Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 23

Did Wagner Exploit King Ludwig?

Did Wagner exploit King Ludwig?

In Luchino Visconti’s magnificent four-hour film Ludwig, the king is ingeniously cast as an
embodiment of the Wagnerian pariah; Visconti has transformed Ludwig’s story
into a veritable homage to Richard Wagner.

Is Visconti’s Ludwig a credible re-enactment of history? Doubtless it could be considered a whitewash job. But not be me. Wagner remains an object of excessive condemnation and mistrust — witness Simon Callow’s recent cheap shot, Being Wagner. In writing about Visconti’s mega bio-pic for the current Wagner Journal, I felt the need to narrate my own version of events.

I contend:

“As his letters confirm, Ludwig was eccentric, but certainly
no simpleton. His instantaneous agenda was to rescue Wagner materially, and to
collaborate with Wagner in the project of redeeming German culture. These
aspirations were no more deranged than was Ludwig himself. . . . Ultimately,
the king and his composer served one another royally. Every other factor bearing
on their friendship of two decades shrinks to insignificance.”

My article, “Ludwig Revisited,” greatly expands a capsule review
I wrote for The Wall Street Journal last year. The Wagner Journal itself, edited by Barry Millington, remains a
remarkable platform for spirited and informed discussion and debate. It’s also
beautifully produced. Would that we had a few more English-language classical-music
publications of such caliber.

Here’s what I wrote, adorned with a sampling of Visconti’s breathtaking mise-en-scene:  

Ludwig revisitedDownload

Dvorak, Harry Burleigh, and Cultural Appropriation — a “PostClassical” Podcast

Could Harry Burleigh — Antonin Dvorak’s African-American assistant — be considered an Uncle Tom?

These days, the question comes up whenever
Burleigh comes up: it’s a symptom of the times, and of our crazy obsession with
“cultural appropriation.”

And it is addressed head-on over the course of the most recent PostClassical Ensemble WWFM podcast, featuring a supreme exponent of the spiritual in concert: the African-American bass baritone Kevin Deas. (To see what he and others have to say, hang on for a dozen paragraphs — or simply access the podcast at https://www.wwfm.org/post/postclassical-feb-15-deep-river)

I would call Harry Burleigh (1866-1949) a
forgotten hero of American music. It was mainly Burleigh who turned spirituals
into concert songs to be sung alongside the Lieder of Schubert and Brahms. The
project became controversial during the Harlem Renaissance – Carl Van Vechten,
Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston were among those who worried or
asserted that Burleigh vitiated the music he adapted. And today Burleigh is
controversial all over again.

Because I have long celebrated Burleigh in public performance, because I often have occasion to lecture on American music, I can cite many examples from personal experience. There was, for instance, the impressively poised African-American freshman at a Midwestern college who opined that “just because Burleigh was black, he didn’t necessarily have the right to do that.” As she had never heard of Marian Anderson, I played for the class a recording of Anderson singing Burleigh’s iconic “Deep River” arrangement. After that, I shared with them Anderson’s historic Lincoln Memorial concert of 1939, when – having been denied access to Constitution Hall because of the color of her skin — she sang Burleigh for more than 75,000 listeners.

It must be acknowledged and pondered that
Burleigh frequently inhabited a white milieu. His arrangements were initially
sung by famous white recitalists – because in 1917 famous vocal recitalists
were white. He himself sang in synagogue and church choirs that were mainly
white. His friends included J. P. Morgan, at whose funeral he sang.

By way of background: Not so very long after
Dvorak and W.E.B. Du Bois extolled the sorrow songs as the likely fundament for
a future American music,  artists and
intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance scoured the African-American musical
past. One starting point was the cottonfield. One outcome was a now legendary
debate over the uses of a past known and acknowledged, wracked with pain and
yet protean with possibility.

It is little remembered that, like Dvorak, Du
Bois was a Wagnerite. As a graduate student in Berlin, he came to know and
embrace The Ring of the Nibelung. In the tradition of Wagner, Herder, and other
German theorists of race, he linked collective purpose and moral instruction to
“folk” wisdom: the soul of a people.  To
Du Bois it was merely obvious that for black Americans the sorrow songs comprised
a usable past that, subjected to evolutionary development, would yield a
desired native concert idiom — the same trajectory anticipated by Dvorak and
Burleigh. Formal training and performance, for Du Bois, did not impugn the
authenticity of folk sources; rather, a dialectical reconciliation of authority
and cosmopolitan finesse would result. Concomitantly, ragtime, the blues, and
jazz threatened Du Bois’s cultural/political agenda. A child of the Gilded Age,
born in tolerant Massachusetts in 1868, he endorsed uplift.

Alain Locke, sole offspring of a well-to-do
Philadelphia family in 1885, was like Du Bois a distinguished black Harvard
graduate. His philosophy of the New Negro, a signature of the Harlem
Renaissance, aligned with Du Bois’s high-cultural predilections. “Negro
spirituals,” Locke wrote in 1925, could undergo “intimate and original
development in directions already the line of advance in modernistic music. . .
. Negro folk song is not midway in its artistic career yet, and while the preservation
of the original folk forms is for the moment the most pressing necessity, an
inevitable art development awaits them, as in the past it has awaited all other
great folk music.” Like Du Bois, Locke championed the tenor Roland Hayes, who
succeeded Burleigh as the pre-eminent exponent of the spiritual in concert.
Like Du Bois, he mistrusted the popular musical marketplace in favor of elite
realms of art.

The opposing camp included Harlem’s loudest
white cheerleader: Carl Van Vechten, who deplored Hayes’ refinements in favor
of Paul Robeson’s “traditional, evangelical renderings” of the Burleigh
arrangements. This – and Van Vechten’s celebration of the blues and jazz –
ignited a furious rebuttal from Du Bois, who discerned a decadent voyeur in
love with black exoticism. But Van Vechten’s revisionism was supported by the
black writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Many of Hughes’s poems
key on the dialect and structure of the blues. He heard in jazz “the eternal
tom-tom beating of the Negro soul.” He deplored the “race toward whiteness” in
the uses of black music. Hurston deplored a “flight from blackness.” She heard
concert spirituals “squeezing all of the rich black juice out of the songs,” a
“sort of musical octoroon.” If to Hurston the sorrowful spirituals Du Bois
espoused sounded submissive, to Locke the blues sounded “dominated” by
“self-pity.” Pitting authenticity against assimilation, the debate identified
conflicting vernacular resources, old and new, rural and urban.

If certain black Americans rejected American
classical music, American classical music rejected them. Even though Hayes and Robeson
enjoyed phenomenal success in recital, opera companies and orchestras resisted
singers and instrumentalists of color. Notoriously, Marian Anderson had to wait
until 1955 to sing at the Metropolitan Opera – an invitation engineered not by
native-born Americans, but by the immigrants Sol Hurok, Rudolf Bing, Max
Rudolf, and Dmitri Mitropoulos.

All of which came up in the course of our two-hour “PostClassical” podcast: “Deep River: The Art of the Spiritual,” celebrating Burleigh and his legacy. Here is what Kevin Deas sounds like singing Burleigh’s fervently inspired transformation of “Steal Away,” a performance at the Washington National Cathedral that I was privileged to accompany at the piano:

“Steal Away” (arr. Burleigh) sung by Kevin Deas (Horowitz, piano)

And here, from the same podcast, is what Kevin
Deas had to say about cultural appropriation:

“I am from a different generation. I grew up in
the sixties and the seventies when the message was ‘everyone can do
everything.’ I felt I was blessed because my dad was in the military – so I
grew up in a melting pot. I grew up among people of all ethnicities. It never
occurred to me that as a black person and a budding artist I needed to take a
specific direction. I wanted to see what my instrument was inclined to do and
to follow that. And my sound wasn’t really right for gospel. I was drawn to
classical music. To think that I was ‘appropriating’ German Lieder as an
African-American would never have occurred to me. No disrespect to other
genres, but that’s where my voice took me. I never questioned the authenticity
of my expression. And I was very happy to come back to the spiritual relatively
late in my career and have a new and different approach. My only expectation
was to improve my art, and to evolve with it.”

