Kenneth Woods- A View From the Podium

Gramophone Magazine

September 2010

Orchestral reviews

Gál

Violin Concerto, Op 39. Violin Concertino, Op 52. Triptych, Op 100

Annette-Barbara Vogel vn

Northern Sinfonia/Kenneth Woods

Avie ® AV2146 (70’ DDD)

Premiere recordings of three gloriously tuneful late-Romantic masterworks

Hard on the heels of Gil’s violin sonatas and Suite (8/10) comes this superb new disc featuring the pre-war Concerto and Concertino, separated by the invigorating late Triptych (1970) written in his 80th year. Annette-Barbara Vogel is once again the nimble-fingered and sweet-toned soloist, ably supported throughout by the Northern Sinfonia and Kenneth Woods.

Vogel’s knowledge of and sympathy for Gál’s music is manifest from her first entry in the Concerto (1931-32) following the exposition of the lovely opening theme (given to the oboe). The Concerto, scored throughout with chamber-musical clarity, is lyrical from first bar to last but no mere parade of tunes: Gál’s succession of Fantasia, Arioso and Rondo are tightly organised, no matter how relaxed or light-hearted they sound. The same attributes can be heard in the Concertino (1939), written after Gál’s protracted flight from the Nazi menace to Britain via Vienna. Scored for violin and string orchestra, its lightness of texture is a model of balance and its sense of inner calm in extreme contrast to the uncertainty of his personal circumstances at the time of its composition. While the Triptych is audibly the product of the same mind as the concertos, it does have the feel of a late work. Its spontaneity of invention was matched by its speed of composition: five weeks from sketch to full score in January-February 1970. The energetic outer movements (the concluding Comedy is a particular delight) frame a more sober central Lament in the form of a pavane and stylistically seems closer to Franz Schmidt than the Concerto. Woods directs a highly polished account but the orchestral playing throughout is most assured. Avie’s sound is excellent but it is the music that compels attention. Strongly recommended.

Guy Rickards

GRAMOPHONE SEPTEMBER 2010 p.57

Now available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

From Classical Music Magazine, 31 July 2010

RECORDING OF THE FORTNIGHT

Gal: Violin Concerto and Concertino, Triptych for Orchestra
Annette-Barbara Vogel, Northern Sinfonia/Kenneth Woods
Avie 2146

Add to the rhapsodic glow of Strauss or Korngold flecks of virtuosic humour and, in the case of the Concertino of 1939, darker hues, and you have Hans Gal’s music. No wonder Vogel has recorded two discs of his muisc, it is enormously rewarding for performer and listener. Finely detailed playing, particularly of the Triptych, gives overdue credit to a composer whose genial genius was obscured by Nazism, illness and the British establishment’s neglect.

(p 43)

Now available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

You can call it the best program you’ve never heard in your life. You can call it the almost revelatory program that almost happened- what you can’t call it is the program for the final concert of the Harlech Orchestral Summer School, which I’m now preparing for.

Harlech is an intense week long program that covers an immense amount of substantial repertoire. Some is simply workshopped and read, while a few pieces are selected for extra rehearsal and the final performance. This year it has been a given that Mahler 5 is going to be on that program- in this year, how could it not be? But what to pair it with?

As it turns out, part of the equation includes a premiere of a new work by Duncan Stubbs written for the winds of the academy called “Harlech Variants.” Given the massive scale of the Mahler and the presence of the Stubbs, it would seem that all that is needed is a relatively slight work to open the program.

Of this year’s repertoire, the obvious choice is Ravel’s La Valse, although one would never call it slight! The parallels with the Mahler are obvious and fascinating- the Scherzo of the Mahler seems an obvious model for the Ravel. Both use dance, notably (but not exclusively) the Viennese waltz, to delve into the darkest corners of the human psyche.

However, as we get closer to the beginning of the festival, there is another work in the repertoire I’ve longed to program alongside the Mahler. I even went so far as to suggest to my colleagues that we ought to ditch the Ravel and do it instead- in spite of the fact that it would make for a ridiculously long program and a very exhausting week of rehearsals. My associates wisely talked me down from that particular ledge.

The piece, of course, is Shostakovich’s 6^th Symphony. Why? Surely the Ravel is the obvious and perfect pairing? Is this just a case of Ken the Shostakovich nut looking for any possible chance to perform a Shostakovich symphony?

Well, I can’t rule that out, but there was more to it than that. First, the Ravel is the obvious pairing. The Shostakovich is just the more interesting pairing because it seems that putting these two great but highly unorthodox works on the same program could be much more illuminating, and could help us to hear both works with clearer ears.

Shostakovich 6 is one of those pieces that is often described as “enigmatic.” It is in 3 movements- one very long slow movement followed by two very short fast movements. It has always had its advocates (Lenny loved it and conducted it brilliantly), but many people can’t get past the fact that it doesn’t seem to do what symphonies after Beethoven are supposed to do, which is to reconcile and resolve large-scale tensions.

The Largo completely overshadows the other two movements, obviously in terms of scale, but also in terms of emotional impact. On the other hand, surely a genius like Shostakovich knew which rules he was breaking and why. Surely Beethoven taught us  that what a symphony ought to do with a movement like the Largo is to balance it with a Finale of equal scale and weight? That’s what his 5^th and 9^th symphonies do so well, and it’s something Mahler mastered in his 2^nd Symphony.

In fact, Mahler 2 might be the ultimate symphonic example of a vast, tragic opening movement (like the Largo of Shostakovich 6) which is followed by some shorter intermezzo-like movements (again like the Shostakovich), which culminates and a vaster and more dramatic triumphant Finale in which all the darkness and tension of the first movement is transcended and resolved (something conspicuously missing in the Shostakovich).

