Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 13

Toradze Memorial Concert

The recent Alexander Toradze Memorial Concert, featuring more than a dozen pianists, is now accessible online here. 

In addition to a lot of music, this event features three video clips of Lexo speaking and performing. 

A Toradze memorial festival will be held in Tbilisi, beginning May 30, 2023, (Lexo’s birthday) with a concert including Vladimir Feltsman performing Mozart’s K. 595 Piano Concerto. The Artistic Director will be Edisher Savitski.

A commemorative CD, including Lexo performing his father’s Piano Concerto, is also planned.

Thank you to Joe Patrych, for hosting the Memorial Concert at Klavierhaus (NYC), and to Behrouz Jamali, for his extraordinary Toradze film.

Lexo’s premature departure is still being processed by those of us who were privileged to know him.

Did Kurt Weill “Look Back”?

My favorite recording of any Kurt Weill song – as I have occasion to remark at the close of my recent NPR documentary on Weill’s immigrant odyssey – is Weill’s own rendition of “That’s Him.” Re-encountering this remarkable performance, with the composer accompanying himself at the piano, I feel a need to ponder what makes it so special.

As I observed on the radio: 

“It’s a song from his 1943 show One Touch of Venus, originally sung by Mary Martin. So it’s supposed to be sung by a woman. . . . It’s yet another face of Kurt Weill – that of the worldly immigrant, of the New York cosmopolite. It magically evokes the sophistication of Broadway 80 years ago. And the words couldn’t be more distant from the sardonic political wit of Weill’s Berlin partner Bertolt Brecht. They’re by the poet Ogden Nash, who specialized in urbane nonsense rhymes. So this is a love song unlike any other – it achieves romantic effusion via whimsical understatement.”

Nash begins:

You know the way you feel when there is autumn in the air

The way you feel when Antoine has finished with your hair

That’s him.

Nash rhymes about the way you feel “when you smell bread baking . . . The way you feel when a tooth stops aching…. ”

The song peaks with a veritable paean of understatement. The romantic object of desire is:

Not arty, not actory

He’s like a plumber when you need a plumber

He’s . . . satisfactory.

As sung by Weill, this love song is not a love song. You can hear that it’s supposed to be by listening to Mary Martin sing it – a beautifully calculated interpretation, with its calibrated dynamics and sweet portamentos. (She was a trained soprano.) 

But it is Weill’s interpretation that’s “not arty, not actory.” Its keynote is the first sentence: “You know how you feel when there is autumn in the air.” For Weill, “That’s Him” becomes a personal expression of twilit serenity. And it’s about Weill himself: a self-portrait.  

What’s more: the same twilight tone inflects Weill’s two most popular Broadway tunes: “Speak Low” and “September Song.” Like “That’s him,” “Speak Low” comes from One Touch of Venus, with words by Ogden Nash:

Speak low when you speak love
Our summer’s day withers away too soon, too soon
Speak low when you speak love
Our moment is swift like ships adrift
We’re swept apart too soon

Speak low, darling speak low
Love is a spark, lost in the dark
Too soon, too soon
I feel wherever I go that tomorrow is near
Tomorrow is here and always too soon

Time is so old and love so brief
Love is pure gold and time a thief
We’re late, darling, we’re late
The curtain descends, everything ends
Too soon, too soon
I wait, oh darling, I wait
Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon?

The words for “September Song” are Maxwell Anderson’s:

When I was a young man courting the girls
I played me a waiting game
If a maid refused me with tossing curls
I’d let the old Earth take a couple of whirls
While I plied her with tears in lieu of pearls
And as time came around she came my way
As time came around, she came.

When you meet with the young girls early in the spring
You court them in song and rhyme
They answer with words and a clover ring
But if you could examine the goods they bring
They have little to offer but the songs they sing
And a plentiful waste of time of day
A plentiful waste of time.

Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short
When you reach September
When the Autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn’t got time for the waiting game

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days
I’ll spend with you
These precious days
I’ll spend with you.

As it happens, Weill recorded “Speak Low” – and it sounds like this. He never recorded “September Song” – but he should have, because he would have been the perfect interpreter. 

Long ago, when a music critic for the New York Times, I had the privilege of interviewing Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, in her Manhattan apartment. She said: “The old-timers were always talking about the past. And Weill never did. Never. Because they would always talk about how marvelous it was in Berlin. And Kurt was always looking ahead. He didn’t want to look back.”

Certainly “Speak Low” and “September Song” explicitly “look ahead” – to “precious days” to come. But the affect of these songs, and of “That’s Him” as rendered by Weill – is autumnal. It would be imprecise to call them “nostalgic.” But they convey a journey’s end. They register, retrospectively, a crucible now mainly past – fleeing the Nazis, skimming Paris and London, tackling the Broadway hegemony of Rodgers & Hammerstein.

