The Unanswered Question

Readers of this blog might (or might not) be wondering what's become of me. There have been no postings in recent weeks because with the conclusion of the concert season I found it necessary to write half a dozen grant applications. This left little time for anything else other than complaining about it.

I am now in Pittsburgh, where I'm directing an NEH teacher-training workshop on "Dvorak and America" through the end of the month. After that, in August, I'll be covering the Santa Fe Opera for the Times Literary Supplement (UK) -- and presumably writing about it here as well. Then the season resumes in September -- which for me means a Post-Classical Ensemble Gershwin festival in College Park.

The "Dvorak and America" institute, which I've previously described in this space (Jan. 23, 2010), has so far spent a lot of time with a little-known work: his American Suite, composed in New York in 1894. Postdating the New World Symphony, this is in many respects the purest example of Dvorak's "American" style -- a New World snapshot comprising vignettes (vs. the symphony's heroic canvases). It invokes cakewalk and plantation song. The finale is an Indian dance that turns into a minstrel song with banjo accompaniment.

As it turned out, the institute's instructors all had somewhat varying views of the Americanisms here inscribed by Dvorak. The Yale art historian Tim Barringer, for whom Dvorak furnishes the nearest musical equivalent to the "American sublime" of Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, hears riverboats where I hear Indians. The music historian Robert Winter hears even more Indians in the American Suite than I do. The pianist Steven Mayer, who eloquently performed the American Suite for us, takes a brisker tempo than I do in the Andante -- which for me evokes the "sadness to despair" Dvorak felt upon encountering the Iowa prairie.

My most controversial book was AmUnderstanding Toscanini -- How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (1987). It was praised and denounced with strange vehemence. Reading the reviews, I marveled that no writer read the book I thought I had written -- until I absorbed that there is no definitive reading of any book. To begin with, transferring intentions -- impressions, arguments -- into words is always imprecise. What is more, a reader brings to a book their own impressions and arguments.

So it is with the American Suite. I bring to this music a mass of knowledge about Dvorak's American sojourn, and the conviction that it mattered greatly, both to him and to us. My reading says something about the music, and also something about me.

Teaching this past week, interacting with teachers, responding to their responses, I think I have learned something about my obsession with Dvorak. My Dvorak is a mediator. He mediates between the New World and the Old. His American Suite isn't just an Old World-style piano piece with a New World patina; it achieves a synthesis. Gershwin matters to me for the same reason. In Classical Music in America, I say that his early death subverted his capacity to heal the schisms separating classical and popular styles -- which is to say, to contribute to the creation of a classical music for Americans (Dvorak's American mission).

All this tells me something about certain tenacious personal schisms. My lifelong devotion to classical music -- music fundamentally European -- complicates my American identity. I take a special interest in hybrids. In fact, my book-in-progress -- Moral Fire: Portraits from America's Fin-de-Siecle -- studies hybrid Americans from the late Gilded Age. Exploring them, I explore my self-contradictions.

During my tenure as Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM, I was handed an opportunity to refashion the orchestra's mission. In the course of two years, it had been abandoned by more than two-thirds of its subscribers: there was nothing left to lose. I proposed making all the programming thematic and inter-disciplinary. Harvey Lichtenstein, BAM's mastermind, said yes.

One of the Brooklyn Phil festivals I concocted was "Flamenco," in 1997. It proved a personal watershed. For one thing, I discovered that Manuel de Falla's El amor brujo, with the addition of a profound flamenco cantaora (Carmen Linares) and a sublime Hispanic dancer (Pilar Rioja), became an existential epiphany rather than a tuneful diversion: my understanding of Spanish music was changed forever. For another thing, "Flamenco" put me permanently in touch with a network of Spanish artists and intellectuals, including the conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez, who had a fledgling DC chamber orchestra he called "musica aperta."

A few years later, I left BAM: running an orchestra there had become financially unsupportable. Around the same time, Angel invited me to partner him in transforming "musica aperta" into a chamber-orchestra version of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. This is how Post-Classical Ensemble was born, in 2003.

Last week, we announced our eighth season. It comprises a robust series of festivals celebrating an assortment of iconic twentieth century composers: George Gershwin, Lou Harrison, and Igor Stravinsky

A chamber-sized version of the Brooklyn Phil, it turns out, is a viable proposition. Angel and I are one-half of a skeletal staff. We hire musicians as needed, and enjoy the loyalty of DC's top free-lancers. We are popular with local presenters, which means we largely avoid the costs of renting a hall. And, as our programming was instantly distinctive, we quickly established a niche of our own in the DC cultural environment.

Two of our three forthcoming festivals build on another programming thread I've long pursued: sharing with audiences issues of interpretation -- of a composer; of his music. Our "Stravinsky Project" in April 2011 -- shared with the Strathmore Music Center, the National Gallery, and Georgetown University -- challenges Stravinsky's own strictures against interpretation. The central participant, the pianist Alexander Toradze, is the most subversive concert artist I know, an incendiary zealot for whom Stravinsky's cool aesthetics of order and objectivity are meaningless.

The Ensemble's "Interpreting Gershwin," in collaboration with the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at College Park, explores a range of interpretive options arising from Gershwin's singularly eclectic genius. One of the participants, the pianist Genadi Zagor, is the wittiest, most elegant improviser I've ever encountered in the classical music world. He will not be the first pianist to improvise the solos in Rhapsody in Blue, but I doubt that those solos have ever been improvised by a virtuoso as spectacularly equipped as Genadi.

