Kenneth Woods- A View From the Podium

This Thursday, April 30th is the priority application deadline for the 2009 Rose City International Conductors Workshop, July 20-26^th in Portland, Oregon. Applications may still be considered on a space available basis after this date, but for full, guaranteed consideration, conductors are strongly encouraged to apply this week. Full application details are on the workshop website- http://www.rosecityworkshop.org/

Returning for their fourth summer together are RCICW faculty members Christopher Zimmerman, chair of conducting and orchestral studies at the Hartt School of Music, David Hoose, director of orchestras and orchestral conducting at Boston University and course director Kenneth Woods, music director of the Oregon East Symphony and Chorale.

Key to the success of the workshop in past years has been the seamless team-teaching approach of the faculty. Alumni have commented “I’ve never been to a workshop where faculty members with such unique and diverse approaches were able to work so effortlessly together without the slightest hint of ego or rivalry” and “The RCICW faculty are unfailingly positive while remaining absolutely tenacious about getting each student to give their very best.”

The RCICW offers students extensive opportunities to work with our faculty in the formal teaching sessions, but also to interact, ask questions and build mentoring relationships outside of the classes.

We hope interested conductors will consider joining us for a lively week of great repertoire- Verdi’s Aida with professional singers, Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto with concert pianist and recording artist Rick Rowley, Haydn’s Symphony no. 99 in celebration of the 200th anniversary of his death and the Mozart Gran Partita for Winds.

If you have any questions, please email our offices at admin@rosecityworkshop.org

Below, you can find out more about our faculty-

Kenneth Woods

BIOGRAPHY

Hailed by the Washington Post as an “up-and-coming conductor” and a “true star” of the podium, Kenneth Woods is Music Director and Conductor of the Oregon East Symphony and Chorale, Principal Guest Conductor of the Rose City Chamber Orchestra and a regular guest conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Mr. Woods has also been a member of the conducting staff at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Cincinnati Pops. In 2009, he makes his first CD recordings with Northern Sinfonia for Avie Records, and makes his debut at the Stratford Proms with Orchestra of the Swan.

Already known in America as one of the most exciting conductors of the new generation, Kenneth Woods is quickly becoming recognized as major talent on the international scene. He has worked with many orchestras of international distinction including the National Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and the State of Mexico Symphony Orchestra. He has also appeared of the stages of some of the world’s leading music festivals, including Aspen, Lucerne, Round Top and Scotia. His work on the concert platform and in the recording studio has led to numerous broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, National Public Radio, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

In the spring of 2001, Kenneth Woods was selected by Leonard Slatkin as one of four participants in the Kennedy Center National Conducting Institute. At the completion of the Institute, he led the National Symphony Orchestra in a debut concert, drawing great critical acclaim. Toronto Symphony Music Director Designate Peter Oundjian has praised Woods as “a conductor with true vision and purpose. He has a most fluid and clear style and an excellent command on the podium… a most complete musician.”

Woods’ activities as an active proponent of contemporary music include collaborations as a conductor or cellist with such figures as John Corigliano, Krystopf Penderecki, Peter Lieberson, Oliver Knussen and many others. He is a highly regarded teacher of conducting who has been a clinician for masterclasses offered by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and in 2005 was asked by the musicians of the Rose City Chamber Orchestra to found a new training institute for emerging professional conductors, the Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop. Guest masterclasses and adjudication include the Royal College of Music in London, Boston University and in 2009 the University of Wisconsin. He is also artist in residence at the Ischia Chamber Music Festival in Italy and Music Director of the Harlech Orchestral Academy in Wales.

As a cellist he has been recipient of the Aspen Fellowship (Mr. Woods has received the Aspen Fellowship as both a cellist and conductor), the Dale Gilbert Award (the only musician to win this award in consecutive years), the Strelow Quartet Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Rural Residency Grant and has recorded and toured extensively as soloist and chamber musician. He has played chamber music with members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian Chamber Players, the Cincinnati, Chicago and Toronto symphonies, and the Minnesota, Gewandhaus and Concertgebow orchestras.  As a student, he coached with members of many of the worlds leading quartets, including the Tokyo, Vermeer, La Salle, Pro Arte, Borodin, Emerson and Vegh.

Mr. Woods pursued his advanced conducting studies at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and has also studied at leading summer institutes and workshops around the world. He has studied conducting with Leonard Slatkin, David Zinman.  

Christopher Zimmerman

BIOGRAPHY

Of his professional debut, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, The Daily Telegraph of London wrote, “Contact with the orchestra seemed immediate, the result a reading in which the playing responded keenly to gestures which themselves were expressive both of the symphony’s fiery vigour and of its finer nuances. Christopher Zimmerman revealed a sharp interpretative profile and control of orchestral timbre….a most auspicious London debut.”

Christopher Zimmerman graduated from Yale with a B.A. in Music, and received his Master’s from the University of Michigan. He also studied with Seiji Ozawa and Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood, and at the Pierre Monteux School in Maine. Zimmerman served as an apprentice to Andrew Davis and the Toronto Symphony and in Prague as assistant conductor to Vaclav Neumann and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Zimmerman made his professional debut in 1985 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, followed by engagements with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. He has also conducted the Prague Symphony, the Slovak Philharmonic, the Seoul Philharmonic, the Mexico City Philharmonic, the Edmonton Symphony, the Hartford Symphony, the El Paso Symphony, the Ohio Chamber Orchestra and the Prague Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra among many other orchestras. In opera he has worked as the assistant conductor for “Carmen” at the Nimes Festival and as the assistant conductor for “Salome” at the Mexico City Opera, where he was immediately reinvited to conduct a production of “Gianni Schicchi”. In 1989 he co-founded and became Music Director of the City of London Chamber Orchestra.

In 1993 Christopher Zimmerman became Music Director of the Cincinnati Concert Orchestra. He made his U.S. operatic debut conducting this orchestra in a production of “Susannah” by Carlisle Floyd, and has since conducted “The Turn of the Screw,” “Gianni Schicchi,” “Suor Angelica,” “Don Pasquale,” “The Song of Majnun,” and “Julius Caesar,” the last two winning the National Opera Association’s First Prize. In 1999 Zimmerman was a featured conductor in the American Symphony Orchestra League’s Conductors’ Preview with the Utah Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Zimmerman was appointed to succeed Werner Torkanowsky as Music Director of the Bangor Symphony Orchestra in 1994 and in 1999 was appointed Music Director of the Hartt Symphony. In 2001 Mr. Zimmerman was appointed Music Director of the Symphony of Southeast Texas.

David Hoose

BIOGRAPHY

David Hoose is Music Director of two distinguished Boston musical institutions, the Cantata Singers & Ensemble, a organization whose repertoire reaches from Bach and Handel to the music of today, with all in between, and Collage New Music, a chamber ensemble devoted to music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and whose members include musicians from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As well, Mr. Hoose has recently completed eleven years as Music Director of the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra. He is Professor of Music at the Boston University School of Music where he is Director of Orchestral Activities and Chairman of the Conducting Department.

Mr. Hoose has just been awarded the 2005 Alice M. Ditson Conductors Award, given in recognition of his commitment to the performance of American Music. He has also received the Dmitri Mitropoloulos Award and, as a member of the Emmanuel Wind Quintet, the Walter W. Naumburg Award for Chamber Music. Mr. Hoose’s recordings appear on the New World, Koch, Nonesuch, Delos, CRI and GunMar labels. His recordings of John Harbison’s Motteti di Montale with Collage New Music and Harbison’s Four Psalms and Emerson with the Cantata Singers & Ensemble have been recently released by New World Records, and his recordings of Peter Child’s chamber opera Embers and of the complete chamber music of Donald Sur are forthcoming. The recording of the Harbison Motteti di Montale has been nominated for a 2006 Grammy Award.

Mr. Hoose has conducted the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Saint Louis Symphony, Utah Symphony, Chicago Philharmonic, Korean Broadcasting Symphony (KBS), Orchestra Regionale Toscana (Florence), Quad Cities Symphony Orchestra, Ann Arbor Symphony, Opera Festival of New Jersey, and at the Warebrook, New Hampshire, Monadnock and Tanglewood music festivals. In Boston he has appeared as guest conductor with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Handel & Haydn Society, Back Bay Chorale, Chorus Pro Musica, Fromm Chamber Players, Dinosaur Annex, Auros, and many times both with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra and with Emmanuel Music. For many summers he has conducted the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Young Artists Orchestra, and he has been guest conductor at New England Conservatory, Eastman School, Shepherd School of Rice University and University of Southern California.

