Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 27

“The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap” Take Two

My exchange with Vladimir Feltsman about “quality art” versus “crap” was posted on youtube and elicited this response:

“Two oldies bemoaning that they have had their day and are confined to the dust bin of history. It is always the no talents that wave their own banner of knowledge as to what is true art.”

Feltsman referenced a performance of Rachmaninoff’s transcription of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” with millions of hits on youtube.

The Romantic piano transcription, as practiced by Rachmaninoff, is a refined art.

Only a worldly performer can do full justice to these pieces. They make their greatest impression when the affect transcends showmanship. This actually requires a higher level of virtuosity.

Here  (click) is Yuja Wang performing Rachmaninoff’s transcription of the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. I am not condemning this highly accomplished rendition as “crap.”

But compare it to Benno Moiseiwitsch – a performance (click) Rachmaninoff himself admired.

Rachmaninoff considered Moiseiwitsch the supreme exponent of his Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. To my ears, Moiseiwitsch’s 1938 recording (click) is unsurpassed. Check out the eighteenth variation (the famous one) at 13:55. I would call that “quality art.”

 

 

 

 

“The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap”

I was chatting with Vladimir Feltsman last Spring about PostClassical Ensemble’s 2017-18 immersion experience, “The Russian Experiment,” when the conversation took an unexpected turn.

I had broached the topic of “cultural community,” and invited Feltsman to compare musical life in the US with the policed Soviet musical milieu he fled in 1987.

We agreed that Western musical life, whatever its virtues, embraced no musical community of culture comparable to what Soviet Russians enjoyed in adversity.

“I’m trying to do what I can to help my younger colleagues,” Feltsman said, referring to the “Piano Summer at New Paltz” festival he founded more than twenty years ago. “In order to be successful, they try to copy the most successful people at the moment in the music business” – people who were not “inspirational characters. . . . We all know their names.”

I recalled a conversation I once had with the pianist Benjamin Pasternack, who is of the same generation as Feltsman and myself. Pasternack and I agreed that there was a time when pianists of international consequence were famous for a reason – but that today it’s become a “crapshoot.”

“It is,” Feltsman agreed. “Absolutely. It’s a different artform. It’s a different market, and we know that the market dictates whatever it needs.”

I requested that our conversation end on a more optimistic note.

So Feltsman added that he hoped “that people, after being satiated with youtube snippets of ‘The Bumblebee’ [millions of hits and counting], would eventually come to understand the difference between quality art and crap.”

This exchange was filmed by Behrouz Jamali, who expertly documents many PostClassical Ensemble events. Behrouz produced a film, “The Russian Experiment: A Different Perspective On Soviet Musical Culture.” “The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap” is an excerpt.

To watch Vladimir Feltsman extol the forgotten Soviet composers of the 1920s, click here. To watch Behrouz’s entire film: here.

Part two of PCE’s “The Russian Experiment” comprises (1) an Oct. 16 concert featuring Vladimir Feltsman and PCE members performing works by Roslavets, Mosolov, and Protopopov (whose Second Piano Sonata is a major find); (2) the Soviet silent film classic The New Babylon with Dmitri Shostakovich’s score performed live on March 30 and 31; and (3) pertinent film screenings at the National Gallery of Art.

For information: postclassical.com

The Arts in the Age of Trump (continued)

The Age of Trump has rapidly changed the American cultural landscape in many ways.

In the silo of classical music, there is suddenly a felt need to ask: What’s it for? Why are we doing this?

How can the arts affect social or political change?

How can concerts help us understand who we are as a nation? What we’ve been or want to become?

These questions are newer than they should be. So long as orchestras cling to traditional templates – the generic mixture of concerto and symphony; the mandatory soloist ; the deferent audience – they will rarely be satisfyingly addressed.

Because we program thematically and across the disciplines; because we regularly interface with schools, universities, and museums; because we invariably invite our audience to speak, PostClassical Ensemble has been tackling such questions for some time. And now that we’re  Ensemble-in-Residence at the Washington National Cathedral, this exercise will become more concentrated and (we hope) more impactful.

Our new season, for instance, closes with “Secret Music Skirmishes of the Cold War: The Shostakovich Case.” We’ll take a close look at the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom, and how it waged war with Soviet propagandists to capture the hearts and minds of intellectuals on the left in Europe and Latin America. The participants will include Nicholas Dujmovic, former Staff Historian of the CIA, and an actor impersonating President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s claim that the arts can only flourish in “free societies” will be juxtaposed with the evidence of piano works composed by Dmitri Shostakovich as performed by a formidable American pianist. We’ll also invite our audience to read a couple of pertinent books: Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters and Marina Frolova-Walker’s new and revelatory Stalin’s Music Prize. That’s May 23 at the Cathedral.

Our annual PCE “immersion experience” is “The Russian Experiment” — a look at experimental Soviet culture before Stalin. The pertinent events include Vladimir Feltsman performing Mosolov, Roslavets, and Protopopov (whose visionary Piano Sonata No. 2 from 1924 is a major find); and the 1929 classic silent film The New Babylon with Shostakovich’s symphonic score performed live. We’ll want to inquire what this idealistic adventure in political music and cinema amounted to, and why Stalin put an end to it.

