Overflow

I'm terribly, terribly sorry.  I lived outside the United States from 1967 to 2006 -- most of my adult life -- and besides, I don't pay much attention to the pop music scene or to the evolution of modern religions.  No one had ever bothered to tell me that pop music and revealed religion had merged here during my absence, thus the earthshaking event of last Thursday came as a great shock to me.

I had heard of Michael Jackson, knew that he was an entertainer -- knew, even, that he was odd looking and that he had a sister who had bared a breast, accidentally or otherwise, before the television cameras during some sort of sporting event.  (None of my friends in Europe, where I was living at the time, could understand why this had created a scandal.  "Was her breast ugly?" was the closest any of them, male or female, could come to fathoming the issue.)  What I did not know, however, was that at some point during my long absence from the country this Jackson fellow had replaced Jesus Christ as the primary object of worship for most Americans.

Fortunately, I was traveling in the Midwest from Friday until Tuesday morning, thus I had the incredible privilege of taking in an enormous quantity of television "news" in hotel lobbies and breakfast rooms, in restaurants, and in a few private homes.  My imagination was fired by the rare chance to see how the early prophets of a new religion manipulate the masses.  And on Saturday, when I realized what was about to happen, I began to tremble all over.  I may not be a follower of any religion, but I've studied the religious music of many great composers and can recite the Nicene Creed by heart; and I knew -- yes, I really knew -- what would take place that day: "Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas, / Et ascendit in coelum"....  Thursday-Friday-Saturday.... it was the third day!  The new Savior would be resurrected, according to Scripture, and would ascend to heaven, just as his predecessor had done.

Midnight came and went, in Jerusalem, in LA, and finally at the International Date Line, and nothing happened.  I was horribly disappointed: I admit that I was hoping to see the clergy, who for centuries had been telling everyone about a first resurrection, thrown into disarray by a second one.  But my disappointment was swept away by a new shock.  It seems that millions of Americans were truly surprised to discover that a high-ranking politician -- the governor of a state that, as I recall, opted to fly a Confederate flag over its capitol building only a few years ago -- could be a lying windbag and a hypocrite and could use public funds to go off to Argentina to spend some quality time (is that term still in use, or have I missed the boat again?) with a lover.

These events have made me so ashamed of my ignorance of the society to which I have returned that I am thinking of taking a course in modern American mores, or of reading Mencken for the first time since my teens.  In the meantime, please send substantial contributions to this writer, who is planning the construction, in Manhattan, of the First Church of Michael. ( Look for my postal address in a forthcoming blog entry.)  I'm hoping that the resurrection has merely been deferred.

The Belcea Quartet, which is based in London but consists of a Romanian first violinist (Corina Belcea-Fisher), an English second (Laura Samuel), a Polish violist (Krzysztof Chorzelski), and a French cellist (Antoine Lederlin), has, within the last ten days, given one full concert and participated substantially in another at Alice Tully Hall, under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and in connection with the CMS's "Opening NIghts" and "Around Prokofiev" mini-series.  I have been a great admirer of this young ensemble since 2004, when I first heard its EMI recording of Brahms's C minor Quartet and G Major Quintet (with the late Thomas Kakuska as second viola), and my admiration has grown even stronger over time. These four musicians -- all technically outstanding and musically intelligent -- pay fanatical attention to detail without ever losing sight of the whole; their performances, live and recorded, are compellingly intense and achieve the apparent naturalness that results only from extremely hard work. At the two CMS concerts, the Belcea delivered one remarkable interpretation after another: Haydn's Quartet in F-sharp minor (Op. 50 No. 4), Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" Quartet, Britten's First Quartet, and both of the Prokofiev quartets.  These events will remain in my memory as highlights of the musical season.