David Hoose studied composition at the Oberlin Conservatory with Walter Aschaffenburg and Richard Hoffmann (student and amanuensis of Arnold Schoenberg), and at Brandeis University with Arthur Berger and Harold Shapero. His horn studies were with Barry Tuckwell, with Joseph Singer, principal horn of the New York Philharmonic, and with Richard Mackey of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. His principal study of conducting was at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied with Gustav Meier and worked with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa.

The Rose City International Conductors Workshop is an educational program of the Rose City Chamber Orchestra, a 501 c3 non-profit organization.

The mission of the Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop is to provide advanced professional training at the highest levels to emerging conductors from all over the world.

I had a wonderfully provocative comment from blogger AC Douglas on my recent post Style and Range. He responded to my statement that-

“I think, at the end of the day, you have to learn absolutely everything you possibly can about style, and then you have to disenthrall yourself from it. You have to totally let go of your own ideas about Mozart, Handel and everything else and look to the score, and be absolutely true to what you find, not to what you bring. At the end of the day, its about listening, not about conducting, not about deciding.”

as follows-

If I understand your above correctly (and if I haven’t, you can safely disregard the rest of this), then you’re the first working conductor of my cyber acquaintance who essentially agrees with my take on this business of “proper” style.

Over the years, I’ve had an uncountable number of knock-down, drag-out online forum fights with working professional conductors who took quite nasty exception to my declaration that with any piece of music whatsoever, one does NOT approach it in performance by being true to the composer, and/or being true to the performance style of the period in which it was written as determined by musicological research, and/or by being true to the perceived style of the composer. Instead, one must *listen* to the music itself as represented in the score, and be true to what the music itself there tells us it wants to be….
 
ACD

Indeed, I think we are in somewhat broad agreement in principle about this, although I wouldn’t be surprised if we came to different conclusions about what sort of artistic results this kind of approach would or should lead to.

The bit of this comment I most wanted to talk about is this-

“With any piece of music whatsoever, one does NOT approach it in performance by being true to the composer, and/or being true to the performance style of the period in which it was written as determined by musicological research, and/or by being true to the perceived style of the composer. Instead, one must *listen* to the music itself as represented in the score, and be true to what the music itself there tells us it wants to be.”

I couldn’t agree more with this statement.

However, musicological research and knowledge of style, experience of historical instruments and records of performance practice (such as timings, metronome marks and contemporary descriptions and reviews) can tell us a great deal about what the symbols in the score really mean and what we should be listening for.

Mahler used all of the notational symbols that Beethoven did (as well as adding many of his own).However, any piece of notation in Mahler almost always means something different than it would in a Beethoven symphony.

Take as an example a fortissimo whole-not for the first trumpet. In Mahler, this would be a clear instruction for a very powerful note, sustained at equally intense level throughout the entire length of the note. In Beethoven, it would mean the player should begin the note loud enough  to create an impression that the entire orchestra, including the trumpets, are playing ff, but that the player should then release to a much softer level of intensity to allow the moving voices to heard. Of course, if  the whole-note were melodic, then the trumpet play should sustain with melodic intensity for the whole bar, but I can’t think of many truly melodic whole notes for the trumpets in all the Beethoven symphonies. Anyway, in Beethoven we assume a release unless he indicates otherwise, in Mahler we assume NO release unless he indicates otherwise (and when he made his versions of the Beethoven 9th, he indeed replaced many of the ff’s with fp’s)

In Mozart we know that the 2^nd beat of a bar is always softer than the first unless specifically indicated otherwise by and accent or sf. In Mahler, it is the opposite- we assume equal intensity on all beats unless he marks an accent on the downbeat (unless he is parodying a dance rhythm, as in the 2^nd movement of the 2^nd Symphony).

We’re blessed to have a wonderful recorded legacy of Shostakovich’s musical collaborators. Sadly, too many Western musicians seem ignorant of the fact that his closest collaborators were players like David Oistrakh, Rostropovich and the Borodin Quartet- musicians who could generate unbelieveable intensity while still making a beautiful, colorful and multi-textured sound. When an American orchestra or quartet hacks brutally though a piece like the 5^th Symphony or Eighth Quartet with tons of non-vibrato playing (something he only asks for at very special moments) crunchy, scratchy bow strokes and note lengths consistently shortened and cheated it is a sad demonstration of the fact that they haven’t done enough research to know what to listen for or learned how to read the text accurately. Likewise, we do have recordings of Mahler’s works by Fried, Klemperer, Walter and Mengleberg, all of whom knew him (and all of whom, for instance, used generous amounts of vibrato in their performances of Mahler). What can we learn about the common qualities of their performances and from the differences about Mahler’s specificity in notation and about his open-ness to different interpretations.

So, all that research and all that knowledge has its place, however, in the end the score is the ultimate reference point, supreme above research, taste and even the stated preference of the composer (think of how many composers from Beethoven through Brahms and on to Shostakovich have created unending confusion by contradicting their clearly notated musical intentions by being too polite in a social situation to point out an error to a conductor or player. And it is the ear that tells us if we’ve read the score correctly.

The problem is that not everything in a great piece of music should be pleasing and enjoyable- some music is meant to make us uncomfortable and impatient. I’m reminded of my thoughts about the Scherzo of Mahler 5 a few weeks ago, and how Mahler seems to be intentionally asking for an uncomfortable and unwieldy tempo. The evidence of that intention is in the score in all of his tempo markings, but doing the research to find out what dances he is referencing (Landlers, not waltzes) and the text of the Goethe poem he was inspired by can help heighten our sense of what to listen for. Sometimes “it sounds better that way” can lead us in the wrong direction.

On the other hand, I was struck on that same program by how much I changed details of my interpretation in rehearsal. Hopefully they were all changes of the magnitude of the small adjustments we make while driving to get around obstacles and compensate for conditions, but when you’ve spent months and months trying to develop a razor sharp mental picture it can be a shock to recognize that with this orchestra in this hall this week, it’s got to be a little faster or a little louder or a little lighter than you pictured it.

Likewise, in a piece like the Mozart Requiem, one cannot be to wedded to notions of classical performance style, primarily because this piece seems to be, among other things, Mozart’s attempt to destroy and end the classical style forever. Much of the piece is based on Handelian models, while other parts of it are infused with a violence and furry that was completely out of step with the classical virtues of balance and grace. Ticking this music, taming it or tidying it up won’t do.

Finally, AC finished his comment as follows-

“You can’t begin to imagine the intensity of the howls of outrage and the derision hurled at me for that statement, in response to which I used to have the greatest sport provoking things further by boldly and with perfectly straight face declaring that the definitive recorded version of the opening chorus of Bach’s Matthäus-Passion was done by Klemperer on his classic EMI recording of the work as that reading is a reading that most truly captures what the music itself tells us it wants to be, the fruits of HIP research to the contrary be damned.”

I know the Klemperer recording well- it was the first one I owned. Beautiful as it is, and much as I admired his deep sympathy with the spiritual journey the piece evokes, I think his textures are too thick to allow all the voices to be heard and the very slow tempo does make it difficult, bordering on impossible, for a listener to hear relationships between ideas and harmonies that Bach intended us to hear because they are simply too far apart.

However, one of my fondest musical memories is my first performance of the Matthew Passion under Robert Fountain at the University of Wisconsin. Fountain knew this piece better than any other conductor I’ve worked with, and for me as his principal cellist and a young conductor it was a profound learning experience to go through the score page by page with him.

Fountain’s approach to the piece was decidedly old school- slow tempi, thick textures, large and virtato-y chorus. If I tuned in to the first 2 minutes of that concert on the radio, I would probably tune it out. However, performing the Passion with him remains one of the most moving musical experiences I’ve ever had. I was deeply affected for days and days after the concert, and I can still remember that feeling of beginning the final chorus in the concert- more so than any other interpreter I’ve worked with or seen, Fountain made us all feel the totality of the piece, the unity and the completeness of it at that moment.

I would never attempt to recreate Robert’s vision of the piece, but I am certainly conscious of the correlation between the depth of his understanding of the piece and the success of the performance. Anyone can imitate a trendy style of playing, but getting to the truth of a great piece demands much more. Depth of understanding trumps style, which is ,after all, a rather vulgar word, every time.

