Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 28

Arts Leadership in the Age of Trump

In 1966 the New York Philharmonic undertook an 18-day Stravinsky festival as a kind of try-out for Lukas Foss, whom Leonard Bernstein favored to take over as music director. The conductors included Foss, Bernstein, Ernest Ansermet (who had conducted for Diaghilev), Kiril Kondrashin (a major Soviet artist), and Stravinsky himself. George Balanchine choreographed Ragtime for Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell. The Soldier’s Tale was given with John Cage as the Devil, Elliott Carter as the Soldier, and Aaron Copland narrating. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sang five Stravinsky songs, Pulcinella, an excerpt from The Rake’s Progress. Larry Rivers created a visual presentation for Oedipus Rex. Remarkably, the Stravinsky festival fizzled and Foss was passed over in favor of a French composer/conductor – Pierre Boulez – as much a stranger to Bernstein’s American agenda as to Indian ragas or Brazilian sambas.

In 1972, across the Lincoln Center Plaza, New York City Ballet undertook a Stravinsky festival of its own. Balanchine’s company gave seven Stravinsky programs in eight days. Of 31 ballets presented, 21 were premieres. The eight Balanchine premieres included Violin Concerto, instantly recognized as iconic, and – on the same opening night — Symphony in Three Movements, which would take some years to register.

Comparisons to the Philharmonic’s Stravinsky festival six years previous were and are inescapable. The Philharmonic festival was bigger, with more big names and a fuller perspective on the Stravinsky odyssey — but was quickly forgotten. Obviously, the City Ballet festival enjoyed a creative component: the new ballets. Equally obvious was the difference in reception. For the Philharmonic subscribers, Stravinsky remained a chore. For patrons of City Ballet, Stravinsky was a privilege.

I tell this story in the course of a 10,000-word essay on arts leadership, written last year when I was a Resident Fellow at NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts. It’s currently posted on Doug McLennan’s invaluable artsjournal.com site, with five substantial responses – an “AJ Debate” itself linked to a recent “arts leadership” conclave at the University of Texas/El Paso.

A villain in my tale is Arthur Judson, for decades the major powerbroker for classical music in the US. Abdicating arts leadership (he even disfavored engaging a music director), Judson had for 34 years haphazardly fostered a faceless Philharmonic constituency. Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein had since 1948 purposefully honed a validating cultural community. George Balanchine and City Ballet changed the face of dance. Leonard Bernstein led audiences to Mahler: he expanded the canon. But Bernstein could not change the face of the New York Philharmonic.

The starting point of my essay is an iconic 1966 photograph I remember from my teenage years. Balanchine, Bernstein, and Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, are posed in front of Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. The Met is about to inaugurate its new home, completing the move to Lincoln Center of the three main institutional constituents. Bing stands alongside a poster brandishing the sold-out world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, inaugurating the New Met. Bernstein (with cigarette) stands alongside a poster showing the sold-out run of a subscription program comprising an obscure Beethoven overture, William Schuman’s String Symphony, and Mahler’s First (not yet a repertoire staple). A City Ballet poster, to the rear, announces the dates of the Fall season. So depicted, three performing arts leaders – all of them famously strong personalities — are seen poised to drive their celebrated companies to greater heights, buoying an unprecedented American cultural complex

Ten thousand words later, my essay ends:

“Lincoln Center was conceived by public-spirited corporate businessmen, led by John D. Rockefeller III. It never became a magnet for artists and intellectuals, humming with creativity, after the fashion of Harvey Lichtenstein’s BAM or Joe Papp’s Public Theatre. It has lately acquired a $1.5 billion facelift, including a dramatically thrusting façade for Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School; Tully itself, however, remains deficient in the intimacy and warmth appropriate to a chamber-music venue.

“Imagine, if you can, a photograph of Peter Gelb, Alan Gilbert, and Peter Martins posed in front of the new, glass-enclosed Tully complex. All three institutions are poised to collaborate on a multi-week festival addressing pressing contemporary social and political issues, with the full participation of the New York City public schools and the City University of New York (whose Hunter College Auditorium will reportedly host the Philharmonic during Geffen Hall renovations).”

I cited this pipedream because I knew it would be realized this February in the city of El Paso, where a “Copland and Mexico” festival, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, would celebrate cultural collaboration between two nations embroiled in an uncertain future relationship. Mexico’s amazing artistic efflorescence of the 1930s – today mostly unremembered by young Mexican-Americans – would be the central topic.

A centerpiece of the programing would be the iconic film of the Mexican Revolution: Redes (1935), which thrillingly combines the talents of a master (and under-recognized) Mexican composer —  Silvestre Revueltas — and a legendary American photographer – Paul Strand. The participating institutions would include the El Paso Symphony Orchestra, the El Paso public schools, and the University of Texas/El Paso (UTEP), with classes and faculty members in half a dozen departments taking part. The festival would penetrate outlying “colonias” without paved roads or running water, and also the neighboring Mexican city of Juarez. The many scheduled events would include “Copland and the Cold War” – an evening of music and theater exploring the impact of the Red Scare on America’s most prominent composer of concert music. It all duly transpired a week ago.

What I could not anticipate was the pertinence of the El Paso festival to arts leadership in the age of Donald Trump – the inevitable focus of the artsjournal conclave in El Paso on Feb. 17. The participants, in addition to Doug and myself, were two bona fide arts leaders: Frank Candelaria, UTEP’s missionary Associate Provost, and Delta David Gier, music director of the unique South Dakota Symphony – whose Lakota Music Project I have extolled in this space. You can watch the conclave here. The talks are 20 minutes each. They tell stories — about how the arts can impact on the way we live, and on individual lives — that need to be heard, and never more than now.

AT THE BARRICADES: The Arts in the Age of Trump

You’re looking at a photo of me – the old guy with the beard – being thanked by students at East Lake High School, a semi-rural public high school on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas. Five hundred East Lake students had just spent 90 minutes watching and listening to a presentation sampling Redes (1935) – the iconic film of the Mexican Revolution, a tale of exploited fishermen who unite and revolt.

As readers of this blog know, Redes is an obsession of mine. However little acknowledged, it’s one of the peak examples, in all cinema, of great music wedded to great cinematography. As the composer is Silvestre Revueltas, and the cinematographer Paul Strand, Redes also documents a historic Mexican/American collaboration during a decade when Diego Rivera’s Mexico exemplified how artists and intellectuals could power social change. Here’s a galvanizing Redes sequence: the funeral of a child.