Our "Stravinsky Project" also includes the American premiere of Stravinsky's Les Noces in its final version for pianola as performed by Rex Lawson, who claims to be one of only three fully trained present-day pianolists; using both hands and feet, he controls the dynamics, tempos, and pedalings of his thundering mechanical instrument. Peggy Parsons -- our exemplary partner at the National Gallery film division -- will strike a fresh print of Richard Leacock's masterful cinema verite Stravinsky documentary, a film never before seen in DC. The same program features Tony Palmer's award-winning Stravinsky film -- with Tony Palmer at hand (from London) to comment. The Stravinsky festival concludes with Zagor improvising a Stravinsky medley -- I cannot think of a more radical assault on Stravinsky's insistence that there is only one correct way to play his music.

I came to the unclassifiable music of Lou Harrison thanks to the conductor Carl St. Clair, who spearheaded a 2006 Harrison festival with the Pacific Symphony (for which I serve as Artistic Advisor). Previously, I had not been prepared to concede the paramount importance and originality of a composer so likable. I agree with Mark Swed (in the Lost Angeles Times) that Harrison's muscular, expansive Piano Concerto (premiered by Keith Jarrett) may be the most remarkable ever composed by an American. We're doing it with Ben Pasternack, whose previous Ensemble assignments have included Copland's Piano Fantasy and John Adams Phrygian Gates, both unforgettably delivered.

Our Harrison festival also includes a film component at the National Gallery -- the world premiere of Eva Soltes's intimate, exquisitely affectionate Harrison documentary, a movie years in the making. In addition to the Harrison Piano Concerto, we'll bring to DC the serene Strict Songs for chorus and orchestra -- Harrison's homage to the West Coast as a refuge from Manhattan, serialism, and a nervous breakdown.

A more or less complete schedule of Post-Classical Ensemble's 2010-2011 festivals follows. Tickets are on sale.

INTERPRETING GERSHWIN (at Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts, the University of Maryland at College Park)

Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2010, 5:30 to 7 pm: TAKE-FIVE: "GERSHWIN AND IMPROVISATION"
With pianists Genadi Zagor and Vakhtang Kodanashvili, and Gershwin scholar Richard Crawford. Multiple versions of Gershwin songs and the Three Preludes, including improvisations and historic recordings.

Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2010, 8 pm: "GERSHWIN AND JAZZ"
Gershwin songs with the University Jazz Ensemble.

Friday, Sept. 24, 2010, 3:30 pm - RICHARD CRAWFORD GERSHWIN LECTURE

Friday, Sept. 24, 2010 - "THE RUSSIAN GERSHWIN"
7 pm Pre-concert talk by Richard Crawford, including Soviet Gershwin recordings

8 pm: with pianists Genadi Zagor and Vakhtang Kodanashvili
Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (original Paul Whiteman version, with the solos improvised) Gershwin: Piano Concerto in F
Gershwin: Cuban Overture

SUBLIME CONFLUENCE: LOU HARRISON AND GAMELAN

Saturday, Feb. 27, 2011, 2 pm, The National Gallery of Art: "Lou Harrison: A World of Music," a documentary film by Eva Soltes (world premiere)

Friday, March 5, 2011, The Indonesian Consulate: Lou Harrison conference (in collaboration with George Washington University), including the Wesleyan University Gamelan, Harrison scholar Bill Alves, Eva Soltes

Saturday, March 6, 2011, Lisner Auditorium
Wesleyan University Javanese Gamelan (Sumarsam, director)
George Washington University Chorus
Benjamin Pasternack, piano

Javanese gamelan music
Harrison: gamelan composition TBA
Harrison: Concerto for Piano and Javanese Gamelan, movement 2
Harrison: Strict Songs for chorus and orchestra
Harrison: Piano Concerto

THE STRAVINSKY PROJECT

1.At Georgetown University:
Stravinsky conference, McNeir Hall, Friday afternoon, April 8, 2011, 1 to 6 pm.

2.At Strathmore Concert Hall, Friday, April 8, 2011, 8 pm: "Stravinsky's Russian Accent"
Alexander Toradze and members of the Toradze Piano Studio; Washington Bach Consort
Stravinsky: Symphonies for Wind Instruments
Stravinsky: Concerto for Piano and Winds
Russian wedding songs as source material for Les Noces
Stravinsky: Les Noces

3. Stravinsky Film Festival, The National Gallery, Saturday, April 9, 2011, 1 to 7 pm
Stravinsky: Tango (in live performance; Alexander Toradze, pianist)
"Once at a Border," a Stravinsky biography by Tony Palmer
"A Stravinsky Portrait" by Richard Leacock (DC premiere)
Stravinsky/Balanchine: Agon (New York City Ballet)

With commentary on "interpreting Stravinsky" by Tony Palmer, Alexander Toradze, Robynn Stillwell; Joseph Horowitz, host

4. At Strathmore Mansion, Sunday April 10, 2011 : "Interpreting Stravinsky" Marathon
--12 to 3:45:
Part one: "The Stravinsky Odyssey," an exhibition of photographs by Katya Chilingiri documenting Stravinsky's odyssey from Russia to Switzerland to France to California, plus Chilingiri's filmed interviews with his descendants in Europe and the US. Chilingiri will offer a guided tour, followed by discussion. (Box lunches will be provided.)