When I wrote to Clive Brown the other day to let him know how much we’d enjoyed working with his edition of Beethoven 2 in Pendleton he sent me his review of the recent set of Beethoven Symphonies recorded by Anima Eterna under Joos van Immerseel from Early Music in November ‘08. There’s a lot to think about in the article, and I thought I would start with this about rubato, an issue not enough of us give enough thought to when it comes to LvB.

In another respect, the Anima Eterna recordings, like all the others, display an entirely modern approach to the issue of Tempo Rubato (in the old sense of rhythmic departures from the literal meaning of the notation within a more or less constant pulse): they do not do it.

In this respect they are entirely within the post Stravinsky tradition of rigid fidelity to the text. Evidence that 19th-century performers, certainly those in the Austro-German tradition, regarded such Tempo Rubato as an essential element of artistic performance is overwhelming. Of course, this applied more to solo playing than to orchestral playing, but it is clear that even the string sections of 19th-century orchestras would have employed some conventional modifications of the written text, such as elongation of the first note under a slur (in the case of short groups) and over-dotting, or sometimes the assimilation of dotted figures to triplets. In the case of wind instruments in solo passages, there was more scope for freedom and it is reported that Beethoven took care to discuss the use of Tempo Rubato in his orchestral music with individual wind players. Examples of these practices in solo playing can be found on some of the earliest recordings by veteran players, for instance the 1903 acoustic recordings by Joseph Joachim (b. 1833) and the 1905 Welte rolls of Carl Reinecke (b. 1824); but they can also be heard in an orchestral context on the 1913 Berlin Philharmonic recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the passage from bar 127-143 of the Andante con moto providing a particularly telling example, with the wind instruments settling into an almost textbook example of Baroque 3:2 inequality. Despite the growing weight of scholarly evidence for such practices, they have scarcely impacted on commercial period-instrument performance.

Now, hear Beethoven with real flexibility and real Tempo Rubato from Wilhelm Furtwangler and the Berlin Philharmonic.

Am I proud to be a slacker? Can a conductor be a slacker? (I think we all know the answer)

During my summer in the conducting program at Aspen I was often struck by the ability of my former teacher David Zinman to always have at his mental fingertips a wealth of scholarly research and trivia about every work that came up during the long summer. In a way, his catalogue of scholarship was more intimidating for me as a younger conductor than his actual conducting or knowledge of the scores themselves, mostly because I just couldn’t envision how I was ever going to find the time to absorb that much research.

I was reminded of that feeling the other day when I caught myself spewing just that sort of trivia at a younger colleague, (although, I hope, in  my own way). With that realization came the larger one of just how much I’ve learned beyond notes and cues in the last 9 years since that Aspen summer- in many ways, more than I could have hoped for back then.

It took only a few seconds of introspection, naval gazing and analysis to figure out what the turning point was for me- it was quitting my teaching gig at EOU in 2002. I’ve always been very much a self-directed learner- not one to thrive as a student unless the projects assigned are aligned with my own curiosities of the moment. When I left the world of full-time employment with benefits for my current life as a free-lance conductor/slacker in 2002, I finally had the freedom to follow my muse.

Granted, many weeks I’m so busy that finding time to brush my teeth seems like a challenge, but in those weeks between concerts I actually have the time and freedom to chase down books and articles, compare editions or just follow the breadcrumbs in the score wherever they lead. One day you’re wondering “why this is that,” and 9 years late you actually know some stuff… Some days it’s even as simple as wondering “how the hell did my former teacher David Zinman know that in 2000?”

Most of my friends in the music business share a deep -seated hunger for a bit of stability in life (heaven knows, I do too), but I’ve never seen any correlation between stability and actual happiness in actual practice. My friends with killer orchestra jobs are by no means likely to be happier than my freelance buddies, nor are my conductor colleagues with iron-clad tenured positions any more chilled than those of us living from gig to gig. If I’d spent the last 6 years as a staff conductor covering all day every day with paid vacations and bennefits  or teaching week in week out, even at a good school, I’d know a lot less about a lot of scores than I do now.

That’s not to say I’d never settle down- we’ve got a wee one now, my travel schedule hurts me physically and mentally (being away from family sucks), and I would like nothing more than to have a partnership with an orchestra we could both grow in for the next 10 to 15 years.

I’m just saying to my younger colleagues, don’t be discouraged by the lack of stability and security in your  life. It’s a blessing- grab it and use it. I also know a lot of friends are in orchestras where their stability and their livelihoods are at risk in the current economic climate. I also know what they’ve given, done, expended and sacrificed to build that stability in their lives- a hard working musician deserves to be able to pay their mortgage without fear and put their kids through college, but if the worst happens, you’ve got to look at an uncertain future as an opportunity.

I’m back at Vftp International Headquarters, tirde but happy, after a wonderful final concert as MD of the Oregon East Symphony. After a scary beginning to the year in the midst of an economic meltdown, we had our second consecutive huge audience turnout, and after some painful budget adjustments early in the year our financial position is looking pretty good. It’s sad to recognize that this era is now over and next time I see the band I’ll be a guest, but I’m delighted to leave with the organization in good health. If I have a few minutes in the coming days, I’ll try to share some final thoughts on my experiences with the orchestra, and there will be more to say when I return in October for my final, final concert. 

The pairing of the Beethoven and Mozart seemed to work really well. It was nice to wrap up our Beethoven cycle with one of the freshest and most invigorating of the symphonies, and I think the work we’ve put in over the years really showed in the band’s ability to fearlessly cope with Beethoven’s metronome markings in the first and last movements. I was delighted afterwards to hear that two of our principal string players had written the word “SHRED!” in the coda of the Finale. Shred they did.

I have to confess I was a bit nervous about the Mozart earlier in the week- the choir struggled with style and accuracy in our piano rehearsal on Monday and our first orchestra rehearsal on the piece really hammered home the need for a vast stylistic range across all the movements and the huge amount of detail we had to cover. However, by the Friday evening rehearsal, things were beginning to gel, and the concert was quite magical. The Dies Irae was insanely exciting- I could just about physically feel the sound of the chorus, and the opening of the Lacrymosa was heartbreaking, without a hint of a downbeat from the choir. Our soloists- Esther Mae Moses, Emily Muller Callendar, Nicholas Fichter and Steve Muller- were all very good, and blended well. Putting together a quartet without a chance to test drive them can be a bit nerve-wracking, but I thought they’d balance well and they did. Emily gets a special shout out. In a true “only at the Best Damn Redneck Orchestra in the World” move, she played principal viola on the Beethoven before quick-changing into her diva frock to solo on the Mozart. Few have the talent to do both those jobs, and fewer still the generosity to be willing to do so.

Readers are invited to have a look at classicaltv.com, which just came to my attention yesterday. The quality of the material they have available so far is encouraging, we’ll see if their economic model holds up.  They’ll need to build their library rapidly to keep viewers coming back. The main criticism I’ve heard so far is that you need Microsoft Silverlight to watch. Funny choice, but a common one right now.

Also around the web- a must read blog post from Jessica Duchen on the subject of her article in today’s Independent on corruption in music competitions. She was stymied in her efforts to bring some sunlight to bear on the dirtiest and darkest corner of the music business by the paper’s legal team. However corrupt you think the competition world is, multiply by a thousand. A friend of mine got his big break when his group won one of the major chamber music prizes. A week after the deadline he had a call from the office telling him they “had” to apply- he said the group was too busy to prepare the required repertoire. “But you’re going to win,” said the director of the competition. And they did.

There’s a Facebook group dedicated to reform of the competition racket- do sign up!

Dear Colleagues

We are fast approaching the priority application deadline of April 30th for the 2009 Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop. In addition to repertoire which includes Haydn- Symphony no. 99, Debussy’s L’apres midi d’un faune, the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto, scenes from Verdi’s Aida and the Mozart Gran Partita for Winds, and a faculty which includes Christopher Zimmerman, David Hoose and myself, our students also get to work throughout the week with our team of professional soloists. Joining us this year is concert pianist and recording artist Rick Rowley, soprano Esther Mae Moses, mezzo Alexis Hamilto and tenor Brennen Guillory.

Please visit our website for more information on the workshop and our application procedures at http://www.rosecityworkshop.org/. Meanwhile, here is some information on our team of virtuoso soloists.

