Musical America Blogs

by Sedgwick Clark

For a couple of years I’ve been putting off even mentioning some worthy books whose authors happen to be good friends. Perhaps I should have taken the old New Yorker answer to books by its contributors and simply listed them without comment. At this late date, I suggest you simply buy these books.

George Szell once told Time magazine that no one would ever write a biography of him: “I’m so damned normal.” No one who knew this podium tyrant believed his self-appraisal for a second. Certainly not his Cleveland Orchestra musicians, who called him “Cyclops,” only partly due to his Coke-bottle thick glasses. Nor Rudolf Bing, famed general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, who clashed with Szell in 1953-54 when he abruptly stormed out of his contract with the company. Someone said to Bing afterwards that Szell was his own worst enemy. Bing’s famous reply: “Not while I’m alive.”

Michael Charry’s George Szell: A Life of Music (Illinois, 2011) is the first book about one of history’s great conductors, and it is likely, given the current lack of commercial interest in classical music, to be the only one. So thank you Illinois Press, and thank you Michael Charry, who had a front-row-center view of this prickly musician for nine years as a member of the Cleveland Orchestra’s conducting staff and apparently remembered everything. His admiration for Szell never flags, yet he allows us to see the conductor’s cruelty to his players when they performed imperfectly as well as his kindness to such impressive young soloists as German violinist Edith Peinemann and American pianists Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, and John Browning. In the judicious balance of reported information and his own observations, Charry has crafted a biography worth waiting for. Importantly, a list of Szell’s repertoire and a complete discography are included—the last time in our computer age I expect to see this.

New York Philharmonic concertgoers over the past six decades will want to read John Canarina’s The New York Philharmonic: From Bernstein to Maazel (Amadeus Press, 2010), a sequel of sorts to critic and journalist James Huneker’s The Philharmonic Society of New York and Its Seventy-Fifth Anniversary (1917) and conductor/teacher Howard Shanet’s Philharmonic: A History of New York’s Orchestra (Doubleday, 1975). While I haven’t read the Huneker book, he was reportedly rarely without strong opinions; nor is Shanet, who uses his book to combat “the vast, and largely unjustified, inferiority complex that has oppressed American music throughout its history . . . .”

Unlike Shanet, Canarina has no “ax to grind.” He takes a historical tone, writing of what he considers the high points of concerts and important facts. Both authors had connections with the orchestra and conducted it—Shanet was a musical assistant to Leonard Bernstein in the early 1950s, and Canarina was an assistant conductor of the Philharmonic in 1961-62, during Bernstein’s tenure. Shanet ended his book before Pierre Boulez’s tenure began in 1972-73. Canarina, however, instead of beginning his book with Boulez, chooses to overlap with Bernstein’s directorship (1958-69), ending with Lorin Maazel’s tenure (2002-09).

It’s a fair but surprisingly dispassionate book, perhaps because conducting and teaching kept the author out of town during much of that time. Hence the reliance on what critics reported. It was Bernstein’s final season when I arrived in New York 44 years ago, and I enjoyed being transported back to the many Philharmonic concerts I have heard since that time. Canarina quotes many reviews with which I disagreed then and which annoy me still. That’s horse racing, to be sure, but I could have welcomed Canarina’s book even more if it had offered completely fresh opinions.

by Sedgwick Clark

An Irresistible Concert  

So soon after declaring my relief at being able to put my concert calendar on hold in the summer, Le Poisson Rouge presented a program too irresistible to miss, with three well-known chamber musicians at the top of their form: violinist Harumi Rhodes, cellist Caroline Stinson, and pianist Molly Morkoski in Ravel’s Sonate posthume pour violon et piano, Messiaen’s eight Préludes pour piano, Takemitsu’s Distance de Fée for violin and piano, Debussy’s Sonate pour violoncello et piano, and Piazzolla’s Verano Portena for piano trio, from The Four Seasons.

One of the best concerts I heard all year.

A Modest Epiphany

There’s a moment in Woody Allen’s new film To Rome with Love when a woman lost in Rome and late for an appointment drops her cell phone down a sewer grate. The unison gasp of horror from a full house at Lincoln Plaza Theaters was my biggest laugh of the evening.