For Naxos, my DC-based PostClassical Ensemble (I’m Executive Director) has produced a DVD mating Redes to a freshly recorded soundtrack. It’s that DVD that I sampled for the East Lake students as part of a week-long El Paso festival, “Copland and Mexico.” As I’ve previously written, El Paso (about 80 percent Hispanic) is an ideal incubator for impactful art.

“Copand and Mexico” is a product of Music Unwound, the NEH-supported national consortium of orchestras, festivals, and universities that I direct. In El Paso, the festival included (among many other activities) three screenings of Redes with live accompaniment by the El Paso Symphony. The third of these was a free performance in neighboring Juarez, Mexico. The Juarez audience was unlike any I have previously witnessed at a symphonic performance. Many families attended. The hall – an exemplary 10-year-old facility on the campus of the university – was full of children. Everyone was raptly attentive. I have little doubt that for many of those who came, the story of the cultural efflorescence that drew Copland, Strand, Steinbeck, Eisenstein, and Langston Hughes to Mexico – a phenomenon concurrently explored in many classrooms at the remarkable University of Texas/El Paso — was a revelation.

The El Paso “Copland and Mexico” festival was covered by Armando Trull of National Public Radio. He filed two stories: one on NPR,  another for The Huffington Post. The interviews included one with a fifteen-year old who attended a Redes presentation at Tornillo High School. Thirty miles south of El Paso, Tornillo (population 3,000) is a “colonia.” So is East Lake — certified by the State of Texas as “a residential area along the Texas-Mexico border that may lack some of the most basic living necessities, such as potable water and sewer systems, electricity, paved roads, and safe and sanitary housing.” The young man in Tornillo told Trull: “It’s important [for us] to know that there are Mexican composers and artists who became successful.” Tornillo students were bussed to the El Paso Symphony concert.

Trull’s story instantly provoked a listener response on the NPR site. It read:

“Propaganda festival. Get rid of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Totally unnecessary government office. If you want to talk about the contributions of Mexicans, you need to cover the whole spectrum. 7 out of 10 federal foreign prisoners in this country are from Mexico. Their welfare usage rates are much higher than the general population and their tax contributions are significantly lower. Mexican immigrants (legal and illegal) drive down wages for American workers. Billions of dollars of drugs (and associated crime) pour across the Mexican border every year, which is tragically killing our young people and destroying our society.”

In fact, far from being conceived as a propaganda instrument challenging our new President, the Music Unwound “Copland and Mexico” presentation – a multi-media exegesis with an actor, an  orchestra, and a continuous visual track additional to Redes —  originated in 2012. The first consortium participant was the Louisville Orchestra. From there “Copland and Mexico” was taken up by the Austin Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, and the Buffalo Philharmonic. The script used in El Paso was verbatim what I wrote five years ago in the conviction that culture can be a potent tool for human betterment and mutual understanding.

I have never been more convinced of that than I am today.

“Copland and Mexico” will next travel to the New Hampshire Music Festival, then the Las Vegas Philharmonic, then the South Dakota Symphony, then the Brevard Music Center. Its pertinence will not fade. Check out the eyes of the East Lake students in the photo below. They are discovering Redes.

(Please note that the views expressed by this posting do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

Are Orchestras Better than Ever? Why Riccardo Muti is Wrong

Are orchestras better than ever?  Riccardo Muti thinks so. Recently, dedicating a bust of Fritz Reiner at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, he said: “The level of the orchestras in the world – especially in the seventies and eighties — has gone up everywhere.”

What is Muti talking about? I suppose he’s applying the criterion of perfection. Perfect intonation, perfect ensemble. What kind of criterion is that?

Thanks to the exceptional WWFM The Classical Network, I’ve been able to respond to this parochial claim at three hours length, in colloquy with Bill McGlaughlin. You can hear the resulting rant here and here. Bill and I auditioned fabulous concert and studio recordings by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony, Dmitri Mitropoulos and the Minneapolis Symphony, Arturo Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic, Artur Bodanzky and the  Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and Evgeny Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic.

Three things bear mentioning about these historic pairings. The first is that – to a degree unknown today – the conductors stayed put. There were no airplanes. The music director was the music director.

The second thing that leaps to mind – and to the attentive ear – is that each of these conductors honed a distinctive sonic imprint. No one could possibly mistake a Stokowski orchestra for a Mitropoulos orchestra.

Thirdly, each of these conductors pursued a distinctive mission allied with repertoire. Except in the cases of Bodanzky and Toscanini, the espoused repertoire was fresh.

Take Koussevitzky in Boston (a 25-year tenure). He gave the American premiere of Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. He gave the world premiere of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. What is more, he commissioned both these famous compositions. His Boston broadcasts capture the most galvanizing readings of both pieces I have ever heard. Bill and I listened to them together. You can hear Koussevitzky’s indescribably hot Mussorgsky/Ravel at 51:40 here – after which I exclaimed “Give me a break! You can’t possibly tell me orchestras are better than ever!”

Then there is Mitropoulos in Minneapolis – an extremist, the Dr. Caligari of the podium. This was an orchestra whose concertmaster, Louis Krasner, had premiered the Berg and Schoenberg concertos. Its stylistic base was Mahler and the Second Viennese School. In 1940 Mitropoulos made the first and best recording of Mahler’s First Symphony. Check it out at 10:16 here. If Mitropoulos (as I argue, citing evidence) conducts Mahler a la Mahler, his Schumann Second Symphony a la Mahler is an acquired taste. Bill (at 32:38) was bewildered: “It makes me really jittery. I can’t understand this Schumann. I know that Schumann was meshugana. It’s almost like an Expressionist Schuman . . . this is so crazy-making for me. Help me out!”

The larger premise of this three-hour harangue is that nothing like the bristling sense of occasion once registered by Koussevitzky and Mitropoulos – or by Bodanzky’s powderkeg of a pit orchestra, so much more distinctive than the generic Met Opera orchestra of today – can any longer be assured. The concert experience needs to be refreshed and rethought. That’s the premise of PostClassical Ensemble, the DC-based chamber orchestra I co-founded with Angel Gil-Ordonez 14 years ago.

In April, WWFM inaugurates “PostClassical,” a series of two-hour thematic specials culling live and recorded PCE performances. We begin by celebrating the Lou Harrison Centenary on April 28. In June, we argue that Bernard Herrmann was the most underrated American composer of the 20th century. Others shows in the series will include “Schubert Uncorked” (with bass trombonist David Taylor), “Stravinsky and Shostakovich Reconsidered (with pianist Alexander Toradze), “Dvorak and Hiawatha,” and “Silvestre Revueltas: Better than Copland.”