Thank you-

Kenneth Woods, director, Rose City International Conductors Workshop

The mission of the Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop is to provide professional training at the highest level to emerging conductors from all over the world.

2009 RCICW Guest Artist Soloists

Rick Rowley, piano-Rick Rowley, piano

Pianist Rick Rowley has appeared extensively as a recitalist, a concerto soloist, and in chamber performances with many of the world’s leading musicians. Of particular interest among his concerto appearances have been his performances of Mozart piano concertos, conducting from the keyboard. He has been involved in concerts on period instruments and performed on the harpsichord with the Texas Bach Aria Group and fortepiano with the Texas Baroque Ensemble. Mr. Rowley has been heard repeatedly on radio broadcast in this country and has recorded for radio in Europe.

Mr. Rowley has made six compact disks for Round Top Records, Premier Recordings, and Summit Records and has produced several others. His recordings include two solo CDs, twentieth-century compositions for cello and piano with cellist Peter Rejto, works for flute and piano with Marianne Gedigian, music for clarinet and piano with Patricia Shands, and songs for voice and piano with soprano Cheryl Parrish.

Mr. Rowley has had a long association with the International Festival-Institute at Round Top, beginning in the early 1970′s. During that time he has performed in numerous concerts, served as Program Director and has been involved with all of the management and planning aspects of the project. Mr. Rowley has also held a faculty position at the University of Texas Austin.

Mr. Rowley is an experienced and busy actor. During the last few years he has acted in twenty-three plays and has served as music director and conductor for several other productions. He was the sound designer for a new play based on “The Firebird,” for which he also composed incidental music and songs. This last season he made his directorial debut in a highly praised production of The Belles of Amherst.

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What people are saying about Rick Rowley’s concerti performances. . .

Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2″Rowley’s attack is simply mind boggling. Even his staccato chords sing with a special resonance. His sense of musical line is an utter revelation and his control of dynamics is an art form all in its own.”   San Antonio Express-News

“From the opening flourishes on the keyboard, the listener was aware of the scope of Rowley’s visionary crusade. Supplementing Rowley’s grand manner was a technique that sharply articulated musical lines and textures; nonetheless poetry was in abundance also.”   
San Antonio Southside Reporter

“Rick Rowley’s performance may be called passionate. He combined strong musicianship with power and sweetness, moving with mature certainty through a demanding score.”  

 El Paso Herald-Post
 

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat
“The fluid execution and freshness of style that we have come to expect from Rowley’s keyboard work were fully in evidence.”   

San Antonio Express-News Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini”Rick Rowley is not only technically assured, but wonderfully and completely unaffected.”

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“He performed with contagious excitement and distinctive style, thrilling the large audience with his interpretation.”   

Piano Guild Notes

Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 1

“Rowley’s incredibly clean, facile technique breezed through a cadenza that epitomized every quality of seriousness, but also good humor, in the work.”   

Bryan-College Station Eagle
 

What people are saying about Rick Rowley’s recitals . . .”With the technical equipment to handle whatever he chooses, Rowley also has an obvious interest in bringing music to life.”    “With the technical equipment to handle whatever he chooses, Rowley also has an obvious interest in bringing music to life.”   Paul Hume,
The Washington Post  

“Some performers make music a ritual observance of forms whose relevance and usefulness have been long forgotten; others, playing the same works, can make the listener believe they were written yesterday, to be performed for the first time today. Pianist Rick Rowley . . . is of the latter sort.”   

Mike Greenberg,
San Antonio Express-News  

“Rowley has everything a concert pianist needs-talent, dedication, accuracy, clarity, precision, total command of dynamics, and interpretive ability far beyond his years. No technical difficulty seems to be an obstacle for him, he just plays and runs the emotional
gamut across the keyboard.”   

Nancy M. Zin,
Topeka State Journal  

“Rowley himself provides a contrast with many of his colleagues, those who emphasize clean, precise musicianship, often at the expense of the emotional content of the piece. Though an excellent musician, Rowley is not content with that alone. In his Tuesday recital, he constantly searched for a deeper understanding of the music and was not afraid to present his own highly personal view of the music.”   

David Connelly,
Shreveport Journal

Esther Mae Moses, soprano

Soprano Esther Mae Moses, a singer known for her touching performances and interpretations of operatic and oratorio repertoire, returns to the Rose City Chamber Orchestra and her second Conductors Workshop following a triumphant summer of masterclasses on Madame Butterfly in 2008.  Recent appearances include soloist in Mahler’s 4th Symphony with the Oregon East Symphony under Kenneth Woods, and the St. John Passion with Portland ‘s Choral Arts Ensemble.  

A graduate of the University of Cincinnati Colleg-Conservatory of Music (CCM), Esther joined the Oregon arts scene with the role of Suor Angelica at the NW Bel Canto Institute and  appeared as soloist with Portland Opera’s outreach programs.  Other appearances include soloist with the Oregon Symphony, and the Tanglewood Music Institute.  Esther’s passion for the Puccini repertoire was developed during two summers with the Opera Theatre of Lucca, Italy- Puccini’s home town. Highlights of the current season include the Mozart Requiem with Oregon East Symphony and birth of her first daughter, Ella.

Alexis Hamilton, mezzo soprano Kathryn Alexis Hamilton, mezzo soprano, has long been a favorite throughout Oregon and Southern Washington. Most recently, Alexis was seen the Lady Jane in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, with Mocks Crest Theatre, Roger O. Doyle, conducting, and as Orlofsky with Columbia Symphony, Huw Edwards, conducting.   She gave the world premiere of the orchestral version of Songs of Men Long Dead by Emily Doolittle with the Oregon East Symphony, Kenneth Woods, conducting.  Also on that concert she performed the Dvorak Stabat Mater.  Other recent oratorio credits include: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Travis Hatten, conducting, The Messiah, Travis Hatten, conducting, Hadyn’s Mass in Time of War,  Kenneth Woods, conducting,  Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, Roger O. Doyle, conducting, and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Kenneth Woods, conducting.  Her versatility and passionate presence have led to critically acclaimed performances of operatic roles including Carmen, Mrs. Noah in Noye’s Fludd, the Mother in Hänsel und Gretel, La Principessa in Suor Angelica, and Zita in Gianni Schicci.  Long respected in Portland for her comic abilities, Alexis is a great favorite at Mock’s Crest Productions. Among her myriad roles for this company are Mrs. Page, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Fairy Queen in Iolanthe, Katisha in The Mikado,  Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus, The Duchess in The Gondoliers, Mad Margaret in Ruddigore and Buttercup in HMS Pinafore.  In addition to her many ties to operetta, Alexis has worked mainstage with Portland Opera as Maddelena in The Journey to Reims, and the Forester’s Wife in The Cunning Little Vixen.  

Complementing her work in full productions, Alexis can often be seen in operatic scene work with Portland Opera’s Education and Outreach Department.   Her body of work there is extensive and includes Beatrice in A View from the Bridge,  Azucena in Il Trovatore, The Mother in The Consul, The Old Prioress from Dialogues of the Carmelites, Carmen, Amneris in Aïda, Maddelena in Rigoletto, and Clarissa and Fata Morgana in The Love for Three Oranges.  Alexis has also done significant recital and symphonic work, and has sung with the Portland Opera chorus.  Alexis has also toured as a member of Portland Opera Works!, Portland Opera’s young artist program.  

Alexis is currently the Manager of Education & Outreach for the Portland Opera.  She studies voice with Ruth Dobson and coaches with Rodney Menn, Mark Trawka and Carol Lucas.  Recent engagements include Mrs. Page in Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and the contralto soloist for the Mahler 2nd Symphony with Oregon East Symphony in 2006, and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with Rose City Chamber Orchestra.

Brennen Guillory, tenor

Tenor Brennen Guillory has appeared in a variety of settings, from the opera house and concert hall to the theatrical stage.  In the Northwest he appeared with the Rogue Valley Opera as Alfredo and Don Jose, with the Eugene Opera as Sam in Susannah. and with the Portland Opera in Aida. He has performed a variety of oratorios from Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.   He has also worked with many orchestras in the region and throughout the United States, and appeared in countless concerts and events featuring works from opera to the art song, including several premiers of new works.  In recent seasons he has been heard in several performances of the Mozart and Verdi Requiems across Oregon and Washington, and sung Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with Rose City Chamber Orchestra under Kenneth Woods.

