Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 7

Mulling Salonen’s Resignation — Take Two

In response to the resignation of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the San Franciso Symphony has now issued a statement denying disagreement over artistic goals – Salonen’s cited reason for quitting. Rather, according to the board, cutbacks in Salonen’s distinctive programing initiatives were mandated “solely by a lack of immediate financial resources.”

Mulling Salonen’s resignation in this space a day ago, I stressed that I know next to nothing about what actually happened in San Francisco. But I know enough to offer some context – which I did, reflecting on the rarity of full-service music directors like Salonen. Conductors possessing institutional vision are bound to incur “extra” costs and, in the short run, seem riskier in every way. 

I cannot help recalling my experiences a couple of decades ago working for Harvey Lichtenstein, who made the Brooklyn Academy of Music the pre-eminent performing arts venue in the Western hemisphere. He was a man who, so far as I could tell, not once discovered that he lacked “financial resources.” Rather, Harvey would excitedly decide what he wanted to do and instruct his legendary development director, Karen Hopkins, to find money for it.

Harvey’s signature initiative, the Next Wave Festival, became a prototype for arts programming across the nation. But there was only one BAM. Certain lessons can be learned from that – not merely about the purposes of art, but about the means of production. 

The first, and most obvious, is the importance of individual vision and initiative. That Lichtensein was known to all as “Harvey” was less a sign of affection than of familiarity – with Harvey’s easy charm, his volcanic temper, and above all, his unrelenting intensity. It was Harvey who had beginning in 1967 single-handedly transformed a moribund facility in an obscure neighborhood. His formula was to draw audiences from Manhattan by offering what Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center did not. His first BAM season included the long delayed New York premiere of Alban Berg’s Lulu, conducted and directed by Sarah Caldwell; the first New York season ever afforded Merce Cunningham, the maverick choreographer long associated with John Cage; the return from European exile of the Living Theatre of Julian Beck and Judith Malina; and Robert Wilson’s state-of-the-art epic The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud. Lichtenstein, in short, was America’s last great performing arts impresario. (Unless it was Joe Papp.) 

Here is a Harvey Lichtenstein story: we went to St. Petersburg for Valery Gergiev’s 1994 Rimsky-Korsakov festival at the Mariinsky Theater. This was years before Gergiev was a household name in classical music. Our first night was an opera wholly new to both of us: The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh. After the first scene, Harvey slapped my knee and announced, “I’m bringing this to BAM.” And he did – conductor, orchestra, soloists, chorus, sets and costumes for four performances in 1995. This was New York’s introduction to the Mariinsky company, and to an opera sometimes called “the Russian Parsifal.” The New York Times panned it and the run sold poorly. Harvey had a guarantor to make up the deficit. 

In the years I worked at BAM, Harvey also fell in love with France’s Zingaro Equestrian Theater, which required bringing a company of twenty-six horses across the Atlantic and constructing a circus tent in lower Manhattan. He was enamored of Arianna Mnuchkin’s Les Atrides, a series of Greek dramas so elaborately re-imagined that he had to refit a Brooklyn armory to house it. A favorite book of Harvey’s was Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, whose protagonist is plagued by an interior voice repeating the words “I want!”

My job was running the Brooklyn Philharmonic – then the “resident orchestra” of BAM. Prior to my arrival, the BPO had lost over two-thirds of its subscribers over the course of two seasons. As there was nothing more left to lose, Harvey gave me a free hand. My most expensive undertaking was a “Russian Stravinsky” festival including two symphonic concerts (different programs a day apart) and a six-hour Sunday “Interplay.” I brought the Pokrovsky Folk Ensemble from Moscow to perform source rituals for The Rite of Spring and Les noces. I assembled a coterie of feuding scholars including the late Richard Taruskin, whose insistence that Stravinsky was “the most Russian” of all composers, and also “an inveterate liar” who falsified his artistic past, anchored these and other events thematically. We also produced a 60-page illustrated program book (which won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award). I did not think to inquire where I would find the money – but I did.

During my tenure the BPO audience more than tripled and funding-raising increased exponentially (in those days, major American philanthropies supported bona fide classical music initiatives — that’s over now, a crucial story in itself). With the exception of Gidon Kremer, I engaged no celebrity soloists. I hugely benefited from access to BAM’s audience and reputation. But good things happened in great part because the BPO was self-evidently mission-driven. It was different from other orchestras. 

And that’s the first thing I noticed about the San Francisco Symphony when a few months ago my daughter moved to the Bay Area and I had a look at the subscription season online. You could delete every performer’s name – every conductor, every soloist — in that 2023-2024 brochure and the San Francisco Symphony would still retain its own brave identity. Try doing that with another big American orchestra and see what you come up with.    

What’s an Orchestra For? — Mulling Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Resignation from the San Francisco Symphony

The resignation of Esa-Pekka Salonen as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony is dominating classical-music news because Salonen made no secret why he quit: a falling out with the board over his elaborate artistic plans and their cost. I have no first-hand knowledge of any of this. What I do know is that Salonen is not merely a conductor; rather, he is – a rare species today – a full-service music director with a vision and the means to realize it. 

