Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 16

BURIED TREASURE: Farwell’s Forbidden “Hako” Quartet — Take Two

My most recent blog was yet another plea that the music of Arthur Farwell – America’s most important cancelled concert composer – become known. I posted the world premiere recording of Farwell’s amazing Hako String Quartet. In response, I have received an amazing comment from Curt Cacioppo. Since it’s buried in the comments section of my blog, I’m reposting it here so that it has a blog of its own.

Cacioppo himself is a formidable American composer. A substantial portion of his output absorbs his profound knowledge of Native American music and ritual. Before he retired from Haverford, he annually taught a course titled “Social Justice: Native American Music and Belief” — a cause he has long and widely championed.

When I call Farwell “cancelled,” perhaps I should produce a little evidence. There’s a lot of it in my forthcoming book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, in which I call Farwell “America’s Forbidden Composer.” Here, for instance, is one case in point, as cited in Dvorak’s Prophecy:

“It is indeed ‘a tricky thing’ to advocate for Farwell today. One of the challenges is enlisting Native American participants. For [PostClassical Ensemble’s 2019 ‘Native American Inspirations’ Festival in D.C.], I unsuccessfully attempted to engage Native American scholars and musicians from as far away as Texas, New Mexico, and California. My greatest disappointment was the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, which declined to partner the festival [on the grounds that Farwell’s music, featured alongside other works by Native and non-Native composers, lacked “authenticity”] even though it presented in concert the South Dakota Symphony’s Lakota Music Project, brought to Washington at the invitation of PostClassical Ensemble.” 

And here is Curt Cacioppo’s stirring commentary:

“America is a country unexcelled in neglecting its composers. So marginal is the value placed on the arts in general that Saul Bellow said, ‘It is sheer madness to want to make art in America.’ In the case of Farwell, even the visibility he achieved in his lifetime was due almost entirely to his personal dynamism rather than external approbation or appraisal. Though he is now reviled and lumped together with supremacist agents of white patriarchy, his ethical stance as an artist and citizen made him heretic among mainstream contemporaries. In that context, it could be argued that he assumed the role of a critical race theorist a century or more before the present trend. Aside from American indifference to the arts, questioning Manifest Destiny and ‘the insatiable progress of our race,’ as James Carleton had phrased it, echoing instead such sentiments as those expressed by Edward Wynkoop, who came to view Indians as ‘superior beings,’ certainly did not serve Farwell as a formula for recognition. (General Carleton, along with Kit Carson, led the seizure of Navajo lands in the mid-1860’s; Major Wynkoop, who experienced a reversal of opinion regarding Indians, was writing about his encounter with Cheyenne representatives during the same period). Heir to a rapacious mindset that heard Sunday school teachers imparting to their youngsters indigenophobic rhymes, such as ‘Kill them all, big and small – nits make lice!, Farwell should be credited for his model defense against the genocidal norm.

“Farwell acts out his humanitarian feelings most consequentially in his HAKO quartet. Compositionally his pinnacle achievement, it rises to capstone importance as the first major stride taken in American string quartet writing, both for its scope and its integrative processes. About 50 years ago I discovered the HAKO ceremony of the Pawnee, Farwell’s source of inspiration, and have returned to study of it periodically ever since. Only very recently did I become acquainted with Farwell’s quartet, thanks to the efforts of Joe Horowitz, although I had been well aware of other examples of his work previously. Before anything else, I have to say that without having fully explored the source material, one misses the majority of what Farwell has attained here, or contrariwise how he may have strayed. The transcription of the ceremony has been library accessible for 120 years. Hardcover came out 10 years ago for under $30, paperback under $15. You can read it on Kindle for less than $10.

“Bravi to Joe, the Dakota String Quartet, and all who made this premiere recording of Farwell’s HAKO possible! The work is unique in so many ways. The risk that Farwell takes in stretching the single, sustained movement form to almost twice the duration of earlier one movement sonatas by Scriabin and Berg, for example, is in itself daring, especially considering the new music attention span of 1923. That aspect, if the listener stays with it, in itself can be engrossing. And the rhetorical pattern that Farwell establishes, drawn directly from the liturgical structure of the ceremony, of intimation answered by revelation, easily could elicit a sense of rapture. How the sonata scheme applies is another matter entirely, better reserved for a graduate theory seminar (my analysis reveals a binary structure or double exposition without an enclosed development section…).”