While living in New York City, Mr. Guillory entered the ministry and was ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, working with immigrants and immigration issues.  After his ordination, he and his wife moved back to their beloved Northwest.  Mr. Guillory serves at Faith Lutheran Church in Junction City.

I’m having an early Beethoven year so far- two runs of Beethoven 1 with the SMP last month, now Beethoven 2 in Pendleton, with the 4^th to follow in a few weeks at the Helix Ensemble.

There hasn’t been a whole lot of time to revisit recordings of these pieces- I’ve mostly been working at the piano when not at the desk, but I have been struck in the recordings I’ve listened to at just how disastrous the results of some “old school” recordings of the First are.

Soggy, heavy, flabby. Ick….

Listening to some of these performances, where a Bruckner sound is being used in a near-Haydn context is like watching a 400 pound NFL lineman trying to compete in the swimsuit competition of Miss Petite USA. As my sister says- “not the body for it.” In this sense, we all owe the HIP gang a huge debt in these pieces. Not because they showed us how we should be doing Beethoven 1 (Ferenc Friscay made the definitive, buns of steel Beethoven 1 many years ago, available as part of DG’s retrospective box set), but because, through their advocacy, they’ve largely rendered unacceptable forever the Beethoven as Bruckner” approach.

I got my first HIP LvB set when I was learning the 9^th, and I remember thinking that the performance of that symphony just wasn’t competitive with many others. Not enough range of color, not enough flexibility, not enough power, not dramatic enough. Later, though, I listened in absolute delight to the 1^st, 8^th and 2^nd symphonies. I’ve had similarly disappointing experiences with the Finale of the 5^th over the years- it’s a music that needs grandeur which some period performers (not all!) shy away from as if embaressed. My dissatisfaction with those recordings is not because the performers in question didn’t know what they were doing (the standards were always high), but simply because the range of Beethoven’s stylistic range and evolution is so huge that any single group of performers will always be hard pressed to match it. Sooner or later, your own ticks and preferences reveal themselves to the listener. The 9^th really does live in a different universe to the 1^st, but the 1^st doesn’t live in Haydn’s world and the 9^th doesn’t live in Brahms’s.

In fact, we had originally considered pairing the 9^th and 2^nd symphonies on this concert, which would have been interesting. I always think of the D minor outburst in the introduction of the 1^st mvt of the 2^nd as being a suddenly glimpse of worlds to come in the 1^st mvt of the 9^th . Could we have captured anything close to the range of sounds and colors those two works need in one concert?

How about the range of sounds needed in a single work?

Musical styles impose their own laws of physics and behavior- cause and effect relationships between tonic and dominant chords in Mozart are different than in Beethoven. In one style, phrases lead forward, in another, they release from. 

However, in a piece like the Mozart Requiem, which is Baroque, even Handelian in one movement and Verdian in the next, and only “Mozartian” in the Hostias (a heartbreakingly simple glimpse into his world in a piece that is otherwise austerely universal-fascinating that he would conceive his most personal piece in such an abstract and ancient style), the laws of musical physics change constantly. What goes up comes down in one movement, but what goes up turns left in another. Somehow, the conductor has got to be true to all these changing laws and mixing styles while at the same time, keeping the incredible sense of unity Mozart has built into the piece.

You see, while the Recordare and the Sanctus could easily be by Bach (in fact, the Recordare is based on a Sinfonia by WF Bach, one of Mozart’s heroes) and Beethoven respectively, the Osanna fugue which ends the Sanctus is based on the same intervals as the Recordare theme. In fact, there is no movement in the piece (including those “by” Sussmayr) that isn’t full of thematic connections to the first. The Lacrimosa starts with the same harmonic progression as the Introit and ends with a quotation of the Requiem theme. The “Quam olim Abrahae” fugue is based on the “Et lux perpetua” theme of the Itroitus. Even the Recordare theme is a variation of the Requiem theme, rising a tri-tone instead of a second trom the leading tone. 

How do we balance unity with range? I think most performances falter because at some extreme of style and emotion they’re not able to match the breadth of Mozart’s vision- they might be too elegant in the Confutatis or too ponderous in the Hostias.

Maybe I’m too young to answer this question (I was going to end the blog with the question!), but I’ll try.

I think, at the end of the day, you have to learn absolutely everything you possibly can about style, and then you have to disenthrall yourself from it. You have to totally let go of your own ideas about Mozart, Handel and everything else and look to the score, and be absolutely true to what you find, not to what you bring. At the end of the day, its about listening, not about conducting, not about deciding.

Listening without prejudice and being true to what you hear. Letting go of those prejudices is the hardest part.

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Monday night I saw our Chorale and the members of the Mid-Columbia Master Singers in Richland, Washington. Our first challenge was getting used to a venue nobody had sung in before- the Master Singers’ usual venue was not open. I was a little nervous about having only one rehearsal with the singers before the orchestra rehearsals, although the OES Chorale has been working with our chorus master for a while and the Master Singers recently performed the piece with their MD, Justin Raffa. One of the difficulties of doing such a well known work, one which most of the choir will have sung before, is that everyone comes in with their own history with the piece. This can be enriching, but it also means people are often used to doing things a different way, and sometimes singers need time and incentive to change their ways. The guys who have done the prep work have had my tempi and diction instructions, so I had to trust that the foundations of a unified performance were there.

The sanctuary of the church was warm (not always something you can count on) and the piano was pretty good, but it was a hard room to hear in. The excessive carpet made it sound a bit like everyone was singing through a paper bag at first. I hate carpet.

I’ve asked the choir to sing using Austro-German pronunciation. It’s not the first time for us- we did the Dvorak Stabat Mater that way a few years ago, and our last collaboration with the Master Singers was the Mozart C minor Mass, also in German Latin. It’s never posed any particular problems, but our chorus master this time has made clear he’s not a fan. For me there are two obvious and compelling reasons for using German Latin. First, it seems most likely that this was the language as it would have been sung in Mozart’s time, and perhaps this gets us just that little bit closer to his world. Second, German Latin is a harder, more austere sound-world than Church Latin- I find that austerity and all those hard consonants give the music even more spine and severity, which seems appropriate in this piece in particular.

There is a third reason- left to our own devices, we sing most carelessly in the languages we feel most at home in. American choirs are often at best unintelligible in a piece like Messiah, at worst, our regional accents can come through in Handel’s music to hilarious effect. Church Latin is everyone’s next most comfortable language, and the vowels one hears from many of our choirs are not what Mozart, even with his fluency in Italian and Latin, would have recognized! Of course, it’s every conductor’s job to fix that, but a foray into a different Latin can let us hear plain-old American Latin with fresh ears.

Whatever the language, this piece needs a lot of it. I’ve heard over 100 Mozart Requiems, and only a few of those were really alive on every consonant and vowel. The music is in the language in this piece- it tells you the phrasing and the articulation all the way through. I just heard a very strange performance of the Kyrie the other day- I always have the strings play very marcato in the fugue subject to match the “K” in “Kyrie.” This group was a period ensemble, and the conductor had obviously asked the strings to begin with one of those soft-edged swell-ey bow strokes we all love. In order to reconcile this with the choir, they sang something like “ear ee ay?” Bizarre. I don’t know if I’ll achieve everything I want to in this piece, but you’ll certainly get a “K” on “Kyrie” if I have any say in it….

“Sing the words, not the music, because in the words is the meaning, and in the meaning is the music.” Benjamin Britten

I attracted a few titters (as opposed to twitters) on Facebook the other day, when my status admitted I was in the process of comparing Urtext editions of Beethoven’s 2^nd Symphony by Jonathan Del Mar (published by Barenreiter) and Clive Brown (published by Breitkopf and Hartel).

I still come across interviews with leading Beethoven conductors talking about how for most of their lives there was no critical edition of the Beethoven symphonies available. Suddenly we have two! What to make of them???

The Del Mar has been in circulation for over a decade, and as the first to the post, it’s had the good fortune to be used in recordings of several cycles, notably Gardiner’s, Zinman’s, Abbado’s and several others. I still chuckle when I read reviews of my former teacher David Zinman’s set praising the revelations of the new Urtext edition when I remember David’s gleeful admission in conducting class that his parts where so marked up and edited that they looked, in his words, “like a fucking Mahler symphony.”

