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Peter Lieberson on Bridge

Friday, December 5th, 2014

Music of Peter Lieberson Volume 3

Piano Concerto No. 3

Viola Concerto

Stephen Beck, piano; Roberto Diaz, viola;

Odense Symphony Orchestra, Scott Yoo, conductor

 

Peter Lieberson (1946-2011) was a composer capable of creating affecting works in a wide range of styles. He was well known for collaborations with his wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; songs resplendent in lyricism. On the other hand, many of his earlier compositions were written in a more modernist vein. Later concertos for piano and viola point out that the composer covered a great deal of musical terrain between the two aforementioned approaches .

“Leviathan,” the first movement of Piano Concerto No. 3 (2003), pits incisive piano lines against muscular gestures from the orchestra. Alternating between richly hued and fragile passages, in “Leviathan” Lieberson convincingly threads his way through an intricate structure. “Canticle,” the piece’s second movement, revels in an extended triadic language. At its outset, roles are exchanged; here the piano is often the more assertive party with the orchestra supplying a lush and sustained background. Eventually there is a changing of the tide, with gentle gestures from the piano being offset by arcing lines and punctuating percussion from the orchestra. The concerto’s final movement is a Rondo. The main motive here, a polytonal chordal cascade, is presented in various permutations and is contrasted by far flung episodes. Of considerable interest are the sudden contrasts one finds here. Varying motives and meters, and transformations of harmony and orchestration provide a bevy of (pleasant) surprises. Soloist Steven Beck plays with thoughtful grace and, where required, strongly articulated virtuosity. Scott Yoo leads the Odense Symphony in an assured performance that takes the concerto’s many contrasting sections and technical demands in stride.

The first movement of Lieberson’s Viola Concerto (1992, revised in 2003) is a catalog of the many ways that you can treat the interval of a minor third. It serves as a motto in the solo part, but also infiltrates the orchestra quite thoroughly: from the flutes right down to the double basses. The second movement, a Scherzo, keeps the minor third around, but often treats it as an ostinato from which ornate altered scales emerge. The piece’s final movement features an expansive and ardent Adagio section, with some lovely cadenza passages and a tapering denouement, capped off (relatively late in the game) by a boisterous Allegro. This features a reintroduction of (you guessed it) that minor third in a variety of new guises. The Viola Concerto is an excellent example of a composer restricting himself to a particular palette, yet allowing a plethora of permutations from it to emerge. And while there are passages in which harmonic centers are ambiguous, the overall musical language of this piece is more conservative than Piano Concerto No. 3. Not that this is a bad thing; it demonstrates the composer’s versatility. One only wishes that Lieberson could still be here to enjoy the stirring rendition of this piece provided by soloist Roberto Diaz and, once again, the stalwart Odense Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Yoo. This is one of my favorite recordings of 2014.

 

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A 25th Anniversary Tour for Wim Vandekeybus

Tuesday, November 25th, 2014

By Rachel Straus

In the 1980s, punk rock, Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” and Mike Tyson’s boxing championships made the ear-splitting, the nocturnal, and the hard-hitting de rigueur. Contemporary dance followed, becoming faster, more brazen and muscular. When the Belgian Wim Vandekeybus arrived on the scene with his first work, “What the Body Does Not Remember” (1987), New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff began her review with these six slamming words: “Tough, brutal, playful, ironic and terrific.” So it was with great anticipation that I attended, at Madrid’s Teatros de Canal on November 23, the reprisal of the dance, which is making a two-year world tour in celebration of the work’s 25th anniversary.

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The first scene of “What the Body Does Not Remember” did not disappoint. Maria Kolegova and Livia Balážová, of Vandekeybus’s company Ultima Vez, treated the floor like it was a wrestler, bouncing off and being mysteriously pinned down by it. Meanwhile Zebastián Méndez Marín’s thudding and scraping sounds on a miked table produced a vision of an invisible combatant seeking to destroy the flailing dancers with what sounded like a sledge hammer and a whip. Francis Gahide’s lighting furthered the sense of gladiatorial imprisonment: horizontal streaks of light produced the illusion of a series of bars that the dancers appeared to be caught in. This physical and sonic intensity could not, and did not, last for the 90-minute duration of the work.

Photo by Danny Willems

Photo by Danny Willems

What ensued, instead, was a series of theater games, which were a letdown. White bricks were thrown and expertly caught by the eight dancers. In another scene, dancers wrapped in brightly colored towels walked across the diagonal and then were stripped of this covering by another passerby. With little on except underpants, the dancers’ near nudity created titters among the audience seated in the sold-out house. Later, in a series of tableaus, or proto group-portrait selfies, Vanderkeybus turned the ensemble into perfectly posed families, each person more confident than the other. The center of the work involved three men continual frisking three women, who were standing in a wide leg-and-arm “X” position. The experience of watching this wasn’t frightening as much as confounding. As the frisking was repeated, two female performers pretended to begin to enjoy the act. Their occasional erotic overtures to their aggressors, however, were hardly convincing. It’s difficult to portray the Stockholm Syndrome without providing motive.

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All of the scenes related above demonstrate aspects of human aggression. But the treatment of this subject in its various iterations felt jejune rather than profound. They possessed in aggregate the impact of the mundane, such as the different pieces of clothing that the performers put on and cast off. In contrast, the expertly shot, minute-long promotional video of the dance is riveting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18pe0-8fjpY).