Part two: Rex Lawson performs the pianola version of Les Noces (American premiere). This was Stravinsky's final version of Les Noces, incorporating all the instrumental and choral parts on a single keyboard (!).

Part three. "Interpreting Stravinsky" with pianists Alexander Toradze, George Vatchnadze, Genadi Zagor; Joseph Horowitz, host. Using archival recordings, film, and music in live performance, we explore Stravinsky's "Russian" and "American" accents.

--4 to 6 pm: "Stravinsky and the Piano" at Strathmore Concert Hall
Pianists Alexander Toradze, George Vatchnadze, Genadi Zagor
Stravinsky: Scherzo from Sonata in F-sharp minor (Baltimore/DC premiere)
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring) (two pianos)
Stravinsky: Tango
Stravinsky: Piano Sonata
Stravinsky: Concerto for Two Solo Pianos
Stravinsky: Sonata for Two Pianos
A Stravinsky improvisation incorporating all the afternoon's music

A recent article on "Funding: The State of the Art" by my friend Andras Szanto makes for informative and depressing reading. "The search is on for a more compelling vocabulary" to rationalize and impel funding for the arts, Andras reports. The "latest linguistic developments" include applying "quality" not "as a mark of aesthetic sophistication," but "to denote a positive human environment."

Good God, is it this difficult to make a persuasive case for the arts? A substantial portion of my professional life has been dedicated to studying, applying, and teaching the story of Dvorak in America (1892-1895). Essentially, this is a story about the uses of culture: how Dvorak helped Americans define and understand themselves. His New World Symphony (1893) was a mighty catalyst for discussion and debate: What was America? Who were Americans? Was plantation song "American folk song"? Were black and "red" Americans emblematic or representative of the American experience?

In New York, Dvorak was received as a prophet; his outside perspective on American mores, American energies, American roots seemed acute, prescient, progressive. In Boston, he was dismissed as an interloper; he seemed naïve, obnoxious. He held up a mirror -- as only culture can. I know no better tool for encapsulating the differences between these two defining American communities at the turn of the twentieth century.

Dvorak received grateful letters from all over the nation. From Louisville, Mildred J. Hill, inspired by a Dvorak article in Harper's (Feb. 1895), mailed him a collection of street cries with a note that she had traveled nearly 300 miles in order to hear the New World Symphony performed in Cincinnati. "I was so carried away by it that I determined to send you the enclosed examples. It takes a real southern person to really understand your work in that Symphony, in my humble opinion."

In addition to soaking up plantation song, prairie vacancy, and the elegiac fate of the "noble savage," Dvorak's symphony was specifically indebted to Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha. Americans a century ago knew Dvorak's symphony, knew Longfellow's poem as part of a cultural vocabulary that informed both personal and national identity. In the 1860s, Americans knew the religious/scientific paintings of Frederic Church for the same reason: like the New World Symphony, like The Song of Hiawatha, "Heart of the Andes" and "Twilight in the Wilderness" were protean resonators.

It amazes and frustrates me that American history is taught to young Americans as a parochial political/social narrative. How many high school American History courses routinely include Dvorak, Longfellow, and Church? There is no way of knowing the Gilded Age without them. Today, as ever, they enable us to ponder who we are.

Here is some more on teaching Dvorak. Here is some more on Dvorak and America. My Wagner Nights: An American History recounts how Wagnerism held up a mirror to American notions of uplift, to American needs, aspirations, and achievements. Culture delights, provokes, inspires -- and instructs.

Alan Gilbert's first season as the New York Philharmonic's music director climaxed with a triumphant run of Gyorgy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre - the New York premiere of a major late twentieth century opera (rare species), ingeniously semi-staged by Doug Fitch.

The crux of this achievement, it seems to me, is a new ambience. Avery Fisher Hall, the Philharmonic's acoustically vexed home, is a formal and impersonal space. Or so it forever seemed during the tenures of Gilbert's predecessors Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, and Loren Maazel. Gilbert not only has acquired a habit of talking from the stage; he chats with the audience. He projects a casual authority.

The sense of occasion achieved by the Philharmonic during its three sold-out Ligeti performances first of all registered a brave and necessary undertaking. But it also registered a degree of engagement - an appreciative audience, an orchestra that looked like it was having fun - only a new ambience could have secured. The piece itself, however musically complex, is a ribald entertainment. It is fun or it is nothing.

In little more than two weeks of rehearsal, Fitch achieved an enveloping theatrical spectacle. A small stage was constructed in front of the orchestra. An ingenious species of live puppetry, also onstage, was magnified on a centrally positioned screen. The singers, all of whom could act, were creatively costumed. Instrumentalists and choristers turned up in balconies, or marched down an aisle. It was neither too much nor too little. Music and action supported one another.

Comparisons to Peter Gelb's Metropolitan Opera are inescapable. Early in his regime, Gelb has had trouble finding directors who can achieve the striking stage pictures and effects he demands without distracting from what should be the main business at hand. He has given us unquestionably artful stage pictures - Phelim McDemott and Julian Crouch's Sattyagraha, William Kentridge's The Nose, Robert Lepage's The Damnation of Faust all leap to mind - whose impact was nevertheless highly questionable. These days, one goes to the Met skeptically disposed. The first question about Robert LePage's forthcoming Ring can only be: will its detailed special effects, certain to impress, rob attention from impressive details more important - inherent details of musical description, of psychological behavior, of political or metaphysical meaning. (Cf. my Met blog of March 25.) The music/theater symbiosis achieved by Gilbert and Fitch has been in short supply.