Who was Kurt Weill? Judging from his correspondence with Lenya, his personality wasn’t exactly becalmed. The letters allude to frustrations and rivalries. In one (June 4, 1944), Lenya writes (in her acquired English): “Maybe after the war you will have a chance to write operas again and then see what will be left of that Hillbilly show ‘Oklahoma.’ That music sounds dummer and dummer every time I hear it. There is something about tradition and it cant be pound into people. It has to grow trough centuries. Evidently. So lets be patient and be grateful for the little white house we got out of spite of them not knowing your real value.”

But “That’s Him,” “Speak Low,” and “September Song” transcend every second thought, every regret and sorrow. They exude reconciliation. And this autumnal dimension enlarges these songs in special ways. As Lenya testified, Weill didn’t wish to “look back.” But he could not wholly ignore his tumultuous past. Weill died young – at the age of fifty. Whence his twilight tone? His fraught saga of flight, immigration, and assimilation, I believe, can be read into “time is so old, and love so brief.”

A footnote: Weill’s delivery seamlessly mates speech and song. That’s part of its magic. Artur Rubinstein, summarizing the supreme art of Feodor Chaliapin, observed that he sang with the same voice with which he spoke. Cf.: “The Greatest Vocal Recording of All Time.“

Kurt Weill’s Immigrant Odyssey on NPR

Kurt Weill, a refugee from Nazi Germany, turned himself into one of Broadway’s leading composers – an amazing feat of assimilation. After the war, he only returned to Europe once, in 1947  – and reported: “Strangely enough, wherever I found decency and humanity in the world, it reminded me of America.”

How does that sentiment play today? It’s a question posed and pondered in my latest NPR “More than Music” documentary, which treats Weill’s odyssey as a lesson in immigration.  The commentators include the social critic John McWhorter and the Weill scholar Kim Kowalke, both of whom reference Weill’s anti-apartheid musical Lost in the Stars (1949) – an implicit condemnation of Jim Crow.

Kowalke says: “There’s no question that when he arrived [in 1935] Weill believed in the American dream. . . . That love of country persisted. . . . But like so many others after the war Weill felt that the American dream had been punctured. And I often think — what if he had lived to see what’s going on in this country today? How would he respond?” Maybe, Kowalke continues, with the  “bleak warnings” about the “fragility of democracy” earlier to be found in Weill’s Die Bürgschaft (1931) and Der Silbersee (1933). 

Asked “What makes Weill Weill?”, Weill himself is heard commenting, on a 1941 radio broadcast: ”I seem to have a very strong awareness of the sufferings of underprivileged people.”

Tracking Weill in Berlin, Paris, and Broadway, our broadcast samples historic recordings by Bertolt Brecht, Walter Huston, Todd Duncan, and Bobby Darin. And we hear terrific modern-day renditions, recorded in live performance at the Brevard Music Festival, by Lisa Vroman and William Sharp, by Brevard’s Janiec Opera Company, and by the Brevard Music Center Orchestra conducted by Keith Lockhart.

My own favorite Weill performance, which closes the show (at 42:20), is Weill himself singing a Broadway love song thathas nothing whatsoever to do with social justice: “That’s Him.” It’s yet another face of Kurt Weill – of the worldly immigrant, the New York cosmopolite. It magically evokes the sophistication of Broadway 80 years ago. And the words couldn’t be more distant from the sardonic political wit of Weill’s Berlin partner Bertolt Brecht. They’re by the poet Ogden Nash, who specialized in urbane nonsense rhymes — and who here conveys romantic effusion via whimsical understatement. Nash begins:

You know the way you feel when there is autumn in the air,

The way you feel when Antoine has finished with your hair,

That’s him.

Nash and Weill rhyme about the way you feel “when you smell bread baking,” the “way you feel when a tooth stops aching.” “That’s Him” peaks with a veritable paean of understatement. The romantic object of desire is

Not arty, not actory.

He’s like a plumber when you need a Plumber.

He’s . . . satisfactory.

Accompanying himself at the piano, Weill is himself “not actory.” Mary Martin, who sang “That’s Him” on Broadway, sounds “arty” by comparison. Weill is here the “plumber”: no less than the song, his rendition divinely celebrates the quotidian. 

To listen to the show, click here

LISTENING GUIDE:

00:00 – Bobby Darin and Bertolt Brecht sing “Mack the Knife”

3:20 – Walter Huston sings “September Song”

4:40 – Weill on the radio show “I am an American” (1941)

7:00 – Lisa Vroman and William Sharp sing “How Can You Tell an American?”

9:00 – John McWhorter on Weill’s notion of “America”

12:16 – The Seven Deadly Sins, with commentary by Keith Lockhart

17:45 – Lisa Vroman sings “My Ship”

22:00 – Weill sets Walt Whitman in response to Pearl Harbor

25:40 – The Ice Cream Sextet from Street Scene 

31:40 – Kim Kowalke on Weill and social justice

35:00 – John McWhorter on Lost in the Stars

38:20 – Kim Kowalke on Weill and the American dream

42:20 – Weill sings “That’s Him”

FOR A RELATED BLOG, click here.

