Musical America Blogs

by Sedgwick Clark

Juilliard and Joseph—Polisi at 25
Unrelenting rain couldn’t dampen the good cheer inside the Juilliard School’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater on April 26 for a gala honoring its president of 25 years, Joseph Polisi. There have been many changes in that quarter century. The student body is more diverse. There are jazz and historical-performance departments now. The endowment has grown five-fold. Along with the recent renovation of Alice Tully Hall has come a 39,000 square foot addition to the school, including the dance studio, which is visible to passersby on Broadway. And, no one should forget, Polisi was Musical America‘s Educator of the Year for 2005.

This congratulatory evening offered continuing proof, if need be, that the ailments of classical music have nothing to do with talent. The student performances were exhilarating, starting with 15-year-old violinist Sirena Huang and 14-year-old cellist Sarina Zhang, who played the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia with humbling assurance and artistry (from memory, incidentally, on four days’ notice). The Juilliard Orchestra played selections, with a number of talented vocalists, from Le Nozze di Figaro. There was world-premiere choreography by Adam Hougland, set to the Andante of Brahms’s Sextet No. 1. Future stars from the Drama department acted selections from Shakespeare, August Wilson, and Tennessee Williams. For a grand finale, the third movement of Rachmaninoff’s finger-busting Piano Concerto No. 3 was negotiated masterfully by 15-year-old Conrad Tao, who was singled out by Harris Goldsmith in the 2008 Musical America as “the most exciting prodigy ever to come my way. His promise is limitless.”

The season is nearly over, but you’ll probably see these young performers’ names on future Juilliard concerts. Most are free, and all contain a brand of commitment and fresh insight that will renew your faith in mankind.

Why We Left Muncie
May 3 was the third time in a year that I’ve run into American composer Jack Beeson. The occasion was the Presentation of the American Music Center’s Awards at which Beeson was receiving the AMC’s Letter of Distinction, given annually since 1964 “to recognize those who have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary American music.” A year ago, on May 21, 2009, the octogenarian composer received an ASCAP Honor for his 50-year membership in that venerable organization. In between these two awards, I saw him on January 26, when his “Love Song, Arietta and Aria” from his opera The Sweet Bye and Bye was performed at a Juilliard FOCUS! concert.

And why is my running into one of America’s distinguished composers important? Because Beeson, too, was born in and left Muncie, Indiana, to go east for a life in music: to study with Howard Hanson at Eastman and, later, with Béla Bartók in New York City, and then for 50 years to teach at Columbia, where one of his students was MA.com contributor Peter G. Davis. I left to write this blog.

Electrifying Szymanowski and Bartók
Of five concerts I heard last weekend, a pair at Zankel knocked my socks off! The concentration was on Karol Szymanowski (1982-1937), Poland’s leading composer after Chopin. Scriabin, Bartók, and Debussy were strong influences, but at his best—in the two violin concertos, the Third Symphony, the Second Quartet, and several chamber works and songs on these two programs—the music conveys an otherworldly ecstasy quite unlike that of his colleagues. Works by Bartók, Schumann, and Janácek were also performed.

Pianist Piotr Anderszewski was the prime mover here, providing full-blooded, freely expressive playing, always sensitive to the quiet moments. Szymanowski’s Metopes and Janácek’s In the Mists glimmered with color, and Bartók’s brief Three Hungarian Folksongs from Csík sang idiomatically. Anderszewski’s partnering with an extraordinary young Norwegian violinist/violist, Henning Kraggerud, in Szymanowski’s Mythes and Schumann’s Märchenbilder, quite took the breath away; he played with Orpheus at Carnegie earlier this season, but I won’t let another opportunity pass when he’s in town. Another artist new to me was the Polish soprano Iwona Sobotka, whose ravishing singing of Szymanowski’s song cycles Slopiewnie and Songs of a Fairytale Princess bowled the audience over.

Last, but certainly not least, was the Belcea Quartet, which Harris Goldsmith has been raving about to me for some time and I now know why. Their impassioned, slash-and-burn performances of Szymanowski’s two string quartets and Bartók’s First Quartet called to mind the Juilliard Quartet from its 1960s recordings—and better than that, in this repertoire, I can’t say. The Szymanowski Second Quartet, in their hands, sounded like one of the last century’s great quartets and the audience went wild. First violinist Corina Belcea-Fisher’s luxuriant vibrato and sliding was a special treat. The Belcea has recorded the Bartók 6 for EMI (I must get the set).

It’s a shame the Times wasn’t in attendance: Both Szymanowski and these superb performers deserved the imprimatur a review would have conferred.

Pogo = NoNo
David Patrick Stearns’ description, quoted in yesterday’s MusicalAmerica.com, of Ivo Pogorelich’s playing of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 on tour in Japan with the Philadelphia Orchestra (“the most complete expression of contempt I’ve ever heard”) reminded me of my last encounter with “Pogo,” as he’s known in the trade. It was a Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Boston Symphony and Seiji Ozawa at Carnegie Hall in 1996. David’s description of Pogo’s Chopin could well be of the Tchaik’s 23-minute opening movement: “Each new statement of Chopin’s main melody was treated with an increasingly slow graveness, to the point at which Pogorelich was literally stopping the music.” I vowed never to hear him again. And I haven’t.

Russian Stravinsky Festival
Next week: a roundup of the Philharmonic/Gergiev’s Russian Stravinsky Festival.

