By: Edna Landau
To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.
One of the questions I am asked most frequently when I meet with students at music schools and conservatories is: How important is it to have a website? I increasingly tell them that it is very important. The challenge for a musician who is still a student is to generate enough information to fill a website, especially if they have only a few, or even no reviews, and their performance calendar is very sparse. Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting with performance psychologist Dr. Noa Kageyama’s Performance Enhancement class at the Juilliard School. The students are all Masters students. In preparation for the class, I asked Dr. Kageyama to give me their names so that I could get to know them a little online before meeting them in person. Only four out of eighteen had websites but one really stood out from the rest. It was created by double bassist Corey Schutzer, whose performance experience to date is largely as a collaborative bassist. He does not yet have a very busy performance schedule and there are no reviews on the website, yet he does have some impressive quotes on the home page, a very interesting and unusual performance sample on the Media page, and a sincerely written page entitled “Teaching Philosophy”, which should help him find new students. He generously lists links to resources that other bassists might find helpful. Most importantly, he succeeds in achieving a warm, personal style of communication and he impressed this reader with his expressions of gratitude to all those who have helped him reach this point in his career. I particularly liked how this was reflected in his bio on the About page, written in the first person. (He was wise, however, to add a more traditional short bio, suitable for downloading by presenters.) I also admired the overall design and the varied and high quality photos (by a violinist and Juilliard graduate, Arthur Moeller). Corey subsequently told me that he used a Wix.com template for the website, which he didn’t find too challenging, but that he spent considerable time composing the content and getting it all organized on the site. The most interesting thing for me was learning from Corey that going through the exercise of creating the website was a major step forward for him, as it reaffirmed the positive things about his career to date, and the process of expressing himself in writing also served to build his overall confidence in representing himself to others.
All of this got me thinking that anyone who interacts with artists, emerging as well as established, wants to hear that artist’s inner voice. We want to know what they are really like, what inspires them, and in the case of their concert performances, why they chose the program they offered. Since I was captivated by Corey’s first person bio, I spoke to a few presenters to see if they would ever print such a bio. The answer was negative, largely because they felt that their audience wants to read something more objective and it is hard for an artist to write objectively about themselves. I concur that it becomes increasingly difficult as an artist amasses more accolades and their writing may come across as bragging. However, what I did hear from presenters is that they are extremely interested in reflecting in their programs the thought behind the chosen program and that they welcome receiving this input in the artist’s own words. At Carnegie Hall, this may appear in the section of the program entitled At a Glance. It is even possible that a bit of biographical information might be included if it is relevant to the choice of program. Hanna Arie-Gaifman, Director of the 92nd Street Y’s Tisch Center for the Arts, told me that she has sometimes interviewed artists prior to their performance and printed a short introduction to them in the program, if she felt that the audience would benefit from knowing more about them. Clark Morris, Executive and Artistic Director of the Harriman-Jewell Series in Kansas City, told me that they encourage artists to contribute their thoughts about the chosen program and even write program notes, if they so desire. They regularly do a question and answer session on stage after the concert to further familiarize the audience with the performers and gain insight into the program they just performed. He also told me that he has been speaking with artist managers about producing short video clips for their artists in advance of a tour that would explain what the music means to them. He envisions something simple and authentic, not slick or overly produced. He would then post the video clips on his website, to complement the informative notes he already has there.
The message here seems very clear. In addition to practicing and honing their performance skills to the highest levels possible, artists (especially young ones) need to reflect about themselves and their artistic choices, and become comfortable sharing with others who they are and what drove them to make those choices. If they devote proper time to helping audiences get to know them, they will be successful in building a dedicated and ever larger following.
To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.
© Edna Landau 2012
Brahms Days in Tutzing
Thursday, November 8th, 2012By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 8, 2012
MUNICH — Johannes Brahms came here in 1870, catching the completed half of Wagner’s Ring and hobnobbing with colleagues, Liszt among them. He basked in new celebrity, his German Requiem having appeared in print a year earlier. The visit ended with a few days’ repose at Lake Würm, nearby.
He came again three years later. Der Ring remained incomplete, but in any case he sought other things: a meeting with poet Paul Heyse, guidance on writing for orchestra from conductor Hermann Levi (whose brother ran his asset portfolio), and more time at the deep tranquil lake (pictured), with its southward vistas to the Alps. Levi duly helped in the city, and the composer checked in in May for a four-month lakeside stay in the fishing village of Tutzing, lately reachable from downtown by train.