I'm open-minded about fresh approaches to opera staging, but generally speaking I'm a fan of the Less-Is-More school.  In my opinion, directors who who want to avoid traditional production styles should clear away whatever is inessential and force us audience members to use our imaginations, rather than hitting us on the head or elbowing us in the ribs with their ideas, especially when their ideas are half-baked .  My guess is that people who pay to attend opera performances are unlikely to want to settle for sitcoms, which they can see free of charge on television. Besides, the directors of even the most simple-minded sitcom scripts are capable of creating logical story sequences, whereas some opera stage directors seem to believe that logical thinking is an impediment to creativity.

Let's imagine, for instance, that an opera plot revolves around a young girl in a 19th-century Swiss village -- a young girl who is deeply in love with and about to marry a young guy, but who, one fine morning, wakes up alone in the bed of another guy and can't figure out how she got there.  We in the audience know that she's a sleepwalker, not a streetwalker, but she and her boyfriend and most of the other people in the story are unaware of this fact until near the end, when all is happily resolved.  Now let's imagine that a stage director decides that what this simple tale needs is not, perhaps, some extra charm or mild humor or even a touch of irony, to prod 21st-century audiences into remembering that 200 years ago, girls who were caught sleeping around before marriage were ostracized by society.  No.  What it needs, according to this hypothetical director, is another, more complicated plot set on top of and running simultaneous with the original one!  Why not, for instance, stage the production as a rehearsal of itself in a contemporary rehearsal hall, with the singers who are playing the young girl and boy also pretending to be engaged to each other in real life?  Hey, isn't that a great idea?

Unfortunately, the two stories don't jibe, and the stilted and far from first-rate Italian poetry by Felice Romani to which Vincenzo Bellini set his opera La sonnambula doesn't lend itself to the transposition.  Imagine an actress in our day saying to her real-life adoptive mother, "To you, beloved, tender mother, who preserved me, a little orphan girl, for so happy a day [i.e., preserved my virginity until my marriage], let this sweet weeping and this embrace tell you this, expressed from the heart more than from the brow."  You might as well try to do an updated movie adaptation of The Scarlet Letter with Hester Prynne played as a contemporary Hollywood actress who, however, has to recite Hawthorne's original words.

I'm glad that I heard Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez in the Met's new Sonnambula production -- although they and the other soloists and chorus could have done with somewhat stronger conductorial participation than that of Evelino Pido' --,but if ever there was an opera plot that can't be shoehorned into a modern urban American setting, this is surely it.

Stronger conducting would also have helped the Met's current production of Il trovatore.  The production looks good, and Sondra Radvanovsky is a vocally and theatrically convincing Leonora.  (Dolora Zajick was unable to sing at the performance I attended; the role of Azucena was taken by a cover.)  But I had the impression that Gianandrea Noseda lets everyone do pretty much what s/he wants without giving a lot of thought to integrating the drama's various characters. Dmitri Hvorostovsky wants to sing "Il balen" at an incredibly slow tempo, maybe to show off his remarkable breath control (and it is remarkable)?  Sure, go ahead and make a lovely, lyrical romanza into an inflated piece of pomposity!  Marcelo Alvarez wants to transpose "Di quella pira" downward so that he can pretend to sing a high C that Verdi didn't write in the first place?  Okay, let's not rock the boat -- let him wow the audience to his heart's content.  Someone wants to cut a repeat here or a few bars there, to save maybe five minutes, total, of performing time?  No problem!

Another Italian conductor named Gianandrea -- Gianandrea Gavazzeni (1909-96), who was a highly cultivated gentleman and a great wit -- used to say that Il trovatore is Italy's St. Matthew Passion.  Its illogical plot, in which the four protagonists stubbornly pursue conflicting and ultimately self-destructive aims, may be seen as an allegory for the Italians' apparently eternal and certainly self-destructive factionalism and exaggerated individualism -- whence all the charm and all the exasperation of life in Italy.  By juxtaposing Bach's intense religious masterpiece against Verdi's passionate melodrama, Gavazzeni was slyly juxtaposing the stereotype of Nordic earnestness against the stereotype of irresponsible Mediterranean fatalism.  Of course the comparison works only as a bon mot, but I -- after having lived nearly a quarter-century in Italy -- can tell you that there is a grain of truth in it.