Mocking Freedom? What To Do With the “Star-Spangled Banner”

My July 4 “More than Music” special for National Public Radio seems to me the hottest radio show I’ve ever managed to produce. The topic is The Star-Spangled Banner – as an instrument for exploring issues of race and national identity. You can hear it here.

The Star-Spangled Banner is controversial today for three reasons. The first is that Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words, owned slaves. The second is that the little-known third verse references “hireling and slave” – and we’re not sure what that means. The third is that American identity is being scrutinized as never before in living memory – what does it mean, right now, when we sing “land of the free”?

The music historian Mark Clague, who invaluable partners the broadcast, has written an important new book: Oh, Say Can You Hear?  It’s a “cultural history” of The Star-Spangled Banner. Mark has many answers. He tells us that Key both owned slaves and, as an attorney, freed nearly 200 enslaved Black Americans. He explains that “slave,” in Key’s third verse, doesn’t refer to African-Americans (which, he adds, doesn’t let Key off the hook). 

And Mark eloquently makes a case for retaining The Star-Spangled Banner – with two revisions. As part of our national inheritance, it stands witness to our history; it changes significance over time; it instigates a virtual “conversation” about the shifting meaning of American patriotism.

The outstanding African-American bass-baritone Davone Tines, however, finds The Star-Spangled Banner “colonialist” and “bellicose.” He builds a case for a new national anthem: “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The “Black national anthem,” it’s as harmonious and inclusive as Keys’ song is (“conquer we must”) is martial.

A third participant in the show is the eminent Civil War historian Allen Guelzo, who tackles a related issue: what to do with statues of Francis Scott Key and other famous slave-owners? Leave them alone, he argues. We are an increasingly forgetful nation. We need to possess a national past. 

Along the way, partnered by Peter Bogdanoff’s technical wizardly, I sample renditions by Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Morton Gould, and Igor Stravinsky, among others. And we also hear two of the more than 500 (!) alternative verses for The Star-Spangled Banner – a post-Civil War anti-slavery lyric by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., which Clague believe should be formally adopted; and a bitterly sarcastic 1844 Abolitionist lyric that, when we hear it sung, chills the spine: 

Oh say, do you hear, at the dawn’s early light,

The shrieks of those Bondmen, whose blood is now streaming

From the merciless lash, while our Banner in sight,

With its stars, mocking Freedom, is fitfully gleaming?

Do you see the backs bare, do you mark every score

Of the whip of the driver trace channels of gore 

Oh Say does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave

O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?

Here’s a listener’s guide: 

7:40 – A close look at Whitney Houston’s 1991 Super Bowl rendition

11:00 – Stravinsky’s version, for which he was accused of “tampering with national property”

14:00 – A close look at Francis Scott Key and slavery

15:04 – What does Key mean by “hireling and slave”?
18:00 – Allen Guelzo on those statues, and related matters

25:00 – Davone Tines on “a demonstrably toxic way of building a foundation for a nation”

26:00 – The Star-Spangled Banner recast as an Abolitionist salvo

33:30 – “Hail Columbia” as an alternative to The Star-Spangled Banner

35:00 – Antonin Dvorak’s alternative to The Star-Spangled Banner

37:00 – Davone Tines’ alternative to The Star-Spangled Banner

43:30 – Mark Clague’s “new verse,” courtesy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 

You can link to previous “More than Music” radio documentaries via the bottom of my home page.

“How I Wish We Had Something Like That Today”

Fill in the blanks:

“This was performed and broadcast to millions of people. And something that should resonate with all of us today is the confluence of fine art and popular art and a mass medium – something we’ve lost in this era, when we’re being sliced into ever narrower shards of demographics. The brilliance of what xxx and xxx did was to embrace all of us, in the best [Walt] Whitman spirit. To make all of us one nation, one community. How I wish we had something like that today.”

The blanks read “Bernard Herrmann” and “Norman Corwin.” The speaker is Murray Horwitz, former head of cultural programing for National Public Radio. And the source is my latest “More than Music” NPR documentary, broadcast yesterday. Its topic: the radio plays of the 1930s and 1940s generally, and the Corwin/Herrmann “Whitman” (June 20, 1944) specifically.

To hear yesterday’s 50-minute show, click here.

Following Murray’s lead, I chime in to suggest that “Whitman” (starring Charles Laughton, music by Herrmann, scripted and produced by Corwin) was “an act of democratic faith in a democratic American audience,” achieving “a kind of optimum engagement, reaching the largest possible audience without diluting Whitman’s verse. We’re very far from that ideal in today’s world of social media.”

Here again is Murray, from the same show: “Radio was IT – the only broadcast medium. And there were only four national networks. So pretty much everybody in the country was listening to the same stuff.”  And the stuff was a product of live commercial broadcasting, often presented non-commercially without ads. 

The further pertinence of “Whitman” is inescapable. He espoused inclusive American ideals. He healed the ripped national fabric after the Civil War. 