That’s what he showed in Los Angeles, where he shaped the Philharmonic as a cultural institution distinctive to southern California and in synch with contemporary cultural mores. He looked for Americans he could champion and came up with two first-rate West Coast composers – John Adams and Bernard Herrmann – and a magnificent Mexican: Silvestre Revueltas. He inquired into the LA sojourns of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Theodore Thomas, the founding father of the American orchestra a century and a half ago, said “a symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community.” That’s what Salonen was about.

Music directors who are more than conductors are ever in short supply, and never more than today when a hyperactive international career seems to certify a conductor’s importance. In this space, I have often extolled Delta David Gier, whose Lakota Music Project makes his South Dakota Symphony matter to South Dakota. Gier moved to Sioux Falls and raised a family there.

Salonen’s departure from San Francisco – assuming that loud protests from his own musicians, among many others, have no effect – resonates with a 1950 Boston Symphony debacle, and also controversial board decisions in New York and Baltimore: stories that may be currently instructive.

If ever there was an exemplary music director of an American orchestra it was Serge Koussevitzky, who not only made the Boston Symphony his own but defined its mission for Boston and America. His long tenure (1924-49) coincided with a surging modernist moment – led by Aaron Copland – supporting a fresh identity for American concert music. Koussevitzky not only declared that “the next Beethoven vill from Colorado come” – he in effect created the Tanglewood Festival as an American music laboratory. You may well think: What a legacy! But Tanglewood today is nothing like the Tanglewood Koussevitzky envisioned and realized. That Tanglewood ended the day the BSO board named Charles Munch his successor. Koussevitzky had urged the board to appoint his protégé Leonard Bernstein. Leaving aside the question of whether Bernstein at 31 was ready for such an assignment, he was in all other respects the ideal choice: securing an American classical music was his raison d’etre. He was even a Harvard graduate, a Massachusetts native.

The late Robert Freeman, whom I was privileged to know, was the son of the BSO’s longtime principal double bass. Henry Freeman served under Koussevitzky, then Munch, then Erich Leinsdorf. With each appointment, he told his son, the orchestra declined. Freeman was probably mainly reflecting on the standard of performance. (In a recent blog about the BSO, I had occasion to embed Koussevitzky’s peerless world premiere broadcast of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.) Commensurately, the Boston Symphony lost its way. In truth, it has never recovered from the board’s 1950 decision.

And so Bernstein instead wound up in as music director of an orchestra for which he was less suited. The New York Philharmonic had never been mission-driven. Rather, it was misruled for  more than three decades by a powerbroker – Arthur Judson — who frankly believed that “the audience sets taste.” Here was a case where a symphonic board itself stepped up in quest of an institutional mission. It fired Judson and, in the same salvo, ousted its music director: Dimitri Mitropoulos, who happened to be a conductor of genius. And Mitropoulos had earlier pursued a brave vision in Minneapolis – a prerogative denied him in New York by Judson’s stranglehold on artistic policy. In any event, when Bernstein took over and declared that he wished to begin with a historic survey of American music, the Philharmonic board passionately approved. 

An initiative like that would have resonated in Boston. In New York, it was too late in the day and Bernstein left after a mere ten seasons.  His preferred successor, one understands, was another conductor/composer/pianist: Lukas Foss. Foss was an astounding musician (I worked with him at the Brooklyn Philharmonic). It is little recognized that, however incidentally, he was one of the supreme American pianists of his generation. On the podium, his unconventional methods inspired many instrumentalists and alienated others. In any event, the Philharmonic opted instead for Pierre Boulez, who had nothing in common with Leonard Bernstein or Bernstein’s American vision. After that came Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, Lorin Maazel, Alan Gilbert, Jaap van Zweden, and now Gustavo Dudamel – an eclectic list resistant to lineage or tradition.

But the most startling conductor appointment in recent American decades came in Baltimore in 1998. David Zinman, a bona fide music director, had turned the orchestra into an important  platform for American music. He also had a radically fresh take on Beethoven. And he was a gifted advocate whose singular “Casual Concerts” revealed a zany comedic gift. Zinman was succeded by a major Russian conductor: Yuri Temirkanov. That was a startling coup. At least as startling, it was a rebuff to David Zinman and everything he had achieved. Zinman renounced his “Conductor Laureate” status in 2001.

Beset by conductors, lacking music directors, our major American orchestras today struggle to define what they’re for and how they connect to the changing cities they serve. Perhaps the most distinguished exception, proving the rule, was the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Mark Swed, the Los Angeles Times’ longtime chief music critic, chimes in valuably here.

I deal in detail with Koussevitzky, Mitropouos, Judson, and Bernstein in Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (2005).

