Musical America Blogs

by Sedgwick Clark

Too bad that we have only one more season of Carnegie Hall’s Spring for Music series to anticipate. Programs have been stimulating and the artists notable. Tickets cost only $25 a seat! But our economy hasn’t cooperated: The Oregon Symphony under Carlos Kalmar—whose concert in the initial season was my favorite concert of the year, bar none—couldn’t raise the funds to return this year, so the already-scheduled Leonard Slatkin and the Detroit Symphony stepped in to play an extra concert.

In the opening concert (5/6), Music Director Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony enlivened John Adams’s Sibelius-tinged Shaker Loops and did their best to make a case for the 1947 version of Prokofiev’s uninspired Fourth Symphony, based on his ballet The Prodigal Son and filled with weak-tea melodic echoes of Romeo and Juliet. In between, they were joined by the inanely dubbed TIME FOR THREE, string trio in the New York premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s pleasant Concerto 4-3.

Morton Gould’s Symphony No. 3 (1946-47), an all-but-forgotten candidate in the Great American Symphony pantheon, was a highlight of the festival. It hasn’t the stature of the Big Three third symphonies of Roy Harris, William Schuman, and Aaron Copland (and indeed it strongly alludes in its first movement to the Schuman and briefly in its second movement to the Harris), but it is nevertheless a major American symphony and reveals a tough, dramatic side of a composer unjustly dismissed as a symphonettist. The jazzy third movement (“with sardonic humor”), in particular, with its brash percussion writing, is a standout. Gould was well served in a vibrantly committed performance (5/7) by the Albany Symphony and its enterprising music director, David Alan Miller, who have recorded the work for Albany Records. The concert opened with John Harbison’s suite from his opera The Great Gatsby. Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody (1931) followed; it will never rival his Rhapsody in Blue, but pianist Kevin Cole and the Albany players got the most from it. Cole tore through a medley of the best of George and Ira for an encore.

Wednesday’s concert (5/8) featured the Buffalo Philharmonic under its music director, JoAnn Falletta, in Giya Kancheli’s “Morning Prayers” from Life Without Christmas and Reinhold Glière’s Symphony No. 3 (Il’ya Muromets). In the program booklet Falletta opines that “both works share a mystical quality,” and her conducting of the Kancheli was eloquent and moving. Il’ya Muromets (1911) was accurately rendered but lacked the flair necessary to bring such a long-winded tub-thumper to life. The elder generation used to impose heavy cuts: This well-paced reading lasted just over 70 minutes; Stokowski’s recording was 43. Perhaps the forthcoming Buffalo recording on Naxos will have more fire.

I missed the first Detroit/Slatkin concert on 5/9, but this team’s monumental Friday night concert of all four symphonies by Charles Ives featured fine playing by the orchestra and the best conducting I can recall from Leonard Slatkin. Tempos were ideal throughout. The Yale student’s First Symphony moved along sleekly, with its early-Dvořák and Tchaikovsky resemblances seeming more homage than hodge-podge. The popular Second moved along buoyantly, neatly integrating all of the composer’s witty pastiche of Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, and American folk and hymn tunes. Only the trumpets’ initial “Reveille” was unaccountably buried before “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” roared to its triumphant conclusion, with Slatkin conducting the final chord with a perfect, sharp attack. (That other Ivesian Leonard followed the score in his 1951 world premiere performance with the New York Philharmonic, but he broadened the chord into an unseemly Bronx cheer in his Columbia and Deutsche Grammophon recordings.) The Third Symphony has always struck me as a crashing bore, but Slatkin kept it moving more than most and all to its benefit.

In a delightful introductory treat to the Fourth Symphony, Slatkin had the orchestra play four bars of the cacophonous Scherzo and then four choirs of the orchestra separately, each playing an instantly recognizable folk tune; then the orchestra played the four bars again together—and nothing was recognizable. I could listen to him deconstruct the second and fourth movements like this all night, bar by bar. The orchestra then proceeded to play the piece spectacularly. What a night—surely the height of the festival!

I was away for the final Spring for Music concert, with Christoph Eschenbach leading Washington’s National Symphony in works by Shchedrin, Schnittke, and Shostakovich, in honor of the orchestra’s past music director, Mstislav Rostropovich.

Steve Smith, ASCAP Honoree

Steve Smith received an ASCAP Concert Music Award on Friday, May17, at the organization’s annual ceremony, held this year at Merkin Hall. Steve has distinguished himself as a classical-music reviewer at the New York Times for nearly seven years and an even longer stint at Time Out New York. In particular, his ardent interest and even-handed reviews in a broad range of contemporary music have won him a loyal readership of both musicians and audiences alike.  Congrats, Steve.

Other ASCAP honorees were conductor/educator Tania León and Jon Deak, composer, educator, and former long-time double bass player for the New York Philharmonic. There was also a centenary tribute to Morton Gould, ASCAP’s former president and noted American composer and conductor.

