Musical America Blogs

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.