huge bodies of strings and woodwinds. And in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, the timpanist displayed the kind of flair in the finale that no one in our day of soberer-than-thou music-making would dare, flourishing his sticks in the air on alternate beats as the coda marched to its majestic end. Rozhdestvensky’s performances of Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture, Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky and Scythian Suite, the brand new Shostakovich Fifteenth, and several other works remain among my highlights of four-and-a-half decades of concert going.

So what has Temirkanov’s leadership accomplished? He shaved off the edge, that’s for sure. In a pair of St. Petersburg concerts at Carnegie last week, the conductor conjured a gigantic cushion of sound in excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh. This is a huge orchestra, with ten double basses, and correspondingly augmented violins and violas—as sumptuous an orchestral sonority as exists on the planet today, without a hint of the stridency one hears from many American orchestras that force their tone to achieve greater volume.

In Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, the pianissimo cellos and double basses in the opening motto sounded like a chorus of Russian basses. Innumerable eye-rolling moments of orchestral beauty enveloped me during the work’s three-quarter hour duration. But my disappointment with this performance had nothing to do with the playing or conducting. It was about Temirkanov’s decision to prune huge chunks of a piece he once honored in toto.

All conductors used to cut this gloriously garrulous piece. In the 1940s, Eugene Ormandy, claiming the composer’s imprimatur, fashioned a heavily trimmed but musically cogent performing version through which most of us prior to 1970 learned the piece. In the late 1960s, Decca/London released the first uncut recording of the work by Paul Kletzki and the Suisse Romande orchestra, followed by André Previn’s highly regarded London Symphony recording from1973 on EMI.

Enter Temirkanov. His 1978 recording of the work with the Royal Philharmonic (EMI) is the Holy Grail of the true Rachmaninoffian. It is a great performance, and it is complete. (Only Rozhdestvensky and Gergiev on LSO LIVE, to my knowledge, gild the lily by including the four-and-a-half-minute first-movement exposition repeat.) Inexplicably, the Temirkanov recording has never been transferred to CD.

He rerecorded a sliced-and-diced version of the Rach2 for RCA at the same time he performed it last in New York with the SPb’ers at Carnegie, on November 5, 1993. Whether the cuts were the same when he last conducted it doesn’t matter; I was equally annoyed.

So is either brand of this Russian band superior? Neither is by any stretch “international.” Fortunately, we have Mravinsky’s recordings—mostly live, as he hated to record—to remind us of the intensely dramatic instrument he crafted. And we can wallow on Temirkanov’s giant davenport.

by Sedgwick Clark

Bernard Haitink led the Boston Symphony this week in a pair of concerts at Carnegie Hall. He made his debut with the BSO in 1971 and became its principal guest conductor in 1995 and conductor emeritus in 2004. This is his 60th season as a conductor. He was principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony from 2006-10, chief conductor of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw for 27 years and now its conductor laureate, and next month he leads the Berlin Philharmonic to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his debut with that ensemble. He turns 85 in three weeks.

There was a time when Americans could experience his vital, direct music-making mainly on records, where—in the cold environs of an empty hall—his artistry didn’t always flower. “How can I conduct Mahler at 10 in the morning?” he asked rhetorically when we were talking more than 40 years ago about making recordings. He wasn’t performing any Mahler with the BSO this time around, but he will lead the New York Philharmonic in the Third Symphony on May 15, 16, and 17. Chances are, that will be a concert you won’t want to miss.

Tuesday’s concert was one of those. American composer Steven Stucky describes his nine-minute Funeral Music for Queen Mary (after Purcell) as mostly “straightforward orchestration,” but it was obviously more than that and very affecting for it. Haitink’s graceful, buoyant collaboration with Murray Perahia in Schumann’s Piano Concerto was the evening’s treat. For years it has been subjected to interminable, “sensitive” interpretations, but this performance restored my faith in Schumann; I haven’t heard its like since the 1948 EMI recording with Dinu Lipatti, Herbert von Karajan, and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, which followed, unfolded in one unbroken line, with Haitink determined to avoid the luftpausen, ritards, and undue emphases of others less trusting of the composer’s score. What a pleasure, for instance, that the flute variation in the final movement moved along purposefully rather than bogging down in wrong-headed expressiveness.