Our ongoing “American Roots” initiative explores little-known chapters in the history of African-American music (without which there would be no American music). This season, we focus on Harry Burleigh, who turned spirituals into art songs, and the once famous black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose historic visits to the US (facilitated by Burleigh) immersed him in plantation song and its potential for the concert hall. A major theme of these events will be the subsequent bifurcation of American music into classical and popular – white vs. black. How did that happen? What did it cost us?

I append an overview of our 2017-2018 season. For more detail, click here.

Oct. 19 – “The Russian Experiment” with Vladimir Feltsman

  Dec. 7 – “Music in Wartime: A Pearl Harbor Day Commemoration”

  Feb. 28 – “Deep River: The Art of the Spiritual”

  March 30-31 – “The New Babylon” – The Soviet silent film classic with Shostakovich’s score performed live

  April 21 – “The Star of Ethiopia”: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Historic Visits to DC (1904-1910)

  May 28 – “Secret Musical Skirmishes of the Cold War: The Shostakovich Case”

 

 

 

 

Copland and the Cold War

PostClassical Ensemble’s most recent WWFM “PostClassical” radio show is “Copland and the Cold War” – aired last Friday and now archived.

Our two-hour program includes Aaron Copland’s prize-winning New Masses workers’ song “Into the Streets, May First” as well as a re-enactment of Copland’s 1953 grilling by Senator Joseph McCarthy starring myself and Bill McGlaughlin.

And – sampling one of PostClassical Ensemble’s three Naxos DVDs presenting classic 1930s films with newly recorded soundtracks — we audition and discuss Copland’s least-known important score: his music for the classical 1939 documentary The City. Scripted by Lewis Mumford, this film – far better known to film-makers than to musicians – advocates government-built “new towns.” Its images of happy workers remind my wife – a native of Communist Hungary – of the propaganda films she knew as a child.

How far did Copland migrate to the left in the 1930s? Citing Howard Pollack’s biography, I read a couple of 1934 letters in which Copland excitedly described his participation in Communist Party functions among Minnesota farmers:

“It’s one thing to talk revolution . . . but to preach it from the streets out loud — well, I made my speech and now I’ll never be the same. Now when we go to town, there are friendly nobs from sympathizers. Farmers come up and talk as one red to another. One feels very much at home, not at all like a mere summer boarder.”

This Cold War chapter concludes a fascinating and at times chilling three-part compositional odyssey charted by “the dean of American composers.” He began as a high modernist in 1930 with his lean, hard, and dissonant Piano Variations – a breakthrough in American music. Then, spurred by Mexico and the Depression, he turned himself into a populist and composed the ballets by which we know him best. It was during the beginning of this period that he addressed Communist farmers, scored The City, and won a New Masses contest for the best workers’ song.

These political adventures returned to haunt Copland in the fifties – during which decade he was bluntly interrogated by McCarthy and observed by the FBI (we now know that the switchboard agent at Tanglewood Festival was an informant). His Lincoln Portrait was dropped by from the Eisenhower inauguration following protests from Republicans in Congress who marked him as a former fellow traveler or worse. Copland now turned his back on the “new audience” he had once wooed, returning to his modernist roots in a series of non-tonal compositions beginning with the bleak Piano Quartet of 1950.

The result is a veritable American fable – suggesting, among other things, that the US is less hospitable to political artists than was the Mexico of Diego Rivera, from which Copland drew instruction. Copland’s Mexican colleague Carlos Chavez at various times conducted Mexico’s first permanent orchestra, ran the National Conservatory of Music, and directed the National Institute of Fine Arts.

Looking back at his Mexican visits of the 1930s, and doubtless reflecting upon the American prominence and influence of such outsiders as Arturo Toscanini, Copland said: “I was a little envious of the opportunity composers have to serve their country in a musical way. When one has done that, one can compose with real joy. Here in the U.S. A. we composers have no possibility of directing the musical affairs of the nation – on the contrary, I have the impression that more and more we are working in a vacuum.”

At the close of our two-hour WWFM radio show, the three co-hosts had (as usual) different perspectives on the topic at hand. Quoting Roger Sessions’ quip that “Aaron is a better composer than he thinks he is,” I opined that the Piano Variations were Copland’s highest achievement and that his populism was “synthetic.”

PCE Music Director Angel Gil-Ordonez expressed admiration for Copland’s non-tonal valedictory, the Piano Fantasy (1957). Of the populist Copland, the best Angel could do was  “He really tried.”

Bill McGlaughlin was aroused by our remarks to passionately defend the entirety of Copland’s oeuvre. From his perspective, Angel and I fail to appreciate the social and political forces impinging on Aaron Copland’s aesthetic vicissitudes — “So you better get over it, Jack.”

The broadcast draws on two PostClassical Ensemble programs: “Copland and the Cold War” (including “Into the Streets,” the McCarthy re-enactment, and Copland piano works in masterly performances by Benjamin Pasternack); and “The City,” presenting the 1939 film with live orchestra. The musical content of both these concerts are preserved on the Naxos recordings we sampled.