Masochism on Broadway

Tracie Bennett’s all-stops-pulled portrayal of Judy Garland’s last three months of drugs, drink, and depression in Peter Quilter’s End of the Rainbow at the Belasco Theatre is a study in masochism—although whose I’m not sure—and she relives it eight times a week. Most of us raised on The Wizard of Oz are aware that Garland’s brief glimpse of the rainbow ended in tragedy, but for many, this Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf treatment may be too much to bear in a night on the town.

Bennett is remarkably convincing, the supporting cast is first-rate, the five musicians are excellent, the restored Belasco is a beauty to behold, but this is definitely not Mary Poppins.

by Sedgwick Clark

I am relieved to say that the concert “season,” such as it used to be, is officially over. Nothing like three mostly concertless months to revivify one’s passion for the art. There are a few scattered enticements here and there, as well as three Mostly Moz concerts on the horizon—a preconcert recital of works by Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky with the amazing 18-year-old pianist Conrad Tao, hearing Philadelphia Orchestra Music Director-designate Yannick Nézet-Séguin for the first time in concert, Louis Langrée leading works by Lutosławski, Bartók, and, of all composers, Mozart. But that’s it so far. I hope to catch up on some recent CDs and will report accordingly.

I’ve also been surprised by the number of people who keep asking me when I’m going to post photos from my Africa jaunt in May. The wildlife and terrain were certainly photogenic, and I even took some video—nothing dramatic, of course, but it’s kind of amazing to be a few feet from a grazing rhinoceros family and have a cheetah nuzzle your leg like a house cat. I hope to get them organized for next week.

Son of The Mentalist

A new TNT series called Perception made its debut on Monday evening (7/9). It’s about a schizophrenic professor of neurology who has hallucinations, solves murders, and is addicted to doing crossword puzzles while listening to the Scherzo of Mahler’s First Symphony. At one point he peevishly ejects his cassette and says to his student assistant, “That’s the von Karajan recording—I wanted the Solti.” Reality check: There is no Karajan recording of the Mahler First. (The conductor decided not to record the First, according to British record executive Peter Alward, quoted in Richard Osborne’s authoritative Karajan biography, because it was “too Jewish.”) So is the script writer pulling our leg or is he hallucinating? At the fadeout, the professor is having a hallucinogenic conversation with a sympathetic former girlfriend; she disappears as his student assistant walks up, hands him a cassette, and he begins to listen with a smile on his face. Must be the Solti Mahler First.

Lacombe’s Tenure Extended in New Jersey

The New Jersey Symphony has extended the tenure of Jacques Lacombe, its music director since October 2010, through the 2015-16 season. His programs are often imaginative, and the orchestra is playing well, with especially fine string tone. I’ve heard concerts in Newark and the impressive Spring for Music appearance in May at Carnegie Hall in which he partnered the Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin in Busoni’s monumental Piano Concerto. He seems like a musician committed to growing with the orchestra rather than using the position as a personal stepping stone. Let’s hope they perform at Carnegie again soon.

Looking forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

7/16 at 6:30, Le Poisson Rouge. Harumi Rhodes (violin) and Friends. Works by Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen, and Takemitsu.

by Sedgwick Clark

Live mannequins greeted audience members as they ascended the steps of the Park Avenue Armory for the New York Philharmonic’s genuine season finale under Alan Gilbert. A few steps further, under a set of bleachers, stood a group of powder-wigged ladies in white floor-length dresses. I stared at one, and her eyes followed me as I passed into the concert arena: creepy, like a white-face mime at Columbus Circle or a smoking caryatid in Jean Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast.

They were, we learned later, the chorus in the First Act finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Across Central Park, away from the orchestra’s staid subscription series at Lincoln Center, Gilbert could cut loose and astonish us in music for multiple orchestras by Gabrieli, Boulez, Mozart, Stockhausen, and Ives. Two evenings dominated by a pair of postwar modernist classics heard only once before in New York had sold out the Armory’s 1,400 seats far in advance, and standees ringed the catwalks on each side of the arena. All the performances bespoke meticulous rehearsal. Even when precision inevitably suffered from the cavernous acoustic and football-field separation of orchestras and singers, one thoroughly appreciated the care in preparation.

The whole production was filmed and will be available for streaming free on July 6 at 2:00 p.m. and for 90 days henceforth on medici.tv. Click for more information.