Brahms: “Tutzing is prettier than recently imagined … . The lake is usually blue, but a deeper blue than the sky … also the chain of snowy mountains — one cannot stop looking at them.”
Tutzingers take pride in this Brahms connection. It produced the Haydn Variations and gave life to the two long-stalled, minor-key string quartets. At a stretch, you could say the sojourn nudged Brahms over thresholds in both his orchestral and chamber music. It saw too the premiere of the Acht Lieder und Gesänge, Opus 59.
Settled in the 6th century by families called Tozzi and Tuzzo, Tutzing sports a lakeshore Brahms promenade, a Brahms memorial, a Brahms apothecary and, not so inevitably, a Brahms festival.
This last, dubbed Tutzinger Brahmstage, had an abortive start in the 1950s on the initiative of anti-Semite and “pronounced National Socialist” pianist Elly Ney. Later, much later, artist manager Christian Lange put the festival on an annual fall footing with modest strata of local government support. Sometime in between, Lake Würm officially became “Lake Starnberg.”
But music festival visitors to handsome Tutzing face a number of ponderables. A walk of homage along the spectacular promenade, for instance, finds the composer honored in flat stone between lake and Alpine view benches, a pleasing effect until you turn and see, lurking just feet away, a grand memorial to the Nazi pianist with high bronze bust and trellised garden.
Choosing when to visit confronts the problem of five events spread around three weekends, not the Ojai-like “days” timeframe suggested by the festival name. (A Carl Orff Festival in the next municipality, where that composer is buried, does better in this regard and supports its local hotels.)
Then there is the matter of programming. Tutzinger Brahmstage 2012, which has just ended amid blazes of fall color and a run of blue skies, favored rings around the composer in place of any survey. Mostly Brahms it was not. Brahms and jazz (a concert on Oct. 18) go together like Mahler and reggae. The lone string chamber work offered, the G-Major Sextet (Oct. 14), got lumped with an unneeded reduction for the same forces of Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony. Baritone Michael Volle diluted his Liederabend (Oct. 21) with warhorses of Mahler, lessening the time to explore Brahms’s vaster output for voice.
On Oct. 26, though, festive impulses and programming logic coalesced nicely. Someone had recalled that Brahms wrote organ music and had invited Vienna-based Renate Sperger to play the 3,000-pipe, 28-year-old Sandtner organ of Tutzing’s neo-Baroque St Joseph’s Church, an instrument with ripe sound and tight, unobtrusive action.
Her program contrasted Johann Nepomuk David’s quasi-cartoonish 1947 Partita on Es ist ein Schnitter, improbably a heartfelt tribute to a friend he lost in combat, with a row of Brahms chorale preludes. Six of these, concluding with O Welt, ich muß dich lassen, were from Opus 122, the chiseled and ashen collection penned a year before the composer died. At midpoint came Brahms’s early but resolute Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, WoO 9 (1856), while two Bach staples — the Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542, and the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565 — framed the evening.
Sperger traced the excesses of the David with calm efficiency and savored introspection in the chorale preludes, abetted by Sandtner’s suave apparatus. In the Bach pairings, she wrought requisite thunder and scaled the quilted fugal flights with unbroken legerdemain.
On the evidence of this year, Tutzinger Brahmstage holds potential in reserve, not least for local businesses. Brahms’s music, particularly the vocal and chamber scores, suits an intimate meeting place, and Tutzing has an authentic claim as a host town, with viable concert venues in St Joseph’s Church and the Evangelische Akademie, its idyllically sited former palace. A focused few days and a sculptural clean-up on the promenade could work wonders.
After leaving Tutzing and Munich in 1873, Brahms returned home to Vienna. There he led the Philharmonic in the November premiere of the Haydn Variations, an orchestral triumph from which he never looked back.
The next month he was once more in Bavaria, to pick up mad King Ludwig II’s Maximilian Medal for Art and Science. Wagner got his at the same time. Who knew? Perhaps Ludwig thought equally highly of both of them.
Photo © Tourismusverband Fünf-Seen-Land
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Tags:Brahms, Brahms Days, Brahmstage, Christian Lange, Commentary, Elly Ney, Evangelische Akademie, Haydn Variations, Hermann Levi, Johann Nepomuk David, King Ludwig II, Lake Starnberg, Michael Volle, München, Munich, Nazi Germany, Renate Sperger, Review, Schloß Tutzing, Tutzing
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