In the ensuing conversation – you can listen to
it – I cited the disapproving views of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.
Reacting to that, Kevin said: “I couldn’t disagree more.” To which Bill
McGlaughlin, who inimitably hosts “PostClassical,” added: “Neither Langston
Hughes nor Zora Heale Hurston were musicians. When real musicians get ahold of [music
they embrace], they’re going to go where they’re going to go – no matter what
the philosophies are. Your gonna follow what’s in your ear and in your heart.”

Following this exchange, we listened to Harry Burleigh sing his own arrangement of “Go Down Moses” (a 1919 recording), followed by “Go Down Moses” as arranged in 1941 by Sir Michael Tippett – i.e., a white British composer. Bill likened Tippett’s stirring appropriation to “Picasso looking at a work of Velazquez and making it into a brand new piece.” Angel Gil-Ordonez called it “a beautiful appropriation of extraordinary material.” And I remarked that Tippett’s “Go Down, Moses” precisely fulfills Alain Locke’s aspiration that African-American spirituals undergo “original development” in “the line of advance in modernistic music.” You can hear it all here:

Burleigh sings “Go Down, Moses” (1919); Sir Michael Tippett’s choral arrangement of “Go Down, Moses” (Deas, Gil-Ordonez, Cathedral Choir)

Our podcast, featuring live PostClassical
Ensemble performances with Angel Gil-Ordonez and the Washington National
Cathedral Chorus, also includes music by Nathaniel Dett, William Dawson, and –
to close – Johann Sebastian Bach: “Ich habe genug,” unforgettably sung by Kevin
Deas.

The podcast mainly samples PostClassical Ensemble’s
multi-media production, “Deep River: The Art of the Spiritual” (with a visual
track by Peter Bogdanoff), as performed at the Washington National Cathedral.
The same production, in various iterations, has been mounted on three other
occasions. It travels to Virginia Tech next month as part of a Deas/Horowitz/Gil-Ordonez
residency in which “cultural appropriation” will be explored in a separate
event. A fifth version, with an expanded presence for Nathaniel Dett, will be
seen at the Phillips Collection (DC) on August 22, retitled “The Spiritual in
White America.”

Here’s a Listening Guide:

PART ONE:

00:16: “Steal Away” (arr. Burleigh) sung by
Kevin Deas (Horowitz, piano)

14:41: “Sometimes I Feel” (arr. Burleigh) sung
by Deas (Horowitz, piano)

20:40: “Deep River” (arr. Burleigh) sung by
Marian Anderson

25:25: The history of “Deep River,” an obscure
upbeat spiritual first slowed down by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1905)

29:37: The Fisk Jubilee Singers’ recording of “Swing
Low” (1909)

34:08: The Fisk upbeat “Deep River” (1876), as reconstructed
by Gil-Ordonez

37:30: Maud Powell’s recording of the Coleridge-Taylor
“Deep River” (1911)

42:00: In sequence, Burleigh’s “Deep River”
(SATB), Burleigh’s “Deep River” (TTBB) with “Dvorak” introduction;
Dvorak/Fisher “Goin’ Home” (all with Washington National Cathedral Choir,
Gil-Ordonez conducting)

57:48: “The elephant in the room”: cultural appropriation

1:07:00: Burleigh sings “Go Down, Moses”
(1919); Sir Michael Tippett’s choral arrangement of “Go Down, Moses” (Deas,
Gil-Ordonez, Cathedral Choir)

1:15:30: “My Lord, What a Morning” (arr.
Burleigh) sung by Cathedral Choir, Gil-Ordonez conducting

PART TWO:

00:00: Nathaniel Dett: “Oh Holy God” (National
Cathedral Choir, Gil-Ordonez)

02:55: How classical music in America “stayed white,”
penalizing black composers

15:26: Dett’s The Ordering of Moses (conclusion) with James Conlon conducting the
Cincinnati Symphony

20:49: Dett: “Listen to the Lambs” sung by
Cathedral Choir, Gil-Ordonez conducting

31:08: William Dawson: “There is a Balm in
Gilead” with Deas, Cathedral Choir, Gil-Ordonez

37:10: “Where You There” (arr. Burleigh); Bach:
“Mache dich” from St. Matthew Passion with Deas, Cathedral Choir,
PostClassical Ensemble, Gil-Ordonez conducting

51:28: Bach: “Ich habe genug” (movement 1) with
Deas, PCE, Gil-Ordonez

(Igor Leschishin, oboe)

1:01:29: Bach: Air from Third Orchestral Suite
with PCE, Gil-Ordonez

Lou Harrison and The Great American Piano Concerto — Reprised

Eight years ago, on the occasion of PostClassical Ensemble’s first performance of Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto with Benjamin Pasternack as soloist, I wrote in this space: “The music of Lou Harrison represents a rare opportunity for advocacy. To begin with, he is unquestionably a major late 20th-century composer, and yet little-known. Also, he is both highly accessible and stupendously original. And he is the composer of a Piano Concerto as formidable as any ever composed by an American.”

Two weeks ago, PostClassical Ensemble reprised the Harrison concerto, again with Ben Pasternack, again with Angel Gil-Ordóñez conducting. The venue, this time, was the great nave of the Washington National Cathedral, where it’s our good fortune to be Ensemble-in-Residence. The spiritual ambience, the resonant church acoustic redoubled the impact of this landmark American achievement. It is original, surprising, exalted. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s part of a review by Sudip Bose, the superb music critic (and managing editor) of The American Scholar:

“It was the piece I as most eager to hear, its opening movement as vast as a canyon . . . How could so magnificent a concerto be so woefully neglected? It’s a question that could be asked of all of Harrison’s music, which is in need of just this kind of evangelism.”

I here offer some further thoughts on this 1985 work, which should be standard repertoire for every American orchestra of consequence.

The first movement is indeed a sonorous canyon, as vast as the American West. Compositionally, it’s a technical tour de force: a terrific sonata form whose trajectory does not depend on directional harmony. Instead, Harrison uses rising scales and intensifying textures to drive toward a refulgent recapitulation. In our Pasternack/Gil-Ordóñez performance, that passage sounded like this:

Lou Harrison Piano Concerto, mvmt 1, PostClassical Ensemble with Benjamen Pasternack,
Angel Gil-Ordóñez Conducting

The second movement is one of Harrison’s “Stampede” scherzos — a tremendous moto perpetuo for the soloist, whose part includes a wooden “octave bar” for rapid-fire octave clusters on the black of white keys. Here’san excerpt from our PCE performance (with percussionist Bill Richards):

Lou Harrison Piano Concerto, mvmt 2, PostClassical Ensemble with Benjamen Pasternack,
Angel Gil-Ordóñez Conducting

The big third movement follows like a balm – it seals the concerto’s majestic amplitude. This Largo is a hymn sung with such gravitas that the Adagio of Brahms’ D minor Piano Concerto becomes a plausible point of reference. Here are Pasternack and Gil-Ordóñez:

Lou Harrison Piano Concerto, mvmt 3, PostClassical Ensemble with Benjamen Pasternack,
Angel Gil-Ordóñez Conducting

And yet Harrison’s finale is not a big Brahmsian rondo but — another original touch — a mere codetta: an ending perfectly gauged. 

The Harrison Piano Concerto was composed for Keith Jarrett, who made the best-known recording. Jarrett’s keyboard command is miraculous, but his impersonality is an obstacle. No less than Pasternack, the Italian pianist Emanuele Arcuili (who plays more American piano music than any American ever has) is an inspired exponent of the Harrison concerto. It tells you some more about the piece that these readings – Jarrett, Arciuli, Pasternack – are utterly different from one another. In fact, the piano writing itself is so singular, so original, and yet so idiomatic as to invite a wide variety of voicings, pedaling, and rubatos.

I discovered this for myself when we undertook a five-minute filmed exegesis of the concerto’s Javanese roots, with the Harrison scholar Bill Alves in charge. With the help of the Indonesian Embassy Javanese Gamelan, Bill showed how layered gamelan textures generate Harrison’s layered keyboard textures – and I was the participating pianist. Here’s the film clip, which we screened as an introduction to the Harrison concerto while the stage was being re-set.

