{"id":930,"date":"2018-02-07T22:49:37","date_gmt":"2018-02-08T03:49:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=930"},"modified":"2018-02-07T22:49:37","modified_gmt":"2018-02-08T03:49:37","slug":"rethinking-classical-radio-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2018\/02\/rethinking-classical-radio-part-two.html","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking “Classical Radio” — Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by Tom Wolff<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sudip Bose, the superb music critic for The American Scholar<\/em> (he is also Managing Editor), writes about PostClassical Ensemble<\/a>\u2019s radio showcase \u201cPostClassical<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I find time to listen to the radio these days, I rarely encounter a program that gives me the same sense of excitement and discovery that I felt as a child. But a few weeks ago I did, while listening to . . . PostClassical . . . Not in my wildest imaginings could I have envisioned such a revelatory and shocking interpretations.\u201d<\/p>\n

As mentioned previously in this space<\/a>, in crafting \u201cPostClassical,\u201d we consciously set out to \u201cre-invent\u201d classical\u2013music radio \u2013 or at least to do something uncompromising: shocking and revelatory.<\/p>\n

Here (below) is Sudip\u2019s whole piece, posted Feb 1.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the broadcast he heard: \u201cSchubert Uncorked,\u201d with bass trombonist David Taylor (pictured above in performance with PostClassical Ensemble):\u00a0http:\/\/wwfm.org\/post\/schubert-uncorked<\/p>\n

Doppelgangers: What does Schubert sound like on a jazzy bass trombone?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I do not listen to the radio nearly as much as I used to, but when I was growing up, programs such as\u00a0Saint Paul Sunday Morning\u00a0<\/em>and Karl Haas\u2019s\u00a0Adventures in Good Music\u00a0<\/em>were household staples, forming an important part of my musical education. I began listening to Haas\u2019s program from a very early age, and I will never forget the opening of each episode, with Haas playing a passage from Beethoven\u2019s Path\u00e9tique Sonata before uttering those famous words\u2014\u201cHello, everyone\u201d\u2014in his genial, warm, and sonorous voice. I must have been seven or eight, home sick from school one day, when I first heard one of Haas\u2019s \u201cmystery composer\u201d programs, in which the host would play several excerpts from a composer\u2019s work, progressing from the obscure to the more familiar, challenging the audience to guess the author\u2019s identity. I remember that sick day well, unable, as I was, to come up with the answer. It was the first time I heard the name Camille Saint-Sa\u00ebns.<\/p>\n

Even when I do find time to listen to the radio these days, I rarely encounter a program that gives me the same sense of excitement and discovery that I felt as a child. But a few weeks ago I did, while listening to an Internet show called\u00a0PostClassical,\u00a0<\/em>which features concert performances by PostClassical Ensemble, an innovative group of musicians now in residence at Washington\u2019s National Cathedral. Led by the historian and writer Joseph Horowitz and the conductor Angel Gil-Ordo\u00f1ez, the ensemble puts on concerts that are far from typical and often experimental, with the aim of contextualizing a composer or a piece of music with verse, theater, film, or dance. Every two months, Horowitz and Gil-Ordo\u00f1ez join radio host Bill McGlaughlin (the former host of the aforementioned\u00a0Saint Paul Sunday Morning<\/em>) in the studio, to discuss their concerts in depth.<\/p>\n

The show I happened to hear was devoted mainly to Franz Schubert, in particular four late songs: \u201cDer Doppelg\u00e4nger\u201d and \u201cDie Stadt,\u201d from the posthumous cycle\u00a0Schwanengesang<\/em>, and \u201cNebensonnen\u201d and \u201cDer Leiermann,\u201d from\u00a0Die Winterreise.\u00a0<\/em>Yes, there were traditional renditions of these lieder, performed with feeling and great taste by the baritone William Sharp and Seth Knopp on the piano, but the versions that were juxtaposed with these\u2014jazz-inflected variants of the pieces performed by the bass trombonist David Taylor and the instrumentalists of PostClassical Ensemble\u2014were what captured my imagination. Not in my wildest imaginings could I have envisioned such revelatory and shocking interpretations.<\/p>\n