Stay tuned.

Music and the National Mood

PostClassical Ensemble – the DC chamber orchestra I co-founded a dozen years ago – produced a concert at the Washington National Cathedral last Saturday night that seemed to address the national mood. These are fractious times – times in which the arts can acquire a special pertinence. Times in which music can be a provocation or a balm.

We titled our program “The Trumpet Shall Sound.” It intermingled spirituals with religious arias by Bach, Handel, and Mendelssohn. Our inspiration was the example of Harry Burleigh – who more than anyone else was responsible for transforming spirituals into art songs.

Burleigh – once Dvorak’s assistant at New York’s National Conservatory (1892-1895) — is a forgotten hero of American music. His seminal “Deep River” arrangement of 1915 electrified American audiences; it was instantly appropriated by preeminent white recitalists. It was later sung by Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. It is still sung today.

Burleigh’s own recital repertoire also included songs by Beethoven, Faure, Grieg, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, and Tchaikovsky. Mendelssohn’s Elijah was a Burleigh specialty. Doubtless for Burleigh all this music spoke a common language of uplift.

Our soloist at the Washington Cathedral was the African-American bass-baritone Kevin Deas. I would say that he is today’s supreme exponent of spirituals in concert. He made his early career singing Bach and Handel. He came relatively late to Burleigh’s spiritual arrangements. For him the distance from Messiah to “Go Down, Moses” is inconsequential.

It has been my privilege to accompany Kevin Deas in concert for the past decade – but never before in such a vast and inspirational space. Burleigh himself advised that “success in singing these Folk Songs is primarily dependent upon deep spiritual feeling.” Kevin possesses a divinely mellifluous instrument (an audience member at one of our concerts confided, weeping, that she felt she had heard “the voice of God”). But his performances  begin not with notes; they begin with with feeling. I know from experience with other singers that an iota of ego is fatal in this repertoire. At the National Cathedral, the gravitas of the space informed all we did. My sense, on stage, was that the evening’s eighth number, Burleigh’s voice-and-piano arrangement of “Steal Away,” hypnotized the big room for good (the nave held nearly 1,000 listeners). It sounded like this.

After that, seamlessly (we proceeded without applause), came Nathaniel Dett’s galvanizing “Listen to the Lambs” with the Cathedral Choir, then Kevin Deas singing “For the Mountain Shall Depart” from Elijah, with PostClassical Ensemble led by Angel Gil-Ordonez. The evening built to Burleigh’s classic “Deep River” for mixed a cappella chorus, followed by two Messiah selections: “The Trumpet Shall Sound” and the Hallelujah Chorus.

But if there was a signature number, it may have been William Dawson’s arrangement of “There is a Balm in Gilead” – a piece Leontyne Price used to sing. Many with whom I spoke afterward had found the evening a necessary balm.

During the Cold War, the Kennedy White House famously hosted culture. JFK would talk about how the arts can only thrive in a harmonious “free society.” That was either naïve nonsense or cynical propaganda. The arts thrive in exigent times. In the twentieth century, the thirties and the sixties – the Depression, the Vietnam years — were decades remarkable for American artistic expression, decades in which music memorably voiced protest and compassion.

We may well be embarking on another such trying period in our nation’s history. In what ways will our musical institutions rise to the occasion? We shall see.

 

 

 

 

Trifonov Plays Shostakovich

No other music so instantly evokes a sense of place as that of Dmitri Shostakovich. When Daniil Trifonov launched Shostakovich’s E minor Prelude at Carnegie Hall last week, the bleakness and exigency of Stalin’s Russia at once chilled the huge space. The Shostakovich affect can seem exotic or native, according to circumstance. I would say it today complements that part of the national mood concentrated in the Northeastern United States and 3,000 miles away on the West Coast.

Trifonov offered a substantial Shostakovich set: five of the 24 Preludes and Fugues composed in homage to Bach in 1950-51. This experience proved doubly revelatory. Comprising the Preludes and Fugues in E minor, A major, A minor, D major, and D minor, the sequence registered as a compositional achievement unsurpassed by other post-World War II composers for solo piano. And Trifonov’s readings were boldly individual. Shostakovich – a considerable pianist – favored a plain style. Trifonov’s style, with its emphasis on color and refined tonal liquidity, is remote from the composer’s.

The D major Fugue, in particular, was barely recognizable. Shostakovich composed a sharp, acerbic Allegretto. Trifonov here produced a Prestissimo blur, an arresting, elusive impressionistic cameo.

The D minor Prelude and Fugue is the titanic capstone to Shostakovich’s 24. Shostakovich’s recording is dry and imperious. Trifonov’s reading is Lisztian: Romantically plastic, generously pedaled. It was the charged high point of the evening.

The remainder of the program was standard: a Schumann first half; Stravinky’s Petrushka to close. I know Carnegie has to sell tickets – but this young pianist may have acquired a following ready for anything. It has been years since I encountered a New York  audience – the hall was packed – as absorbed in a purely musical experience. There is nothing exceptional about Trifonov’s hair or attire. He is neither glamorous nor notorious. At the age of 25 he is already embodies a species become rare: a major concert pianist. He also composes.

What comes next for this young man? Aside from my son, I noticed no listeners approximately the pianist’s own age. A decade hence, will Daniil Trifonov fill Carnegie Hall? And what will be be playing? The marginalization of classical music accelerates apace.

PS: PostClassical Ensemble’s Shostakovich-Weinberg festival this March includes another boldly individual pianist: Alexander Toradze, in  Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto. Edward Gero of the Washington Shakespeare Theatre will play Shostakovich. We will have occasion to compare Shostakovich’s official pronouncements of the 1930s and ‘40s with what he later had to say about his Fifth and Seventh Symphonies. To see Ed Gero as the younger Shostakovich, and find further information on the concerts, click here.

Brendel and Schubert

This weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” includes my review of Alfred Brendel’s new essay collection, “Music, Sense, and Nonsense,” as follows:

It is axiomatic, to some, that music speaks for itself. But there are musicians who both perform and speak for music. In this country, Leonard Bernstein was surely the most influential exemplar. Bernstein’s landmark campaign for the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, which he greatly helped to canonize beginning in 1959, included popular sermons on television and in print. But Bernstein’s 1960 Young Peoples’ Concert titled “Who Is Gustav Mahler?” and his 1973 Norton Lecture extolling Mahler’s Ninth as an iconic 20th-century masterpiece were ephemeral acts of advocacy: By themselves, they do not endure as important statements.