And so this is yet another dimension of Lou Harrison’s protean concerto – like so much of Harrison, it derives from his immersion in non-Western musical genres, Javanese gamelan in particular. This influence is profound: both atmospheric and compositional. 

How to program such music? As PostClassical Ensemble is an “experimental orchestral laboratory,” the Cathedral’s great nave was reconfigured, with the orchestra in the center and (thanks to our indispensable partnership with the Indonesian Embassy) Javanese and Balinese gamelans at either end. Our three-hour concert told a story: how it is that, of all non-Western genres, Indonesian music has most influenced the Western tradition. The story begins with Debussy. It separately embraces Javanese and Balinese strands. It includes Ravel, Britten, Poulenc, Messiaen, Bartok, Reich – and also lesser known but vitally original composers like the Canadian Colin McPhee. 

We began with Javanese music and dance, already playing as the audience entered the nave. Three dancers proceeded down the central aisle and froze in front of a piano – at which point Wan-Chi Su commenced Debussy’s Pagodas. The remainder of the first half comprised piano and two-piano music by Ravel, McPhee, Messiaen, Poulenc, and Bill Alves. The intermission featured Balinese music and dance. 

Part two was the Harrison concerto, preceded by an earlier Harrison composition: the Suite for violin, piano, and chamber orchestra. Here again, the Cathedral setting told. As I learned from Bill Alves, this 1951 Harrison composition coincided with his immersion in Christian mysticism. As the gamelan influence is already apparent, the Suite is sui generis. In their invaluable Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick (2017), Bill and Brett Campbell call it “one of the most surpassingly beautiful American musical creations of the 1950s . . . [it] closes with a softly swaying, melancholy chorale that reaches as deep into the heart as anything Harrison ever wrote.” 

At our performance, the chorale was consecrated by stained-glass windows. Angel Gil-Ordóñez is a sovereign conductor of all and any slow-motion music. Our exceptional concertmaster, Nati Draiblate, was the violin soloist. It sounded like this:

Lou Harrison Suite for Violin, Piano and Orchestra, PostClassical Ensemble with Netanel Draiblate and Wan-Chi Su, Angel Gil-Ordóñez Conducting

Sudip Bose, in his American Scholarreview, memorably summarized: “These days, the word fusion . . . has become a cliché. But here was a vivid, persuasive argument in favor of embracing a fluid world culture. Works of the imagination should not be limited by borders, or by walls, and when art is born out of reverence, we the public should not be impeded by questions of ownership and accusations of appropriation. Not when the artworks in question move and enrich us all.”

To which Bill Alves adds: “Lou’s attitude was something he inherited from Henry Cowell – that everything in the world should be considered a legitimate influence. And Lou’s idea was also part of his universalistic orientation. His advocacy of Esperanto is another example. In his book The Music Primer, Lou points out that drawing musical borders is an artificial process – that really music changes by degree as one crosses geographical borders around the world.”

PostClassical music increasingly demands its own venues and formats. Its master prophet was Lou Harrison: an elusive yet iconic American original. 

His time will come. 

(Stay tuned for a “PostClassical” podcast on the WWFM Network with the complete Harrison Piano Concerto, as performed by PCE on January 23 at the Washington National Cathedral. For filmed excerpts from the concert, here is a vivid feature by Indonesian Voice of America.)

Falla and Flamenco — “The Birth of Spanish Music”

According to my friend the remarkably loquacious Spanish pianist Pedro Carboné, the “birth of Spanish music” occurs during the third of Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain. Pedro made this argument at length on our most recent “PostClassical” broadcast: “Falla and Flamenco.” And he clinched it by citing his distinctive live performance of this piece with PostClassical Ensemble.

You can hear what Pedro’s talking about by gong to 1:03:00 here. Bill McGlaughlin, who hosts “PostClassical,” was duly impressed. He called the birth-moment in question “heart-stopping.”

Like so much of Spanish culture, Falla (1876-1946) embodied a confluence of Moorish, North African, and Catholic ingredients. As Pedro experiences Nights in the Gardens of Spain, movement one – a fragrant tone poem evoking the Alhambra’s iconic Generalife gardens – shows “what Spain was”: Moorish. In movement two, “the gypsies arrive” with an exotic song juxtaposed with a Moorish dance. And movement three is a fusion: the music “never heard before.” The work’s exalted coda tracks the departure of the Moors. It’s an inspired reading – and so is Pedro’s actual performance.

Pedro’s gift for descriptive aplomb peaks with his detailed explication of another, more rarified Falla composition: the Concerto for harpsichord or piano. This is “late Falla,” meticulously and painstakingly composed in 1923-26 — by which time Falla had discarded the flamenco influence that previously impelled his ceaseless search for the Spanish soul. Here is a composition that usually makes no sense in performance. The reason, as Pedro shows, is that Falla is in fact undertaking an “encapsulation of the history of Spanish music.”

The concerto’s first movement fractures –almost as Stravinsky might – a famous medieval Spanish song: “De los alamos vengo, madre.” The second movement, called by Ravel the greatest chamber music of the twentieth century, is an austere religious epiphany – an homage to the stark Catholic grandeur of the siglo de oro. The finale celebrates the Spanish harpsichord school of the eighteenth century: Scarlatti and Soler. And of all of this, Pedro adds, is couched “in the language of the twentieth century.” Falla skips the nineteenth century – the century of zarzuela – because he disdains it.

PostClassical Ensemble has many times presented the Falla concerto with Pedro, conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez. We quickly discovered that audiences were clueless unless we contextualized this dense fifteen-minute identity quest precisely as Pedro does. So to introduce movement one we of course perform “De los alamos.” For movement two Angel conducts motets by Tomas Luis d Victoria. And we combine the finale with some Soler.

It’s all on our “PostClassical” broadcast.“ And you can hear Bill McGlaughlin discover the originality of this rarely performed masterpiece; responding to movement two, he exclaims: “I have to admit, that piece is really hard for me to understand. I hear about seven different directions in it” — ranging, Bill continues, from music resembling a Lutheran chorale, to mellifluous cascades he likens to Saint-Saens, to “some really cold, acerbic modern stuff.”

Pedro makes an even more revelatory statement, to my ears, in Falla’s Fantasia Betica, composed in 1919. It’s the last of his flamenco-inspired creations, and the most radically harsh in its quest for authenticity. As Pedro explains, Falla conceived it as a corrective to his “Ritual Fire Dance,” which he heard Artur Rubinstein perform as a flashy encore. He decided to give Rubinstein a virtuoso solo keyboard piece with more pianistic and musical substance. Rubinstein played the Betica once and never again – it’s not intended for popularity. Pedro’s rendition is weighty and hard; it treats flamenco with the same gravitas as Falla did. You can hear it on part two of our broadcast, at 12:41. If you’re interested in sampling an antithetical reading, swifter and wondrously refined, here is Alicia de Larrocha. But Pedro will have none of that: “Don’t rush!” he explodes.

The overall argument is that austerity defines Spain. For Pedro and Angel, the aestheticization of “Spain” by such French composers as Bizet, Debussy, Ravel, and Chabrier is precisely “French,” not “Spanish.” And their Falla performances follow suit. I have written about this before, in my 2010 blog, “The Problem with De Larrocha.” 

Angel therefore regards Victoria, not Falla, as Spain’s greatest composer: a musician as austere as the Escorial itself. Assessing the reinvention of Spanish music undertaken by Falla at the turn of the twentieth century, he references Spain’s loss of its colonial empire and the birth of “modernismo” – for Spanish artists and intellectuals, a striving to reconnect with mainstream European aesthetic innovation after a century of insular provincialism.