Gelb has sought to refresh the Met by going outside opera, outside music, in his choice of directors. But musical knowledge can also refresh. I can't help but find it pertinent that Fitch reads music. If you watch Wieland Wagner directing Wagner on youtube, you'll observe him coaching the delivery of sung lines - of music -- the way a stage director coaches spoken text. My first Bayreuth experience was the premiere of Harry Kupfer's instantly famous Flying Dutchman, in which the story becomes Senta's deranged fantasy - a product of the societal repression Wagner limns (her father is a greedy capitalist; her peers are husband fodder). In the second act, Kupfer aligned the more chromatic music with Senta's hallucination of the Dutchman; the squarer, more diatonic stretches were the quotidian reality she fled. That is: the stylistic ambivalence of this early Wagner masterpiece was supported and explained. Kupfer's production was as musical as it was intellectually fresh and visually indelible.

Of the operatic performances I attended in New York over the past season, the two most stirring were delivered in concert: The Trojans at Carnegie Hall, with Valery Gergiev and his Mariinsky forces, and now Ligeti with the Philharmonic. Stage directors can get in the way.

It's again my good fortune to be Artistic Director of the National Endowment for the Arts' Music Critics Institute, which -- as was recently announced -- will take place Oct. 9 to 19, hosted by Columbia University. I mention this partly in the hope that some readers of this blog may be interested in applying (email: nea.institute@gmail.com). We accept 25 applicants from all over the US. Some call themselves critics, some are bloggers, many do other things as well. Evenings are spent attending concerts. During the day, there are workshops, lectures, and visits of various kinds.

As ever, the institute is scheduled to coincide with the fall's most auspicious New York classical music events. In season past we have gorged on Valery Gergiev's Prokofiev, Bernard Haitink's Mahler, and Jeremy Denk's Ives. We've met with Gergiev and Denk, we've watched Gianandrea Noseda rehearse the New York Philharmonic. Our meetings with Peter Gelb, at the Met, and George Steel, at the City Opera, are a study in contrasts. Alex Ross and Justin Davidson are regularly at hand in some capacity

This year, our October dates key on the Met's new Boris Godunov, conducted by Gergiev, with Rene Pape in the title role and Peter Stein -- a great name in German theater -- directing. High expectations are in order -- and high curiosity. Pape sings words as meaningfully -- as tangibly, a gift given to few (Hans Hotter leaps to mind) -- as any operatic artist alive; but can he do it in Russian? BAM, the same week, is hosting the New York premiere of Evan Ziporyn's A House in Bali, based on the glorious memoir and traumatic life story of Colin McPhee, who pioneered in mating gamelan and Western music.

Not the least intriguing aspect of the NEA institute, for those of us who run it (my colleagues are Andras Szanto and Anya Grundmann), is the opportunity to track a sea change in the field. Our first institutes included many newspaper critics whose chief responsibilities included reviewing last night's concert. A burning issue, at these early institutes, was "objectivity." Our critics worried about being too cozy with the artists and administrators they critiqued. This "conflict of interest" anxiety, it seemed to me, more shrank than enhanced their sense of vocation: they pursed a narrow mission.

That music critics of this persuasion are a vanishing species does not disappoint me. Our institute debates over "objectivity" vanished some years ago. Our participants are increasingly original. They come with a knowledge base stretching far beyond the confines of classical music. An increasing number are actual practitioners in the arts: instrumentalists, conductors, singers, composers. They understand the fragility of a 21st century community of culture. Had they been the music critics whose jobs and papers are now disappearing, would it have made any difference? I would like to think so.

I sense that the institute is potentially changing from a terminus to a refueling station: a means of transitioning to a post-classical future equipped with websites and radio stations -- and even a few newspapers -- that vitally serve the culture of the community.

When Dana Gioia, as head of the NEA, ingeniously created the critics institutes in classical music, dance, and theater, he was pursuing an enlightened mandate. Not so long ago, daily papers in small and moderate media markets lacked critics who were adequately trained. Many were generalists whose background was in journalism, rather than the arts. Dana logically envisioned the critics institutes as an exercise in remedial education -- and so they were. As it turned out, however, our first participants, and their newspapers, were on the verge of extinction. The institutes wound up servicing different and more dire needs, and seizing more necessary and significant opportunities. As I have lamented in this space before, the "classical music crisis" has little attracted the sustained attention of charitable foundations; concurrent exigencies afflicting arts journalism seem little noticed at all -- except by the NEA.

What we have observed at the NEA Music Critics Institute, in short, is a growing chance for cultural conversation, for partnerships in the arts embracing the overlapping activities of those who write, administer, and perform. The newspaper culture of objectivity, which long inhibited such necessary symbiosis, is waning. What -- if anything -- will take its place?