BURIED TREASURE: Arthur Farwell’s “Hako” — Will String Quartets Have the Courage to Perform It?

In the world of classical music, it sometimes happens that a major work lies dormant, undiscovered and unperformed, for a very long time. Consider the case of The Trojans, today known as a peak achievement in Romantic opera. Berlioz finished composing it in 1858. The first complete performance took place in 1890. Not until Colin Davis championed and recorded The Trojans in the 1960s did it become widely recognized as something more than an intriguing anomaly. 

In the world of American classical music, Charles Ives is the champion composer of buried treasure. The most famous belated Ives discoveries were John Kirkpatrick’s 1938 Town Hall performance of the Concord Sonata (today extolled as the summit of the American keyboard repertoire) and Leonard Bernstein’s premiere of the Symphony No. 2 (arguably the most iconic American symphony) with the New York Philharmonic in 1951. Ives finished the Concord Sonata around 1915. He finished his Second Symphony in 1901. 

Right now, it’s finally become inevitable that William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony, premiered by Leopold Stokowski in 1934, will become known as a galvanizing achievement in American symphonic music. Incredibly, our major orchestras still haven’t gotten around to it – but they will. (Angel Gil-Ordonez will lead PostClassical Ensemble in the DC premiere this coming March.)

And then there is Arthur Farwell’s Hako String Quartet of 1922. A new Naxos CD, produced by PostClassical Ensemble and scheduled for release next month, features the world premiere recording – which just had its broadcast premiere via David Osenberg’s always enterprising WWFM Classical Network as a new installment in WWFM’s “PostClassical” series.  The terrific performance is by the Dakota String Quartet – principal string players of Delta David Gier’s remarkable South Dakota Symphony. Go to 12:50 of Part II here.

The Naxos CD is entitled: “Arthur Farwell – America’ s Neglected Composer.” In my forthcoming book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music,” I write about Farwell extensively as “America’s Forbidden Composer.” As I remark in my spoken introduction to the WWFM broadcast: neglected or forbidden, Farwell isn’t played for reasons political, not musical. As the leader of our Indianist movement in music, he’s today condemned as a cultural appropriator.

I have discussed Farwell extensively in this space. What was he trying to do? He believed it was a democratic obligation of Americans of European descent to try to understand the indigenous Americans they displaced and oppressed – to preserve something of their civilization; to find a path toward reconciliation. His Indianist compositions attempt to mediate between Native American ritual and the Western concert tradition. Like Bartok in Transylvania, like Stravinsky in rural Russia, he endeavored to fashion a concert idiom that would paradoxically project the integrity of unvarnished vernacular dance and song. He aspired to capture specific musical characteristics – but also something additional, something ineffable and elemental, “religious and legendary.” He called it – a phrase belonging to another time and place – “race spirit.”

As for the Hako – I do not know of a more engrossing string quartet by an American.  I write in the program notes for the new Naxos release: 

The twenty-minute Hako String Quartet is the longest of Farwell’s Indianist compositions and the only one traditionally structured. A one-movement sonata form, it marks a pivot toward the chamber works (none of them Indianist) he would subsequently write. The point of inspiration is the Hako ceremony of the Great Plains tribes of the Pawnee Nation, a celebration of the symbolic union of Father and Son to maintain peace and fertility in the cosmos. Although at various moments the players are asked to evoke the woodpecker (to favor the storm gods) and the owl (guardian of the night), and although Native American tunes are quoted, the quartet is at the same time a subjective personal response to an Indian ceremony. It strives to honor and convey the “great mystery . . . to which refreshing source American life is leading us back form the artificialities and technicalities which have latterly beset European culture.” To the performers of the Hako Quartet Farwell wrote: “Certain things must be brought to the interpretation before it has even a chance of proving itself. E.g., the immensely reverential spirit of the Indian in general, and his immense dignity, and the unction with which each syllable is taken in his singing.” 

The Hako Quartet claims no authenticity. Rather, it documents the composer’s enthralled subjective response to a gripping Native American ritual. It is Arthur Farwell’s rapture that is here “authentic.” 

Musically, the Hako cannot be written off. Will today’s string quartets possess the enterprise and courage to perform it? 

Copland and Joe McCarthy on NPR – a “Surreal Experience”

“Aaron Copland and the Spirit of Labor Day” – the radio documentary I was delighted to produce for the enterprising NPR newsmagazine “1A” – is archived here.