Across the water, the champion double advocate was Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924). A musician singular in temperament and personality, Busoni was the supreme concert pianist of his generation as well as a composer whose wizardry will always attract a dedicated minority of listeners. His essays and letters, vivid embodiments of a spirit infused with paradox and humanity, will be read as long as there are people who care about musical meaning and aesthetics.

Alfred Brendel, whose collected essays and conversations in “Music, Sense and Nonsense” total more than 400 pages, is a prominent retired pianist (he departed the stage in 2008) who enjoys continued prominence as a writer. He also happens to be notably influenced by Busoni—by the “peculiar serenity” of his music and the ironic acuity of his intellect. But Mr. Brendel the writer does not command Busoni’s fullness of idiosyncrasy and worldliness. Rather, his achievement echoes that of Bernstein, whom he otherwise does not resemble. Like Bernstein, Mr. Brendel, speaking for music, has powerfully espoused a neglected repertoire: the piano sonatas of Franz Schubert.

Schubert, to be sure, has not been neglected at any point in Mr. Brendel’s lifetime. But his piano sonatas, with a few exceptions, were and are. From Mr. Brendel’s 2015 essay “A Lifetime of Recordings,” one learns with incredulity that Otto Erich Deutsch, who cataloged Schubert’s oeuvre, first heard the C minor Sonata—today esteemed as part one of a valedictory 1828 trilogy—when Mr. Brendel himself played it in Vienna in the 1960s. Rachmaninoff, it is said, did not even know that piano sonatas by Schubert existed. Though I was myself once a habitué of piano recitals, I have never heard in concert the Schubert sonata I would most like to command at the keyboard: the 40-minute A minor Sonata, D. 845, of 1825. It simply is not played.

As Mr. Brendel stresses, the late discovery of these works is a function of their perplexing originality: Compared with the Classical sonatas of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, or the Romantic sonatas of Chopin, Schumann and Brahms, they are uncategorizable. Charles Rosen (another noted pianist-author) nails this point in his dazzling “The Classical Style” (1971), whose penultimate paragraph concludes that Schubert “stands as an example of the resistance of the material of history to the most necessary generalizations.”

Mr. Brendel’s indispensable project has been to promote the eight Schubert piano sonatas composed in 1823 and after as a canon worthy to set beside Beethoven’s 32. He has recorded and re-recorded these works. He has tirelessly purveyed them in concert. What is more, what he has had to say about them may prove more memorable than his recordings and performances.

In the Schubert essays here collected, Mr. Brendel hones a metaphor that ceaselessly illuminates this protean composer: the “sleepwalker.” Using Beethoven’s decisiveness of form and sentiment as a foil, he showcases Schubert’s waywardness—a defining feature long misread as weakness. As opposed to Beethoven’s “inexorable forward drive,” Schubert can convey “a passive state, a series of episodes communicating mysteriously with one another.” As opposed to Beethoven the “architect,” Schubert “strides across harmonic abysses as though by compulsion, and we cannot help remembering that sleepwalkers never lose their step.” Next to Beethoven’s “concentration,” Schubert ”lets himself be transported, just a hair’s breadth from the abyss, not so much mastering life as being at its mercy.”

These observations will strike home to anyone who has listened closely to the Schubert sonatas or whose fingers have grappled with them and experienced at close quarters their chronic resistance to definitive formulation. Their ambiguities of sentiment and interpretation excite feelings of vulnerability. The A major Sonata, D. 959—for some, Schubert’s supreme achievement for the keyboard—begins at least three times. Only with the dreamy second subject, a Lied, does the first movement attain a recognizable expressive state. The second movement shatters into atonal chaos. An endless finale gradually establishes the first movement’s song mode as an anchoring poetic ingredient. Translating this music into words, Mr. Brendel finds “desolate grace behind which madness hides.”

One corollary, as with Mahler, is a musical state of existential duress unknown to Beethoven, a condition of unease or terror prescient of world horrors to come. Mr. Brendel: “In such moments the music exposes neither passions nor thunderstorms, neither the heat of combat nor the vehemence of heroic exertion, but assaults of fever and delusion.” Schubert presents “an energy that is nervous and unsettled . . . ; his pathos is steeped in fear.” An “impression of manic energy” points to “the depressive core of [Schubert’s] personality.”

Mahler himself wrote of Schubert’s “freedom below the surface of convention.” Mr. Brendel: “The music of these two composers does not set self-sufficient order against chaos. Events do not unfold with graceful or grim logic; they could have taken another turn at many points. We feel not masters but victims of the situation.”

The antithesis of Schubert’s delirium is the dream-finale, a child’s paradise with which the Sonatas in D major, D. 850, and G major, D. 894, conclude. The dream finale of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is explicitly Schubertian: It quotes the D. 850 finale. The American composer-critic Arthur Farwell, documenting the intense Mahlerian vagaries of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony as conducted by Mahler in New York in 1910, proposed a mutuality of identity binding these twin Austrian pariah personalities nearly a century apart.

A surprise disclosure of “Music, Sense and Nonsense” is that Mr. Brendel’s collected Beethoven writings (110 pages) substantially exceed in length his Schubert writings (77 pages). But Beethoven requires no special advocacy. Busoni does—and I would have happily discovered more than the 17 pages here collected in appreciation of one of music’s most elusive geniuses: “There was the Faustian side of his intellect, which made him familiar with the melancholy of loneliness. As its counterbalance we find serene confidence, rarefied irony and ready surrender to grace.”

Finally, Mr. Brendel has long made a cause of Franz Liszt—after Schubert, his most productive topic, challenging incomprehension and neglect. If Liszt today is not really in need of a champion[ok? (“less needy” didn’t quite track w/the rest of the sentence)], that was not the case in 1961, when Mr. Brendel wrote the essay “Liszt Misunderstood”: “I know I am compromising myself by speaking up for Liszt. Audiences in Central Europe, Holland and Scandinavia tend to be irritated by the sight of Liszt’s name on a concert bill. . . . [They] project onto that performance all the prejudices they have against Liszt: his alleged bombast, superficiality, cheap sentimentality, formlessness, his striving after effect for effect’s sake.”