Two days after the conclusion of Valery Gergiev's three-week New York Philharmonic "Russian Stravinsky" festival (cf. my Stravinsky blogs of March 23, May 3, May 9), I found myself listening to "Non-Russian Stravinsky": the Concerto for Piano and Winds as rendered by the singular American pianist Jeremy Denk and a terrific orchestra of young musicians - Ensemble ACJW - led by John Adams at Carnegie's Zankel Hall. The differences were startling.

With the Philharmonic Gergiev invested the concerto's opening Largo with a liturgical gravitas. As the Largo returns to end the piece 20 minutes later, this formidable Slavic frame set the tone. Amazingly, Gergiev engaged all eight of the Philharmonic's double basses alongside the concerto's massed winds and brass (Stravinsky does not specify the number of basses to be employed). Ensnared by this thick tonal envelope, the young Russian pianist Alexei Volodin couldn't hold his own. He is obviously a polished player, with a glossy sound alluringly applicable to Chopin or Rachmaninoff. And it was in his favor that no more than Gergiev did he attempt to perform and interpret with Stravinskyan objectivity. That said, Gergiev needed a weightier, more challenging partner (e.g., Denis Matsuev, who performed the Stravinsky Capriccio with him earlier in the week).

Denk, by comparison, is a pianist impossible to place. I would call him "American" - he capers outside all European traditions of interpretation known to me. That so original an artist - so blithely irreverent and adventurous (his current season repertoire includes Ligeti, Carter, Feldman, Ades, and Ives) should have lately acquired something like a major career (Philadelphia Orchestra, London Philharmonia, etc.) is a mystery. I cannot think of a precedent among American-born solo instrumental soloists. I first encountered him in a program of Bach partitas treated as coloristically as Edwin Fisher and Wilhelm Kempff once purveyed this music - and yet not remotely Germanic in tone. I have since heard him in Tchaikovsky, Ives, and now Stravinsky. It all sounds like Denk to me.

If I were to attempt to put into words what Denk sounds like, the first impression I would wish to convey is the illusion of complete spontaneity - by which I refer not only to darting details of tempo and dynamics, but to a supreme acuity of touch and hearing, of deft inflection of hand and - never to be neglected - foot. Other Denk attributes that leap to mind are subtly aerated keyboard textures and a playfulness of intellect that never careens into eccentricity. A protean artist, he tickles the brain and delights the ear. He also happens to possess 10 spectacular fingers that refuse to brag (I have not heard his Liszt).

In the Stravinsky concerto, Volodin struggled with the leaping marcatissimo octaves of the last measures; the final cadence was deprived of punch. Denk sailed through this passage without a care. Even more remarkable, it seemed to me, was the first movement's Piu mosso coda, which builds to a crushing downbeat on another of Stravinsky's reprises of the opening Largo. As the texture thickened, Volodin lost momentum. Denk turned up the heat again and yet again. The return of the Largo was louder and more massive in Gergiev's Philharmonic performances; but Denk's build-up insured that Adams's players entered with more impact.

Denk sang the concerto's slow movement beautifully, graciously, memorably. In the finale, he dipped in and out of the jazzy syncopations while sipping champagne. I would call his Stravinsky Concerto "Franco-American."

If ever there were to be an "American Stravinsky" festival, exploring New World changes wrought in our hearing and understanding of music so culturally layered and unmoored, Jeremy Denk would be the obvious candidate to illuminate this opposite side of the Stravinsky coin.

Readers of this blog will appreciate my keen interest in Valery Gergiev's performances of Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements on the final two days of the New York Philharmonic's three-week "Russian Stravinsky" festival (cf. my postings of March 29 and May 3). This work, so complexly monogrammed with the composer's layer upon layer of identity, is one of the most impressive products of his long and ambiguous American exile. Gergiev's intense understanding of the symphony as a "war symphony" promised a revelatory reading, and fresh insights into the Stravinsky odyssey generally.

Though the Symphony in Three Movements was commissioned by the Philharmonic in celebration of the impending end to World War II - it was even proposed that it be titled "La Victoire" - Stravinsky balked at furnishing a programmatic note. In fact, he did not even write the work afresh. The first movement uses sketches for something resembling a piano concerto. The second recycles harp-and-flute music originally intended for the Hollywood film The Song of Bernadette. The prominence of the piano and harp in all three movements became a binding idea. Both outer movements are notably militant and march-like. Though Stravinsky toyed with the alternate title "Three Symphonic Movements," the Symphony in Three Movements achieves a consolidated grandeur of intensity. Many writers - beginning with the composer Ingolf Dahl, whom Stravinsky close to write the original program note - have compared it to The Rite of Spring.

More than a decade after conducting the Philharmonic in the first performance (Jan. 24, 1946), Stravinsky confided to Robert Craft that the Symphony in Three Movements was "linked in my mind with a concrete impression of the war almost always cinematographic in origin. For instance, the beginning of the third movement is partly a musical reaction to newsreels I had seen of goose-stepping soldiers." After furnishing a scenario for the entire finale, he characteristically added: "Enough of this. In spite of what I have admitted, the Symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes. That is all." (To Bruno Zirato of the Philharmonic, Stravinsky had written in 1945: "It is well known that no program is to be sought in my musical output. . . Sorry if this is desapointing [sic] but no story to be told, no narration and what I would say would only make yawn the majority of your public which undoubtedly expects exciting descriptions.")