I received a wonderfully bristling response from Steve Robinson, who for more than a decade ran WFMT/Chicago when it was (by far) the best classical-music radio station in the US. Steve writes:

“The Copland program was entertaining, informative and, if I can use a word that fell out of favor in public radio decades ago, educational.  Listening to this one-hour special on a nationally syndicated news program was a surreal experience and took me back to my early days in public radio (late ’60’s…) when stations weren’t afraid to air documentary programs about classical music that were challenging and thought provoking. I had thought those days were gone forever.” 

I share Steve’s admiration for Rupert Allman, who produces “1A” and proposed that the complex – and timely, and controversial – Copland odyssey be allocated a full 50-minute slot. 

The show narrates in considerable detail Copland’s adventures on the political left – and the price he paid: a 1953 interrogation by Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, which we re-enacted.

I was expertly partnered by Peter Bogdanoff, with whom I have created six documentary films – including “Aaron Copland: American Populist” – that Naxos will release in November in tandem with my new book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music.

Here’s a listener’s guide to the radio show:

PART ONE:

1:40: “Into the Streets May First,” Copland’s prize-winning 1934 workers’ song (a possible radio premiere)

4:30: Copland’s advice to “participants in revolutionary activity” interested in producing “a good mass song” as “a powerful weapon in the class struggle.”

5:33: Copland addresses a Communist picnic in Minnesota, talking to farmers as “one Red to another.”

8:00: Backlash: the Red Scare and “a resulting climate of fear and intolerance, of division and polarization, of futility of dialogue and informed discussion” – all “pertinent today.”

PART TWO:

14:05: Copland’s Piano Variations (1930) – a modernist “wake-up call,” a “new American sound”

16:00: In Mexico, Copland finds himself “a little envious” of artists and musicians who inform the fate and identity of a nation, versus “working in a vacuum” in the US.

17:25: In search of “new musical audiences,” Copland fashions a style “for both us and them” – and takes it to Hollywood, where Erich Korngold’s musical upholsteries sound Viennese.

20:35: A trial run for Hollywood – Copland composes his best film score, today the most important Copland score we don’t know: The City (1939). It embodies a new American sound for the cinema – and also a manifesto on the left, propaganda for an activist government. We audition four excerpts, narrated and conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez with PostClassical Ensemble.

PART THREE:

34:07: Historian Joseph McCartin on the collision courses charted by Copland and McCarthy

35:50: Copland’s interrogation by Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn. Asked if he has ever been a “Communist sympathizer,” or has attended “a Communist meeting of any kind,” he wriggles as best he can.

40:15: Closing a circle, abandoning the “new audience” he once courted, Copland laboriously fashions a valedictory Piano Fantasy (1957) returning to the dissonant idiom of the Piano Variations he composed nearly three decades before. With commentary by pianist Benjamin Pasternack, who ultimately finds Copland the man inscrutable.

43:48: The Copland story as a parable about the fate of the artist in American culture and society – a “synthetic populist,” he’s both “iconic and marginal,” residing “both inside and outside the American experience.” I tell an eyewitness story about Copland being disrespected by the New York Philharmonic (1980) and contrast that with the manner in which Benjamin Britten was esteemed in Great Britain. Notwithstanding Copland’s influence and celebrity, his aspiration that he and his fellow American composers might shape the cultural affairs of a nation – as Carlos Chavez and Diego Rivera could in Mexico – remained unrealized.  

My parting shot (48:40): America’s artists have been allotted “an insufficient role.” My forthcoming Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music argues a failure to identify a “usable past.” “We absolutely need to connect with our past. In general, as Americans, we have short memories. And right now if we cannot claim and refresh a common cultural inheritance, we’ll be in trouble as a nation.”

Joe McCarthy Grills Aaron Copland: “As your Communist Party record is extremely long . . . “

“As your Communist Party record is extremely long, I think counsel [i.e., Roy Cohn] will want to ask you some questions. . . . Those who underestimate the work the staff has done in the past end up occasionally before a Grand Jury.”

–Senator Joseph McCarthy, addressing Aaron Copland (May 26, 1953)

This chilling audio re-enactment, with Edward Gero as McCarthy, is an excerpt from “Aaron Copland: American Populist,” a 45-minute NPR documentary to be broadcast as a Labor Day Special this Monday at 10 am ET via the newsmagazine “1A.”