Why did the live performance not deliver? Part of the reason could stem from performance fatigue. These eight dancers have been reenacting “What the Body Does Not Remember” for two years. In the work there are no dance steps to hide behind. The performers must interact with each other like it is the first time. To convincingly do so, night-after-night, they need to be brilliant actors. They are brilliant physical artists, and that is saying a lot, but for the purposes of this work, it is not enough. Some works can’t be performed too much. If they do, they lose their punch.

I haven’t mentioned the music yet because I’m trying to erase it. According to the plentiful literature produced by Vandekeybus about “What the Body Does Not Remember,” which includes this resource pack (http://ultimaveztour.co.uk/UltimaVez-ResourcePack.pdf), composers Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch responded to what they saw in the dancers’ rehearsal process. What they came up with sounds like a cross between an action movie sound track, an amateur garage band improvisation, and the music of Theodor Adorno.

 

 

 

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Expunged ‘Tannhäuser’ opens Debate on Artistic Freedom

Friday, May 17th, 2013

By Rebecca Schmid

The tolerance of German audiences for extreme stage productions is a source of national pride and the envy of many abroad. But a production of Tannhäuser at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein which had to be stripped down to concert performance last week has set off a national debate about the sanctity of a director’s artistic freedom. Two seasons ago, the Bayreuth Festival mounted the same opera in a new production by Sebastian Baumgartner which places the heroine, Elisabeth, in a “biogas” chamber. It caused a moral outcry in the press, but the notion of her being “recycled” rather than outright gassed appears to have kept the staging in repertoire. In Düsseldorf, at the Oper am Rhein, the director Burkhard C. Kosminski went a step too far. Naked extras were already being gassed during the overture. An entire family was shot after its members had their heads shaven by soldiers. Venus was dressed in an SS uniform; Elisabeth was raped and burned. The boos in the small city of Düsseldorf started 30 minutes into the production, according to Der Spiegel, and some audience members were so traumatized that they needed medical attention. Criticism from the Jewish community was just the icing on the cake. But Kosminski refused to modify his vision, for fear of betraying his artistic principles. Less than a week after its premiere on May 4, the opera was reduced to a concert version.

The obvious issue, which audience members were quick to point out, is that Nazis and persecuted Jews have nothing to do with Tannhäuser. The opera is about a pilgrim who leaves Venus’ world of love-making, enters a song competition on the Wartburg, and finds redemption in the saintly Elisabeth. An editorial in the German magazine Cicero , dedicated to the intersection of arts and politics, observes that a director turns to Nazis when he has no good ideas of own. The author continues to criticize Germany’s lavish public funding for theater, calling Hitler its “patron saint.” It may be worth noting that the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, a shared entity of the nearby cities of Düssseldorf and Duisburg, nearly entered financial meltdown last season. Was the production a desperate attempt to lend the company a cutting-edge status capable of competing with the many other opera houses in West Germany (let’s not forget that the reunited country possesses altogether one-seventh of the world’s companies)?

In an interview with Der Spiegel this week, Kosminski states the “real scandal” at hand is “censorship in the arts.” He insists that the production intended to mourn, not ridicule, the victims of World War Two, describing himself as “terrified” by criticism from the Jewish community. Just yesterday, he won the support of the president of the Akademie der Künste, Klaus Staeck, who has written a letter demanding that the production be reinstated. “Art—regardless of its quality!—is not a superfluous luxury,” he argues. Is it then justified to use art as a vehicle for emotional torture? And is quality not an important criterium when good tax money is being invested? From a purely literary point of view, there is little to no basis for casting Tannhäuser as a war criminal who is forced into the SS guard. Surely Greek myth is more important to understanding the opera than Wagner’s indirect connection to the Holocaust as a role model of Hitler.

Although the opera derives its plot in part from Thuringian legend, there is little in the way of nationalist undertones compared to later works such as Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger, Parsifal and, to some extent, the Ring cycle. Patrice Chéreau caused a scandal upon the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival in 1976 by setting the cycle at the time of early German industrialization. This is a loaded topic, given the industrial killings that followed during World War Two, but the production opened the door to historical allegory on the Festspielhaus stage. Stefan Herheim’s 2008 production of Parsifal, which opens in the Villa Wahnfried in the 1880s and ends in the Federal Republic of Bonn, plumbs the possibilities even further. The appearance of swastika flags and black-and-white footage from the Second World War remains controversial, but Herheim caused the audience to think critically about the inextricability of Wagner’s works from his time and the institution of Bayreuth itself.

Kosminski, through his graphic depictions of the violence and genocide, crossed a threshold that was already at breaking point. Although I didn’t see the production first-hand, the audience’s reaction would indicate that he lacked the sophistication of a director such as Chéreau or Herheim. The exploitation of World War Two—not just to artistic ends but in the media and in academia—has reached a point of saturation in Germany that, thanks to the reaction at the Oper am Rhein, should finally be considered cause for concern. Artistic freedom does not license a director to indulge his darkest fantasies or work out psychological issues at the expense of an opera. Do we go to the theater to be provoked, reviled and confused, or enlightened and transported by an interpretation that allows us to penetrate a given work with more understanding and appreciation? Wagner may remain a thorn in the cultural consciousness, but it is not paying respect to anyone—neither the composer, the German people, nor the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust—to use his stage works as vehicles for cheap, shock tactics under the pretence of creating socially relevant art. As austerity plagues Europe, it is even more shameful to invest in stage productions that ruin rather than illuminate an opera.

