Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 26

Exalting Bruckner at Carnegie Hall

Bruckner’s symphonies are communal rites of spiritual passage. For maximum impact, they require a proper hall and appropriate congregants. In New York City, Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall – formerly Fisher Hall, and Philharmonic Hall before that — is too dry and plain for Bruckner, and the New York Philharmonic audience that habituates that troubled space is restless and irreverent. I’ve heard Lincoln Center Bruckner conducted by Leonard Bernstein, Christoph Eschenbach, Kurt Masur, Riccardo Muti, and Klaus Tennstedt. None of these experiences stuck except Tennstedt’s Symphony No. 8, a volcano of existential intensity. But lacking the requisite cathedral sonority.

Carnegie Hall, a few blocks downtown, is ideal for Bruckner, and I’ve heard a lot of it there. The conductors were Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Herbert Blomstedt, Sergiu Celibidache, Bernard Haitinck, Eugen Jochum, Masur again, Zubin Mehta, Simon Rattle, and Wolfgang Sawallisch. The performances that mattered were Celibidache in No. 4 and Jochum in No. 8. For Celibidache I smoked a joint and sat up close and I knew what I was doing – the symphony played itself in slow motion, with every detail of sonority and balance hypnotically poised. Jochum’s Eighth was, by comparison, warmly human, therapeutically wholesome, rapturously beautiful.

Daniele Gatti, who conducted the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony a few nights ago at Carnegie Hall, is relatively new to me. I first heard him five seasons ago at the Metropolitan Opera, conducting Parsifal – a performance I reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and reprinted here. Gatti’s Parsifal was the most memorably conducted opera I’ve encountered in New York in decades. His Carnegie Hall program – which began with excerpts from Parsifal act three – confirmed that first impression.

What distinguishes this conductor, so far as I can tell, is a combination of German and Italian traits that reads like a string of clichés. German is his mastery of structure and – a related attribute – inspired access to the harmonic undertow of tension and release that grounds “Innerlichkeit.” The Italian part is what makes Gatti’s Bruckner sui generis: a Mediterranean investment in legato and sostenuto. Long, sinuous strands of song are wedded to long-range musical architecture. With the Concertgebouw, the weight and suppleness of these sound designs were – even more than at the Met – singularly refulgent. The Gatti Bruckner 9 was distinctive, vast, exalted. A great performance.

So sustained was Gatti’s architectural plan that – unique in my experience of the work – he launched the second movement attacca, without so much as an exhalation of breath following the first movement’s massive coda. The symphony’s ending, often fashioned as a celestial appendix, was in Gatti’s reading not a narrative event, but structural: the beatific halo was not distended.

Bruckner’s Ninth is full of pregnant silences. Gatti’s were in some cases daringly prolonged, but at all times precisely calibrated to weigh a phased accretion or dissipation of pulse and intensity. In these fraught passages, the audience plays a crucial role. At Carnegie, 2,500 listeners sat silently in thrall: a welcome sign of civilization.

I left the hall feeling wonderfully purged. How I wish that New York City had a conductor or orchestra of such exalted caliber.

 

 

 

America’s Most Exceptional Orchestra

Setting aside PostClassical Ensemble, the guerilla DC chamber orchestra I co-founded fourteen years ago, the most exceptional American orchestra I know is the South Dakota Symphony.

South Dakota’s “Copland and Mexico” festival, which concluded last Sunday afternoon, had many highlights. The performance of Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemaya was lots better than the versions you can see on youtube conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. The crucial difference was a slightly slower tempo, maximizing the weight and momentum of this amazing Mexican juggernaut, and the expert punctuation of certain rhythmic details at the very end. The musicians, for whom Revueltas was a discovery, responded with an infectious gratitude and excitement I do not typically encounter elsewhere.

Another new work for the orchestra as Aaron Copand’s prize-winning 1934 Communist workers’ song, “Into the Street May First!” It was to have been sung by a local chorus. When that fell through, the musicians took it over with interest and alacrity, singing from their seats. (A few scurrilously threatened to “take a knee.”)

Only a veteran of American symphonic affairs could fully appreciate the South Dakota situation. Many orchestras are fractured by tensions between “labor” and “management.” Wariness and indifference are pervasive. When the Pittsburgh Symphony went on strike in 2016, the picketing players were quick to differentiate themselves from the institution. That would be unthinkable in Sioux Falls.

The crucial ingredient is the 57-year-old music director: Delta David Gier. A year into his tenure, he moved to Sioux Falls. He and his wife have raised their kids there. What he has achieved would have been unthinkable had he not decided to become a local resident. That many American music directors live off site is tolerated far more than it should be. Art museums aren’t run by outsiders. Neither are theater companies.

Gier’s South Dakota programing is sophisticated. He emphasizes new and American works. Next season’s Mahler 8 will complete a comprehensive South Dakota Mahler cycle. He does without guest conductors and brand-name soloists. His 14-year tenure shows what can happen, over time, when a music director with vision is manning the home front.