Our previous “PostClassical” broadcasts – all archived – are “Are Orchestras Really ‘Better than Ever?'”, a Lou Harrison Centenary celebration, and “Dvorak and Hiawatha.” Coming up next, on 20: “The Most Under-Rated Twentieth Century American Composer” – a tribute to Bernard Herrmann.

COPLAND AND THE COLD WAR

 

LISTENING GUIDE

PART I – Copland the modernist turns populist

6:30 – Copland the wild man: Piano Variations (1930), performed by Benjamin Pasternack on Naxos

22:00 – Copland speaks at a Communist picnic in Minnesota (1934)

28:00 –  “Into the Streets” (1934), Copland’s prize-winning workers’ song for The New Masses

32:00 – Copland becomes a film composer: The City (1939), espousing government-funded “new towns” with happy workers. From PCE’s Naxos DVD.

52:00 – The famous lunch counter scene from The City, in which Copland prefigures Philip Glass

59:00  — “Sunday Traffic” from The City

PART II – Copland the populist returns to modernism

3:00 – Copland in Hollywood: The Red Pony

11:30 – Copland is interrogated by Senator Joseph McCarthy (1953)

18:00 – Giving up on the “new audience” he once courted, Copland composes a non-tonal valedictory: The Piano Fantasy (1957), performed by Benjamin Pasternack on Naxos

 

 

Milstein vs. Szigeti

My frustrations with a recent performance of Brahms’ Violin Concerto sent me to youtube in search of something different: an act of therapy.

A foible to which violinists are prone (pianists are immune) is lingering upon or otherwise savoring a beautiful note. That’s OK in Bruch or Tchaikovsky but does no favors to Brahms or Beethoven.

After half an hour of Menuhin, Heifetz, Milstein, of Furtwangler, Toscanini, and Klemperer, I discovered a Brahms concerto beyond any I’d ever encountered: Joseph Szigeti (the second of my photos) in live performance with Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic in 1948. Mitropoulos’s orchestra is incendiary. Szigeti’s rubatos are dictated by musical structure, not sonic allure. He never lingers on the beauty of a note because his sound is never beautiful. It slavishly serves the keenest possible musical intelligence.

Listen to Szigeti and Mitropoulos ignite at 12:20, surging toward the first-movement recapitulation of this historic performance. Or listen to how Szigeti’s rounds off his cadenza to prepare the first movement coda. The ensuing prolonged ovation – from a Carnegie Hall audience that knew it wasn’t supposed to clap midway through a concerto – isn’t about violin playing.

I have never heard a violinist sing the second movement less prettily or more tellingly. The eloquence of Szigeti’s song is a function of phrasing and accentuation, not timbre or polish. This entire Adagio is galvanized by a binding trajectory. There is not a single indulgent rubato or rallentando. The performers make the strongest possible case for the music at hand. Forget about rote “textual fidelity” – this proactive interpretation is as authentic as it gets.

For beautiful violin playing Milstein is my man. I have long considered his 1963 recording of Saint-Saens’ Third Violin Concerto the most seductive violin playing documented in sound. So after binging on Brahms I returned to that recording – on youtube – for the first time in many years.

I also discovered Milstein in Chausson’s Poeme – a revelation. He takes the soaring airborne central Anime at a clip so fast the affect is astral.

I wrote about Milstein long ago – in 1993, when EMI commemorated his death with a two-CD box celebrating “The Art of Nathan Milstein.” That New York Times article is re-printed in my 1995 essay collection The Post-Classical Predicament. I can’t improve on my encomium. Here’s part of what I wrote:

“Milstein’s violin was worldliness itself. He never forced or varnished his slender, silvery tone. He shunned the urgent vibrato of his onetime classmate Jascha Heifetz. He disdained what Virgil Thomson called the ‘wow effect.’ At top speed, his passagework was easy, clear, never out of breath. In every aspect of interpretation, he eschewed exaggeration. His very appearance, dapper and composed, was not debonair, but simply and unaffectedly aristocratic. . . .

“Of Camille Saint-Saens it was quipped that he possessed all the attributes of a great composer save innocence; he was incurably, imperturbably urbane. Milstein’s 1963 recording of Saint-Saens’s Third Concerto . . . is without doubt one of the most beautiful ever made by a violinist.

“A performance more earnest than Milstein’s would make this music sound sentimental. A more brilliant performance – from a less transcendental instrumentalist, incapable of Milstein’s composure under fire – would make it sound trite. The vehemence of the concerto’s opening Allegro, the intoxication of its luminous swaying slow movement, the elan and manque religiosity of its tarantella-and-chorale finale – all, in Milstein’s hands, are poised, but perfectly, between passion and refinement. The result is transformative: an exercise in elegance and craftsmanship become sublime.”

I first encountered this recording at the Upper West Side apartment of my friend Solomon Volkov, who had co-authored Milstein’s autobiography. Solomon played for me the second subject of the first movement. That’s at 2:40. The calm fluidity of this passage, juxtaposed with a window view of the Manhattan sky with Broadway far below, made an uncanny impression I will never forget.

Some years later I met Milstein’s last accompanist, Georges Pludermacher. When I shared with him my admiration for the Saint-Saens performance, he told me that it had been Milstein’s favorite recording (notwithstanding some insecurity in the opening solo, which he regretted).