Looking forward
My week’s scheduled concerts:
5/6 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Valery Gergiev; Denis Matsuev, piano. Stravinsky: Symphony in C; Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, Petrushka (1911 version).
5/7 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Valery Gergiev; Alexei Volodin, piano. Stravinsky: Symphony in Three Movements; Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments; The Rite of Spring.
5/10 Ensemble ACJW/John Adams; Jeremy Denk, piano. Adams: Son of Chamber Symphony; Stravinsky: Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments; Andriessen: De Staat.
5/12 Metropolitan Opera. Berg: Lulu.

The Clearing
All of a sudden the bloom is on Lincoln Center’s newly planted trees, and construction is clearing after what has seemed a lifetime, as construction always does. In the arts world’s current, shameless fund-raising ploy of attaching husband-and-wife donors’ names to every square millimeter of property—stages, box offices, bathrooms, anything (for the time being) that doesn’t move—even a grove of trees adjacent to the David H. Koch Theater backstage entrance is named. Actually, I’m eager to see if these arboreal additions will soften the cold travertine visage that critics have dissed since Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall opened in 1962. Landscaping is much like clothing in making bare bones look healthy, and presumably the tree donors will help pay for the landscapers.

Look where we are now:
(1) Once again we can enter the subway on 64th Street instead of having to walk up to 66th Street. (Gawd, what an ordeal that has been—nearly as annoying as slogging down to the Chase ATM on 61st Street!)
(2) The Juilliard Bookstore is moving this week from its temporary mobile-home location of the past two years to its permanent (a dangerous word) location, opening on May 10.
(3) The awful clutter around the reflecting pool is gone at last; I’m taking bets now as to how long it will be before it begins to leak again. What a pleasure to see Eero Saarinen’s beautiful Vivian Beaumont Theater again.
(4) And the uptown half of 65th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway is paved.

I have it from good sources that the end of May should bring further clearance in front of Avery Fisher.

Encouraging Kids at the Phil
It’s great to see so many kids at the New York Philharmonic’s “Russian Stravinsky” concerts—students on some group sales program, I figure. And they genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves. Watching a hundred men and women making an exciting sound together in the flesh, rather than on TV or a video, is inspiring. That’s it, guys, get ’em early, when their ears are still open to new sounds (although Stravinsky, dead these 40 years, is by no means new).

So I was pleased to read the Phil’s announcement on Tuesday that Music Director Alan Gilbert would conduct six School Day Concerts next month. His commitment to music in this community is welcome after his predecessor’s lack of involvement. “These concerts, which are designed exclusively for school children in grades 3 through 12, will showcase world-premiere compositions by six New York Philharmonic Very Young Composers, ages 10 and 11, and three composers participating in the Making Score program of the New York Youth Symphony, ages 13 to 16. Also on the program: the score of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka.“

Just imagine—being 10 and hearing something you yourself created played by the New York Philharmonic, topped off by Petrushka. Wow! There’s a subscriber for life.

Martin Segal’s Good Works
Speaking of the Beaumont, one of my favorite Lincoln Center events of the year is the annual luncheon to announce the Martin E. Segal Award recipients. The awards were established in the former Lincoln Center Chairman’s name upon his retirement in 1986. Each year two performers nominated by Lincoln Center constituents receive $7,500 “for career advancement and future study.” This year’s engaging young artists were New York City Opera baritone Quinn Kelsey and New York City Ballet principal dancer Daniel Ulbricht.

The astonishingly sprightly, 94-year-old Segal is high on my indebtedness list because he single-handedly scotched Joe Papp’s addlepated idea to convert the Beaumont’s dynamic “thrust” stage into the common proscenium variety. Papp, otherwise a theater visionary, claimed during his brief tenure running the Lincoln Center Theater that Jo Mielziner’s thrust design was unstageable, which has been disproved in my experience—as a press department gofer at the Theater during Jules Irving’s tenure and more recently as a theatergoer, including the long run of South Pacific, which I may have objected to musically and interpretively but not as stagecraft.

Photo: MARTHA SWOPE
That was a credit line I saw often during my three years at the Beaumont, when I was in and out of her 72nd Street studio regularly to pick up photos she had taken of Rep Theater productions. I hadn’t seen Martha for ten years, since we published some of her Sondheim show photos when he was Musical America‘s Composer of the Year for 2000. So when I heard that her photos would be on exhibit for a benefit auction of the Humane Society of New York on April 27th, I hightailed it down to the DVF Studio on West 14th Street.

There she was, hair white, a bit distracted from all the attention, and sporting an elegant-looking cane but otherwise same as ever. And there were several of her wonderful photos—of Lee J. Cobb as Lear, whom I had met in Press Director Susan Bloch’s office during my first interview with her in February 1969; of Tennessee Williams, whom I also met in Susan’s office, at the time of Camino Real a year later; of Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams rehearsing Agon, with Balanchine and Stravinsky in the background; Balanchine with Maria Tallchief, Suzanne Farrell, Lincoln Kirstein, and his cat Mourka in flight; and shots of several shows I saw over the years, such as A Chorus Line, James Earl Jones and Kevin Conway in Of Mice and Men, Elizabeth Ashley in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd, Blythe Danner in her undies and Keir Dullea in Butterflies Are Free, Meryl Streep in Happy End, and Frank Langella in Dracula.