Understanding Liszt, for Mr. Brendel, is understanding the probity and nobility of the B minor Piano Sonata, not the inspired showmanship and ingenious panache of the “Don Juan” Fantasy. For him, Liszt’s is “the most satisfying sonata written after Beethoven and Schubert.” He takes issue with Charles Rosen, for whom the “Don Juan” Fantasy testifies to Liszt’s “profound originality,” including “almost every facet of his invention as a composer for the piano.” Busoni, in the preface to his edition of this demonic paraphrase of themes from “Don Giovanni,” accorded it “an almost symbolic significance as the highest point of pianism.”

“It is a peculiarity of Liszt’s music,” Mr. Brendel writes, “that it faithfully and fatally mirrors the character of its interpreter.” Applying this shrewd aphorism to Mr. Brendel himself: Performing Liszt, he was no swashbuckling Don Juan; nor did he seek to become one. Applying it to Mr. Brendel performing Schubert: He was the demented Wanderer of “Winterreise,” never the sweetly hapless lad of “Die schöne Müllerin.”

Mr. Brendel’s essays on the art of piano performance – that is, on his own art – prickle with assertions inviting prickly response. Many pianists will vehemently disagree with his vehement objection to the explosive first ending of the first-movement exposition of Schubert’s B-flat major piano sonata. Is this “jerky outburst” really “unconnected to the entire movement’s logic and atmosphere?” Well, that depends on how one reads the movement’s simmering left-hand trills. Given today’s free fall in musical literacy, this advisory component of “Music, Sense and Nonsense” will in any case speak to a small minority of music lovers.

Mr. Brendel himself is a man of wide-ranging interests. He is a published poet. As a young man he composed and painted. His personal history, growing up in Nazi Austria (he was born in Wiesenberg, now part of the Czech Republic, in 1931), shadows his distaste for musical dogma and also, one supposes, his susceptibility to Schubertian terror. Fantasizing another life story in a 2015 interview, he wished for “no wars, no memories of Nazis and fascists, no Hitler or Goebbels on the wireless, no soldiers, party members and bombs.”

The collected essays and lectures of Alfred Brendel occupy a classical-music bubble—and register no awareness that the bubble is shrinking fast. If this failure to deal with the fate of Schubert, Beethoven, and Liszt in the twenty-first century is a disappointment, it equally reassures us that an audience endures for musical ruminations that are learned but not esoteric, studious but not academic. Will Schubert’s sonatas be justly appreciated while a wide appetite for Schubert still exists? How long will it take for the D. 845 Sonata to take its rightful place in the piano pantheon—or will it remain forever off-stage?

The Future of Orchestras Part IV: Attention-Span

A colleague in Music History at a major American university reports that it has become difficult to teach sonata form because sonata forms transpire over 15 minutes and more.  This topic – shrinking attention-span — is obviously not irrelevant to the future of orchestras.

My most memorable TV interview took place half a dozen years ago in a Southern city of moderate size. I was producing “Dvorak and America” for the local orchestra, assisted by Kevin Deas. We were roused from our hotel in the wee hours of the morning and conveyed to a studio complex. We found ourselves sitting on a pair of stools in a glare of light, idly watching someone forecast the weather. Quite suddenly I was asked a question by a twenty-something-year-old wearing a frozen smile, a lot of make-up, and a headset. I began to talk about Dvorak and watched her smile fracture. Her stressed features told me that she was being instructed to halt my stream of words – but I was not letting her intervene. I was actually on the verge of saying, “I know you would like me to stop talking now, but there are a few more things about Dvorak that I’d like your audience to know.” I had been speaking for fewer than two minutes.

Another such story: when I produce concerts I invariably ask that there be a post-concert discussion. This is often treated as a kind of concession. The frequent time-limit is thirty minutes. On one occasion, the presenter sat at a desk facing me. He had before him a series of large cards which he displayed for my benefit, one per minute: 30, 29, 28, 27 . . . The time-limit was paramount.

This fear of inducing boredom, pressing for simple thoughts and short sentences, is of course fatal to thoughtful verbal expression. But it is pervasive, and never more than today.

Imagine my surprise, several months ago, when an interviewer arrived at my apartment, sat alongside me on a couch with a small tape recorder, and invited me to speak as much as I pleased. Naturally, such a person – predisposed to actual conversation — asked penetrating questions without obvious answers. And then he turned our conversation into an hour-long radio show with interpolated musical excerpts.

The gentleman in question is David Osenberg and his award-winning radio show, on the WWFM classical network, is “Cadenza.”

Our conversation – which you can listen to here – pursued the question that has long preoccupied my professional life: what is the future of what used to be “classical music,” and what can be done to make it matter?

So David and I talked about my recent series of blogs about the fate of orchestras. I opined that fundamental change is both necessary and unlikely, at least as far as the “major” orchestras are concerned. I talked about better things happening in El Paso (at 15:00) and South Dakota (16:00), and at the Brevard Music Center (19:00) and DePauw University (21:30). Ultimately, I talked about the three DVDs PostClassical Ensemble has produced for Naxos, taking classic films from the 1930s and freshly recording the soundtracks. And David expressed the hope that WWFM could feature PostClassical Ensemble concerts on a regular basis, by way of exploring new ways of doing things.

Meanwhile, I continue to draw inspiration from the subversions of Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. Here is Stephen Moss, interviewing Fischer for The Guardian (Aug. 12):

“What Fischer wants to avoid above all is a sense of routine. ‘We work with intensity and in a very personal way. It is more like the way a string quartet works. I don’t say to the principal cellist: “Please a little softer.” I would say: “Come on Peter, what the hell are you doing?” It’s a different communication, much more personal. I immediately notice when their level of focus or concentration is not what it should be. I work much more like a theatre director would work with actors.’ . . .

“The orchestra [Fischer] founded is his lifelong passion; he also sees it as a ‘laboratory’ for orchestras of the future, offering flexibility, openness and a group of players that he encourages to develop as portfolio musicians rather than spending their lives as fixtures with the orchestra.

“’If you are a member of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the great thing is that you are allowed a much more versatile musician’s life,’ he explains. He wants ‘individualists’ rather than ‘obedient, uniform soldiers.’  ‘For the future of music, it is better to develop the symphony orchestra as a more flexible organization that can embrace other musical styles. Now, we have a symphony orchestra that looks more or less like the one in Richard Strauss’s time. It’s already 100 years old. I don’t really think it will stay the same 100 years from now. The idea of a symphony orchestra must develop over time or it will become a museum.’

