Back at Vftp International Headquarters, I’m starting to recover (slowly) from a busy concert weekend with the Surrey Mozart Players. I actually thought it was an unusually satisfying program.

Mozart- Impresario Overture

Fauré- Pelléas and Melisande Suite

Saint-Saens- Cello Concerto no. 2

Strauss- Romanze for Cello

Poulenc- Sinfonietta

There were several things about the program I enjoyed. First, it’s quite unusual to have a concert of music by all major composers without a single mainstream warhorse. I suppose the Fauré is the most standard piece we did, but even that is a bit of a rarity. No one had played or ever heard a live performance of the Saint-Saens, including the soloist, Parry Karp, and me, and the Strauss was almost totally forgotten for the better part of 100 years. The Impresario is the first real Mozart piece I ever played, but there were a lot of people who confessed to never having heard it, and the Poulenc is something of a rarity.

Really, we tend to think that if you don’t know a piece by a major composer, there must be a reason- it’s not that good! However, this is not always the case. Some are rare because of specific technical difficulties, some have been out of print, some aree hard to program. It’s so refreshing to remember that there’s always more music to explore.

The other aspect of the program that I particularly liked was the interesting relationships and contrasts between the composers. Fauré and Saint-Saens were very close friends, even though they wrote quite different music, and, to me, Saint-Saens and Richard Strauss are quite similar figures. If either of them had died at the same age as Mozart, they would have gone down in history as among the most radical composers who’d ever lived. Instead, they lived to see themselves become considered arch conservatives. I wish we could get away from this linear way of looking at music history- music is always changing, but never evolving. One generation does not improve on the next, so it’s not incumbent on any composer to keep up with the times. It was nice to have the very early Strauss just after the very late Saint-Saens- both of them found their voices early in life and then just kept writing great music. Strauss may have called himself a “first-rate second rate composer,” and the epitaph could just as easily apply to Saint-Saens, but that’s hardly an insult.

In my rap from the podium, I suggested to the audience that the Poulenc is a bit like one of those magical times as a child when you’re left in the care of a rather permissive guardian- maybe a young cousin or friend of the family.   Suddenly, you have the freedom to do things that were always out of bounds, and to behave more irreverently than you ever could in more serious company. It’s such witty music, but also so completely uninhibited- he’s perfectly happy to jump from something beautifully austere to something luxuriously schmaltzy. It’s great fun to conduct- so many fantastic tunes and colors.  I found the slow movement the most challenging, just because it doesn’t really have a form. You just kind of have to go with the flow and enjoy yourself- again, for once you can focus on enjoying the sheer decadent beauty of the music, and it’s actually very moving.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods 

We had a very interesting moment tonight in rehearsal with the Surrey Mozart Players- I’m curious if anyone besides me even noticed it….

We were rehearsing the Saint-Saens 2^nd Cello Concerto for the first time with our soloist, Parry Karp. Parry is a rare cellist who plays concertos like a full-time soloist (and has played a huge range of repertoire), but doesn’t look at the world through the eyes of many a soloist- he’s a quarter player, recitalist, teacher and chamber musician.

Tonight we were running through each movement with him and got to the coda of the last movement of the concerto, which sounds quite straightforward but is full of rather nasty syncopations. After crashing through to the end in the run-through I suggested we try it about half tempo with just the orchestra, which helped a bit. Then, Parry offered to play along at half-tempo.

That was the interesting moment!

Now this may sound like a simple and reasonable suggestion, but the sheer sanity of the idea astounded me, because this is something that just never happens in rehearsals. How many times in my life as a conductor, cover conductor or cellist have I been in situations where all the problems on stage could be solved by going through it slowly with the soloist? Hundreds! Thousands!

The thing is, it is almost never done. On the rare occasion I’ve seen it tried it has been socially awkward and has usually led to the soloist not playing very well, or looking rather put out, but that’s really only a couple of times I’ve ever seen it attempted. I can think of a rare incidents with soloists where I’ve said before a rehearsal (perhaps with a student orchestra or a community orchestra) something to the effect of “can we just run the 2^nd movement a little tiny bit under tempo today because they can’t quite make that speed yet,” and that’s almost always been accepted with a look of pained tolerance rather than supportive enthusiasm, but that’s nothing like doing something at half speed.

Anyway- we did it slowly with him, and it really helped. How many concerti have I seen done with the greatest orchestras where something really could have been fixed by doing that?

I understand the mindset- the orchestra wishes to present the soloist with a perfect product and visa versa, so both sides sort out their problems separately. Parry comes in as a world-class quartet player- quartets play slowly in rehearsals together all the time. He sees the orchestra as colleagues. We do it slowly with him, it sounds great, we pick it up to tempo and it’s quite transformed….

I know this must sound silly to people who haven’t witnessed this themselves. You must be thinking “Woods is making this up. I’m sure soloists and orchestras rehearse together in all sorts of ways, or they’re just so good that they don’t do this because they don’t need to” I promise…. so many times….  where five minutes of this would have made all the difference, and……. well….. you know the rest…..