Oddly, the opening Gabrieli Canzon XVI for antiphonal brass and its performers were not listed in the program. Too bad, for the Philharmonic brass may never have sounded so sheerly beautiful in their home town. They deserved more recognition than mere listing in the orchestra roster 11 pages later.

The major works were Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen (“Groups”) for Three Orchestras (1955-57) and Pierre Boulez’s Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna for Orchestra in Eight Groups (1974-75). Both have been more written about than performed—at least in the U.S.—and it’s easy to hear why. The music is fiendishly difficult and requires extra rehearsal time (as well as extra conductors in Gruppen, in this instance Magnus Lindberg and Matthias Pintscher). Over half a century later, the German composer’s total serialism and experiments in electronics have not gained a wide audience. These performances of Gruppen were only the second and third in New York; the first was by the New England Conservatory Orchestra at Juilliard in 1965. Tanglewood attendees may recall when Oliver Knussen, Rheinbert De Leeuw, and Robert Spano led the work and then repeated it immediately at the festival’s Contemporary Music series in 1993 (those interested should google Edward Rothstein’s eloquent Times review).

Critics usually tread lightly on reputed “classics” for fear of appearing foolish among their colleagues. I’ll plead obtuseness and say that, for me, Gruppen’s sole arresting moment occurred about three-quarters into the piece, when the north and south orchestras passed recognizably similar material back and forth for a few seconds (the climax?) before reverting to the work’s arid intellectuality. The piece seemed far longer than its 21:21 timing indicated. Perhaps repeated viewings of the Medici streaming will produce a “eureka.”

While Boulez is no less intellectually rigorous than Stockhausen, he nearly always seduces the listener (or me, anyway) with the glimmering colors in which he cloaks his music. He is, after all, French and a descendant of Debussy and Ravel, although in Rituel he evokes his teacher Messiaen. It lasts under 30 minutes, but there’s a sameness to it that made it seem overlong at its U.S. premiere with the Philharmonic under the composer in January 1977 and which Gilbert could not counteract.

So what’s Mozart doing in this company? The final scene of Don Giovanni involves three small orchestras, which were spaced out in the performance space with the singers roving around in the audience. The audacity of staging this scene in such a vast space with so much going on at the same time far outweighed the lack of precision or the fact that the singers’ lines became an indistinct echo when the characters weren’t directly facing you.

Charles Ives’s bona fide 20th-century classic, The Unanswered Question, which closed the concert, for once received its ideal spatial layout: the horseshoe arrangement of strings on the floor, playing ppp throughout to represent “The Silences of the Druids—Who Know, See, and Hear Nothing”; the flutes seeking “The Invisible Answer” from a raised platform amid the strings; and the solo trumpet lofting “The Perennial Question of Existence” from an open door at the very top of the western end of the Armory. While I would have welcomed a broader tempo (Gilbert was just under six minutes), the Philharmonic’s playing was tonal beauty incarnate.

A Class Act

The actor Alec Baldwin has donated a million dollars to the New York Philharmonic. The gift specifically honors the orchestra’s outgoing president and chief executive Zarin Mehta.

“I have loved classical music all of my life,” stated  Baldwin in a Philharmonic press release on Monday (7/2), “but Zarin Mehta made my dream of becoming part of the world of classical music come true.” So far, the actor has become host of the weekly Philharmonic broadcasts, recorded a pre-concert admonition to audiences to turn off their cellphones et al., performed the role of Narrator in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat under Valery Gergiev in 2010, been host of some of the orchestra’s Live from Lincoln Center broadcasts, become a member of the Philharmonic Board, and recorded a Capitol One bank TV commercial promoting Lincoln Center, for which he was paid a cool million and which he has now graciously passed on to the orchestra.

A class act, Mr. Baldwin. Perhaps I’m naive, but I can’t help thinking that there are more stars of the popular arts and sports who love classical music and would welcome a Zarin Mehta’s enterprising offer to support their local arts scene. It’s surely worth a try.

by Sedgwick Clark

Gilbert’s Austere Nielsen

Alan Gilbert’s first major recording project since becoming music director of the New York Philharmonic is the symphonies and concertos of Denmark’s foremost composer, Carl Nielsen (1865-1931), for Dacapo. The series commenced last year with the Second Symphony (The Four Temperaments), recorded live in concert. Last week was the Third, nicknamed Sinfonia espansiva. The two are set for release on the first CD in the fall.