I happened to attend – both in rehearsal and performance, what I believe were Milstein’s final concerto performances – of the Bruch Gminor with Gerard Schwarz and New York’s Y Chamber Symphony. I experienced the startling quietude of the opening solo as a rebuke to my generic expectations.

Milstein reportedly said that he loved the violin more than music itself – a touching confession. Of Szigeti it was self-evident that music and not the fiddle was his first love. They are great antipodes of the violin.

 

 

Kurt Weill in 2017

“Wherever I found decency and humanity in the world, it reminded me of America.” That this observation – recorded by Kurt Weill in 1947 – rings hollow in 2017 does not diminish the fascination and pertinence of Weill’s extraordinary creative saga, perhaps the most elusive charted by any major composer.

In Berlin, Weill’s caustic signature was The Threepenny Opera, created with Bertolt Brecht in 1928. Seven years later he landed in the US, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany. During the fifteen years of his American career – he died of a heart attack in 1950, age 50 – not a single one of his European stage works was given a professional American production. He had instead become a leading Broadway composer whose two smash hits were Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus. He had also become a patriotic American who told Time Magazine: “Americans seem to be ashamed to appreciate things here. I’m not.”

Weill’s European/American odyssey was explored in copious detail during this summer’s Brevard Music Festival. Not the least exceptional component of this festival-with-a festival was Brevard’s inquisitive audience. “Was Weill Panglossian?” Bob Wilkinson, a retired airplane pilot who came to everything, wanted to know. The response – during a two-day Kurt Weill symposium – led to the Red Scare and the conjecture that, had he lived a few more years, Weill might have been subpoenaed by Joseph McCarthy and asked a few questions. Could Weill have reconsidered the popular American audience he had courted, as did Aaron Copland? We will never know.

The Brevard festival incorporated ten events over a period of five weeks. Audiences could compare The Seven Deadly Sins, which Weill considered his finest achievement as of 1933, with Street Scene, the 1947 Broadway opera he believed would be his most important legacy. There was a full program of obscure “early Weill.” An evening juxtaposing Weill and Arnold Schoenberg presented antithetical musical responses to Pearl Harbor. A generous sampling of Weill’s Broadway fare was one of two events incorporating a continuous visual track. The other was a “cabaret” – “Change the World, It Needs It!” – exploring the tangled relationship between Weill, Brecht, and Marc Blitzstein, all of whom pursued art as an instrument of social or political change. “Change the World” ignited a one-hour post-concert discussion; one respondent called it “a call to action.”

The Brevard Weill festival was both an act of advocacy supported by the Kurt Weill Foundation, and an adventure in contextualized programing  supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities’ Music Unwound project (of which I’m the director). Concurrently this summer, the New Hampshire Music Festival presented a Music Unwound “Copland and Mexico” festival – another look at music and politics. Both the Brevard and New Hampshire festival audiences are weighted with retirees from the big city – which is to say, people of a certain age who grew up reading books and now have plenty of time to pursue their cultural interests. I was left with an uneasy feeling that the older the audience, the better.

The performers at Brevard included two supreme singing actors – Lisa Vroman, who brought down the house with The Seven Deadly Sins, and Bill Sharp, who brought down the house (I kid you not) with Schoenberg’s 12-tone Ode to Napoleon, which musically rages at Hitler as only Schoenberg could. The festival also boasts three orchestras, a world-class artistic director (Keith Lockhart), a fearless artistic administrator (Jason Posnock), and a ridiculously accomplished student opera company.

Weill’s Broadway opera Street Scene, with a cast of 50 (I include Mrs. Jones’s dog), was the festival climax. This day-in-the-life of a 1920s Manhattan apartment block depicts the American Melting Pot and probes the American Dream. It originated as a 1929, Pulitzer-Prize winning play of the same title by Elmer Rice – a view from the left of fraught aspiration and frustration. In 1947, the national mood was sunnier, and Street Scene the opera – for which Rice and Weill were joined by Langston Hughes – acquires a subliminal New World glow notwithstanding the hard lives under review. It retains topicality but the topics have shifted. There was a chill in the house when Frank Maurrant, a stagehand discomfited by the immigrant melee, sang his aria “Let things be like they always was. That’s good enough for me!”

Dean Anthony, who heads Brevard’s Janiac Opera Company, was once a widely experienced comprimario tenor – which is to say that (unlike some others one could name) he’s an opera director who is both theatrically and musically literate. He also happens to have participated (as Mr. Buchanan) in the best-known of all Street Scene revivals – the one directed in Berlin (and elsewhere) by Francesca Zambello. As amazing as I’ve found Dean’s work with Brevard student vocalists in previous summers, directing Weill he has surpassed himself.

The excellence of the Brevard Street Scene began with a stunning physical production, designed and built in-house (top of this blog).

As most of the characters in the drama are ethnic types, they easily become cartoons. And yet they must register quickly and vividly to clinch the neighborhood’s melting-pot diversity. The Brevard production flawlessly negotiated this fine line. Each participant was accorded a repertoire of detailed gesture and expression. But the result was not glib or shallow.

