Musical America Blogs

by Sedgwick Clark

Just the other night a colleague was saying how much we owe Leon Botstein for programming rarely (and often never) heard music. Nonetheless, my friend was nowhere to be seen at the conductor’s Sunday afternoon pairing of two 70-minute Romantic behemoths at Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra: Busoni’s sole piano concerto and Liszt’s A Faust Symphony. Then there was the critic last August who replied that he loved the composer too much when I asked why he didn’t attend Botstein’s “Sibelius and His World” concerts at Bard College’s summer music festival.

One can understand both. One looks at Botstein’s invariably enticing, over-rich programs from a distance, licking one’s lips at the proffered smorgasbord, but in the end usually wishing the conductor had been more mindful of his players’ and his own capabilities. My first friend missed a strong reading of the Busoni and a perfunctory, inadequately rehearsed Faust; the second an excellent, sensitively shaded Sibelius Fourth and a shockingly played Third. One just never knows what to expect.

One can venture a pretty good guess, however, when an intellectually inspired program such as the Busoni-Liszt pairing meets current economics. Both pieces require short choral sections and soloists—a virtuoso pianist (the dexterous Piers Lane) in the former and a tenor (the sweet-toned Ryan MacPherson) in the latter. But even the greatest of orchestras and conductors require intensive rehearsal for two hours and twenty minutes of Romantic soul searching that few of the players could have previously encountered, and it was clear that the Liszt got short shrift. Moreover, Botstein’s impatient pacing of Liszt’s slower tempos indicated more of an eye on the clock and the damnation of overtime than a sympathetic interpreter. Go to the Beecham and Bernstein recordings for total conviction.

Botstein has been music director of the American Symphony for 19 years. Basically a pickup orchestra, it has performed mainly at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York City and in the summer at Bard College’s Summerscape festival, which the conductor (who is also president of the college) founded in 1990. Its imaginative programming of orchestral, chamber, and solo music is centered on a single composer each year and includes works by other composers who influenced him and whom he, in turn, influenced. A lavish, beautifully printed  program booklet, containing essays, art, and photos, is available at no cost, and a full-fledged book of essays may be purchased by those desiring further immersion into the composer’s world. Add the extra-musical opportunity to explore one of the Hudson Valley’s most attractive terrains, Annandale-on-Hudson, and you have a pair of memorable weekends.

I hadn’t been to a Bard summer festival since 2005, even for such favorite composers as Elgar, Prokofiev, and Berg, but I couldn’t resist Sibelius and His World. Seems the regulars couldn’t either, for nearly all the orchestral concerts in the 900-seat Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Hall appeared sold out, and the 400-seat Olin Hall chamber-music recitals were respectfully full too.

Ever since Fisher Hall’s opening night in 2003, with the ASO playing Mahler’s Third Symphony, Botstein encouraged the orchestra to play full force throughout, which may work in New York’s 2,800-seat Avery Fisher or Carnegie halls but was painful above forte at Bard. The only Botstein performance I recall with pleasure in this hall was a sensitively conducted Appalachian Spring suite in Copland’s original 13-instrument chamber version in 2005.

What a surprise, then, in the gruff introduction of the first weekend’s opening work, Finlandia, that the brass were commanding, not excruciating. As this all-Sibelius evening progressed, I savored the orchestral sound as never before in this hall—the sprightly woodwinds, burnished brass, and tonally ingratiating, if not always precise, strings. I don’t know when Botstein began holding back the ASO musicians in Fisher Hall, but one can now look forward to their playing at Bard.

Botstein’s performances are presentations rather than interpretations. It was said of Alfred Hitchcock that he enjoyed the planning of his films but was less interested in the actual process of filming. That may have been a façade, and it may be with Botstein as well. No one could doubt that he is committed to the music and wants to communicate with his audiences. Still, he would do well to consider what impression his podium demeanor creates. Avoidance of showmanship or outward display of emotion is one thing, but he drags onto the stage as if he would rather be anywhere else. At the end of a performance he lets his hands drop to his side as if nothing of import had occurred, makes a curt bow, turns, and slumps off. In nearly every performance I heard this summer, the polite applause stopped instantly the moment he disappeared from view. Perhaps this cool response validates his self image as a “serious” musician. But make no mistake, an audience craves confirmation that what it has heard matters, and if the performer behaves like a stage hand, the music, the composer, and the audience will be short-changed, no matter how expert the performance.