The orchestra’s signature initiative is the Lakota Music Project, which Gier initiated in 2009. It connects SDSO to six Indian reservations. The relationship is symbiotic; it builds trust and community. To date, SDSO has produced more than 30 side-by-side musical events juxtaposing two cultures and their practitioners.

Two seasons ago, SDSO travelled to the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation to perform “Dvorak’s America,” exploring the influence of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha on Dvorak’s New World Symphony. I reported the outcome in this space. The mood on the bus was cheerful: business as usual. Many another orchestra would have resented that three-hour ride.

Last week’s “Copland and Mexico” was partly undertaken as an overture to Sioux Falls’ Hispanic community. The Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe was a center of attention. So were two middle school classes that spent two months studying aspects of Mexican culture and history. The students’ “infographics” were displayed in the lobbies of the Washington Pavilion performing arts center. Six middle schoolers took part in pre-concert discussions with Gier. More than 500 newcomers to SDSO attended the festival concerts for free. The hall was packed with families.

The contract SDSO has negotiated with its players promotes a degree of “service flexibility” that could be controversial elsewhere. It maximizes opportunities to send musicians to schools, hospitals, health centers — and Indian reservations. The musicians feel well utilized. They interact as a family.

Both “Dvorak and America” and “Copland and Mexico” came to Sioux Falls via the NEH-funded Music Unwound consortium that I am fortunate to direct. SDSO is the ideal recipient. Both prongs of Music Unwound – contextualized, cross-disciplinary programs, and linkage to institutions of education – are fully served.

“Copland and Mexico” tells the story of Aaron Copland’s 1930s Mexican epiphany. The examples of Diego Rivera and Carlos Chavez turned him into a populist – even, for a time, a political artist on the far left. We heard Copland’s El Salon Mexico. Mainly, however, the program introduced a lesser-known musical genius surpassing Copland: the mercurial, short-lived Revueltas. The main event was a film with live music: Redes (1935), in which Paul Strand’s hypnotic cinematography and Revueltas’s volatile score mark one of the highest and most dialectical achievements in marrying music with the moving image.

It was Gier’s inspiration to rupture the concert with a surprise. Not only did “Into the Streets, May First!” interrupt the scripted narration; it was instantly followed by a re-enactment of Copland’s testimony when in 1953 he was subpoenaed by Joe McCarthy and asked if he had ever been a Communist. Bob Wendland, playing Copland, stood in a solitary spotlight; McCarthy’s voice of god was declaimed from on high. As with so many American artists and intellectuals, Copland’s Depression-era politicization returned to haunt him during the Red Scare.

The SDSO concerts incorporated vigorous 45-minute post-concert discussions. On Saturday night, an audience member asked how the musicians felt about accompanying a film. Mario Chiarello, one of three members of the double bass section who teaches music in Sioux Falls public schools, had joined the post-concert audience – and volunteered a response. He explained that Redes was twice rehearsed without the film. With the addition of the film at the dress rehearsal, he said, a new dimension was attained. The musicians could not see the overhead screen, but an uncanny sensation swept the orchestra – a feeling of being empowered by “something bigger.”

That could stand as a metaphor for the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra.

The Case of James Levine: Taking Stock

When a pianist plays the piano, when a violinist plays the violin, when a conductor conducts an orchestra, the performer channels music through a network of personal traits. This should be self-evident.

It has always seemed to me, for instance, that Artur Rubinstein was an exceptionally wholesome artist. Listen to Rubinstein’s recordings of Chopin waltzes and you will discover (however subliminally) a broad emotional vocabulary at play – and a conscious application of specific emotional states to specific waltzes. The entire exercise is one of cultivated civility and worldly maturity. We are sampling the performer’s persona.

I have two favorite studio recordings of Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony: Wilhelm Furtwangler with the Berlin Philharmonic and Josef Krips with the London Symphony. Back in the days when such things mattered, these were known readings. (As a young New York Times music critic, I once wrote an assessment of the Furtwangler performance. A reader wrote to state his preference for Krips, and explained why.)

Furtwangler’s Schubert C major is epic and demonic. Krips’s is warm and songful. In affect, these readings have little in common. They both deeply engage with the scope and pathos of a score that – as so often in Schubert – is uncannily polyvalent.

It is easy to trace the lineage of these readings. Furtwangler’s feasts on Germanic Innerlichkeit, and also precepts of interpretation preached by Richard Wagner. A constant flux of tempo calibrates flow, structure, and climax. Krips’s interpretation extols Viennese gemutlichkeit; Furtwanglerian interventions, in such a context, could only get in the way.

James Levine’s high reputation as a musical interpreter has always seemed to me a frustrating mystery. Whether of Verdi or Wagner, his performances evinced no lineage. And his persona, so far as I could tell, remained a blank.