Making Alma Mahler “actually seem like a real person”

The new German edition of “The Marriage,” from Wolke Verlag — with an ingenious cover

When I embarked on my novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York, I felt I possessed a pretty good understanding of Gustav, and none at all of Alma. Nor are the various biographical treatments of Alma adequate – she escapes portraiture, and the basis of her legendary allure remains inscrutable. My only way forward was to endeavor to experience Mahler’s glamorous spouse, and her bewilderingly new surroundings, as best I could. As I have earlier testified in this space, I learned the most when juxtaposing her with women of high professional achievement – in particular, with the Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad (the Callas of her time) and the young Natalie Curtis, who documented the music of Native America. In these encounters, as I re-imagined them, Alma clarified her insecurities. And of course in narrating the volatility and vulnerability of her husband (my book is not hagiography), I incidentally rendered Alma’s vicissitudes more understandable.

But it has come as a complete surprise that all reviews of The Marriage discover something like a breakthrough account of Gustav Mahler’s wife. The latest, by Kenneth Woods (a gifted Mahler conductor and scholar) in The American Purpose, reads in part:

“In a novel of so much value, the central triumph is not Horowitz’s ability to humanize Mahler, but to have provided readers—for the first time in my experience—with a nuanced, believable, balanced, and compelling portrait of Alma Mahler. Like her husband, Alma’s was a complex and contradictory personality, and this has made it easy for writers to appropriate her for their own ends. 

“To some, Alma remains the villain in Mahler’s life story—the woman who broke his heart and his health, and whose writings were so full of misleading and dishonest details about the man that she damaged his posthumous reputation far more than any critic. Her antisemitism and alcoholism have not made her a particularly sympathetic figure, either. To others, she was the innocent victim of Mahler’s misogyny, a woman denied the opportunity to exist on her own terms and forced instead to be “wife and mother” to the great man, to serve the cause of his genius. Neither of these extremes is credible.

“Horowitz’s Alma is the first incarnation of her this author has encountered that actually seems like a real person. And, fittingly for a book entitled The Marriage, the novel is as much, if not more, hers as her husband’s. There are so many questions about Alma and her marriage to Mahler, and most of them begin with “Why?” This was the first book in which I felt like I was getting believable answers.”

Lower down, Woods writes of my portrayal of Mahler’s crucial New York predecessor, the conductor Anton Seidl, that his “shadow looms over the tragic events Horowitz captures so poignantly. As such, he emerges as perhaps the figure one most looks forwards to learning more about.” A protégé of Richard Wagner, in effect Wagner’s surrogate son, Seidl is in fact the central character of my next book – another historical fiction that’s a prequel to The Marriage: The Disciple: A Tale of New York in the Gilded Age. 

You can read the rest of Kenneth Woods’ review here.

Related news: a handsome German edition of The Marriage has just been published by Wolke Verlag (the ingenious cover sits atop this blog). A Korean version is forthcoming. I will offer a talk on Mahler and Schubert (“Taverns in Paradise”) at the Colorado Mahlerfest this May 18. And Mahlerei – my bass trombone concertino adapting the Scherzo of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony for David Taylor – will receive a Mahlerfest performance three days ahead of that.  

What If Porgy Happens to be White? — Celebrating the Art of Lawrence Tibbett

Lawrence Tibbett as Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra Lawrence Tibbett as Gruenberg’s Emperor Jones

George Gershwin chose Lawrence Tibbett to make the first recordings of Porgy’s songs from his opera Porgy and Bess. But Tibbett did not sing them at the Alvin Theatre – Todd Duncan (called by Gershwin “the Black Tibbett”) did. Gershwin wanted a Black Porgy onstage, and Tibbett was white.  He was also the supreme American operatic baritone of his (or any other) time. 

An extraordinary new 10-CD set issued by Marston Records celebrates the art of Lawrence Tibbett – and so does my most recent “More than Music” feature on NPR. The diversity of his achievement is staggering. And his many recordings in Black dialect are something to think about. In the opinion of John McWhorter, on my NPR show: Given Tibbett’s pre-eminence as an American baritone, given his capacity to inhabit a role and excavate feeling, given his dedication to opera in English, the role of Porgy “was almost written for him.”

McWhorter’s recent New York Times columns include one on “Black English Doesn’t Have to Be Just for Black People.” He takes issue with critics of the comedian Matt Rife, who’s always “dipping into Black English.” McWhorter writes: “Rife is not posing or ridiculing; he’s connecting. Linguists call it accommodation.” The subtlety of McWhorter’s argument resists summary here. But it’s pertinent that Tibbett, too, is “not posing or ridiculing.” Just have a listen to his 1935 version of “Oh, Bess Oh Where’s My Bess?”

McWhorter’s NPR commentary continues: Though the notion that “white people should be allowed to sing like Black people” was “once OK,” today a white baritone singing and acting “Black” would “be hunted to a different planet.” This type of thinking, McWhorter argues, should be “reconsidered” – Tibbett singing Porgy embodies “an American artform evaluable in itself [that] need not be seen as mocking.” 

As McWhorter happens to be a professional linguist, I asked him the most obvious question. He answered that, in the context of linguistic practice in 1935, Tibbett “sounds authentic to me. . . . He sounds to me like an educated Black person singing in a sincere ‘dialect idiom,’ . . . adopting a dialect in the same way an opera singer is trained to sing with a proper German accent. . . . If we told a modern skeptical Black critic to listen to one of those [Tibbett] cuts, and we told him it was a Black person, I doubt if one out of one hundred of them would be able to smoke out that they were actually listening to a white man.” Nearly half a century after the premiere of Gershwin’s opera, it’s come time “to just listen to Tibbett as a human being,” opines John McWhorter.