Does the Herrmann/Corwin “Whitman” matter today? In effect, it’s a 30-minute composition for narrator and orchestra, awaiting attention. The baritone William Sharp, who takes the part of Whitman in the PostClassical Ensemble “Whitman” recording on Naxos, says: “It speaks to us so strongly,” a “magically wonderful thing” to hear were orchestras to program it.

(Herrmann is part of the “new paradigm” – the new narrative for American classical music – that I propose in my book Dvorak’s Prophecy. I continue to regard him as the most under-rated 20th century American composer. Why aren’t our orchestras programing his Moby Dick cantata? It’s certainly not because Herrmann doesn’t sell. We’re talking about the composer of Psycho, Vertigo, and Citizen Kane.)

The participants in yesterday’s radio show, in addition to Murray and Bill, include Alex Ross of The New Yorker (a huge Herrmann fan) and the Whitman scholar Karen Karbenier.

The next “More than Music” NPR documentary will air July 4. The topic (tracking Mark Clague’s superb new book) is the unlikely history of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” – which we’ll hear performed by Jimi Hendrix, Whitney Houston, and Jose Feliciano, among others. And we’ll sample verses you’ve never heard before.

Again, my thanks to Rupert Allman and Jenn White of WAMU’s “1A” for believing in what Rupert calls “long-form radio.”

A “listener’s guide” follows:

00:00 – We start with the shower scene from Psycho, “to get everyone’s attention.”

2:30 – Orson Welles and the birth of radio drama: “The War of the Worlds”

8:07 – Bernard Herrmann hypnotically sets Whitman’s paean to the grass — “handkerchief of the lord” – consecrating the young Civil War dead.

12:30 – Herrmann’s unforgettable invocation of “America the Beautiful,” a “teeming nation of nations.”

15:50 – Whitman and Herrmann extol a great democratic citizenry, “immense in passion, pulse, and power.” 

19:57 – Murray Horwitz: “Radio was IT.”

21:12 – Radio’s biggest star: FDR. The first “fireside chat.”

24:29 – Whitman’s “radical vision of democracy” explored by Whitman scholar Karen Karbinier (“He strikes a perfect balance between individuality and community”).

31:29 – Dorothy Herrmann describes her notoriously irascible father reacting to a prelminary screening of Psycho (“Did you ever see such a piece of crap?”).

32:54 – Herrmann’s sublime Clarinet Quintet, featuring clarinetist David Jones.

39:04 – Alex Ross on Herrmann (“one of the most original composers of any century,” “a very great talent, one that we’re still very far from appreciating and celebrating in full.”

To purchase a related Bernard Herrmann DVD (“Beyond ‘Psycho’”), click here.   

What Museums Can Do and Orchestras Cannot Do

Winslow Homer: “Lost in the Grand Banks”

I keenly anticipated the Metropolitan Museum’s current Winslow Homer retrospective. Titled “Cross-Currents,” it comprises 88 oils and watercolors, a 200-page scholarly catalogue, a “visiting guide,” an audio guide, and docents readily at hand. The driving aspiration is to newly frame a major nineteenth century American painter, with due regard for our current wrestlings with issues of American purpose and identity. 

In short – it is a necessary exercise in curating the American past, something our museums do and our orchestras do not.

As I write in Dvorak’s Prophecy, cities (I mention Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh) whose art museums “regularly scrutinize the American cultural narrative” host orchestras innocent of this endeavor. And I specifically cite a 2018 Metropolitan Museum exhibit tracing the lineage of the painter Thomas Cole, adding: 

“Were an orchestra to do something similar, it might be a contextualized presentation of the symphonies of John Knowles Paine (1875, 1879) – crucial progenitors of the American-sounding Second and Third Symphonies of George Chadwick. I would not call Paine a ‘great composer.’ But he is a great and necessary figure in the history of American classical music. American orchestras do not even know him.”

Were an American orchestra to “do something similar” to the Met’s Winslow Homer retrospective, it would be a celebration of our greatest symphonist: Charles Ives, whose 2024 Sesquicentenary is nearly upon us. Will anything like that take place? There is a tool kit at hand: the “Brevard Project” this July. It’s a week-long think tank/seminar exploring the ways American orchestras can “use the past” to serve the nation and reinvigorate their mission..  

                                    ***

Devouring the Winslow Homer galleries, I was impelled to recall the 1895 Civil War oration of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., with the immortal words: “Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” 

Self-made, virtually self-taught as a painter, Homer (1836-1910) apprenticed to a commercial lithographer at nineteen and became a frequent illustrator for Harper’s Weekly and Ballou’s Pictorial. He was all of 25 years old when the Civil War erupted. He became its most memorable painter. This singular apprenticeship “touched with fire” powered his destiny with gathering force. He seized the elemental – and, with his signature seascapes, became the recorder of man at war with his surroundings in an indifferent world.  Many an iconic Homer canvas shows sailors at the mercy of a sullen sea. At the Met, I was galvanized by the existential power of “Lost in the Grand Banks” (1885), with its brooding and featureless gray sky.