During Charles Munch’s tenure as music director (1949-1962), the Bostonians gained a reputation as an orchestra with a French accent, but one wonders whether that reputation still holds. Perhaps Charles Dutoit could resurrect Munch’s colorful heritage in French orchestral works, but Haitink conjures distinctly less colorful timbres. Which is not to say that his understated performances in Wednesday’s all-Ravel program were less than enjoyable. Alborada del gracioso could have used more rhythmic snap and color, but the diaphanous orchestral shimmer in the song cycle Shéhérazade was superbly judged, perfectly balanced with Susan Graham’s subtly sensuous singing.

After intermission, Haitink led a virtually flawless, if not terribly exciting, performance of the complete Daphnis et Chloé. Perhaps he felt that ballet tempos were most suitable for a performance of the complete score—as I suspect did Pierre Monteux, the work’s first conductor, when he recorded the work in 1959 for Decca. At any rate, the sections marked Vif (“lively”) and the concluding dance (Animé) lack energy in both conductors’ renditions. Certainly neither approaches the two orgiastic renditions by Munch (1955 and 1961) on RCA.

The playing in both concerts was everything one could wish, and the wordless singing of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in Daphnis moreso.

Looking Forward

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

2/14 Metropolitan Opera. Borodin: Prince Igor. Gianandrea Noseda, cond. Oksana Dyka (Yaroslavna), Anita Rachvelishvili (Konchakovna), Sergey Semishkur (Vladimir Igorevich), Ildar Abdrazakov (Prince Igor Svyatoslavich), Mikhail Petrenko (Prince Galitsky), Stefan Kocán (Khan Konchak).

2/15 Carnegie Hall. St. Petersburg Philharmonic/Yuri Temirkanov; Julia Fischer, violin. Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 2. Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2.

by Sedgwick Clark

The musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra were all smiles at their most recent Carnegie Hall concert, on Monday, February 3. Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin led Smetana’s The Moldau, Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3, with Radu Lupu as soloist, and Dvořák’s sunny Symphony No. 6. It’s a happy orchestra now, after several years of economic and artistic uncertainty, and players and audience appear quite satisfied with their new maestro.

I was happy throughout most of this appealingly conservative program, too, but I was also surprised to hear forced and unblended string sonority at times, and by a lack of quiet playing. Few pieces of music require a greater sense of flow than The Moldau, and to my ears, a succession of single notes often dominated a fluid line.

Bartók was on his deathbed when he composed his gentle Third Piano Concerto as a performance vehicle for his wife, pianist Ditta Pásztory-Bartók. Lupu played the work at his most recent New York appearance, as I recall. The second movement—one of Bartók’s exquisite “night music” pieces—chirped raptly in Lupu’s hands, and the closing Allegro vivace danced energetically. N-Z’s accompaniment was well judged, never overwhelming the soloist.

Dvořák’s Sixth Symphony is unfairly overshadowed by his last three masterworks of the form, and N-Z’s performance was a treat, with an especially deeply felt Adagio. The audience had offered a warm welcome to N-Z at the beginning of the concert, and it roared its approval at the end. He has New York’s Philadelphia fans on his side now.

I sometimes wondered if N-Z were trying too hard, however, unwilling to allow the mellow Romanticism to unfold naturally. I felt this when he conducted Carmen at the Met a few years ago (although his Rusalka last week was ravishing). The sound coaxed from the Philadelphians by Michael Tilson Thomas two months ago when he subbed for the indisposed N-Z at Carnegie was positively velvety in comparison (my blog, 1/9/14).

Looking Forward

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

2/9 Carnegie Hall. Garrick Ohlsson, piano. Beethoven: Sonata No. 30, Op. 109. Schubert: “Wanderer” Fantasy, D. 760. Griffes: The Night Winds; Barcarolle; The White Peacock. Chopin: Sonata No. 3, Op. 58.
2/11 Carnegie Hall. Boston Symphony/Bernard Haitink; Murray Perahia, piano. Purcell/Steven Stucky: Funeral Music for Queen Mary. Schumann: Piano Concerto. Brahms: Symphony No. 4.
2/12 Carnegie Hall. Boston Symphony/Bernard Haitink; Susan Graham, mezzo; Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Ravel: Alborado del gracioso; Shéhérazade; Daphnis et Chloé (complete).