I’ve called my show “’Wanting You’: The Art of Lawrence Tibbett,” referencing an American operetta chestnut, a baritone blast today mainly associated with the likes of Nelson Eddy: hearty and synthetic. Tibbett’s rendering of this Sigmund Romberg number – which he frequently sang on the radio and in recital coast to coast — attains a startling emotional veracity. I invited Thomas Hampson – today’s most famous American baritone – to have a listen. Hampson said: “Quite frankly, this may be some of the most perfect singing I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s just breath-taking.  I know the song, I’ve sung it, it’s no walk in the park . . . And the way he negotiates, just technically, this expansive expression, but also with the beauty of tone . . . I mean, my goodness me, what a sound! And to think that this is what was cherished.”

Tibbett craved the role of Porgy. But it was Gershwin’s preference that Porgy be sung onstage by a Black cast – and the Gershwin Estate has maintained this prohibition, at least in the US. Late in his career, in 1953, Tibbett was signed to sing Porgy in Europe. But by then his voice was shot and he had to withdraw. He did, however, sing two roles at the Met made up as an African-American: the Black fiddler Jonny in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, and – a signature part – Brutus Jones in Louis Gruenberg’s operatic adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. Fleeing through a jungle, pursued by rebels, Jones sings “Standin’ in the Need of Prayer.” Tibbett left an overwhelming 1934 studio recording of this number. Harry Burleigh, for a time the leading African-American concert baritone, heard Gruenberg’s opera and wrote appreciatively to Tibbett. Tibbett wrote back: “Of all the letters of praise I received, yours means most to me, you who stand so high in the esteem of the Colored race, as well as in the esteem of my own race. You saw the inner significance of the work, and that was lacking in most everyone else’s analysis.”

On Marston’s Tibbett set, and on my radio show, you can also hear Tibbett singing “Scottish” and singing Cockney, singing in French, German, and Italian, inhabiting a bewildering range of personalities and genres. “He had a chameleon-like ability, almost at a genius level, to take on . . . major identity changes,” says Conrad L. Osborne, for more than half a century the pre-eminent English-language authority on opera in performance. On part three of my show, Osborne (who contributes a terrific 60-page booklet to the Marston box) ponders at length what makes Tibbett’s story quintessentially “American.” His training was ad hoc and sui generis; he never studied abroad. Born in Bakersfield, California, he was the son of sheriff killed in a shoot-out when he was seven. His very vocal timbre, Osborne suggests, conveyed an American “call” kindred in spirit to the “lonesome cowboy.” In fact, not only did Tibbett sing cowboy songs; he worked as a ranch hand. This range of experience mattered. 

Among the big finds in the Marston set, calibrating the range of Tibbett’s genius, is a 1937 Chesterfield Hour performance of Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.” He’s not just a big voice vacationing from opera. This rendition is as personal as Frank Sinatra’s or Ella Fitzgerald’s. It’s unique to Tibbett – his way with words, his vocal opulence, his huge dynamic range. The song was brand new in 1937, by the way – Tibbett is pitching it. 

As memorable, in Marston’s set, is a 1937 Chesterfield Hour performance of Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Tibbett also frequently sang on the Packard Hour, the Ford Sunday Evening Hour, the Telephone Hour, the General Motors Hour, the Voice of Firestone. That is: on national commercial radio programs hawking cars, cigarettes, and automobile tires, he regaled a mass audience with opera, operetta, and the Great American Songbook.

To my ears, Tibbett is unexcelled in what may be the quintessential Italian lyric baritone aria: “Di provenza” from Verdi’s La traviata. In the Marston set, you can hear him sing it on the Chesterfield Hour. You can also hear him sing it in live performance at the Met in 1935: the cradling legato of his dark baritone, its freedom of phrase and of cadential punctuation, are galvanizing. Singing in German, he’s also the most compelling exponent I know of Wolfram, in Wagner’s Tannhauser. That’s opposite Lauritz Melchior at the Met in 1936. If you happen to be familiar with this opera, check out the third act’s linchpin moment, when Wolfram’s unexpected compassion ignites Tannhauser’s confessional Rome Narrative; Tibbett’s expression of empathy – at 2:36:00 here — is so believable that the incredulity of Tannhauser’s gratitude seems wholly unrehearsed.

I close my radio commentary on the art of Lawrence Tibbett with a “final thought” that “feels so presumptuous that I’m almost reluctant to confide it” —

“We tend to think of human nature as a constant – generation to generation, the same or similar thoughts and feelings. But in recent decades – decades of laptops and cellphones and social media – changes in human predilection are kicking in at exponential speed. When you consider Lawrence Tibbett’s exceptional popularity – on radio, in Hollywood, in opera, in recitals in halls large and small across the United States — re-encountered, he bears witness to another time. Sure, we’ve always expressed, or cloaked, our feelings differently, from one moment, or from one epoch to another.  But some of those feelings may actually wither away. Listening to Tibbett sing Cole Porter or Jerome Kern, or Gershwin or Verdi, makes me wonder how much we’ve changed and what those changes may mean. 