Nielsen completed his Third in 1911, the same year as Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, and Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Debussy was working on Book II of his Préludes and Ravel on Daphnis et Chloé. Three weeks after Nielsen finished his Third, Mahler died, leaving his Tenth Symphony unfinished.

Like those composers, Nielsen’s mature voice is unmistakable—unique even, like Janáček’s—with warmly German Romantic roots. He has often been compared with his fellow Scandinavian Sibelius, but the Dane’s sunny optimism, prankster humor, and humanistic love of life are nowhere to be found in the moody Finn’s music. Nor were those qualities much evident in Gilbert’s first of four performances of the Third (6/14), although a friend who heard three performances felt he had relaxed into the work a bit more by the final one.

Gilbert began promisingly with sharp attacks on those stuttering (Anthony Tommasini’s apt description in his Times review) fortissimo chords, digging in with ample schwung to the central oom-pah waltz section. But taut symphonic structure is not what Nielsen is about. By the work’s end, with only fleeting hints of rubato or expressive rhetoric (such as healthy unmarked ritards in the final bars of the outer movements) to heighten the music’s joy, one felt Gilbert’s vision anything but espansiva. His sole departure from the score was a slight increase of tempo for the last two pages of the finale, which raised the temperature nicely.

The conductor’s urgency should better suit Nielsen’s propulsive Fourth (The Inextinguishable) when the time comes.

The program opened with Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, with Gilbert preferring warm, rounded textures over the work’s inherent nervous intensity. His sensitive accompaniment in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto fit Leonidas Kavakos’s affectionate interpretation like a glove. I felt the first two movements dragged somewhat, having learned the piece via the famous Heifetz recording, but the finale veritably crackled, bringing the audience roaring to its feet.

Comfortable Mozart   

Coming after Gilbert’s spectacularly successful subscription finales to his first two seasons, Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre and Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, a pair of Mozart works to end the season seemed a cruel joke. True, Emanuel Ax’s genial take on the 22nd piano concerto and a buoyant, unpressured performance of the Mass in C minor (Great) on June 20 were nothing to sneeze at. Moreover, a Joseph Flummerfelt chorus (New York Choral Artists in this case) is always a treat. And those productions must have been costly in a time of red ink. But this is the New York Philharmonic, damn it all, and those two 20th-century operas were huge hits with the public and critics. An imaginative music director is a terrible thing to waste.

Dutilleux—the French Bartók?

Scheduling three non-subscription concerts of mostly 20th- and 21st-century music the following week partly made up for this lapse of judgment.

First, on June 26, a superbly performed concert of three scintillating works by French composer Henri Dutilleux: Métaboles (1961-64), Ainsi la nuit (Thus the Night) (1973-76), and Tout un monde lointain . . . (A Whole Distant World . . .) for Cello and Orchestra (1968-70, rev. 1988). Yo-Yo Ma was soloist, so the concert was sold out and scalpers proliferated. (I wonder how many audience members had the vaguest notion of what they were about to hear?) They heard top notch—Ma at his best, the young Miró Quartet irrepressible in the second work, and the Philharmonic strings in Métaboles as sumptuous as I’ve ever heard them, reminding us that Gilbert is a violinist. A definite highlight of his tenure thus far. Dutillieux revealed a delightful penchant for pizzicato in the first two works especially, reminiscent of Bartók’s MUSPAC and, more generally, the Hungarian master’s Concerto for Orchestra.

The concert also marked the first year of the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music at the New York Philharmonic, with Dutilleux as its inaugural winner. Upon accepting the award, the French composer announced that he would share the prize money of $200,000 with composers Anthony Chueng, Franck Krawczyk, and Peter Eötvös, who will write new works for the Philharmonic in Dutilleux’s honor. Kravis and her husband, Henry, have been major donors for new works at the Philharmonic since 2003, and the new prize will be awarded every other year. The Composer-in-Residence position is also endowed by the Kravises. Bravi to all concerned!