If Mahler 2 is the grandest and most perfect example of that approach to symphonic form, it’s certainly not the only example. Bruckner deals with it in his 5^th, 8^th and 9^th Symphonies (we can see from the fragments where he was going with the Finale of his 9^th). And, even if the 2^nd is the most powerful and explicit example of a cathartic Finale in his music, Mahler’s 1^st 4 symphonies all treat the Finale in a similar way- as a summing up and culmination of all that precedes them.

However, in the 5^th Symphony, Mahler for the first time goes in a different and more ambivalent direction. The 5^th is written in 5 movements, which are grouped into 3 parts. The 1^st part of the symphony is unmistakably where the center of gravity of the entire work is located- two movements of unprecedented darkness, intensity and ferocity. Part I of Mahler 5 ends in as black an abyss as anything in the repertoire I can think of (like the Largo of Shostakovich 6). Dark as the Funeral March is which opens the 2^nd Symphony, there still seems to be room for the drama to continue from that point. The ending of Part I of Mahler 5 is so black and nihilistic that it seems impossible that anything could follow which would be able to balance or transcend that darkness.

Mahler follows this in Part II with an ambivalent Scherzo which you can read about here. Like the Ravel, it is in many ways a dance of death, or at the very least a dance which expresses a certain affection for oblivion. Again, Part II of the Shostakovich is similar- it is also a Scherzo, but the mood is hardly carefree.

Part III of the Mahler promises a return to life. It is now well known that in many respects, the famous Adagietto is a love song, but it is also filled with references to Mahler’s own Kindertotenlieder, or Songs on the Death of Children. Yes, it has moments of stunning tenderness and exquisite longing, but it, never mind what today’s politically correct writers tell you, includes passages of searing anguish and deep, deep pain.

In Mahler 2, the last grand and dramatic Finale is preceded like a structural upbeat by the song Urlicht. Like the Adagietto, it is intimate and tender music in which hope seems to begin to awaken, if not assert itself. However, where the Finale of the 2^nd begins with a savagely dramatic outburst (obviously related to the opening of the Finale of Beethoven 9), the Finale of Mahler 5 begins with a joke. Mahler quotes one of his own songs (Lob des hohen Verstandes) about a singing competition between a cuckoo and a nightingale judged by an ass. It hardly promises a Finale in which the tragedy of  Part I can be overcome, and it turns out to be.

The Finale of Mahler 5 is humorous, virtuosic and passionate. The humor is sometimes warm and bright, other times black and sardonic. It makes extensive reference to the music of the Adagietto, now played in a genuinely carefree, breezy style, perhaps as if to say love is as much a game as anything else. There is only one reference to Part I, but what a reference it is- just before the end, he brings back the great chorale of the 2^nd Movement. This overpowering peroration had collapsed into abject crisis the first time it was heard, but here, it shines out in triumphant confidence. If the symphony ended here, he might just have pulled of the kind of transcendent ending we’d been hoping for all along, and what a feat that would have been!

But Mahler chooses not to do so. Instead, the piece continues just long enough to undermine the Chorale. Instead of ending in catharsis, the piece ends in laughter – perhaps, like love, triumph is also all just a game, or perhaps he is saying that the culmination of the chorale is the ending to yesterday’s story- life goes on! The piece ends with a torrent of whole tone scales- the most ambivalent of musical structures. Is it light or dark humor? Is there an edge of madness in that laughter? Those whole tone scales seem to signal we can’t be sure Do we all live happily after? Are all life’s problems solved? I don’t think so, but life goes on, and in Mahler’s world the primal force of life is extraordinarily powerful.

Likewise, the 3^rd Mvt of Shostakovich 6 doesn’t try to fix what the Largo has broken. Like Mahler’s Finale, the primary emotion is humor, both dark and light. Much as I love, and much as the world needs the Finale of Mahler 2, the Finale of Maher 5 is truer to life, hard as that is to accept. My sense is that Shostakovich 6 is also a pretty profoundly true-to-life work. Perhaps he is saying that suffer as you will (remember the Largo), don’t expect the heavens to open and for God to give you all the answers. Life goes on, in all its hilarity and insanity.

Side by side, the Shostakovich looks a little less of an enigmatic failure and much more a triumph of ironic realism, and the Mahler looks less Beethovenian and more modern.

Of course, it’s possible there is an even darker truth in the Shostakovich- we know he advertised that his original intention was to make the work a portrait of Lenin, complete with choral Finale. Maybe the work was meant to look more like Mahler 2, and the 2^nd and 3^rd movements were kindred intermezzi to the 2^nd and 3^rd mvts of Mahler 2?

However, in 1939, Russia was still waiting for the happy ending to the Lenin drama. Perhaps the deafening silence that follows the 3^rd mvt of the 6^th is the point. Shostakovich didn’t write a Finale because life hadn’t given him one to depict?

It sounds good, but I’m not convinced. The Largo seems to introverted and personal to have anything to do with politics and history- if it’s about anything other than despair, it is about music. More on that to come, I hope.

It has always bothered commentators that the ending of Shostakovich 6 doesn’t feel like an ending worthy of its beginning. Isn’t that obviously his point? Of course the piece is unfinished- he doesn’t want you to walk away from the symphony ready go out for a drink. He wants us to be thinking about what the piece means, to be struggling to make sense of its pain and contradictions. The work of the listener is just beginning when this piece ends.

Hi Vftp fans (!) and friends–

Well, as the man said, what a long, strange trip it has been.

I returned to Cardiff and Vftp International Headquarters yesterday after a full month on the road. Unusually, half of that trip was for VACATION- hence the lack of any recent posts here.