He seems especially engaged in the works involving choruses and those with soloists. In the all-Sibelius program that opened with Finlandia, he and the orchestra were attentive partners to violinist Henning Kraggerud’s rustic projection of four of the six Humoresques, Opp. 87 and 89, and to soprano Christiane Libore, whose impressive voice was never overwhelmed in that spooky ten-minute tone poem Luonnotar. The two symphonies fared less well. Imagine if the rehearsal time for the disastrous Third, mentioned above, had been devoted to the Fifth, which followed? The monumental Fifth is far more difficult to bring off, and while it received a more successful performance than the Third, its elemental wonderment and power were never suggested. An interesting thing happened at the symphony’s conclusion, which ends with six fortissimo, widely spaced chords. Botstein obviously had rehearsed his players to a tee. He actually looked involved, and he achieved powerful, purposeful, precise results.

The composer’s early choral symphony, Kullervo, revealed Botstein at his best, vigorously in control of the orchestra, two soloists, and an all-male chorus. Brimming with memorable Sibelian melodies and imbued with youthful energy, Kullervo tells of a vengeful Finnish folk hero who seduces his long-lost sister and finally falls on his sword out of guilt. (This is a hero?) Other notable Sibelius performances by Botstein were The Swan of Tuonela, The Oceanides, and the Seventh Symphony. The latter was part of my favorite program of the season: Sibelius, Tapiola; Barber, Symphony No. 1; Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 5; Sibelius, Symphony No. 7. Come to think of it, one of my favorite programs of all time.

A final note: Bard’s is the oldest audience I’ve ever seen—far older even than the Philadelphia Orchestra’s at Carnegie Hall. Observing the aged upstate males negotiating the cement steps in the steeply raked auditorium was frightening; fortunately, they had their sturdier wives guiding them. And the kids? They were spilling out of a tent not far away, their rock music proudly declaring their vote. A portent, perhaps, for the festival’s future.

Virtuoso Prokofiev from Yale

A two-concert marathon of Prokofiev’s nine piano sonatas, played by Yale University students of Boris Berman, was a highlight of the season so far. Given these young artists’ technical perfection and obvious commitment, it was difficult to imagine the composer being better served. For a mere $10 a ticket, this was a bargain of many a year.

Hearing such impressive performances live in concert banished any comparisons with the memorable recordings by Richter, Gilels, Horowitz, or Berman himself. It seems unfair to single out any of these talented pianists, but Henry Kramer in the Sixth Sonata and Esther Park in the Ninth were especially successful in investing these fingerbusters with expressive character, and Larry Weng’s torrid attack on the well-known Seventh fully realized “the anguish and struggle of the war years” referred to by Berman in his insightful program notes.

The two concerts (with an hour between for dinner), at Weill Recital Hall, instantly lifted the gloom engendered by Botstein’s immediately preceding Liszt next door.

Program 1:

Sonata No. 1, Op. 1 – Naomi Woo

Sonata No. 2, Op. 14 – Euntaek Kim

Sonata No. 5 (second version), Op. 135 – David Fung

Sonata No. 9, Op. 103 – Esther Park

Sonata No. 4, Op. 29 – Scott MacIsaac

Program 2:

Sonata No. 8, Op. 84 – Lee Dionne

Sonata No. 7, Op. 83 – Larry Weng

Sonata No. 3, Op. 28 – Melody Quah

Sonata No. 6, Op. 82 – Henry Kramer

by Sedgwick Clark

Soon after I moved to New York in the fall of 1968, Charles Munch brought the Orchestre de Paris on tour to Carnegie Hall. He programmed three of his favorites: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Barber’s Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, and the second suite from Daphnis et Chloé. The next afternoon, Jean Martinon led the orchestra in Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin Suite, which he had recently recorded for RCA with the Chicago Symphony. Having money for only one concert, I figured that I could hear Munch do those pieces anytime. Two weeks later he dropped dead of a heart attack. 

I’ll never forgive myself for missing my one opportunity to see and hear Munch in the flesh, even though I am glad to have heard Martinon’s Bartók, which turned out to be the only time I would hear him live.

These concerts come to mind as I think of my friend Andrew Kazdin, who died on Monday after a four-year battle with cancer. I didn’t know he was ill and hadn’t seen him or spoken with him since running into him a couple of years ago at Lincoln Center. Like his protégé at Columbia Records, Steven Epstein, who wrote an affectionate appreciation of Andy and his work for MusicalAmerica.com on Wednesday, I knew and admired several Kazdin recordings before I met him. Many were by Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic. Boulez spoke highly of Andy, and indeed they were a perfect team, for they were both fanatical about clarity of detail and ensemble perfection.