The staging of Sam Kaplan’s arioso “Lonely House,” in some ways a theme-song for the opera, encapsulated the ingenuity of the whole. Sam, who dreams of law school and other bigger things, is confiding  frustration and estrangement. His song ends as hopelessly as it began: “I’m lonely in this lonely house/in this lonely town.” In the Brevard production, Sam (Taylor Rawley) is leaning on a lamp post.

Dean has him take a breath after “lonely” and sticks a fermata (a hold) on “town.” Sam turns from the audience and sustains a diminuendo on this long E-flat as he walks slowly out of the lamp’s sad pool of light and disappears into darkness. Had he remained in place for applause, the poignancy of the moment could only diminish. And the transition to the next episode – a “scene and song” in another key entirely – could only jar.

(Opera is an integrated artform. Here and elsewhere, Dean worked hand-in-glove with his superb conductor, Robert Moody.)

I also had occasion to watch Dean Anthony coach “Glitter and Be Gay,” the coloratura showpiece from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. This was part of a daily opera workshop he calls “movement.” Vocal and dramatic insights are seamlessly wed. As Bernstein’s inebriated Cunegonde, collapsed into the crook of a piano, Dean was both hilarious and true; he topped and transcended camp. He directs Candide at Brevard next summer as part of a Bernstein Centenary celebration that will also broach the Red Scare, Young People’s Concerts, and sundry other topics. This festival will not be NEH-supported. Rather, it documents the longterm impact of Music Unwound at Brevard. In the wake of last summer’s Music Unwound “Dvorak and America” festival, and this summer’s Weill activities, Brevard has become the only major American summer music festival/training institute to embrace humanities-infused pedagogy and programming: thematic immersion experiences.

Meanwhile, Music Unwound will take “Kurt Weill’s America” to El Paso via the El Paso Symphony and the University of Texas at El Paso; to Sioux Falls via the South Dakota Symphony; to Raleigh and Chapel Hill via the North Carolina Symphony and UNC; and to Buffalo via the Buffalo Philharmonic. I have no doubt that Weill’s saga of immigration and assimilation will prove freshly pertinent many times over.

(Photos by Bobby Bradley)

 

 

 

 

New Musical Venues for a New National Moment

With classical music under siege, many are rethinking audiences and venues. Here in Manhattan, Geffen Hall – previously Fisher Hall, and before that Philharmonic Hall – has never been an inviting place in which to hear music. The acoustics are defective, the ambience is nothing special. One cannot blame the hall for the New York Philharmonic’s disengaged audience – but it’s a factor. At Carnegie Hall, ten blocks downtown, a community of listeners is joined on special occasions by distinguished ghosts seduced by echoes of a hallowed past.

PostClassical Ensemble – the DC chamber orchestra I co-founded 14 years ago – has at all times been without a special home, even  an adequate home. Our concerts are thematic and sui generis. We incorporate film, dance, or theater. We don’t fit comfortably in a concert hall.

Last season PCE was invited by the Washington National Cathedral to produce “The Trumpet Shall Sound” – a concert intermingling spirituals and religious arias, all sung by the inspirational bass-baritone Kevin Deas. The Cathedral Choir – a superb professional chorus – took part, as did dozens of DC high school choristers. The main nave – a towering, aspirant spiritual corridor — was full. The audience was inter-racial. The music impacted in ways no concert hall could possibly have fostered.

PCE was subsequently invited by Mike McCarthy, the Cathedral’s music director, to become an Ensemble-in-Residence. Mike is a man with a mission and it aligns with ours: to explore music as an instrument for human betterment. Addressing PCE’s new residency, he commented:

“Washington National Cathedral is one of the finest examples of devotional art in the world. It stands testament to mankind’s yearning to see the perfection of beauty on earth. It allows us to glimpse a portal through which we can experience the divine. In such an environment music plays a crucial role, amplified by inspirational surroundings.  It is both a cultural legacy that we have inherited and cherish, and a means for responding to the world and its challenges.”

Our initial season of concerts at the National Cathedral comprises “Music in Wartime,” a Pearl Harbor Day commemoration; “Deep River – The Art of the Spiritual,” a Harry Burleigh celebration; and “Secret Skirmishes of the Cold War: The Shostakovich Case,” a reconsideration of the CIA’s cultural Cold War.

The first of these events will begin with one of Hanns Eisler’s workers’ songs performed as a processional. The second will end with “Goin’ Home” as a spacial experience. The third will include an actor performing as John F. Kennedy. For 2018-19 we are planning a mega-event which will empty the nave of pews and incorporate lighting design. The Cathedral also offers a multitude of smaller spaces ideal for  art installations, and for lectures and discussion.

At a national moment when art for art’s sake seems increasingly irrelevant, the Washington National Cathedral seems newly pertinent to art.

 

Rethinking “Classical Radio”

When commercial radio was new, the airwaves were saturated with classical music – not just recordings and live concerts, but highly produced pedagogical programs. You could tune into Abram Chasins for tips on playing Chopin’s E-flat major Nocturne.