The rest of the scene was, well, different. Several ladies walked around with dogs, presumably theirs, in their arms; another was stroking a white doggie doll, which I kept looking at, expecting, hoping to see it move. Again and again I saw people I thought I should know, and whose photos I may well have seen in the Times‘s Styles section. But since all the photos weren’t Martha’s, my attention flagged and I was just about to leave when the auction began and I was momentarily trapped. A photo of Marilyn Monroe in peasant garb went for $6,000 and one of Martha’s for around a thousand. And then I left. I wonder how much the photo of a nude woman lying in bed atop her bull mastiff went for?

No Times Rich Obit?
Those who have been awaiting a New York Times obituary of Alan Rich have been given another dash of reality. Allan Kozinn’s evocative obit of Alan appeared online on April 26, and it apparently won’t reach newsprint. Go to www.newyorktimes.com.

P.S. Thursday, April 29: Well, the Times came through at last. Check out Alan’s obit on page 13 of the Business section. He’d act blasé, but, deep down, he’d probably be amazed that they gave him so much room, and with a photo too!

by Sedgwick Clark

MONTREUX, SWITZERLAND. This has been some week! My wife and I have been here to celebrate a friend’s 70th birthday. At the same time, I have been looking forward avidly, as readers of this space know, to the New York Philharmonic’s “Russian Stravinsky” festival, which begins tonight. But I won’t be at Avery Fisher because we weren’t able to get home in time due to that damned volcano in Iceland. (Calls to mind the volcanos in the Sacre section of Disney’s Fantasia.) I’ll be somewhere over the Atlantic—perhaps at the same time as the Mariinsky Chorus, which also couldn’t make it to New York in time.

The confluence of events seemed made in heaven. Three weeks of Stravinsky concerts preceded by the pleasure of visiting near the town where the great man composed his most famous work, Le Sacre du printemps. In the warm sunlight glittering off Lake Geneva we strolled along Quai Ernest Ansermet, named after the man who conducted the first performance of L’Histoire du soldat in 1918 and was a lifetime champion of Stravinsky. We cut over in front of the Casino to walk up perhaps the shortest road in the world, Rue Igor Stravinsky.

Before leaving Montreux proper, we dropped by the Auditorium Stravinski; the season had ended, but my Musical America business card was evidently impressive enough to get us a personal tour by the hospitality manager, Nathalie Tippmann, a friendly young woman who had lived in Atlanta for six years. The Montreux Jazz Festival, which just celebrated its 40th year, is obviously the town’s primary musical event. There are statues of Vladimir Nabokov, B.B. King, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and Freddie Mercury (of the rock group Queen) on prominent display, but no I.S. Then we drove to Clarens, hoping to find the house where Stravinsky lived when he composed Le Sacre. Apparently it no longer exists, but at least there’s a street named after the work.

The dreaded volcano dust seems to be abating, so it’s “Home, James.” We considered several possibilities: flying from Milan for $36,000 on Tuesday; $32,000 from Geneva on Friday; $8,000 from Paris on Sunday. Instead, we take a train from Lausanne at 6 a.m. to Zurich, fly to Amsterdam for a three-hour layover before flying to Kennedy and arriving at 10 p.m.

I wonder if there’s a Concertgebouw matinee? 

by Sedgwick Clark

It was in 1969, as a reference librarian at the University music library, that Vivian Perlis began taping interviews with many friends and colleagues of Charles Ives and subsequently fashioned them into a revelatory, award-winning book for the composer’s centennial in 1974, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (Yale University Press). Here she is, speaking about the genesis of her invaluable Oral History of American Music (OHAM) at Yale.

“[T]he university librarian at that time told me when I wanted to broaden the project and work with many composers that he really did not see that he would want anything but written material in his library.”

Holy cow! Talk about short-sightedness.

This quote leapt out at me from an article about Perlis and OHAM by Laura Pelligrinelli on the Internet yesterday, forwarded to me by MA.com’s intrepid editor, Susan Elliott. As we know, Perlis wrote and collaborated on several more books that even her old (in every sense of the word) boss would want in the Yale Library:

An Ives Celebration (University of Illinois Press, 1977), edited with H. Wiley Hitchcock
Copland, 1900 through 1942 (St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984), with Aaron Copland
Copland, Since 1943 (St. Martin’s Press, 1989), with Aaron Copland
Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale University Press, 2005), with Libby Van Cleve

Paperback versions of all but the last named are available, and in December The Complete Copland will be published, which is certain to contain new material. It’s a tossup as to which composer benefited most from her scholarship: the irascible Uncle Charlie or the man generally considered to have been America’s greatest composer. Ives was revealed in myriad ways by those still alive who knew him best, and Copland received an autobiography at last. He had wanted one for some time, but by his late seventies his memory had begun to fail and he needed a knowledgeable collaborator to help dredge up and organize his thoughts. Perlis was perfect. With infinite patience and wisdom she produced a pair of books in which Copland’s voice was identical to that in his many writings, lectures, and interviews over his long life. To flesh out the composer’s words, she added those of his colleagues recorded for her Oral History program and her own insightful comments.

It was “a musical autobiography,” said Copland to those who questioned the lack of his private life in the book. That’s what he wanted. Of course it was inevitable in our tell-all world that his private life would be revealed—along with those of other homosexual American composers who preferred to remain in the closet. For that, one may refer to Ned Rorem’s diaries, Joan Peyser’s psycho-biography of Bernstein (Beech Tree Books, 1987), which claimed to be the first to “out” American composers and performers, and Howard Pollack’s biography of Copland (Henry Holt, 1999). Paul Moor dealt with this question in his review of the second Copland/Perlis volume in the May 1990 issue of Musical America. He concluded, “[The first] volume made fascinating reading; this one tops it.”