The trope of the self-invented, self-made American artist figures prominently in Dvorak’s Prophecy. I apply it to Walt Whitman, Hermann Melville, and – most especially – to Ives. It connects to something as “unfinished” as the United States itself. The Met’s Homer retrospective documents years of renewal, but also – at least to my eyes – pronounced terminal decline. My impression is that his lack of formal technical training ultimately became a source of limitation.

Many years ago, an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum cruelly juxtaposed the watercolors of Homer and John Singer Sargent. Homer was proud of his watercolors, and justly so. But Sargent’s command of this treacherous medium was sovereign. As a technician, he disclosed a virtuosity beyond Homer’s reach.

Seizing the Civil War, grappling with man’s war with the elements, Homer was an artist whose themes sometimes exceeded his means. And Sargent’s means can surpass his themes. It is in the music of Charles Ives – music still under-performed and under-recognized – that great American themes and uncanny, idiosyncratic means jostle in a wondrously dynamic equilibrium. 

The Ives Sesquicentenary seems to me a make-or-break moment for our struggling orchestras.

Remembering Lexo

When I filed my eulogy for Alexander Toradze, one of the emails I received was from David Hyslop. The former CEO of the Minnesota Orchestra, he knew Lexo at home in Minneapolis and on tour. Hyslop remembered Toradze as a great talent – and an even “greater person.” 

I was reminded, after a fashion, of a malicious review filed by a colleague during my New York Times tenure in the late 1970s. This was someone who loathed a Toradze performance. His review declared Toradze’s career over – he was a pianist no longer in demand by audiences or orchestras, the Times’ readers were informed. When I next encountered my colleague, I felt the need to inform him that I knew Alexander Toradze rather well, and that he was an “exceptional human being.” My colleague replied in a casual sing-song: “I’m sure that’s true.” This ended our exchange with the glib sentiment: So what? — it doesn’t matter. But it did matter, and it does. 

In Fort Worth, in the wake of the 1977 Cliburn Competition, the local public TV station produced a thirty-minute film: “Lexo.” This was before the era of soundbites. The film ends with a nearly complete performance of Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka, documenting an interpretation so vividly characterized that more than a few pianists regard it is a benchmark. But the glimpses afforded of Lexo’s interaction with his host family, including two young children, are every bit as memorable. At the age of 25, the Toradze personality – its onslaught of warmth and wellbeing — was already as striking as Toradze the pianist.  

In the wake of Lexo’s death, recorded concert performances are freshly turning up on youtube. One is the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor concerto, with David Atherton and the Hong Kong Philharmonic. This is from 1990 – the same year as the Prokofiev Third my son Bernie has flagged. Lexo’s mettlesome intellect is documented in fraught interaction with a volcano of feeling. It would be a pale understatement to characterize the old warhorse as re-animated by such inhabitation; Tchaikovsky can barely hang on.  

In the irreplaceable living room of Lexo’s South Bend home – a room filled with memorabilia and photographs and above all with memories – I two days ago discovered an album of photographs of his mother. She was a famous Georgian film actress. (His father was the pre-eminent Georgian composer.) Liana is smiling and proud. She has her arm around young Lexo, perhaps ten years old – and his arm is around her. Lexo’s countenance also evinces love and pride. But he is not smiling. One clearly senses something exceptional about the object of his mother’s high regard – an autonomy of spirit, a maturity beyond his years.  

How Lexo left his mother, father, and sister in 1983 is a story many times told. Touring with a Moscow orchestra in Spain, he was not permitted to perform. He had not been allowed to visit the United States, where he already had an excited and appreciative audience, for four years. Discovering himself in a Madrid restaurant without an escort, he impulsively sought asylum. A recent Russian posting quotes a newspaper interview from 2013 in which he says, “I never intended to leave anywhere, let alone run away . . . I broke down. It’s hard to believe, but it was a completely unprepared situation. I was thirty-one years old.” The Toradze odyssey, complex and unfathomable, may partly be read as evidence of the human cost of the Cold War. 

The night he would die in his sleep, Lexo texted a smiling selfie with cigar to Vladimir Feltsman, a friend of many decades. He was in an expansive mood. Notwithstanding a recent heart episode, he was feeling robust. He had just been told that his cardiac readings were strong. He was actually on the mend from a period of poor health.

A related blog: Toradze on Stravinsky  

Alexander Toradze 1952-2022

The pianist Alexander Toradze, who died yesterday of heart failure at the age of 69, was much more than a friend.

Lexo enjoyed telling the story of our first encounter – a story of American naivete. This took place in a small room at Carnegie Hall. He was touring as a Soviet artist; the year must have been 1979. The meeting was arranged by Mary Lou Falcone, the publicist of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition, in which Lexo’s second-place finish had stirred a national controversy. Mary Lou doubtless envisioned a lively exchange. I was eager to know how Alexander Toradze felt about the Soviet suppression of Alfred Schinittke and other “forbidden” Russian composers. He replied, without skipping a beat: “When was the last time John Cage’s prepared piano pieces were performed at Carnegie?” This took place in the presence of a man sitting silently in a corner – Lexo’s Soviet handler, of whom I was oblivious.