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RCO Anniversary Extravaganza

Friday, April 12th, 2013

By Rebecca Schmid

If tradition means not preserving the ashes but fanning the flames, in the words of Gustav Mahler, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is celebrating its 125th anniversary with one foot firmly planted in the past and the other striding fearlessly into the future. Between a tour of six continents this season, the orchestra gave an anniversary concert on April 10 at its home concert hall, the Concertgebouw, founded the same year as the orchestra, in 1888, with an official opening on April 11. For modern-day residents of the Netherlands, this month also marks an important time in politics. Queen Beatrix will soon cede the throne to Prince Willem-Alexander, making him the country’s first King since 1890. The event honored the royal family, in attendance with Princess Máxima—soon-to-be Queen and the orchestra’s official patron—with red carpeting and black-tie dress. But the RCO, a crowned exception on the Netherlands’ tenuous landscape of budget slashes to the arts, does not take its status for granted. The entire proceeds of the concert, which featured three soloists—Thomas Hampson, Janine Jansen and Lang Lang—in a program of late 19th and turn-of-the-century repertoire alongside a new work by Dutch composer Bob Zimmerman, will be invested in educational outreach.

The RCO, which enjoyed close relationships with Mahler and Strauss under the 50-year tenure of Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg, has not only kept this music flowing in its veins but performs in a hall which provides an ideal acoustic environment for the luxurious strings, golden brass and sumptuous dynamic architecture that emerges under Music Director Mariss Jansons (winner of this year’s Ernst von Siemens Prize, otherwise known as the classical world’s ‘Nobel’). The Concertgebouw was modelled after the Gewandhaus in Leipzig but, unlike its German counterpart, survived World War Two. Inaugurating a new era for the building, projection screens hung in gilded frames on each side of the stage, providing a canvas for historical images and artists’ commentary much in the style of the Beyond the Score series initiated by the Chicago Symphony or the multi-media presentations of the New World Symphony in Miami.

Hampson, before taking the stage for Mahler songs from the Knaben Wunderhorn cycle and Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, praised the RCO musicians on video for a “desire to be true to the master” that is “hugely more evident than in other places,” referring to composer as “one of their own.” The ambient whirring that opened and closed the footage may have lent his comments a clichéd tone, but the unforced beauty of the orchestra in Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld or the perfectly shaped rubati of Rheinlegenden lived up to the baritone’s elation. Hampson, one of few singers today who is able to capture Mahler’s searing irony, was at his best in the final Lob des hohen Verstandes, supported by the orchestra’s playful woodwinds and the fresh energy of its low strings. The swelling of individual lines that Jansons was able to achieve in Rheinlegenden found an even more powerful outlet in the suite from Strauss’ Rosenkavalier, penned in 1944 with the relationship of the Marschallin and Octavian at its center. Waltzes floated through the hall with warm nostalgia, and slow, tender passages glowed with burning intensity under Jansons’ inviting gestures.

He may be the only conductor who could have brought together string players from the Concertgebouw, his Bavarian Radio Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Berlin Philharmonic—the latter being the only two orchestras where he guest conducts. The ensemble created an impressive homogeneity of tone in the Elégie from Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, with a silky pianissimo and crescendi that breathed further and further into celestial rapture. Saint-Saëns’ Introduction et Rondo capriccioso received an affecting performance with Dutch violinist Jansen as soloist, whose fierce communication powers lent fast passages vibrancy and spunk. Lang, having described the third movement of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto onscreen as a “kind of war,” demonstrated a virtuosity so clean as to border on mechanical but created a wild energy with the orchestra in the final stretch.

Zimmerman’s Komt vrieden in het ronden, a neo-Romantic set of variations on a well-known Dutch folk song, fit well with the rest of the program and gave equal spotlight to all three soloists—an occasion that is not likely to be repeated. The audience laughed in amusement upon Hampson’s first entrance, while Lang was the King of Piano Cool as he read through the score. Jansen invested her lines with more personal expression in the music’s circular exchanges built on conventional harmonic schemes. The program opened with the prelude from Wagner’s Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which was performed for the inauguration of the building 125 years ago. Jansons drew a sound that was rich but never bombastic. The conductor’s humility was more than apparent during standing ovations for the extravagant occasion. Despite a high dose of old world charm, the evening was mostly memorable for the RCO’s fresh, exciting musicianship that invested even the most familiar Romantic works with new meaning. Surely this is the essential ingredient for every orchestra—even if it doesn’t bear the title of the “world’s greatest,” as bestowed by Gramophone Magazine in 2008—as its preserves its legacy while forging a path into the complex demands of the 21st century.

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Where does the Concertgebouw Stand?

Thursday, February 21st, 2013

by Sedgwick Clark

NOTE: BEGINNING THIS WEEK, I’LL BE POSTING MY BLOG ON THURSDAYS AT NOON RATHER THAN WEDNESDAYS.

Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and its current music director, Mariss Jansons, stopped by Carnegie Hall last week (2/13 and 14) for a pair of concerts to celebrate the ensemble’s 125th anniversary. They were a great success, as always, with everyone on my aisle burbling over its glorious sound and virtuosity.