Perlis herself addresses Copland’s private life and his memory failure on pages 294-98 of the Ives to Ellington volume. For the so-called “general” American music reader, this is an ideal bedside table companion. One can open it at random to read the composers and their friends in their own words, interlaced with Perlis’s perceptive comments about all things germane. Two CDs of the composers’ voices are included. And as with all her other books, the photos are fabulous!

On April 8 at Zankel Hall, the Yale School of Music presented “Voices of American Music: a tribute to OHAM on its 40th anniversary.” American composers I saw included Musical America Composers of the Year Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (1999) and Steve Reich (2001), and I’m sure there were dozens more. Several Yale musicians performed music by Ives, Copland, Zwilich, Ellington, Blake, Reich, Druckman, and Cage, concluding with Fanfare for the Common Man. I was over at the Philharmonic for the program’s first half and only arrived in time for Reich’s New York Counterpoint (1985), played by clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, who gave its first performance. All performances were excellent, but I was bowled over by Cage’s exhilarating Third Construction (1941). Mark, you shoulda been there! Several percussionists played cymbals, cowbells, claves, teponaxtle (a Mexican drum), quijadas (jaw bones), tin cans, rattles, conch shell, lion’s roar, and many other instruments. I was particularly thrilled to be so close to the lion’s roar—one of Varèse’s favorite instruments—and see how it was “played.” Believe it or not, the Copland Fanfare at the end was actually anticlimactic!  Interspersed between the music were audio and video recordings of the composers.

This was ostensibly a tribute to OHAM, but we all know who is most deserving of our tribute. I first met Vivian in 1974, at the Ives Centennial concerts in New York. Charles Ives Remembered had just been published, and she had given me editorial advice for the cover article on Ives in the long-gone FM Guide, which I edited. She has given me invaluable advice and assistance over the years with articles on American composers in Keynote, another magazine I edited, and with various Musical America composer tributes.

She has been, and remains, simply, the American composer’s best friend.

Perspectives on Andriessen
Unfortunate scheduling has led to my being away when Musical America‘s 2010 Composer of the Year, Louis Andriessen, will be in New York for his Carnegie Hall “Perspectives” concerts. All readers should go and enjoy in my stead and tell me next week what they thought! Hear that, Sarah and Zizi?

The Russian Stravinsky
The music season’s most exciting event starts next Wednesday—seven programs of Stravinsky, with Valery Gergiev leading the New York Philharmonic. Anyone who loves music should hie to Avery Fisher Hall’s box office ASAP.

by Sedgwick Clark

Steve Smith made a pointed accusation in his New York Times review (4/3/10) of last Thursday’s all-William Schuman concert (see my blog, 3/24/10) by the Juilliard Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin.  After marveling at the Third Symphony, he wrote: “That American orchestras can neglect so vital a creation in favor of any number of second-shelf European works seems criminal.”

Amen.

In over 40 years of New York concertgoing, I’ve heard the piece only four times: by the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein twice, most recently in 1985; by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Carlo Maria Giulini in the early 1980s; by the New Yorkers under André Previn in April 1997. That the symphony had not been performed in New York for 13 years according to Schuman’s publisher, G. Schirmer, is indeed criminal.

There is considerable American music for orchestra that I’m sure would appall Steve by its absence. How many works by those 20th-century American greats Copland, Ives, Barber, or Bernstein turn up these days on ordinary concerts simply because the music is good—as opposed to being on all-American music concerts? The Harris Third, Hanson Second, Creston Second, Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes by Paul Klee, Ruggles’s Sun-treader? And this is only the beginning.

William Schuman composed seven other symphonies he allowed to be performed. How long before we hear one of those again in a New York concert hall?

Addendum. Those who love American music should know about a ten-disc CD set of New York Philharmonic broadcast performances called “An American Celebration” (NYP 9904), released directly by the orchestra. It contains 13 hours of music by 38 American composers—a total of 49 live performances, from 1936-1999, under 21 conductors. I hesitate to mention this because I was involved with its production, along with Barbara Haws, the orchestra’s archivist/historian. But it’s really too good to go unmentioned out of false modesty.

Elijah‘s Language
In his review this morning of the Boston Symphony performance of Mendelssohn’s oratorio  Elijah at Carnegie Hall on Monday (4/5/10), Jim Oestreich questions the use of “the original German [text] despite the availability of a lovely English translation made for its premiere—in Birmingham, England, in 1846—and since used widely by Mr. Frühbeck and others. At a time when we hear no end of talk about demystifying classical music and broadening its audience, wouldn’t the use of English in a case like this be a sensible place to start?”

Point well taken. But it wasn’t Frühbeck’s decision. A friend in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus informed me that the chorus had performed it in English in the past and that it was James Levine’s decision to sing it in German. As is widely known by now, Levine had to cancel due to continuing back problems, and Frühbeck was fortunately available to lead an excellent performance.

Looking forward
My week’s scheduled concerts:

4/8 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Antonio Pappano; Joshua Bell, violin. Mozart: Symphony No. 31; Bruch: Scottish Fantasy; Brahms: Symphony No. 4.

4/12 Leonard Nimoy Thalia. Cutting Edge Concerts/Victoria Bond. Works by Kristin Kuster, Laurie San Martin, Anna Weesner, Sean Shepherd, Jeremy Thurlow, Sebastian Currier, and Harold Meltzer.