Lexo was in all things original. I have not met anyone more gifted at thinking while speaking – his remarks were never generic. For him, conversation was an art – doubtless a skill he acquired in his native Tbilisi, where toasting is a competitive creative act. Because his father was the leading Georgian composer, and his mother a prominent screen actress, he enjoyed access to the highest precincts of Soviet culture – including meetings of the Composers’ Union – at an early age. It showed.

In my book The Ivory Trade, I documented the youthful aplomb, the intensity of charm, of Lexo at full throttle at the 1976 Clibrun competition:

“Round-faced and pudgy, sociable, demonstrative, he was a born performer. Earnestly searching for an errant English word, he would purse his lips and knit his brow, and shut his eyes in a hard squint. In repose, his features turned vulnerably soft. Pleasure crinkled his eyes, puffed his cheeks, and stretched his mouth into a broad smile. . . .

“From the moment he sat down to play, Toradze was an adrenaline machine, arms ifidgeting, torso twisting, legs twitching, as he nervously glanced at the orchestra and the conductor. In action, eyes clamped, jaw clenched, he crowded the keyboard like a pugilist, bowing his head, curling his back, spreading his elbows. He beat time sharply with his left foot. His powerful hands, with their surprisingly long fingers, stood tall, tickling the keys or punishing them.

“Everything Toradze touched sounded different. His Bach was Gothic. His Haydn was relentless, formidably dour. He traversed a Scarlatti sonata in an eerie, mountful slow motion . . . “

Many years later, an attempt to implant Toradze in a documentary film for American public television proved a predictable fiasco. His discourse could not be captured in soundbites. A subsequent film by Behrouz Jamali recorded Lexo telling three stories over the course of one hour; it is the one to see.

The Toradze approach was not for everyone – or for all repertoire. Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto was one piece that could not survive a Lexo onslaught. I thought he made his deepest statement in Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2, which he read – Lexo always needed a story – as a requiem for Maximilian Schmidthof, who committed suicide. This detailed reading – a traumatic narrative of loss — transforms and amplifies the music in surprising ways. In music, an “agogic” accent is achieved not via loudness, but a slight delay. In his commercial recording of this work, partnered by his lifetime friend Valery Gergiev, the tremendous agogic accent Toradze interpolates at 11:42 (just after the first movement cadenza), and which Gergiev thunderously absorbs, is not to be found on the page. 

My son Bernie, who knows such things, believes Toradze’s supreme recorded performance is a 1990 version of the concerto he was practicing in the days preceding his death: Prokofiev’s No. 3, again with Gergiev. Hear it.

As a Moscow Conservatory student, Lexo listened clandestinely to the Voice of America “Jazz Hour.” He was not the only one for whom jazz signified American freedoms. Jazz informed Lexo’s thundering syncopations in Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Possibly his favorite story was meeting Ella Fitzgerald in Portland, Oregon. Touring as a Soviet artist in 1978, he discovered that Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson were about to perform a Portland concert. When he refused to take a scheduled flight for a Miami rehearsal, his American manager, Shelly Gold, told him he was jeopardizing his career. Lexo stayed in Portand and wound up onstage with Ella Fitzgerald. He dropped to his knees and kissed her hands. He told her that she mattered more in Russia than she could possibly matter to any American. Her photograph was always on his piano. (A full telling of this story begins at 18:16 here.)

Once, during a panel conversation in Washington D.C., Lexo heard an American music historian sarcastically demean Tikhon Khrennikov. The longtime head of the Soviet Composer’s Union, Khrennikov was initially appointed by Stalin, whom he faithfully served. When the Khrennikov lecture was over, Lexo casually remarked: “I knew Khrennikov. I also knew his wife, who was Jewish.” Without heat, he redrew Khrennikov as a flesh and blood mortal, fending as best he could. It was a Woody Allen moment. 

Like other Soviet emigrants I have known, Lexo looked back without illusions or ideological blinders. He saw no cartoons. But America – I must say — proved something less than he had hoped or expected. 

His 1983 defection was characteristically novelistic. Touring with a Moscow orchestra in Spain, he was forbidden to perform. It was a last straw. He entered the American embassy and requested refugee status. Two days later, the orchestra’s concertmaster hung himself in a hotel bathroom. Russian intelligence agents attempted to kidnap Lexo in a restaurant. There were high-speed chases on Spanish highways. Three months later, he began a nine-city tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic: his first American concerts in more than four years.

