By: Edna Landau
To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.
For those who live along the eastern seaboard of the United States, this past week was filled with overwhelming challenges, including displacement from homes, freezing temperatures, loss of electrical power, extensive property damage and financial loss. Many of us have read about the telethon organized by NBC, featuring performers including Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Billy Joel, Sting, and Christina Aguilera, which raised $23 million in donations to the American Red Cross for Hurricane Sandy relief. A note I received on this blog following the storm inspired me to pay tribute this week to less heralded performers who gave generously of themselves to make this trying experience more bearable. Marianne Schmocker, director of Marianne Schmocker Artists, wrote as follows:
I do not have a question, but thought you might be interested to read this. One of the groups that I represent, the Hugo Wolf Quartet, performed an afternoon concert in New York on Sunday, October 28, and headed out to the airport to return to Vienna at the start of Hurricane Sandy, only to be turned away. They found one of the last taxis to leave for Manhattan. The director of the Austrian Cultural Forum, Andreas Stadler, who had presented the quartet a few days earlier, invited them to stay in the ACF building where he also lives. However, there was not enough space for all four musicians. Two of them had to sleep on the concert stage. After the storm on Monday, they gave a free concert at the ACF which was attended by seven people. When they heard that concerts were canceled everywhere in Manhattan, they gave another free concert on Thursday, November 1. This time, the hall was packed, after an announcement appeared on the ACF’s website and word spread via Facebook and Twitter. Even though the quartet had to live together in a very small place away from their families who were very worried about them, they still had the energy to play music for others. As their manager, I discovered the Hugo Wolf Quartet anew. I am proud to work with them.
In speaking with Ms. Schmocker, I learned that the Hugo Wolf Quartet offered different programs each time they played, trying to present music that was as uplifting as possible for the special circumstances. For the final concert on November 1, they wanted to offer Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet #2 but they had a small problem – they didn’t have the music. So they went to Starbucks, joined the large numbers of people who were already signed on to their WiFi, downloaded the music onto their computers and printed it out at the Austrian Cultural Forum.
Before leaving the country, the quartet’s cellist, Florian Berner, joined by Mr. Stadler, did an interview for WWFM in Princeton. Mr. Stadler explained how the November 1 concert came about. As he and the quartet had been sharing accommodations and meals for several days, they discussed what would be important to New York after the storm. They felt that the answer was a message of reconstruction and good spirit, something for which music is the perfect vehicle. Mr. Berner reported that the atmosphere was so exceptional during the concert that they were reminded how important art and music are when we encounter moments in life which we don’t know how to handle. A number of audience members thanked him and the Quartet for giving them a two hour reprieve from watching great devastation on television and lifting their depressed spirits.
It is particularly touching when artists from abroad seize the opportunity to share the healing power of great music with us in our time of need. I am sure they were not alone. Bravo to all the other performers who spontaneously responded in similar fashion. Please feel free to use the comments feature on this blog to share your stories. I’d love to hear from you!
To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.
© Edna Landau 2012
Brahms Days in Tutzing
Thursday, November 8th, 2012By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 8, 2012
MUNICH — Johannes Brahms came here in 1870, catching the completed half of Wagner’s Ring and hobnobbing with colleagues, Liszt among them. He basked in new celebrity, his German Requiem having appeared in print a year earlier. The visit ended with a few days’ repose at Lake Würm, nearby.
He came again three years later. Der Ring remained incomplete, but in any case he sought other things: a meeting with poet Paul Heyse, guidance on writing for orchestra from conductor Hermann Levi (whose brother ran his asset portfolio), and more time at the deep tranquil lake (pictured), with its southward vistas to the Alps. Levi duly helped in the city, and the composer checked in in May for a four-month lakeside stay in the fishing village of Tutzing, lately reachable from downtown by train.
Brahms: “Tutzing is prettier than recently imagined … . The lake is usually blue, but a deeper blue than the sky … also the chain of snowy mountains — one cannot stop looking at them.”