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

UPCOMING CONCERT-
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Surrey Mozart Players

Mozart- Overture to The Impressario
Faure- Pelleas and Melisande Suite
Saint-Saens- Cello Concerto No. 2 in D minor
Richard Strauss- Romanze for Cello and Orchestra
Parry Karp, cello
Poulenc- Sinfonietta

The first concert of the 2007-8 Surrey Mozart Players season is a mostly-French program full of interesting connections. In America, orchestras often begin their season with the national anthem- at SMP, our anthem is a Mozart overture.

Then it’s on to France, and two works by men who shared a sixty year friendship- Fauré and Saint-Saens. Fauré was the more forward looking composer of the two, with a musical style that teasingly foreshadowed the new worlds of Debussy and Ravel. His music to Pelleas and Melisande is evocative, lyrical and full of color. If Fauré’s music points with understated elegance to the new harmonic worlds of the 20^th Century, Saint-Saens was a composer whose music remained firmly rooted in the Romantic world of the 19^th. His first cello concerto, written early in his career when he was at his most famous, is one of the staples of the repertoire. When he returned to the genre much later in life, his music was becoming decidedly unfashionable, and the piece never quite caught on with the public.

One reason for the neglect of this concerto may be the exceptionally difficult solo part. Saint-Saens even went so far as to write the solo cello part on two staves. Our soloist this week is the American cellist Parry Karp, who has been the cellist of the Pro Arte Quartet since 1976 when he won the position at the age of 19. Karp also performs the music of another precocious 19-year old, Richard Strauss. Like Saint-Saens, Strauss’s long creative life gave him the chance outlive his superstardom as tastes changed and a new generation of composers emerged.

Finally, we end the evening with the rather delectable Sinfonietta by Francis Poulenc.
Cellist Parry Karp

Cellist Parry Karp is Artist-in Residence and Professor of Chamber Music and Cello, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is director of the string chamber music program. He has been cellist of the Pro Arte Quartet for the past 30 years, joining the group in 1976.

Parry Karp is a active solo artist, performing numerous recitals annually in the United States with pianists Howard and Frances Karp. Mr. Karp has played concerti throughout the United States and gave the first performance in Romania of Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo with the National Radio Orchestra in Bucharest in 2002. He is active as a performer of new music and has performed in the premieres of dozens of works, many of which were written for him, including concerti, sonatas and chamber music. As a solo recording artist, he has recorded the solo cello works of Ernest Bloch, and works of Frank Bridge, Rebecca Clarke, Ernest Chausson, Edward Joseph Collins, Georges Enesco, John Ireland, Alberic Magnard, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Miklos Rosza, and Richard Strauss. Unearthing and performing unjustly neglected repertoire for cello is a passion of Mr. Karp’s. In recent years he has transcribed for cello many masterpieces written for other instruments. This project has included performances of all of the Duo Sonatas of Brahms, as well as compositions of Bach, Dvorak, Hindemith, Strauss, Stravinsky and Szymanowski. Parry Karp performs annually in summer music festivals throughout the United States.

As cellist of the Pro Arte Quartet he has performed over 1000 concerts throughout North, Central and South America, Europe, and Japan. His discography with the group has been extensive and includes the complete string quartets of Ernest Bloch, Miklos Rosza, and Karol Szymanowski . Many of these recordings received awards from Fanfare and High Fidelity Magazines. Other composers whose string quartets or string quintets the Pro Arte Quartet has recorded during his tenure include: Beethoven, Luís de Freitas Branco, Martin Boykan, Tamar Diesendruck, Dvorak, Brian Fennelly, Andrew Imbrie, Fred Lerdahl, Walter Mays, Mendelssohn, Karol Rathaus, Samuel Rhodes, Roger Sessions, and Ralph Shapey. As a member of the Pro Arte Quartet he has recorded the Piano Quintets of Ernest Bloch, Johannes Brahms and Armando José Fernandes with pianist Howard Karp. Guest artists with the Pro Arte during his years have included: the Emerson Quartet, Denes Koromzay, Leon Fleischer, Sidney Harth, Gunnar Johansen, Gilbert Kalish, Jerome Lowenthal, Robert Mann, Samuel Rhodes, Robert Silverman, Christopher Taylor, Laszlo Varga and Tamas Vasary. Gunther Schuller conducted the group in the premiere of his String Quartet Concerto which he wrote for the Pro Arte Quartet. The Pro Arte Quartet was one of five finalists (the others were the Juilliard, Tokyo, and Emerson Quartets, and the Beaux Arts Trio) for the First Annual Arturo Toscanini Award in the Chamber Music Category

Parry Karp’s chamber music discography outside of the Pro Arte Quartet includes the three piano trios of Joel Hoffman, as well as works of Britten, Fauré, Martinu, Mozart and Pierné. Mr. Karp had a visiting professorship at the University of British Columbia, and has been a visiting fellow at Princeton University. Former students of Mr. Karp’s are members of professional string quartets, major orchestras, and teachers in the United States.

Mr. Karp received early training in Vienna, Austria and studied cello with Lee Duckles, David Kadarauch, Peter Farrell, Gabriel Magyar and Gabor Rejto. Inspirational chamber music teachers included Gabriel Magyar, Howard Karp, Lorand Fenyves and Zoltan Szekely.

Click here for a review of Parry’s latest CD of Bloch’s works for cello solo and cello and piano

Click here to listen to a recent  Parry Karp recital performance, including the cello and piano version of the Strauss from the UW-Madison website

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