Okay, I admit it…. I take a certain personal pride in this episode of “quote of the week….”
“I haven’t played that loud since the last time I played for you.”
It was meant as a compliment, I think. I certainly took it as one.
The last time I was in Pendleton before this week was for our performance of the Elgar Violin Concerto with Jorja Fleezanis in February, a memorable week for all concerned. Funny that the week I return to Pendleton is the week she returns to the Elgar, this time with the Minnesota Orchestra and Neville Mariner.
The Star Tribune has this long and very good feature on Jorja with some unusally insightful remarks about the Elgar. The OES concert even gets a brief mention “I was flying in Oregon,” said Jorja.
That she was. I just got my hands on the CD of our concert- I’m happiest with the orchestra’s playing of the piece out of everything we’ve done here. We had a beautiful sound going that week, but most importantly, we were flawlessly with her through every twist and turn in that famously impossible accompaniment.
And we did fly- the entire performance came in at 46’51.” That’s over ten minutes faster than Kennedy’s recording, and, to the best of my knowledge, the fastest performance this side of Heifitz, who actually used some rather lousy cuts in the finale, for which I assume he is still burning in hell.
At our tempos the piece feels bigger because it hangs together in one huge, al-powerful arch, instead of being a serious a stagnant, strung-together single events.
I’m feeling a little frustrated at my current blogging output- it is just that time of year when one has to answer emails or one doesn’t work in the year to come….
Oh yes, there is also music to learn….
I’ve already shared a few thoughts about Brahms 1 in expectation of this week’s Oregon East Symphony concert, but not much of anything about Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, a not-insignificant piece that is also on the program….
In fact D&T is my favorite Strauss tone poem- solely on musical merit. Of course, I consider Alpine Symphony as a symphony, and Don Quioxte as a cello concerto for purposes of that list. Still, even if they were in contention, I think D&T might win out. I think that musically, it is the richest and most inspired of all the tone poems, and that it is also the most perfectly constructed. I can scarcely think of a piece of romantic music where the form more perfectly suits the meaning of the music.
Strauss’s famous dying joke(“dying is just like I composed it in Tod und Verklarung”), which I’ve quoted often this week, as well as his refusal to behave as a “serious artist” throughout his life has, I think, led some musicians to overlook the musical seriousness of the piece. Fair enough, it works beautifully as a thrill ride, but I do think the piece has a certain honest spirituality that is powerfully apparent when it is well performed.
In fact, as I get older, I tend to respect Strauss’s tendency to express his deepest emotions through his music and not through his letters or through an angst-ridden public persona. Strauss seemed keen to puncture the accumulated grandiosity of romantic music- think of the nihilistic ending to Don Juan or the inherent ironic posture of Ein Heldenleben, and in doing so, he liberates the style to express real feeling more directly. Ein Heldenleben, simply by virtue of the title and the subject matter, comes into existence as an affront to romantic decency, and yet, much as we resent the egotism of his choice of “the composer” as heroic figure, in the end, the piece is deeply moving- he dismantles the ironic pose and makes us believe in the viability of author as hero by the end.
While Ein Heldenleben, Don Juan, Sinfonia Domestica and Till Eulenspiegel are largely ironic in their outlook, a piece like Death and Transfiguration (as well as Don Quioxte, which is both his most comic and most serious and least ironic piece) shows Strauss the composer revealing himself in a more vulnerable way. Where the hero of Heldenleben conquers all in his path before accepting death more or less on his own terms, in D&T, the protagonist is described as someone who, have spent all his life striving, is someone who has always been met with “no.” It is only in surrender to death that he finds that which he sought. This is an almost Mahlerian perspective.
In this sense, it is less a study in ironic triumphalism than in hope, an emotion that Strauss always treated with the utmost respect and delicacy.