No doubt whatsoever, it is a great orchestra, and for many of my over-40 years of hearing it in concert it was my favorite European orchestra. But the dark, burnished sonority of yore, cultivated to such full-toned splendor during Bernard Haitink’s tenure (1963-1988), was eviscerated by Riccardo Chailly’s superficial musicianship (1988-2004). And the turnover of orchestral musicians that occurred internationally in the last two decades of the 20th century brought forth a new generation of players who pride clarity over rich, bass-oriented textures. The only orchestra I know that has managed to retain its early-1970s persona resides in Philadelphia, and it remains to be seen what effect its new music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, will have.

So what effect has Jansons had on the RCO? While one can’t deny his expertise on the podium, I don’t find much personality in his conducting—of the Austro-German repertoire anyway. He was at his best in the first concert, in his accompaniment to Leonidas Kavakos’s kaleidoscopic brilliance in Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2. Still, it was little more than an expert rendering of the score. Listen to soloist Zoltán Székely and the Concertgebouw in the live world premiere recording under Willem Mengelberg in 1939 for those little nudges of temperament I missed with Jansons or the 1958 Stern/Bernstein/New York Philharmonic studio recording (in its judiciously remixed Prince Charles Edition reissue) for no-holds-barred emotional drama.

Recalling Jansons’ devastating Mahler Sixth Symphony a few years ago on LSO LIVE, I looked forward to the Mahler First, which followed intermission. But despite the orchestra’s powerful, pinpoint playing, the Wayfarer themes didn’t sing, the third movement’s Parodie sections were poker-faced, and in general the slow music was impatient and tempo changes were exaggerated. A disappointment.

Little need be said about the next evening’s Strauss Death and Transfiguration and Bruckner Seventh. Over the weekend I pulled out my recordings of Strauss’s own 1926 Staatskapelle Berlin recording, the 1942 Philadelphia and 1952 NBC Toscaninis, 1960 Monteux/San Francisco, and 1983 Haitink/Concertgebouw of the former, and the 1951Furtwängler and 1974 Karajan, both with Berlin, of the latter. All were different, all sublime in their individual ways. Jansons sped up where Strauss marks Sehr breit (“Very broad”) for the transfiguration theme and sailed through the Wagner tuba threnody after the Bruckner’s second-movement climax. Inexplicable.

David Hamilton (1935-2013)

Another of my heroes is gone. David Hamilton, 78, died at home on February 19 after a long illness. He reviewed records and wrote occasional features for High Fidelity when I began building my record collection in college, and I relied on his insights into 20th-century music, especially that of Stravinsky. His initials at the end of a review meant “must read,” even if I had never heard of the composer.

David was a Princeton grad (A.B., 1956; M.F.A., music history, 1960), where he was the music and recording librarian, 1961-65. He was assistant music editor and then music editor at W.W. Norton, 1965-74, then became music critic of the Nation in 1968 and wrote for many publications during his lifetime. I had the pleasure of editing (if that’s the word, for his copy was immaculate) articles of his at Keynote and Musical America. His Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia (1987) is one of my most frequently used reference books. For many years, he was producer of historical Met Opera broadcasts and wrote notes for the company’s program booklet.

One of the benefits of working in the classical division of Philips and Mercury Records in the early 1970s was that I got to know many writers who were formative in my musical taste. It’s easy to remember my first lunch with David: We were each going to hear Boulez conduct the Philharmonic that evening in what turned out to be one of the great Mahler Sixths I ever heard, and with a grin he pulled out the Mahler Critical Edition score from his briefcase.

We often saw each other at Boulez concerts. The conductor’s Rug Concerts were nearly always sold out, and long lines of the converted would form to get the best seats on the floor. I always arrived early and when the doors opened would storm up the escalator as the ushers shouted, “No running allowed.” (Shades of elementary school!) When David was there, I would save him room. But one night, an all-Schoenberg Rug Concert was only about half full. I remarked after a striking performance of Pierrot Lunaire that it was too bad it hadn’t sold out. “Well, look at it this way,” he replied. “Have you ever seen so many people at a Schoenberg concert?”

David succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease, one of those ironies that we who remain find so baffling in those of such extraordinary intellects. His long-time friend Sheila Porter was with him the afternoon before he died and told me that she and his nurse chose James Levine’s Met recording of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro for him to hear.

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Ultraschall as pan-New Music Haven

Sunday, January 20th, 2013

By Rebecca Schmid

Berlin may be the capital residence for young composers today, and no other time of year makes this more apparent than the Ultraschall Festival for New Music. They gathered in strong numbers during freezing temperatures for a concert on January 19 at the Haus des Rundfunks, where Brad Lubman led the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in works by Johannes Maria Staud, Michael Jarell, Chaya Chernowin and Georg Friedrich Haas—only the last of whom was not present because he is moving to New York. The concert was moderated by Co-Intendant Magarete Zander, a broadcaster with Kulturradio RBB which co-hosts with the festival with the former West Berlin station Deutschlandradiokultur.