Tutzingers take pride in this Brahms connection. It produced the Haydn Variations and gave life to the two long-stalled, minor-key string quartets. At a stretch, you could say the sojourn nudged Brahms over thresholds in both his orchestral and chamber music. It saw too the premiere of the Acht Lieder und Gesänge, Opus 59.
Settled in the 6th century by families called Tozzi and Tuzzo, Tutzing sports a lakeshore Brahms promenade, a Brahms memorial, a Brahms apothecary and, not so inevitably, a Brahms festival.
This last, dubbed Tutzinger Brahmstage, had an abortive start in the 1950s on the initiative of anti-Semite and “pronounced National Socialist” pianist Elly Ney. Later, much later, artist manager Christian Lange put the festival on an annual fall footing with modest strata of local government support. Sometime in between, Lake Würm officially became “Lake Starnberg.”
But music festival visitors to handsome Tutzing face a number of ponderables. A walk of homage along the spectacular promenade, for instance, finds the composer honored in flat stone between lake and Alpine view benches, a pleasing effect until you turn and see, lurking just feet away, a grand memorial to the Nazi pianist with high bronze bust and trellised garden.
Choosing when to visit confronts the problem of five events spread around three weekends, not the Ojai-like “days” timeframe suggested by the festival name. (A Carl Orff Festival in the next municipality, where that composer is buried, does better in this regard and supports its local hotels.)
Then there is the matter of programming. Tutzinger Brahmstage 2012, which has just ended amid blazes of fall color and a run of blue skies, favored rings around the composer in place of any survey. Mostly Brahms it was not. Brahms and jazz (a concert on Oct. 18) go together like Mahler and reggae. The lone string chamber work offered, the G-Major Sextet (Oct. 14), got lumped with an unneeded reduction for the same forces of Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony. Baritone Michael Volle diluted his Liederabend (Oct. 21) with warhorses of Mahler, lessening the time to explore Brahms’s vaster output for voice.
On Oct. 26, though, festive impulses and programming logic coalesced nicely. Someone had recalled that Brahms wrote organ music and had invited Vienna-based Renate Sperger to play the 3,000-pipe, 28-year-old Sandtner organ of Tutzing’s neo-Baroque St Joseph’s Church, an instrument with ripe sound and tight, unobtrusive action.
Her program contrasted Johann Nepomuk David’s quasi-cartoonish 1947 Partita on Es ist ein Schnitter, improbably a heartfelt tribute to a friend he lost in combat, with a row of Brahms chorale preludes. Six of these, concluding with O Welt, ich muß dich lassen, were from Opus 122, the chiseled and ashen collection penned a year before the composer died. At midpoint came Brahms’s early but resolute Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, WoO 9 (1856), while two Bach staples — the Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542, and the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565 — framed the evening.
Sperger traced the excesses of the David with calm efficiency and savored introspection in the chorale preludes, abetted by Sandtner’s suave apparatus. In the Bach pairings, she wrought requisite thunder and scaled the quilted fugal flights with unbroken legerdemain.
On the evidence of this year, Tutzinger Brahmstage holds potential in reserve, not least for local businesses. Brahms’s music, particularly the vocal and chamber scores, suits an intimate meeting place, and Tutzing has an authentic claim as a host town, with viable concert venues in St Joseph’s Church and the Evangelische Akademie, its idyllically sited former palace. A focused few days and a sculptural clean-up on the promenade could work wonders.
After leaving Tutzing and Munich in 1873, Brahms returned home to Vienna. There he led the Philharmonic in the November premiere of the Haydn Variations, an orchestral triumph from which he never looked back.
The next month he was once more in Bavaria, to pick up mad King Ludwig II’s Maximilian Medal for Art and Science. Wagner got his at the same time. Who knew? Perhaps Ludwig thought equally highly of both of them.
Photo © Tourismusverband Fünf-Seen-Land
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Tags:Brahms, Brahms Days, Brahmstage, Christian Lange, Commentary, Elly Ney, Evangelische Akademie, Haydn Variations, Hermann Levi, Johann Nepomuk David, King Ludwig II, Lake Starnberg, Michael Volle, München, Munich, Nazi Germany, Renate Sperger, Review, Schloß Tutzing, Tutzing
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