2/13 Carnegie Hall. St. Petersburg Philharmonic/Yuri Temirkanov; Denis Kozhukhin, piano. Rimsky-Korsakov: Excerpts from The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh. Kancheli: . . . al Niente. Tchaikovsky: Concerto No. 1.

by Sedgwick Clark

The Philadelphia Orchestra had the reputation in the Ormandy days of a well-oiled machine that played in a predictably beautiful, glossy manner no matter the maestro. Ormandy’s successor, Riccardo Muti, sought to change the corporate Philadelphia Sound into a “composer’s sound” (and now he’s saying that again about his current American orchestra, Chicago). To my ears, the result was a recognizable Muti Sound, evident in his conducting of the New York and Vienna philharmonics, as well: emphasis of high frequencies, reduction of lows, de-emphasis of strings, rather grainy textures, and, above all, strait-jacketed rhythmic control. Muti’s successor, and an Ormandy admirer, Wolfgang Sawallisch, gloriously restored the old Philadelphia Sound. His successor, Christoph Eschenbach, retained his own haphazard, Germanic sound, and Charles Dutoit gave the orchestra a glistening Franco-Russian accent.

The orchestra’s new music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, has by all reports captured the Philly audiences’ hearts, and I’ve blogged approvingly twice about his Philly concerts at Carnegie Hall (10/25/2012 and 2/28/2013). He’s an exciting guy, and I was looking forward to hearing what he would do with a pair of Philadelphia specialties at Carnegie Hall on December 6. But a sinus-related illness prevented him from travelling. In his stead, the orchestra snagged Michael Tilson Thomas, who elicited unfailingly excellent playing. Hélène Grimaud was scheduled for Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with YN-S but switched to No. 1 with MTT. She turned in a strong, relatively straightforward interpretation—far preferable to her exceedingly lethargic recording with Kurt Sanderling for Teldec several years ago. Thomas’s accompaniment, like much of his work these days (see my blog, “Whatever Happened to MTT,” 11/15/13), was overly refined for such a stern piece, especially in the turbulent opening movement. His tempos for Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique were well chosen and the playing beautiful, but the music’s delirium was kept on too short a leash for my taste (and where were those deliberately vulgar blats of the lower brass in the Marche to the Scaffold?). Inclusion of the first- and fourth-movement repeats was welcome, but I missed the cornet in the second movement—“apparently added to [the manuscript] at some point after the completion of the symphony,” writes Edward T. Cone, editor of the Norton Critical Score—which adds such color and vivacity to Colin Davis’s recordings.

Ligeti in the Lake

Last week I tuned into the middle of a 1946 noir film called Lady in the Lake on TCM. Robert Montgomery stars as the detective Philip Marlowe and also directed. Interestingly, the music score is a cappella choral vocalise, composed by Maurice Goldman, who, according to IMDb.com, is credited only as “Choral Director.” At about 68 minutes into the film, Marlowe leaves the murdered Florence Elmore’s parents’ home, gets into his car, and starts driving. The background music wells up, and darned if it doesn’t sound strikingly similar to the Kyrie from Ligeti’s Requiem (1963-65), which Stanley Kubrick used in 2001 to underscore the appearance of the monolith.

One of my consultant film experts says that Lady in the Lake was popular internationally. I wonder if Ligeti’s yen for the macabre extended to Hollywood noir?

by Sedgwick Clark

Forgotten repertoire is usually forgotten for a good reason. But the industrious Pacifica Quartet and Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin hit pay dirt with the Piano Quartet of Leo Ornstein at Zankel Hall on November 19. Ornstein (1893-2002) studied violin at St. Petersburg Conservatory. After his family migrated to New York City, he received a scholarship at the Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard), where he studied piano. His early works, in the teens, were apparently the essence of enfant-terribleism. Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve quote a horrified review in London’s Daily Mail, March 27, 1914, in their Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale, 2005), a must read for anyone interested in American music:

“WILD OUTBREAK AT STEINWAY HALL

A pale Russian youth dressed in velvet, crouched over the instrument in an attitude all his own, and for all the apparent frailty of his form, dealt it the most ferocious punishment. Nothing as horrible as Mr. Ornstein’s music has been heard so far—save Stravinsky’s ‘Sacrifice to Spring’ [sic]. Sufferers from complete deafness should attend the next recital. . . .”