In fact, you can look at the major tone poems as each connecting to one fundamental aspect of the human character- Heldenleben is a study in courage, Eulenspiegel in subversion through wit, Don Juan- nihilism, Also Sprach- will, and Quioxte a study in frailty and compassion. Strauss’s portrait of Quioxte as the demented Don is devastating in its realistic evocation of madness and dementia, and yet, for once, Strauss eschews all sense of superiority and condescention- Quioxte seems to have been the one protagonist Strauss truly loved and empathised with.
And then, in Tod und Verklarung, he abandons any pretense of superiority, writing of the protagonist “What he has sought all this time with his heart’s deepest longing, he still seeks while bathed in mortal sweat, seeks—but alas cannot find it.” In the end, Strauss recognizes the powerlessness of man– man cannot overcome all– and leaves us with hope:
“Then the last blow of death’s iron hammer rings out, breaks the earthly body in two and covers his eyes with the night of death.—But he hears mightily resounding from heaven that which he sought here longingly….”
c. 2008 Kenneth Woods
Today was the annual youth orchestra school concert tour- three schools in three tiny towns to the north of Pendleton this year. This is a project we have undertaken in each of the six years since we started the orchestra, and, even more so than in past seasons, I found the day interesting, rewarding and moving.
My work with the preparatory orchestra is one of the things I most treasure about this job, but my travel schedule makes it difficult to find enough rehearsal time for us to put on the kinds of concerts we want to. The orchestra rehearses weekly throughout the school year under the leadership of my colleague Travis Sipher, who has always done a good job of preparing them for my time with them and maintained a productive and positive working environment all these years. Travis is leaving us the spring to move to Eugene after five years of outstanding service to the organization and the city. The youth orchestra typically begins and ends the year with weekend-long rehearsal retreats, which is fun on a social level for the players, and allows us to work together enough that my impact with them can be more than just on a surface level.
Sadly, this spring we got bumped at the 11th hour from the Bar M ranch, so we had to have most of our retreat in our usual rehearsal venue- less a retreat than an epic rehearsal slog. Much as we might have missed the mountain scenery, hot springs and fresh air, at least we still managed to get a lot done. I’ve written before of the fact that because of the small number of advanced students here, we’ve tended to do a lot of classical repertoire- lots of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, and the student’s amazing performance of Beethoven 8 in the fall convinced me that they had really begun to develop an surprisingly strong sense of classical style. As a result, I programmed our first all-Romantic and 20th c. concert for this spring, in spite of the fact that the group is really too small to do Borodin and Sibelius. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe may have claimed Sibelius for small orchestras, but I don’t think we’ll ever see pocket-sized Borodin recordings. Never mind- we’re here to teach and learn, not to be bullied by orchestration.
In the end, I think this year’s retreat was all about learning to play romantic music. At most levels, it is the kind of music you play most, and so one tends to think of the stylistic aspects- the singing and sustaining sound, the big dynamic range, the intensity- as a given. It was actually something new for me to take a group that plays Haydn and Beethoven really well, and not like kids, and have to teach them to play Sibelius, and not even really tough Sibelius at that. Fortunately, by the end of the day Sunday, the “long line” was in sight at last.
Travel is an inescapable part of life as a freelance conductor, and over the years I have flown hundreds of thousands of miles on Northwest Airlines, the only airline with service from Cardiff to Pendleton.
My history with Northwest has not always been a happy one- I used to call them Northworst in honor of their frequent mysterious cancellations, perpetually missing bags, and often down-right mean cabin crews. However, over the last five years, their standards had improved incredibly. By and large, my flights had been taking off, I’d been landing with my baggage in the same city as me, and the in flight service had remained at more-or-less pre-9/11 standards, with a marked increase in courtesy and personal warmth, while that in the rest of the industry had sank to ever new lows.
So, it was with a groan of despair that I read that they are being gobbled up by Delta, the worst airline in the western world. I’ve written about Delta before- their treatment of musicians traveling with valuable and fragile instruments has long been so horrible that in 2006, the American Federation of Musicians called for a boycott.