What today passes for classical music radio is a different species of broadcasting. You can spend an afternoon listening to the 50 greatest hits (scientifically culled) in their latest, most generic studio incarnations. Older recordings are shunned. Talking is avoided as a plague upon the listener.

A fellow named David Osenberg has courageously crafted an alternative template. It’s called WWFM Classical Radio and anyone can tune in anytime because it’s streamed internationally. At Dave’s invitation, PostClassical Ensemble now has its own “PostClassical” series on WWFM. These two-hour shows are nationally unique. They’re thematic. They’re crammed with commentary – not just knowledge and opinion, but learned debate. The three participants – myself, PCE Music Director Angel Gil-Ordondez, and host Bill McGlaughlin – are frequently flying in different directions. And Bill – who comes to radio as a conductor and musical advocate of long experience – is additionally prone to personal anecdotes and historical digressions that temper my obsessive harangues.

We began with a show challenging Ricardo Muti’s assertion that orchestras are better than ever, sampling amazing recordings from the thirties and forties, when orchestras were better than now.

Then came our Lou Harrison Centenary tribute.

The latest installment, just up, is “Dvorak and Hiawatha.” Like the Harrison show, it features PCE recordings for Naxos – which, like WWFM, enthusiastically supports our attempts to do everything differently.

I believe “Dvorak and Hiawatha” has to be one of the most provocative treatments of American music ever aired on American radio. My premise – which Angel supports and Bill resists – is that Dvorak became an “American composer.” Is the New World Symphony directly inspired by Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha? Does it end with a dirge signifying Hiawatha’s departure into “the purple mists of evening”? Angel and I think so. Bill isn’t so sure. He sees Aaron Copland as an heir to Dvorak. Not I; Copland balked at using the “Negro melodies” Dvorak adored. A truer heir, to my way of thinking, was George Gershwin. Or the American Bartok: Arthur Farwell.

Our shows spill beyond the allotted two hours. But Dave posts everything. Here’s a Listening Guide for “Dvorak and Hiawatha”:

Part I: THE HIAWATHA MELODRAMA

7:00 – How the Dance of Pau-Puk Keewis inspired the Scherzo from Dvorak’s New World Symphony

12:30 – Why does Dvorak’s symphony end with a dirge? Hiawatha’s Departure

17:50 – The Larghetto from Dvorak’s Violin Sonatina as a picture of Minnehaha and Minnehaha Falls

26:10 – Dvorak’s American Suite and his Indianist mode

33:00 – The complete Hiawatha Melodrama, with Kevin Deas and PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez, on PCE’s Naxos “Dvorak and America” CD

Part II: DVORAK’S AMERICAN SUITE

4:25 – Does the opening evoke Jerome Kern?

5:40 – The second movement’s “plantation song”

8:20 – The third movement’s minstrel dance, plantation song, and Indian elegy

12:20 – What defines Dvorak’s Indianist trope?

13:13 – How an Indian dance becomes a minstrel song in the finale

15:35 – Why this is not “program music”

17:35 – The complete American Suite, performed by pianist Benjamin Pasternack on PCE’s Naxos “Dvorak and America” CD

39:00 – Why is Dvorak’s “American style” more than an “American accent”?

40:02 – The Dvorak Humoresques in G-flat and F major (sounds like Gershwin), with pianist Benjamin Pasternack

53:00 – Dvorak vs Aaron Copland – why Gershwin is the real heir to Dvorak

Part III: THE AMERICAN BARTOK: ARTHUR FARWELL

00:50 – Farwell’s Indian War Dance No. 2, performed by Benjamin Pasternack

6:06 – Farwell’s “Pawnee Horses,” in versions for piano (Benjamin Pasternack) and 16-part a cappella chorus (The University of Texas Chamber Singers conducted by James Morrow)

17:00 – Dvorak/Fisher: “Goin’ Home,” sung by Kevin Deas with PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez

TO PURCHASE PCE’S “DVORAK AND AMERICA” ON NAXOS: click here

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Uncle Vanya Meets Porgy and Bess

What did the legendary Russian experimental theater director Yevgeny Vakhtangov (1883-1922) have in common with Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, and Carousel? The immigrant director of these landmark Broadway productions, Rouben Mamoulian, was to some degree a Vakhtangov disciple.

Mamoulian took Broadway by storm in 1927 with his staging of Dubose Heyward’s novel Porgy. At the age of 30, he was an overnight star, an apostle of radically integrated musical theater imposed by a singular directorial vision. Mamoulian’s fame drove him to Hollywood, where he  hired Richard Rodgers to through-compose music for Love Me Tonight (1932) – a supreme musical film that subverts and surpasses Ernst’s Lubitsch’s film musicals. It may be plausibly inferred that Mamoulian introduced Rodgers to the strategies and ideals that would make Oklahoma! and Carousel Broadway break-throughs. In short: Mamoulian is a forgotten hero of American musical theater – and the influence of Russian experimental theater on mainstream Broadway is a story even more forgotten.