He gave the first performances in America of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Sonatine, Schoenberg’s Drei Stücke, Op. 11, and Scriabin’s Ninth and Tenth Piano Sonatas. “In about 1920,” write Perlis and Van Cleve, “at the height of his performing career,” Ornstein abandoned his performing career to compose and teach. His modernist style became more lyrical, of which the Piano Quintet (1927) is an example. It was commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the notable philanthropist who commissioned such works as Bartók’s Fifth Quartet, Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète, Prokofiev’s First Quartet, Ravel’s Chansons madécasses, Schoenberg’s Third and Fourth quartets, Poulenc’s Flute Sonata, and Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

The Pacifica foursome and Hamelin have been performing Ornstein’s Piano Quintet nearly everywhere the past year, and they will record it for Hyperion this month. Nearly 40 minutes long, it’s a spooky piece. The driving intensity of the opening movement’s Allegro barbaro alternates with exotic lyricism, perfectly integrated by the impassioned Pacificans and flawless fingerwork of Hamelin. French influences pervade the middle Andante lamentoso, which momentarily segues into the “Little Egypt” or snake charmer hoochie-coochie music (“All the girls in France . . .”) popular in America in the first three decades of the 20th century before returning to the initial lyricism. Bartókian folk dance influences the final movement, which ends quietly.

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in her review on the Times web (11/22) perceptively characterizes Ornstein’s style in this work as “Late Late Romanticism” and wonders why it isn’t in the standard repertoire. Good question.

The Pacifica’s ardent Beethoven’s B-flat Quartet, Op. 130, with its original Grosse Fuge final movement, was a crowd pleaser, but to me was no competition after that spellbinding Ornstein discovery.

Perlis, incidentally, was Musical America’s Educator of the Year in 2011, and Van Cleve wrote our tribute to her. Vivian pioneered her invaluable oral history recordings of American composers and performers while at Yale University, and Libby succeeded her as director of the school’s Oral History program.

by Sedgwick Clark

Our Musical America Awards party was on Tuesday (12/17). As always, I got behind on my weekly blogs while preparing for the party. As always, in receiving their awards, our honorees spoke eloquently in words that left us all in awe of their commitment to their art. Susan Elliott provided a full report on our Web site the next day. For the record, the honorees were:

Audra McDonald, Musician of the Year

George Benjamin, Composer of the Year

Pablo Heras-Casado, Conductor of the Year

Jeremy Denk, Instrumentalist of the Year

International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Ensemble of the Year

Shostakovich at Juilliard

A month ago in this space I raved about a November 15th Juilliard Orchestra concert and urged readers not to miss the following Monday’s concert (11/25) of early Shostakovich works conducted by Vladimir Jurowski: selections from the composer’s film score to The New Babylon (1929), a suite from music for a 1931 variety show, Hypothetically Murdered, and the teenage composer’s First Symphony, which was unusually clear and cogent in Tully Hall’s tight acoustic.

A quick scan of orchestral personnel revealed this to be an entirely different, and equally musical, group of players. The concertmaster, Francesca Rose dePasquale (a Master of Music student from the great family of strings that played in the Philadelphia Orchestra and Boston Symphony), was scintillating in her many solos throughout. A distinguished career will undoubtedly be hers.

I Remember Rosenkavalier

Based on memories of past Rosenkavaliers at the Met, I urged readers to see the current revival of the 1969 Nathaniel Merrill production before its rumored replacement. I caught it again on 12/7, and barring a new paint job I’m afraid I see the wisdom of its retirement (while quaking at the thought of what gawdawful updating a la the Met’s Las Vegas Rigoletto we might be in store for). I’m sorry to report that the cast had the notes but little more and that Edward Gardner’s conducting eviscerated the Met orchestra’s customarily sumptuous tone from first note to last and provided scant lilt in Strauss’s glorious waltzes.