“He wants his ensemble to be able to play everything. ‘The conventional symphony orchestra leaves baroque repertoire to the period instrument orchestras and contemporary music to the specialized groups,’ he says. ‘Because we encourage the individual interests of musicians, we have a period instrument part of the orchestra, we have a chorus, we have a group playing Transylvanian folk music, another group working on jazz improvisations.’

“The aim is to keep both musicians and audience on their toes. He is known for his innovations: concerts where the audience chooses the pieces, which means they are played without rehearsal; encores in which the orchestra abandon their instruments and sing instead; operas where he does the staging himself . . . Every convention must be challenged.”

Amen to that.

It was my privilege to know Felix Galimir, a peerless chamber musician raised in the Vienna of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. When he came to the United States in the 1940s, Felix was confounded to discover that there was never enough time. In Vienna, there had been plenty of time.

Another distinguished musicians of my acquaintance, Lazar Gosman, played in Yevgeny Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic before emigrating to the US. He was amazed that, post-concert, symphonic musicians would hop in their cars and drive home. In Leningrad, they would congregate over vodka and talk.

As I previously reported, Ivan Fischer’s Budapest orchestra rehearses without a clock.

 

 

 

 

Virgil Thomson: Guerilla Tactics and Slapdash Judgments

In today’ s Wall Street Journal I review the new Library of America Virgil Thomson compendium. Here’s what I had to say:

The heyday of American classical music occurred around the turn of the 20th century, when most everyone ­involved assumed that American composers would create a native canon and that American orchestras in 2016 would play mainly American music. This vibrant fin de siècle moment also marked the apex of classical-music journalism in the United States. In New York, the most estimable critics were W.J. Henderson of the Times, Henry Edward Krehbiel of the Tribune, and the ubiquitous James ­Gibbons Huneker. All were active participants, not sideline observers.

One reason that music journalism declined after World War I was the criterion of “objectivity,” which ­removed critics from a world of composers, performers and institutional leaders that Henderson, Krehbiel and Huneker had knowingly inhabited. The grand exception, proving the rule, was Virgil Thomson of the New York Herald Tribune, who was a composer of consequence and an active conductor and who maintained close and significant working relationships with artists in other fields. Thomson’s 1967 autobiography, “Virgil Thomson,” ­reprinted in the Library of America’s new Thomson anthology, records theatrical enterprises alongside Orson Welles and John Houseman and interactions with a Parisian cohort that included James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Edited by Tim Page, the new Thomson collection incorporates two additional books—“The State of Music” (1939) and “American Music Since 1910” (1971)—as well as an assortment of essays for the New York Review of Books and other ­periodicals.

Not included, because they were republished in a previous Library of America volume, are the hit-and-run Tribune reviews that made Thomson a notorious and influential guerrilla warrior from 1940 to 1954. These ­brilliantly informal inside jobs bore witness to the commercialized celebrity culture that classical music had become. It was Thomson who fingered Arthur Judson, a national musical power broker (running two ­orchestras and the leading New York concert bureau) who put business first and art second, and it was Thomson again who reduced the ­“educational” efforts of David ­Sarnoff’s NBC and RCA to “the music appreciation racket.” He called the ­violinist Jascha Heifetz ­“essentially frivolous” and considered the Philharmonic “not part of New York’s intellectual life.”

In his autobiography, Thomson explains: “The New York Herald ­Tribune was a gentleman’s paper, more like a chancellery than a business. During the fourteen years I worked there I was never told to do or not to do anything.” Notably, Thomson was not told not to continue composing and conducting. His favorable reviews of Eugene Ormandy, who programmed lots of Thomson’s music with the Philadelphia Orchestra, were part of the package. And he pursued an insouciant personal style that would never have been tolerated at the Times. His principles, he wrote, “engaged me to expose the philanthropic persons in control of our musical institutions for the amateurs they are [and] to reveal the manipulators of our musical distribution for the culturally retarded profit makers that indeed they are.” Another sally in his autobiography records that the Times’s “chronic fear of any take-off toward style came back to mind only the other day, when Howard Taubman, its drama critic, dismissed a play by the poet Robert Lowell as ‘a pretentious, arty trifle.’ ”

If re-reading Thomson’s feuilletons today remains a bracing experience, it must be emphasized that his larger efforts are compromised by know-it-all slapdash judgments and contentious aesthetic biases that are more forgivable and delectable in a daily newspaper, where they may be ­balanced by others’ accounts. The longer pieces collected here are studded with howlers, of which I will cite two bearing on a Thomson specialty: American opera.

Recalling the inception of the Metropolitan Opera on page one of “American Music Since 1910,” Thomson records that “for its first seven years, from 1882 to ’89, [it] gave ­everything, including Bizet’s Carmen, in German.” In fact, the Met began in 1883 as an Italian house and was ambushed by Germans from 1884 to 1891 before the box holders took it back. This issue of opera and language, as Henry Krehbiel (miscalled “Edward” by Thomson in a paragraph extolling fact-checking at the Herald Tribune) acutely appreciated, would prove crucial to the failure of American opera in the decades to come.

A second example: Writing in 1962, Thomson called George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” an “opéra comique, like Carmen, consisting of musical numbers separated by spoken ­dialogue.” But Gershwin wrote sung recitatives. The dialogue one sometimes encounters in “Porgy” was added after Gershwin’s death. Thomson himself loudly reviewed “Porgy” at its 1935 premiere. He denigrated Gershwin as a gifted dilettante—the same judgment he had applied to Charles Ives. A chronic Francophile, Thomson keyed on the professionalism instilled by his Paris-based teacher Nadia Boulanger, who also taught Aaron Copland and countless other Americans whose music was more kindred to Thomson than “Porgy” or Ives’s “Concord” Sonata. A 1962 encomium to Boulanger is the warmest and tenderest thing in the Library of America collection; the usual temperature of Thomson’s prose approximates that of an ice-cold shower.

Thomson’s assessment of Ives, in a chapter from “American Music Since 1910” called “The Ives Case,” makes strange reading today. A breathtaking Thomsonian generalization—“an artist’s life is never accidental, least of all its tragic aspects”—predicates a breathtakingly severe verdict: that all of Ives is compromised by “a divided allegiance.” By dividing himself between composition and the life-insurance work he pursued to earn a living, Thomson argues, Ives never mastered a musical calling. From Thomson’s essay one would never glean that, even as a student, Ives could craft an exemplary German Lied (“Feldeinsamkeit”). Rather, a “homespun Yankee tinkerer,” Ives wrote songs that “will not, as we say, come off.” His exemplification of “ethical principles and transcendental concepts,” Thomson opines, seems “self-conscious,” “not quite first-class.”