Classical Oops

The New York Times’s Sunday Review section on May 12 printed an interview with one Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, “a cardiologist and professor at U.C.L.A.’s David Geffen School of Medicine.” Her husband is the chairman of Universal Music Publishing Group, so her home rocks to “many forms of music all the time.” She continues: “I’ve also recently found on YouTube this historic footage of iconic violinists—Heifetz, Horowitz [sic], Oistrakh—playing with the great symphonies of the past century.”

It reminded me of a press release I received several years ago from Philips Records announcing the reissue of “Schubert: The Complete Impromptus conducted [sic] by Alfred Brendal [sic]. . . .”

The Rite at 100

Mark your calendars! On Wednesday, May 29, Q2, the contemporary classical online station of New York’s WQXR, will celebrate the centenary of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring with 24 hours of recordings of the work.

Audra on Live from Lincoln Center

Don’t miss Audra McDonald’s brilliant performance on PBS, Friday, May 24, at 9:00 p.m. In the words of the New York Times’s Stephen Holden, “Absolutely thrilling.” I was there, and he was absolutely right.

by Sedgwick Clark

Evgeny Kissin

Two pianistic superstars played two days apart last weekend at Carnegie Hall. I had avoided their recitals for years but thought I should try again since I was in town for the weekend. The first was Evgeny Kissin, 41. His prodigious prowess is documented from his earliest years at the keyboard, and in 1995 he became Musical America’s youngest Instrumentalist of the Year. For a time he seemed to grow with each concert, but by the end of the decade his playing had become fussy and self-regarding.

Not so last Friday night, however. Perhaps most impressive throughout was Kissin’s knowing sense of rubato, a depth of emotion without a hint of calculation. He began with Haydn’s E-flat Sonata, No. 49–the one with the repeated da-da-da-duh motive in the first movement that Beethoven would later “borrow” to open his Fifth Symphony. The pianist’s approach vacillated between classical and romantic, and maybe he’ll make up his mind someday. But there was no doubt of Kissin’s emotional identification with Beethoven’s final sonata, Op. 111. Demonic in the first movement and with a superbly sustained adagio molto semplice e cantabile in the second, the maturity of his insight left me breathless and, with the final trills, shaken. No performance I have heard from him in concert or on record quite prepared me for this reaction.

Schubert composed his four Impromptus (1827) the year before his death at age 31, and Kissin’s muted, pensive playing after intermission reminded one of Claudio Arrau’s dictum that Schubert’s late music must be interpreted with “the proximity of death” in mind. The final work, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 in C-sharp minor, brought down the house with an old-fashioned demonstration of virtuosity that sent the audience roaring to its feet—no showing off, just pure, staggering feats of Lisztian pianism. He was rewarded by a young female fan, not with the usual flowers but with a teddy bear. Wonder of wonders, he actually grinned.

Was the audience trying to compete? I know it’s allergy season, but the uncovered coughing, rustling, the cell phone that inevitably rang in the Beethoven’s quietest moment, the incessant dropping of personal belongings and programs (which have become so laden with donors’ names that they sound like small detonations when they hit the floor), made me contemplate joining the N.R.A. All the more astonishing that Kissin’s concentration was so complete.

Maurizio Pollini

Anyone who has attended Maurizio Pollini’s concerts regularly has a memory bank of unforgettable performances from Bach to Chopin to Beethoven to the European avant-garde: In my account, Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto with Boulez and the NYPhil, Chopin Etudes, Boulez’s Sonata No. 2 and Stockhausen’s Klavierstucke X, Beethoven’s Waldstein and Appassionata sonatas leap immediately to mind. In all these, his perfect dexterity, clarity of voicing, and rigorous intellect overcome such deficiencies as brusque phrasing, lack of expressiveness, and monochromatic piano tone.

These qualities, good and bad, had become all too predictable in recent years, and I preferred to live with my memories and his best recordings. But he was playing an all-Beethoven program that included those two sonatas, and I thought these performances would be instructive. Indeed, his previously infallible fingerwork appears to be a thing of the past. In the opening Pathétique Sonata, smudged passagework and uneven runs were alarming, but he has always taken a while to warm up. The Waldstein was hardly an improvement, though, and charmless besides. The little Sonata No. 22, Op. 54, was an incoherent rush of notes. The Appassionata at least succeeded in its obsessive, unrelenting drive, but the two Bagatelles for encores were tossed off with the least charm and shape of the evening. You’d never know it from the audience response, which was loud and long.

His advocates like to say that his artistry is “controversial,” but that’s a copout. I’ll stick with my memories and selected CDs as a reminder of his best days.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

5/9 at 7:00. Avery Fisher Hall. Audra McDonald in Concert: Go Back Home.