“I don’t doubt that for many young people today, the opulence of the Tibbett baritone, and its operatic connotations, are insuperable obstacles. I think of how much they’re missing.”

LISTENING GUIDE (tune in here): 

00:00: “Oh Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess?”

2:42: “Wanting You”

4:18: Commentary by Thomas Hampson on “Wanting You”

6:40: “In the Still of the Night”

9:33: “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”

15:16: Commentary by John McWhorter on “singing Black”

21:02: George Shirley on Porgy and Bess

24:08: “Standin’ in the Need of Prayer” (from The Emperor Jones)

26:02: George Shirley on The Emperor Jones

30:15: “Di provenza” (from La traviata)

34:40: Jago’s Credo (from Otello)

37:35: Conrad Osborne on what makes Tibbett “American”

Opera in South Africa: “You Get What You Deserve”

One of the most remarkable developments in classical music today is the profusion of gifted Black South African opera singers graduating from the University of Cape Town and winding up on major stages in Europe and the United States. Why and how is that happening? As I was recently in South Africa, I enjoyed an opportunity to try and find out. The outcome is the most recent of my “More than Music” documentaries on National Public Radio. You can hear it here.

South Africa is a “singing country.” In segregated Black townships, under apartheid, singing was inherent to church and school. And it became commonplace for Black high schoolers to sing selections from oratorios. With the end of apartheid in 1991, the cork was out of the bottle. By 2000, more than 90 per cent of the opera students in Cape Town were Black. 

As remarkable: casting in opera became color-blind virtually overnight. In the US, opera companies and audiences resisted seeing Black tenors sing opposite white sopranos. Today, the acrimony continues over who should sing what, and whether the entire enterprise is “colonialist.”

Here is the soprano Goitsemang Lehobye, whom you can hear singing Verdi and Gershwin on my “More than Music” show: “I want to sing [Puccini’s] Madame Butterfly one day. But am I not going to do it because I’m not Japanese, I’m not Asian? I come from a place where we don’t think like that. When you get onstage, you pretend to be what you’re supposed to be. And life goes on.”

And here is the tenor Sakhumzi Martins, whom I (surreptitiously) recorded – in Fish Hook, South Africa — in a rapturous rendition of “Maria,” from West Side Story: “It’s a shame what Black Americans are facing. In South Africa, for you to get cast, you have to be  hard worker. There’s no short way. The opportunities are quite slim, so you have to work and sweat. We have learned not to take things personally. It’s just business, you have to want it more than the next person. So it’s got nothing to do with color [who gets chosen]. We all know one another. In South Africa, you get what you deserve.”

And here is John McWhorter, quoted on my radio show: ”To a Black American, some Africans cam seem almost oddly secure and joyous – they don’t seem to have a basic sense of whiteness as an insult to them.”

To hear a related “More than Music” program on George Shirley and racial integration at the Metropolitan Opera, click here.

LISTENING GUIDE:

Part 1 (00:00): Sakhumzi Martins sings Bernstein; Jeremy Silver (who runs the University of Cape Town opera program) on what’s happening and why

Part 2 (12:00): Goitsemang Lehobye sings Verdi and Gershwin; Angelo Gobbato on the history of opera in South Africa; Mzilikazi Khumalo and the South African choral tradition (with commentary by Khumalo and music historian Thomas Pooley)

Part 3 (29:58): Khumalo’s epic Ushaka (commentary by orchestrator/conductor Robert Maxym); summing up: “In South Africa, you get what you deserve.”

The Best Performance of the Worst Masterpiece?

Gershwin’s Rhapsody performed by Alexander Tsfasman and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky

Now that the centenary of Rhapsody in Blue (last Monday) has come and gone – with fanfare and a degree of controversy and a sampling of many renditions of Gershwin’s “worst masterpiece” – I am left with a craving to revisit my favorite version: by Alexander Tsfasman and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. That’s right: a 1960s Soviet studio recording with a Moscow orchestra. 

Rozhdestvensky was the leading Russian symphonic conductor of his generation. Tsfasman was the Russian pianist most associated with Rhapsody in Blue, having toured it throughout the Soviet Union during the interwar decades.

I would call this recording a supreme validation of Gershwin – from abroad (of course), where he was not patronized.

A product of the Moscow Conservatory, Tsfasman (though closely associated with jazz throughout his career) brings to Gershwin’s piano writing a Romantic keyboard arsenal – hair-trigger virtuosity; an heroic range of sonority and dynamics – rarely encountered in this much battered score. Initially denigrated by Lawrence Gilman in the New York Herald-Tribune for its “trite and feeble” tunes, the Rhapsody was later described by Leonard Bernstein as “not a composition at all.” Most recently, in the New York Times, it was pegged the “worst masterpiece,” “corny and naïve.”