We all have bad nights. A constant opera goer in my apartment building saw the next performance—four days later, from her usual seat in the Dress Circle, with the same cast and conductor—and said that it was far better than what I describe above.

Looking Forward

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

12/22 Carnegie Hall at 3:00. MET Orchestra/James Levine; Peter Mattei, baritone. Mahler: Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen; Symphony No. 7.

12/27 Metropolitan Opera at 7:30. Verdi: Falstaff. James Levine, cond. Oropesa, Meade, Blythe, Cano, Fanale, Maestri, Vassallo.

by Sedgwick Clark

British composer Benjamin Britten was celebrating his 50th birthday on November 22, 1963, when news came of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Fifty years later, we in New York’s major concert halls were somehow able to salve our memories of that world-altering tragedy and at the same time honor the composer’s centennial with outstanding performances of three of his most attractive works. Carnegie Hall featured a semi-staged concert of his most popular opera, Peter Grimes, with David Robertson conducting the St. Louis Symphony, and at Avery Fisher Hall, Alan Gilbert led the New York Philharmonic in the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings and the rarely played Spring Symphony for soloists, chorus, and orchestra.

As I began learning about classical music in college in the ’60s, British Decca was systematically recording Britten’s works with the composer as conductor, just as Columbia had been doing with Stravinsky. Along with Stravinsky’s recordings, I also bought Britten’s as well as recommended versions of his music by other conductors. The first was Carlo Maria Giulini’s EMI release with the Philharmonia Orchestra of the Grimes Four Sea Interludes and Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra; those performances are still unsurpassed, to my ears, for warmth and expressiveness. When I finally got around to hearing the composer’s recording of the complete opera, I was surprised to find that the Interludes seemed dry and perfunctory in comparison.

But the problem seems deeper to me than the performances: Most of Britten’s music leaves me cold. I was afraid to say so at the time (after all, so many eminent critics praised his works). The conclusion is unavoidable that, for all the evident craftsmanship and striking instrumentation, the music remains emotionally removed to me, like much of Brahms. Dale Harris pinpointed my reservations in an article entitled “Britten’s Operas: Will They Survive?” in the March 1979 issue of Keynote magazine. After explaining why he thinks Peter Grimes, “for all its weaknesses, is likely to survive,” Harris continues:

“Throughout the composer’s operatic oeuvre there is a persistent element of inhibition, a terror—the word, I feel, is not too strong—of emotional commitment. . . .  Britten’s essential subject is usually said to be the destruction of innocence, and, certainly, he showed throughout his career a real fascination with a whole succession of victims—among them, Grimes, Billy Budd, Lucretia, Miles and Flora, the haunted children of The Turn of the Screw, and Owen Wingrave. No less central to his creative sensibility, however, is another and related subject: the frustration of love, a theme which surfaces importantly in Peter Grimes, Gloriana, Death in Venice, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and which one could conclude helped to attract him to certain plot situations in the first place. Yet there is hardly a trace in any of these works of genuine amorous passion, the existence of which, I submit, we must be persuaded of before we can believe in its frustration. . . .”

I have warmed most to Britten’s earliest works, up to around 1950—and also to the War Requiem (1962), which I have found an emotionally devastating piece, most notably under Mstislav Rostropovich and Gianandrea Noseda. It is a favorite of Kurt Masur; he performed it twice while music director of the New York Philharmonic and recorded it for Teldec. Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony are set for a Carnegie Hall performance on April 30. If Britten had written nothing else, he would be acknowledged a great composer.