After 2 weeks of blissful sight-seeing, hiking and family time, it really struck me when I got home yesterday just how insanely busy I had been in all the weeks leading up to our get-away. I had completely forgotten that the night before we left for America, I had done a pretty big concert with the HSO (Franck D minor, Saint-Saens 3^rd Violin Concerto and Berlioz Corsaire Overture), and only been home for about 3 hours between that concert our departure for Heathrow. There was still junk from that concert in the car when we got to Heathrow yesterday, but it seemed like relics of a distant epoch.

2010 has been a very, very intense and busy year so far, and there is a huge backlog of stuff I meant to write about and hope still to write about, but I’ve been humbled enough by past failings not to promise readers  too much. Much as I would like to say that this week we can look forward to posts about x, y and z, all I can really say is that it is great to be back, and that I certainly have a lot of ground to cover about June concerts, the Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop, the Gal CD and projects ahead.

Meanwhile, it is time to start learning some music again. Between May 31 and July 11, I  did 8 programs with 8 orchestras, with no repeated repertoire on any of those concerts, but since finishing the workshop on the 11^th of July, I have not opened a score! It felt good.

Next up is the Harlech Orchestral Summer School, which is a mountain of rep, much of it new to me-

Arnold- The Inn of Sixth Happiness
Janacek- Taras Bulba
Mahler – Symphony No 5
Niccolai- Overture to the Merry Wives of Windsor
Prokofiev- Selections from Romeo and Juliet Suite No.  2
Rachmaninov – Isle of the Dead
Ravel – La valse
Shostakovich – Symphony No 6
Walton- Variations on a Theme of Paul Hindemith

I’ve done Mahler 5 quite recently, but it’s always a lot to take in. I usually do the Prokofiev R&J music in my own selection of music from the 3 suites, which I can make a little closer to the plot of the play than the suites themselves are, and so there are a couple of movements in the 2^nd Suite that are new. I did the Niccolai recently on the SMP Viennafest concert back in January. Everything else is new, and the Shostakovich, Janacek, Ravel, Walton and Racnmaninoff should keep me busy for the next 2 weeks.

So, maybe I can deliver a new wealth of Vftp posts this week, and maybe I can’t! Maybe it is time for a post on how to learn scores really, really freakin’ fast.

In any case, I hope readers are all having a good summer. Thanks for your comments, and please keep in touch!!

Ken

From the Surrey Advertiser

July 9, 2010

Ambitious programme draws Surrey Mozart Players’ season to a close.

The Surrey Mozart Players concluded their 2009/10 season and their run of Schumann’s orchestrals works with a most ambitious programme in the Electric Theatre.

Under their charismatic conductor Kenneth Woods, they gave an inspired performance of  one of Schumann’s fines works for orchestra, his Manfred Overture. The composer, mentally disturbed himself, was ideally placed to portray Byron’s tragic hero.

The performance was deliberately nervy and fevered, with plenty of dramatic tension, and the frenetic string playing contrasted sharply with the chorale-like wind chords towards the end.

Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, written in the wake of his disastrous marriage, is so difficult that Leopold Auer pronounced it unplayable, even if it has now become very popular.

Its difficulties were exquisitely surmounted by the young Russian-born violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky, who throughout produced a wonderful, warm tone from his eighteenth-century instrument.

If the long first movement and its astonishing cadenza were technically proficient, the central Canzonetta, with its touching main theme, took off emotionally, with some lovely duetting between soloist and the wind instruments.

The Finale, full of Russian folk-like themes, was driven forward with a thrilling sense of momentum.

The soloist galvanized the orchestra into their best playing of the evening, while his own part reached to the very top registers of the violin, and he drew a tremendous ovation from the audience.

Notwithstanding the dry and “toppy” acoustic of the Electric Theatre, the orchestra exuded warmth in their rendering of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony.

Described by Kenneth Woods as one of the few “tragic” symphonies in the repertoire, it is full of good tunes and fascinating harmonies, particularly in the modally inflected Andante. The descending motives of the opening, echoed near the end of the great passacaglia Finale were beautifully shaped. The bumptious Scherzo movement, with its jolly interjections from the triangle was fluent, yet exciting.

The Finale itself was imbued with some lovely phrasing, a careful pointing out of the contrapuntal niceties, and, after some effective tension and release in dynamics, concluded with a great climax.

Shelagh  Goodwin

From the August 2010 issue of The Strad

Gál Violin Concerto op 39, Vioin Concertino op 52, Triptych op 100

Annette Barbara Vogel, violin

Northern Sinfonia/Kenneth Woods

Here’s a real treat: a pair of long-list violin concertos from that most fecund decade for the medium, the 1930’s.

Hans Gál (1890-1987) was a Viennese-Jewish composer who managed to flee his homeland for the UK at the time of the Anschluss and spent the rest of his life as a musicologist in Edinburgh. The songful Violin Concerto was written in 1932 when he was at the height of his fame as a composer in Austro-Germany and musically falls very much within the central European tradition with hints of Bartok, Mahler and neo-Classical Strauss. The Concertino (with string orchestra) was written in London in 1939, but its lyrical ease belies the times and his precarious circumstances. German violinist, Annette-Barbara Vogel, who has already recorded Gál’s chamber music for Avie gives committed performances of both pieces and revels in the honesty of this music. She brings a winning presence to her tone and delivery, and maintains a perceptively fluid relationship with the accompanying forces of the Northern Sinfonia.

The symphonic-scale Triptych for orchestra dates from 1970, but is written in a style that seems unchanged from the time of Mahler and Korngold, whose music the pieces resemble at times. The Sage Gateshead recording is warm and supportive.