If you care to sample Tsfasman’s Gershwin bear-hug, start with the solo at 8:30 and go to the “love theme,” magnificently prepared and sung, and thence to the end.

Another validation, again from abroad, is last Monday’s 45-minute feature on BBC 3: a tenacious inquiry, by Olivia Giovetti and Nick Taylor, into the American “melting pot”: what it was – and was not — for Gershwin; whether something like it can be captured in music today. The participants are mainly American composers, who volunteer a range of considered responses, including some misgivings.   

I contribute my own two cents — and now find I have this to add: Gershwin’s pot included Black American music, Cuban music, Jewish music, classical music. He loved it all and didn’t worry about disrespecting anyone. In today’s terms, he was a heedless appropriator. But his curiosity was so great, and his gift so facile, that he could absorb these influences without skimming.

Today the range of influences is much greater — for a start: Asian and African music (as Steve Reich mentions on the BBC show). This may be viewed as an enrichment, but it’s also a risky complication. We have one master practitioner of East/West fusion who’s deeply versed in a wide-ranging multiplicity of styles — that’s Lou Harrison. A lot of what’s produced by American composers today, reflecting on the American experience, seems to me in comparison “makeshift music”: a shortcut. Will any of it last? 

Gershwin, as he rapidly matured, became a student of musical form — in some respects, the hallmark of Western classical music: organizing time. For instance: considering that Porgy and Bess was Gershwin’s first attempt at something like grand opera, the scene of Robbins’ funeral is a magnificently knit narrative sequence (which cannot be said of the opera as a whole — Gershwin was still learning). What American composers are today aspiring toward a comparable mastery of long-range musical argument? I worry about this sort of thing. And even more (of course) about the state of the American “melting pot” generally.

The question overhanging BBC-3’s splendid tribute to Rhapsody in Blue is: Where are we now? 

Indeed.

 

Happy Birthday to the “Worst Masterpiece”

February 12 marks the 100th birthday of Rhapsody in Blue. Via NPR, the daily newsmagazine “1A” is re-airing my “Gershwin Moment” documentary from last February; it highlights my favorite Rhapsody in Blue recording, by Alexander Tsfasman and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky (Moscow, 1960). And I’m taking part in additional Gershwin radio features on NPR and BBC-3. As the pianist Benjamin Pasternack once had occasion to remark to me: “It’s the most beloved piece in the American concert repertoire.” 

But, historically, it may also be the most reviled. When I wrote Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (2005), among my most startling discoveries was “the Gershwin Threat.” In the classical music community, prominent musicians who spoke up for Gershwin were invariably foreign-born – a long list including Schoenberg, Klemperer, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel. American-born classical musicians typically disparaged Gershwin as a dilettante interloper. The larger picture here is the Jazz Threat – an antipathy to jazz being one of the defining features of interwar American classical music. In fact, the Gershwin Threat is an inexhaustible topic – and it apparently remains itself inexhaustible.

A much noticed Jan. 26 article in the New York Times, by the estimable jazz pianist Ethan Iverson, was headlined: “The Worst Masterpiece: ’Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100.” Iverson calls Gershwin’s Rhapsody “naïve and corny.” His grievance is that the “promise” of Rhapsody in Blue “hasn’t been honored.” Gershwin’s “bold and obvious proposal” was that America’s vital Black vernacular be merged with classical genres. And it never really happened.

He’s correct about that – our concert composers have mainly squandered the Black musical motherlode – but Gershwin (of all people) is not to blame. He was the great hope, not the great obstacle. Iverson cites the “reception history” of Rhapsody in Blue – but that history is obviously unknown to him. What’s salient here isn’t that Rhapsody “clogged the arteries” of American symphonic practice; what’s salient is that it was shunned. Just check out the subscription-concert repertoire for the major American orchestras all the way to the turn of the 21t century – with the exception of the New York Philharmonic, they all ghettoized Gershwin as a marginal “pops” composer. A typical example: the Boston Symphony first performed Rhapsody in Blue on subscription in 1997. 

Did Rhapsody in Blue exert a baneful influence on American composers? No – it exerted virtually no influence at all. They denigrated it as amateur hackwork. The most notable exception, if it can be called that, was Aaron Copland’s Piano Concerto of 192 , conceived as a modernist “improvement” on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F. And that’s how Paul Rosenfeld influentially extolled it — for fixing Gershwin’s “hash derivative” efforts. Roy Harris, in comparison, urged Copland to ignore jazz altogether. You have to look abroad – to, e.g., Ravel’s divine Piano Concerto in G – to find a major composer for whom Gershwin was a catalyst for memorably assimilating the jazz influence. In the US, the exception that proves the rule was Gershwin’s own Porgy and Bess – itself a work still threatening and misunderstood in the US (but not abroad).

Gershwin’s followers, Iverson complains, had “terrible rhythm” (he singles out Oscar Levant). But Gershwin was himself a master stride pianist. He was intimate with Harlem. He hung out with James P. Johnson and Luckey Roberts.

The Gershwin Threat was many things. It stigmatized Black America as declasse. It symptomatized New World provincialism, an exaggerated quest for pedigree. It never wholly died.