Art is emotional ambiguity and intellectual complexity, among many other things.  We can talk and talk about making art-music more approachable through mash-ups and crossovers and other forms of "outreach," but the hard truth is that not many people possess predisposition plus curiosity plus the willingness to dig down deep - a combination that's virtually a precondition for having art-music play an important role in one's life.  New and not-so-new approachability techniques will work for some young people, I hope, and demonstration-performances in the schools by orchestral professionals seem to me a promising tack to take: get the musicians, especially the young ones, out of the concert hall and communicating directly with the kids!  But I suspect that pure accident, stumbling on the right thing at the right time, will continue to be the Number 2 pathway to art-music - Number 1 being, of course, growing up in an environment in which that music is a natural (not enforced) part of daily life.

On the issue of concert-hall formality I can testify that when, as a pre-teen, fifty years ago, I first started attending concerts, I found the dressing-up by performers and audience alike ridiculous - particularly the wearing of 19th-century tail coats by male orchestra players, conductors, and soloists - and I still find it ridiculous.  But many people, especially among the subscribers and/or donators to musical organizations, disagree with me: some like the uniformity and believe that miscellaneous clothing would be distracting; others claim that the formality helps to create a sense of occasion.  I'm a music addict (I thirst for good performances of the music I love and stimulating ones of music with which I'm less or not at all familiar), so for me the music creates its own occasion.  But I figure that putting up with the penguin suits and the rituals of stage entries and exits, bows and blown kisses, and polite or enthusiastic applause is a microscopically small price to pay to keep the music going.  Audience members no longer need to wear dresses or jackets and ties to concerts or even to opening nights at the operas, whereas such stuff was de rigueur when I was a youngster; young people and anyone else can come in t-shirts and jeans if they like, so that attire is no longer a valid excuse for not going to musical events.  Yet the fact is that just as I didn't see a lot of other 12-year-olds at concerts when I was 12 or a lot of other 18-year-olds when I was 18, I don't see a lot of 12- and 18-year-olds in attendance today.  Formality, or lack of it, doesn't seem to be a major issue.

I don't agree with Richard Strauss's contention that for people who lack musical training, listening to music is necessarily "a purely sensual, aural feast, unmitigated by any mental activity," and that such listeners are presumptuous to assume that they understand music "better than, for example, Turkish."  Many of a piece's psychological subtleties can be communicated to a person who is sensitive to music and accustomed to a given musical language even if that person is musically illiterate.  Not to mention the fact that being musically literate or even being a professional musician does not automatically guarantee musical sensitivity.  Nevertheless, exposure to fine music, like exposure to fine literature, theater, dance, painting, sculpture, architecture, etc., is effective only when there is some basic receptivity, and the relationship to music can be deepened only through a readiness to pursue what is eternally elusive - to take pleasure in the search itself and in one's evolving but never completely evolved understanding.

Thais at the Met last week.  According to the program notes, Anatole France -- author of the novella on which Jules Massenet's opera is based -- lavishly praised the composer for his treatment of the subject.  There's no denying that the music is skillfully written or that each of the principal characters has a clearly delineated musical personality, but somehow or other the composition as a whole is undistinguished.  The famous "Meditation" interlude is lovely, but when Massenet brings his hit tune back for the umpteenth time later in the opera you feel like blue-pencilling the score and scrawling the word "REDUNDANT!" here and there.  There's a fair amount of Wagner-with-rouge in the work, and it seems clear that Massenet was thoroughly familiar with the musical exoticism of Aida, especially the opening of Verdi's third act, elements of which can be detected in Thais's Act II quartet. But it's equally obvious that Strauss picked up a trick or two from Thais before he wrote Salome.

