Musical America Blogs

by Sedgwick Clark

The media were consumed last week by the death at age 82 of Dick Clark (need I say, no relation?). I was never a fan of American Bandstand. I came home from school when I was a tot and twisted to Hollywood on Indianapolis TV’s late-afternoon Frances Farmer Presents instead of Chubby Checker. There, in her world-weary voice, the aging actress introduced the film of the afternoon with anecdotes about the stars. I was too young to appreciate what she had to say, but I recall that her show was interlarded with so many commercials that often I didn’t reach the denouement before my mother called me to dinner. It was many years before I learned who got the girl in Casablanca.

Anyway, while America was mourning, I had less charitable thoughts about Dick Clark. In 1972 the New York Daily News ran a short interview with him saying that classical music would die because no one wanted to listen to it. “What a moron,” I thought, and skewered the piece on the wall of my office at Philips and Mercury Records. For some reason I never forgot that little news piece. It perished in the electrical fire that ignited in the ceiling months later, a little after 6 one evening when I would have been at my desk. Fortunately, I was at dinner with Bernard Haitink that night in Boston, where he was conducting Mahler’s First—else my ashes would have forever commingled with Dick Clark’s thoughtless words.

Van Zweden’s Galvanic Mahler    

And speaking of Mahler’s First, it was the major work led by Musical America’s current Conductor of the Year, Jaap van Zweden, in his New York Philharmonic debut on April 12. Talk about intensity! I don’t recall ever seeing a more tightly wound podium demeanor. He cued every last entrance, and the New Yorkers responded with coiled-spring precision. Interpretively, the Dutch conductor fell somewhere between Bernstein’s emotionalism and Haitink’s objectivity, with dynamism in spades. You can’t lose with Mahler’s Triumphal conclusion—the horns standing suddenly to pour out their golden tone fff—and the audience went predictably wild. What was not predictable was that the orchestra stayed seated, applauding van Zweden as he came out for his first bow—a remarkable gesture of respect from these difficult-to-please musicians. He’ll be back soon, no doubt.

In the first half, he accompanied the volatile 25-year-old Chinese pianist Yuja Wang in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. She kept pushing ahead, but van Zweden and his players kept up respectably. The concluding allegro, beginning with the pizz. strings at 131, was dispatched with a breathless edge-of-seat unanimity that I’ve heard equaled only by the mercurial Martha Argerich, Charles Dutoit, and the Orchestre National de France at Avery Fisher Hall on March 18, 1994—the best performance I’ve ever heard live. Message to Yuja: A bit more poise can yield a more satisfying performance overall.

Looking forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

4/26 Metropolitan Opera. Wagner: Das Rheingold. Fabio Luisi (cond.). Wendy Bryn Harmer, soprano; Stephanie Blythe, mezzo; Patricia Bardon, mezzo; Adam Klein, tenor; Gerhard Siegel, tenor; Bryn Terfel, baritone; Eric Owens, bass-baritone; Franz-Josef Selig, bass; Hans-Peter König, bass.

4/27 New Jersey Performing Arts Center (Newark). New Jersey Symphony/Jacques Lacombe; Gil Shaham, violin. Mozart: Masonic Funeral Music. Berg: Violin Concerto. Danielpour: Kaddish for Violin and Orchestra (world premiere). Prokofiev: Symphony No. 3.

4/28 Metropolitan Opera (broadcast). Wagner: Die Walküre. Fabio Luisi (cond.). Katarina Dalayman, soprano; Eva-Maria Westbroek, soprano; Stephanie Blythe, mezzo; Jonas Kaufmann, tenor; Bryn Terfel, baritone; Hans-Peter König, bass.

4/30 Metropolitan Opera. Wagner: Siegfried. Fabio Luisi (cond.). Katarina Dalayman, soprano; Patricia Bardon, mezzo; Jay Hunter Morris, tenor; Gerhard Siegel, tenor, Bryn Terfel, baritone; Eric Owens, bass-baritone.

5/1 Carnegie Hall. Mathias Goerne, baritone; Lief Ove Andsnes, piano. Songs by Shostakovich and Mahler.

5/2 Carnegie Hall. New York Phiharmonic/Alan Gilbert. Mahler: Symphony No. 6 (“Tragic”).

by Sedgwick Clark

I didn’t react favorably to all the works in Michael Tilson Thomas’s American Mavericks series, which has consumed this blog for three weeks. But that’s not the point: This is the kind of programming that keeps our concert halls vital, and the full houses certainly bespoke wide interest, especially among younger listeners. As I write this (4/19), I look forward to a program tonight at Carnegie Hall of George Crumb’s music, courtesy of Leon Botstein and the American Symphony. Among other works, I’ll hear Crumb’s Star-Child, which I haven’t heard live since its premiere in 1977 with Boulez and the New York Philharmonic. Long may these enterprising conductors wave!