This topic is owned by the pre-eminent contemporary Spanish novelist: Antonio Munoz Molina, who happens to be a frequent participant in PostClassical’s ongoing “Search for Spain in Music.” Antonio emphasizes the initial energy of Spanish modernism, reminding us that Berg’s Violin Concerto was premiered in Spain and that Schoenberg composed some of Moses und Aron in Barcelona. Then came the elephant in the room – Francisco Franco. Modernismo was prematurely terminated. And Falla emigrated to Argentina, where his creative gift lapsed. He belongs in the company of Ives, Elgar, and Sibelius – all composers who stopped composing long before they stopped living. All of them, I would say, were estranged by twentieth century aesthetics. In Falla’s case, the impact of Stravinsky seems to have shattered his stylistic base. The Concerto was one result. His two final decades of relative silence were another.

Our broadcast ends with another Spanish composer Pedro Carboné re-understands: Isaac Albeniz (1860-1909). Like Falla, Albeniz undertook a renewed search for Spain. Like Falla, he embodies a confluence privileging flamenco. Like Falla, he is both popular and little understood, at least in theUS.

A central problem is Enrique Arbos – the eminent Spanish conductor who transcribed five movements from Albeniz’s solo piano masterpiece: Iberia (1905-1909). When I was young, the Arbos versions of Iberia were more heard than the Albeniz versions. And they are radically different: so simplified in texture and affect as to approximate a Hollywood reductionism.

The real Iberia is monumentally dense. Olivier Messiaen called it “the wonder of the piano, the masterpiece of Spanish music which takes its place – and perhaps the highest – among the stars of first magnitude of the king of instruments.”

And that’s the Iberia Pedro champions. No one makes this music sound more knotted or unrelenting. Again, the antithesis is de Larrocha. On our “PostClassical” broadcast, you can sample Arbos’s technicolored rendering of “Triana,” from Iberia book two. And you can hear Pedro’s “Triana.”

In the WWFM studio, Pedro collapsed in pain during our audition of Arbos’s Albeniz. He recuperated to introduce “Rondena,” also from Iberia book two. It is my favorite Carboné performance. Whether or not it captures the soul of Spain I cannot say. That it is authentically soulful I have no doubt.

Albeniz studied with Liszt. Falla was an appreciable keyboardist; you can hear his premiere recording of his Concerto on our radio show. They both wrote for the piano as only a pianist could. In the lineage of notable pianist/composers, Albeniz and Falla belong right up there with Mozart and Beethoven, with Liszt and Busoni, with Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. To my ears, their most singular – and most voluble — advocate is Pedro Carboné.

The “Falla and Flamenco” installment of“PostClassical,” lovingly produced by Dave Osenberg for the WWFM ClassicalNetwork, is here.

Listening Guide:

PART ONE:

00:00: Flamenco as a source for Spanish cultural identity

7:30: “Austerity” as the “essence” of Spanish music, distinguishing it from the French “Spanish” style.

10:48: Falla’s El Amor Brujo (excerpts) with PCE and flamenco cantaora Esperanza Fernandez

21:20: Commentary on Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain and “the birth of Spanish music”

26:32: Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, movement one, with Pedro Carbone and PCE

44:45: Commentary on Nights, movements 2 and 3

49:44: Nights, movements 2 and 3, with Pedro Carbone and PCE

1:03:00: “The first Spanish tune”

PART TWO:

00:00: Falla’s Fantasia Betica and the “quest for authenticity”

12:41: Fantasia Betica, performed by Pedro Carbone

27:24: Artur Rubinstein and the Fantasia Betica

33:44: Falla and the challenge of modernism; cf Ives, Elgar, Sibelius; the Falla keyboard concerto as the “encapsulation of the history of Spanish music”

35:41: Discussion of the Falla concerto, movement 2 as a religious epiphany

38:59: Falla concerto, movement 2, performed by Pedro Carbone and PCE

49:50: Spanish religious austerity — Tomas Luis de Victoria: “Caligaverunt oculi mei” conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez

55:40: “De los alamos vengo, madre” and the Falla concerto

56:40: Falla concerto, movement 1, performed by the composer

1:01:53: Falla concerto, movement 1, performed by Pedro Carbone and PCE

1:07:53: Soler and the Falla concerto

1:10:50: Falla concerto, movement 3, performed by Pedro Carbone and PCE

PART THREE:

4:24: “Triana” by Abeniz, transcribed/performed
by Enrique Arbos

15:26: “Triana” performed by Pedro Carbone

25:46: Francisco Franco as “the elephant in the room”

32:07: “Rondena” by Albeniz, performed by Pedro Carbone

High Culture Without Apologies — What Orchestras Can Do

The current Weekly Standard has a long piece by me about the future of American orchestras. I write that orchestras can help us to heal our shredded national fabric and regain a lost “sense of place” – a shared American identity via our history and culture. And yes, I mean high culture.

I continue in part:

“Our colleges don’t teach much history any longer. Many cultural institutions seem increasingly adrift. And yet I have stumbled upon an unlikely alliance that works: orchestras in partnership with universities. . . .

“If orchestras are ever to regain their role as agents of national unity, they will need to undertake a larger mission and curate the American past. . . . It must be understood that orchestras in the US have evolved very differently from museums. There are no scholarly curators on staff. The American musical past is little known or exhumed, nor is any cultural context outside of classical music. . . .”

The picture above, from my Weekly Standard article, shows me interacting with students in an El Paso colonia as part of an NEH-supported Music Unwound festival binding the El Paso Symphony to the University of Texas/El Paso, and to the El Paso public schools.

To read the whole piece, click here.

How South Dakota Shows What Orchestras Are For

Beginning in the 1860s, the conductor Theodore Thomas – a symphonic Johnny Appleseed – began touring the entire United States with his Thomas Orchestra. His credo was: “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community.” And in cities large and small, it did.

Today, the American orchestra is no longer the civic bulwark it once was. There are exceptions. I would say that the Chicago Symphony is one. That’s partly because Thomas himself was the founding music director, in 1891; and because he was succeeded by his assistant, Frederick Stock, through 1942. That is: For half a century, the Chicago Symphony had only two primary conductors, both German-born. It also happens to be the only American orchestra whose founding music director was a major conductor. And so it retains a central place in Chicago’s identity. It also retains an anchoring Germanic identity, Riccardo Muti notwithstanding.

But the American orchestra that most shows the culture of the community can only be the South Dakota Symphony. As I have previously written in this space, it is our most exceptional orchestra. I am just back from a week in South Dakota, and my impressions have only deepened.

The occasion was a third Music Unwound festival, funded by the NEH. Previously, we undertook “Dvorak and America” (bringing the New World Symphony to an Indian reservation) and “Copland and Mexico” (for which the musicians lustily sang Copland’s Communist workers’ song “Into the Streets May First!” – even though several had scurrilously threatened to  “take a knee”). This season’s Music Unwound immersion experience was “American Roots.” It comprised two subscription concerts, three young people’s concerts (filmed by South Dakota public TV), ancillary concerts and a master class at two universities, and the participation of two middle school Social Studies classes (with sixty seventh graders reading my young readers book Dvorak and America). The total attendance was something like 6,000, and covered a geographic radius of 150 miles.

The SDSO subscription audience is by far the most diversified in age I have ever encountered at a professional symphonic concert (and I have been around). And yet the programing is bold. The main work on “American Roots” was Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 2. The current season also includes Mahler’s Eighth (completing a Mahler symphony cycle), Sibelius’s Seventh, concertos by Nielsen and Lalo, and new music by Jeffrey Paul (the orchestra’s superb principal oboe) and Erik Larsson.

Alongside all that, the orchestra pursues its signature Lakota Music Project, producing side-by-side concerts at Indian reservations that juxtapose classical music with Native American works.

But the most remarkable aspect of the South Dakota Symphony, for any observer as venerable as myself, is the attitude of the musicians. They are engaged. They are mission-driven. As I had occasion to tell them at an Ives rehearsal: “This orchestra is so friendly it’s disorienting.”

Many factors are in play. Sioux Falls is full of orchestras. The middle school I visited has three of them. The SDSO itself maintains three youth orchestras (I heard a rousing youth-orchestra rendition of the Mussorgsky/Rimsky Night on Bald Mountain).  With 250,000 people, the metropolitan area is small enough to facilitate community. A recent influx of immigrants from North Africa and Southeast Asia seems assimilated with forethought and good will. But the singular vision of the SDSO music director, Delta David Gier, is paramount. He moved to Sioux Falls and raised a family there. He concocted the Lakota Music Project. He has initiated programing featuring Ghanaian, Persian, and Chinese instrumentalists and composers. He has elevated the standard of performance to a startling height of conviction and finesse. He is a thinker and a leader.