Staud, a young Austrian composer and former student of Jarell whose commissions include works for both the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic, mentioned in onstage discussion how unusual it was to be programmed back-to-back with one’s teacher. His work Contrebande (On Comparative Meterology II), which premiered with the Cleveland Orchestra in 2010, reveals the influence of Jarell in its non-conformist language and ability to narrate through intricate orchestration. Staud takes the listener’s hand through this approximately 18-minute series of miniatures based on excerpts from a Der andere Herbst by the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, exploiting the full orchestra with melodies that are tossed organically between sections and textures from piano clusters to hollow blows that do not exist for their own sake but to build an inner drama.

Jarell, when asked about mentoring his students, said that a composer has no choice but to be an honest with himself—a precept that is more obvious in theory than practice. The Swiss native’s Sillages—Congruences II for flute, oboe and clarinet and orchestra (2005), originally conceived for flutist Emmanuel Pahud, clarinettist Paul Meyer and oboist François Leleux, undertakes a sonic exploration of rippling water that draws inspiration from the artist Alberto Giacometti. With this in mind, the first section of the approximately 26-minute work moves mystically through space like the sculptor’s signature figures that stretch their bodies inexorably toward heaven. The trio, performed by ensemble recherche, twitters above an atmospheric orchestra, breaking still surfaces. The second part recalls Jarell’s Flute Concerto for Pahud in its frenzied dialogue, creating tremendous tension that is resolved in the leading winds.

Chernowin’s The Quiet (2010) similarly moves from whispering, creaking and muted percussion that evoke the beginning of a snowstorm until the bassoons and double bassoons break through the surface and usher in an ominous swarm of musical ideas—an avalanche turned upside down, in the composer’s words. The most haunting work of the evening was Haas’ …sodaß ich’s hernach mit einem Blick gleichsam wie ein schönes Bild…im Geist übersehe for chamber string ensemble (1990/91), inspired by a W.A. Mozart letter about the act of transforming an idea into a finished work. Fragments from the Sonata for Violin and Piano in B-Major (KV 454) emerge like ghosts out of an extended stretch of subdued squeals, pizzicato, and col legno strokes before receding again into emptiness. One could almost see the glow of the melodies as they unfurled—so fleeting that one could not catch them—before the strings resumed their relentless search.

Lubman, asked by Zander if one could find such a program in the U.S., could only laugh. “In the U.S.?” he asked rhetorically, explaining that smaller ensembles dominate the scene. A concert of purely contemporary orchestra music was a non-existent breed, he said, praising Germany for the value it places on culture. Of course, the history is not so simple. The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, founded in 1946 by Radio in the American Sector (RIAS), is one of several broadcast orchestras erected under American reconstruction after World War Two. The many composers who flock over the pond are, depending on one’s view, returning to their roots.

As it happens, Ultraschall’s official motto this year is to celebrate the exchange of ideas between France and Germany, once warring nations who signed the Elysée Treaty fifty years ago this month. The narrative of ‘internationality’ having come to dominate many artists’ identities, the theme can be stretched to showcase a wide range of composers—which is exactly what the festival does best. I just wonder how the Geneva-born Jarell fits into the spectrum of Franco-Allemand fraternity (Vive la Neutralité)…

Stay tuned for more on the Ultraschall Festival (January 17-27).

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An Italian, and possibly a Swiss, Symphony at the Philharmonie

Friday, January 11th, 2013

By Rebecca Schmid

Journeys have provided powerful inspiration to writers, painters and composers alike, opening eyes to new ways of seeing the world. The broadening of artists’ palettes has sometimes allowed them to capture a landscape more vividly than the natives could themselves. One only has to think of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Gauguin’s portraits of French Polynesia (colonialist considerations aside), and—at least for an outsider— Mendelssohn’s Fourth, or Italian, Symphony. Riccardo Chailly, guest conducting the Berlin Philharmonic on January 9, juxtaposed this work with Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony, which in a similar vein was likely inspired by a trip to either Switzerland or Upper Bavaria.

Bruckner is easily the most provincial Romantic composer to have entered the symphonic canon, having rarely ventured outside his native Austria and devoting much of his opus to sacred works. Passages of the opening movement of the Sixth deviate strongly from the stormy, fretful tone one associates with his symphonies, with an exotic modal brass motive and a positively sunny melody for the violins. Program notes suggest that an underlying, one could say proto-minimalist, string texture represents the motoric drive of a train, while the trumpets herald new earthly vistas. Chailly’s vigorous, scooping gestures brought out the might of the Philharmonic.

The following Adagio brims with Mahlerian stillness, which the conductor savoured to melting effect. Even if Bruckner was not referring to the Swiss Alps, he suggests a heaven on earth that sounds very close. It is also worth noting that Mahler made several changes to the symphony before it had its first full performance in 1899, 18 years after Bruckner had completed it. By the third movement, the composer has—at least stylistically—returned closer to home terrain, with menacing blows of fate and bombastic, descending tutti passages, although there is an almost classical alternation between forte and piano sections.

The finale further vacillates between the serene and the tempestuous, with declamatory Wagnerian harmonies in the brass contrasted against delicate, protesting pizzicati and a fleeting waltz-like melody that, in the context of a journey, indicates a certain wistfulness for the fatherland. The symphony ends with a fervor that Chailly brought to a resounding close. Although the horns of the Philharmonic have even more precise on other occasions, it hardly mattered in the wider scheme of this bracing performance.

