Unanswered Question: May 2010 Archives

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.