5/10 at 7:30. Carnegie Hall. Spring for Music. Detroit Symphony/Leonard Slatkin. Ives: Symphonies Nos. 1-4 (complete).

by Sedgwick Clark

The Rite of Spring, the centennial of which we celebrate on May 29, has been played everywhere this season and undoubtedly will the next. But while The Rite is forever ubiquitous, much of Stravinsky’s huge output languishes—such as his rarely played sacred works, which New York’s Trinity Church presented in toto in three concerts last weekend (4/26-28). It was a genuine event, well attended, and performed sympathetically by the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Trinity Youth Chorus, and instrumentalists from NOVUS NY under the interpretive warmth of Trinity’s music director, Julian Wachner. Appropriate for a festival of such importance, the beautifully printed and illustrated program booklet, with thought-provoking notes by Matthew Guerrieri, was a keeper.  

The rarity of Stravinsky sacred-music performances is no surprise. Most of it was written during his last period, when he was adapting Schoenberg’s “method of composing with 12 tones” to his own aesthetic. While the expatriate Russian’s unique voice could not entirely be quelled, the concert-going public has voted on Schoenberg’s technique (and Stravinsky’s use of it) with its feet. After more than a century since its genesis, few 12-tone or serial works are played with any frequency, and even those are capable of emptying a room of non-believers before you can say “boo.”

The real surprise is that Stravinsky, a devoutly religious man, wrote so few works on sacred subjects. On the other hand, Ralph Vaughan Williams, an avowed atheist, composed some of the most affecting music on religious themes in the 20th century. Of all the music performed at Trinity, only the Symphony of Psalms (1930) is an indisputable masterpiece, well known and often programmed. Several critics convened at the end of the first concert, wondering which works we could “cross off the list,” as the New Yorker’s Alex Ross amusingly put it, of music we had never encountered in concert. We both had looked forward especially to Threni (1957-58) and had come armed with our scores. Wachner’s heartfelt reading was a satisfying account, even if it lacked the clarity of the composer’s recording. The same could be said of Introitus: T.S. Eliot in Memoriam (1965) and Abraham and Isaac (1962-63), the latter a minor revelation due to Sanford Sylvan’s expert vocalism. The performance of The Flood (1961-62) was game, but I find the music arid.

I could never get into the 1948 Mass before this lovely Trinity performance, but whatever delights some find in Canticum Sacrum (which Time magazine headlined “Murder in the Cathedral” for its report on the 1956 Venice premiere) escape me still, as do most of the shorter pieces. But Requiem Canticles (1966)—which Stravinsky called his “pocket requiem” and which was performed at his funeral—is his last masterpiece, albeit a small one, and it was given an eloquent account.

The Symphony of Psalms, the final work in the concerts, was performed in a two-piano arrangement by Karen Keating—a decision that on paper seemed disappointing but that largely avoided the one serious drawback of these concerts: the muddying factor of Trinity Church’s cavernous acoustics, which compromised nearly every performance to some degree. Stravinsky’s rhythms and scoring thrive in utmost clarity, and these performances would have been even more successful in the drier Zankel or Tully halls uptown.

Nevertheless, in the Symphony the superb Trinity chorus could be heard at its full stature without the acoustical confusion of orchestral textures, and the excellent pianists, Pedja Muzijevic and Steven Beck, were perfectly balanced. I’d love to hear Bruckner Motets at Trinity someday.

Colin Davis in the Green Room

My good friend and loyal reader of this blog, the conductor, educator, and author John Canarina, wrote to me of a post-concert encounter he observed between the late Colin Davis and a young musician:

“In the year 2002, I think it was, I went back to the green room after Colin Davis had conducted a NY Phil concert. The only people there ahead of me were a couple with their young son, about 10 years old. When Davis appeared the couple asked if they could take a picture of him with their son, who was studying music. He readily agreed and, in the process, asked the boy what instrument he played. “I play the clarinet,” was the reply, whereupon Davis exclaimed, ‘That’s what I played—look what happened!’”

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

5/3 at 7:00. Carnegie Hall. Evgeny Kissin, piano. Beethoven: Sonata No. 32, Op. 111. Works by Haydn, Schubert, and Liszt.

5/3 at 9:00. Zankel Hall. Kronos Quartet; David Krakauer, clarinet. Missy Mazzoli: You Know Me From Here. Valentin Silvestrov: String Quartet No. 3. Aleksandra Vrebalov: Babylon, Our Own. Laurie Anderson: Flow.

5/4 at 7:30. Carnegie Hall. Renée Fleming, soprano and host; Jeremy Denk, piano; Emerson String Quartet; Paul Neubauer, viola; Colin Carr, cello. R. Strauss: Drei Lieder der Ophelia, Op. 67. Brahms: Ophelia Lieder. Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht. Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder, Op. 91 (2). Brahms: Intermezzi, Op. 118, Nos. 1 and 2. Songs by Weigl, Wellesz, Webern, Zeisl, and Schoenberg.