Andy let me attend many Boulez recording sessions at Manhattan Center. Foremost in my memory is the mind-boggling sonority conjured in the ballroom’s immense acoustic in Stravinsky’s Firebird, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, and Varèse’s Arcana, superbly captured by Andy’s army of microphones. His multi-miking technique was controversial, to say the least, and the golden-ear crowd consistently panned his productions. Andy didn’t mind bad reviews as much as he did critics who claimed to know how he had achieved his results. He did not suffer fools gladly, for he knew his craft absolutely—and an extraordinary range of other subjects as well.

One of those subjects was pizza. Wherever Andy went to make a recording—Cleveland, Israel, Los Angeles, Marlboro—he first scoped out the town’s best reputed pizza parlor. He had to have pizza on Friday nights. In all his travels he thought Grimaldi’s, underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, was the tops. We had planned to go together one Friday night for years but, I’m very sorry to say, never got around to it.  

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

12/1. Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Daniel Harding. Mahler: Symphony No. 10 (Deryck Cooke performing version).

by Sedgwick Clark

I’ve had cymbals and triangles on the brain. I was obsessed with them the other day because I had just heard the New York Philharmonic under Bernard Haitink play Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. The climax of the slow movement was punctuated by fortissimo cymbal and triangle (I’ll spare you talk about editions and how he intermingled Haas instrumental details with the purported use of Nowak), and the players assaulted the ear with unrestrained vengeance—crude, brittle, monochromatic, as sensuous as the screech of the subway downstairs. The players only did what most percussionists do when confronted with an ff sign, which is to create as much noise as possible until the conductor says to cool it. I hasten to add that in all other respects the performance was admirable and the audience gratifyingly silent. But why Haitink allowed the artillery to blast away with such violence at a moment of such transfigured release escapes me still.

The Mariinsky cymbals at the orchestra’s Carnegie Hall Tchaikovsky festival, which I rhapsodized about last week are still shimmering in my ears. Like the Curtis Institute of Music triangle in Rossini’s Overture to La gazza ladra back in February 1984 at the same venue, I don’t think I’ll ever forget that hauntingly musical sound. And from cymbals, no less!

Is it the player, the conductor, the instrument, or the hall who/that bears the most responsibility? I’d bet on the conductor. Leading the Mariinsky, as we all know, was Valery Gergiev, and at the head of Curtis’s student orchestra was Sergiu Celibidache, age 72, making his American debut. John Rockwell in the Times called the concert “about as revelatory an experience, both thrilling and thought-provoking, as this writer has encountered in 25 years of regular concert-going.” Googling John’s review last night, I see that he even referred approvingly to “the tiny ping of the triangle.” Celi, who was known to rehearse details without end, must have worked with his young player for hours, explaining patiently why less is infinitely more. That feathery ping resounded in Carnegie’s pre-renovation acoustic with unearthly beauty and color, a philosophical statement on its own.

Koussy and Springsteen

Note to the cynics among us: Did you see in MusicalAmerica.com (11/23) that Serge Koussevitzky’s 1940 recording of Roy Harris’s Third Symphony was selected along with Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run for the 2012 Grammy Hall of Fame? Yes, there’s only one classical entry out of 25, but someone picked a great one.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

11/29 Metropolitan Opera House. Metropolitan Opera/Yannick Nézet-Seguin; Jonas Kaufmann (Faust), René Pape (Méphistophélès), Marina Poplavskaya (Marguerite). Gounod: Faust.

by Sedgwick Clark

One would have cough thought it a TB ward in February. But, no, it was Carnegie Hall’s opening cough night in October. Yo-Yo Ma’s pianississimos in Tchaikovsky’s Andante cough cough cantabile took the breath away from the non-coughers at Carnegie Hall’s opening night (10/5). Too bad the coughers couldn’t hold their breaths because they missed some truly ravishing playing by the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev as well.

Traditionally, Russian orchestras have been praised for their excitement but rarely for refinement. My previous concert encounters with the frequently under-rehearsed Mariinsky had left me unprepared for its virtuosic ensemble, perfect sectional balances, and sheer tonal luxuriousness. Not a coarse bar to be heard in this welcome Tchaikovsky festival. Even the cymbal player avoided shattering ears, eliciting striking color and shimmer from his dangerous instrument.