Anatole France's hatred of sanctity and sanctimoniousness is mainly respected in Louis Gallet's libretto, but the novelist's brilliant irony -- which, after all, was his most salient characteristic -- is nowhere to be found.  Agreed: communicating irony through music is extraordinarily difficult, but in this case no attempt whatsoever seems to have been made by either Gallet or Massenet; thus the story is automatically condemned to two-dimensionality.

In the punishing title role, Renee Fleming gave one of the finest performances I've ever heard from her, musically and dramatically, despite some shrillness once in awhile, whereas Thomas Hampson, in the less obviously virtuosic but equally tough and important role of Athanael, was dramatically convincing but vocally monochromatic.  Jesus Lopez-Cobos conducted fluently but also rather flaccidly -- and this is an opera in which a bit of rhythmic drive every now and then would be welcome.

The first act and part of the third take place in the Egyptian desert (effectively stylized in this production by John Cox), with a group of religious eremites wearing the sort of ragged tunics that seem to have been de rigueur for fourth-century Christians in the wilderness.  But in the second act we find ourselves in a modern palace in Alexandria, complete with rifle-toting guard; a swanky dressing-gown for Nicias (Thais's lover-of-the-week -- a tenor role, of course), formal evening garb for the guests, and a glittering palm tree that could have been stolen from a Miami Beach hotel lobby.  We chumps in the audience are not supposed to ask why, in a modern Muslim country, folks would be praying to Venus and the other gods of ancient Rome.

But enough of that: it's holiday time!  Concert life has slowed down, even in New York, and the last time I turned on the radio I heard, within a short time-span, "White Christmas" sung by -- if I'm not mistaken -- Bing Crosby, Benjamin Spock, Imogene Coca, T. S. Eliot, Kirsten Flagstad, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Buffalo Bob, Margaret Thatcher, and Leonid Brezhnev.  Better to concentrate on CDs, of which some interesting examples have recently landed on my desk.

I've had many qualms, over the years, about quite a few British early music artists and ensembles, but I was greatly impressed last season by Harry Bicket's conducting of La clemenza di Tito at the Met.  This made me curious to hear his recent recording, with the English Concert on the Virgin Classics label, of Bach sacred arias sung by countertenor David Daniels.  The disc contains excerpts from the Mass in B minor, the St. John and St. Matthew passions, and three cantatas, and the results are excellent and profoundly moving throughout.  These are artists well worth following.

EMI and Sony BMG have been reissuing valuable historic recordings from their vaults; these are in part consolation prizes -- meant, perhaps, to distract us from the realization that the "majors" are making relatively few studio recordings of today's artists -- but in themselves the re-releases are always more than welcome.  From EMI comes a wonderful, seventeen-CD box of recordings by David Oistrakh, the centennial of whose birth passed largely unnoticed this past September.  The great violinist's serious musicianship, technical mastery, beauty of tone, and expressive intensity are all to be heard here, in repertoire that stretches from the Baroque masters to his friends Prokofiev and Shostakovich.  His interpretations of some of the earlier works may sound stylistically old-fashioned today, but the care that he lavished on every detail of every piece and the coherence with which he put those details together are always a great lesson.  One of the reasons why I don't mind being over sixty is that I was able to hear Oistrakh live on many occasions.

I have a close relative who was born the same year (1917) as the remarkable Romanian pianist Dino Lipatti and who is still in excellent physical and mental shape, which makes it all the more difficult for me to absorb the fact that Lipatti, whose reputation and influence have never waned, has been dead for fifty-eight years. Nearly his entire recorded legacy can be heard in EMI's recent seven-CD release of his recordings of Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Grieg, Ravel, and Bartok; the quantity is not vast, but the beauty and intensity of the playing have moved and continue to move generations of musicians and listeners.