These late songs of Schubert are dark, mysterious, brooding, full of despair. \u201cDer Doppelg\u00e4nger,\u201d for example, depicts a man who has ventured to the former home of his beloved and is stunned and terrified to find his double standing there, revealed in the moonlight, staring up at the house and the sky. It\u2019s an eerie enough work in its original setting, yet when Taylor seemingly improvised the solo line on the bass trombone, he transformed the familiar into something strange, still plangent and bewitching, but now uttered by a voice from another world\u2014guttural, stuttering, flutter-tongued. With the orchestral accompaniment playing a steady, mesmeric dirge, the pathos was unrelenting, almost too much to bear. How had Taylor done it? I wondered. How had he conjured up a hazy, ghostly double of this moody Schubert lied? Later in the show, Taylor played \u201cDer Doppelg\u00e4nger\u201d again, this time in a more extroverted, virtuosic manner. The same notes, but a completely different effect\u2014the idiom more indebted to bebop and jazz, the orchestra sounding almost Brucknerian by contrast.<\/p>\n

The title of the episode was \u201cSchubert Uncorked,\u201d yet this was not so much Schubert let loose as reinvented. I had never heard anything like Taylor\u2019s version of \u201cNebensonnen\u201d (about the phantom-like appearance of three suns in the sky), in which he put his trombone aside and sang the solo line instead, floating the notes in the upper register as if he were some bardic gypsy from Eastern Europe, albeit one singing in English. In \u201cDie Stadt,\u201d he and the ensemble managed yet another transformation, turning the fog-bound city of Schubert\u2019s song into some dystopian landscape, the sound of the brass trombone emerging from the murky depths like some antediluvian sea creature.<\/p>\n

\u201cDer Leiermann\u201d (or, \u201cThe Hurdy-Gurdy Man,\u201d the concluding song of the cycle\u00a0Die Winterreise<\/em>) might seem to be an obvious candidate for this sort of imaginative metamorphosis. It\u2019s an odd song, to say the least: at the end of his melancholy winter journey, the disconsolate wanderer-singer encounters a barefoot beggar on a street corner, shunned and reviled, playing a monotonous tune on his hurdy-gurdy. \u201cDer Leiermann\u201d has reminded the tenor Ian Bostridge of Bob Dylan. It\u2019s a song, according to Bostridge, \u201cthat doesn\u2019t conform to classical norms in singing,\u201d one in which \u201cit is hard to achieve the requisite vibe.\u201d Indeed, when Bostridge was performing\u00a0Die Winterreise\u00a0<\/em>once in Russia, \u201cDer Leiermann\u201d \u201cemerged as a song that was hardly sung, rasping and guttural by the standards of\u00a0bel canto<\/em>.\u201d His fear was that it would sound \u201clike a ridiculous intrusion of pop singing into the classical world.\u201d How appropriate, then, given this context, was Taylor\u2019s version, both played and sung (the vocal line at times approximating the half-spoken half-sung technique known as\u00a0Sprechstimme<\/em>), with Zoltan Racz accompanying him on the accordion. It was a polystylistic marvel\u2014reminiscent of jazz, folk music, Indian ragas\u2014and almost symphonic in the density and conflation of textures, styles, and timbres. The two-hour episode held other delights: a hair-raising rescoring of Schubert\u2019s Arpeggione Sonata, a moving version of the Adagio from Bruckner\u2019s String Quintet, and two movements of the\u00a0Bass Trombone Concerto\u00a0<\/em>by the Swiss composer and saxophonist Daniel Schnyder\u2014kinetic, driven, seductive in its use of Middle Eastern idioms\u2014yet it\u2019s Taylor\u2019s Schubert performances that have been haunting me ever since. I cannot get them out of my mind.<\/p>\n

To listen to \u201cSchubert Uncorked\u201d and other episodes of\u00a0PostClassical,\u00a0<\/em>visit\u00a0http:\/\/wwfm.org\/programs\/postclassical#stream\/0<\/a>. To learn more about PostClassical Ensemble, go to\u00a0http:\/\/postclassical.com\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Sudip Bose, the superb music critic for The American Scholar (he is also Managing Editor), writes about PostClassical Ensemble\u2019s radio showcase \u201cPostClassical\u201d: \u201cWhen I find time to listen to the radio these days, I rarely encounter a program that gives me the same sense of excitement and discovery that I felt as a child. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-930","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-f0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=930"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":934,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions\/934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}