5/5 at 3:00. Carnegie Hall. Maurizio Pollini, piano. Beethoven: Sonata No. 8, Op. 13 (Pathétique); Sonata No. 21, Op. 53 (Waldstein); Sonata No. 24, Op. 78; Sonata No. 23, Op. 57 (Appassionata).

5/6 at 7:30. Carnegie Hall. Spring for Music. Baltimore Symphony/Marin Alsop; Time for Three (string trio). Jennifer Higdon: Concerto 4-3. John Adams: Shaker Loops. Prokofiev: Symphony No. 4 (1947 version).

5/7 at 7:30. Carnegie Hall. Spring for Music. Albany Symphony/David Alan Miller; Kevin Cole, piano. Harbison: The Great Gatsby Suite. Gershwin: Second Rhapsody. M. Gould: Symphony No. 3 (original version).

5/8 at 7:30. Carnegie Hall. Buffalo Philharmonic/JoAnne Falletta. Kancheli: “Morning Prayers” from Life Without Christmas. Glière: Symphony No. 3 (Ilya Muromets).

5/9. Avery Fisher Hall. Audra McDonald in Concert: Go Back Home

by Sedgwick Clark

Christian Thielemann is Germany’s most sought-after conductor. Twenty years ago, he was on the hot track to a big U.S. career. He made the customary rounds of the majors and, I can attest, led some impressive concerts over five seasons with the New York Philharmonic between 1995 and 2002, excelling in the widescreen tone poetry of Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony and Ein Heldenleben. When leading Der Rosenkavalier at the Met in 1993, he stood up to Kathleen Battle’s diva demands and her career never recovered. He began recording for Deutsche Grammophon. He conducted Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina at the Lincoln Center Festival in 1997 and seemed to be connecting with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the mid-1990s. But until last week his most recent appearances locally appear to be at the Met for Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten in January 2002.

He has said that the reason is scheduling, but I wonder. Artistic kerfuffles dot his European posts. A political right winger, he reportedly made a comment to the effect that Germany had no cause to apologize for its past, and a well-known artist manager told me that his career was dead in the U.S.

Now age 53, he conducts at Bayreuth, Salzburg, Berlin, Vienna, and Dresden, where he became principal conductor this season of the Staatskapelle Dresden, which he led at Carnegie Hall on April 17 and 19. The orchestra is 465 years old and boasts a creamy, consonant sonority. I recall a fine concert some years ago conducted by Herbert Blomstedt at Lincoln Center, featuring the Bruckner Fourth. The ensemble’s outstanding recorded symphony cycles of Schumann by Wolfgang Sawallisch (EMI) and Brahms by Kurt Sanderling (RCA) stubbornly resist deletion from my collection.

Thielemann’s symphony performances have often struck me as wayward, much in the manner of one of his mentors and Furtwängler acolyte Daniel Barenboim, so I skipped the first concert, all-Brahms. But the second concert was devoted solely to Bruckner’s monumental Eighth Symphony, and I figured that a former protégé of Herbert von Karajan might have something worthwhile to say about the work. I was wrong.

Bruckner’s Eighth opens with a pianissimo tremolando in the strings, doubled by sustained horns. One’s ears should prick up immediately in anticipation, but a ragged horn entrance broke the spell before it even could be cast. Perhaps for this reason, the symphony’s ominous, sharply rhythmic primary motive in the lower strings was disconcertingly phlegmatic, and the movement only gained purpose toward the end. The Scherzo was marred by the kind of fussiness New Yorkers endured during Lorin Maazel’s tenure at the Philharmonic, and Thielemann  compromised the movement’s giddy rush to the double bar with a clumsy ritard at the end and a cushioned attack on Bruckner’s final, staccato note. The sublime Adagio began impatiently but broadened expressively by the climax. Overall, the finale was most successful, and he seamlessly integrated the Haas edition’s conflation of the original 1887 version and the 1890 revision. Alas, any positive feelings I had over the performance’s 84-minute duration were obliterated by his grotesque distortion of the symphony’s final four notes.

European speculation has Thielemann succeeding Simon Rattle at the Berlin Philharmonic when the Brit’s contract expires in five years.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

4/25 at 7:30. Zankel Hall. Young Artists Concert. Ives: Three Places in New England. John Adams: Shaker Loops. Andrew Norman: Try. Michael Gordon: Yo Shakespeare. (John Adams and David Robertson, instructors.)

4/26 at 8:00. Trinity Church. Choir of Trinity Wall Street; Novus NY; Julian Wachner, cond. (free admission; pre-concert lecture given by Matthew Guerrieri at 7:00). Stravinsky: Sacred works (complete). The Flood. Abraham and Isaac. Threni. Introitus.