When he first arrived at the Met, he whipped the orchestra and chorus into shape and refreshed the repertoire. No doubt he was a facile musician. Even as a young man, he had evidently acquired a lot of repertoire and practical experience. His readings were typically intense, massive, and loud, sometimes to the point of brashness. In subsequent decades, he mellowed. But I never heard from Levine much evidence of emotional variety or depth. According to my experience, he had little capacity to organize a long stretch of music, or to powerfully shape a climax or pregnant phrase. He did not produce a sonic signature – as Furtwangler and Krips did; as Gergiev and Muti do. He did not possess an ear for color or texture.

If you listen to the Met broadcasts of Ettore Panizza and Artur Bodanzky – broadcasts I have written about in this space – you’ll hear conducting (and orchestra playing) of a higher caliber. And Panizza and Bodanzky stood on the shoulders of giants: Seidl, Mahler, Toscanini. The early Met was a conductor’s house.

Let me share a couple of vignettes.

In the 1980s I was artistic advisor to the Schubertiade at the 92nd Street Y. The central participant was the baritone Hermann Prey, invariably partnered by Leonard Hokanson. Hokanson had studied with Artur Schnabel. His Lieder accompaniments were highly shaped, highly inflected interpretations; I would call them “Schubertian” a la Schnabel. He and Prey worked seamlessly together. Then it happened that Prey was offered a Carnegie Hall recital, singing Schubert. He replaced Hokanson with James Levine. Levine and Prey also worked seamlessly together. But Levine’s accompaniments, next to Hokanson’s, were stiff and generic. The performances were forgettable.

A little before that, when I was a critic for the Times, I hung out at the home of a psychoanalyst who would rent an extra bedroom. His tenant, for a period of time, was a young man from within James Levine’s inner circle. I was recklessly frank in sharing my poor opinion of Levine’s performances. On one occasion, I suggested that Levine (then in his thirties) lacked sufficient life experience to conduct opera at the highest level. Opera is theater, after all. You don’t entrust Hamlet to someone who doesn’t know life. His quick response told me that this question had been asked and answered before – the answer being that breadth of “life experience” wasn’t a valid consideration in the world of classical music performance.

I shared these views the other day with a member of the Met orchestra. He contrasted James Levine with conductors who command a “complete” concept of an opera. He mentioned Carlos Kleiber and Daniele Gatti. My Times Literary Supplement review of Gatti’s Parsifal appeared in this space; it made the Levine Parsifal sound square and cumbersome. I did not hear Kleiber’s Rosenkavalier at the Met. My friend remembers Kleiber instructing the orchestra that the music accompanying the Marschalin must shimmer like chiffon, creating a veil through which this character’s fading beauty could be apprehended.

On youtube you can watch Kleiber rehearse the overture to Die Fledermaus — a supremely worldly operetta. After three notes of the first, teasing theme in the violins, he stops the orchestra to ask for a rendering “a little more dishonest.”

There is a ripeness in that exhortation that my ears never detected in the performances of James Levine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Schubert Uncorked

Every once in a while a master composer creates music so radically new that it seemingly falls wholly outside its time and place. Franz Schubert’s 1828 song cycle Winterreise (“Winter’s Journey”), charting an uncanny descent into madness, is such a work. Schubert’s contemporaries didn’t know what to make of it. Its chilly existential numbness is routinely likened in affect to Dostoyevsky. But Winterreise is sui generis.

The timelessness of Winterreise, its limitless expressive parameters, tantalize singers to do something more. It has sometimes been staged. In my experience, adding something more to Winterreise results in something less. I know of only one exception: the Schubert excursions of the bass trombonist David Taylor, himself sui generis.

Taylor plays and sings Die Nebensonnen and Der Leiermann – the final two songs of Schubert’s cycle. He also plays two late Schubert songs setting bleakly surreal poems by Heinrich Heine: Die Stadt and Der Doppelganger.

Der Doppelganger has in fact become a Taylor signature. He first performed it many years ago in Vienna’s Musikverein, as an encore with the Tonkunstler Orchestra. Taylor remembers the  initial skepticism of the musicians – and also their subsequent amazement, and that of Vienna’s music critics. He tells this story as part of “Schubert Uncorked,” the latest installment of PostClassical Ensemble’s “PostClassical” radio series on the WWFM Network.

You can hear Taylor tell this story on part two of “Schubert Uncorked.” If you want a mighty dose of Taylor’s Schubert, listen to Die Stadt and Der Doppelganger on part two, beginning at 32:53.