MATTHEW RYE

There is a new and perceptive review of the new Gal CD at Classical CD Reviews by critic Gavin Dixon here-

….Gál’s aesthetic is inherited directly from the tail-end of the Austro-German Romantic tradition. His musicbears many similarities with that of Franz Schmidt, although not the long, lyrical melodic lines that characterise so much of Schmidt’s orchestral music. Franz Schreker is another similar Viennese voice, although Gál (thankfully) avoids the excesses of Schreker’s neurotic Expressionism. In fact, it is difficult to deduce much about Gál’s personality or temperament from this music. He was presumably a very calm, centred man, for whom music came from within, rather than through conscious reactions to external stimuli. How else to explain the stylistic similarities of these three works, the Concerto written before his flight from the Nazi’s, the Concertino written in London during the war, and the Triptych written towards the end of his life, in Edinburgh in 1970….

….the lightness of the composer’s touch combines yet again with a rock-solid compositional technique, with very listenable results. The performances and the recording are of a consistently high standard. The Northern Sinfonia …… are probably better than anything he ever heard in this country. But most importantly, both orchestra and conductor Kenneth Woods are sensitive to the lightness of the textures and always elegantly balance the soloist. Annette-Barbara Vogel is about the most ideal exponent a composer could hope to have. She, too, maintains that delicate balance between thematic rigour and lightness of touch, often through very gradual changes of tone colour and a coherent approach to phrasing. Her low register is particularly impressive, a rich, immediate sound, but never overpowering or unduly woody. These works all border on the textures of chamber music at times, and the intimacy that Vogel achieves brings those quiet textures up close. This is her second Hans Gál project; her first was a disc of Violin Sonatas, also on Avie (AV2182). If you’ve heard that and were impressed, and I understand most were, then buy this. You won’t be disappointed.

Now available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

As we celebrate the release of the new Gal CD, I’m hoping to use this blog to give readers a chance to get to know a little bit more about this fascinating musician and figure. I thought we might make a nice bridge from recent topics by starting with Mahler. Here are two wonderful and telling anecdotes from an article by Martin Anderson. The first is from an interview recorded by Anderson and Gal in 1986, when the composer was 96.

I believe you heard Mahler conduct in Vienna .

Yes, it was always an extraordinary experience. In attended one of his earliest performances at the Yie Opera. It was Auber’s Fra Diavolo, curiously.

But that was in 1897!

Yes, that is correct. I was only a small boy, but in those days it was the custom for children to go to the opera with their parents, and so we went to see Fra Diavolo. We heard Mahler conduct quite often at the opera house, where he remained until 1907. It is extraordinary how these things stick in the memory. But it was the most marvellous conducting – in all these years I’ve never heard anything to equal it.

In the appendix to this article, Anderson relays a story Gal told to Malcom Smith at Boosey and Hawkes

When I was a school-lad, I lived in Vienna [he did tell me what Gasse it was, but I can’t now remember]. It was on the first floor, above a confectioner’s. I was taught by my mother to play the piano, and after a time, of course, when I was nine or ten, she couldn’t teach me any more, so I had a gentleman in from the Conservatoire there. He used to come in on a Saturday morning and leave me a couple of pieces to learn by the next Saturday.

One particular Saturday he said: ‘Hansi, you’ve done very well today – here’s a pfennig for you: go and buy some sweeties downstairs’. After he’d gone, my mother said: ‘Alright, you can go down’. So I went downstairs. I knew the people in the shop very well: a couple of daughters and an old dear, who was about 80-odd and sat behind the door and took the money; the daughters made the sweets and cakes and they served.

When I came in with my pfennig [it might have been a groschen – it was the equivalent of about a ha’penny], one of the girls said: ‘Oh, Hansi, you played very well today, we enjoyed it very much. What can we do for you?’ So I said I had a pfennig and I’d like some sweeties. They said: ‘Well, as you know, you can have ten of your choice for a pfennig’. So they made a cardboard cornet for me out of paper and I put various selections in. Then they said: ‘As you played so well, you can have two more’. So I thanked them very much and went to pay my money to the old dear.

She said: ‘You played very well. It reminds me that, when I was a young girl, I used to live in such-and-such a Gasse. We lived on the second floor, and there was a flat above us, and there was a musician there who caused us terrible trouble. I slept in one room and my parents in another, and he used to bang on the piano all through the night, and my parents had to stand on the bed with a broomstick and bang on the ceiling and shout at him to stop. Of course, I saw this chap as I went to school in the morning – he’d be coming done the spiral staircase and I used to follow him down the road. He used to wear a long black coat and a top hat, and all the children used to shout and throw things at him. After a time he moved because he didn’t pay his rent’.

I said: ‘Who was that?’

She said: ‘It was Beethoven’.

Read the whole thing here.

This Satuday evening I’m conducting a program that includes Berlioz’s Corsaire Overture, the Saint-Saens 3^rd Violin Concerto and the Franck Symphony in D minor. It’s almost ten years to the day since I last conducted the Franck (that time around it was paired with the Ravel Pavanne pour une infante defunte and the Chausson Poeme for Violin and Orchestra).

The Franck is hardly obscure or unknown, but it was once a repertoire staple and these days is much more rarely heard. In fact, the vast majority of the orchestra this week are playing the piece for the first time. I think it’s a pity such a marvelous and effective piece isn’t done more often, but what is more worrying is that its disappearance from the repertoire seems to be part of a larger trend.

A few years ago I went to a talk by orchestra management guru Henry Fogel (former boss of the Chicago Symphony). Henry spoke a great deal about repertoire and programming- about the importance of new music, and about the importance of designing imaginative, provocative programs, but also about pieces like the Franck. He made the point that there was a great deal of music that had huge audience appeal, which was once heard regularly on subscription concerts which is now somehow not considered serious enough. At the same time, pops concerts have largely abandoned what we used to call light classics in favor of arrangements of commercial music from Hollywood, Nashville and Broadway.

The gap between serious and popular programming has become huge- and there is an absurd treasure trove of great music that has been deemed too serious and old fashioned for pops concerts but to frivolous for subscription series. The upshot is a world where you can have a pops concert of tenth rate Country gobbledeegook programmed just after a festival pairing Carter and Bruckner, but not much in between.