Second is a pair of concerts at the gargantuan Park Avenue Armory consisting of four works for multiple orchestras: Stockhausen’s Gruppen; Boulez’s Rituel (composed for the Philharmonic when he was music director); Mozart’s finale from Act I of Don Giovanni; and Ives’s The Unanswered Question, which is not really for three orchestras, but strings representing silence, a solo trumpet intoning the question, and flutes replying in increasingly hysterical “answers.” Presumably these three choirs will be widely separated in the Armory. The concerts are this coming weekend, the 29th and 30th. 

Let’s Not Forget CONTACT

This new-music series was conceived by Gilbert and the orchestra’s initial composer in residence, the Finn Magnus Lindberg, whose three-year term will be assumed next season by the American Christopher Rouse. On June 9 (Carl Nielsen’s birthday, incidentally) Lindberg hosted his final CONTACT program, with David Robertson conducting, at Symphony Space.

The astonishing 103-year-old Elliott Carter’s latest world premiere, Two Controversies and a Conversation, was played. He was in attendance for an interview with Lindberg and to cheer on percussionist Colin Currie and pianist Eric Huebner. The Swiss composer Michael Jarrell’s impossibly titled NACHLESE Vb: Liederzyklus (2011), on poems by Luis de Góngora y Argote, received its U.S. premiere. I have no idea if it’s a total-serial work, but it certainly harks back to the prim timbre and erotic beauty of fifties’ Boulez. I was riveted from first note to last and hope to hear more of Jarrell’s music soon. Charlotte Dobbs appeared to have mastered the composer’s intricate writing utterly.

Robertson introduced Boulez’s …explosante-fix… after intermission. He had conducted the Ensemble InterContemporain in the 1993 premiere of this final version and not only spoke lucidly but apparently extemporaneously, without notes, about the work’s history and composition. Absolutely mind-blowing! Equally impressive was his conducting, which harked back to Boulez’s Philharmonic days and the elder conductor’s extraordinary ability to make the performances so confident and easily grasped. And the Philharmonic players proved they still have it, seemingly negotiating these complex works as if they were basic repertoire—a crackpot notion that violinist Fiona Simon disabused me of afterwards, enumerating the hours of rehearsal both officially and at home. Well worth it, Fiona!

Looking forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

6/29, Park Avenue Armory. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Magnus Lindberg, Matthias Pintscher, assistant conductors. Gabrieli: Canzon for antiphonal brass. Boulez: Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna. Mozart: Don Giovanni, Act I Finale. Stockhausen: Gruppen. Ives: The Unanswered Question.

by Sedgwick Clark

The blockbuster of Carnegie Hall’s second Spring for Music festival last month was the second (!) performance this season of the rarely played, 70-minute piano concerto by the turn-of-the-20th-century piano virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni. It’s not a “great” piece, as one considers Beethoven’s Emperor great, but it’s a hoot and was stupendously negotiated on May 9 by the Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin and sympathetically accompanied by the New Jersey Symphony under Jacques Lacombe.

Alex Ross’s New Yorker review (January 9, 2012) of the earlier performance this season, by Piers Lane and the American Symphony under Leon Botstein, is necessary reading for anyone interested in the piece. He calls it “a wildly entertaining creation” and approvingly cites Bernard Holland’s loveable summation of the concerto–“a hymn to immoderation”–in his Times review of the work’s previous local performance, in 1989 at Carnegie. As fun as this garrulous example of late-Romantic mysticism is, however, its requirement of a men’s chorus in the finale will likely ensure its infrequency.

On the festival’s opening night, May 7, Hans Graf led the Houston Symphony in a well-drilled all-Shostakovich program. Houston was first to perform and record the Eleventh Symphony in the U.S., with Leopold Stokowski in 1958, so the work seemed a natural choice. But the Eleventh, composed in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, reworks popular and revolutionary prison songs to tedious length, especially in the first and third movement adagios. Only Rostropovich’s searing, expansive performance with the LSO ten years ago at Avery Fisher raised it above the level of film music in my experience. Also played was Shostakovich’s Anti-Formalist Rayok, a 20-minute, late-1950s satire of Soviet bureaucrats, written for private performance among friends. Perhaps one has to be Russian.