The show derives from a Copland documentary I produced for PostClassical Ensemble – one of six documentary films exploring topics in American music, all of which Naxos will release this Fall in tandem with the publication of my book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. 

Pressed by McCarthy, Copland denied ever attending “a Communist meeting.” But in fact he was deeply engaged by the Popular Front in the 1930s, even addressing a Communist picnic in Minnesota. His excruciating encounter with the Red Scare broaches topics urgently pertinent today: the suppression of free expression and open-minded dialogue (both on the left and the right); the marginalization of the arts in American culture and society.

My own mantra (as expressed at the end of the Copland broadcast) is that “Americans must claim and refresh a common cultural inheritance – or we are in trouble as a nation.” 

Joe McCarthy Grills Aaron Copland: “As your Communist Part record is extremely long . . . “

“As your Communist Party record is extremely long, I think counsel [i.e., Roy Cohn] will want to ask you some questions. . . . Those who underestimate the work the staff has done in the past end up occasionally before a Grand Jury.”

–Senator Joseph McCarthy, addressing Aaron Copland (May 26, 1953)

This chilling audio re-enactment, with Edward Gero as McCarthy, is an excerpt from “Aaron Copland: American Populist,” a 45-minute NPR documentary to be broadcast as a Labor Day Special this Monday at 10 am ET via the newsmagazine “1A.”

The show derives from a Copland documentary I produced for PostClassical Ensemble – one of six documentary films exploring topics in American music, all of which Naxos will release this Fall in tandem with the publication of my book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. 

Pressed by McCarthy, Copland denied ever attending “a Communist meeting.” But in fact he was deeply engaged by the Popular Front in the 1930s, even addressing a Communist picnic in Minnesota. His excruciating encounter with the Red Scare broaches topics urgently pertinent today: the suppression of free expression and open-minded dialogue (both on the left and the right); the marginalization of the arts in American culture and society.

My own mantra (as expressed at the end of the Copland broadcast) is that “Americans must claim and refresh a common cultural inheritance – or we are in trouble as a nation.” 

Toradze’s Piano Stories — Take Two

My recent posting of Behrouz Jamali’s extraordinary film about Alexander Toradze produced a couple of comments so extraordinary that I’m re-posting them here.

The first is from David Bondy, an attorney who was once in artists’ management:

I too have been mesmerized by Toradze’s recording of the Prokofiev 2. The first movement unfolds like no one else’s. Others who tackle this work grab it as though it will slip through their hands if they give it any room to breathe. Toradze suspends time at the start, which requires absolute concentration and confidence that the listener will stick with him. I remember the first time I heard the recording. It was as though it were a different piece but so much more nourishing than the typical interpretation — thought-provoking and deeply felt. It has become hard to hear this work otherwise.

I agree with you about authenticity. Anyone who argues that an interpretation must reflect that of the composer’s wishes (assuming we could ever know them) must explain why we need further performances of Rachmaninoff’s concerti when we have his extraordinary recordings of them. If we play them anyway, is it “authentic” to copy precisely what Rachmaninoff did? And if you don’t copy what he did, are you playing authentically? When you consider the problem, you realize how ridiculous it quickly becomes.

Lastly, Ella and Oscar. What a wonderful story. I hope Mr. Toradze knows that there are Americans — at least a few — who revere these great artists as much as he does. I understand they mean something different to him than they can to me, growing up here where they were part of my cultural inheritance. But life would be dramatically less rich without their work, as it would be without Mr. Toradze’s.

And here’s the second comment, from the pianist Steven Mayer:

I have encountered Alexander Toradze at several key moments in my own career, including at the 1977 Van Cliburn Competition (Toradze didn’t win, but the controversy he created did for him what Martha Argerich and not winning did for Ivo Pogorelich in 1980 in Warsaw), his debut with the L.A. Phil in Ravel’s G Major Concerto (I was a prof at UCLA then, and just happened by the symphony that evening), and a fun recital at which both of us played as part of Ilana Vared’s Rutgers Summerfest.

Behrouz Jamali’s brilliant documentary captures the essence of Toradze.

Lili Kraus once compared Toradze’s talent to the force created by the splitting of an atom. I would add that, 44 years later, a certain poise, perspective and wisdom place Toradze uniquely on a perch, seemingly without peers.

Watch how skillfully Horowitz leads Toradze into intimate reminiscence — of touring the States with his personal K.G.B. agent by his side, refusing to play the next gig because Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson would be missed in a live concert, and so much more.