Mendelssohn’s Fourth emerged with tremendous care for dynamic contrast and shape of phrase as Chailly held thorough, but unaffected, control over the orchestra. Most impressive were the perfectly-built crescendi and decrescendi that emerged, particularly in the third movement Con moto moderato, and beautifully rounded, legato lines. Mendelssohn’s economic orchestration at times calls to mind a chamber ensemble, which the Philharmonic brought out through its characteristically tight communication between sections, particularly in the last two movements.

Concert Master of the evening Daishin Kashimoto led the violins with great precision, although the sound could have been warmer in fortissimo passages. Solo Clarinettist Andreas Ottensamer played with particular finesse in the Andante movement, characterized by sensuous, swelling lines throughout the orchestra and a touch of melancholy. True to his ‘German’ spirit, Mendelssohn does not only convey the pleasures of fine wine and sunshine but a deeply introspective, nostalgic view of the world. Perhaps this is why his symphonic portrait of Italy resonates so strongly.

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Finding the Right Gimmick

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

by Sedgwick Clark

Shaham’s 1939 Dark Horse

Gil Shaham had an epiphany. After years of recognition as one of the brightest young lights of the concert circuit, the Israeli-American violinist conjured one of the most imaginative programming concepts in years. He had been struck by how many violin concertos written in the 1930s had entered the basic repertoire: Stravinsky (1931), Berg and Prokofiev Second (1935); then, in 1939 alone, the same year that Hollywood produced perhaps its greatest year ever, the Bartók, Hindemith, Walton, Britten, and Barber concertos. Since 2009 he has performed all of these but the Hindemith and Britten, and in December, when he received Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year award for 2012, he promised that he would get to those too.

But there are many other concertos on the periphery waiting to be discovered—as Dennis D. Rooney mentioned in his tribute to Shaham in the Musical America Directory—waiting for the right performer to bring them alive to a public that loves the tried and true but welcomes a little spice too. The Szymanowski Second (1932) is one; Henryk Szeryng introduced it to me at a New York Philharmonic concert nearly 40 years ago. And after four decades of over a hundred concerts a season, countless radio broadcasts, and the collection and partial deaccession of over 20,000 LPs and 10,000 CDs, I’m about to be introduced to another ’30s violin concerto at a Philharmonic concert—this time courtesy of Gil Shaham, who gave the Walton concerto such a virtuoso turn with this orchestra last spring. The work is Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Concerto funebre (1939). Astonishingly (to me, anyway), I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a note of Hartmann’s music. Shaham will perform this concerto with the New York Philharmonic and David Zinman on March 15, 16, 17, and 20. Who knows? As with Szymanowski it may be a new love affair. I’ll let you know.

As a warmup to hearing Gil again in concert, I listened this past weekend to two Shaham CDs on his own Canary Classics label, which he founded several years ago when his previous label, Deutsche Grammophon, didn’t want to record a disc of Fauré chamber music. An all-Prokofiev disc (ATM CD 1555) includes the two violin sonatas, Opp. 80 and 94, the Five Melodies, Op. 35, and three Heifetz transcriptions sandwiched between the larger works. It’s a great CD, with the violinist contributing subtleties of dynamic shading and phrasing that elevated these works far beyond my previous estimation; he is ideally partnered by his sister, Orli Shaham. The sound, superbly produced by Eric Wen, matches the performers in its breathtaking realism. My preferred recording of the sonatas was previously the ’70s Perlman-Ashkenazy (most recently paired on an RCA CD with Perlman’s peerless recording of the Second Concerto with Leinsdorf and Boston). Henceforth, I’ll reach for the Shahams. Another superior Shaham CD on Canary is called “Virtuoso Violin Works” by Sarasate (CC07). This time Gil shares violin duties with his wife, Adele Anthony, and the pianist is Akira Eguchi. The four tracks requiring orchestral accompaniment feature the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León conducted by Alejandro Posada.

The Rest Is Noise in London

Another brilliant programming connection will dominate London’s Southbank Centre next season. It takes the subject of American music critic Alex Ross’s award-winning book The Rest Is Noise as a stepping-off point, and I quote:

“In 2007 Alex Ross wrote the seminal book The Rest Is Noise – listening to the Twentieth Century. Throughout 2013 we bring the book alive, with nearly 100 concerts, performances, films, talks and debates. We will take you on a chronological journey through the most important music of the 20th century to dramatise the massive political and social upheavals. The London Philharmonic Orchestra, with over 30 concerts, is the backbone of the festival that reveals the stories behind the rich, exhilarating and sometimes controversial compositions that have changed the way we listen forever.”

BBC Four is also involved in the project, assuring that the Foggy City will be awash in 20th-century music next season (see link).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2012/bbc-four-southbank-partnership.html

NOW, I ask you, my good friends at Lincoln Center: Here’s a concept inspired by an internationally acclaimed book by an American author, published in America (Farrar, Straus, Giroux). With all your resources and a campus made for a project of such scope, why . . . ? But that’s a hopeless query. The Brits beat us to it, and no arts org on this coast is likely to jump off the 20th-century music cliff in today’s economic climate.

A New Carlos Kleiber Bio—in ENGLISH!