These unique radio programs are recorded in real time by myself, Angel Gil-Ordonez, and Bill McGlaughlin. We listen and react. Bill is in charge. He brings to this assignment a singular combination of gravitas, humor, and informed sincerity. Hearing Taylor’s Schubert for the first time, he registered incredulous admiration; he called Taylor’s Nebensonnen “naked in front of the world.” Angel, re-hearing Schubert/Taylor performances he had conducted half a dozen years ago, called them “much more emotional” than the original versions: “This level of sentiment cannot be achieved with a [singing] voice.” My own reaction, on the air, was to call Taylor’s Doppelganger an inspired “phantasmagoria.” If you think all this is hyperbolic, listen to the broadcast and think again.

Like all PostClassical broadcasts , “Schubert Uncorked” features performances by Gil-Ordonez conducting PostClassical Ensemble – in this case, culled from two different concerts. The first of these juxtaposed Taylor’s readings with the songs as Schubert composed them, rendered by the baritone William Sharp (whom I would call today’s supreme American singer of concert songs).

“Schubert Uncorked” also includes the broadcast premiere of the Schubert/Taylor Arpeggione Concerto, which recasts Schubert’s virtuosic Arpeggione Sonata as a wild showcase for bass trombone and strings. You can hear Taylor, in the broadcast, confessing about this premiere performance: “I was afraid, actually.” We all were.

Taylor also said, of his Doppelganger at 37:45 of part two: “I don’t’ recognize my own playing . . . I never played it like that. That was pretty gargantuan.” And so it is.

You can also hear Taylor playing Daniel Schnyder’s Bass Trombone Concerto, composed for Taylor in 1999. It’s now played by trombonists all over the world. Schnyder is a master synthesizer of jazz and classical styles. His gift for orchestration and instrumentation sets him completely apart from others who produce pabulum when mixing genres and traditions. The PCE performance is a kaleidoscopic romp – you won’t find any youtube performances of the Schnyder concerto this vividly realized.

PostClassical broadcasts are two hours long. We take no prisoners. We trust our listeners. There is plenty of talking, including spats and harangues. My gratitude to David Osenberg of WWFM, who proposed PostClassical and is our producer, is profound.

P.S.: PostClassical Ensemble is about to commission from Daniel Schnyder a Mahler appropriation: “Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht” for bass trombone (Taylor), baritone (Sharp), and Chamber Orchestra.

Here’s a listener’s guide (below) for “Schubert Uncorked.” The full broadcast may be accessed here.

PART ONE:
9:01: Schubert: Der Doppelganger (William Sharp, baritone; Seth Knopp, piano)
*13:01: Schubert/Taylor: Der Doppelganger (David Taylor, bass trombone; PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez
23:06: Schubert: Nebensonnen (William Sharp, baritone; Seth Knopp, piano)
*25:56: Schubert/Taylor: Nebensonnen 
31:12: Schubert: Der Leiermann (William Sharp, baritone; Seth Knopp, piano)
*34:22: Schubert/Taylor: Der Leiermann (Taylor; Zoltan Racz, accordian)
*44:13: Schubert/Taylor: Arpeggione Concerto (ending) (Taylor, PCE, Gil-Ordonez)
 
PART TWO:
*00:00: Schubert/Taylor: Arpeggione Concerto (mvmt 2) (Taylor, PCE, Gil-Ordonez)
14:03: Bruckner: Adagio from String Quintet (arr. for string orchestra) (PCE, Gil-Ordonez)
*32:53: Schubert/Taylor: Die Stadt (Taylor, PCE, Gil-Ordonez)
37:45: Schubert/Taylor: Der Doppelganger (Taylor, PCE, Gil-Ordonez)/
54:33: Schnyder, Bass Trombone Concerto (mvmt 2) (Taylor PCE, Gil-Ordonez)
1:01:00: Schnyder: Bass Trombone Concerto (mvmt 3) (Taylor, PCE, Gil-Ordonez)
 
*Broadcast premiere

Aida at the Met

When I was a teenager, my mentor in all things operatic was Conrad L. Osborne. I read him religiously in High Fidelity Magazine. I thrilled to his encyclopedic erudition, to his impassioned advocacy, and (not least) to the ruthless thoroughness with which he documented and assessed a devastating decline-and-fall in standards of performance. I never met him, never glimpsed him. I envisioned an eminence gris.

Low and behold, C. L. O., age 83, now has his own blog.  The omniscient graybeard I had envisioned was at the time a young adult in his thirties. After a long silence (he is also the author of a sensationally stylish, hilarious, and acute 1987 opera novel, O Paradiso), he may be read regularly at http://conradlosborne.com/blog/. And he’s about to publish his magnum opus, a mega-book on a topic he rigorously pursued in High Fidelity decades ago, when classical-musical conditions were somewhat less dire than today: the transformation of operatic art into a generic anodyne performance product. He will also have something to say about what to do next.