Stravinsky's first performance of the Symphony in Three Movements (kudos to the Philharmonic for posting it on their website) is notably gutsy. But reviewers listened with Stravinsky's polemics ringing loudly in their ears. Olin Downes of the Times heard "sterile stuff, at best a reworking of ideas expressed much more vitally in preceding scores" -- and he cited Stravinsky's "long and oft repeated doctrine that this music means nothing at all in either the emotional or programmatic sense." Irving Kolodin heard music "concerned with musical materials as such." In the Herald Tribune, Virgil Thomson, a more sympathetic auditor, went off on a tangent: "The present work, if I mistake not, evokes the Romantic Russian symphony, the more obvious sources of its style being early Tchaikovsky and possibly Borodin."

How the reviewers might have reacted to Stravinsky's wartime symphony had the composer been less militantly diffident is impossible to surmise. Thomson excepted, they heard what they expected to hear. And I suppose the same is true of me. I knew that for Gergiev the Symphony in Three Movements evoked the war symphonies of Prokofiev and Shostakovich (and that he came to this view before learning of Stravinsky's "admissions" to Craft). I knew that he experienced the opening flourish as an "alarm." In rehearsal, I heard him tell the Philharmonic that this rising gesture should be "very brutal." He told the bassoonists that their brisk dialogue near the opening of the finale could be considered music of "fear." He asked that certain staccatos be played non-staccato. Rather than precision, he concentrated on harmony, sonority, mood. He achieved a darker, more full-bodied sound than a Boulez or Salonen would seek. The work's occasional jazzy syncopations were jazzy not for him. The second movement eschewed elegance. A dire mood was sustained.

I wish I could report that the resulting interpretation silenced my reservations about the Symphony in Three Movements. I still find the outer sections of the second movement weak. The middle episode still incongruously reminds me of its cinema source: Bernadette's spooky vision of the Virgin Mary. Certainly, this is a symphony full of stirring things. Doubtless, it is among the most memorable produced on American soil. But I am not persuaded that the many episodes - the construction is additive - always maintain a high level of inspiration.

Gergiev coupled the Symphony in Three Movements with the Concerto for Piano and Winds (1924) and - ending the festival - The Rite of Spring. My friend David Schiff, in the audience, compared the Stravinsky piano concerto with the roughly contemporaneous piano concertos of Bartok and Prokofiev (I would have added Rachmaninoff's crafty Rhapsody on the Theme by Paganini). In these cruel comparisons, Stravinsky comes up short. Schiff compared the symphony with the symphonies of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, with the same result.

The Philharmonic's festival, with no fewer than 16 Stravinsky compositions, furnished an exceptional opportunity to compare Stravinsky with himself. The opportunity proved fascinating and, ultimately, unsettling. The greatest impressions - I speak both of the pieces and of Gergiev's searing performances - were left by Petrushka and by The Rite of Spring (I did not hear the Firebird or Les Noces).

Writing not long ago [April 8] in the New York Review of Books, Charles Rosen remarked in passing: "Stravinsky followed the few years of oPetrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces with a turn to neoclassicism: he continued for many decades to produce some of his finest music, but nevertheless the energetic panache of the first years had evaporated." Surely Stravinsky is one of the most courageously resilient figures in the history of Western classical music. Had there been less cause for resilience - had there been no revolution to evict him from his homeland - he might have left a legacy less intriguingly textured with self-denial and re-invention, more sustained in its elemental energy and riotous panache.

The New York Philharmonic's three-week Stravinsky festival is in full swing. It offers a singular opportunity to hear no fewer than 16 Stravinsky works conducted by Valery Gergiev - who proposes a much different Stravinsky than, say, Pierre Boulez or Esa-Pekka Salonen: darker, earthier, weightier.

In effect, Gergiev furnishes phase two of a new Stravinsky template, supplanting the image of the cosmopolitan modernist blithely transplanted in Paris and Hollywood. The new Stravinsky is, of course, essentially Russian. In the US, we first came to the Russian Stravinsky via Richard Taruskin and other scholars who unearthed tangled Russian roots of various kinds. Now Russian-trained musicians of Gergiev's generation - including my friend Lexo Toradze and his touring Toradze Piano Studio, with its numerous Stravinsky marathons - are equally purveying a Stravinsky different from any glimpsed by Robert Craft (except when he accompanied Stravinsky to Leningrad and Moscow in 1962 and observed the composer elated and rejuvenated).

Yesterday I had occasion to host and produce an all-day event for the Philharmonic festival. Using a team of gifted Juilliard pianists, we surveyed Stravinsky's odyssey chronologically, beginning with the F-sharp minor Sonata he composed under Rimsky's tutelage, ending with the Sonata for Two Pianos of 1945. That is: we tracked a scenario of self-renewal that was equally a scenario of self-contradiction and self-denial. To further explore the ambiguities at hand, we examined the Piano Sonata (1924) as edited in 1978 by Stravinsky's son Soulima, who revised his father's strictures "against interpretation." And we heard a recording of Mozart's C minor Fugue made by Igor and Soulima in the 1930s - a finicky act of re-interpretation, of feeling repressed and reprocessed, bordering on the insolent.