Advance word was strong on the English conductor Justin Brown and the Alabama Symphony. A promo DVD with his orchestra of the Badisches Staatstheater, Karlsruhe, was as fine a Bruckner Fifth as I’ve heard from any conductor alive today. His recently released Karlsruhe Mahler Ninth on Pan Classics, however, is astonishingly uninvolved. Brown has championed contemporary American music in Alabama, and on May 10 he led the New York premieres of two recent ASO commissions, the first of which made a bang-up concert opener. While composing Astrolatry, lifetime city dweller Avner Dorman actually ventured into the countryside at night for inspiration. To an impressive degree he has captured his newfound “awe of nature” in this glittering 14-minute piece. Less persuasive was Paul Lansky’s tinkly Shapeshifters for two pianos and orchestra. After intermission, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was well played but less-than-compelling interpretively. The Fourth or Eighth might have shown this team’s work to better advantage.

I had never heard Charles Ives’s unfinished Universe Symphony (“realized and completed by Larry Austin”), with which the Nashville Symphony closed the festival on May 12. The Universe is in the style of Central Park in the Dark, beginning quietly, building to a raucous climax, and then tapering off . . . but lasting four times as long (36 minutes), at least in the hands of Nashville’s Giancarlo Guerrero, a name new to me and, I assure you, quite an enthusiastic fellow. Personally, I’m content with Central Park. But the Nashville’s performance—beginning with the quietest pppppp imaginable—was sensational. Ives fans may look forward to next Spring, when Leonard Slatkin will bring the Detroit Symphony to Carnegie for all four (legitimate) Ives symphonies in one gulp!    

As before, the concerts were streamed live internationally by Classical 105.9 FM WQXR and attended by busloads of hometown concertgoers.

Frühbeck’s Carmina burana at the Phil

Carl Orff’s ability to set Carmina’s bawdy texts with vitality and memorable melodies has excited audiences for 75 years despite critical sniping at the work’s rhythmic simplicity. Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Musical America’s Conductor of the Year for 2011, served it resoundingly well on June 1 with the New York Philharmonic, soprano Erin Morley, tenor Nicholas Phan, baritone Jacques Imbrailo, the Orfeón Pamplonén chorus, and Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Among many fine instrumental touches, Sandra Church’s slinky flute duet with Markus Rhoten’s perfectly balanced timpani in the Tanz was outstanding. Frühbeck’s 1965 New Philharmonia recording on EMI is still my favorite.

Selections from Manuel de Falla’s unfinished cantata, Atlántida, opened the concert.

Looking forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

6/14, Avery Fisher Hall, 7:30. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Leonidas Kavakos, violin; Erin Morley, soprano; Joshua Hopkins, baritone. Beethoven: Coriolan Overture. Korngold: Violin Concerto. Nielsen: Symphony No. 3 (Sinfonia espansiva).

6/20 Avery Fisher Hall, 7:30. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Emanuel Ax, piano; soloists and chorus. Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 22; Mass in C minor (Great).

by Sedgwick Clark

It was quite a day yesterday for our last complete day in Africa: I rode Coco, a 34-year-old elephant, and got drenched in the all-consuming mist of Victoria Falls. Also, Zimbabwe’s notoriously corrupt president, Robert Mugabe, 88, made a surprise visit to the historic Victoria Falls Hotel, where we stayed our last two days. He was receiving some odd sort of United Nations proclamation as a “leader for tourism,” reported msnbc.com, which added that the U.N. was thus endorsing Zimbabwe as a friendly nation and safe-tourism destination. Human rights activists promptly criticized the move. Mugabe’s odious anti-gay and -lesbian views are well known, as are his abuses on his own people to retain power. Hotel workers wisely put up a photo of the president to mark the occasion, which spoke volumes.

Bwana Clark & Peggy Kane with Norman on Coco

In a few hours I’ll either be aloft or waiting for a plane connection for nearly 20 hours. PK and our favorite travelling companions have had a great two and a half weeks in South Africa. While they have typically been more aware than I, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed being liberated from my calendar, not knowing the date, the day, or the time of our activities. Oh, I was aware of a few of the world’s events, such as the deaths of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and my old boss Herbert Breslin. And, on the one day I happened to check Musicalamerica.com, I learned of the most public demonstration yet of Metropolitan Opera head Peter Gelb’s thin skin. Only three weeks after I arrived in New York in September 1968, F-D sang Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder in the first concert I ever heard by the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein—my first live encounters with these great musicians, all in one concert! Herbert rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, and my two months with him weren’t my most auspicious, but I still retain a respect for his burning commitment on behalf of most of his clients. As for Peter, heads of arts organizations all stick their heads on the critical chopping block if they aspire to greatness, and attempts to stifle serious criticism after less-than-successful performances will always smell fishy. He was wise to reverse his edict within a matter of hours.