4/13 Carnegie Hall. Philadelphia Orchestra/Charles Dutoit; Piotr Anderszewski, piano. Szymanowski: Symphonie concertante; Debussy: La Mer; Stravinsky: Le Sacre du printemps.

by Sedgwick Clark

His music is so compellingly rhythmic, so delightfully witty, so eminently repeatable. Why, then, except for three early masterpieces, are so few works by Igor Stravinsky played in our concert halls today with any regularity?  

We can credit New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert for the concert coup of his orchestra’s season: Russia’s foremost conductor, Valery Gergiev, leading three weeks of music by the 20th-century’s foremost composer, who also happened to be Russian. Can anyone doubt that Gilbert would have loved to perform this music himself—with the orchestra that boasts the strongest Stravinsky tradition in the world? But, as he explained last year in the season press preview, he learned that Gergiev, who we all know is music director of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre, was available and thought it an irresistible opportunity for New Yorkers to hear this uniquely Russian performance combo. (The festival runs from April 21 through May 8; see our Web site’s Annotated Calendar for specific dates and programs.)

Marketing departments use the flimsiest excuses these days to call something a “festival.” And most of all, they need a title! The Philharmonic could have scheduled The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, added in the stylistically similar Song of the Nightingale and Symphony in Three Movements, and tossed in a few short works like Fireworks, Scherzo a la russe, and Circus Polka to make the “festival” seem more substantial. Moreover, purely orchestral works would have saved a lot of money and not alienated hidebound subscribers for whom any vocal music is anathema.

But no, this is a genuine festival, one that does Stravinsky and everyone involved proud. The three early ballets are scheduled, of course; also, Les Noces, Le Roi des étoiles (“King of the Stars”), Renard, L’Histoire du soldat, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and Symphony of Psalms. Also such debatably “Russian” works—normally dubbed “neoclassical”—as Jeu de cartes, the Violin Concerto, Oedipus Rex, Orpheus, Symphony in C, Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, Concerto for Piano and Winds, and Symphony in Three Movements. One could be greedy and wonder why, after importing the Mariinsky chorus and several Russian singers to perform, such quintessentially Russian—and early—works as Le Rossignol and Mavra are omitted? I could have gladly done without the complete L’Histoire, with that tedious Ramuz text, and settled for Stravinsky’s endlessly witty and inventive music in the suite. Also the frequently performed Violin Concerto. But we would have had to give up two “star” performers to do so: Alec Baldwin as Narrator in L’Histoire, and Leonidas Kavakos as soloist in the concerto. And speaking of stars, Jeremy Irons will be the Speaker in Oedipus Rex.

One might legitimately wonder how Gergiev justifies nearly every piece as Russian. (You can find out on a five-minute video interview of the Russian conductor by the American music director, at www.nyphil.org/Stravinsky, but I’ll give you a précis.) Stravinsky grew up in St. Petersburg, his father sang at the Mariinsky, and all of young Igor’s first musical experiences were at the Mariinsky. Gergiev’s performances of Stravinsky’s music are based on his experience of Mussorgsky, Glinka, and Rimsky-Korsakov operas and their orchestration, and Tchaikovsky’s symphonies. Also, Gergiev says, at the end of his life Stravinsky said, “I think in Russian, I hear in Russian, my words are Russian.” Which makes the Mariinsky chorus’s participation a major plus, argues Gergiev, “not only in the understanding of words and color but also the energy and special sonority that comes with . . . being a part of the tradition. The chorus is all-important in Les Noces, so the difference should be quite striking.”

“Russian” or “neoclassical,” who cares in light of such extraordinary music, performed by such stellar musicians—successors to players who Stravinsky himself conducted and recorded with more than any other? 

Thank you, Maestro Gilbert. I hope you bring back these and several lesser-known Stravinsky works during your tenure. 

by Sedgwick Clark

William Schuman at 100
We celebrate the centennials of two major American composers this year: Samuel Barber this month and William Schuman in August. The first is permanently enshrined in music history by dint of his Adagio for Strings, and he composed much other music that deserves to be played more often. The second, alas, has suffered the undeserved oblivion accorded many composers and performers upon their deaths.

Schuman was best known as a symphonist, and several of his ten are among the finest written by an American. But his major exponent during his lifetime, Leonard Bernstein, has been dead for 20 years. Only Gerard Schwarz, our current generation’s tireless champion of American music and Musical America‘s Conductor of the Year in 1994, has picked up the ball and recorded the symphonies with his Seattle Symphony for Naxos. With the release of the Eighth Symphony this month, they are now all available—all, that is, except Nos. 1 and 2, which the composer withdrew from performance.  Recently Schwarz related to me over lunch how he studied those early symphonies in the Library of Congress and approached Schuman’s son, Tony, to allow him to record the works. After consideration, Tony decided to honor his father’s wishes. So the cycle stands at Nos. 3 through 10.

Nearly 70 years after its premiere, the Third is unquestionably Schuman’s finest symphony and among the top ten of American symphonies. The work’s brooding lyricism and propulsive energy retain their power, and the wild outburst of timpani in the first-movement Fugue and rim shots on the snare drum in the concluding Toccata never fail to produce goose bumps. There are two Bernstein recordings and the new Schwarz, but there’s nothing like hearing it live. Leonard Slatkin, another distinguished proponent of Schuman’s music, will conduct the Juilliard Orchestra in the Third Symphony at an all-Schuman concert on Thursday (4/1) at Avery Fisher Hall. Also on the program are the Circus Overture and the Violin Concerto. Don’t miss it!