And speaking of pianists: Sony BMG has reissued, in its "Original Jacket Collection", two ten-CD sets of RCA Victor recordings, one dedicated to Arthur Rubinstein (all Chopin), the other to Vladimir Horowitz (mixed repertoire).  All but one of the Rubinstein CDs contain the well-known recordings that he made between the late 1950s and mid-1960s, when he was in his seventies (the remaining one dates from 1946); the sound is beautiful, the interpretations are often more cautious than what one heard from him in the concert hall during the same period, but they do give a very good idea of the Rubinstein phenomenon.  The Horowitz set is spread over a longer time-span, from 1940, when the pianist was thirty-seven, to 1982, when he was seventy-nine, although there are gaps during the periods in which he was recording for Columbia and Deutsche Grammophon.  I have never been and am not now a Horowitzian, but these CDs demonstrate not only his almost terrifying virtuosity but also his repertorial curiosity: Clementi, Scriabin, Barber, and Kabalevsky are heard alongside the more typical Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, et al.  No Horowitz admirer who does not already own these recordings will want to be without them..

When Deutsche Grammophon's recording of Osvaldo Golijov's Ayre came out a few years ago, I was impressed by the effectiveness of the composer's eclecticism.  I was looking forward to hearing his opera Ainadamar in concert performance at Carnegie on December 7, with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and many of the artists who had given the work's premiere in 2003, including conductor Robert Spano and soprano Dawn Upshaw. I enjoyed some beautiful arioso moments here and there throughout, as well as Golijov's inventive take on Cuban rhythms in the work's central segment, and the performance seemed completely secure. But whereas the mixture of genres, styles, and idioms worked most of the time in Ayre, in Ainadamar Golijov was perhaps trying to make a big tapestry out of very little substance.  The stock Spanish melodic-harmonic material was almost embarrassingly trite in this context; the characterization of the pasionaria antifascist actress Margarita Xirgu and her hero, Federico Garcia Lorca, was ridiculously one-dimensional; and the whole work, although only eighty minutes long, seemed to go on forever.  Granted, an opera is at a disadvantage when it is presented without stage action; nevertheless, no amount of visual distraction could have reduced the sensation that this music often meandered aimlessly.  And then there was the thorny issue of amplification of voices and instruments: here and there, one could understand why it was necessary, but most of the time it seemed gratuitous, especially within Carnegie's fine acoustical environment.

At Zankel two nights later, Alisa Weilerstein offered Golijov's brief Omaramor for solo cello as a virtuosic bonbon amid weightier repertoire, and here the composer's eclecticism was much more subtle -- unobtrusive suggestions of tango, for instance, rather than tango-in-your-face.  The eight-minute miniature worked much better than the eighty-minute opera.

Weilerstein is an outstanding cellist -- thoroughly musical, technically excellent, with a huge dynamic range (the piano was open full-stick but never threatened to overwhelm the cello), and poised and secure in public.  The interpretation that she and the sensitive pianist Inon Barnatan brought to Beethoven's Op. 102 No. 2 provided another example of the Extreme Phrasing and Extreme Dynamics type of approach that I've been grumbling about in previous posts.  Artists who make the listener hear the music's subtleties are rare enough, but the rarest of all are those who let the listener hear the music's subtleties.  This struck me the other day while I was listening to Vladimir Ashkenazy's now vintage recording of Chopin's B minor Sonata: the inner voices in the Largo movement seem simply to exist, in all their quietly erotic beauty, as if by miraculous accident; they don't force us to hear them, yet they're irresistible.  A performance is, among other things, necessarily a commentary on a work, but the best performances are those that don't draw attention to this fact.  When every phrase is piled high with "meaning", the interpreter is putting him/herself in front of the work at hand.  Once again, let me be clear: Weilerstein's and Barnatan's playing was excellent and the interpretation thoughtful; it simply went overboard.

The excess was less evident in the Chopin Cello and Piano Sonata, also beautifully played, but Weilerstein was at her most compelling in Kodaly's horrendously difficult Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8 -- one of those works that sound more interesting than they are, when you really think about them, but that nevertheless grip you when they are played with the sort of mastery that this young artist brought to this piece.