I became aware of the magnitude of Mamoulian when writing Artists in Exile: How Refugees from European War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts (2008). Subsequently, I plundered the Mamoulian Archive at the Library of Congress and discovered that Mamoulian’s impact on Porgy and Bess was more fundamental than anyone had imagined. He single-handedly turned Heyward’s novel into a musical redemption drama (Porgy the play was already full of singing) eschewing Heyward’s efforts to “authentically” represent the African-American Gullahs of Charleston’s Catfish Row. (I reported these findings in “On My Way” — The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess.”) 

How indebted was Mamoulian to Vakhtangov? It’s an elusive topic because Mamoulian preferred to present himself to Americans as a self-created genius. And yet descriptions of the Vakhtangov studio – of which Mamoulian was part sometime during his Moscow years 1915-1918 – fit the Mamoulian mold. Vakhtangov was a Stanislavski disciple who rejected Stanislavski’s verisimilitude. Rather, he espoused  “fantastic realism” wedded to “total theater.” Like Stanislavski, he cultivated an aesthetically bonded community of actors. Unlike Stanislavski, he was obsessed with choreographing sound and music – with rhythm and tempo. His detractors complained of a surfeit of detail, of elaborate artifice and a failure to project interior feeling. All of this fits Mamoulian – especially his hyper-ambitious Porgy and Porgy and Bess productions, preceding a long and erratic decline accelerated by the influence of Hollywood and a bad marriage.

A century later, Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theater endures. Rimas Tuminas, its Lithuanian artistic director since 2007, is today a reckonable force in Russian theater. His award-winning Vakhtangov production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, first given in Moscow in 2009, is currently enjoying a short run at New York’s City Center. To what degree Tuminas’s Vakhtangov Theatre retains the imprint of Yevgeny Vakhtangov I have no idea. But this Vanya seems to fit the bill. It rejects verisimilitude. It embraces total theater and a consuming directorial vision (what we today call Regietheatre). And, most strikingly, it integrates music more pervasively than any production I have ever encountered of a classic play.

In fact, a musical score composed by Fautus Latenas is a constant ingredient. Latenas has supplied a series of minimalist mood vignettes, each a short refrain incessantly repeated. The volume is usually low, but there are also crescendos and climaxes aligned with Chekhov’s text. This could be a recipe for kitsch if the score were deployed to underpin the mood on stage. But that mood is polyvalent, and more often than not the musical component is ironic. Sonia’s excrutiating scene with Dr. Astrov, for instance, is played to a tart waltz.

In a useful interview in the City Center program book, Tuminas says:

“Chekhov looked at people’s desire to be happy and thought, ‘My god, you are so funny! You daydream and expect happiness, knowing full well that it’s impossible!’ He sees all these poor, holy crearures who want something and are reaching for something even though there’s nothing up ahead, and it makes him smile a kind, forgiving smile. That’s probably why there’s so much humor in his plays. It’s deeply hidden, but if we can grasp it, perhaps we’ll understand something important about our own lives.”

I would not call the humor in Tuminas’s Uncle Vanya “deeply hidden.” Sergey Makovetskiy, who plays Vanya (in the photo above), is virtuoso mime. Limping and disheveled, ill-attuned to life’s requirements, he projects the pathos of a W. C. Fields or Buster Keaton. A reading more distant from Michael Redgrave’s famous English-language Vanya is scarcely imaginable. At the play’s beginning, the news of the Professor’s arrival animates Vanya hilariously. The pompous formality of the entrance itself, accompanied by a fawning retinue, equally invites laughter. But this tone is not sustained. The contradictory vectors dialectically at play – humor vs.  pathos, music vs. action, attraction vs. repulsion among the variegated dramatis personae of the Serebryakov estate – are at all times exquisitely  unpredictable.

The Professor himself is cast against type. Vladimir Siminov is a big, robust actor whose credits include Othello and Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. His Aleksandr Vladimirovich is surprisingly libidinous but sufficiently preposterous. Sonya, Eugenia Krehzhde, is a gamin whose credits include Tatyana in Eugene Onegin. Neither she nor Makovetskiy’s Vanya could credibly run a rural Russian estate.

The elusive affect of this production is not the concentrated bittersweet aura we know as “Chekhov” – and whose aching vacancy is supported by silence, not music. I thought the use of the Hebrew prayer “Kol nidre” (played by a solo trumpet) as a type of theme-song was a miscalculation – it does not invite submissive repetition under the dialogue. Otherwise, I found the production engaging at one or another level at every unforeseen twist and turn.

In Rouben Mamoulian’s 1935 Porgy and Bess, “I got plenty o’ nuttin’” was accompanied by a set of empty rocking chairs moving to and fro in time with Porgy’s song, as were the needles of women sewing. In Tuminas’s Uncle Vanya, pre-recorded musical cues precisely dictate the timing of a spoken phrase. What any of this may have to do with the legacy of Yevgeny Vakhtangov remains a tantalizing question.

 

 

 

 

The Lou Harrison Centenary

 

If you asked me who composed the best American violin concerto, and who composed the best American piano concerto, I would answer with the same name: Lou Harrison.

And yet, except on the West Coast of the United States, Harrison is not a brand name. The present Harrison Centenary year can help to change that. We finally have a copious full-scale biography: Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell. Alex Ross, our most necessary observer of American classical music, has published a brief but telling Harrison encomium in The New Yorker.  And PostClassical Ensemble has contributed a new Naxos CD with two of Harrison’s most important works: the aforementioned Concerto for Violin and Percussion, and the Grand Duo for violin and piano.