The point of “American Roots” (which like all Music Unwound programs migrates around the US, adapted to local needs and desires) is to introduce audiences to Charles Ives. He is arguably the most important American composer of classical music. He is little performed. His eccentricities are considered forbidding. He was long viewed with suspicion by lesser Americans like Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. (I do not know of a subsequent American symphony as cannily assembled as are the five movements of the Ives 2, completed around 1909; such works as the Third Symphonies of Copland and Roy Harris seem lopsided and uneven by comparison.)

And yet Ives is easy to humanize, because he was a great man. One Music Unwound presentation, “Charles Ives: A Life in Music,” intermingles Ives songs (peerlessly – and I mean peerlessly – sung by William Sharp) with letters. One of those, from his daughter Edith, began:

“Dear Daddy,

“You are so very modest and sweet Daddy, that I don’t think you realize the full import of the words people use about you, ‘a great man.’

“Daddy, I have had a chance to see so many men lately – fine fellows, and no doubt the cream of our generation. But I have never in all my life come across one who could measure up to the fine standard of life and living that you believe in, and that I have always seen you put into action no matter how many counts were against you. You have fire and imagination that is truly a divine spark, but to me the great thing is that never once have you tried to turn your gift to your own ends. Instead you have continually given to humanity right from your heart, asking nothing in return; — and all too often getting nothing. The thing that makes me happiest about your recognition today is to see the bread you have so generously cast upon most ungrateful waters, finally beginning to return to you. All that great love is flowing back to you at last. Don’t refuse it because it comes so late, Daddy.”

Once contextualized, the often cantankerous Second Symphony is infectious.  By “contextualized,” I mean that the Music Unwound program precedes the symphony with a half dozen tunes that Ives quotes, beginning with “Camptown Races” (sung by Bill Sharp with banjo accompaniment). We demonstrate how Ives uses another Stephen Foster tune, “Old Black Joe,” as the second subject of his Civil War finale, and thereby (as he once explained in a futile attempt to interest the New York Philharmonic) expresses sympathy for the slave.

All that comprised the second half of the SDSO subscription program. The first half began with a minstrel song played by banjo and spoons (SDSO principal percussionist John Pennington proved an electrifying spoon virtuoso). Gier then revealed that the tune just heard was composed by . . . Antonin Dvorak. It’s the A major second theme in the finale of his American Suite, transforming an A minor Indian dance. This 1894 Dvorak composition, still scandalously little-known, comprises a stack of American postcards. The Music Unwound performance of Dvorak’s suite incorporates a visual presentation created by my longtime colleague Peter Bogdanoff; adapted for Sioux Falls, it features the South Dakota artists Oscar Howe and Harvey Dunn depicting the Dakota flatland in juxtaposition with Dvorak’s evocation of the Iowa prairie he knew as of 1894. The result looked like this:

Another South Dakota ingredient was the participating pianist: Paul Sanchez, a Sioux Falls native. Sanchez’s account of Rhapsody in Blue was original – the most bewitchingly lyric I have ever encountered. This beloved work is what sold the concert, but was no sell-out: a straight line runs from the American Dvorak to Gershwin, and we clinched it with Dvorak’s G-flat Humoresque – the bluesy music that inspired Gershwin to become a composer.

The scripted, multi-media program I have just partly described ran 70 minutes on the first half and another 65 on part two. Gier likes long programs. Many in the audience stayed put to talk. The topic, framed by my script, was “What is America?” Inescapably, our discussion fixed on issues of race.

Next October, the SDSO Lakota Music Project travels to DC for a festival – tentatively titled “Native American: From Spillville to Pine Ridge” – that my PostClassical Ensemble will produce at the Washington National Cathedral. The National Museum of the American Indian will also take part. The South Dakota contingent will include Gier, nine SDSO members, two distinguished Native American musicians, and an ethnomusicologist. One of the participating players will be the orchestra’s principal clarinetist, Chris Hill – a 32-year SDSO veteran. Over lunch, I asked Chris if he were aware of the DC project. He answered that, as a member of the SDSO board, he had insisted on casting the first vote in favor.

I was with Bill Sharp (whose impressions of the SDSO echo my own, as do those of David Hyslop, who managed the St. Louis Symphony and Minnesota Orchestra and is currently the SDSO interim CEO). Bill remarked to Chris that the orchestra’s Sommervold Hall is one of the most acoustically impressive in which he has had occasion to perform. (Bill has performed in many halls.) Chris said: “I helped to design it.” Sommervold may in fact be the best orchestral auditorium to be found among the countless multi-purpose halls constructed around the turn of the twentieth century. The idea was to accommodate the local orchestra and lucrative itinerant musicals in one and the same space. It failed elsewhere because the resulting space was too big; the builders were intent on maximizing box office revenue. Sommervold has only 1,800 seats; it prioritizes the South Dakota Symphony.

Chris added that he conducts the Sioux Falls Municipal Band, now celebrating its centenary. There are 24 bandshell concerts every summer. Any Ives? we asked. Of course, he answered.

*. *. *

To sample the South Dakota Symphony’s Music Unwound “Copland and Mexico” production, click here.

Sioux Falls has a public radio station that broadcasts extensive arts interviews. To hear Joe Horowitz in conversation with SDSO Music Director Delta David Gier, click here.

Jonas Kaufmann vs. the Orchestra of St. Luke’s

 

My father, who grew up on the Lower East Side, probably never heard opera until – like other Jews of his generation facing American quotas — he went to medical school in Vienna in the 1930s. His only prior exposure to full-throated singing, I imagine, came in the synagogue: cantorial tenors.

When I was very young and precociously amassing LPs of Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, my father collected recordings of the operetta tenors from his medical school years, singers whose high temper and juicy high notes connected with Jan Peerce singing “Kol nidre,” or Richard Tucker in the Yiddish songs of Goldfaden. Richard Tauber and Joseph Schmidt were his favorites. So I grew up with songs of Vienna and Berlin ringing in my ears.  And they’re still there.

Jonas Kaufmann, who must be today’s most celebrated operatic tenor, commands a wide repertoire in German, Italian, and French. But for his Carnegie Hall concert last Friday night, Kaufmann presented selections from his 2014 “Berlin album” — “You Mean the World to Me.” I read in the Carnegie program book that this cross-over CD “made it onto the pop charts.”

Having never heard “You Mean the World to Me,” I looked forward with excitement and mild trepidation. I imagined that a brainy singer – and Kaufmann assuredly is that – might bring self-conscious artistry to this repertoire, now nearly a century old. I was expecting something a little synthetic.

But Kaufmann made no attempt to sound like Tauber or Schmidt – any more than they had sounded like one another. Instead, he gloriously found his own way into the tradition they embodied.

Certainly Kaufmann’s chocolate tenor is darker in timbre, and heftier in weight, than the instruments once associated with “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” or “Wien, Wien nur du allein.” But it rings on top. And it’s wonderfully susceptible to the crooning head voice that was a Tauber signature.

We heard selections by Lehar and Kalman, by Ernst May and Tauber himself, by Robert Stolz and Mischa Spoliansky – songs composed between 1925 and 1933 for operetta and for early talkies. Somehow, the bewitching Tauber combination of spontaneity, intimate charm, and vocal fireworks was renewed. The evening climaxed with a heroically robust rendition of “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz.” Kaufmann made the songs his own.

The dimensions of this feat were inadvertently magnified every time the singer departed the stage, and we were left alone with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s conducted by Jochen Rieder. Never have I heard so clueless a performance of a Central European waltz as the St. Luke’s treatment of Lehar’s divine Ballsirenen from The Merry Widow; a lilt was not even attempted. But the evening’s nadir was the waltz from Giuditta. Whatever time was allotted to rehearsing this number (surely very little) would have been better spent inviting the instrumentalists to audition Hilde Gueden in “Meine Lippen sie Kussen so heiss” via youtube (I am perfectly serious). They showed no more familiarity with the pertinent style than they might have performing an Indian raga or a Javanese gamelan number.