New York’s Bow to Britten’s Centennial

Peter Grimes (1946) was the first opera I ever saw live, 45 years ago at the Met; Jon Vickers sang the title role and Colin Davis conducted. Not bad. The St. Louis Symphony’s Grimes struck me as no less seaworthy, with the opera’s sublimely atmospheric Sea Interludes and Passacaglia all the more vivid emanating directly from the stage rather than from an opera pit. Some of Robertson’s tempos struck me as overly brisk: Mrs. Sedley’s warning lacked dread, and the townspeople’s bidding of “Good night, good people, good night” was short on affection. Anthony Dean Griffey’s Grimes may have lacked the sheer, unhinged danger of Vickers’s characterization—the mad scene, for instance, went for little, and it was difficult to imagine this warm bear of a man abusing his apprentices—but his singing was unfailingly eloquent, movingly capturing the character’s bewildered humanity. Susanna Phillips’s stalwart Ellen Orford was, for once, not a wimpy schoolmistress. Alan Held’s gruff bass-baritone gave Captain Balstrode an authority I don’t recall before. Actually, the entire cast bore a welcome seriousness that, for me, surpassed the cartoonish performances of the townspeople at the Met over the years.

Alan Gilbert’s Britten double header was one of his most successful nights on the Philharmonic podium. I arrived too late for the Serenade (1943) on Thursday evening (11/21) but stuck around for the Spring Symphony (1948-49) and returned to hear both works on Saturday night. The originally scheduled tenor had fallen ill, and his replacement at the latter performance was none other than Anthony Dean Griffey, the St. Louis Grimes the night before at Carnegie, who proceeded to sing no less superbly in both works. The Philharmonic’s principal horn player, Philip Myers, performed on a natural horn in the Prologue and Epilogue as Britten directs. He reportedly had a spotty night in the Serenade on Thursday, but on Saturday he was at the top of his game, negotiating Britten’s wide intervallic leaps and expressive dynamic contrasts with apparent ease and delivering astonishing diminuendos to ppp. The ebullient Spring Symphony, consisting of 12 poems about the spring season ranging in date from the 13th century to the 20th, had not been played by the Philharmonic since 1963 under Bernstein. Another 50-year lapse would be inexcusable.

Decca’s Complete Britten

Today’s crop of British critics (and many American ones) consider Britten his country’s greatest composer. I remain firmly in the Vaughan Williams camp. But I’ll have plenty of time to reassess the music and recordings in Decca’s recent 65-CD release of Britten’s complete works, consisting of all the Decca material plus recordings from 19 other labels to make the set complete.

In addition, four bonus CDs include a series of newly conducted interviews with surviving musicians who worked closely with Britten, historic recordings and rarities, and Britten’s rehearsals at the recording sessions for the War Requiem, which itself has been newly re-mastered this year from the analog master tapes. The set also features a DVD of Tony Palmer’s film on the making of the 1967 recording of The Burning Fiery Furnace, chosen specifically for its insight into the Britten-Decca recording relationship and the working methods of producer John Culshaw and his Decca team. To crown the set, a 208-page full-color hardback book offers a host of articles and insights, a complete alphabetical index of works included in the edition, a gallery of original Decca LP sleeves from 1953 onwards, and recording session pictures and Aldeburgh landscapes newly photographed for this edition.

Looking Forward

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

12/13 Avery Fisher Hall at 2:00. New York Philharmonic/Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos. Beethoven: Symphony No. 8. R. Strauss: Ein Heldenleben.

12/14 Weill Hall at 1:00. Discovery Day: Benjamin Britten. Paul Kildea, keynote speaker; Malcolm Martineau, music director and pianist; Joélle Harvey and Emalie Savoy, sopranos; Paul Appleby, tenor; John Brancy, baritone. Includes a new documentary about the composer, a song recital, and keynote lecture by Britten biographer Paul Kildea.

12/14 Zankel Hall at 7:30. Ensemble ACJW/David Robertson; Dawn Upshaw, soprano. Berio: Folk Songs. Reich: City Life. Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta.

By Sedgwick Clark

So it’s time for my annual paean to the Juilliard Orchestra. I love to hear these young musicians—their passion, their commitment, their maturity, their technical polish. Last Friday (11/15) they played a varied program of 20th-century works by Adams, Barber, R. Strauss, and Ives. Conductor Jeffrey Milarsky, whose work I had admired previously with Juilliard’s excellent contemporary-music group Axiom, was mighty impressive—surprisingly so in Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils because I didn’t expect such a sinuous performance from a contemporary-music specialist. So much for my preconceptions.