I’ve conducted all nine in Del Mar by now, and all but the 9^th in the old Breitkopf/Kalmus/Mystery edition. There are also good scores available of the First and Second from Henle.  Last spring I got interested in the new Breitkopf Urtext edition and looked for some reviews of the materials. All I could find on line was one review from a librarian at the LPO who had concerns about the page turns in some of the parts while expressing admiration for the quality of the scholarship.

The most obvious difference between the Breitkopf and Barenreiter editions is the fact that the Breitkopf edition shares editorial responsibilities between Clive Brown and Peter Hauschild, while the Barenreiter is entirely the work of Del Mar. The arguments for both approaches are intriguing- a single editor allows for a consistency of editorial approach and realization. Sharing the workload offers the opportunity for a wider breadth of opinion and possibly an edition that is less tainted by the tendencies and prejudices of a single eye and mind.

After all, I’m not sure a real Urtext edition should have a star editor- the whole point of a scholarly edition ought to be to make the preferences and tendencies of all outside hands- past performers, past editors and current ones- disappear and instead to give us the most honest and unbiased picture of what the composer wrote and wanted, in all its messy contradiction.

Last year, I did the Fifth in the Brown edition- again, there was the question of page turns. Brown is open on the question of whether there should be a da capo in the Scherzo of the 5^th while Del Mar is against it (although Zinman and Abbado both take it in spite of him- again, just because it says “Del Mar” on the CD box doesn’t mean you’re necessarily hearing the editor’s point of view). Although there were clear markings in the music for taking the da capo repeat, some of the strings had impossible page turns to get back to the top. It wasn’t a big deal, but did necessitate some photocopying.

Otherwise, I found the bar-by-bar comparison of his score with Del Mar’s and my old Norton Critical Score and the Dover interesting. Brown also has a book-length volume of Critical Notes for the 5^th Symphony which I found incredibly interesting and helpful. Interestingly, many of the new “discoveries and corrections” in the Del Mar that everyone was so excited about look more like “possibilities and questions” in the Brown edition. Brown is exceptionally careful to let the conductor know of all possible credible variant versions left to us by Beethoven, who never arrived at a “final” version of the 5^th. Most of the time, you don’t have to even go to the critical notes to see variants- wherever possible he’ll put both versions in the score in a clear format. I came away from the Brown score with a better sense of just how contradictory the sources are, and that as a performer you need to know where the contradictions are and be prepared to make your own determinations of what you think Beethoven was after. If something is not 100% certain from the sources, the editor should let us know that and let us see all the messy, confusing facts, and where possible, give us performing materials that can be adapted to different readings with tons of editing by the librarians.

Now, I’ve repeated the process with 2^nd Symphony, also edited by Clive Brown. This time, the critical notes are included in the same volume as the score itself, which is incredibly convenient. With Del Mar (and with the Brown 5^th), you are required to by separate, expensive volumes for the notes. Again, there are many interesting differences with Del Mar- things that are closer to the “old” edition in places, others that seem like completely new discoveries (including some interesting notes that are different in some sources!). As with the 5^th, Brown is generally more pro-active (but not always so) at letting the conductor know when there is more than one legitimate version of the passage at hand, and the presence of the Critical Notes in the same volume makes the process of following up on those points very convenient.

In both symphonies there are passages that I find more convincing in one or the other edition, and Brown doesn’t always come forward with alternate readings to the version he’s given us, but he does so more often than Del Mar.

In this case, I’ve bought my own set of parts from Breitkopf. They look great- I’ll let readers know if funky page issues raise their ugly heads.

So, my verdict? Any professional conductor should own both scores when your budget allows for it, as well as a reprint of the old version (which you’ll still see on stands for many years to come and which is really not bad at all). Both are excellent, and the opportunity to compare to such well-researched and well presented editions is a delight. Right now, Del Mar is the industry standard, and one can get steamrolled in this business if you do much thinking for yourself. However, if you can only afford one at this time, by the Brown- the inclusion of the Critical Notes make it an easy first choice.

I have yet to do any of the symphonies edited by Hauschild. I’ll report back if I get the chance!

Distinguished author Roderick Swanston introduces his piece in the current BBC Music Magazine as follows-

“Writing about music is beset by mistakes. “Distinguished” writers peddle false facts which get repeated and spread. So it gave me pleasure to set the record straight on some common errors. My advice: don’t trust anything until you’ve checked it yourself!”

To my eternal annoyance, I average about a typo (or several) per paragraph here at Vftp, so I know more than most how Swanston must have felt when he saw this in print on the subject of who really wrote the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor (I always thought it was Stokowski …)

“One suggestion has been Johannes Ringk, allegedly a pupil of Bach who had access to his works: perhaps he cribbed it(in which case it could still be by Bach!), or is it an arrangement of another work? Who knows? “I do!” thundered Christian Wolff, the most eminent Bach scholar of them all, from his Harvard haven…”

I’ve never heard of a Christian Wolff, but there is one heck of a Bach scholar at Harvard named Christoph Wolff….

My greatest ever typo was on a resume I sent off to a handful of high-powered jobs I was going after with great gusto around 2000. As a result, I will never, ever, ever forget that “t” is next to “y” on the computer keyboard. I wonder what the reaction was as search committee members around the country read about my experience as conductor of the Oregon Easy Symphony…..

Bernard Jacobson has a very interesting article in this Sunday’s Seattle Times on the search for a  new music director for the Seattle Symphony. I LOVE Seattle, and can’t think of a job I’d rather have, but I think (know) I’m still 5-10 years and 20 CDs away from getting considered. I can only hope that whoever is hired this time leaves about the time I’m ready for the gig. His list of hot prospects for the job?

Lawrence Renes, who has spent several years as music director of both the opera and the orchestra in Bremen, Germany, gave some outstanding concerts with the Seattle Symphony in recent seasons. He also led a spectacular account of Strauss’ “Elektra” for Seattle Opera last October.

Yakov Kreizberg, head of the Netherlands Philharmonic in Amsterdam, is a charismatic musician who has, I believe, not been invited back after his artistic successes here only because he has differed with Maestro Schwarz on matters of orchestral layout.

Ignat Solzhenitsyn, one of the greatest pianistic talents to have emerged in recent years, is equally gifted as a conductor. In his mid-30s, he is in his fifth season as music director of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia and may well be ready for a bigger challenge.

Asher Fisch, in his eighth season as music director of the Israel Opera (and appointed principal guest conductor of the Seattle Opera last season), has demonstrated formidable skill and intelligence in both opera and symphony.

And JoAnn Falletta wowed both public and critics here a few weeks ago with a stunning performance of Ravel’s “La Valse”; she heads both the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Virginia Symphony but might be attracted by the Seattle post. 

Jacobson saves the real controversy for last, with a list of people he hopes won’t be considered- conductors whose “careers have outrun their talent.” Ouch.

Please, no!

This final group makes up five conductors whose careers, in my opinion, have vastly outrun their talents. Valery Gergiev is a world figure, and a charismatic one, but an undemanding rehearser whose results too often lack focus and artistic insight.

Roberto Abbado is one of those conductors in whose performances absolutely nothing seems to happen.

Another is the widely admired Osmo Vänskä, darling of some of my critical colleagues. When I started to plan this article, I bought his much-praised recording of Beethoven’s Third and Eighth symphonies to find out if my negative response to his concerts might have been misplaced, but the first movement of the “Eroica” was so drearily uneventful that I couldn’t listen any further.

David Robertson is an inventive programmer who seems to lack corresponding musical inspiration.

And, though it is politically incorrect to say so, I do not think Marin Alsop would have been offered the music directorship of the Baltimore Symphony were she not a woman and the orchestra’s board (strongly opposed in the matter by most players) wanted to make a sociopolitical statement. She can conduct composers like John Adams and Toru Takemitsu well enough, but her forays into such music as the Brahms symphonies have been disastrous in both interpretive and technical terms.

Well- It’s not my list, to be sure!!!! However, we’ve all got people whose fame and celebrity leaves us scratching our head in confusion. I can’t begrudge him getting his list in there while he’s got a chance, even though I don’t think Gergiev is applying for the Seattle gig, much as it is about my favorite city with a great orchestra in a great hall.

There is a transcendence. It isn’t enough to simply have difficulties with life itself – one has to be able to convey this in music too! A Mahler symphony is about more than emotion, it is also about structure. In a long movement such as, for example, the last movement of the Sixth Symphony, it is certainly  not enough to say “I can feel the emotion”. Mahler worked extremely hard and made an enormous effort to transcribe and organise his ideas and to render them effective. Anyone who performs the work with feeling alone is creating a lie about Mahler.