Aaron Copland, in a 1943 letter, surmised a "psychology of exile" in Stravinsky characterized by "exquisite perfection" and a "lack of immediacy of contact with the world around him." Copland added, "I don't think he's in a very good period. He copies himself unashamedly and therefore one rarely comes upon a really fresh page - for him, I mean." But Stravinsky is equally a study in regeneration. (Copland more appreciated Stravinsky's stylistic departures of the twenties and thirties - but not those of the 1950s. I explore Stravinsky's psychology of exile in my Artists in Exile [2008].)

As surveyed in performance yesterday, the Stravinsky journey was in fact bewildering in its resourcefulness and complexity. Think of the composers who could not handle the aesthetic upheavals of the early twentieth century. Elgar, Sibelius, Ives, Falla all stopped creating. These cases are distinguishable, but the Great War, puncturing Romantic afflatus, is generally pertinent. Elgar dried up after the 1919 swan song of his Cello Concerto; he died in 1934. Sibelius tried and abandoned a turn to modernism (his Fourth Symphony of 1911); he destroyed whatever he may have composed after 1930: 27 years before he died. Ives - like Elgar, like Sibelius, an embattled apostle of uplift - produced nothing much after 1920; he died in 1954. For Falla, the influence of Stravinsky impelled a neo-classical turn with his important but little-heard Concerto, whose 15 minutes took four years to compose (1923-26) (cf. my Falla blog of March 9). After that came two decades of labor on the unfinishable cantata Atlantida.

Prokofiev had to return to the Soviet Union - which he knew to be a totalitarian police state - in order to replenish his challenged muse. Schoenberg had to undertake a laborious new methodology: serialism. Like Stravinsky's, his resilience was partly a function of sheer tenacity in the face of cultural and political turmoil.

Gergiev, at yesterday's Philharmonic event, compared Stravinsky and Prokofiev. He asked: What if, like Prokofiev, Stravinsky had visited the USSR in 1927? He answered: Stravinsky would have discovered a keenness of interest in himself and his music unknown in the West, and greater resources to produce and perform it. Rooted in the St. Petersburg of his youth and young adulthood, in the Mariinsky milieu of his father and of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, he might ultimately have composed massive operas in the Russian tradition (as Prokofiev would compose War and Peace), Gergiev suggested.

In a fascinating reminiscence, Gergiev described his first encounter with Stravinsky's Symphony Three Movements (1945) some three decades ago, performed by Colin Davis and the London Symphony on tour in Russia. He sensed a darker, more sinewy symphony than Davis purveyed: a war symphony in parallel with the war symphonies of Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

Fixating on purported programmatic content in Shostakovich, on imagined allusions to Stalin and the Gulag, we lose sight of the notes, Gergiev said. Stravinsky is the opposite case, he continued. We too much take him at his word: that music is powerless to express anything but itself, that (as Stravinsky told the Philharmonic's Bruno Zirato when asked for a program note for the Symphony in Three Movements): "It is well known that no program is to be sought in my musical output." (On the undoubted extra-musical resonances of Stravinsky's World War II symphony, see my blog of March 29.)

I can't wait to hear Gergiev's New York Philharmonic performances of the Symphony in Three Movements later this week.

When people worry about the impact of the recession on the performing arts, they worry about money: waning ticket sales, waning foundation support, waning gifts, waning fees. They should also worry about newspapers - about the draconian impact on arts journalism as papers cut back or go under.

The arts cannot flourish in a media vacuum. I know there are new media. But cultural conversation on the web is diffuse. Whatever purposes it may best serve, serving performing arts institutions - one function, however incidental, of mainstream print reviews and commentary - is not among them.

These thoughts are triggered by Bill Keller's review of Alan Brinkley's new biography of Henry Luce in today's New York Times Book Review. Keller is the executive editor of the Times. He writes: "It would be a mistake to sentimentalize the previous century's version of journalistic authority. But it is probably affair to say that the cacophony of today's media - in which rumor and invective often outpace truth-testing, in which shouting heads drown out sober reflection, in which it is possible for people to feel fully informed without ever encountering an opinion that contradicts their prejudices - plays some role in the polarizing of our politics, the dysfunction of our political system and the increased cynicism of the American electorate."

How I wish that this plausible judgment were commonly applied to the splintering of arts discourse. Five years ago, when I was invited to reflect on the state of arts journalism for Syracuse University's Goldring Program in Arts Journalism, I began by citing Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years. This classic 1941 history of the Group Theatre is many things - one of which is a case study on the life and death of a cutting-edge arts institution, offered as a lesson in futility. The failure of the Group Theatre, Clurman writes, was partly a failure of the press: New York's drama critics, he says, were not notably invested in standards they were prepared to articulate and defend. OK, probably not - but that they at least enjoyed a central pulpit, and the capacity to make a difference, looks pretty good today.

The same was true, of course, of Henry Luce's Time and Life - and of Look Magazine and countless other publications and TV shows I knew growing up. The performing arts coverage left a lot to be desired. And yet it mattered. Important players were right at hand: Ingmar Bergman, Pablo Casals, Tennessee Williams, Igor Stravinsky, Rodgers and Hammerstein actually registered as icons. Dwight MacDonald's classic putdown of "midcult" was unarguably just. As with the Ed Sullivan Show, or the Bell Telephone Hour, classical music as surveyed by a Luce or William Paley or David Sarnoff was all too Eurocentric and venerable, insufficiently tuned to America and to the contemporary moment. But the makings of significant public conversation were in place.

