Unanswered Question: July 2011 Archives

In 1942, Edith Ives, age 28, wrote her father a 1,700-word letter for his 68th birthday -- decades after Charles Ives had ceased composing. It read in part:

"Dear Daddy,

"You are so very modest and sweet Daddy, that I don't think you realize the full import of the words people use about you, 'A great man.'

"Daddy, I have had a chance to see so many men lately -- fine fellows, and no doubt the cream of our generation. But I have never in all my life come across one who could measure up to the fine standard of life and living and you believe in, and that I have always seen you put into action no matter how many counts were against you. You have fire and imagination that is truly a divine speak, but to me the great thing is that never once have you tried to turn your gift to your own ends. Instead you have continually given to humanity right from your heart, asking nothing in return; -- and all too often getting nothing. The thing that makes me happiest about your recognition today is to see the bread you have so generously cast upon most ungrateful waters, finally beginning to return to you. All that great love is flowing back to you at least. Don't refuse it because it comes so late, Daddy."

When I first encountered Edie's letter, in Tom Owens' ChSelected Correspondence of Charles Ives (2007), I knew it had to become part of a public presentation. I realized, in an instant, that Ives -- himself a writer of distinction -- was a prime candidate for a concert with actors that would mutually illuminate Ives the man and Ives the composer. The result is "Charles Ives: A Life in Music," which this November launches Post-Classical Ensemble's 2011-2012 season as part of a three-day "Ives Project."

In the eight years since Angel Gil-Ordonez and I founded Post-Classical Ensemble in Washington, D.C., we have worked to consolidate its mission as an "experimental laboratory" for the symphonic field. Thanks in part to a $200,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we can now maximize our partnerships -- with Georgetown University, with the National Gallery of Art Film Division, with the Music Center at Strathmore -- in pursuit of new concert strategies.

With George Gershwin, Ives is arguably the supreme creative genius to grace the narrative of American classical music. But, as with Gershwin, his impact is glancing at best. And, as not with Gershwin, his music remains little known to the musical public at large. "The Ives Project," hosted by Strathmore, engages the pianist Jeremy Denk and the baritone William Sharp (both supreme Ives advocates) in a strategy for better acquainting American audiences with the cranky Ives idiom -- for penetrating its assaultive exterior, for its forbidding crankiness, for connecting to its warm heart and soul. The Project includes songs, chamber works, and the Concord Sonata; letters, essays, and historic recordings; and lecture/recitals by both Denk and Sharp.

Post-Classical Ensemble's other principal 2011-2012 projects are "Falla/Stravinsky" (Nov. 26-27; December 3-4) and "Schubert Uncorked" (March 24 and 31).
"Falla/Stravinsky" is a double bill: full stagings of Falla's El Amor Brujo and Stravinsky's A Soldier's Tale.

Over the years, my experience producing various versions of El Amor Brujo has been fulfilling and frustrating in equal measure. This magnificent flamenco appropriation doesn't really work in its original stage version, and the orchestral suite we know sacrifices potent dance and narrative dimensions. So Post-Classical Ensemble has engaged a master choreographer -- Igal Perry -- to choreograph the suite, streamlining the story and stripping away the dialogue. Our vocal soloist will be Esperanza Fernandez -- a legendary gypsy cantaora. There will be six dancers. The orchestra will be onstage. The production premieres Dec. 3 and 4 at Georgetown University; we intend to tour it.

"Schubert Uncorked" continues our collaboration with one of the world's premiere instrumentalists -- the uncategorizable bass trombone virtuoso David Taylor, who most recently performed with us at the Kennedy Center, inflicting his inimitable version of Schubert's "Der Doppelganger." For "Schubert Uncorked," at Georgetown University next spring, Taylor will premiere his own version of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata, transformed into the first-ever classical trombone concerto.

Both "Falla/Stravinsky" and "Schubert Uncorked" link to film events at the National Gallery of Art. For full information, click here.