My wife, who is Hungarian, said she would have preferred “the Budapest postal workers’ orchestra.” We were both reminded of hearing the Kronos Quartet attempt Bartok back in the 1990s: a harbinger of things to come. Musical performance devoid of context.

So it was a weird evening at Carnegie Hall. Rarely have I listened to an orchestra with such discomfort. Never have I responded to a tenor with such gratitude.

The penultimate encore was a classic Old World torch song: “Don’t Ask Me Why.” I’m not claiming that Jonas Kaufmann’s performance eclipsed my father’s Greta Keller LP. But it was damned good.

 

 

Stokowski and Ormandy — What Happened in Philadelphia?

 

As I write in Understanding Toscanini (1987):

“In 1932, in a minor cause celebre, Wilhelm Furtwangler was discovered likening American orchestras to ‘pet dogs’ (Luxushunden) in a speech honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the Berlin Philharmonic. To Furtwangler, whose rapport with the New York Philharmonic’s ‘dog owners’ had not been smooth, the absence of government subsidies in the United States implied that orchestras were deemed less essential there than in Europe. When the ‘pet dogs’ analogy stirred American resentment, he took pains to explain to the New York Times that he ‘intended to convey the idea that orchestras had grown to be more of a necessity to German communities than elsewhere on account of the greater age of German musical culture and national tradition.’”

This explanation was necessarily disingenuous. Furtwangler was not the sort of man to trade anecdotes at Manhattan dinner parties. His lapdog analogy plainly questioned the influence of affluent non-musicians in musical affairs.

In a recent blog I called the Philadelphia Orchestra’s decision to replace Leopold Stokowski with Eugene Ormandy “one of the most parochial blunders in the institutional history of classical music in America.” Was the Philadelphia Orchestra a Luxushund?

The incongruous 44-year phenomenon (1936 to 1980) of a middling conductor taking over from a galvanic genius remains mysterious. Certainly (as I earlier speculated) the music businessmen  Charles O’Connell and Arthur Judson had input into Philadelphia’s decision to hire Ormandy over such readily available refugee candidates as Erich Kleiber and Otto Klemperer – not to mention Fritz Reiner, who next door at the Curtis Institute coveted the Philadelphia podium.  O’Connell superintended the classical music division of RCA Records. Judson was for decades the presiding powerbroker – the Robert Moses – of classical music in the US. He ran the New York Philharmonic and (for a time) the Philadelphia Orchestra. He created Columbia Artists — the most powerful booking agency for conductors and instrumentalists.

For readers unfamiliar with Judson, here are a couple of Mahler vignettes:

In 1935 Klemperer, as a New York Philharmonic guest conductor (and a clear candidate to become a regular presence), insisted on conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony. His three performances impacted overwhelmingly; Olin Downes, in the Times, called them “historic.” Judson’s response was to apprise Klemperer that his Mahler concerts had run a substantial deficit. As reported by Klemperer’s biographer Peter Heyworth, this “Pyrrhic victory” sealed Klemperer’s fate in New York. When he discovered he would not be invited back, Klemperer wrote to let Judson know he was “very much offended”—an “outburst of rage and resentment,” according to Heyworth, “unique in his career.”

One of the Philharmonic’s most important American premieres was of Mahler’s Sixth, under Dimitri Mitropoulos in 1947. But the Philharmonic balked at scheduling the work on the Sunday afternoon broadcast concert — Judson maintained that Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F would be more suitable national radio fare and would also sell more tickets at home. In response, Mitropoulos wrote Judson (October 14, 1947) “to beg you, almost on my knees” to change his mind. “It would be a crime not to give this New World [broadcast] premiere of this great and exciting symphony . . . It would be a great event from which we have nothing to fear and from which to expect no less than the highest gratitude of all the musical artistic world in the United States.” He added that he awaited Judson’s response “with anxiety.” Judson said no.

Eugene Ormandy enjoyed a close, even filial relationship with Arthur Judson. Judson played a crucial role installing Ormandy in his first major position, in Minneapolis. He doubtless advocated for Ormandy in Philadelphia. In later life Ormandy said of Judson, “I owe everything to him.”

Thanks to an email from Gregor Benko, I now have at hand a long letter from Olga Samaroff which sheds further light on Ormandy’s Philadelphia  appointment. Marked “PERSONAL,” it’s dated December 8, 1934 (in which year Stokowski had temporarily “resigned”) and is addressed “Dear Curtis” – its recipient being Philadelphia Orchestra Association President Curtis Bok. “If I were President of the Philadelphia Orchestra there is just one man I would consider for the whole job, — that man is Eugene Ormandy,” Samaroff writes. “I feel very convinced that somewhere he will prove to be one of the greatest conductors of his generation.”

Samaroff (born Lucy Hickenlooper) was a prominent American pianist and pedagogue. She was also Leopold Stokowski’s first wife, and backstage played a decisive role both molding his exotic public persona and promoting his glamorous musical career. Her letter to Bok self-evidently conceals a back story – a web of negotiation impossible to extrapolate. But its surface content is wholly engrossing.

Here is a paragraph comparing Ormandy to other Philadelphia possibilities:

“I think the best thing that could happen in Philadelphia would be to have someone do what Leopold did in the beginning – be the regular conductor and conduct throughout the season [contradicting Judson’s unfortunate practice in New York of preferring guests to a permanent music director with teeth]. . . If Reiner were as good a symphony conductor as he is an operatic conductor, it seems to me he would be a logical choice but frankly and confidentially, I do not feel he is a big symphony conductor. Furtwangler has left Berlin [he had resigned in a dispute with the Nazis, but would be reinstated] might like to come to America but he is already too much the pampered ‘prima donna’ to do the kind of work somebody will have to do. He is also hard to get on with personally. Kleiber is not big enough. Klemperer is uneven. He does some things very well and other things not nearly so well. [Jose] Iturbi made a great success in Philadelphia in a concert primarily devoted to Spanish music . . . If he has the same limitations as a conductor however that he has as a pianist, I fear Philadelphia would miss the great experiences they have had in Bach, Brahms, Wagner and Beethoven. . . . “

Well, Samaroff was wrong about Reiner. Certainly Furtwangler and Klemperer were harder “to get on with personally” than Ormandy would be. Was Kleiber “not big enough.”? He today looms a lot bigger than Ormandy. What is more: In Berlin, it was he who led the world premiere of Berg’s Wozzeck in 1925, a brave and triumphant undertaking. As a guest with the New York Philharmonic in 1930 and 1931, Kleiber programed Mahler, Hindemith, Berg (excerpts from Wozzeck and Lulu both), Krenek, Toch, and Malipiero. Klemperer’s New York Philharmonic programs included Berg, Bruckner, Hindemith, Janacek, Mahler, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich.  Even Furtwangler, whose repertoire predilections were conservative, in 1925 led the Philharmonic in its first performances of The Rite of Spring.

Samaroff’s letter continues:

“Although Ormandy has become one of my personal friends I had formed my musical opinion of him when I did not know him from Adam. I went to a concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra when I knew nothing of him musically or personally. I was overwhelmed by the display of qualities that were so like the young Leopold that it was uncanny. I am not speaking of externals of conducting that might be imitative of Stokowski’s methods. I am speaking of purely musical and temperamental qualities, of phrasing, feeling and orchestral balance . . . As a man I do not yet know him very well but I have already had occasion to discover one priceless quality – loyalty. . . .

“Someone recently said to me that he was an opportunist. . . I know orchestra men resent his rise from the ranks [Ormandy began as a violinist]. They always do. The orchestra players’ jealousy of the conductor is as inevitable as any other form of class feeling. They all think they could be conductors if they had the chance. In Ormandy’s case it is enhanced by the spectacular rapidity with which he emerged . . . But if given life and death power – that is the power to dismiss men – I do not think he would have any difficulty in establishing control. After all, that is the one sure thing in determining the attitude of orchestra players towards their conductor. They do their best for the man who has the power to fire them.”