Whatever one may make of such judgments, what seemed Germanic hot air to Thomson is what for many today most gauges Ives’s greatness. Those “ethical principles” and “transcendental concepts” are what convey a moral afflatus equally found in Bruckner, Mahler, Sibelius and Shostakovich—also on Thomson’s list of windbag composers. With Germanic “Innerlichkeit” (or inwardness) he will have nothing to do: Only Thomson could have likened its most famous podium practitioner, Wilhelm Furtwängler, to Arturo Toscanini, who “streamlined” music in favor of surface affect.

Thomson believed that the German influence on such American composers as Ives, Edward MacDowell and George Chadwick was toxic. Are Chadwick’s symphonic works merely “a pale copy of . . . continental models”? I would not say that of Chadwick’s effervescent “Jubilee” (1897), with its whiff of “Camptown Races.” Did Thomson even know much of Chadwick’s music? It is doubtful. But his assumptions were echoed in the American-music narratives popularized by Copland and Leonard Bernstein, both of whom also dismissed Chadwick and questioned the professionalism of Ives and Gershwin.

Among the most substantial occasional pieces in the present collection is a 1965 assessment of books about Debussy, Bizet, Berg and Webern for the New York Review; it provides a concise exegesis of Thomson’s aesthetic predilections. Debussy was, he wrote, the “most original” 20th-century composer, and French literature was his inspirational fount. His “most vibrant pages are those in which a literary transcript of some ­visual or other sensuous experience has released in him a need to ­inundate the whole with music. This music, though wrought from a vast vocabulary of existing idiom, is profoundly independent and original. . . . None of it really sounds like anything else. It had its musical origins, of course; but it never got stuck with them; it took off.”

Debussy’s highest flight is the ­opera “Pelléas et Mélisande” (1898), in which “for the first time in over a century (or maybe ever) a composer gave full rights to subtleties below the surface of a play. . . . The sensitivity with which the whole is knit . . . never again produced so fine a fabric.” The only “runners-up” to “Pelléas” among 20th-century operas are Berg’s “Wozzeck” and “Lulu.” Berg depended on his German musical forebears “to guide him through the dark forests of abnormal psychology.” Owing, Thomson confides, to a “perverse fascination with the Germanic view of music as something strictly for scholastic temperaments,” he undertakes a review of Willi Reich’s then-newly translated Berg biography. Both the book and its subject, he says, embody “Germanic types” who “think in simplified alternatives—black or white, right or wrong, our team against all the others in the world.”

A slightly earlier New York Review piece, “How Dead Is Arnold Schoenberg?,” supplements these views. Schoenberg’s letters are said to distill the self-portrait of “a consecrated artist, cunning, companionable, loyal, indefatigable, generous, persistent, affectionate, comical, easily wounded, and demanding.” Schoenberg is the characteristic German “for whom a certain degree of introversion was ­esteemed man’s highest expressive state.” It is good to lay the cards on the table.

And what of Thomson’s own place in music history? The readings at hand amass a shrewd self-assessment, becomingly modest yet laced with piercing insinuations of self-regard. It is only appropriate that Thomson lavishes attention on his two operatic collaborations with Gertrude Stein. “Four Saints in Three Acts” (1934) and “The Mother of Us All” (1947) embellish the tiny American operatic canon. For those who love the artful innocence of Erik Satie, they are a sublime achievement; for the rest of us, they embody a taste rarefied yet readily accessible.

Thomson was also one of the best American composers for film (a topic somewhat skirted in his autobiography). His scores for the classic ­documentaries “The Plow That Broke the Plains” (1936), “The River” (1938) and “Louisiana Story” (1948) are outstandingly fresh, organic in unexpected ways. For a cavalcade of cars fleeing drought-infested farms—the climax of “The Plow”—Thomson ­furnishes a divine habanera. Elsewhere his patchwork of hymns and popular song strikes an American note both authentic and original. When Thomson claimed to have ­preceded Copland in concocting an American idiom combining “simplification” and “folk-style tunes,” he was merely telling the truth.

Finally, Thomson embodies an iconic American life story. Born in Kansas City in 1896, seasoned in Paris, ultimately a legendary denizen of Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, he combined vernacular New World whimsy with the refinements of Old World high art. He traced his ­obstreperousness to “the Booth ­Tarkington-George Ade-Mark Twain connection.” In his lifetime, this ­gadfly spirit made Thomson a necessary voice. Posthumously, he utters fearless but fallible understandings based on formidable knowledge and experience and equally formidable ­eccentricities of feeling and opinion. He is more a guide to his own time and place than a sage analyst or observer of timeless truths.

One can feel grateful for this ­Library of America volume and yet believe that a greater service could be rendered by anthologizing American musical journalists from an earlier era. Henderson’s 2,500-word Times review of the premiere of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony remains a masterpiece of probing approbation, with one of the subtlest descriptions of the central Largo ever conceived. Krehbiel’s 4,000-word Tribune review of the American premiere of Strauss’s “Salome” remains a masterpiece of moral opprobrium, as plausible today as the day it was written. Huneker’s account, in his autobiography, of an inebriated evening with Dvorak (“Such a man is as dangerous to a moderate drinker as a false beacon is to a shipwrecked sailor”) remains among the most colorful portraits of any composer ever penned. A full dose of such writings would open wide a window on an American past not sufficiently remembered—not least by Virgil Thomson.

 

 

 

Virgil Thomson: Guerilla Tactics and Slapdash Judgments

In today’ s Wall Street Journal I review the new Library of America Virgil Thomson compendium:

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/a-li...