Partch, Bates, Del Tredici, Harrison (3/29)

The music of California composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) is genuinely unique, played only on instruments he himself created. My interest has been known to wander in his longer works, but his 17-minute Daphne of the Dunes (1958; rev. 1967) was an aural delight and never outstayed its welcome. I was struck by the similarity of the work’s opening rhythm to the fandango beat in Bernard Herrmann’s title music for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959).

Mason Bates’s “stylistic signature,” writes Thomas May in the program notes, is “the blend of acoustic instrumentalists and/or singers with electronic sounds.” The quarter-hour Mass Transmission, for organ, electronica (the composer’s own moniker for his “palette of digital samplings and techno beats”), and chorus, was composed for this festival. It sets texts by early 20th-century Dutch parents attempting to reach their children in Java via radio and an online blog describing a woman’s impressions of Java. The 35-year-old Bates’s music sounded like ’60s MOR.

At intermission, composer David Del Tredici (b. 1937) upstaged his own music with his personal performance art involving a youngish man, chains, and a silver-spiked dog collar and leash. In his comments prior to conducting DDT’s piece, MTT with tongue in cheek called him “the most maverick composer in the room.” DDT’s 45-year-old 12-tone Syzygy for soprano and 20 instrumentalists sets poems by James Joyce—a far cry from his latter-day neo-Romantic Alice in Wonderland period. It received a committed performance from the not-always-ideally-audible soprano Kiera Duffy and MTT. A few days later, I listened to Richard Dufallo’s 1970s Columbia recording of Syzygy and found it a much more approachable, less dissonant piece. I have no idea which best represents it.

Those colorful percussion instruments had all the fun in Lou Harrison’s Organ Concerto with Percussion Orchestra (1973). I can’t imagine that Paul Jacobs, the fine soloist, enjoyed playing the 1974 Rodgers electro-acoustic organ. For all I know, its desiccated wheeze was the authentic timbre of an organ baking in Java’s salt air, but it certainly wasn’t a balm to the ears. Most interesting to me was Harrison’s borrowing of Varèse’s ambling Ionisation rhythm for the snare drums early in the concerto.

Reich, Monk, Foss, Subotnick (3/30)

Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) is one of his minimalist, all-percussion works that never fails to send an audience into ecstasy. What a great concert opener!

Meredith Monk (b. 1942) is Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 2012, but she is also a singer, keyboardist, dancer, choreographer, director, and film maker. Her Realm Variations, for several San Francisco instrumentalists and her own vocal ensemble, demonstrated that her status as a composer is no less distinguished. It was the most sheerly beautiful piece in the festival, and I look forward to a recording so I can get to know it well.

I heard Lukas Foss (1922-2009) play the piano part of his Echoi (1963) two or three times over the years, and I have his recording on Epic, but it never seemed to run as long as this performance did. He allowed for improvisation in the piece, which I presume accounts for the inflation. The program book lists 24 minutes, but these fine performers took 30:10. Too long.

It pains me to report that I found little to engage me in Jacob’s Room: Monodrama by Morton Subotnick (b. 1930), a composer whose early electronic works for Nonesuch Records I admire greatly. Jacob has undergone many incarnations, including a full-length opera, since 1985. In the new version, music and text for several characters in the opera are now given to a single voice, spoken and sung by the composer’s wife, soprano Joan La Barbara. Electronic manipulation “throws” her voice and what the program bio describes as “her unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques—multiphonics, circular breathing, ululation, and glottal clicks” around the auditorium in a manner that I found distracting to such a serious subject, which the composer explains thusly: “The basic notion of Jacob’s Room is that holocausts are not just local catastrophes; they also gradually destroy the thin fabric we have of being human. They deprive us of the artifacts we have created and our empathy as a group. When these things fall apart, we find ourselves alone in the universe.” Simplicity was called for.

Looking forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

4/23 Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space. Cutting Edge Concerts/Victoria Bond, conductor and host. Theodore Wiprud: My Last Duchess (world premiere). Robert Sirota: The Clever Mistress (New York premiere). Fully staged one-act operas.

by Sedgwick Clark

I really should be working on my taxes . . . .

Cage, Cowell, Adams, Varèse

The first concert to involve San Francisco musicians in the series, on Tuesday in Carnegie Hall, began with the most anticipated event of the series: Cage’s whimsical 1970 Song Books, with Jessye Norman, Meredith Monk, and Joan La Barbara the unlikely trio of vocalists, and Tilson Thomas miming various actions. Cage provides nearly a hundred numbers to be executed, organized by the performers. MTT chose a half-hour selection for this occasion. Frankly, the So Percussion concert LINK the previous evening provided far more fun in Dan Deacon’s less pretentious Cage knockoff, Take a Deep Breath.