The festival included Tchaikovsky’s six numbered symphonies, Rococo Variations with Ma, and the First Piano Concerto with the latest Tchaikovsky Competition winner, 20-year-old Daniil Trifonov, who emphasized melodic detail over structural rigor, caressing the keys with generous, colorful tone; Gergiev’s accompaniment never overbalanced him. Of the Tchaikovsky symphonies I heard, Nos. 3 and 4 favored luminous sonority and plush attacks over searing intensity.

Scheherazade and Shostakovich’s First Symphony were festival interlopers. The Rimsky used to turn up each season, but it’s played relatively rarely these days. Gergiev was content to revel in the score’s sensuous glories, especially in a seductively broad third-movement, but the finale’s turbulent shipwreck fell short of Witold Rowicki and the Warsaw Philharmonic’s memorable maelstrom at Carnegie in January 1974. The Shostakovich, which in lesser hands can fall apart structurally, turned out to be my favorite of Gergiev’s performances. The second-movement scherzo, especially, was thrillingly precise.

I have to go back to November 1973 at Carnegie for the most unforgettable Tchaikovsky performance I’ve ever heard: a hair-raising Francesca da Rimini during several concerts of Russian music with the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Philharmonic under Gennady Rozhdestvensky. (Fairness report: In 2005 Gergiev and Mariinsky played a helluva Francesca in Carnegie too.) Also on that series was the fastest Glinka Ruslan and Lyudmilla Overture one could possibly imagine, with every hemidemisemiquaver astonishingly in place, and Tchaik’s Fifth. In my mind’s eye I can still see the timpanist marking the march tempo of the finale’s coda, showily brandishing his sticks in the air as the music strode to its triumphant conclusion. Whatever happened to such joy and flair in music-making?

The unique character and commitment of the Mravinsky-trained Leningraders was simply overwhelming. No orchestra today matches that style of playing—certainly not the current internationalized version that now exists under the St. Petersburg name—and I doubt we’ll hear its like ever again. Get the electrifying Deutsche Grammophon recordings made in London on tour in 1960 of Rozhdestvensky in Francesca and Mravinsky in the last three Tchaikovsky symphonies. Imagine the intensity level ratcheted up tenfold, and you’ll have an idea of what I heard that evening.

Anecdote time: The fall in 1973 when the Leningrad played, I had a brief stint with the firm handling Carnegie Hall’s p.r., and I was involved in a Times photo shoot of Rozhdestvensky for a feature in Arts & Leisure. One of my colleagues offered the conductor a comb before the photo was taken. He ran the tines over his bald pate, smiled broadly, and said, “It’s for my brains.”

Haitink at the Phil

Bernard Haitink led the New York Philharmonic last week for the first time since 1978. Zachary Woolfe spent three-quarters of his Times review castigating the orchestra for its conservative programming this season, exemplified by Haitink’s selection of Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Beethoven’s “Pastorale” Symphony. Zack is correct about the overall programming, but the trend is epidemic throughout the world’s orchestras, even in San Francisco, if they wish to stay in business.  He was also correct in judging the performances to be “eloquent” and “enjoyable.” I heard the Tuesday performance (11/15) and particularly warmed to the performances of the orchestra’s Principal Cellist Carter Brey and Principal Violist Cynthia Phelps in the Strauss.

But, to come full circle, I bring up this concert to point out that the audience was uncommonly quiet and respectful, which I expect at Carnegie but not at Lincoln Center. I’ve not been to a Tuesday concert at the Philharmonic in years, choosing to attend on Thursday nights despite the noisier audience. The orchestra players seemed relaxed and enjoying themselves. It showed in their music-making.

Haitink, who was Musical America’s Musician of the Year in 2007, leads more standard repertory for the second of his two programs with the Phil this season: Haydn’s “Miracle” Symphony and Bruckner’s Seventh. Let’s hope he is invited back soon.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

11/18 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Bernard Haitink. Haydn: Symphony No. 96 (“Miracle”). Bruckner: Symphony No. 7.  (Also 11/19.)

11/19 Carnegie Hall. Baltimore Symphony/Marin Alsop; Caroline Dhavernas, Speaker (Joan of Arc); Ronald Guttman, Speaker (Brother Dominic); other soloists; various choruses. Honegger: Joan of Arc at the Stake.