John Adams’s Tromba lontana, a quiet, four-minute fanfare for two trumpets opened the concert. Samuel Barber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Piano Concerto (1962), commissioned for Lincoln Center’s opening week, received a balanced mix of expressiveness and virtuosity by soloist Kevin Ahfat. But is the piece itself worth the effort? Barber biographer Barbara B. Heyman writes, “The Piano Concerto marks the high point in Barber’s career.” Surely that isn’t a qualitative judgment, which it could be of the frequently performed, far superior Violin Concerto (1939). Despite the praiseworthy Juilliard outing last week, it remains an oddly disjunct piece, with solo and orchestral passages alternating disconcertingly as if the composer had not had the time to integrate them. A major performance of the Piano Concerto hasn’t turned up in a New York concert hall since May 1987 with John Browning, the work’s faithful first soloist, Leonard Slatkin, and the St. Louis Symphony at Carnegie Hall. A check with its publisher, G. Schirmer, finds scattered performances at music schools and second- and third-tier orchestras around the U.S. in the past 20 years.

Before the concert resumed, pianist Gilbert Kalish presented Milarsky with the 2013 Alice M. Ditson Conductor’s Award for the advancement of American music. Milarsky’s sexy Salome’s Dance and an ideally paced performance of Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England completed the concert. I look forward to hearing this conductor again. As for hearing the Juilliard Orchestra again, we need only wait until Monday, 11/25, at Alice Tully Hall, when Vladimir Jurowski leads an all-Shostakovich program. See you there.

Rosenkavalier—See It Now

An amusing press release arrived from Chicago Lyric Opera the other day, exclaiming that its new production of La Traviata would be “performed uncut!” Amusing because we in James Levine’s Met Operaland are accustomed to hearing every last note, good or bad. That was brought home last Saturday night as PK and I staggered home from Die Frau ohne Schatten, wishing the third act had been at least 20 minutes shorter. The same act of Der Rosenkavalier has its longeurs too, but Strauss wasn’t mystified by Hofmannsthal’s libretto in this case and produced music of consistently soaring inspiration.

Some friends think Die Frau is Strauss’s best opera. I’ll take Rosenkavalier, myself, for its everlasting humanity, wit, and melodic beauty. For 40 years I’ve reveled in the Met’s consummate 1969 Nathaniel Merrill production, and fondly recall Yvonne Minton’s hilarious “Mariandel” in 1973 and Evelyn Lear’s Marschallin (admittedly long in the tooth for the 30-something character, but affecting) in 1985 at her very last Met performance. The production will be revived on 11/22, with further performances on 11/25, 30mat, 12/3, 7eve, 10, and 13. Judging by the Gelb regime’s systematic retirement of old productions, this may be its last stand. I urge all who love this opera, or don’t know it yet, to see it before it’s too late.

Big Mac’s Old Ploy

McDonald’s had a problem: Teenagers were loitering instead of buying Big Macs, so management blared “operas and classical music” over their speakers. “Absolute genius,” said Diane Sawyer on ABC Nightly News last night, evidently unaware that a 7 Eleven store in British Columbia had pioneered the idea in 1985 and that New York’s Port Authority bus station had been driving the homeless away for years with Mozart and Handel.

by Sedgwick Clark

I’ve blown hot and cold on Michael Tilson Thomas’s considerable abilities over the years. I vividly recall a masterful Ein Heldenleben (10/9/02) and an emotionally affecting Das Lied von der Erde (2/13/02) at Carnegie Hall with the San Francisco Symphony, of which he has been music director since 1995 and raised to one of the top seven orchestras in the country. His late-1970s recordings with the Buffalo Philharmonic of the complete music of the American master Carl Ruggles (Other Minds CD) will likely never be equaled. His irresistible programs, frequently of 20th-century American and Russian music, have drawn me to his concerts every season despite his tendency to interpretive fussiness and self regard. In Thomas’s curiously muted Carnegie concert on Wednesday (11/13), for instance, works by Beethoven, Steven Mackey, Mozart, and Copland perplexed to a degree I don’t previously recall.