Last week, PCE launched our new CD with a Harrison concert at the Indonesian Embassy in DC (a Harrison mecca thanks to Ambassador Budi Bowoleksono). Both the CD and the concert (and also Ambassador Bowoleksono) are represented in the second installment of our “PostClassical” radio series on the indispensable WWFM Classical Network. You can access this two-hour tribute, hosted by Bill McGlaughlin, Angel Gil-Ordonez, and myself, right here.

To listen to the Violin Concerto, in a torrid performance by Tim Fain with Angel and PCE, just fast-forward to 18:35 of Part I.

Harrison invented the percussion ensemble with John Cage and Henry Cowell. With Cage, he plundered junkyards and import stores in search of new percussion resources. Their implements included old brake drums and a variety of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian instruments. The eminence gris of American percussion, William Kraft, once told me:

“It was totally new to explore Asian percussion and junk percussion, as Cowell, Cage, and Harrison did.  I found Lou’s percussion writing more fascinating than Cowell’s or Cage’s. I think he was the most musical, and the most in tune with sound.  I think the Harrison Concerto for Violin and Percussion is a masterpiece – you don’t find music like that written by Cowell or Cage. The solo part for the violin is a virtuoso part, extremely well written. And all the sounds, whether produced by maracas or flower pots, are so well integrated that you forget that they’re exotic.”

You could say that Harrison’s concerto combines the experimental panache of an amateur with the craft of a professional. The first two movements were composed in 1940, then revised in 1959 when the finale was added. Harrison gratefully acknowledged the influence of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto of 1935: “among the highest musical achievements of the century. . . . It really walloped me.” Berg’s molto espressivo violin writing echoes through Harrison’s score. There are also precise percussion instructions in Harrison’s exquisite hand –  “For the washtubs, drill holes (4) up from center on the sides of inverted galvanized iron tubs & suspend by strong elastic cords.” For the coffee cans, “cork or rubber-ended pen-holders make good beaters . . . & are best for the clock coils as well.”

Harrison’s music is an original, precise, and yet elusive product of  far-flung cultural excursions. He may also be understood as a composer of paradoxes. His idiom is lyric but never lush. He can be monumental but is not grandiose. His Western forebears are Renaissance, Medieval, and Baroque, not the far more famous Classical and Romantic masters. His American roots are wonderfully protean. American is his self-made, learn-by-doing, try-everything approach. So is his polyglot range of affinities. He espoused “world music” before there was a name for it.

PCE’s new Naxos recording documents twin aspects of Harrison’s art: his pioneering role as a composer for percussion, and his pioneering role integrating Western and Indonesian idioms. The achievements are linked. Western percussion instruments of metal and wood are largely Eastern in origin. The gamelan bred the xylophone.

Harrison first learned to play gamelan in 1975, when a Javanese gamelan visited Berkeley for a summer institute. His teacher was Pak Cokro — one of the foremost twentieth-century gamelan masters. It was Pak Cokro who first suggested that Harrison compose for gamelan. The Grand Duo for violin and piano – performed on the new Naxos CD by Fain and Michael Boriskin —  is a remarkable example of gamelan-infused chamber music. Like Harrison’s Piano Concerto of 1985, it embodies Harrison at his most regal. Its sustained majesty is a function of its steady, gamelan-like trajectory, undeflected by the tension-and-release of traditional Western harmonic practice. The piano’s sharp attacks and tolling octaves evoke gamelan sounds. Gamelan penetrates in countless other ways, obvious and not. The resulting music does not much resemble the music of anyone else. It is certainly music unthinkable from Cowell or Cage.

The WWFM Harrison Centenary tribute also features music not on the CD – including the sublime Suite for Violin and Harp of 1949, in live performance at the Indonesian Embassy (go to 42:18 part II). This happens to be the first Harrison composition I ever encountered – as a green New York Times music critic in the late 1970s. Its combination of simplicity and originality confounded me. In those days, the hallmark of musical originality was complexity. I listened with guilty pleasure.

Times change – and so must the reputation of Lou Harrison, born in Portland, Oregon, a century ago.

The WWFM “PostClassical” Celebration of the Lou Harrison Centenary:

PART I:

00:00: Gamelan influences Debussy and Poulenc

18:35: “Stampede” from Harrison Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and Gamelan, recorded in live performance by Nati Draiblate and Ben Capps, with PCE percussionists Bill Richards and John Spirtas conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez

33:54: Harrison’s Grand Duo for Violin and Piano, from our Naxos CD with Tim Fain and Michael Boriskin

PART II:

7:38: Harrison/Cage “Double Music,” from our Naxos CD

42:18: Harrison Suite for Cello and Harp, recorded in live performance by Ben Capps and Jacqueline Pollauf

54:58: Harrison Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and Gamelan, movement 3, recorded in live performance by Draiblate, Capps, and the Indonesian Embassy Javanese Gamelan (leader: Pak Muryanto)

1:07:18: A Lou Harrison tribute by Indonesian Ambassador Budi Bowoleksono