The Franck is no cupcake of a piece- it’s like lovely French Bruckner (yes, I know he was Belgian born), rather long, quite dense and certainly serious. It’s just not-quite-serious enough to hold its place on the modern concert platform- I’m told that some opinion makers think his melodies are too naive. I think that for the Franck, as for a lot of the works that have similarly fallen out of the repertoire, part of the issue is that in these works, the performer’s creativity, personality and even whimsy is essential for making the piece work.

We’re quite used to composers like Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich or Elgar , all of whom are well served by quite literal readings of the score. One’s personality as an interpreter is important and still comes through, but at the end of the day, if you are quite literal in your reading of a piece by Elgar or Mahler, you’ll get quite a good result. In my experience, a piece like the Franck needs an interpreter who is willing to take more risks with tempo and color. Charles Munch was the greatest advocate for the Franck, in my opinion- his performances certainly show a profound knowledge of everything Franck asks for, but Munch is anything but shy about moving it along where he thinks it is necessary or taking time to savor a delicious chord change. Compare that to over-reverent recordings where a conductor has tried to be absolutely strictly faithful to Franck’s score without stepping one inch beyond what is written- suddenly the music feels stodgy, ponderous and dull. Even badly played, Beethoven or Mahler’s works scream “this is great music!” but there is a lot of other music where a great performance can make good music a great experience, but a bad performance can make good music sound terrible.

In the greatest of the great music, my first job as interpreter is to try to understand why everything in the score is there, and why anything one might have excepted there but not found is missing. In a lot of music that is merely delightful, fun, wonderful or interesting, the performer needs to be a bit more assertive and a bit less reverent. Knowing whether you are dealing with good or great music is where it gets trick and dangerous.

I’m a collector of Borodin 2’s- it’s not a piece you would listen to for profound insights into the art of composition. It is a showcase for orchestra and conductor, and it can be a great one. However, it doesn’t show up often on concert programs these days.

Liszt tone poems, suites from ballets, Weber overtures, works by Niccolai, Suppé, Chabrier, Lalo, Saint-Saens- the list is long of classical works that aren’t considered quite serious enough for subscription audiences but are too serious for pops concerts. My teacher, Gerhard Samuel, was a great Mahlerian and a serious composer in the serial tradition. When he was appointed Associate Conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra) under Dorati, his first suggestion was to program a series of operetta nights on Sundays.

Dorati said that this blurred the lines between classical and pops too much, and would damage the reputation of the orchestra. “If Samuel gets his operetta series, I quit!” he thundered

Gerhard got his series, and Dorati stayed. The series ran for several years using young, inexpensive singers, with simple stagings more or less improvised at the rehearsal on the edget of the stage. It was the most successful series the orchestra ran in those years. Most concerts sold out.

I’m sure there is still a vast untapped audience for classical music that doesn’t take itself too serious, that doesn’t look down on decadence frivolity or luxury….

_______________________

Some follow-up thoughts for this post….

1- Finding that line between music you treat with the utmost reverence and that you can, or should, be more interventionist is hard. Misunderestimate a great composer and you become one of those turkeys who re-orchestrated Bruckner or cut half of Rach 2.

2- The best way to avoid being Leopold Auer and having you name forever attached to a barbarous and ham-fisted set of cuts to the Tchaikovsky fiddle concerto is to start working on any new piece with the sort of thoroughness and spirit of enquiry you would bring to an acknowledged MASTERPIECE.

3- Only once you’ve lived with the piece, and, if possible, heard some performances, or best yet, done some performances, if you really feel like it needs the Ken Woods touch or the Maestro X touch, you can let loose.

4- Generally speaking, other than opera, I never cut a piece. Better to just conduct fastser…..

Peter Grahame Woolf writing for Musical Pointers

Han Gal: Violin Concerto, Violin Concertino & Triptych for Orchestra.

Annette-Barbara Vogel,
Northern Sinfonia / Kenneth Woods

…….The two concertante works for violin from the ’30s, excellently played and recorded, are delightful, provided you accept that Gál was one of his generation not caught up in the European modernist trends. They both merit consideration by up-coming violinists seeking out repertoire.

Like a Franz Schmidt, Gál was content to compose within the tradition of late romanticism, and it served him well for a large catalogue of music which merits thorough investigation and live performance.

The Op 100 orchestral work is substantial and could well have been put out as a Symphony. A splendid CD which should give pleasure and satisfaction to collectors and which deserves to feature on radio programmes everywhere.

Now available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Orchestra of the Swan’s recording of Finzi and Copland Clarinet Concertos, the Finzi Romance for Strings and the 13 Instrument version of Appalachian Spring on Somm Records is Classic FM’s CD of the Week.

Tune in on Saturday, June 26 to “The New CD Show” at 5PM as  David Mellor reviews the best of the latest classical releases, and plays excerpts from the new OOTS CD.

Other reviews–

Norman Lebrecht’s CD of the Week

17 May 2010 by Norman Lebrecht

Copland, Finzsi: Clarinet concertos (Somm) ****

Odd that this pair does not get coupled more often. Both composers were jews in self-denial who sought identity in rustic folklore.n But roots will out. The opening of Copland’s concerto is reminiscent of Mahler, while Finzi’s has a touch of the Bloch. Soloist Sarah Williamson plays with poise and verve; David Curtis conducts the supple Orchestra of the Swan. Appalachian Spring and a Finzi Romance are the fillers in this unassumingly glorious summer pudding

Colin Anderson writing in today’s Classical Source-

….There is something deceptive about Hans Gál’s music, the work of the long-lived (1890-1987), from Vienna to Edinburgh composer, whose output has been so well served by Avie. Gál’s other violin concerto, from 1939, with string orchestra accompaniment, this time in two movements instead of three, the first elegiac and of endless melody suggestive of circumstance but not indulging it, and ultimately a pure musical statement, and a finale (linked to by a cadenza) that looks back to an earlier epoch and to the terpsichorean point of the Rigaudon that is here interspersed by poignant musings.