I return to the rigor of my calendar recalling only my 2013 Directory deadlines and a lick of my lips in anticipation of Alan Gilbert’s NYPhil performance of Nielsen’s Third Symphony sometime this month. In my next blog I hope to test your patience with some brief comments on the pre-Africa Spring for Music concerts at Carnegie and the Met’s final performances of the season, as well as scintillating photos and video from our safari. Stay tuned.

by Sedgwick Clark

I’m sitting on the porch of the Tinga Game Preserve in Kruger National Wildlife Park watching a herd of nearly 20 elephants feed down by the river. One of the kids is on his back rolling around in the dust, just as our bichons do in Central Park’s grass.

Shortly before, he was marching along behind his mother (I presume), followed by another adult elephant and another child—large, small, large, small. A pretty picture, and hard to take one’s eyes away. An hour ago they were to the left of the porch. Suddenly they were startled by something and stampeded wildly—but with surprising grace—to the right about 30 feet in front of us, braying and hooting vociferously. If only I had had our video camera poised!

Yesterday afternoon we were out in the bush with a guide and sited three giraffes, a white rhino, a rare black rhino, and a hippo, as well as several elephants and impala—the latter being as ubiquitous as deer in the Hamptons. This evening we saw a cheetah and a spotted leopard, as well as many elephants, baboons, and impala again. We heard lions roaring in the distance, but we still haven’t seen one. We have one more day . . . .

Peggy Kane petting a cheetah

Last Friday we visited the Hout Bay Music Project in Cape Town, the small music school for disadvantaged students I mentioned in last week’s blog. The students’ families have come to the city in search of a job, and they live in hastily built shacks of corrugated metal and found materials. The kids’ instruments are hardly more substantial. The school is run by Leane Dollman, a woman who is not paid but has raised money to keep the school going. The school teaches primarily strings and percussion, but also song and dance, and the kids put on such a routine for us when we arrived. Later, the teacher led a short concert of string arrangements for us. Amidst tuning up, a young cellist played Smetana’s Moldau. I walked over to him and told him it was one of my favorite pieces and that he had good tone. He beamed. He was a very serious young man, as well as one of the best dressed of the kids, and I encouraged him to continue. I’ll bet a little Yo-Yo Ma would help.

We came bearing gifts: 30 CDs of chamber and solo string music, sheet music from G. Schirmer, t-shirts from the New York Philharmonic, and baseball caps commorating Lincoln Center’s 50th year. Jonathan Rosenbloom, of Time Inc., had brought several issues of “Time for Kids,” which immediately captured the students’ interest. But when we tried to play some CDs, their stereo was found to be so wanting that we bought them a new Pioneer system from a local dealer. In response to my blog last week, Eric Gewirtz of Boosey & Hawkes wrote to me asking what his company could do. We’ll try to work something out. When one sees the power of the arts and how lives can be so affected, it’s impossible not to become involved.

Peter Clark with an owl perched on his hand.

by Sedgwick Clark

I’m off for a two-and-a-half-week safari vacation in South Africa with PK and our favorite traveling buddies. From Cape Town and the wine lands to Kruger National Park to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, it will undoubtedly be a far cry from the MGM back lot and grainy second-unit location images impressed upon me since I was a kid. Whatever I’ll encounter, I may be sure it won’t be Maureen O’Sullivan, Grace Kelly, or Ava Gardner, although The African Queen and all those shots and malaria pills have made me a bit apprehensive of the smaller wildlife thereabouts.

One stop will be outside Cape Town to the Hout Bay Music Project, which teaches string and percussion students. We’re taking scores and sheet music from Schirmer Inc., t-shirts from the New York Philharmonic, caps from Lincoln Center, and plenty of CDs I’ve received over the years. I’ll bet the kids especially appreciate three of the multi-CD chamber-music sets released annually by Music@Menlo, which contain 73 works from the baroque to 21st century. But I’m also bringing CDs by Musical America honorees David Finckel and Wu Han, Gil Shaham, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Joshua Bell, and undoubted future honorees.