It is very difficult to achieve a balance between feeling and structure, but emotion without structure produces no security and, when you listen to a long movement such as this (the Finale of the 6th Symphony- ed.), one needs to sense the structure too. I am not suggesting that one needs to analyse the work, since not everyone is capable of taking an analytical approach, but one needs to find this balance, which is very hard to do.

Part of a wonderful interview with Pierre Boulez from the Musikverein website.

I find Boulez to be one of the most thoughtul and open-minded musicians alive today, not at all the inflexible modernist tyrant some would have you think he is.

People often think that a conductor’s job is to make decisions- she or he, after all, appears to decide whether or not to take the repeats, how fast the pieces are played, what are the articulations, what language to sing in and on.

My approach is always to try to eliminate decisions- if you do enough research and enough study, you often no longer have to choose between option a and option b, because one becomes obviously the correct one. For instance- I no longer have any question in my mind whether to conduct the march that begins the coda of the finale of Shostakovich 5 in 2 or in 5. In spite of the depressing fact that far more than half the conductors I’ve seen do the piece take it in two, the evidence in score is clear, and they are wrong. I would be just as wrong if I “decided” to take it in two. I’d go so far to say that in a lot of pieces, if you catch yourself making a decision (for instance “I don’t think it helps to take this repeat that Brahms wrote here because it makes things a little too long), you’ve probably made a mistake. You don’t “decide” to play an f-sharp as an f-sharp and not as a d. Most “interpretive” issues should, if you’ve done your homework, be just as easy to resolve.

But sometimes, when the necessity of putting on a concert gets out in front of one’s quest for aesthetic clarity and certainty, you have to risk making decisions.

I’d say the textual question I’ve wrestled with the most in the Mozart Requiem is whether and when to “double-dot” in the Rex Tremendae. 30 years ago, I think everyone pretty played all the rhythms in this movement as written (and, in general, slower). However, as modern conductors and scholars began to look at it in stylistic and performance practice terms, many came to see compelling arguments for double-dotting all the dotted-8th/16th rhythms.

Writers have pointed out that dotted rhythms, typical of French Overture style (a style in which dotted rhythms are always double-dotted), have long been used in processional music associated with kings and princes. It surely cannot be a coincidence that this movement, with the text “King of Terrible Majesty,” is permeated with dotted rhythms, they postulate. Therefore, we should treat those dotted rhythms as we would in a French Overture- a noble procession, in this case, a terrifying one.

The argument seems irrefutable, and the effect is striking- particularly when you first hear the choir singing in double dots- “Rex Tremendae Majestatis” in the 6^th bar. It’s quite electrifying.

However, accepting this stylistic approach quickly begins to create what I think are problems- relationships thaat are fascinating in the score cease to exist in performance.

Throughout the movement, until the last three bars, the strings maintain a near constant cascade of dotted-16h/32^nd notes. When the choir has their first declaration in dotted notes in bar 6, they have dotted8th/16^th’s. Then, in bar 7, Mozart begins one of the most interesting and intense contrapuntal passages in all of music. After taking a bar off for the choir, the strings return to their dotted 16^th/32nds, but now in imitative pairs, with the violins in 3rds answered a beat later by the cellos, basses and violas, also in 3rds.

On top of this, we have the women of the chorale singing a canon 2 beats apart at the fourth. This canon is all built around dotted rhythms- dotted 8^th/16^th’s

So, here, many modern performers render those dotted 8^th/16^th’s as double-dotted 8^th/32nds. Not only is this in keeping with the French Overture style, it means the quick notes now “fit” with the faster dotted rhythms in the strings- instead of 16ths “clashing” with 32nds, everyone sings or plays 32nds as the “quick” notes of their dotted rhythms. I find this all plausible.

However, the tenor and bass parts cause me to question whether or not double-dotting is what Mozart had in mind here. Beginning one beat after the canon in the Altos and Sopranos (so, in between their entrances!) we have another canon, again separated by 2 beats between the tenors and basses (singing at the 5^th). Their entrances all begin with dotted rhythms, but in their case, the first dotted rhythm is twice as slow as the dotted 8^th/16^th’s in the women (Mozart actually writes this as quarter/8^th rest/8^th). Then, in their next gesture, they continue on in diminution- doubling their speed to the same dotted 8^th/16^ths as the other canon.

What Mozart has written here is fascinating- 3 sets of imitative pairs of ideas, each built on dotted rhythms, but each set functioning at a different metric level. Then, within the material, he uses diminution to reduce back from the slowest version of the dotted rhythm (in the men’s canon) to faster and faster values. At the end of the second episode (when the role of the men and women is reversed) of this music (bar 16), he’s reduced all the voices down to the dotted16th/32nds of the strings.

If the women double dot their canon, it ceases to be perceptible that they are singing a rhythm that is twice as fast as that in the men, unless the men change their dotted quarter/8^th to double-dotted quarter/16^th, which again restores the clash of 16^th and 32^nd that double dotting was supposed to remove. In fact, I’ve never heard that done. If the men’s canon continues with the diminution double dotted to match the women’s, the listener can no longer perceive the diminution in their line. Mozart’s amazing rhythmic tapestry is reduced to agreeable mush (especially since many conductors don’t insist on proper dotted rhythms from the strings, settling for a lazy, tripletized version).

In fact, if you play the 3 levels of dotted rhythms very precisely, there is no clash between the 16^th and 32^nd- that is only a problem if the strings are sloppy. If they no to place their 32^nd after the 16^th.

Interestingly, the 3^rd level of rhythm and the separate category of cannon was a late addition of Mozart’s. His sketch for this movement shows only the beginnings of a 4 part canon, not the 2 pairs of ideas he ended up with, pairs he was able to make more distinct by beginning them with different “levels’ of the dotted rhythm.

However, in other places, particularly bar 6 and similar places, I feel like the ferocity of the double-dotted rhythms is more appropriate, and more organically connected to what precedes it.

I’ve spent many hours agonizing over this- perhaps Mozart didn’t intend us to make a big deal out of the difference between and 8th and 16th? Perhaps style trumps all- but what style is the Requiem in? It’s not really a piece of “Classical” music like the Sinfonia Concertante or the Haffner Symphony. It’s a strange mixture of Baroque and Romantic- but that’s the subject for a future post. I’ve even emailed a number of Mozart scholars, to no avail. Those I’ve heard from offer opinions but no clarifying insights. 

By Monday night, I’ll have to decide.

I think one perceptible evolution in my study habits and interests over the last few years has been that I’ve gotten more and more interested in quotation in music.

Of course, I suppose I may be putting my neck on the block a bit admitting that, because implicit in the statement is the notion that at somepoint in the past I wasn’t as interested in quotation as I should have been. Perhaps as this blog hits cyberspace, smug conductors and musicologists around the world are stroking their black moustaches, muttering “See- Woods has just discovered quotation. I always had him pegged for a fraud!”

So, maybe I should make clear that I’m just finding more success and satisfaction studying with an eye and ear for quotation than in the past.

Anyway, on a purely practical level, knowing all the quotes in a piece of music for a conductor is a bit like loading a weapon that can never be fired. To put it in more practical terms: nothing is more likely to make an orchestra start rolling their eyes in rehearsal than some conductor telling them “this passage is a quote from the St Matthew Passion, but upside down and backwards in a bi-tonal context.” If you’re lucky, you might get off with a “ah Maestro, I see you read the program notes from the Bernstein recording too.” If you’re unlucky, they’ll just silently judge you.

Some quotes are too cool to keep to yourself- if you really think a quote is so killer, so awesome so amazing, that it’s worth risking the eye-rolls, then you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. I told an orchestra the other night about the B-A-C-H quotes in Schumann 2. I hope the damage is not permanent- they took it pretty well. I even got an “oh- cool” from a violinist (who I won’t betray by identifying her in print).

Anyway, quotes are much on my mind, as the Mozart Requiem is full of quotations and references. The main “Requiem” theme, the DNA of which permeates the entire work, is, in fact, a quote. This melody (d-c#-d-e-f) is from a Lutheran hymn, “When My Final Hour is At Hand.” If you’re trying to figure out how much truth there is to the stories of Mozart’s reportedly saying that he was writing “my own Requiem,” the fact that the main theme of the entire piece is attached to the words “My Final Hour” rather than his, hers, ours or theirs is worth knowing.