Osborne’s coruscating take on the new Met Norma begins by dissecting defects in the pit. He writes:

“It is crucial, even in the presence of fine singing, that urgent sounds, sounds that insist on the music’s dramatic significance, emerge from the alliance of pit and podium. The Met’s maestro, Carlo Rizzi, did for this score what he has done for all I’ve heard  him conduct—turned it down from a boil to a simmer, and thence to Superlow. There was little sonic presence, except at the biggest moments. The slow accompaniments died, the quicker ones chattered harmlessly along. There was no suspense, no tension, no sense of dramatic construction, not a trace of grandeur.”

My own most recent Metropolitan Opera experience with the standard Italian repertoire was a dormant Aida. I can remember a time when the Met could capably double-cast this grand opera. The cast I encountered was provincial top to bottom. The glamourous trappings – the world-class orchestra and chorus; the fulsome production (live animals) – created a surreal self-contradiction. Without a viable Aida or Radames or Amneris or Amonosro, Aida is reduced to unbearable pomp.

Though I’m old enough, I never heard Leontyne Price or Franco Corelli (my obsession was Wagner). So my point of reference, for Verdi at the Met, is the broadcast recordings of the thirties and forties led by Ettore Panizza. It was once possible to access all these performances on youtube (including La traviata with Rosa Ponselle and Lawrence Tibbett, Tibbett’s Rigoletto and Boccanegra, Jussi Bjoerling and Zinka Milanov in Masked Ball, and – the peak achievement – Giovanni Martinelli’s Otello), but they’re frequently removed. (The Panizza Aida is up right now, as of four months ago; you can listen here. Panizza’s Otello is permanently lodged on the audio site accompanying my Classical Music in America – right here.)

Some months ago, no longer finding my favorite Aida online, I  purchased it via amazon. That is: I now own on CD the Feb. 6, 1937, performance conducted by Panizza, with a cast comprising Gina Cigna, Giovanni Martinelli, Bruna Castagna, Carlo Morelli, and Ezio Pinza. I just listened to the whole thing, beginning to end.

Every singer is vocally and dramatically commanding. But the binding imprint of this singular performance resides in the pit. I cannot improve on what I wrote in Classical Music in America. Panizza’s orchestra is an Italian powderkeg surpassing any opera band to be heard today.

“The membership was overwhelmingly Italian, including a few, such as principal oboist Giacomo Del Campo, who had played under Toscanini [at the Met] before World War I. . . . With Toscanini’s departure, the Met’s Italian wing was entrusted to superior leaders: first Tullio Serafin, then Ettore Panizza. The latter (today not even a name), born in Buenos Aires and trained in Milan, from 1921 to 1931 conducted a La Scala, where Toscanini esteemed him (as did Richard Strauss, who arranged for him to conduct Elektra in Vienna). His Met years were 1934-43. Given his extensive European career, which also included Covent Garden, it bears emphasis that he considered that Met’s ‘as fine a theater orchestra as I have seen in the world.’ . . . Compared to Toscanini, he favors a broader play of tempo. But the velocity and precision, the taut filaments of tone, the keen timbres, the clipped, attenuated phrasings are all Toscanini trademarks. Like Toscanini, Panizza will bolt suddenly to the end of a scorching musical sentence; like Toscanini’s, his musicians are lightning respondents. And Panizza is a master of controlling the show while showcasing his cast; calibrating Martinelli’s titanic climaxes and magisterial breadth of phrase, he achieves a unity. Encountering this memento of times past is a humbling experience.”

The live recordings of Maria Callas singing Aida in Mexico City are famous for a reason; no subsequent soprano has made such a wrenching impression in the Nile Scene. But for a complete rendering of this episode – the human heart of Verdi’s opera – Panizza is irreplaceable. No other conductor in my experience deploys such a range of tempo or secures so vital an interpretive template. His wicked accelerandos and lavish cadential ritards are always at the service of the singers and of the drama at hand (no other Radames conveys such confusion and shame as Martinelli does here). Panizza’s razor’s edge balance of abandon and control, vital to Verdi, is actually a lost art.

This recording should be inflicted on all present-day singers, conductors, and (god help us) stage directors attempting Aida. Many would find it revelatory. Too many others simply wouldn’t get it.

 

 

 

Music and WW II: Eisler, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Stravinsky

PostClassical Ensemble inaugurated its new residency at Washington National Cathedral with a World War II program – “Music in Wartime” – juxtaposing works by Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Dmitri Shostakovich. The results were startling.

Eisler’s strange odyssey is ripe for exploration. In Weimar Germany his workers’ songs linked to a Workers-Singers Union with 400,000 members. Partnering Bertolt Brecht, he became a reckonable political force in support of the Communist Party. Then Hitler chased Eisler and Brecht abroad. Both, incongruously, landed in Los Angeles. Both were expelled and wound up in Communist East Germany, where Eisler wrote the national anthem but nevertheless proved an ideological outcast.