4/27 at 8:00. Trinity Church. Choir of Trinity Wall Street; Novus NY; Julian Wachner, cond. (benefit for music education; composers panel discussion at 3:00; musicologists/critics panel discussion at 7:00). Stravinsky: Sacred works (complete). A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer. Elegy for J.F.K. In Memoriam Dylan Thomas. Requiem Canticles. Canticum sacrum.

4/28 at 3:00. Trinity Church. Choir of Trinity Wall Street; Novus NY; Trinity Youth Chorus; Julian Wachner, cond. (free admission). Stravinsky: Sacred works (complete). Anthem. Cantata. Pater Noster. Credo. Ave Maria. Symphony of Psalms. Bach (arr. Stravinsky): Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch.”

4/28 at 7:30. Weill Hall. Yale in NewYork. Claudia Rosenthal, soprano; Boris Berman, piano; Ettore Causa, viola; Jasper String Quartet; members of the Yale Philharmonia/Julian Pellicano. Hindemith: Sonata for Viola and Piano, Op. 11, No. 4 (1919). Minimax (Repertoire for Military Orchestra), parody for string quartet (1923). Overture to The Flying Dutchman as Played at Sight By a Second-Rate Concert Orchestra at the Village Well at 7 o’clock in the Morning, parody for string quartet (c. 1925). Die Serenaden, Op. 35 (1925). Kammermusik No. 2, Op. 36, No. 1, “Piano Concerto” (1924).

4/30 at 7:00. Metropolitan Opera. Handel: Giulio Cesare. Harry Bicket (cond.); Dessay, Coote, Bardon, Daniels, Dumaux, Loconsolo.

by Sedgwick Clark

New York music lovers were fortunate to hear many performances by the British conductor Colin Davis and the Chicago Symphony’s longtime principal trumpet Adolph (“Bud”) Herseth in its concert halls. Last weekend the music world lost both artists, who afforded me some of the most inspiring musical experiences of my life.  How lucky we are to have so many examples of their artistry on record and in our memories.

Colin Davis (1927-2013)

How many musicians give their finest performances at the end of their lives? Colin Davis did. When word of his death at age 85 hit the Internet last Sunday, April 14, his revelatory Beethoven Missa solemnis with the London Symphony Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall on October 21, 2011, leapt instantly to mind. With infinite wisdom, he had conveyed the composer’s emotional message as never before in my experience. It turned out to be his final New York performance. Six years before, he had led the LSO with blinding commitment in Vaughan Williams’s Sixth and Walton’s First symphonies. Indeed, the Walton far surpassed his highly regarded recording on the LSO LIVE label. And on April 3, 2008, he led the New York Philharmonic in a searing realization of VW’s Fourth Symphony that rivaled the composer’s own hellbent 1937 recording.

In the spring of my first season in New York, 1968-69, Davis led Metropolitan Opera performances of Britten’s Peter Grimes, with Jon Vickers and Geraint Evans, and Berg’s Wozzeck, with Evans and Evelyn Lear–thrilling, both of them. On January 19, 1972, I met him for the first time. It was my third day in my new job as p.r. director at Philips, his recording label. He had just conducted the opening night of a new Met production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and our office took him to dinner afterwards. Eager to engage him in conversation, I asked him (for some reason I can’t recall) what he thought of composers conducting their own works. “Oh, they’re all terrible,” he replied. Astonished, I asked “Stravinsky?” “He’s awful!” he said, rolling his eyes. “Well, what about Britten?” I asked, thinking I had him there. “He’s the worst!” he exclaimed. I shut up.

My boss told me that he was the only Philips artist who never asked, or had his manager ask, for an advertisement in the concert program. He was unfailingly friendly and relaxed to this new kid in the office, and his delightfully British, mock-serious sense of humor could turn boyishly ribald at times. When joining a group for lunch after a Tanglewood rehearsal, one of the men pointed out that his fly was open. Davis thanked him, saying, “Mustn’t let the little birdie out.” Another time, after a winter concert, two attractive young women with markedly plunging necklines came to the Green Room to tell him how much they enjoyed the performances. Apparently they frequented his concerts, and after they left he expressed worry that they “might catch cold”–a concern he repeated several times later in the evening at my boss’s apartment over dinner.

Talking with him about Sibelius after he had led the composer’s Third Symphony in Boston was a great opportunity. I expressed surprise at how slowly he took the middle movement, Andantino con moto, quasi allegretto. “I love the ineffable sadness of the music at that tempo,” he said quietly. I suggested that he should record all the symphonies with the BSO. When I returned to my office I told my boss how wonderful the performance was and that he should record the cycle. Sibelius not being a big seller, she snapped, “Sedgwick Clark, if you ever tell him that, you’re fired!” Of course I remained mum, but she fired me three months later anyway. Davis did record the seven symphonies in Boston, as well as several other Sibelius works, and they were hailed internationally upon their release.

Colin Davis was Musical America’s Conductor of the Year in 1997 in recognition of his appointment as the New York Philharmonic’s principal guest conductor.