Cage said that Henry Cowell, whose Synchrony (1930) followed, was “the open sesame of new music in America.” Maybe. But except for an all-Cowell concert LINK by the American Symphony under Leon Botstein at Lincoln Center two years ago, performances of his some 1,000 pieces have been few and far between since his death. For all his purported innovations–the most influential being “tone clusters,” in which the piano keys are struck with the fist or forearm–all the works I’ve heard seem to exist more as showcases for inventiveness than cogently structured music. Still, the nearly 14-minute Synchrony begins with a gorgeous three-minute trumpet solo (beautifully played by SF’s Mark Inouye) and contains lovely moments until its abrupt ending.

A lot of people I respect venerate John Adams’s music. His Absolute Jest was composed for this Mavericks tour. It’s a sweet, inoffensive piece inspired by (in the composer’s words) “the ecstatic energy of Beethoven, who was the master of taking the minimal amount of information and turning it into fantastic, expressive, and energized structures.” The problem with such an homage is, once Absolute Jest ended, all I could remember was Ludwig van’s Ninth Symphony scherzo and the opening movement of the Op. 131 string quartet. When a Stravinsky—whom Adams often evokes rhythmically—throws in a skittish reference to Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia in Jeu de cartes or an elephantine rendition of Schubert’s Marche Militaire in Circus Polka, it couldn’t be anyone but Stravinsky. The well-received performance was undoubtedly a composer’s dream.

When influences from Stravinsky’s early ballets seep into Edgard Varèse’s Amériques (ca. 1918-21; rev. 1927), one smiles knowingly but can’t possibly escape the gruff French-American composer’s path-breakingly percussive voice. Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic performed Varèse’s complete works LINK on two roof-raising Lincoln Center Festival concerts two summers ago. Gilbert’s Philharmonic predecessors Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, and Lorin Maazel also played Varèse’s music—Boulez most distinguished of all—but I don’t recall any Varèse at Carnegie since the stupendous Philly/Muti Arcana in 1985 and Cleveland/Dohnányi Amériques in 1989. Enter Michael Tilson Thomas and his virtuoso San Franciscans, who shook the rafters with a smashing, superbly played Amériques. Now Arcana, please?

Ruggles, Feldman, Ives Orchestrated

Tilson Thomas has been the master interpreter of Carl Ruggles’s Sun-Treader (1926-31) since performing and recording it in 1970 with the Boston Symphony. His Carnegie Hall performance at that time was the New York premiere. His complete recording of Ruggles’s music later that decade for CBS with the Buffalo Philharmonic and various soloists was recently released on CD for the first time on the Other Minds label. It only amounts to 80 minutes of music, of which the ca. 16-minute Sun-Treader is best known. At the Wednesday concert, the San Franciscans seemed a bit more refined than either of the recordings but without ever compromising this granite-hewn score. More Ruggles, Michael?

I know I should “get” Morton Feldman’s whisper-quiet notes and silences in Piano and Orchestra (1975). I read in James M. Keller’s astute notes of Feldman’s aesthetic alignment to the painters of the New York School. A friend explains how carefully the harmonics and pauses are composed, but I’m still left as cold as a white Rothko canvas. I’ll keep trying, but Feldman performances don’t come around often. There is no doubt, however, of the commitment and artistry of pianist Emanuel Ax, whose forays into 20th-century and contemporary music are admirable, the conductor, and the San Francisco musicians.

Charles Ives composed his “Concord” Sonata between 1916 and 1919; then he obsessively revised it until 1947. That’s 31 years. The even more obsessive American maverick, Henry Brant, took five years longer to orchestrate it (1958-1994), calling it A Concord Symphony. From the very opening the orchestral garb bears a strong resemblance to Sun-Treader’s dissonant palette, which makes sense because Ives and Ruggles were friends and knew each other’s music well. The San Francisco team’s recording of the Brant orchestration was released earlier in the year on the orchestra’s own (and very successful) label. Needless to say, it’s a “must” for all Ives fans—what the record companies used to call “a sonic spectacular.” But the live experience struck me as even more stunning, revealing overtones in the woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings that perhaps only Carnegie’s fabled acoustic can offer. Ives and Ives/Brant provide a fascinating comparison, and I strongly recommend listening to the “Concord” Sonata recordings by Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Teldec) and Jeremy Denk (Think Denk Media).

Tax Deadlines Wait for No Munsonian  

Tune in next week for my pithy words on the last two Mavericks concerts.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

4/12 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Jaap van Zweden; Yuja Wang, piano. Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 3. Mahler: Symphony No. 1.