Fans of American music also shouldn’t miss Joseph W. Polisi’s American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman (Amadeus Press). Polisi—protégé, friend, and successor once removed to Schuman as president of the Juilliard School—was given exclusive access to his papers and the family archives, and it’s doubtful that there will ever be a more authoritative and sympathetic account of his life and music. Polisi’s vivid discussion of Schuman’s years as president of Lincoln Center and how his artistic vision for the center clashed with the financial concerns of John D. Rockefeller 3rd and the Trustees is far more candid and detailed than Lincoln Center’s own published official histories–and was of great interest to one whose first job in New York, 41 years ago, was at the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center (now Lincoln Center Theater).

A Bartók Soirée à la Soros
The financier and philanthropist George Soros hosted a dinner party at his home on Monday night (3-22) to boost sister violinists Angela and Jennifer Chun and their new Harmonia Mundi CD of the 44 Bartók Duos, just released. They played some of the Duos and a movement from Prokofiev’s Two-Violin Sonata. It’s refreshing to know that someone still believes in recorded CDs (the distinction needs to be made in this case) and in Bartók, his countryman, whose music still seems thorny to some listeners.

Ross on Gelb and the Met
Don’t miss Alex Ross’s progress report on Peter Gelb’s tenure at the Metropolitan Opera (“A bumpy season at the Met”) in this week’s New Yorker (3-29). Wonder of wonders, it’s Alex’s second piece in as many weeks—a trend that can’t be encouraged too much.

Ravel Revel at CMS
Damn! For the second time in a month, I’ll be out of town for an enticing Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center program. First it was a pair of Finnish-music offerings last week, and there’s an all-Ravel program on April 18. I can’t go, but you can, and I’ll list the delicious works to show why you should:

Introduction and Allegro for Flute, Clarinet, String Quartet, and Harp
Shéhérazade for Mezzo-Soprano, Flute, and Piano
Sonata for Violin and Cello
Cinq melodies populaires grecques for Mezzo-Soprano and Piano
Piano Trio in A minor

Looking Forward
My week’s scheduled concerts:
3/25 Carnegie Hall. San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas; Christian Tetzlaff, violin. Works by Kissine, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Liszt.
3/25 Zankel Hall. So Percussion. Works by Reich, Mackey, Trueman.
3/26 Carnegie Hall. San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas. Mahler: Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”).

by Sedgwick Clark

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Alex Ross’s “Orchestral comparisons at Carnegie Hall” in his latest New Yorker column (3/22/10). He mentions ten concerts, nearly all of which I heard too, and singles out the Minnesota Orchestra concert conducted by Osmo Vänskä that I wrote about in this space on March 3rd. It’s always gratifying when a colleague one respects agrees with you, especially when you both think the concert was one of the best you’ve ever heard. On his blog two days ago, Alex announced the topic of his New Yorker piece and quoted an approving sentence from my blog about the concert. “Turnabout is fair play,” declared the old Vox budget LP label, and I trust he won’t mind my quoting his ultimate judgment on the concert: “For the duration of the evening of March 1st, the Minnesota Orchestra sounded, to my years, like the greatest orchestra in the world.”

Vänskä was Musical America‘s Conductor of the Year in 2005. In accepting the award he said that the orchestra had charged him with making the Minnesotans the finest orchestra in the world. When I reminded him of that backstage after the concert on March 1st, he smiled broadly and said, “We’re getting there, aren’t we?” An increasing number of people agree.

Bernstein’s Haydn
The first piece I ever heard Leonard Bernstein conduct live, at a New York Philharmonic concert in fall 1968, was Haydn’s Symphony No. 87. I hung on every note. Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with Fischer-Dieskau and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which followed, were no less compelling. A brand new New Yorker, fresh out of college, I attended all the Bernstein concerts I could afford on $100 a week ($76.90 after taxes), and never missed a Haydn performance. A few months ago Sony performed a major service by putting all of Bernstein’s Haydn recordings for the Columbia label into a 12-CD bargain box for $72—its most important release since its complete Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky recordings on 22 CDs for $45. Sampling this rerelease in light of today’s authentic-performance movement has only reaffirmed my affection for his warm, witty, expressive renderings of this endlessly inventive and most human of composers. One can pick at certain tempos, such as his mawkish Trio in the Menuetto of the 96th, but the rest of the performance is delightful. It is Bernstein’s Haydn that I always take from my shelf for enjoyment.

It’s too bad that Bernstein recorded only three Haydn symphonies in his late, Deutsche Grammophon years: Nos. 88, 92 (“Oxford”), and 94 (“Surprise”)—superb readings all, and with the Vienna Philharmonic to boot.  Interestingly, the latter’s second-movement Andante is fully a minute faster than his 1970s Adagio-like New York performance, and the “surprise” chord is a much quicker attack than the heavy, spread chord on that earlier rendition. A nod to authenticity? Only No. 92 was new to his discography, and it’s become a special favorite: relaxed, abounding with puckish details—perfect to wake up to, but, then, perfect at any time of day.

In reviewing the conductor’s first disc of the “Paris” symphonies in 1964, the late Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon wrote in High Fidelity magazine that “Leonard Bernstein is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, interpreters of Haydn’s music we have today, either here or in Europe.” His judgment stands.