Adolph Herseth (1921-2013)

Friday, January 9, 1970, is a storied date for untold numbers of New York orchestra fans. On that evening at Carnegie Hall, Adolph (“Bud”) Herseth intoned the stuttering trumpet fanfare that opens Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Georg Solti proceeded to set a standard of all-out orchestral virtuosity that dominates the field still. Solti was called back to the stage 14 times in 15 minutes by a standing, stamping, cheering audience that refused to leave. Many orchestra players, too, were in no hurry to exit, milling about onstage after the hall lights were turned up, looking out in wonderment at the ovation and waving at audience members who remained to shout their praise. For three days hence my throat was so sore I could barely talk. It was the most exciting concert I’ve ever heard.

Herseth was principal trumpet of the most famous brass section in the U.S. from 1948 to 2001, and when he died at age 91 last Saturday his stature as a local hero was fully acknowledged in the press. John von Rhein wrote in the Trib: “For more than a half-century, Adolph Herseth’s distinctive sound and playing style were the bulwark of a brass section whose fabled power and brilliance have long been the sonic hallmark of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He was a legend, in the finest sense of that much-abused word.”

The next time you play one of those fabulous Chicago Symphony Orchestra recordings with Rafael Kubelik (Mercury), Fritz Reiner and Jean Martinon (RCA), or Georg Solti (Decca/London), pay special attention to the trumpet playing. You have seven CSO recordings of Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition to choose from.

Adolph (“Bud”) Herseth was the first orchestra player to receive Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year award, in 1996.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

4/19. Carnegie Hall. Dresden Staatskapelle/Christian Thielemann. Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 (Haas edition).

4/24 at 7:30. Zankel Hall. Young Artists Concert. Steven Mackey: Ground Swell. John Adams: Gnarly Buttons. Carter: Double Concerto. (John Adams and David Robertson, instructors.)

4/25 at 7:30. Zankel Hall. Young Artists Concert. Ives: Three Places in New England. John Adams: Shaker Loops. Andrew Norman: Try. Michael Gordon: Yo Shakespeare. (John Adams and David Robertson, instructors.)

by Sedgwick Clark

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has taken its time in replacing James Levine, who stepped down as music director two years ago due to a back injury. While two years without a captain at the helm is hardly optimum, at least the orchestra has avoided Philadelphia’s precipitous mismatch of Christoph Eschenbach (2003-2008). Last week in the two concerts I heard of the three it performed at Carnegie Hall, the BSO demonstrated that it remains close to the top of its game, with its traditional warmth, tonal elegance, and ease of virtuosity firmly in place.

Wednesday’s concert (4/3), under Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, the orchestra’s favorite guest conductor and Musical America’s 2011 Conductor of the Year, is close to my favorite program of the season. The BSO “owns” two of these works, both commissioned by its enterprising music director from 1924 to 1949, Serge Koussevitzky. The first, Hindemith’s Concert Music for Strings and Brass, Op. 50, deserves to be heard more often. It was one of several works the Russian conductor commissioned for the orchestra’s 50th anniversary in 1930—others being Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Roussel’s Third Symphony, Hanson’s Second Symphony (“Romantic”), Prokofiev’s Fourth Symphony, Copland’s Symphonic Ode, and works by Honegger, Respighi, and himself (anonymously). After hearing Koussevitzky reprise the Concert Music eight years later, Hindemith wrote in his journal, “I was pleasantly surprised by the piece, for I hardly remembered it. It is serious and very fresh, and not at all ugly.” He adds that the BSO is “the best orchestra in the world,” and one imagines that Frühbeck’s energetic, witty, deeply felt performance would only have bolstered the composer’s estimation.

The second BSO commission on the program, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, needs little comment. It may be the last large orchestral work to enter the basic repertoire. Frühbeck received notably impassioned playing from all concerned, with especially pungent contributions from the woodwinds. Only at the very end did the orchestra come a cropper. Many conductors on record, beginning with Reiner, broaden the tempo at bar 616 for the climactic brass fanfare; Bernstein, Boulez, and others too numerous to mention wrong-headedly (in my humble opinion) follow suit, devitalizing the ending. That old literalist Leinsdorf in his 1962 recording—his first as the BSO’s music director—slams the coda home in tempo as Bartók indicates, which never fails to blow the roof off. Frühbeck’s players couldn’t seem to agree, and what should have been electrifying short-circuited.

Sandwiched between the Hindemith and Bartók works was another conservative 20th-century masterpiece, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, played expressively by Garrick Ohlsson and partnered in kind by Frühbeck. While some might prefer more sec articulation and a slightly quicker pace to evoke the diabolical composer of the title, Ohlsson’s pianism was no less satisfying than in his performance with Atlanta and Robert Spano two seasons ago of the composer’s Third Piano Concerto.