***

I write about the Gershwin Threat at length in “On My Way” – the Forgotten Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess’’ and Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. 

And here’s a Listening Guide for The Gershwin Moment on 1A:

00:00 Rhapsody in Blue, as recorded in Soviet Russia in 1960

4:12 — John McWhorter on resituating Gershwin in the story of American music

8:55 — Ruby Elzy sings “My Man’s Gone Now” for the departed composer

13:40 –Kirill Gerstein plays “I Got Rhythm”

14:30 — Gerstein performs and discusses his improvised cadenza in the Gershwin Piano Concerto in F

23:33 — Traci Lombre on Gershwin and Black America

26:20 — Gershwin plays “I Got Rhythm”

27:40 — Nina Simone sings “I Love You Porgy”

29:50 — “Music by Gershwin” on the radio (1934)

35:10 — Mark Clague on An American in Paris — taxi horns and sonata structure (with the University of Michigan Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Kiesler)

40:40 — What if Gershwin had lived as long as Copland (with comments by Mark Clague)

The Boston Symphony In Trouble

[Above: Boston’s Symphony Hall, built by Henry Higginson and opened in 1900.]

Last week I heard the Boston Symphony perform Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth at Carnegie Hall. The conductor was their music director since 2014: Andris Nelsons. I had planned to write a blog but instead emailed my impressions to a dozen friends in the music business. The emails that came back – some from people long familiar with the BSO or Nelsons or both – more than suggested that this is an orchestra in trouble. So I’ve decided to turn my private email into a public blog. I’m willing to risk seeming presumptuous and gratuitous. I have a constructive agenda.

My wife Agnes and I left at intermission. We were climbing the walls.

We were seated opposite the first violins, about 15 rows back. I would not even call this section a section. It was an eclectic group of violinists, disengaged to varying degrees. At the rear were two ladies who liked to chat. They did so in between scenes. At times they barely moved their bows. At the end of the first half, when the orchestra rose to bow, it took them a long time to leave their seats and they did so chatting.

The conductor is a mystery to me. When he asked his violins for a big response, the reaction was sluggish. I see that he conducts in Leipzig, Vienna, Berlin, that his Shostakovich CDs win awards. I encountered him once before, leading Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame at the Met. I was with a distinguished pianist; we both found it slack. 

My first experience of Lady Macbeth was at the City Opera back when it performed at City Center. I was in high school. The conductor was Julius Rudel. The orchestral interludes raised the roof. The show was hot and fierce.

A year ago, I participated in a memorable Shostakovich 7 in South Dakota – I write about it often. Some time afterward, I spot-checked a few recorded performances of the soul-stirring ending of that symphony. The Nelsons/BSO version compared unfavorably, I thought, with Delta David Gier/South Dakota Symphony. In fact, the same South Dakota performance included, on the first half, one of those Lady Macbeth interludes – wittier than Nelsons’ BSO rendition.

The BSO’s Lady Macbeth was sung in Russian by a non-Russian cast — my wife, fluent in Russian, was unimpressed. They next record it for DG.

The house was practically full and everyone seemed prepared to enjoy the second half.

The BSO has a new executive director: Chad Smith, coming over from LA. He will make a difference. Already, he’s announced the creation of a humanities arm – something the LA Phil has, something every major American orchestra needs. And he’s increased the presence of his music director at Tanglewood – in principle, the right move. 

I imagine that he will rethink the programing. What will happen with the humanities component remains to be seen. In LA, so far as I can tell, it emphasizes the contemporary arts. Nothing wrong with that. But it bears reckoning that Boston is not LA – no other American musical institution had nearly so impressive a beginning. The orchestra’s inventor, owner, and operator, in 1881, was Henry Higginson, a visionary genius insufficiently recalled and not least by the BSO itself. The conductors of those early seasons included Arthur Nikisch – later the pre-eminent symphonic conductor in Germany. Nikisch’s 400 BSO concerts are today wholly unremembered. At the time, their impact was cataclysmic. This is a story that bears retelling. 

The orchestra’s most impactful music director was Serge Koussevitzky (1924–1949); it is he who created the Tanglewood Festival as an American music laboratory. Koussevitzky was a man who thought nothing of telling Bela Bartok, terminally ill in a New York hospital bed, that we was to compose a major work for the Boston Symphony. The result was the Concerto for Orchestra, which Koussevitzky premiered in 1944. A few weeks later, he scheduled further performances of the same music so it could be nationally broadcast. That radio performance (Dec. 30, 1944) remains the most vivid, most virtuosic version I have ever heard (or will ever hear); the galvanizing string choir is a Koussevitzky signature.

Koussevitzky’s many causes included pieces by his countryman Igor Stravinsky then little played by others in the US. It was also in Boston that Stravinsky delivered his seminal Norton lectures at Harvard University. This is a story that the BSO and Harvard could remember together. 

We are today witnessing an ever riper crisis in the American symphonic community. Our orchestras, once civic bastions, need to figure out what they’re for. In my experience, the South Dakota Symphony is one orchestra ahead of the pack. Its example should be studied. (For my 7,000 word American Scholar manifesto on “Shostakovich and South Dakota,” click here.)

