Alex Ross's Blog, page 16

Chanticleer sings Machaut

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From Manuscript A at the Bibliothèque National.

Medieval Longing. The New Yorker, July 1, 2024.

The San Francisco Symphony debacle

[image error]Uncomfortable revelations often ensue when journalists with real business experience scrutinize the byzantine doings and opaque sayings of large non-profit institutions. Adam Lashinsky, former executive editor of Fortune magazine, has done a huge service by addressing the crisis at the San Francisco Symphony in an article for the San Francisco Standard. When Esa-Pekka Salonen announced earlier this year that he would not renew his contract because of a fundamental disagreement with the Board of Governors, the Board and its CEO, Matt Spivey, responded with scary-sounding talk of drastic deficits. Lashinsky examines these claims and finds them problematic. He writes: "Spivey says the symphony had an $11 million operating deficit in its most recent fiscal year. But that’s only true if you leave out an 'extraordinary' $15.1 million donation from the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation." He also says: "The symphony says much of its endowment is restricted to certain uses at certain times. That said, despite signaling in its most recent audited financial report that it would decrease its annual 'draw' from 5.75% to 4.5% over six years, it recently changed gears and increased that figure to 6.45%. The cash is clearly there for the taking—but apparently not enough to have kept the respected conductor it had worked so hard to recruit." Most eyebrow-raising is Lashinsky's mention of rumored plans to merge the San Francisco Symphony with the San Francisco Opera. "Spivey claims ignorance about these claims," Lashinsky adds. This strand of the story bears particularly close watching.

Previously: Mäkelä in Chicago, Salonen in San Francisco.

A Liza Lim and Karin Hellqvist moment

Lim writes: "Part 3 of the work comprises a sequence of suggestions for the player to recall aspects of the Swedish folk tradition in the form of one of the Näktergal polskas (handed down in the 19th century by fiddle-player ‘Nightingale’ Erik Ersson from the Dalarna region of Sweden). This act of recall is intended as a kind of ventriloquism of other voices, of patterns lodged in the body through practice and examined through a deconstruction of left- and right-hand movements. The various forms of ornamentation: finger trills, lateral bow glides and brushing movements, are amplifications of notions of desire; of the human desire to create ‘lures’ through demonstrations of skill, aesthetic beauty, and an artisan’s personalisation of given materials, weaving threads of time, story, dance and song."

An Enescu / Hamelin moment

A Shostakovich / Finley moment

"...and art made tongue-tied by authority..."

When Rudi met Pauline

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On December 6 and 7, 1918, Sergei Prokofiev led the Chicago Symphony in a program of Haydn's Symphony No. 7 ("Le Midi"), d'Indy's The Enchanted Forest, Chabrier's España, and his own Scythian Suite and First Piano Concerto, conducting the last from the keyboard. As Phillip Huscher notes in a CSO blog post, Henriette Weber wrote in the Herald and American: “The music was of such savagery, so brutally barbaric, that it seemed almost grotesque to see civilized men, in modern dress with modern instruments performing it. By the same token, it was big, sincere, true.”

One or the other of these concerts was the scene of a significant meeting that changed the course of modern architecture. In the audience were Pauline Gibling, a composer, writer, educator, and activist who was working at Jane Addams's Hull House, and R. M. Schindler, an Austrian-born architect who was working for Frank Lloyd Wright. Both were so swept away by Prokofiev's "weird harmonies," as a headline had it, that they elected to leave the concert early, not wanting to hear anything more. Decades later, Gibling recalled that they had left at intermission and that the music they skipped was by Carl Maria von Weber. In fact, the Scythian Suite was the second-to-last piece on the program, and the final item was Chabrier's España. No matter: Gibling's memory was accurate enough, given the passage of time. The point is that Gibling and Schindler did not yet know each other. They struck up a conversation as they were walking out. They were married the following year. In 1920, they moved to Los Angeles, where Schindler had the task of supervising Wright's projects for the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall. Two years later, they took up residence at 835 Kings Road, the radical house that Schindler designed for two couples. The marriage did not last, but Gibling played a crucial role in planning the house and in expanding Schindler's field of vision. She continued to write incisively about Schindler's work even after the marriage had fallen apart. She is one of the most important voices in the early history of American modernist architecture.