All was right with the world as I left Carnegie after Daniele Gatti had led the second Boston concert (4/4) in Mahler’s Third Symphony (the following night he would lead an all-Wagner program). I was amazed at how easily I was able to suppress my usual Mahlerite niggling and surrender to the glories that Gatti accomplished. I was especially moved by the last movement, which flowed naturally—inevitably—and had just the right “saturated, noble tone” of the brass on the final page that Mahler demands. On the other hand, I felt that the tempo for the third-movement posthorn solo was a bit brisk to achieve the ideal nostalgia. Moreover, many quiet details such as the percussion in the first movement’s introduction were not audible because Gatti took pp marks too literally; recordings can ensure audibility, but live performance in a large space is something else entirely. Overall, however, the Bostonians sounded absolutely resplendent, and one cannot close without noting Anne Sofie von Otter’s evocative singing in the fourth-movement “Midnight Song” from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra and the superb violin solos from second Assistant Concertmaster Elita Kang in this and the previous evening’s Rachmaninoff. A Mahler Third on such a high interpretive and technical level at Carnegie Hall makes life worth living.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

4/11 at 7:30. Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/David Robertson; Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano. Messiaen: Les Offrandes oubliées. Mozart: Concerto No. 23. Tristan Murail: Le Désenchantement du monde. Beethoven: Symphony No. 2.

4/11 at 7:30. Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Joshua Bell, violin. Christopher Rouse: Prospero’s Rooms. Bernstein: Serenade (after Plato’s “Symposium”). Ives: Symphony No. 4

by Sedgwick Clark

Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic – America’s hottest orchestra/conductor team – breezed through New York last week for a pair of sold-out concerts they had just performed in LA, London, Lucerne, and Paris. Dudamel is a bona fide star. Now 32, he draws a younger-than-usual audience, and cheers erupted when he walked to the podium. But nothing in his demeanor indicates that this acclaim has gone to his head; he even appears bashful about it. True to his El Sistema upbringing, his commitment to music education is unwavering, and nothing in the American publicity mill will deter it. His conducting style is understated, with minimal gestures, and when the performance ends he walks through the orchestra to single out important soloists and entire choirs. He’s one of the gang, and he respects each and every one of them. He’s got the goods, and what’s happening on that other coast should be followed with great interest by the faltering music business.

He loves contemporary and 20th-century music, and all the works he conducted in New York fit that bill. Indeed, the first of the Lincoln Center concerts (3/27) was the local premiere of a single, extraordinarily ambitious work: John Adams’s oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2011-12). Many consider Adams a great composer, an opinion I wish I could share. His new work, lasting over two and a half hours, stretched the limits of boredom as few performances I can recall – not since Carlo Maria Giulini led this same orchestra in a full-hour, headache-inducing distention of Beethoven’s Eroica at Carnegie Hall 34 years ago.

For fuller, more gentlemanly analyses of the Other Mary, read George Loomis’s report (3/29) on the Musical America Web site and Anthony Tommasini’s in the Times (3/30). But even they were quite mixed over the sprawling structure of librettist and director Peter Sellars’s amalgam of poetry. Sellars is a brilliant thinker and talker, as he demonstrated once again in a pre-concert discussion, but noble ideas do not a viable libretto make, as this team so excruciatingly demonstrated with the opera Doctor Atomic. However, my concern here is about the musical element of the piece, not the political or religious matters – or Sellars’s distracting staging – that upset some of the reviewers I googled. I simply was not emotionally engaged by the way Adams arranged the notes.

The score is structured in two parts. The first part is the longest, and except for a couple of brief Orffisms I waited in vain for memorable melodic inspiration. The second half seemed to acquire a more angular rhythmic profile, perhaps because the deadline was encroaching and the motoric wisps of Stravinsky, Orff, and even Janáček that dot Adams’s earlier works asserted themselves more readily. (Tommasini heard “recognizeable inspirations, like big-band jazz, Bach, Copland, Ives, Ravel and more . . . .”) Whatever the case, Dudamel and the Angelinos acquitted themselves brilliantly as far as I could tell, and Deutsche Grammophon recorded the work in March.

Dudamel’s second concert (3/28) began with an ugly piece called Zipangu (1980), by Canadian composer Claude Vivier. According to the program book, Vivier’s “own style synthesized many characteristics of Debussy’s and Stravinsky’s music.” Nonsense.

The real music ensued with a rather soggy rendition of Debussy’s La Mer and a detailed and expressive (or, if one didn’t like it, slow and meandering) performance of Stravinsky’s complete Firebird (1910). While I prefer the greater intensity and drama of the composer’s recorded performance, which is tighter by five minutes, there were plenty of gorgeous moments to savor throughout the score in Dudamel’s conception, from the lovely “Round dance of the princesses” to the exciting “Infernal dance of Kastchei’s subjects,” which provoked applause at its wild conclusion.