Sondheim and the Phil
I had hoped to report on the New York Philharmonic’s 80th-birthday tribute to Stephen Sondheim last night (3/16/10), but I had to skip it at the last minute. Sondheim was Musical America‘s Composer of the Year ten years ago, the first non-classical artist to be honored by this pub. MA.com’s editor, Susan Elliott, an ardent musical-theater fan, e-mailed me close to midnight, “I’m SOO sorry you missed it.  It was amazing.” Susan was working at RCA when the label recorded the Phil’s extraordinary live performances of Sondheim’s Follies in 1985. She knows of what she speaks. Then, as now, the Phil pulled out all the stops in getting a star cast (Lee Remick for the original cast’s Alexis Smith!). And Tom Shepard, who produced so many Sondheim show albums for Columbia and RCA, commandeered the whole shebang superbly. If you don’t have this recording, your show collection is not complete. Fortunately, we can look forward to a PBS amalgam of the two 80th-birthday performances in the near future. You can get the necessary details in Stephen Holden’s Times review this morning. He calls Monday’s concert “thrilling,” and I, for one, can’t wait.

by Sedgwick Clark

I attend around 125 concerts annually and am often asked what good ones I’ve heard recently. At a time in my life when I can barely remember the prior sentence, I just heard the fourth concert of the year that I’ll bet I can recall next week without consulting my calendar: the London Philharmonic under Vladimir Jurowski in Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony on March 7.

Both conductor and orchestra have seemed rather pallid to me in previous New York appearances, mostly in standard rep. But not this time! Shostakovich’s tuttis raged with uncompromising fury, made all the more ear-splitting by Fisher Hall’s harsh acoustics. Three days later, my ears still feel clogged (but that may be my allergies). Several times during the performance I feared for the musicians’ hearing; at least I was in row U. The LPO’s quiet playing was no less impressive, but those moments were fidgety valleys between onslaughts. This was superb Shostakovich, in every way. At under 59 minutes, it was a fast performance—far more aggressive than Bernard Haitink’s monumental interpretation two years ago with the Chicago Symphony, which timed out to just over 70 minutes and revealed that the piece has its lyrical moments as well.

One might argue that Haitink’s daring approach is wrong-headed in looking for subtlety in this music—that works of this decibel quotient are simply, as PK calls it, “guy music.” One female friend used to fulminate during standing ovations for Mahler’s music: “Look at them—they’re all men!” Indeed, Mahler is everywhere in Shostakovich, and nowhere more than in the Fourth. Structurally episodic, its sections contrast wildly between manic prestos and dogged mumbling, ironic waltzes and polkas and jackboot marches. It’s long, too, but like Mahler’s even longer Third, the first movement of Shostakovich’s Fourth is in sonata form. Apparently Vivien Schweitzer, who called it “incoherent” in her Times review yesterday, is not convinced by the symphony, and I urge her to keep trying. This is the toughest nut to crack in his oeuvre—it took me years—and now I won’t miss a performance.

I’ve often thought of Shostakovich’s Fourth as a nervous breakdown in music. He began composing it during a time of great success, in mid-September 1935, when his satirical opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, was enjoying immense popularity with audiences and critics. All Soviet productions of the opera ended abruptly, however, when Stalin attended a new production at the Bolshoi on January 26, 1936, and two days later, Pravda published an editorial entitled “Muddle Instead of Music,” condemning “formalist” composers whose music did not speak to the Soviet masses. Shostakovich, a nervous man in the best of circumstances, went from being the Soviet Union’s most highly regarded composer to a man in mortal terror. He spent the next months composing the symphony, in December it went into rehearsal under a conductor apparently ill-equipped to cope with it, and it was withdrawn before its premiere for reasons that may still only be conjectured. It was finally performed for the first time in 1961, conducted and recorded by Kirill Kondrashin.

Shostakovich’s state of mind is all in the music. Laurel E. Fay—author of the most reliable, i.e., factual, book on the composer, Shostakovich: A Life, and also my friend and frequent concert companion (especially for Shostakovich works, and the Fourth in particular)—would label such an assertion “fantasy,” but I believe it.

The first half of the concert opened with Shostakovich’s aptly titled Five Fragments, written “reportedly in a single day in June 1935,” writes program annotator Paul Schiavo. He conjectures that these pieces “may well have served as preparatory exercises for the large and teeming Fourth Symphony that was already gestating within him.” The Allegretto piece undoubtedly does in its all-but-literal quote on solo violin, but I also heard long-line resemblances to the Fifth Symphony in a couple of the other Fragments. At any rate, while I’m glad to have heard it in tandem with the symphony, which is the only way I can imagine it is worth programming, it’s of interest solely to Shostakovich scholars and fanatics.

Then came Ravel’s ever-delightful Piano Concerto in G, played by Alexander Toradze. Russian audiences cheer his overtly emotional style, with its edge-of-cliff tempos and heavy rubato. But my own prescription for effective Ravel interpretation requires a certain elegance and simplicity, neither of which is in Toradze’s lexicon and certainly not on Sunday in the ineffable Adagio assai. There’s surely a happy medium between this and David Fray’s faceless account at the New York Philharmonic in December. Jurowski and the LPO’s accompaniment was first-rate, keeping up admirably with the soloist’s breakneck third-movement Presto, which they encored when the audience wouldn’t stop applauding.