Many of my readers will, I'm sure, be reminded of another great meet-cute in musical history: that of John Cage and Morton Feldman at a New York Philharmonic concert in 1950, at Carnegie Hall. The program, under the direction of Dimitri Mitropoulos, included Webern's Symphony, which both composers were eager to hear. At the end of the concert was Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, which both composers wished to avoid. Walking out, they encountered each other in the lobby of Carnegie Hall and began a conversation that transformed American music. "Wasn’t that beautiful?” was Cage's opening remark. The event became sufficiently legendary that in 2002 Carnegie mounted a commemorative series titled "When Morty Met John." One more wrinkle: in the thirties, when Cage was still living in Los Angeles, he socialized in the bohemian atmosphere of 835 Kings Road and, his primary sexual inclinations notwithstanding, had an affair with Pauline Gibling Schindler. Their love letters were published in 1996 by ex tempore magazine.

A Jeanne Artemis moment

A Schmidt / Chicago moment

The final few minutes of this live rendition of Franz Schmidt's Second Symphony, with Neeme Järvi and the Chicago Symphony, offer some of the most goosebump-inducing brass playing you are ever likely to hear. In a comment on Michael Hovnanian's CSO Bass Blog, a CSO musician recalled the circumstances of the recording, which took place at performances in April 1989. The orchestra had just come back from tour, and few of the players had had a chance to look at Schmidt's very demanding score. The first run-through was a catastrophic mess. Järvi, with the wry, avuncular manner that has made him beloved among orchestra musicians, smiled and said, "Now once more — with nuance!" The electrifying atmosphere during the coda might have something to do with a collective exhilaration at having made it through intact.

Thought of the day

"Culture falls into the greatest danger when it lacks political instinct and will."

                             — Thomas Mann, "On Myself," 1940

The dangers and delights of improvisation

Those who have puzzled over the precipitous rise of Klaus Mäkelä must now ponder the even more abrupt apparition of Tarmo Peltokoski, a twenty-four-year-old Finn who is actually billed as a student of Mäkelä. Although Peltokoski's accomplishments are so far minimal — he is the music director designate of the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse — he has won a Deutsche Grammophon contract and has just released his début disc, containing Mozart's Symphonies Nos. 35, 40, and 36. The orchestra is the reliably superb Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, who maintain the precise urgency that they developed under the leadership of Paavo Järvi. There's nothing especially distinctive about Peltokoski's conducting, but he seems an able technician. To that extent, he is a worthy graduate of the École de Mäkelä. In another category altogether are Peltokoski's three piano improvisations on Mozart, amounting to about sixteen minutes of music, which are distributed among the three symphonies. I actually spit out my coffee when the first of them came on. It's the kind of thing you might hear in the cocktail lounge of a very weird Viennese hotel. We're used to seeing oblivious vanity among conductors, but usually not at the very beginning of their careers.

I felt a certain dread on seeing that another recent DG release, featuring the young German pianist Julius Asal, also includes improvisatory interludes. This experiment, however, is vastly more successful. Asal has devised an unexpected and absorbing program weaving together sonatas of Scarlatti and Scriabin — composers who rarely appear in the same sentence. Asal plays each with magical clarity and an extraordinarily sensitive touch. Interpolated are two brief "Transitions" of Asal's devising, in which he meditates on the immediately preceding material and anticipates what comes next. He brings to bear a certain minimalist aesthetic, with ambiguous harmonies caught in momentary loops, yet there is no sense of a break with the surrounding material, as there certainly is with Peltokoski's smarmy riffs on Mozart. Instead, there is a wonderful feeling of suspension, of historical limbo. I'd be interested to hear more music in own Asal's voice. DG is surrounding Asal with the kind of slick marketing that it bestows on so many of its artists, but in this case the attention seems to be deserved.