Through it all, Eisler (schooled by Schoenberg) figured out a way to marry leftist politics with a sophisticated musical style. And in LA, with Brecht, he produced a Hollywood Songbook that exquisitely ponders the condition of exile that was his perpetual fate.

At the same moment that Eisler and Brecht finished their Songbook, with its bemused Los Angeles imagery of swimming pools and celluloid spools, Schoenberg in LA composed a furious response to Pearl Harbor: the Ode to Napoleon, whose closing paean to George Washington is Schoenberg’s way of showering gratitude on FDR.

Meanwhile, in Soviet Russia, Shostakovich was processing the Nazi invasion and Siege of Leningrad. PostClassical Ensemble’s “Music in Wartime” program here offered the shattering Piano Trio No. 2 of 1944.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Schoenberg and Shostakovich were positioned as antipodes by Cold War advocates and enemies; you couldn’t endorse them both. But mountains of dust have settled since the sixties – and Schoenberg and Shostakovich are still standing. The Ode to Napoleon and Shostakovich Second Piano Trio are timeless expressions of moral commitment by composers of heroic temperament – artists big enough to calibrate the most momentous world events.

Consider, in contrast, the case of Igor Stravinsky – also in Los Angeles along with Eisler, Brecht, and Schoenberg. His Symphony in Three Movements assays World War II from afar. It is an artistic act of detachment. Privately keying on newsreel images, it absorbs world events with calculated indirection (a topic I have previously explored in this space). A famous anecdote: when apprised that the war might invade the US, Stravinsky’s first reaction was to ask where he could next remove himself in order to get away from it.

Our PCE Pearl Harbor Day concert, then, began with a half-hour Eisler set combining choral political songs from 1928 with solo songs from the Hollywood Songbook. Next came the Shostakovich trio. After intermission, we listened to FDR declare war on Japan (“a day that will live in infamy”). This led, attacca, to Schoenberg’s Ode. More than one hundred people stayed on to talk about it.

Our new home — the National Cathedral — served this music magnificently. The Eisler workers’ choruses were sung in street clothes; the workers marched off, singing, down the aisle of the great nave. The Shostakovich was framed by the towering severity of the vaulted crossing.

The performance of the Trio was the most formidable in my experience. The pianist was Alexander Shtarkman, whose clarion sonorities possess a thrusting edge worthy of Sviatoslav Richter (I write about this astonishing artist in The Ivory Trade). The violinist and cellist were Netanel Draiblate and Benjamin Capps – PCE’s soloistic concertmaster and principal cellist. Michael McCarthy’s Cathedral Choir is a magnificently maintained professional chorus. William Sharp, who sang seven Hollywood songs and was narrator in the Schoenberg, owns these assignments. Angel Gil-Ordonez conducted the Ode to Napoleon with fastidious care and impassioned advocacy. That he considers this work a twentieth century masterpiece was wholly self-evident.

 

 

Arnold Schoenberg’s Musical Response to FDR

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What kind of American was Arnold Schoenberg?

In Los Angeles, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, he adopted English as his primary language. He watched The Lone Ranger on TV. For his children, he prepared peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches cut into animal shapes.

Then Pearl Harbor was bombed. Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, in reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s declaration of war on Japan, is one of the most stirring musical responses to a world event ever conceived. It’s the closing work on PostClassical Ensemble’s “Music and Wartime” concert on December 7 – Pearl Harbor Day — at the Washington National Cathedral:

 

The same PostClassical Ensemble program of music composed during World War II includes Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 (1944) and a selection of the Hollywood Songs composed by Hanns Eisler, setting unhappy poems by his fellow Los Angeles refugee Bertolt Brecht.

Eisler had studied with Schoenberg in Vienna after front-line service in World War I. He made his name in Berlin during the 1920s and ‘30s as the preferred composer for workers’ songs – Kampflieder (“songs of struggle”) – linked to a Workers-Singers Union with 400,000 members.

With the coming of Hitler, Eisler fled to the US, where he attempted to help New York City’s Composers’ Collective foster a comparable proletarian song movement enlisting Aaron Copland, among others. This went nowhere and Eisler wound up in Los Angeles. Though he found employment as a film composer, another musical outcome – an expression of estrangement to set beside Schoenberg’s Pearl Harbor patriotism — was the Hollywood Songbook.

Of his American exile, Schoenberg wrote that he “came from one country into another . . . where my head can be erect, where kindness and cheerfulness is dominating, and where to live is a joy and to be an expatriate of another country is the grace of God. . . . I was driven into paradise.”

Meanwhile Eisler was blacklisted and interrogated as the “Karl Marx of Music.” He was conspicuously deported in 1948. His response, also widely reported, read: “I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud at being driven out. But I feel heartbroken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way.”

In East Berlin, Eisler composed the national anthem for the German Democratic Republic. Though re-united with Brecht, he discovered himself ideologically suspect all over again. In effect, he is a composer who endured a condition of exile for most of his professional life.