Lexo eventually wound up in South Bend, Indiana, occupying an endowed Piano chair at the University of Indiana there. This was not the big IU music school in Bloomington, but a much smaller operation looking for prominence. It seemed an incongruous move, but Lexo capitalized on the opportunity at hand and created a singular artistic phenomenon: the Toradze Piano Studio. Single-handedly, he recreated the intense mentoring environment he had known in Moscow, as well as the communal social life he had known in Tbilisi. Composed of students and former students, the Studio toured widely, especially abroad, purveying thematic festivals many of which I partnered. There were marathon programs of Shostakovich in Paris, Prokofiev in Edinburgh and St. Petersburg, Stravinsky in Rotterdarm, Rachmaninoff in Salzburg. For the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Studio performed the entire solo output of Alexander Scriabin as an eight-hour marathon. 

Lexo’s suburban South Bend home was the site of innumerable gargantuan dinners and post-concert parties. His Russian and Georgian students ate pizza, played basketball, and barbecued salmon in their backyards. They shopped for steak and vodka in the early hours of the morning in vast twenty-four hour food marts. It was all a testimony to Lexo’s personal magnetism; the warmth of his nature, his depth of experience.

In my book Artists in Exile I reported Lexo observing in 2006:

“From the standpoint of nourishing cultural needs, South Bend may not be the ideal place for young artists to grow up. And it may not be true that we actually enjoy in this country all the ‘open society’ benefits that we’ve been told about. But for my generation – in Soviet Russia, at the Moscow Conservatory and also in Tbilisi – this notion of American freedom is still powerful, and I’m sure it’s still powerful for the world at large. . . . Willis Conover’s jazz hour on the Voice of America — that was the talk of my generation and also of my parents’ generation. Of course you were in danger if you listened to these broadcasts. We often listened in a basement, where an older friend of ours had a very powerful shortwave receiver. That gave us a sense of freedom. Then life goes by and you actually get to this country and you carry this notion with you, even if you grow disappointed. Even if everyday life can be pretty harsh and difficult, still that can’t spoil the dream. It’s a dream so strongly associated with your youth that you’re just saturated with it. You can smell it, taste, it, touch it. You can’t kill it and you don’t want to kill it. This dream is one of the things that bonds our group, in America. It’s a condition of hope associated with a faraway place. It’s actually a dream stronger than any reality. . . .

“I mean, I can’t envision a group of perforemers in which 80 per cent are not native born succeeding anywhere else. Can you imagine something like that in Russia? In Germany? In France? You need an open, accepting environment, you need the attitude: ‘Let it be.’ I feel this in South Bend.”

But it’s all gone now, and not only because Lexo himself is gone. Lexo’s odyssey was as complex and unfathomable as Lexo himself.

***

In Behrouz’s film, Lexo performs Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata in a manner unknown to Prokofiev and yet conveying its own kind of truth. Lexo’s interpretation is wholly invested in the experience of wartime – of Prokofiev and World War II. The first movement is reconceived without barlines, as if improvised in the heat of the moment. Its second theme, with repeated notes, is for Lexo “drops of tears.” The entire second movement is performed with the soft pedal down. The finale is performed without pedal. 

In The Ivory Trade, Lexo says: “l can’t just look at a score and think: ‘Gosh, what a beautiful concerto; I’m going to make it just delicious.’ That doesn’t interest me. Composers, if they are expressing something, they do it because they cannot express it in other ways, because there is something they need to get out of their system. You don’t need to get out of your system pure happiness and joy. You need an element of discomfort, or irritation . . . That’s where our real differences are – in pain. Tolstoy, at the beginning of Anna Karenina, says, ”All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So I have to find this element. I have to find two or three pages of pain. Then I use that, because I can associate with that, and elaborate. I can use my own experience. And fortunately, my own experience with pain is quite considerable.”

In Behrouz’s documentary, I comment that Toradze interprets the Prokofiev Seventh Sonata via a process of “infiltration” of thought and feeling. “You can’t just surrender to the composer,” I suggest, “or you surrender yourself.” Referencing the scenarios he adduces in this sonata, and also in Beethoven’s Op. 109, I further tell him: “It’s not important whether your story is true. It’s true for you. It’s an instrument of interpretation; it lets you inhabit the music.” In the interpretation of music, there are different varieties of “fidelity” and “authenticity.”

Lexo possessed a special capacity to extract subjective truths binding his personal experience with notes on a page. Essentially, it was a special capacity to probe himself.

Lexo was like a brother to me and to my wife Agnes. He was like an uncle to my two children. I count knowing him, for more than four decades, among the most privileged experiences of my life. 

Silvestre Revueltas, Arthur Farwell, and the “New Paradigm”

Every once in a while a review comes along that eloquently affirms the convictions inspiring a book or recording – even though the convictions in question may not be widely known or held.

I’m thinking — gratefully — of two Naxos CDs I’ve recently produced, as received by Nestor Castiglione in Music Web International and by Curt Cacioppo in the same publication as well as via his own blog. The music is by Silvestre Revueltas and Arthur Farwell — composers I extol as part of my “new paradigm” for American classical music in Dvorak’s Prophecy.