Steve J. Sherman graciously offered to show us how to use PK’s new digital single photo and video camera, so I’m hoping you will be seeing some photos of the music school next week.  In the meantime, its Web site is www.houtbaymusic.org.

by Sedgwick Clark

Mahler Meets Shostakovich

German baritone Matthias Goerne and Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes performed a fascinating recital of songs by Mahler and Shostakovich at Carnegie Hall on 5/1, all to do with death. Neither composer is Mr. Rogers, but Mahler has been in such vogue for the last 40 years and is such a compelling tunesmith that his dark side and irony are readily accepted. Not so Shostakovich, whose terror under the Stalinist and later regimes and his own increasing physical infirmity late in life produced music of an often uncompromisingly grim nature. For instance, he sets 11 poems about death in his Fourteenth Symphony (1969), and I’ve never attended a performance where elderly audience members didn’t begin exiting halfway through the piece in increasing numbers.

The recitalists chose well, interspersing six of the 11 songs from Shostakovich’s 1974 Michelangelo Suite with ten Mahler songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Rückert-Lieder, and Kindertotenlieder. Andsnes contributed fine, if monochromatic, accompaniments. (I much prefer the orchestral settings.)

But even with the texts in hand, I could barely distinguish a word Goerne was singing. At intermission, I checked with German and Russian friends, and they agreed. He bobbed and weaved disconcertingly, with his eyes nearly always in the score except when the text said “heavens” and he would roll his eyes toward the balcony. When he wasn’t looking at the score, he was looking at the first-tier boxes on audience left. He virtually turned his back on those sad souls sitting in audience right. Recording engineers probably want to nail his feet to the stage and put a neck brace on him. I don’t think that Carnegie’s wet acoustic helped either; if I have to hear him in concert again, I hope it will be at Tully.

Gilbert’s Soft-centered Mahler Sixth

I’ve always thought of Mahler’s Sixth as a hard piece—literally. But in Alan Gilbert’s New York Philharmonic performance at Carnegie on 5/2, there was nary a sharp attack to be heard. There was plenty of expressive shaping and rubato, and the first-movement exposition repeat was played, but Mahler’s “Tragic” Symphony was tapioca to my ears. I don’t remember Gilbert’s Avery Fisher performance two years ago as being mushy, and wonder if Carnegie’s reverberation threw the players off. 

In a practice that is becoming more frequent these days, Gilbert performed the Andante second. For my money, it was especially unsatisfying on this evening because the opening movement had not made its full, crushing effect for the slow movement to serve as a respite: It was more emotionally necessary than ever for the Scherzo’s slashing ferocity to follow the first movement. Mahler only conducted the Sixth twice and never made up his mind definitively, so the controversy will likely never be settled.

Looking forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

5/9 Carnegie Hall, 7:30. “Spring for Music.” New Jersey Symphony/Jacques Lacombe; Hila Plitmann, soprano; Marc-André Hamelin, piano; Men of the Westminster Symphonic Choir. Varèse: Nocturnal. Weill: Symphony No. 1 (“Berliner Symphony”). Busoni: Piano Concerto.

5/10 Carnegie Hall, 7:30. “Spring for Music.” Alabama Symphony/Justin Brown; Susan Grace and Alice Rybak, pianos. Avner Dorman: Astrolatry. Paul Lansky: Shapeshifters for Two Pianos. Beethoven: Symphony No. 7.

5/11Metropolitan Opera, 8:30. Janáček: The Makropoulos Case. Jiři Belohlávek (cond.). Karita Mattila, soprano; Kurt Streit, tenor; Johan Reuter, baritone; Tom Fox, baritone.

5/12 Carnegie Hall, 7:30. “Spring for Music.” Nashville Symphony/Giancarlo Guerrero; Tracy Silverman, electric violin. Ives: Universe Symphony (Austin ed.). Terry Riley: The Palmian Chord Ryddle for Electric Violin and Orchestra. Grainger: The Warriers.

5/12 Metropolitan Opera, 9:00. Britten: Billy Budd. David Robertson (cond.). John Daszak, tenor; Nathan Gunn, baritone; James Morris, bass-baritone.