Moving ahead to 1970, Hans Gál reached his ‘opus 100’ with Triptych, a set of three movements for orchestra, the opening ‘Impromptu’ energetically if severely introduced, every note significant, the contrasting mellower invention sometimes suggesting Richard Strauss’s late-in-life autumnal music (specifically “Capriccio”), but with an independence of thought and a timelessness of invention that is at once Mozartean yet also crisply contemporary. The central ‘Lament’ is sparse if tellingly personal; and the final ‘Comedy’ is joyous and inviting, and not without a flourish or two.

Gál’s art has the enviable ability to say so much without being tempted to decorate, augment and make denser. Such transparent and highly-crafted scores are given superbly prepared performances here. I had a few reservations over Annette-Barbara Vogel’s playing on the Gál violin-and-piano release, but her playing here is first-class, so too the quick-witted response of Northern Sinfonia under Kenneth Woods. Both the recording and the booklet’s annotation are excellent.

Read the whole thing here.

“Ken, we’ve had a few personnel issues while you were away and were down several string players. We’ve filled most of the places, but there are two violinists who can only come Saturday to the dress rehearsal, but they are very good.”

“That’s fine”

”Also, I should point out the woman in the dark shirt in the 2nds”

“Yes” I recognized her. She’d played in other programs I’d done with this orchestra, but hadn’t been to rehearsals for this concert.

“She won’t be there on Saturday.”

“Oh.”

“You see she’s dying of cancer.”

I’ve seen so much cancer in the last three years, I could quickly tell exactly where she was in the grim progression of the disease. She didn’t look sick, just a little tired and very sad. There’s that long phase when you know that the body is being slowly relentlessly devoured and dismantled from within, where the only visual evidence is that look of fatigue and sadness. In some weeks, there would be a crisis of some kind as the body reached a breaking point- that could be the end or the beginning of the end.

“Well, she’d hoped to come for some rehearsals in September, just to play for fun, but it looks like she won’t make it till then, so I encouraged her to come tonight just to play a bit and see everyone, but I didn’t want you to be worried if she wasn’t there for the concert.”

“No that’s, fine. Of course”

“Then there is the……” My colleague continued updating me on the logistics and dramas surrounding the concert this week, but my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about what to do in a rehearsal when you know it might be someone’s last. Suddenly, drilling this program to the highest possible level didn’t seem like such an important goal. What could I… what could we give her in this rehearsal- would she enjoy playing through big chunks of things, or exploring a few interesting corners in the music in a bit of detail? Could I help work the band up to a good tingly-sensation moment? Should we just keep everything low-key?

We got down to work, and I looked over at her during the first tutti passage. She seemed tentative, obviously sight reading, and a little frail.

And then the next thing I knew, it was the break. My rehearsal instinct is so strong, I think I’m no longer capable of keeping anything in my head during a rehearsal except the work at hand. Whatever issues I mean to keep track of during the session, I usually forget as soon as I start working. Sometimes I feel more like an animal in rehearsals, in the sense that everything I do is so driven by instinct, habit and training.

As I stepped away from my stand, I remembered her, and looked over. She was loosening her bow, but stayed seated as I left the room. I went outside, made some small talk with other players. My mind was still elsewhere. I wanted somehow for this rehearsal to give her a bit of comfort or pleasure. It’s funny, but once you leave school and start working with orchestras, you learn that death is a regular presence in orchestral life, as it is in all life. I’ve lost quite a few colleagues over the last 15 years. The long-term projection for everyone involved in an orchestra is a 100% mortality rate. However, knowing that this random week will likely be the last for someone is different- and I guess it hit me more because of the fact that I didn’t have any other connection to this player other than the orchestra. I’d never have noticed she was ill, and I’m sure she was previous times she played. She surely deserved a rehearsal with a conductor who knew her better, and here she was, stuck with this intense American she’s never really met.

I could hope that she’d enjoyed the first half, but I’d been too much in my rehearsal trance to observe her reactions. I was determined to watch more carefully and to try and make that last hour as fun and satisfying as possible. Fuck the concert.

But, as we started to tune, I could see she wasn’t returning to her seat. She looked very tired now. She found a chair behind the orchestra and sat and listened until the end of the rehearsal.

When we finished, she was talking to someone as I walked by. I tapped her gently, extra gently, on the shoulder. “Thank you so much for coming in tonight,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

Concluding thoughts-

Being a concertmaster is an extremely high-stress job, in which you have to work to a very high standard, while often sublimating some of your own instincts and ego as a musician.  You may well miss opportunities to work with less pressure or to focus on getting the interpretations you want of works that matter to you. Play chamber music, both formally and informally. Go to see your fellow leaders an action and think about what you can learn from them (a wise conducting mentor once suggested I try to think of 3 positive things I would like to emulate from every conductor I see, no matter how good or bad I thought they were). Continue to play solo. Challenge your own tastes by living with competent recordings that you don’t automatically like.

Never miss a chance to hear your orchestra play with another concertmaster- you can learn so much from the experience, and it can be really restorative. I remember when I was at the CSO, I encountered one of the string principals (not the concertmaster) backstage after his first concert in the audience in many, many years. He was so excited- he kept saying how amazing the orchestra sounded. When you’re up there working so hard every day to get the last detail right, it is too easy to lose sight of what the music sounds like as a listener. It’s great to sit out there and remember how lucky you are to work with your colleagues. And, on a purely practical level, you will always see things your replacement does differently that you can learn from

Finally- Learn something about conducting- go to a workshop if you can. I was astonished a few years ago after observing a conducting masterclass with a leading professional recording orchestra when I heard the concertmaster, with many, many years of experience say “I guess there is more to it than I thought. I never really thought there was any technique to it beyond beat patterns.” How sad- knowledge is power, after all.