Schoenberg died in Los Angeles in 1951, Eisler in East Berlin in 1962.

 

The Most Under-Rated 20th Century American Composer — Take Two

Back in the thirties and forties, there were no American music historians to tell the story of American classical music. So the task fell to a couple of composers: Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. According to the official Copland/Thomson narrative, noting much of consequence was composed by Americans before World War I. Their focus was on themselves and kindred composers, many of them tutored – like Copland and Thomson – by Nadia Boulanger in France.

This Oedipal view, appointing modernists the inventors of a distinctly American classical music, remains potent today. How I wish it could be retired. Copland and Thomson viewed the two most consequential concert composers ever produced in the US – Charles Ives and George Gershwin – as dilettantes. They were ignorant of the American Dvorak. And even though they both composed for the cinema, they paid no attention to Bernard Herrmann, whom I have previously anointed in this space “the most under-rated 20th century American composer.”

It is about time that the magnitude of Herrmann’s contribution be acknowledged. Working with Orson Welles, Norman Corwin, and Alfred Hitchcock, he was a peerless composer for radio and film. As a radio conductor on CBS, he was a vital advocate of new and unfamiliar works and composers – the antipode to NBC’s Arturo Toscanini. And, notwithstanding advocacy in New York by John Barbirolli and Leopold Stokowski, his measure as a concert composer remains a well-kept secret.

Two years ago PostClassical Ensemble produced the first festival exploring Herrmann “in the round.” We’ve now turned it into a two-hour “PostClassical” WWFM radio feature, archived here at http://wwfm.org/post/postclassical-ce...

Composing for radio dramas (a forgotten genre of high consequence), Herrmann mastered “melodrama” — the art of composing for music and the spoken voice. Our radio show samples “Whitman” (1944), a Corwin/Herrmann radio drama so potent it deserves to be revived by orchestras and actors. It originated as a patriotic wartime vehicle for Charles Laughton. Thanks to a reconstruction by Christopher Husted, PostClassical Ensemble gave the concert premiere as part of our 2015 festival.

Of Herrmann the film composer, PCE presented the DC premiere of his Psycho “symphonic narrative” – an integrated concert work lovingly reconstructed by John Mauceri, and far preferable to the Psycho Suite orchestras still perform by mistake.

Of Herrmann the concert composer, PCE presented the American premiere of the original version of the non-tonal 1936 Sinfonietta for Strings that Herrmann cannibalized for Psycho.

And we performed Herrmann’s chamber music masterpiece: the intoxicating 1967 clarinet quintet Souvenirs de voyage – on our radio show, preceded by pertinent excerpts from his two most intoxicatingly Romantic film scores: Vertigo and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Finally, our “PostClassical” show closes with the sailor’s chorus from Herrmann’s Moby Dick – a spellbinding excerpt that also allows us to sample Herrmann the conductor. Why this 1938 cantata is not performed is an unanswerable question. It would be a stirring vehicle for any Wagnerian bass-baritone interested in adding the towering role of Ahab to Wotan and Amfortas. It would be easy to market. It would ignite a standing ovation.

As ever, our broadcast features unrehearsed needling and jostling between Bill McGlaughlin, Angel Gil-Ordonez, and myself. We listen to the music in real time. We respond spontaneously. It is a fresh adventure every time.

I append a summary with time-code

PART ONE:

5:08: Bernard Herrmann speaks — irascibly

6:33: His daughter Dorothy describes accompanying “Daddy” to Psycho

12:02: Herrmann’s Psycho Symphonic Narrative performed by PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez (DC premiere)

28:30: An influence on Psycho? Bartok’s Divertimento, movement 2

41:10: Herrmann’s Sinfonietta for Strings performed by PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez (American premiere of the original version)

PART TWO:

4:14: Herrmann and radio: the Norman Corwin radio drama “Whitman” (1944) – an excerpt from the original broadcast, with Charles Laughton

14:09: Herrmann and Hollywood: the Love Scene from Vertigo

21:11: The “Liebestod” from The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

26:10: Herrmann’s Clarinet Quintet (Souvenirs de voyage) performed by PCE members

54:33: The Sailors’ Chorus from Herrmann’s cantata Moby Dick, conducted by the composer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap” Take Four

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Processing my exchange with Vladimir Feltsman, I find myself distracted by something I have long more or less ignored: the art of the piano as manifest by the young artists who today dominate the scene — what Feltsman calls “a new artform.” I am sure my limited purview is unfair. But it’s a sea-change; no previous piano pantheon has so recklessly privileged youth.