Alison Ames informs me that Corresponding with Carlos: A biography of Carlos Kleiber by Charles Barber has been published by Kindle, available through Amazon for $52.69. The reader reviews, which seem astute, are raves, and two of the reviewers find the price well worth it. Here’s the link:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=Carlos+Kleiber&x=0&y=0

American readers frustrated by the existence of three bios in German may click on this link for info (they’ll still be frustrated, of course, but at least the info will be available to them):

http://www.amazon.de/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?__mk_de_DE=%C5M%C5Z%D5%D1&url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Kleiber%2C+Carlos&x=0&y=0

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

3/15 Metropolitan Opera. Verdi: Macbeth. Gianandrea Noseda (cond.). Thomas Hampson, baritone; Nadja Michael, soprano; Dimitri Pittas, tenor ; Günther Groissböck, bass.

3/16 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/David Zinman; Gil Shaham, violin. Hartmann: Concerto funebre. Beethoven: Symphony Nos. 1 and 3.

3/17 Walter Reade Theater.1:30 The Callas Effect. 3:00 Callas on Film.

3/17 Alice Tully Hall. Vadim Repin, violin; Itamar Golan, piano. Janácek: Violin Sonata. Ravel: Violin Sonata. Violin Sonata No. 2. Chausson: Poème. Ravel: Tzigane.

3/18 Carnegie Hall. American Symphony Orchestra/Leon Botstein; Stephen Powell, Lori Guilbeau, Robert Chafin, Burak Bilgili, Corey Bix, soloists; Collegiate Chorale Singers. Schmidt: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (in concert).

3/21 Rockefeller University. Rachel Barton Pine, violin. Paganini: Caprices (24).

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New York Was His “Howieland”

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

by Sedgwick Clark

It’s a most improbable New York story: Broadway salutes a theater critic, of all things, by dimming its lights during prime box-office time prior to curtain. How often has that happened? No one would have been more astonished to receive this honor than its recipient, Howard Kissel, theater critic of the New York Daily News for 20 years, who died on Friday (2/24) at age 69 of complications from a 2010 liver transplant.

Howard and I shared a Midwestern upbringing and undying gratitude for living in New York City and being able to partake of its wonders. He was as unassuming, knowledgeable, and gentlemanly a member of the Fourth Estate as one could imagine. His critical judgments were direct, perceptive, and never gratuitously personal, laced with a droll, understated wit that always left one smiling. I had met Howard at the Russian Tea Room back in the 1970s when he was arts editor of Women’s Wear Daily and W magazine but only got to know him well in the ’90s. In between, he appeared in his one and only film as Woody Allen’s manager in Starlight Memories (1980). He wrote a biography of David Merrick and a study of Stella Adler’s teaching techniques. We saw each other frequently at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, when we would compare notes and I could grill him about shows I should try to sandwich between my concertgoing. I never received a bum steer.

An S.R.O. audience at Howard’s funeral yesterday shared many tears and much laughter as he was remembered. His sisters, Anne and Judy, affectionately eulogized their big brother, saying that he always seemed to be from another planet, which they called “Howieland.” A friend recounted that Howard had been on a list for a liver transplant for some time, but when the hospital finally called he discovered he had tickets that evening for City Center’s Encores! presentation of Stephen Sondheim’s cult musical Anyone Can Whistle and opted for the show. It would be months before he got a second chance for a new liver.

Musical America was fortunate to have Howard writing theater reviews for its Web site on occasion in recent years, and he blogged under the title “The Cultural Tourist” for the Daily News and, more recently, the Huffington Post, in which he filed his last, bittersweet entry three days before his death. Both the News and the Times printed obits worthy of his charmed life.

And then, on Tuesday at 7 p.m., Broadway dimmed its lights for a minute in recognition of one of its own.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

3/2 Carnegie Hall. Vienna Philharmonic/Lorin Maazel. Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 1, 5, and 7.

3/5 Zankel Hall. Making Music, Jeremy Geffen, moderator. Soloistes XXI. Saariaho: Echo; Nuits, Adieux; Lonh; From the Grammar of Dreams; Tag des Jahrs.

3/6 Carnegie Hall. Boston Symphony/John Oliver. Tanglewood Festival Chorus/John Oliver. Christine Brewer, soprano; Michelle DeYoung, mezzo; Simon O’Neill, tenor; Eric Owens, bass-baritone. Beethoven: Missa solemnis.

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Omus in Person

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

by Sedgwick Clark

I first met Omus Hirshbein in Carnegie Hall’s executive offices, where he worked for a brief time in 1973 between tenures at the Hunter College Concert Bureau and the 92nd Street Y. He was walking out of a planning meeting, saying in frustration to anyone nearby, “They won’t listen to me—they should be emphasizing the sound of Carnegie Hall.” Guess what Carnegie’s subscription campaign was the next season, after Omus left for the Y? There he would create a concert series that for two decades would dominate the chamber-music field in New York (and annoy the hell out of me because it was such a nuisance to get to from my apartment near Lincoln Center).

We became friends over the years, especially after buying one of his pianos several years ago when his upper West Side apartment could no longer house two Steinways. Every time my wife and her four-hands partner, the composer and conductor Victoria Bond, get together to play, we think of Omus and his wife, Jessica.