I suppose all of this sounds wildly optimistic, incredibly naïve and hugely demanding. What is amazing and inspiring, however, is that most concermasters come pretty remarkably close to being the best they can be at the job. Every musician will have different talents and strengths, different weaknesses and deficiencies. For all of us, it’s just a matter of trying to make our weaknesses into strengths- we never achieve perfection, but we can get pretty close.

So, let me leave you with a few simple basic tips. A Top 11 Tips for Young Concertmasters

1-       Prepare technically to be ready for any interpretation

2-       Develop a repertoire- have as much of the standard repertoire under your belt as possible.

3-       Be ready with ideas when needed, and open to ideas when present

4-       Remember- you set the tone with your preparation and attitude.

5-       Take responsibility for how the orchestra goes about its work in rehearsals and concerts. Don’t make excuses for mediocrity, and don’t encourage excuses or distractions.

6-       Learn about leadership

7-       Be ready to adapt your leadership styles to the needs of the situation

8-       Be ready to set aside your own ideas about a piece and to try to bring to life the ideas of guest soloists and conductors to the very best of your ability, regardless of whether you agree or nott

9-       Be absolutely fearless and ruthless about taking charge and over-ruling a conductor when it is needed to avoid an ensemble problem or train-wreck

10-   Never, ever play ahead of the beat unless it is to stay with a soloist.

11-   Try to forget who people are- treat the great and good and the young and unknown with the same mixture of respect, encouragement and personal authority. Prepare equally well regardless of the orchestra or conductor, and try just as hard to bring to life the ideas of people of all backgrounds.

Where it gets complicated-

Remember how we discussed the difference between preparing a recital and an orchestra work? The key difference is that in one case you are aiming for a coherent artistic vision (yours!), and in the other one you are preparing to be able to execute all kinds of artistic visions. This need for tremendous flexibility extends to all aspects of your work as leader. We already discussed how you may have to adjust your leadership style and communication skills not only from orchestra to orchestra, but from player to player. This kind of flexibility extends to musical leadership as well.

You should expect yourself to be just as able to be effective with a conductor who might be a pianist or wind player and has few if any strong ideas about technical execution of string writing as with a conductor who is an accomplished string player. One week, all decisions about bowings, bow strokes and note lengths might be left with you, while the next, you are looking at the conductor’s own bowings, which might not be your first (or even 10th)  choices. You should be just as happy and effective in either situation.

I suppose I am one of those string-playing conductors of the second school, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Often, a great deal of thought and trial and error has gone into a bowing that might seem a little uncomfortable at first. I wouldn’t expect any principal to feel trapped by a bowing that doesn’t work, but often, if a player takes a few moments to think “what was he after with this” the problem goes away. George Szell wasn’t a string player, but he had very strong ideas about bowings. His bowings aren’t always very idiomatic, but there wouldn’t have been a Cleveland sound without some of them.

However, if your job was as simple as blindly following the instructions of conductors with strong and grounded ideas about bowings and filling in the holes in the knowledge of non-string player conductors with your own bowings and ideas, life would be pretty easy and the word “complicated” wouldn’t really apply to your job.

Instead, when dealing with a non-string player on the podium, you want to make sure the bowings you are suggesting are the right one’s for her vision of the piece. Listen carefully when he or she sings passages- can you come up with a bowing that sounds like their version of it? Can you ask the conductor about the musical execution they want in a way that leads you to the right bowing?

Likewise, a string-player conductor’s bowings are always a work in progress. I want my bowings to get better over the years, not to just be stuck where they were 5 or ten years ago. Again and again, I have been hugely grateful for the insight of a player who has come up with a better way of getting at something in the score. Funnily enough, this works best when you treat the string expert and non-string expert in the same way. Ask yourself- what is this conductor trying to achieve? Is there a better way of getting it? When they sing it, does the bowing on the page look like the best way to get it?

A good exercise can be to study the more unusual bowings of composers we know had experience or expertise in bowing. Mahler and Elgar are the two best examples- some of their bowings can seem pretty bizarre on first encounter, but if you live with them to understand why they are there and practice them long enough that you can do them in the way the composer intended, they work to achieve very specific and interesting musical results.

This kind of process guides you away from worrying about how a bowing feels to how it sounds. Bowings shouldn’t be predicated too much on comfort, but on musical result. It’s up to you as an artist to make sure your technique is at a level where you can make a somewhat tricky bowing work if it makes for a good musical result.

Solos

It should be clear by now that there is often a naturally occurring difference of opinion between conductors and concertmasters about matters of tempo, execution and style. Well handled by mature and humble artists, this makes for better performances- the presence of more than one strong personality can only be a good thing.

I suppose the relationship can be more fraught where solos are involved. It needn’t be so- I love working with compelling and imaginative soloists, whether in concertos or within the context of orchestral works. The extent to which I go with you or you go with me has to do with all sorts of things. At one extreme, I would say a solo like the one in Heldenleben is a situation in which the conductor treats the violin soloist with utmost deference- it is your show! One the other hand, there are moments like the end of the 2^nd Mvt of Brahms 1- everyone calls that passage a violin solo, but in reality it is for solo violin, solo horn and solo oboe, and it consists entirely of material we’ve heard before. In that case, the violinist has to be prepared to come up with something that works with the other soloists and with the conductor’s interpretation of the movement as a whole.

It’s worth remembering these examples in your study. Try to know where the musical ideas in your solo come from in the piece, and where they return. You might find it is just as important that you be able to adjust to the ideas of a clarinet solo 30 bars before yours as it is to adjust to the conductors whims and wants. Even in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, there are moments when the soloist, regardless of fee, has to follow the orchestra.