The Future of Orchestras, Part III: Bruckner, Palestrina, and the Rolling Stones

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“Would the New York Philharmonic sing Palestrina?” – the question posed by my previous blog – arose from a recent performance of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony in which the musicians did precisely that. The conductor was James Ross, whose University of Maryland Orchestra breaks the mold. Jim writes: #

“’Sense of occasion’ is absolutely the goal; that there are unique reasons why a certain program is taking place with this orchestra in this community on this particular day . . . Concerts should be singularly memorable and unrepeatable. No performance of the Rolling Stones on tour fell short of that goal despite their getting up the next day and doing ostensibly the same concert again each night. That’s why they had groupies! . . . If the only reason some people still come to classical concerts is to hear a specific piece or pieces played live rather than at home, I suspect that specialty audience is now officially well on the way towards extinction. The ones we need to curate are those who come because they expect that something is about to happen, that something about the live experience will offer up ‘a sense of moment’ that will allow unexpected connections and recognitions to unfold for each listener. Those seeking the ‘moment’ are sorely and sadly disappointed at most of our concerts, I fear. This is on us conductors to change by unleashing and challenging those in front of us first, and then helping those behind us to understand why we’re doing what we do, what motivates us. Addressed well, I think just about any audience will give just about any piece a fighting chance of being heard and appreciated.” #

So for his Bruckner Fifth – a work little known to his musicians or his College Park audience — Jim began with a little talk about what he was doing: #

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Then the orchestra sang Palestrina: #

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The University of Maryland Concert Choir furnished further Palestrina excerpts before each of the symphony’s movements “to give a musical and visceral sense of the fountain from which Bruckner’s sacred symphony springs.” Finally, for the refulgent closing reprise of the chorale theme, Jim had the Concert Choir (in a balcony) sing along to the text of Kyrie Eleison. It sounded like this: #

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This enthralling experiment ignites memories of another – Bruckner’s Ninth as rendered by the Pacific Symphony (I’m the Artistic Advisor) five years ago. Carl. St. Clair, the orchestra’s remarkable conductor, is a devout Catholic. The composer with whom he bonds completely is Bruckner. Carl’s humility, and also a deficit in opportunity, have long deferred experiences with this composer that Carl was born to undertake. #

Carl’s Bruckner 9 was his first. The work and the composer were virtually unknown to his Orange County audience. Carl reads this final Bruckner opus as a gripping religious narrative of trial and redemption. For him, the pounding Scherzo signifies a crucible of carnal temptation which the dying composer must endure. The Adagio’s three cataclysms signify a further rite of passage recalling the agonies of Christ. The coda’s beatitude is a leavetaking literally envisioned: the apocalyptic visions sited, the radiant halo of divinity towards which the humble believer ascends and into which he is absorbed. #

Carl wanted to begin the evening by imparting this narrative, but without giving the work away or diminishing the orchestra as an audio-clip tool. So he engaged Paul Jacobs to play the necessary excerpts on the organ. The first half ended with Paul performing Bach’s St Anne Fugue (gloriously). It began with a sung processional by a chorus of Norbertine Fathers. #

Carl’s reading of Bruckner 9 was intensely transporting. He lived the piece. Segerstrom Hall has a choral loft; the listeners there face the conductor. In two of our three performances, there was a medical incident during the Adagio – someone there passed out and needed professional attention. On the second such occasion, Carl had to stop the symphony and ask the audience to pray. I am certain that these events were not coincidental. #

Not every Bruckner performance requires an act of contextualization. I vividly remember, at Carnegie Hall, No. 4 with Sergiu Celibidache and the Munich Philharmonic, and No. 8 with Eugen Jochum and the Bamberg Symphony at the very end of Jochum’s life. Both these conductors established a sense of occasion the moment they set foot on the stage. Celibidache was an acquired taste; you had to listen on his own terms. I knew I would be hearing a slow-motion Bruckner 4 (it lasted 80 minutes) and prepared by getting stoned. The Jochum Bruckner 8 was wholesome, purged of the demonic. In the opening of the Adagio, he conjured colors never before heard. None of the Bruckner Jochum recordings I’ve come across are anything like what I encountered on this magical occasion. #

Celibidache and Jochum were great Bruckner conductors galvanizing an audience predominantly familiar with Bruckner. Those days are mainly gone. What will ultimately impel orchestras to finally rethink the concert experience? Jim Ross writes: #

“Can anything more be expected of the orchestra as an institution if the job description of its players stays the same? The human force of 100 players either encouraged or denied the opportunity to have the orchestra be a place of personal growth, experimentation, and creativity is just too strong to fight. It will come from them and with them, or it won’t come at all, in my opinion.” #

My friend Mark Clague at the University of  Michigan, an exceptional educator, said the same thing in his June 30 response to my initial mega-blog: #

“It’d be best, I think, if the real driver of change will be the imaginative career goals of music students (and by extension future musicians). If students come to school or develop a broader definition of what success could mean, they will demand an education that leads toward this success — say as experts in community engagement. At this point, we’re in something of a vicious circle where success (say at a traditional orchestral audition) is defined by performance skill alone and thus schools are caught between narrow and broader paradigms. Because auditions are inhumanly competitive, schools focus all educational activities prior to winning an audition on such singular success. This leads to the collegiate orchestra, indeed the whole music school on some level, focusing only on teaching traditional repertoire that will appear on such auditions. The collegiate orchestra as a broad, flexible educational tool that you envision would be a powerful innovation . . . Short of a traumatic crisis, it’s hard for me to see change here coming from the top, however. It needs to come from our students. They vote with their applications, their enrollments, and the classes that they choose to take. I hope their courage and openness will allow us all — from professors to professional musicians — to embrace these opportunities.” #

I agree – the more the musicians know about the cultural institution of which they’re part, the more they participate, the better for everyone. Returning from my three weekends of music conferences, I rebuked myself for never having thought to invite any PostClassical Ensemble musicians onto our board. So beginning next season the PCE board of directors will include our principal trumpet, Chris Gekker, and our principal percussionist, Bill Richards. #

Bill anchored last season’s percussion program featuring Lou Harrison’s sui generis Concerto for Violin and Percussion (which we both performed an recorded with Tim Fain). Chris (known to all brass players) has lent distinction to countless PCE performances. I am thinking especially of the Gershwin Concerto in F (the second movement’s divine blues) and of our new Naxos DVD of Redes. Next spring, he takes part (with Alexander Toradze) in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (which began life as a trumpet concerto). #

The same Shostakovich program features Edward Gero (a leading DC actor) as Shostakovich in a 20-minute Theatrical Interlude. We’ll also explore the relationship between Shostakovich and Mieczyslaw Weinberg. The larger topic is “Music Under Stalin.” #

The season begins with “Mozart, Amadeus, and the Gran Partita” – our way of contextualizing the most famous of all wind serenades. The concert will be hosted by Antonio Salieri. The participants include the Washington Ballet Studio Company. We’ll explore how Mozart transformed a genre previously associated with gossiping, flirting, and courtly minuets. The idea is to create a sense of occasion. #

PS – in 2017-18 we undertake an immersion experience – “The Russian Experiment 1917-2017” – featuring the pianist Vladimir Feltsman and the composer Victor Kissine. The repertoire includes Alexandr Raskatov’s The Seasons Digest – which asks the musicians of the orchestra to sing. #