And listen to Toradze as he plays Prokofiev — before it’s placed in the next space capsule for extra-terrestrial interception.

Dvorak’s Prophecy — “Essential Cultural History”

Kirkus Reviews, which previews books for booksellers, critics, and others in the know, has just previewed my forthcoming Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music.

It’s been accorded a star (good news) – and the review itself grasps my book whole.

In summary: “Horowitz closes with a clarion call for American classical music to ‘acquire a viable future, at last buoyed and directed by a proper past.’ His chronicle of ‘a failure of historical memory’ is feisty and opinionated but always backed by solid evidence. Essential cultural history.”

The publication date is Nov. 9, 2021. Naxos will concurrently release six documentary films I’ve produced, exploring the “new paradigm” for American classical music that Dvorak’s Prophecy proposes. For more information, click here. 

Here’s the full Kirkus review:

DVOŘÁK’S PROPHECY [STARRED REVIEW] 
And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: Norton

Why is American classical music so White?

In 1893, visiting Bohemian composer Antonin Dvořák predicted that a “great and noble school” of American classical music would build upon the nation’s “negro melodies.” Instead, writes music historian Horowitz, classical music in America became “a Eurocentric subsidiary,” while African American melodies and rhythms were segregated in popular music. Yet Dvořák’s prophecy encouraged Black composers, including his assistant, Harry Burleigh, and mixed-race Englishman Samuel Colridge-Taylor, to compose classical works steeped in African American folk music that were widely performed and discussed at the turn of the 20th century. The villains in Horowitz’s indictment are modernists Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Virgil Thomson, who all “maintained that there was no American music of consequence before 1910.” White outliers such as Charles Ives, who unabashedly quoted from popular songs in his symphonies and sonatas, and George Gershwin, who wrote an opera with African American protagonists, were dismissed as eccentrics or sentimentalists. At the same time, African American composers William Grant Still, Florence Price, and William Levi Dawson, though taken seriously in the years between the world wars, plunged into obscurity because they didn’t fit into the modernist narrative. Horowitz is unafraid to tackle the third-rail issue of cultural appropriation, coming down firmly on the side of artists’ freedom to draw on any traditions that speak to them. He covers his back by enlisting African American tenor George Shirley to make the most forceful defense in a foreword: “I have no right to tell anyone they cannot perform the music of Black folk if they have the desire and ability to do so with proper respect for its content and distinctiveness.” Horowitz closes with a clarion call for American classical music to “acquire a viable future, at last buoyed and directed by a proper past.” His chronicle of “a failure of historical memory” is feisty and opinionated but always backed by solid evidence.

Essential cultural history.

Art Tatum and the “Black Virtuoso Tradition”

On the heels of his film with Alexander Toradze (my previous blog), Behrouz Jamali has released another remarkable film essay dealing with the art of the piano: The Black Virtuoso Tradition. It features what the New York Times once called “piano playing at its most awesome”: Steven Mayer playing Art Tatum.

The Black Virtuoso Tradition is an American musical phenomenon that I framed decades ago, inspired by Mayer’s eloquent advocacy of Black pianists who never wrote their compositions down – Tatum, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton. Steve – and only Steve — has been presenting this music (transcribed from recordings) as canonized American piano repertoire for decades.  If you add to that Scott Joplin, James P. Johnson, Nathaniel Dett, and Margaret Bonds, and also such white composers as Gottschalk, Dvorak, Gershwin, Bernstein, and Bolcom, you wind up with one of the signature achievements in American music: piano cameos, many of them highly virtuosic, absorbing Black vernacular strains. 

The Black Virtuoso Tradition remains virtually invisible for two reasons. The first is that other pianists don’t purvey it. The other is that it combines “popular” and “classical” genres. It’s actually therapeutic – as I remark in Behrouz’s film, “it heals the schism driven like a stake through classical music in America.”

The inclusion of Dvorak may surprise. It’s my contention that by 1894 he had become an ‘American composer” as surely as Domenico Scarlatti, born in Italy, became “Spanish.” The proof in is in the pieces Steve plays: the G-flat and F major Humoresques; the American Suite (though it’s not in the film).

You’ll find Behrouz’s film on the website I’m constructing for my forthcoming book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (which W. W. Norton releases in early November). In tandem with that, Naxos will release six films I’ve produced with the visual artist Peter Bogdanoff, and an Arthur Farwell CD I’ve produced for PostClassical Ensemble. It is all to be found here, here, here, and here.