An interesting detail: Stravinsky added two snarling trombone glissandi near the end of the Infernal dance in his 1919 Suite, which is the way the Firebird music is most often performed, and he retained it in his longer 1945 Suite. Neither the complete 1910 ballet music nor the 1910 Suite versions include the glissandi, but Dudamel added them (as well as, he told me later, other scoring details from the 1919 version that I didn’t notice), and they fit just fine. Why didn’t anyone else – including the composer himself ex post facto – think of this?

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

4/4 Carnegie Hall. Boston Symphony/Daniele Gatti; Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo; Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Mahler: Symphony No. 3.

4/5 at 7:00. Metropolitan Museum. New York Philharmonic Contact Concert/Alan Gilbert; Liang Wang, oboe. Unsuk Chin: Gougalon. Poul Ruders: Oboe Concerto. Anders Hillborg: Vaporized Tivoli. Yann Robin: Backdraft.

4/8 at 7:30. Symphony Space. Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival. Loadbang; Kathy Supove, piano; Oleg Dubson, actor. Alexandre Lundsqui: Gutteral I and II. Douglas Gibson: Fanfare for the Common Audience. Reiko Füting: Land of Silence. Andy Ahiko: LOVE LOST LUST LONE. Victoria Bond: The Page Turner. Hanna Lash: Stoned Prince.

4/11 at 7:30. Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/David Robertson; Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano. Messiaen: Les Offrandes oubliées. Mozart: Concerto No. 23. Tristan Murail: Le Désenchantement du monde. Beethoven: Symphony No. 2.

by Sedgwick Clark

In his “New York Chronicle” music column for the April issue of The New Criterion, my friend and colleague Jay Nordlinger writes about a concert by Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra that we both attended on February 13 at Carnegie Hall. At one point he notes that some audience members applauded between movements of the two works performed. “This was not especially annoying. The shushing of them by others—harsh, petty, self-righteous shushing—was.” Being one of those shushers, I’d like to have my say.

Honestly, I can’t help it—it’s like a doctor’s tap on my knee. Shushing escapes my lips the moment someone applauds between movements. My brows knit, my teeth clench, and my head turns accusingly toward the offending clappers. The artists onstage have poured out their hearts to transport us to the composer’s world, but the applause destroys our concentration, breaks the spell. Wait for the conclusion of the work to register your approval, I believe, and you will be far more satisfied than if you dissipate it too soon. In a great performance, premature applause is like a knife in the heart, no less than unchecked hacking or a beeping cell phone. (In the latter regard, I recall a Philharmonic matinee at which a woman answered her phone to say, “I’m at a concert and can’t talk now.”) One music-loving friend has sworn off live concerts completely in favor of his recordings, unable to tolerate “piggish audiences who have no respect for the composers, artists, or fellow listeners.”

Recording engineer Seth Winner, who has worked on resuscitating NBC Symphony/Toscanini broadcasts, reports that applause between movements was diminishing in the 1930s but actively frowned upon in earnest when the orchestra went to an hour-long format in 1941 because it threw off the timings of the program. By the time I began going to concerts, nearly 45 years ago, applause between movements was essentially non-existent, and conductors would hold up an arm for silence. 

Many of those concerned about the future of classical-music concerts believe that the younger set is alienated by such concert decorum. If people want to applaud between movements, let them, they say. Times change, and there’s no reason for acceptable concert decorum not to make adjustments as well. The late music critic Alan Rich wrote in New York magazine in the 1970s of the sneering glances of Met Opera patrons when he wore jeans to an opening. Nowadays, a man in a tux or tails at a Met opening is the exception.

As in every activity in life, however, there are rules and boundaries so that communal activities may be enjoyed by the majority. Hence, the pre-performance announcements about turning off cell phones before concerts and movies, not taking photos, or otherwise fiddling with technical doodads that might distract your neighbor’s attention from the music or screen. If I’ve been “harsh, petty, self-righteous” in my imprecations, Jay, I’ll attempt to be less so in my shushing lest I turn into my friend who has forsaken the concert hall.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

3/22 at 7:30. Carnegie Hall. Jeremy Denk, piano. Bartók: Piano Sonata. Liszt: “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” Prelude after J.S. Bach, S. 179; Sonetto 123 del Petrarca from Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième année; Après une lecture du Dante, fantasia quasi sonata; Isoldes Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. J.S. Bach: Prelude and Fugue in B minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, BWV 869. Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111.

3/27 at 7:30. Avery Fisher Hall. Los Angeles Philharmonic/Gustavo Dudamel. Peter Sellars, director. Los Angeles Master Chorale/Grant Gershon. Kelly O’Connor (Mary Magdalene), Tamara Mumford (Martha), Russell Thomas (Lazarus). John Adams: The Gospel According to the Other Mary.

3/28 Avery Fisher Hall. Los Angeles Philharmonic/Gustavo Dudamel. Vivier: Zipangu. Debussy: La Mer. Stravinsky: The Firebird (complete ballet).