The letter is signed: “Affectionately yours, Olga.”

I realize there are readers who will agree with Olga here – when Norman Lebrecht reproduced my previous Ormandy/O’Connell blog on slippedisc, the respondents included Ormandy enthusiasts. Without getting into a shouting match, I will add that I heard Ormandy in live performance at the Academy of Music a few times in the late 1960s. I will agree that his live performances surpass his studio recordings. (I also found the sound upstairs quite decent, however notoriously dry the downstairs acoustic of the Academy may be.) I liked best a reading of the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition. The smooth skin of the Ormandy sound cushioned the bite of Mussorgsky’s characterizations and (in the case of the feuding Jews Goldenberg and Schmuyle) caricatures. But the sonic refulgence of the “Great Gate at Kiev” was undeniable.

Travel north to Boston, however, and listen to Serge Koussevitzky conduct the same music (I here refer to his broadcast of October 9, 1943). First of all, Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony is on fire; Ormandy was never this incendiary. Secondly, the spiritual elevation of the “Great Gate” occupies a realm of expression Ormandy was never known to inhabit. If you don’t believe me, just have a listen: go to 52:00 of the “PostClassical” Broadcast “Are Orchestras Really ‘Better than Ever?’

I pick this particular piece to make a point because it so happens that Koussevitzky commissioned and premiered Ravel’s orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition – no small achievement — in Paris in 1922. That’s a fundamental difference between Ormandy and such intrepid culture-bearers as Stokowski and Koussevitzky. Koussevitzky’s proudest achievement was Tanglewood – he created it as a laboratory for American music and American composers.  The list of important Koussevitzky commissions and premieres is long. As for Stokowski, the composers he historically championed ranged from Schoenberg to Rachmaninoff to Varese (think about that). He led his own Youth Concerts and his own Young People’s Concerts (including one in which he produced a live baby elephant for Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals).

There is a smoking gun in the annals of Arthur Judson. As I write in Classical Music in America: “In 1931, responding to complaints about Toscanini’s limited [New York Philharmonic] repertoire, Judson issued this remarkable edict: ‘There are certain composers like Bruckner and Mahler who have not yet been accepted heartily by the American public. Certain of their works are played from time to time and it may be that they will gradually attain their permanent place in the repertoire . . .We can only go as far as the public will go with us.’ . . . This market mentality was previously anathema to classical music. . . . It would never have occurred to . . .  Koussevitzky or Stokowski to treat audience taste as a given; as artists, their mission was to chart virgin terrain. In fact, Judson’s attitude . . . demeaned and redefined the performer’s role in the larger scheme of things musical. For the most part, music new or unfamiliar was considered not good for business.”

Arthur Judson notwithstanding, Koussevitzky and Stokowski shaped taste. Wilhelm Furtwangler notwithstanding, their American orchestras were not lapdogs.

P.S.: Curtis Bok resigned as President of the Philadelphia Orchestra board on Dec. 11, 1934 – three days after Samaroff’s letter — in protest against the board’s ouster of Stokowski. His mother, Mary Louise Curtis Bok, did the same. Though Stokowski came back, and the Boks did not, Samaroff’s counsel presumably remained pertinent when in 1941 Stokowski left Philadelphia for good and Ormandy became sole music director. However one reckons the magnanimity of the Boks and other Philadelphia philanthropists, and their influence on the affairs of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Curtis Institute (the Mary Louise Curtis Bok Foundation invaluably supports Curtis to this day), the most colossal of all American musical philanthropists was Henry Higginson. He invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony. He also built Boston’s Symphony Hall. It greatly mattered that Higginson (while a banker) was a Vienna-trained musician. He had taste, he had ears, he had exceptional scouts abroad. Personal amenability was self-evidently not a high criterion for prospective Boston Symphony conductors. Nor was Higginson impressed by great reputations. He was after talent. He hired Artur Nikisch before Nikisch became Germany’s pre-eminent symphonic conductor. He settled on Karl Muck, a powerful leader who in wartime betrayed him and broke his heart. I would additionally call Higginson a great man; he fits no categories for cultural benefaction. For the singular story of Higginson and the BSO, see my Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (2005). For a full Higginson portrait, see my Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle (2012).

 

The Artist and His Audience

As many who follow baseball know, Jacob deGrom is an artist.

It’s not just that he’s likely to win the National League Cy Young Award. Or that his stats this season were off the charts: a 1.70 ERA; 29 consecutive starts allowing three runs or fewer; 269 strike-outs in 217 innings.

DeGrom throws exceptionally hard. He is deceptive. He is a master of location. But the predominant impression, from the stands, is of Zen-like concentration, of a poetic fluency of self-possession uncanny and impregnable. The vicissitudes of the game seem not to intrude.

As I happened to be in DC on September 19, I was able to watch deGrom’s last two starts of the season, the second being a week later in New York. In both games, deGrom was a miracle of dispatch and efficiency. He worked quickly and rhythmically, easily, with long, lithe strides. He rarely fell behind in the count. Very few balls left the infield. Many dribbled between the mound and first base. I can’t remember seeing so many assists and put-outs by a pitcher (and DeGrom – a former shortstop — is a lyrically deft fielder). Against the Braves in New York, deGrom was brushed back three times by the opposing pitcher; he remained a picture of placidity.

Of the 15 innings deGrom pitched, 14 were scoreless. The exception – the third inning in DC – began with a rare walk; suddenly, deGrom couldn’t find the plate. He gave up to two runs, then shut the door. What accounted for this lapse I have no idea.

Might DC’s National Park, built in 2008, have been a factor? I refer not to the understandable DC allegiance of the Nationals’ fans, but of something far more distracting: the indifference of the ballpark itself.

Baseball stadiums behave differently than they used to. There was always an organ and an announcer. But over time it was generally assumed that baseball is insufficiently brisk and eventful to sustain the full attention of a mass of human beings. So new scoreboards exploded, and new sound systems did too. Also, something was done about those long breaks between innings – breaks greatly increased by the insertion of ever longer TV commercials.

At Nationals Stadium, not a single synapse was left unattended – we were treated to diversions of every description. The most elaborate was a “Presidents’ race” in the outfield, with George and Abe (but no Donald Trump). This event was included in the “Highlights of the Game,” recapitulated on a gargantuan screen. Meanwhile, the fortissimo stadium organ was rarely silent. In the late innings, when people began to leave (the Nationals were losing), it was deployed ever more insistently. The ambient crowd noise was also uncommonly loud: thousands talking rather than watching. And no wonder: the grace and tempo of the game were violated at every turn.

All of this was intrusively at odds with deGrom’s poetic composure.

In his many writings about performing symphonic music, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler harped on the significance of the audience. He insisted that, absent an engaged body of listeners, great music could not be made. Is baseball doomed by inattentive stadiums?

However: seven days later, in Queens, Citi Field listened to the game. Electronic musical intrusions were nearly absent except between innings. A spectator could pursue observations and think thoughts. The crowd gaped at Jeff McNeil’s airborne grab of a line drive far to his right. We absorbed the sweetness of Michael Conforto’s home run swing.

In the latter innings, when deGrom found an even deeper groove, the increased frequency of strike-outs was acknowledged.  When deGrom strode to the plate in the bottom of the seventh, there was shared understanding that he would therefore pitch the eighth. At the top of the ninth, the appearance of Seth Lugo emerging from the bullpen instantly registered widespread disappointment. After the game, deGrom was interviewed on the field. The crowd froze to watch and listen. The Mets’ losing season was forgotten in a surge of empathy and pride.

The most proactive sports audience I know is the Rangers’ at Madison Square Garden. The finer points of ice hockey are formally applauded en masse. Chants are invented and shared on the spot. Think now of the shrinking world of classical music. New York used to have such an audience for opera. Arias and duets are calibrated to ignite an immediate response. I am old enough to remember the Met when a full house registered informed expectation, keen arousal, delirious surprise. No longer. Cast a pair of equally certified celebrities in Eugene Onegin – I am thinking of Renee Fleming and the late Dmitri Hvorostovsky – and the approbation is equally generic. Never mind that Hvorostovsky was born to sing Onegin, and that Fleming was too self-conscious an artist to feign Tatyana’s innocence.