Much has been made of Weilerstein's head movements and "inspired" gazes into space, but she is certainly not the only instrumentalist to be so afflicted, or afflicting.  For hundreds of years musicians have debated over whether emotion should be expressed only through the playing or also through physical attitude.  During the Baroque period, the dominant ideal seems to have been sprezzatura (literally "contempt", but more accurately translated, in this case, as "nonchalance"): according to this philosophy, performers should always appear to be playing with ease and not to care about the effect made on the audience.  But Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach believed, on the contrary, that "in languishing, sad passages, the performer must languish and grow sad;" that "in lively, joyous passages, the executant must again put himself into the appropriate mood;" and that "fitting expressions help the listener to understand our meaning."  I very much favor the sprezzatura school -- I want instrumental music to affect me through my ears, not through my eyes -- but I can always turn my head or close my eyes if the onstage show is too much for me.  Notice, by the way, that the more a conductor emotes and jumps around on a podium, the less the orchestra musicians watch him or her: the proportions are almost mathematical.  Have a look at the old films of Erich Kleiber, Monteux, Mravinsky, Reiner, Toscanini, Walter, and compare them to the films of Bernstein and his emulators, and then tell me which group receives more attention from the orchestra.

Just as impressive as Weilerstein's recital was last Friday's "Musicians from Marlboro" concert at the Metropolitan Museum.  Violinists Miho Saegusa and Jessica Lee, violist Mark Holloway, and cellist Na-Young Baek gave the most powerful and appropriately insane performance of Janacek's "Kreutzer Sonata" String Quartet that I've ever heard, and these four musicians plus violinists Scott St John and Yonah Zur, violist Maiya Papach, and cellist Susan Babini also gave one of the most fleet but intense accounts in my experience of Mendelssohn's youthful Octet.  The interpretation that five of the same players brought to Mozart's Quintet in E-flat, K. 614, wasn't quite as refined and accomplished as their work on the other two pieces, but the whole concert was thoroughly enjoyable -- I left it feeling elated.

The musical event of last week in New York was without a doubt Elliott Carter's one hundredth birthday concert at Carnegie Hall.  To reach that age in good health and with all one's marbles intact is no mean feat in itself; to do so while still in full command of one's creative powers and energies is simply flabbergasting.  And there he was, occupying an aisle seat near the front of the historic auditorium (which was only seventeen years old when he was born), listening to his new, brief, but highly complex piano concerto, Interventions, with Daniel Barenboim as soloist and the Boston Symphony under James Levine.  Afterward, Carter made his way slowly but surely onto the stage to receive the audience's ovation as well as a huge birthday cake from Carnegie's administrators and a rendition of "Happy Birthday" from the orchestra.  Nor were there any concessions to age in the piece itself: from the orchestra's opening, insistent A, opposed immediately by the piano's opening, equally insistent B-flat, the work was full of Sturm und Drang, with little of the lyricism that can be heard, for instance, in some of Carter's other late-period work.  (I'm thinking in particular of the Tempo e Tempi cycle of 1998-99, which was beautifully performed by soprano Susan Narucki with Levine and the Met Chamber Ensemble at Zankel last year.)

In the first half of the concert, which consisted of Schubert's profoundly moving Fantasy in F minor for piano, four hands, and Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, Barenboim and Levine seemed ill-matched.  Barenboim emphasized the Fantasy's surface brilliance, whereas Levine seemed more interested in the piece's introverted nature; and in the concerto, Barenboim gave us blocks of details (often interesting ones) while Levine seemed to be struggling to preserve structure.  In any case, the evening's real feature was its conclusion -- one of the most (maybe the most) sweepingly dramatic yet thoroughly detailed performances of The Rite of Spring that I have ever heard.  Yes, there were a few bloopers is some of the solo wind parts, but gimme a break: this was the conclusion of a long evening (the 8 o'clock concert wasn't over until nearly 11) that ended not with a whimper but with a bang -- and what a bang!