Unanswered Question: June 2010 Archives

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.