In Twentieth Century Music, an admirable and much-used survey written in 1974, Eric Salzman devotes 13 pages to Stravinsky, 11 to Schoenberg, and 6 to Berg versus 2 for Ravel, 2 for Shostakovich, 1 for Sibelius, and 1 for Richard Strauss. To Sergei Rachmaninoff, he allots a single sentence, consigning him to the "older Romantic tradition" of Russian music.

Today, 37 years later, Rachmaninoff is an expanding twenty-first century presence. Shunned by modernists for deficits in originality and influence, he is newly admired alongside other twentieth-century Romantics. In fact, he possessed a musical personality so strong he could not possibly have failed to create (however unfashionably) a voice of his own. And we have begun to listen to this voice with fresh fascination. When in 1997 the ubiquitous Third Piano Concerto was attacked in The New York Times as "a cozy piece of schlock," an eminent musicologist, Joseph Kerman, rose to Rachmaninoff's defense in The New York Review of Books. "Novel, persuasive, expressive" was Kerman's shrewd revisionist verdict, surveying the structure of the concerto's vast first movement.

My own Rachmaninoff epiphany occurred a decade or so ago when I found myself listening on a car radio to a 1934 Rachmaninoff piece I thought I knew -- the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini -- and thinking: this is at least as good as anything Stravinsky was writing in, say, the 1940s. It partakes in the Stravinskyan virtues: concision, piquant scoring, rhythmic variety. And (of course) it conveys a distinctive emotional charge Stravinsky shuns.

In contradistinction to the twentieth century icons Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Rachmaninoff was long debunked as a composer who never evolved, whose decades in exile were a creative wasteland. It's true his compositional output plummeted after he left Russia in 1917. There are only five pieces. But the Rhapsody is one of them - it's the Rachmaninoff concerto for people who don't like No. 2.

And the Symphonic Dances of 1940 - Rachmaninoff's last opus - may be his magnum opus. Certainly, it's his valedictory, a musical testament whose keynote is metaphysical intensity. The three movements originally bore titles: "Midday," "Twilight," and "Midnight." These are stations of life. The finale ends in a blaze of glory, effacing strains of Dies Irae; near the close, the composer inscribes: "Alliluya."

I'm barely familiar with the Three Russian Songs for chorus and orchestra (1926). I don't have strong feelings about the Corelli Variations (1931). The Third Symphony (1936) seems to me a work whose long gestation betrays failing inspiration. The case of the Fourth Piano Concerto, which underwent alteration over a period of 15 years, is far more tantalizing. Having for the first time encountered the original 1926 version - released for publication by the Rachmaninoff Estate in 2000 and rarely heard since -- via Texas' Round Top Festival, I still find the melodic material for the middle movement banal. In the outer movements, however, Rachmaninoff's diminishing melodic gift translates as a kind of virtue: they bristle with interesting material, deployed in surprising ways. In Eteri Andjaparidze's potent Round Top performance, the concerto lasted fully eight minutes longer than Rachmaninoff's own 1941 recording of the final, 1941 version, with its slashing abridgements. No less than Rachmaninoff the composer, this concerto, once consigned to oblivion, is music that will not go away.

And then there is "early Rachmaninoff." Only recently has his 50-minute First Symphony (1895) entered the outskirts of the repertoire. It is heroic confessional music: a successor to the big Tchaikovsky symphonies, as different from the second and third Rachmaninoff symphonies as the Tchaikovsky suites are from the Pathetique.

Rachmaninoff destroyed the First Symphony after its disastrous premiere. My guess is that this volcanic effusion violated his intense privacy. He could not have anticipated that the score would be discovered in Russia long after his death. The most piercing, most poignant moment in all of Rachmaninoff is the coda to the first movement of the Symphonic Dances, which pacifies the "vengeance" motto that ultimately pounds the First Symphony into silence. This private allusion - the First Symphony was wholly unknown in 1940 - is a closing of the circle, the completion of an unlikely creative odyssey, courageously aloof from contemporary fashion and taste, begun in pre-revolutionary Russia and ending, Russian still, in southern California.