Omus died on December 31st after a long decline due to Alzheimer’s. It seems especially tragic that one whose mind was so fertile would leave us in such a manner. I’m sorry I took so long to take note of him in this forum. Perhaps I was stymied because Brian Kellow, who worked for Omus at the Y in the 1980s, captured his personality and accomplishments so warmly and vividly in an Opera News piece, as did Allan Kozinn in his New York Times obituary (January 7, 2012). So I decided I would do something different and reprint Omus’s own typically impassioned words from a panel discussion on the programming of classical music, which appeared in the 1995 Musical America Directory. Participants with Omus in the discussion were industry V.I.P.s Deborah Borda, Eugene Carr, Mary Lou Falcone, Christopher Hunt, and Jane Moss. I highly recommend your reading it; check out the Services section on top of the Musicalamerica.com desktop. You may find, as I did when I read it again, that it could have been recorded yesterday.

Omus Hirshbein: “I think there are two reasons why people like to go to concerts these days. One is being addressed by the kind of programming that the American Symphony is doing. Back in 1986 I agreed to put together a series of eight concerts for the Museum of Modern Art exhibition called “Vienna 1900.” It had to do with the years of the Vienna Secession, which are roughly 1898-1918, and the composers were Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky, Schmidt. And I said to them, “But no one will come.” To my surprise, tickets were being scalped on 53rd Street. I saw virtually none of the usual New York music people at those eight concerts. Audience members were reading, they were seeing the paintings, they were seeing the workshop of Hoffman, and they were hearing a group of composers described by curator Kirk Varnedoe as part and parcel of the Secession, and they went. Okay, that’s one reason.

“The other, of course, is that music is supposed to touch the heart. And it’s supposed to touch the soul. Now, there was a period of 40 or 50 years when what was new was ugly. Sorry, it was mostly ugly. And the legatees of those Viennese geniuses—and I speak of Schoenberg as a genius—made it worse. They became academic, producing a system of writing in this country that was not for the public. Now, there are some young people writing music today who are mobbed by audiences. I’m talking about Aaron Kernis, and Bright Sheng, and there are others. And maybe it signals a reversal of that horrible trend where what was new was impossible to listen to. That’s all I can hope for, because the teaching of music has become of little importance in most of the major cities today as they cope with their social and educational problems.

“Let me just add that money is really an issue. And I’m not talking about balancing budgets. On the wall in my new office is a blowup of an advertisement from 1971, announcing a repeat concert of Victoria de los Angeles and Alicia de Larrocha doing a program of Spanish tonadillas and whatnot. I ask people to look at it because it has tremendous meaning—and finally down at the bottom, they come across what is really disturbing about it. And this is 1971, folks. The top price at the Hunter College Concert Bureau, where this took place, in a 2,200-seat house, was a dollar below Carnegie Hall and a dollar below Lincoln Center: six and a half dollars. A movie was three bucks, or three and a half. A musical event of that magnitude was twice the price of a movie. And that was prevailing.

“Now, I throw down a gauntlet to the commercial interests that have ruined our business. I assure you that Mostly Mozart once was a three- and four-dollar ticket. Commercial interests, and the interests of unions, have hurt us a great deal. This not a high-tech business, this is not the movies, this is not mass media, and we are paying the kind of monies out that would say it’s mass media, and it ain’t anything like that.

“. . . I had a staff of music lovers in my previous job. Music lovers. A couple of them were married, they were in their thirties, and you know what they do? They get together with their friends in a restaurant, and they spend an evening, and that’s all they can afford to do; they are making $23,000 and $24,000 a year, and they cannot afford to go to these concerts.

“. . . There’s another side of the coin. Once the performer becomes recognizable, there is the most extraordinary avarice to get the fees up as fast as possible. And that, for me, is what has wrecked the business. An artist could go on the road and make a decent living at fees somewhere in the $5,000 or $6,000 range and that’s about all that anybody out there in the hinterlands can afford. Now, I think maybe that’s all I have to say.”

Of course, it wasn’t all he had to say. His last professional endeavor was to found, with his former Y colleague Jacqueline Taylor, a series of free public concerts with major artists that they called “Free for All at Town Hall.” They wrote about its genesis in the 2004 edition of Musical America Directory, and we can still look forward to these concerts each spring. Martin Riskin, who is now president and artistic director of the series, tells me that the upcoming concerts will be dedicated to Omus.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

2/1 Paul Hall. FOCUS! Festival. Cage: Five Songs (1938); Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard (1950); Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939); Etudes Boreales, Nos. 1 & 3 (1978); Sonnekus² (1985); Satie Cabaret Songs; Child of Tree (1975); The Perilous Night (1944).

2/7 Rodgers Theatre. Gershwin: Porgy and Bess. Audra McDonald (Bess), Norm Lewis (Porgy), David Alan Grier (Sportin’ Life).

1/8 Peter Jay Sharp Theater. Gluck: Armide. Juilliard Orchestra/Jane Glover. Emalie Savoy (Armide), Alexander Hajek (Hidraot), David Portillo (Renaud), Alexander Lewis (Artémidore), Luthando Qave (Ubalde), Noah Baetge (Le Chevalier Danois), Wallis Giunta (Phénice), Devon Guthrie (Sidonie), Evan Hughes (Aronte), Renée Tatum (La Haine), Soo Yeon Kim (La Naïade), Pureum Jo (2nd Coryphée), Deanna Breiwick (Une Bergère), Lilla Heinrich-Szász (Lucinde), and Raquel González (Mélisse).

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