So I’ve been binging on the recordings of Rachmaninoff. Re-encountering his 1924 version of Chopin’s Scherzo in C-sharp minor (i.e., a performance recorded when he was 51 and in the throes of a complex exile that compelled him to reinvent himself as a touring concert artist), I am reminded what ripe keyboard artistry sounds like. Instantly, I’m arrested by the second theme: a chorale. Because this pianist has subtly trained his ten fingers as independent operators, he can shade and differentiate the voices at will. This may sound like an esoteric feat, but use your ears from 1:15 to 2:19: the chorale lives and breathes.

As some readers of this blog may dimly remember, I long ago wrote a book titled Conversations with Arrau. I will never forget Claudio Arrau’s sublime performances of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata – not least for the full textures of the first movement’s chordal second theme. “He voices everything,” a Juilliard piano pedagogue once complained to me. Precisely.

Arrau left a singular 1953 recording of that Chopin C-sharp minor Scherzo. Like Rachmaninoff’s it is not an interpretation for everyone. Rather, it is distinctive in approach, distinctive in sound. It is “quality art.”

I just revisited it on the web – right here. In Conversations with Arrau, I wrote about the passage at 26:55:

“Arrau’s Chopin lacked both the heartiness of [Arthur] Rubinstein and the complex display of [Vladimir] Horowitz. Without inquisitive listening, not only was the scope of Arrau’s interpretations not likely to be received as a virtue, but the detailing—so different from Horowitz’s – was likely to pass unnoticed.

“A case in point is the piu lento section of the C-sharp minor Scherzo, which Arrau charges with mystery. Rather than dramatizing the modulation to the minor with pathetic inflections and smeared pedaling showing the dejection of the filigree, the meaning of the passage is uncovered at a depth. The muted chords are weighted to retain their majesty. The filigree is softened without diluting its poise. The smorzando is underlined by an imperturbably steady ritardando. The effect is of tragedy dissolving, just before the healing surge of the coda, to a searching calm rarely found in Chopin.”

Probably these observations sound terribly recondite (this blog posting feels like an act of recidivism). There used to be an audience for written observations of this kind – and for the commensurate artistry of the deservedly famous pianists so described.

Are there great young pianists? In North America, the irrefutable examples are Glenn Gould and Van Cliburn. If these were instances of the ardor of youth trumping the wisdom of maturity, both satisfied the highest criteria for “quality art.” Gould’s Goldberg Variations recording of 1955, when he was 23, is the singular emanation of a distinctive artistic personality. The same was true of Cliburn’s Rachmaninoff in Moscow, in 1958, when he was 24. And each pianist already commanded a sonic imprint all his own. Notwithstanding the pertinence of the Cold War, Gould and Cliburn were famous for self-sufficient musical reasons, reasons intrinsic to artistry.

“The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap” Take Three

 

Though as usual most of the feedback to my recent blogs comes via private emails rather than public responses, a flurry of interesting posted responses here and via Facebook spurs me to rant some more.

Re: “quality art” versus “crap,” Joe Patrych – someone who knows what pianism once was — writes:

“Part of the problem is the audience – in order for a sophisticated musician such as Moiseiwitsch to be fully understood requires that the audience is properly educated in what constitutes art – the importance of that in Soviet (and post-Soviet) Russia vs. the dismissive approach to arts education in the US is certainly part of the problem, and it takes a lot of work to self-educate; it is clear that most people don’t have the impetus to do so.”

A new book that’s a necessary read is Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics by Marina Frolova-Walker. Excavating Soviet archives, she documents the intense private deliberations that considered which Soviet composers, singers, and instrumentalists would be awarded substantial monetary prizes, with their attendant prestige. We eavesdrop on what the composers Shostakovich and Myaskovsky had to say. We also eavesdrop on craven ideologues.

The book begins with some testimony by the actress Vera Maretskaya. She writes:

“In ’46, when I was a delegate to the Congress of Antifascist Women, I happened to speak with an English actress, who had been forbidden to approach our delegation. But she boldly made her way over to us regardless and struck up a conversation with the Soviet women. While she was talking to me about the arts, she couldn’t keep herself from looking downwards, at my chest, and eventually she asked me: ‘What did you get that medal for?’ I told her that it was a medal given to Stalin Prize laureates. ‘For what?’ she asked. ‘For my work in the role of Nadezhkda Durova,’ I replied. . . . ‘What did they give you?’ I asked her. After a moment’s hesitation, she dipped into her handbag and pulled out something drab-looking, small and flat, a kind of powder box. ‘That’s how they reward us performers.’”

Much could be said about this vignette. Stalin’s Music Prize is certain to be a galvanizing topic when PostClassical Ensemble presents “Secret Music Skirmishes of the Cultural Cold War: The Shostakovich Case” at the Washington National Cathedral on May 23.

P.S.: The most impressive New York audience I’ve encountered in recent seasons was at Town Hall last June for a Russian-language Uncle Vanya presented by Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theatre. That audience was hungry, engaged, and generationally diverse (parents with children). It was also (of course) overwhelmingly Russian.