The larger crisis is an erasure of the arts from the American experience. The crucial loss is of cultural memory. We live in the present moment. Our attention spans are short. But the arts, historically, build on past achievement. History, lineage, tradition: ballast. 

I cannot think of an American cultural institution with a more glorious history than  the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

To hear a “More than Music” NPR feature on the South Dakota Symphony, with live excerpts from Lady Macbeth (at 29:56) and (at 00:10 and 8:45) Shostakovich’s Seventh, click here.

For a long look at Henry Higginson, see my Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle (2012) [with a jacket blurb from former BSO CEO Mark Volpe].

For much more on Nikisch and Koussevitzky in Boston, see my Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall (2005)

Rachmaninoff in Exile: “Implacable Poise and Sovereign Humanity”

Reviewing Fiona Maddocks’ beautiful new book on Sergei Rachmaninoff in exile for The American Scholar, I write: 

“With the waning of modernism, Rachmaninoff’s stock began to rise; for the first time, he became an object of serious scholarly inquiry. Today, he ranks with Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Serge Prokofiev as one of four great Russian composers populating the interwar period and after. . . .

“In this company, Rachmaninoff is the one who left Russia yet stayed Russian. At first, he seemed creatively stranded. . . . Then, miraculously, came two late masterpieces. The first, the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, is concise and ingenious, witty and warm. It also somewhat feeds on the smart syncopations and wicked virtuosity of Harlem piano. The second is the Symphonic Dances . . . Summoning his waning energies, he fashioned a musical testament. . . .

“We are drawing a new musical map. Looking back, the twentieth no longer seems the century of Stravinsky. Prokofiev once eclipsed Shostakovich – but no longer. And Sergei Rachmaninoff stands apart from the turmoil that enveloped him, a pillar of implacable poise and sovereign humanity.”

To read the review, click here.

For a related Rachmaninoff blog, clock here.

“Tannhäuser” — Take Four

Wilhelm Furtwängler

Conrad L. Osborne has now chimed in with a typically riveting review of the Met Tannhäuser, bristling with insights into the opera and its performance last December 12. Read it.

As a brief postscript to my three previous Tannhäuser blogs, and Conrad’s blog, would like to draw particular attention to his observations about the current condition of the Met orchestra, as revealed in the opening pages of the opera’s famous overture:

“The playing almost never sounded committed to the beauty and drama of the writing. It was generally obedient to the letter of its law, but never to its spirit. This was patently true of the strings, and—not to overlook the placidity of the lower-voiced viols—most patently of the violins. As important as the other choirs are in our mind’s-ear evocation of a Wagnerian texture, it is the strings, led on by the violins, that carry the writing forward the largest share of the time, as in most composition for a classical orchestra. So (staying with the first couple of minutes of the Overture, one of the all-time greatest) you have only to imagine the first string entrance, in the cellos, with the Burden of Sin theme (“Ach, schwer drückt mich der Sünden Last” is your textual reference); then the violins taking up the theme, but higher, with a seraphic tint that suggests that though sin still exerts its drag, a light gleams on high—both these brief, leaning-forward statements played calmly and prettily, without the slightest hint of a counterforce, of an inner struggle; and finally, over the fortissimo entrance of the brass and percussion with the Pilgrim’s Chorus, one of the score’s most famous effects, the overlay of descending violin triplets, utterly undone by a literal picking-apart of each triplet into evenly played duplets interrupted by rests, with no sense of attack or of playing through, as if the players just didn’t know how this is supposed to go.” 

To add my two cents: The mechanical rendering of the violin triplets during the first grand statement of the pilgrims’ theme produced the audio equivalent of blinding strobe lights flashing at regular intervals; it was bewilderingly odd. As for the entrances of the cellos and violins a little earlier on (as described by Conrad), just about any credentialed recording of this glorious passage will convey its gravitas and ardor. Try, for instance, Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1952. It would be a simple task to notate the many inflections of pulse, tempo, and dynamics, including a characteristic climactic allargando, here interpolated by the conductor and players. But it would be impossible to replicate this performance accordingly; the urgency of the pilgrims’ song must be felt. And unless this overture strives, it cannot possibly launch the opera.

Many years ago, when the Met orchestra regularly failed to make much of Valery Gergiev, I urged one of its members to attend a New York City concert by Gergiev and his own Mariinski Orchestra. He did – and discovered the  majestic soundworld that Gergiev was trying to instill in the Met pit. Though it will never happen, one thing that would improve matters in today’s Met pit would be a listening exercise. I am certain that some members of the current Met orchestra would be flabbergasted to discover to what it sounded like in the days of Artur Bodanzky and Ettore Panizza – beginning with the sheer energy of the playing. This was still an Italianate band, once led by Arturo Toscanini. It specialized in hair-trigger attacks and cantabile slides in the strings. It brought its own galvanizing style and powderkeg intensity to Wagner and Verdi, especially with Bodanzky and Panizza on the podium. Those broadcast recordings remain not only inspirational, but specifically instructive — moreso now than ever.