Just one last reminder that tonight is the night for the broadcast of my recent concert with the Contemporary Music Ensemble of Wales on this week’s edition of Hear and Now on BBC Radio 3.
The concert is hosted by writer, critic and broadcaster Ivan Hewett and can be heard this Saturday, April 19th at 10:30 PM GMT on BBC Radio 3, or online at-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/index.shtml
If you are too busy to listen today, you can listen to the program anytime via the Radio 3 on-demand service for one week after the broadcast here-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/radio3/aod.shtml?radio3/hearandnow
(The on-demand service usually becomes available several hours after the show)
The program includes works by Iannis Xenakis, Paul Mefano, Earle Brown and Gordon Downie. Complete broadcast information can be found here-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/hearandnow/pip/wa051/
Program notes for the concert are here.
It was a very challenging and rewarding program, with amazing contributions from piano soloist Ian Pace and the musicians of CMEW. As part of the broadcast, Ivan Hewett will be interviewing both CMEW Artistic Director Gordon Downie and Paul Mefano, who flew over from France for the concert. The BBC website is also featuring my lengthy interview with Gordon Downie. Be sure to read it if you haven’t already.
Let me know how it sounds- I’m in rehearsals all day with the OES Preparatory Orchestra so won’t get to hear it until later this week.
I turned down what I’m sure was going to be a very, very good homemade Indian dinner tonight because I am on what many of you may consider a fools errand.
Of all the pieces in my repertoire, I would say Brahms 1 is near the top of the list of pieces I would be happy to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in with no warning or prep time (a level of familiarity and comfort I’m sure I share with most conductors). Given how busy I find myself these days, it may seem like a glorious time waster that I am trying to listen attentively to every recording I have (and several new ones I’ve recently discovered). At 40-50 minutes per recording, that is a huge job, and one I won’t manage to finish this week.
Now, I’m 100% against learning pieces from recordings, or even learning interpretations from recordings- one can’t simply take Furtwangler’s tempo in the introduction and Gunter Wand’s in the Allegro and have something make any sense. This is not collage making. However, I don’t want to be limited to only the boundaries of my own intellect and imagination, so I am studying the art of performance and interpretation in this piece, as well as, and separately from, studying the piece itself. All this while trying to avoid getting hung up on “ooh, isn’t it cool the way he brought out the 3rd horn there,” and instead trying to understand the cause and effect relationships that make performances happen or not.
For the curious, keen and bored- here is the latest Oregon East Symphony promotional spot. Is this the future of marketing?
The musicians of the Rose City Chamber Orchestra are happy to announce a second selection round for the 2008 Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop, July 21-27 in Portland, Oregon. Interested conductors should submit their applications, including postmarking any materials that are being mailed, by May 7, 2008. Workshop faculty include David Hoose from Boston University, Christopher Zimmerman from the Hartt School and RCICW director, Kenneth Woods.
Four slots remain in each of the two programs. The Emerging Artist program offers advanced training at the highest level for conductors who have completed the bulk of their studies and are beginning to establish themselves in the professional arena. The Discovery Program is an intensive immersion in conducting and score study for young conductors beginning their studies, advanced instrumentalists with some previous conducting training, experienced amateurs and music educators.
The Emerging Artist program offers students the chance to work with full orchestra and professional soloists in repertoire including Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor, op 95 as arranged by Mahler, Dvorak’s Wind Serenade, the 13 Instrument version of Copland’s Appalachian Spring, scenes from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and the Brahms D minor Piano Concerto. All sessions are video-recorded to DVD in CD-quality audio. All Emerging Artist students also participate in a final concert.
Discovery Program repertoire includes Haydn’s Symphony no. 86, Stravinsky’s Octet for Winds and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 2 in D major, and all DP teaching sessions are also professionally videoed. Students in both programs will also participate jointly in seminars and discussion sections throughout the week.
This season’s soloists include pianist Rick Rowley, tenor Brennen Guillory and soprano Esther Mae Moses.