At the end of the day, there are solos where you can really cut loose and do what you  like, and others where you are simply a part of a relatively tightly organized musical narrative and need to play with the same level of discipline and restrait you do when playing with the whole section. Knowing the difference is a matter of experience, study and humility.

Where it gets much more complicated

I suppose it won’t surprise readers that much of this essay has dealt with how to help a conductor communicate effectively and get the interpretation they want- the importance of being able to follow a beat, understand an interpretative goal, bring to life a color, read a mind or execute a bowing. Remember, however, that the reason this is so important isn’t because we want a world of happy orchestras, but that this is the best approach for making sure you are playing in a great and unified orchestra

However, the most difficult, and in some ways the most important part of your job, is knowing when not to follow a conductor. Many years ago, I was watching a gala performance of Carmina Burana. One movement is basically a soprano cadenza- the orchestra plays a chord, she twitters about for a a bit, the orchestra plays a second chord, she floats off to a high note and we go on the next movement. That night, the conductor clearly and decisively cued the chord change way too early. The concertmaster had her eyes on him like a laser and all the other string principals and didn’t move a muscle. Somehow, she just held the orchestra there until the right moment, where they all changed together. I’m sure it was a memorably awful moment for the poor conductor, but he must have been very, very grateful to her for saving the performance.

Some years later, I had the reverse happen while I was on the podium- the orchestra was holding a chord while the piano soloist played some virtuoso stuff, then we had to change chord. At some point the concertmaster decided enough was enough and she went an tried to change the chord. In that case, she was wrong, and having the first stand of first violins playing a different harmony to everyone else wasn’t a pretty sound. The difference in these examples is that one concertmaster knew the solo part perfectly, the other didn’t. Concertmaster No. 2 didn’t make a mistake by ignoring me- her mistake was not learning the solo part properly.

Of course, up until a split second before, the concertmaster wouldn’t have known that mistake was coming. In any rehearsal, any performance it is possible at any moment that a leader might have to step in and drop the hammer for the good of the music. Perhaps a conductor just slightly guesses wrong when following a soloist and commits to a beat while the pianist hesitates at the last second- in this case, it’s less even a question of a mistake by the conductor as a bit of eccentricity from the soloist, but you can make the minute  adjustment so that the orchestra is perfectly with the soloist. Maybe a conductor has gotten nervous about a late horn entrance and starts to rush a bar, just one in a long symphony, out of concern. It is the leader who says to the orchestra- never mind the horns, we’re playing in tempo.

But in that same moment, the right decision could be to follow the horns, even if it makes a momentary tempo lapse. It takes experience to know, in the moment, which is right.

A mature conductor knows that this is probably the most important and pressurized part of your job, and we are grateful for all a leader can do to re-establish unity when someone else, be it conductor, soloist or orchestral colleague does something unpredictable or just plain wrong.

The difficult question is when to act and when not to. When and why do you over-rule a conductor?

I’d give a young concertmaster the same advice I give conductor’s about following soloists- it’s not your place to decide whether or not someone’s interpretation is in good taste or makes sense. I may think pianist x takes the last movement of the Schumann too fast, but I should do all I can to keep up. I may thing pianist y plays Chopin with too much rubato, but I should try to accommodate their interpretation to the best of my ability as a musician. Likewise for the concertmaster- try to let go of your sense of whether this rit is too much or that tempo is too fast. It might be, but leave it to the critics and the players’ committee to hold the conductor to account.

It is supremely damaging on many levels, if you intentionally take a slower tempo than a conductor gives simply because you think their tempo is “too fast” on aesthetic grounds. On the other hand, if a nervous conductor takes off in a concert at an unplayable tempo, it is your job to avert disaster by insisting on something slower. Your job is to know whether to do something risky you may not believe in or to stop something happening that will lead to disaster.The moment of truth usually lasts a fraction of a second. Remember the message I suggested you try to project to the orchestra at all times “anything that can be done, we can do.”  In the first case, if a conductor is going too fast for your taste, tough cookies- overruling her is likely to send the message that you think the orchestra isn’t up to the job. Conductors have to accept crazy tempi all the time from soloists and try to make them work- I feel your pain. However, if it is not something that can be done, do your  best to make it happen, whether you think you are going to like the result or not.

This is why humility is such an important part of a concertmaster’s job- you have be able to set aside your instincts and beliefs about the piece- and these will be beliefs that you may have developed over many years. No good conductor wants a blank slate- we like working with engaged and passionate musicians with ideas and opinions. I like it when I feel a strong sense of intent from a player. I can always sense it when it is there.

When I’m conducting and I feel any disconnect between what I think I’m showing and what I’m getting, I quickly ask myself- are they saving me from a mistake? Am I doing something in poor taste? Do they just have a better idea than I did? Am I not listening? I try to set aside my interpretative goals long enough to make sure that I’m not the problem, or that I’m not missing an opportunity to learn. However, I have a responsibility to make sure that I’m true to what I’ve learned and discovered in my study. If I don’t go with the orchestra, it’s not that I don’t value the input, it’s hopefully that I feel like I have to go with what’s in the score instead. This is when I need the leader to trust me and come along

So much about conducting has to do with conviction and projection- conductors need to trust their instincts and be able to follow them in concert. A good leader empowers a conductor to feel flexible, decisive, spontaneous and connected to the performance. They also empower their colleagues in the orchestra to feel that they can take a performance absolutely anywhere. Sometimes, I’ve seen a leader who was sceptical about an interpretation become totally convinced by the concert. Deciding “this rit is too much” at the first rehearsal is not your job- although it is perfectly fine (even much appreciated) to mention your concern at a break. Deciding the conductor has dropped a beat, however, is your job.