Thomas’s apparent aim for a beautiful, unforced orchestral sonority à la Herbert von Karajan dulled both the lyricism and triumph of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3. In Mackey’s program note for his playfully orchestrated Eating Greens (1993), he aspires to join “a tradition of American ‘crackpot inventors’ ” led by Charles Ives, Elliott Carter, Lou Harrison, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Harry Partch, and Conlon Nancarrow. The music had no chance in Thomas’s devitalized performance, however, which lacked any semblance of sparkle, wit, or crackpottery. Bernstein might have pulled it off if he had cared or lived long enough. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 with Jeremy Denk seemed a near complete mismatch of minds.

Only in Copland’s Symphonic Ode (1927-29; revised 1955) did Thomas demonstrate commitment. It’s a piece he reveres and has recorded with distinction. It was a favorite of Copland’s too—an attempt to compose “purer, non-programmatic” music after his jazz-inflected works of the 1920s, following his return to the U.S. after studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. But it’s not top-drawer Copland. Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony couldn’t master the difficult rhythms, and the premiere was postponed for revisions. These days, such “difficulties” are second nature to such virtuoso conductors and players as Thomas and his San Franciscans, but audiences have never warmed to either this piece or this period of Copland’s works. As in the evening’s previous performances, applause was perfunctory.

By the mid-’30s Copland had moved on to his folk-nationalist “American” period, and in an encore Thomas at last unleashed his San Francisco players’ inherent splendor with  the Hoe Down from the composer’s ever-popular Rodeo. The audience went wild.

by Sedgwick Clark

Deep thought of the day: Every performance is different.

Second deep thought: Every listener hears the performance differently.

Two weeks ago I wrote at the end of my “Valery the Variable” blog that opening-night critics had lambasted Valery Gergiev’s conducting of the Met’s Eugene Onegin (9/23) as unbearably slow and stodgy. Having found in the past that the last performance in a series was his best, I deliberately waited for the sixth and last one (10/12) and found that I “couldn’t imagine more effective, naturally flowing tempos.” Last weekend I heard the beginning of Gergiev’s Met broadcast of Onegin on SiriusXM radio—obviously an earlier performance—and it was indeed unbearably slow and stodgy.

Is Esa-Pekka Salonen the anti-Gergiev, by which I mean that one should try to attend his earliest performances? Jay Nordlinger in The New Criterion and Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times rhapsodized about every note of E-P’s excellent program with the Philharmonic, based around the New York premiere of his recent Violin Concerto and performed five times. Ravel’s Ma Mère l’oye Suite gently opened the concert, and Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony brought it to a roaring close.

I heard the final concert of the series, and my reaction contradicts nearly everything they wrote about the Ravel and Sibelius works. We were much closer in our perceptions of the second work performed—of Salonen’s Violin Concerto (2009) with a fiery Leila Josefowicz as soloist, which evidently received the most rehearsal (and Tommasini’s consideration in his review). The concerto is very easy on the ears, as his music increasingly became while discovering the basic repertoire on the Los Angeles Philharmonic podium over 17 years. Brilliant moments abound, but I miss a sense of structure, a feeling that the piece is going somewhere. (No difficulty in this regard with the Sibelius Fifth, that’s for sure.) So I look forward to auditioning these artists’ L.A. recording on DG and seeing what I think after repeated hearings.

It’s no surprise that I sense a lack of direction in Salonen’s compositions because I often find little detours in his conducting of other composers’ works. Take Ravel, for instance: In the third movement Salonen adopted a slower tempo for a ten-bar transition between numbers 6 and 7, and then again for a similar transition between 16 and 17, which only served to break the music’s stride. And talk about breaking stride, he slowed markedly for the majestic horn theme (deciso) in the finale of the Sibelius, sapping its inherent energy.

Perhaps due to exhaustion—rehearsal of a new program in the morning and the previous program for the fifth time in the evening—the Phil’s playing in the Sibelius was surprisingly lacking in transparency on Tuesday. Jay wrote of the first note of the Sibelius being “absolutely together” and the horns playing in “flabbergastingly fine shape.” On Tuesday, the first note was ragged and the horn fished the opening solo. Moreover, pianissimo playing was never quiet enough, most distressingly in the ppp Misterioso section in the finale. I wonder what it was like on opening night.