Apply online at www.rosecityworkshop.org
My March 9th concert with the Contemporary Music Ensemble of Wales will be broadcast this coming Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 10:30 PM GMT. You can listen online at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 live, and the show will be archived on the Radio 3 website for one week from the date of the broadcast.
In addition to three works by Gordon Downie, Earle Brown’s witty Novara and Mefano’s magical and ephemeral Interferances, the concert culminates in a performance of Xenakis masterful and deeply affecting Akrata.
For those interested in Xenakis, please check out On An Overgrown Path, where Pliable is focusing on the Greek master this week. Or check out some of my recent posts.
Re-blogged below is the broadcast info from the R3 website-
Musical ModernismSaturday 19 April 2008 22:30-0:00 (Radio 3)
Ivan Hewett presents musical modernism new and old, with classic works of the 1960s alongside new pieces by Downie and Jarrell.
Duration: 1 hour 30 minutesPlaylist:
Downie: Fragments for cello and piano
Mefano: Interferences
Downie: Piano Piece 3
Brown: Novara
Downie: Forms 7: Non-mediated forms for 24 instrumentalists
Xenakis: AktrataJohn Senter (cello)
Ian Pace (piano)
Contemporary Music Ensemble of Wales
Kenneth Woods (conductor)
(Concert recorded last month at BBC Wales in Cardiff)
It is long past time that I write a bit about music, and at the risk of boring you to tears, I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about the private and arcane world of score study.
In expectation of Sam’s arrival, I managed to keep about a month free of concerts. This has meant that I’ve had an unusually long period of time to think about my upcoming concert with the Oregon East Symphony on April 26, when we will finish our season with two of my favourite pieces- Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, and Brahms’ Symphony no. 1.
The Brahms is very, very dear to me, and a piece I’ve probably played and studied as much as any in the repertoire. In my cello-playing life, I certainly performed it 3 times for every Beethoven 5 I ever did. It was also one of the first pieces I ever studied properly as a conductor, and the first one I conducted from memory in my first semester of study with Chris Zimmerman. Of course, Chris is now my colleague on the faculty of the Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop, and it was quite a feeling to teach Brahms 1 in our first summer together alongside Chris. I was lucky to learn it with him, as it is his party piece, and a work he knows inside and out.
Since then, I’ve covered it, rehearsed it, read it, performed it, done it on auditions, taught it, performed it again and so on. All this in spite of the fact that I tend to treat all of the Brahms symphonies as quite sacred, and avoid doing them under less-than-ideal circumstances. It is no accident that this will be my first Brahms symphony with the OES, coming after 3 Mahler symphonies. Don’t believe the hype- Brahms is always harder than Mahler or Strauss or Stravinsky.
Coming back to a piece that you know well and love deeply is always humbling, as there is so much to discover anew every time, and my thinking on Brahms 1 has evolved tremendously over the years. It can also be strangely stressful- knowing where the problems are in a piece can take some of the fun out of studying it. I keep catching myself thinking “ah, that 3rd bass saxophone part is so difficult and bloody Zebidiah is such a rusher, he’ll mangle it at the first rehearsal!” Toscanini once said that (bad) orchestra musicians exist to destroy his dreams. The tragic corollary is that they can haunt your waking hours even from afar, so that by the time old Zebidiah massacres the sax solo for the fist time, it is as if he’s done it 100 times in your head.
So, when preparing for a new performance of a piece like this, I find it essential to forget a bit about performance, and about the inevitably flawed contributions to be made by yourself and your colleagues, and try, try, try to connect only to the music in the most idealized sense.
In a sense, Brahms, more than most composers, makes it easier to feel as though you’re always learning his works for the first time. There are no easy answers in Brahms- no metronome markings, few indications of tempo nuances, and even those often ask more questions than they answer. You can’t simply “learn” a Brahms symphony- they are not conductor proofed in the way the Mahler symphonies are. You have to struggle, and you have to make hard choices in a world of ambiguity and paradox.