In a bygone era, I once heard Nicolai Gedda sing Lenski in the same Tchaikovsky opera. Was he the last tenor to deploy something like the floated half-tones once famously purveyed by Kozlovsky and Lemeshev? Perhaps. His second act aria detonated a sustained eruption of recognition. I will never forget how that 1979 audience sealed the occasion.

Jacob deGrom notwithstanding, we live in distracted times. No doubt baseball will suffer the same dilution as grand opera. But not yet.

Rachmaninoff Uncorked — Take Two: RCA, Ormandy, and the Cork

Charles O’Connell, who commanded “artists and repertoire” for RCA Victor from 1930 to 1944, left a book of reminiscences – The Other Side of the Record (1947) – documenting an astute, querulous intellect and a meddlesome ego. It was often O’Connell who decided what music famous conductors, pianists, and violinists might commercially record.

O’Connell admired Sergei Rachmaninoff – yet only recorded Rachmaninoff in two extended solo piano works: Schumann’s Carnaval and Chopin’s B-flat minor Sonata, both classics of the discography for piano. That is: O’Connell failed to record Rachmaninoff’s esteemed readings of Liszt’s Sonata or Beethoven’s Op. 111. Or of the piece Rachmaninoff considered his supreme compositional achievement: the existential Symphonic Dances. Rachmaninoff was known to play the Symphonic Dances, privately, with his friend Vladimir Horowitz in the two-piano version. We know that he wished to record the Symphonic Dances as a conductor. O’Connell had thrice recorded Rachmaninoff memorably conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in his own music. But O’Connell lacked enthusiasm for the Symphonic Dances and nothing was done.

All this matters greatly because Rachmaninoff refused to allow his live performances to be broadcast or otherwise recorded. Even though he was a master of musical structure, we have no documentation whatsoever of how he shaped the monumental Beethoven and Liszt pieces he famously purveyed. As important: we don’t know what he sounded like in a real hall with a real audience.

The new Marston 3-CD set “Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances” – the topic of my previous blog – permits a glimpse of this “real” Rachmaninoff: a supreme instrumentalist more emotionally aroused than the one O’Connell managed to capture in sound. Rachmaninoff’s private rendering of his Symphonic Dances, as recorded by Ormandy (probably without the pianist’s knowledge), is an unprecedented opportunity to eavesdrop on Rachmaninoff performing absent the intrusive self-awareness imposed by RCA’s microphones.

This historic release also suggests another impediment to hearing the real Rachmaninoff: Eugene Ormandy himself.

Of the repertoire Rachmaninoff happened to record, only one extended composition embeds the searing nostalgia that was the expressive keynote of this great artist. That is the Piano Concerto No. 3. His 1939-40 recording, with Ormandy, is a dry run. The concerto’s lachrymose intensity is missing.

That it did not have to be is proven by Rachmaninoff’s 1929 recording of a less emotionally fraught composition: the Piano Concerto No. 2. The difference is the conductor, Ormandy’s irreplaceable predecessor in Philadelphia: Leopold Stokowski.

Ormandy’s recorded accompaniments to Rachmaninoff’s First, Second, and Fourth Piano Concertos are merely supportive: they give the soloist nothing to work with. (My pianist friend George Vatchnadze, describing the Rachmaninoff-Ormandy relationship, calls Ormandy a “puppy” and a “servant” — apt adjectives.) Stokowski’s accompaniment to the Second Concerto is unique. The signature lava flow of his magnificent Philadelphia strings is not only memorably ravishing; it is acutely calibrated in dialogue with the composer/pianist. It is not for nothing that Rachmaninoff called Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra the greatest orchestra that had ever existed.

If you want to hear what I’m talking about, listen first to the passage from the First Concerto that Vladimir Horowitz once identified as the only instance of RCA adequately conveying Rachmaninoff’s art. This is the piano solo beginning at 12:52 here. And observe how the intrusion of Ormandy’s generic accompaniment cancels the abandon of Rachmaninoff’s playing, with its untethered rubatos and magically layered dynamics.

Now Stokowski – try the coda to the first movement of the Second Concerto, beginning at 8:45 here. You’ll hear pianist and conductor immersed in an inspired dialogue: two exemplary instruments of musical expression – Stokowski’s orchestra and Rachmaninoff’s Steinway – feed one another.

It is hardly surprising that once Ormandy took over, Stokowski did not guest-conduct in Philadelphia for more than two decades. Or that Stokowski, when passing through Philadelphia by train, would invariably lower the window shade.

How is it possible that Eugene Ormandy could have succeeded Leopold Stokowski? Both O’Connell and Arthur Judson, classical music’s supreme powerbroker, played decisive roles (O’Connell, in his book, testifies that Ormandy looked upon Judson “as on a father”). This choice — coinciding with refugee conductors of world stature looking for work in the US (Kleiber, Klemperer, etc.) — is one of the most parochial blunders in the institutional history of classical music in America. It bears comparison with the Met’s decision to replace Artur Bodanzky with Erich Leinsdorf in 1939; Leinsdorf, too, was a refugee — but no Kleiber or Klemperer. Two decades later, RCA inflicted Leinsdorf on the Boston Symphony; the resulting recordings are today forgotten.

And how is it possible that Rachmaninoff chose to record with Ormandy? According to O’Connell, “he preferred Ormandy to anyone, though he collaborated successfully and in the most friendly fashion with Stokowski.”

But O’Connell held Ormandy in exaggerated esteem. And I read in Richard Taruskin’s copious note for the new Marston release that Rachmaninoff, his longtime loyalty to Philadelphia notwithstanding, didn’t care for Ormandy’s reading of the Symphonic Dances — his preferred conductor for that work (other than himself) being Dmitri Mitopoulos. The Marston set includes a scorching New York Philharmonic Symphonic Dances led by Mitropoulos in live performance in 1942.

Another annotation for the new Marston release, by the producers, reports that Rachmaninoff’s preferred interpreters included Stokowski, Mitropoulos, and Willem Mengelberg – an informative list. These were sui generis conductors who never played by the rules. And, however constrained he may have been in the presence of Charles O’Connell and Eugene Ormandy – neither did Sergei Rachmaninoff.

PS: In an email exchange with Gregor Benko, the longtime Rachmaninoff authority who co-produced “Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances,” I learned the following:

“O’Connell tried to kill two birds with one stone, thinking he would please Rachmaninoff in keeping his promise for Victor to record Symphonic Dances, and satisfying his annual contractual commitment to Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony, by having Stock make the recording.  He hadn’t realized how much this would displease Rachmaninoff, or how much Rachmaninoff wanted to conduct the recording himself.  As happens so regularly at record companies, this seemingly minor personality kertuffle resulted in total failure, and no one recorded the Dances. O’Connell claimed that Rachmaninoff forgave him later, but we believe that is not true.

“As for plans for recording the Symphonic Dances with Vladimir Horowitz [in the two-piano version]:  talk of this has been much exaggerated, based on wishful thinking.  Horowitz and Rachmaninoff played it together privately in California, unknown date but sometime after their first two piano partying there in June, 1942.  Rachmaninoff was already ill and his circle was very worried. He tried to keep up a good face, and went with Horowitz to see Bambi at the Disney studios.  On July 17 & 18 Rachmaninoff played in the Hollywood Bowl and he was bent over.  Lumbago, it was explained, but it was probably acute pain. In July Steinway stopped making pianos as the war really began affecting music. A few weeks later his cancer was diagnosed.  It was a struggle just to fulfill contracted engagements for late 1942/early 1943, and plans for the future were on hold. No contracts for new things, no dates set aside for new recordings. Each contracted concert played was a trial, and finally in mid-February he stopped the tour. He died at the end of March. There was no way such a recording could have happened . . . ”

For much more on Arthur Judson and Leopold Stokowski, see my “Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall” (2005). For more on Charles O’Connell, David Sarnoff, the provincial NBC/RCA impact on American musical life, see my once notorious “Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American-Culture God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music “[1987].)