Revueltas’s Redes is (alas) not an especially famous film score – but it’s one of the most galvanizing ever composed. Reviewing the new Naxos world premiere recording of the complete Redes music, performed by Angel Gil-Ordonez and PostClassical Ensemble, Castiglione writes:

“It is as welcome a revelation as can be hoped, permitting the listener to finally grasp the unfettered breadth of Revueltas’s genius. Like Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Bernard Herrmann, Revueltas crafted evocative music that not only blended with and augmented on-screen action, but managed to create its own self-sustaining logic and structure . . . a dazzling symphonic fresco that displays Revueltas’s imagination in full flight.”

Contrasting Revueltas with Aaron Copland, whose music for The City is recorded on the same disk, Castiglione observes:

“The Mexican was intuitive, earthy, and intemperate, the last trait contributing directly to his tragically short life and even shorter creative career. The American, on the other hand, was calculating, urbane, and restrained. Where they coincided was in their sympathy for the political left, each taking up pen and score paper to agitate for what they believed to be a better tomorrow, and in their shared appreciation of the emerging importance of cinema in helping to convey their message to a mass audience.”

Cacioppo’s reviews are of Arthur Farwell’s Hako String Quartet – also a world premiere Naxos recording, with the Dakota String Quartet:

“In his Op. 65, Farwell surpasses all previous efforts, including his own, at attempting . . . cross-cultural coalescence. The process and result seem sui generis until we encounter, a generation later, a Native composer who conversely embraced Western musical tradition: Louis Ballard (1931-2007). Ballard, part Quapaw and part Cherokee, was descended from chiefs on both sides of his family, and grew up learning the cultural practices of his people. At the same time, he pursued a musical path of study at the University of Tulsa with Béla Rózsa, and a career that took him to New York City and the celebrated capitals of Europe. Louis felt himself at once an avowed post-Schoenbergian and thoroughly Indian. Ultimately he said, pointing to one of his scores, ‘This is not Native American music or any type of music other than “Louis Ballard music.”’ Now that we are finally able to hear and take measure of Farwell’s Hako quartet, and reflect upon its genesis and intent, it becomes clear what exact counterparts he and Ballard are in historical relation to each other, each searching for synthesis, each writing his music, each shining a light toward compositional advancement. The parallel conjures up the Hopi twins at the North and South poles, who keep the planet rotating. Each composer takes the cultural inheritance bequeathed and entrusted to him and pools it with resources of the other in an effort to define his individual artistic identity, consequently widening and enriching the art.”

In fact, all the music here – Revueltas’s Redes, dignifying rural fishermen ensnared in a punitive market economy, Copland’s The City, proselytizing for a workers’ paradise, Farwell’s Hako, celebrating Native wisdom – seeks to “widen and enrich.”

Here’s a pertinent film: Redes Lives!

Here’s a pertinent National Public Radio documentary on “Mexico’s most famous unknown composer.”

 Here’s a pertinent film about Copland, populism, and the Red Scare.

The Brevard Project — A Call to Action

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I frame my book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music as a call to action.

It ends: “If American classical music — our performers and institutions of performance, our conservatories, our agencies of philanthropy — can awaken to the moment at hand, classical music in America may yet acquire a vital future, at last buoyed and directed by a proper past.”

I’m talking about counteracting a condition of “pastlessness” – a failure to explore American cultural roots, a need to pursue a more inclusive American musical narrative. It’s all in my book.

For as long as I can remember, American orchestras have been chastised about a failure to innovate. The response, by and large, has focused on fund-raising, marketing, and board development. But the challenge at hand is not about selling tickets. It’s about re-thinking artistic practice. 

And there may at last be a critical mass of like-minded individuals and institutions ready to take the plunge. I am referring to the “Brevard Project” – “Reimagining the Future of Orchestral  Programming” — debuting this July at the wonderful Brevard Music Festival. The sponsoring organizations, in addition to Brevard itself, are ArtsJournal, Bard College’s training orchestra The Orchestra Now, the Blair School of Music (Vanderbilt University), the Chicago Sinfonietta, the South Dakota Symphony, and the University of Michigan School of Music. When you factor in what’s already happening at these places, it’s an auspicious list.

The Project faculty is also exceptional. Some of the names, in addition to myself, are Leon Botstein, Lorenzo Candelaria, Mark Clague, Lara Downes, JoAnn Falletta, Delta David Gier, Blake-Anthony Johnson, Doug McLennan, Jesse Rosen, George Shirley, and Larry Tamburri.

The dates are July 11 to 16. Conductors, artistic administrators, executive directors, community engagement specialists, conservatory students, and board members are all welcome to apply. The fee, including tuition, housing, and meals, is $600.  For information, click here. 

Concurrently, Brevard is hosting a “Dvorak’s Prophecy” festival. The dates are July 8 to 15. There will be four concerts and numerous ancillary events.  The repertoire includes William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony, the world premiere of Dawson’s “Largo” for violin and piano, a rare opportunity to hear Arthur Farwell’s magnificent Hako Quartet, novelties by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Margaret Bonds, etc., etc. The performers include the legendary George Shirley.

Brevard itself is an idyllic retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from Asheville. Temperate weather. No bugs.