For instance, I noticed recently that the “animato” at letter D and K in the last movement doesn’t appear in Brahms’ manuscript (which has been reprinted cheaply by Dover and is well worth buying). However, the original Simrock edition, the Vienna Gesellschaft edition edited by Hans Gal and the new Henle Urtext edited by Robert Pascal all have both “animatos.” Irritatingly, the Pascal edition critical notes seem to only be available in the hardbound $330 version of the score, which, of course, the RWCMD library doesn’t have, so I have been unable to discover his rational for leaving them in.
I was relieved to see that my old boss Gunther Schuller had noted their absence in his long essay on Brahms 1 in his book The Compleat Conductor. Later on, I found one recording by Eugen Jochum (in many ways, the best recording I’ve found of the piece), that does away with them. Instead, Jochum starts the Allegro non troppo, ma con brio unusually fast. It’s bold, but I’m not convinced, but even if Brahms himself added those animatos to the first edition, what does it say that they weren’t part of the original design of the piece. The tempo relationships have always seemed like the key to understanding that piece- wave after wave of speeding up in each section of the movement, culminating in the build up to the final Piu Allegro. Maybe not, though?
Mahler or Beethoven would never have left us with such questions, but Brahms was actually resistant to handing us easy answers. He refused many requests to clarify his wishes from coleagues, friends and publishers- instead, a bit like Shostakovich, he seems to have felt that if someone lacks a feel for the music, a few extra tempo markings won’t fix the problem. I had always treated tempo intensification as the key to understanding the form of the Finale of Brahms 1. Now, I’ve found something that is forcing me to rethink that. So far, all my research has been able to establish is that the question is not going to be easy to answer. The answer may be the same this time around, but the cost of reaching it gets higher each time.
For regular readers who have been irritated and distressed at the relatively slow pace of posts this month, take heart- a proper blog post full of wonky musical nonsense is on its way.
However, while reading the paper this afternoon, I came across this gem in today’s Independent.
The Barbican has been forced to cancel a concert by the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov because of changes to visa regulations requiring non-EU citizens to provide fingerprints.
Sokolov, 57, was due to perform a programme of Mozart sonatas and Chopin on 10 May at the London concert hall, followed by an appearance at Glasgow’s City Hall. But the pianist will no longer travel to the UK, where he has been performing regularly for the past 18 years, because he is unwilling to disrupt his schedule to apply in person for the new biometric visa.
A Russian citizen with Italian residency, Sokolov was told that, after years of someone else applying for a visa on his behalf, he would have to travel from his home in Verona to Rome to provide fingerprints…
Read the whole thing here.Now, Grigory Sokolov may not be a household name and international jet-set superstar, but I dare say, Sokolov probably can make as fair a claim as anyone in the world to being the greatest living pianist.
That ill-considered, short-sighted, beaurocratic obstructionism would prevent an artist of such standing coming to the U is simply pathetic. I almost said tragic, but it is more of a farce than a tragedy, except that there are so few chances in life to hear an artist of this calibre- it is a tragedy for those who were lucky enough to have tickets. This is the kind of backward, insular and paranoid way of dealing with the outside world that one used to associate with working behind the Iron Curtain or in the most corrupt of banana republics, not in the world’s most culturally dynamic capital.
These visa requirements are nothing but ludicrous posturing- they won’t make anyone safer in any country. Remember, many of the worst terrorists in recent British history were UK citizens and residents, and there is no visa requirement for Europeans or Americans. The Oklahoma City bomber could come to the UK today on a tourist visa (were he not dead), but Grigory Sokolov has the tromp all over Italy being fingerprinted like a criminal.
We need security legislation that protects our lives livelihoods and liberty, and we need it in all countries. We don’t need more neo-totalitarian surveilance-society snooping and meddling, and we certainly don’t need and can’t afford to wall off our countries into isolationist backwaters of parochial ignorance.