And here’s an index to Behrouz’s film:

00:00: Kevin Deas narrates pertinent history

4:00: Louis Moreau Gottschalk: “The Banjo”

8:19: Scott Joplin: “Pine Apple Rag” (of Schubertian eloquence)

11:33: Commentary on Gottschalk and Joplin.

16:13: Joplin: “Maple Leaf Rag”

18:50: James P. Johnson: “Blueberry Rhyme” (an intoxicating reverie with pearly filigree)

23:11: Fats Waller: “Ain’t Nobody’s Business”

25:28: Commentary – ragtime vs. stride piano

35:40: Antonin Dvorak: Humoresque in F

38:17: Dvorak: Humoresque in G-flat

41:35: Art Tatum: Humoresque

46:40: Discussion – Tatum (with a clip of him playing)

55:00: Tatum: “Tiger Rag”

Toradze’s Piano Stories

Behrouz Jamali has created the kind of film I had always hoped to see about Alexander Toradze. 

I permits Toradze to speak for an hour without abridgement or abbreviation. It abjures soundbites. 

I believe it should be seen by all devotees of the piano, and to fledgling pianists at music schools and conservatories.

Born in Tbilisi in 1952, Toradze graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, toured the West as a Soviet artist, defected to the United States in 1983, and has since taught and lived in the US while maintaining an international career. His father, David, was the leading Georgian composer.

In sixty minutes, Toradze tells three stories.

The first is about why his father had to quit playing jazz in a famous Moscow restaurant in 1940. This is a story about Russian pedagogy and the generosity of Reinhold Gliere. 

The second story (at 18:16) explores how jazz represented American freedoms to Soviet musicians of Toradze’s generation, and how as a touring Soviet artist in 1978 he refused to fly to Miami from Portland, Oregon, because he insisted on hearing Ella Fitzgerald (“a goddess”) and Oscar Peterson.

The third story – and, to me, the most important – is about how Toradze applies stories to music to achieve a kind of “authenticity” having nothing to do with literal adherence to the score. The focus is Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata (33:43), which Toradze performs in a manner unknown to Prokofiev and yet conveying its own kind of truth. 

Toradze’s reading is invested in the experience of wartime. One repeated-note theme, for instance, is for Toradze “drops of tears” (41:00). I comment that Toradze interprets the Prokofiev sonata via a process of “infiltration” of thought and feeling. “You can’t just surrender to the composer,” I suggest, “or you surrender yourself.” 

Typically, Toradze needed to find a “story” when returning to Beethoven’s Op. 109 Piano Sonata (52:00). I 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.” 

If you want to hear more Toradze, I recommend his singular recording of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinski Orchestra. Here Toradze’s story is that the concerto remembers and mourns Prokofiev’s friend Maximilian Schmidthof, who committed suicide. This detailed reading transforms and amplifies the music in surprising (and controversial) ways. In music, an “agogic” accent is achieved not via loudness, but a slight delay. 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.  

A superb recent zoom interview with Toradze by the conductor Gerard Schwarz may be found here.

Savage Beauty — Take two

Three months ago I blogged about Min Xiao-fen’s exceptional new recording, “White Lotus,” in which her pipa is mated with Rez Abbasi’s guitar. The music comes from her soundtrack to a classic Chinese silent film: “The Goddess.”

I’m delighted to see that NPR has now done an enterpirising seven-minute feature.

Here’s an excerpt:

ABBASI: And there is that scene [in “The Goddess”] where the principal comes to visit the mother and son. And we both dig into a kind of the blues . . . It’s like a blue pipa.

(SOUNDBITE OF MIN XIAO-FEN’S “HATHA (SUN AND MOON)”)

MIN: It’s a little bit like the swamp kind of idea, because, you know, Chinese [music] has a blues, too. . . . And so that’s why I feel this American style for blues swamp is the perfect match with the Chinese blues.

ABBASI: Yeah. Chinese opera’s drenched in the blues, actually.

How I wish the musical fusion of East and West more frequently attained the synergies explored in this remarkable recording. One father of all such synergies was the master American composer Lou Harrison, who in his majestic Piano Concerto fused gamelan with Brahms. It worked because he dealt not only with intermingling surface attributes, but intermingling creative idioms: from the inside out.