Does anyone care about the fate of arts journalism today? Few accounts of the demise of the daily paper seem to take notice of it. Foundations ignore it. The main exception of which I am aware is the National Endowment for the Arts, which under Dana Gioia undertook annual institutes for critics in music, theater, and dance. I am fortunate of have been the artistic director of the NEA Music Critics Institute since its inception in 2004. In seven years we have witnessed the disappearance of the fulltime music critic as a likely newspaper staff-member. The bloggers who have taken their place as institute participants are in many instances brighter and fresher than their precursors - but the platforms they occupy are smaller, less stable, less prominent. For the moment, I hold out more hope for the local radio station that takes responsibility for showcasing and buttressing the cultural life of a community. For a performing arts organization, the eager attention of a WFMT/Chicago (of which, alas, there is only one) can make a life-or-death difference.

Clurman wrote: "The Group could not sustain itself as such because it was isolated. The Group Theatre was a failure because, as no individual can exist alone, no group can exist alone. For a group to live a healthy life and mature to a full consummation of its potentiality, it must be sustained by other groups - not only of moneyed men or civic support, but by equally conscious groups in the press, in the audience, and generally in large and comparatively stable segments of society. When their this fails to happen, . . . it will wither just as an organ that is not nourished by the blood's circulation through the body."

Theodore Thomas, the Gilded Age father of American symphonic culture, preached: "A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community." In cities big and small, it did. Today, our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions. We are greatly challenged to identify, nurture, and sustain anything like a community of culture infused with arts and learning.

To assess the legacy of a conductor, the first place to look is repertoire. Leonard Bernstein's too-brief decade as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic was remarkable in many ways, but the surest criterion of Bernstein's success is the music he successfully championed. He made Mahler, Ives, and Nielsen matter as they had not mattered before.

Every orchestra, every conductor, should aspire to impact on repertoire - whether locally, nationally, or internationally. As a producer of concerts, and as Artistic Director of DC's Post-Classical Ensemble (which I co-founded with the conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez seven years ago), I hunger for opportunities to celebrate important music that remains little-known.

The composer we most program in DC is the Mexican Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940). Angel and I feel confident that his time will come. We believe that Revueltas's score for Redes (1935) is as stirring as Prokofiev's for Alexander Nevsky. We think that few composers this side of the Atlantic have created a symphonic palette as individual or vital.

We've also championed (and recorded) Aaron Copland's The City (1939) as his highest achievement as a film composer - the most important Copland score that remains little-heard. We gave the American premiere of Kurt Weill's Walt Whitman songs in the version with orchestra in the conviction that this heartfelt response to Pearl Harbor is one Weill's finest American works (cf. my blog of Feb. 21).

Last night at BAM, Angel conducted the Orchestra of St Luke's in the American stage premiere of Manuel de Falla's El Corregidor y la Molinera (The Magistrate and the Miller's Wife) in a new production that Post-Classical Ensemble repeats in DC this Friday night. A 45-minute dance/pantomime with chamber orchestra, Corregidor has a tangled history. It premiered in Madrid in 1917. Diaghilev wanted it. But he also wanted many changes. He had Falla recast it with a full orchestra, less pantomime, and many new numbers, including a fresh finale. Massine choreographed and danced the Miller. Picasso did sets and costumes. The result was The Three-Cornered Hat - whose triumph doomed Corregidor to obscurity.

According to the listing in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, Three-Cornered Hat is a "revised and expanded" version of Corregidor. Not really. The story is the same, and two of the famous Three-Cornered Hat dances - the fandango and seguidilla - originate in Corregidor (in deliciously fragrant scorings for a 17-member pit band). But Corregidor is longer than Three-Cornered Hat, not shorter. And about half the music is different.

In a post-concert discussion at BAM, Angel called Corregidor "cartoon music." And so it is. The score prickles with detailed gesture and incident aligned with precise musical description. There are also facetious allusions to Beethoven's First and Fifth Symphonies, and (a reference not mentioned in any Falla book I know) to the Rhinemaidens in Gotterdammerung (water music, for the Corregidor's hapless plunge into the local river en route to seduce the Miller's Wife).

The changes Diaghilev wanted were both practical and shrewd. Corregidor was far too intimate for his Ballet Russes. Its ending is problematically abrupt. And Falla - a compulsive eccentric; he was known to brush his teeth for 30 minutes -- got carried away with his cartoonsmanship (what is derided in film-music circles as "Mickey-Mousing"). As he was an inveterate reviser, intent on perfection, he would certainly have polished Corregidor had Three-Cornered Hat not intervened.

In short, El Corregidor y la Molinera is an orphaned work craving reconsideration. A literal staging, with every cartoon detail in place, would today risk seeming impossibly anachronistic. And so Angel and I commissioned a new production from Barcelona's Ramon Oller - an original choreographic talent, whose well-traveled adaptation of Carmen (with the same splendid principal dancers -- Sandrine Rouet and Javier Garcia - as Corregidor) ranges far afield from Bizet. The density of pantomime in Falla's Corregidor is in Oller's Corregidor replaced with a density of dance. It is a fascinating exercise. Will it travel? Can it rescue Corregidor? We will see.

One thing is certain: had there been no Diaghilev, and no Three-Cornered Hat, El Corregidor y la Molinera would today be beloved for its fandango, seguidilla, and countless other aromatic signatures of Falla's genius.