Cultural exchange is more needed than ever, and what the world really needs is international visa-free travel for all artists and cultural ambassadors (Ireland already extends tax-free status to artists), who do so much to energize our economies and enrich our societies while being modestly rewarded financially.
Write your MP!
More from the Independent here.
I had already written this when I discovered to my delight that Jessican Duchen was already on it. Well done, Jessica, both for mentioning the story and for highlighting Sokolov’s pianism (somethign she has done many times)
It is snowing in Cardiff- are we having April fools day a week late this year?
I tried to keep a window of time clear this year to have time to help out with Sam after his arrival. Since I travel so much of the time, I always tend to enjoy extended interludes at home when I can not only enjoy family time, but also sample some of the pleasures of life in Cardiff, like shopping at the market downtown, sampling some of my favourite restaurants like Café Menuet, or walking in Sophia Gardens. Not all are practical with a newborn, however. Still, I’d much rather buy my dinner from the local butcher and greengrocer than from some huge multi-national corporation-run supermarket, which can be the only option when you’re in a terrible rush all the time.
Along these lines, I recently returned for the first time in a long while to the local coffee roasters in Pontcana. In every other city that I’ve lived in, there has been a coffee house central to the rhythms of my life- Baba Budans in Cincinnati (I actually dreamed about their coffee last night), Café Espresso Royale in Madison (Café Depresso as we used to call it- a classic wear black and read Kafka coffee joint in those days), Stump Town coffee has made my many residencies in Portland all the happier, and then there is the lamented Pendleton Coffee Bean in the hometown of the OES. Sadly, after all these years, I have yet to find such a place in Cardiff, nor have I found a satisfactory local coffee roaster- a terrible irony given that I have the best coffee machine at home I have ever owned.
Anyway, I went back to the local place last week after a dog/baby walk- it’s a beautiful little shop with the roaster on show, run for many years by a local family. Should be perfect, but, sadly, as I remembered, the espresso beans were stale and under-roasted, didn’t generate enough crema and produced a thin, shallow-tasting coffee. It feels like a betrayal of principals to say this, but it was a relief to open a bag of Starbucks espresso beans this morning- when the best you can get is the coffee of corporate power, it’s not a good thing. This reminds me that I need to get to work on my design for the perfect 2nd suitcase- one with a built-in wine case which will hold 12 bottles safely packed in coffee beans…. The UK has alot going for it, but it is not a good place to be thirsty compared to the Pacific Northwest.Speaking of getting it wrong…..
I’ve been trying to get thank you notes out to everyone who has sent a card or note since Sam’s arrival. If we’ve failed, you must remember, we’re not firing on all cylinders yet. Fortunately, we’re not the only ones- there are the friends of Suzanne’s family who were at our wedding who sent us a very sweet card to “Susan and Norman- congratulations on the birth of your beautiful daughter.” No, that wasn’t received on April Fool’s Day.
For those of you who followed the suprising controversy surrounding my interview with composer Gordon Downie with interest, his orchestral work “forms 6: event aggregates” will be the featured work on this week’s Pre-Hear on BBC Radio 3.
The show is at 9:45 PM GMT on Saturday, April 5 and can be heard via the R3 website as well as on terrestrial radio.
forms 6 is performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under my good friend Grant Llewellyn. It’s a very different piece from either of the works that featured on the Contemporary Music Ensemble of Wales program last month- piano piece 3 and forms 7. Those will be broadcast on Hear and Now on April 19th.
UPDATE- The archived broadcast can be heard for the rest of this week here.
I thought it would be appropriate in celebrating Gerhard’s accomplishments as both a performer and composer to cobble together a podcast showcasing some of his recordings. This is by no means a comprehensive selection, but more of a grab bag of some of my favourites from my own collection. Sadly omitted is his groundbreaking recording of the Ives Universe Symphony, my copy of which was lost in last year’s fire- it is well worth seeking out and is print. Continue reading