Coda: Another Testosterone Favorite
Another of my favorite testosterone pieces is Prokofiev’s Third Symphony; and somewhat less so, his “age of steel” Second Symphony, with which Shostakovich must have been acquainted when he wrote his Fourth, at least in score if not performance.  In my younger salad days I used to play the Leinsdorf/Boston recording of the Prokofiev Third at ear-splitting volume when I was pissed at something or someone. There were only two recordings of the Shostakovich Fourth then, and I had neither, but it surely would have been on my letting-out-steam list.

Note to Regular Readers
Last week’s blog was posted before I had finished everything I wanted to say about the Minnesota Orchestra’s phenomenal March 1 concert at Carnegie Hall. You might want to check out the complete version as it now stands.

by Sedgwick Clark

In the past two weeks I heard two concerts I’ll never forget, both at Carnegie Hall. 

The first was on February 17, with my favorite European orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw, playing my favorite Mahler symphony, the Third. The CGB was Mahler’s favorite orchestra and its music director, Willem Mengelberg, the only conductor other than himself who performed the music the way he intended. I’ll bet he would have approved Mariss Jansons’s conducting on this evening, which reminded me of Horenstein’s noble interpretation. Even if I prefer a slower tempo in the finale, the music unfolded naturally and without the impatience he had demonstrated the night before in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony. And the playing! It was simply stupendous—rich, warm, expressive, unforced musicianship that we modern Americans think of as “old world,” available on our side of the Atlantic only from Philadelphia on its best days (we’ll see if Chicago can reclaim its stature when Muti has settled in). Astonishingly, there was not a single strident note in the entire evening (and no wrong ones, either). The posthorn solo—suitably distant—took one’s breath away, and for once one’s stomach didn’t clutch as the climactic high A approached. To say that the contributions of the mezzo, Jill Grove, and the New York Choral Artists and American Boychoir, were up to the orchestra’s standard is the highest praise I can imagine.

The timbre and style of playing achieved by the Minnesota Orchestra under its music director, Osmo Vänskä, on Monday (3/1) was totally different but no less astounding. Vänskä seeks absolute transparency of texture and perfection of detail and attack. Thus Beethoven’s normally lumbering full-orchestra arrangement (by the late Michael Steinberg in this instance), taken at a ferocious clip, emerged lithe and dynamic, as if played by the world’s finest quartet. The first and second violins were split left-right, and throughout the concert I’ve never heard the seconds make such a strong impression on that side of the stage. To hear the five string bodies converse fortissimo with such unanimity and split-second force was jaw-dropping, but the pianissimos—a Vänskä speciality—arrested the listener’s attention no less. More than once I exclaimed to myself, “My god!”

After intermission came Sibelius’s nationalistic symphonic poem, Kullervo, an 80-minute piece for two soloists, men’s chorus, and orchestra. It tells a grim story about a thoroughly unpleasant “hero” who was separated from his family as a boy and many years later encounters and unknowingly rapes his sister on his way home from paying taxes. He woos her with the words:

“Come into my sledge, my dear,
come under my rug, my darling,
there you shall eat my apples
and crack my nuts at leisure.”

Her entirely understandable response of “I spit at your sledge, you villain, you rat. . . ” ires him to commit his foul deed, and at the end he falls on his sword in contrition. Those who know the composer’s compact later symphonies may be surprised at this early work’s garrulousness, which owes a strong debt to Bruckner, especially in the work’s structure and frequent lengthy pauses, which Vänskä fearlessly honored in full, presumably beating the longest rest clearly so that the audience would not applaud prematurely (it also ensured that his players would not mistake their entrance). Despite its dark story, it’s actually a rip-snorting piece, with Sibelius the inspired melodist and tone painter apparent throughout. The choral passages roar along with Brucknerian panache (cf. the Austrian composer’s Te Deum), and the soloists add high drama to the overall effect.

Kullervo’s New York premiere by the Nashville Symphony under Kenneth Schermerhorn, at Carnegie in 1979, and a Brooklyn Philharmonic performance led by Robert Spano in 1998, were good, but this Minnesota outing was in another league entirely. The wonders of ensemble were jaw-dropping. As usual, Vänskä’s laser-like ear and care for balances revealed hidden treasures in nearly every bar. He must have rehearsed those creepy first-violin downward-slithering pianissimo motives early in the second movement for hours to get such uncanny unanimity. Never were the strings overwhelmed by the brass, as happens with many orchestras, and the woodwinds contributed many distinctive solos. And when, I ask, did you last hear double basses in such perfect, pungent tune? I wonder if the Minnesota players know just how extraordinary their playing was on Monday night? If this was an example of their standard level, the orchestra’s subscribers may be the luckiest in the nation.

The encore, Finlandia, complete with the male chorus in the final bars, was icing on the cake.

Bleeding Olympian Chunks
Was anyone else bothered by the slicing and dicing of music for the ice dancers at the Olympics? Carmen, Scheherazade, Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody—on and on, brutally abridged to match the choreography rather than the other way around. Certainly those involved had no awareness of the jarring juxtaposition of keys.

And then there were a couple of General Electric commercials. The poetic slow movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G served as background to how a woman’s cancer was treated. Three sections of the opening solo piano statement, before the flute and strings enter quietly, were used. Its soothing character was perfect, and I was pleased to hear Ravel receive such exposure, however anonymous. Still, why not allow the music to play as written for the length of the commercial? I’ll think it over when Alexander Toradze plays it on Sunday (3/7) with the London Philharmonic under Vladimir Jurowski at Lincoln Center.

In a second GE commercial, the famous Beethoven Ninth melody is intoned by children around the world saying “ah” as doctors depress their tongues. That was fun.