Then, figure in the fact that Mozart was not the first to use that theme- Handel’s “The Way’s of Zion do Mourn” (which you can hear a short excerpt of here), written 54 years earlier. Mozart knew his Handel- he even made his own performing version of Messiah. Handel’s text (all taken from Lamentations) depicts a whole world overcome with sadness- “The ways of Zion do mourn and she is in bitterness; all her people sigh and hang down their heads to the ground.”

So, in this opening, Mozart is already combing the personal with the universal- the terror of the one facing “my final hour” with the grief of the nation in the face of incalculable loss.

I can still remember hearing this piece for the first time- it is one of the earliest musical memories of my childhood. This very opening appeared in a dramatization of Mozart’s life for radio I heard when I was about 5. I remember thinking it was the saddest music I’d ever heard. I still feel that way- knowing where Mozart took his building blocks from doesn’t change my understanding of or reaction to the music. Sad music sounds sad- you don’t need an owner’s manual to understand it.

But, I now think I could feel, even as a naïve child hearing the piece for the first time, the presence of these quotes and these levels of meaning. This is the mystery of music- piece affects you with of all the layers of meaning in contains, whether you have the knowledge or experience to identify them or not. This theme permeates and its extrapolations, derivations and evolutions permeate the entire Requiem (including the movements supposedly written by Sussmayr). That it is not simply the notes d-c#-d-e-f but a hymn with a text and a history means that when Mozart when Mozart brings it back in the last 5 bars of the Lacrimosa as the last melodic idea of the first half of the Requiem (don’t tell me that was Sussmayr’s idea) he’s not merely creating a kind of thematic unity, but something deeper and more personal.

In fact, the other main melodic idea of the first movement, first heard in the soprano solo in bar 21 (“Te decet hymnus Deus in Zion”) is also a quote. This melody (d-f-d-d-eb-d-c-bb) also has a history. It is another Lutheran hymn “Meine seele erhebet den Herren” or “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” Bach used this melody, also called the German Magnificat, in his Cantata BWV 10, which shares the same title, but it also appears in several other Bach works. The history of this hymn goes all the way back to Gregorian chant and a family of chants known as “Pilgrim’s tones.” How appropriate then that when the chorus takes up this melody in bar 27 (when the sopranos sing “Ex audie orationem meam”), Mozart sets the text as a perfect imitation of a Bach-ian chorale prelude. I’ve even considered using a childrens chorus to double the women here for that very reason.

On top of this, Mozart was NOT the first composer to use this hymn for the “Te decet..” (the Latin here means “A hymn, O God, beckoneth Thee in Zion, And a vow shall be made to Thee in Jerusalem- “Hear My Payer…”). Michael Haydn did so in his Requiem, which Mozart sang as a chorister in his youth. You can hear the excerpt here. Haydn’s treatment is freer, but it’s definitely the same material. What does it mean? Is it a simple shout out to a fellow-Requiem master, a short-cut from a composer who was desperate to meet a deadline? I don’t think so, but to guess at the motivations of a genius like Mozart is foolish. All I can say with certainty is that there is more here than meets the eye, or the ear.

But, I won’t be telling the band this next week. Can’t face the eye rolls. That’s why I’ve got this blog.

Coming up in exactly 2 weeks will be my final concert as music director of the Oregon East Symphony, a program consisting of two special works. On the first half, we’ll perform Beethoven’s 2^nd Symphony, which completes a cycle of all the Beethoven symphonies during my tenure (and most of the concerti and overtures, but not quite all). On the second half, we’re doing the Mozart Requiem, a piece very dear to me, and one which I hope to write quite a bit about in the days to come. We’ll see how I do.

The last time I did the Mozart was in 2002 with the Grande Ronde Symphony when I was teaching at Eastern Oregon University. In parallel with that concert, I taught a seminar piece on the class, which remains my favorite experience of classroom teaching from those years. We spent an entire term analyzing and discussing the piece, its historical importance and its context, and I think all of us felt we could have spent many more terms on it by the end. The students were graded on the basis of a research paper- the topic could be anything related to the Mozart Requiem, whether that be an analysis of the piece, a comparison of editions and sources, a history of musical requiems and Mozart’s place in it or just about anything else. Most of the papers were refreshingly good, and a few were inspiring- the range of topics was the most interesting outcome. This is a piece whose roots reach out in amazingly diverse ways. Looking back, I think the performances of the Requiem we did that year were the highlight of my time with the GRSO- certainly up there with Shosty 5 from year one and Beethoven 9 from year two.

Coming back to a piece I’ve spent so much time on is awfully humbling- all that work and all that time, and it is still an awe-inspiring work, and my return to research has uncovered and opened up a lot of paths for discovery that I was completely unaware of last time around. I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of the surface.

So, where to start?

How about with the thorny question of “which Mozart Requiem, K 626, will we be performing?” Or even, “Who wrote the Mozart Requiem?”

A silly question, you say? Isn’t there only one K 626?

Well, of course, many of you will know that the history of this piece is a rather tortured one, and scholars and conductors disagree vehemently about how much of the piece comes from Mozart and in what form we should perform it.

The short version of the history of the piece, shorn of all the fictions in Amadeus, is simple but dramatic. Mozart was commissioned by a Count Walsegg through an anonymous messenger- the Count, an amateur composer, wanted to pass of Mozart’s Requiem as his own for a performance in memory of his deceased wife. In his final days, Mozart, in spite of terrible, almost unimaginable agonies, worked intently on the piece, but when he couldn’t complete it, he passed it off to his pupil Sussmayr, who orchestrated it and provided the missing movements himself. The arguments among scholars and conductors are basically over the quality of Sussmayr’s contributions, and the quantity- how much of what he claimed was his really was his?

The scenario immediately gets more complex because we now know that at least four composers worked on the completion of the Requiem in the months after Mozart’s death- Sussmayr, Eybler, Frystadtler and Stadler. There are lots of detailed discussions and critiques (here, here and here for instance) of their contributions on the internet- they’re well worth reading, but read them with some healthy skepticism. What people say about the Mozart Requiem often tells who more about them than about the Requiem (including me, I’m sure).

In any case, on the basis of the autograph, where we can see what is in Mozart’s handwriting and what is in the handwriting of others, we know Mozart only orchestrated the first movement, and then offered suggestions for key orchestral touches throughout the rest of the piece. Everywhere else, he has provided the vocal parts and the figured bass. He seems to have only written the first 8 bars of the Lacrimosa (Constanze said this was his last act before dying), the rest being written by Sussmayr, and Sussmayr also claimed the Osanna fugues and the last three movements (Sanctus, Bennedictus and Agnus Dei) as his creations, not Mozart’s.

Throughout the Requiem, there is ample evidence of Sussmayr’s contributions in the form of numerous voice-leading errors and incorrect transpositions (mistakes which simply don’t exist in any other work of Mozart’s), and in orchestrations that sometimes seem out of character.

In recent decades, scholars have attempted everything from a simple publication of the “Sussmayr” version with the mistakes and wrong notes corrected, to a version that presents only the music we can more or less prove is Mozart’s (the Richard Maunder edition is probably the most radical of these, although I have not had the chance to study his score in depth, only to flip through in a library once for a few minutes) to versions that keep Sussmayr’s compositional contributions while re-orchestrating the piece more in the style of Mozart’s other music (the Franz Beyer editions, the 1979 edition was the first version of the piece I conducted), to those that try to re-do what Sussmayr might have done if he’d been more skilled. The Robert Levin edition is the best known of these- it goes fairly far in attempting to “fix” counterpoint in all the movements, not only the last three, and, most boldly, gives us an Amen fugue (listen to an excerpt) at the end of the Lacrimosa (Robert Levin has the kind of brain that allows him to dispense with Mozartian fugues faster than I can churn out blog posts). In the 1960’s, Mozart’s sketch for this fugue was found, so we know that he intended to end the first half of the Requiem with a fugue, so Levin is on solid ground historically, but many listeners will be hopelessly attached to the original ending. He also re-writes the two Osanna fugues.

In the end, I’ve opted to use the NMA edition of the Requiem (edited by Leopold Nowak), which is just the “old” Sussmayr version corrected as much as the editors thought possible. It is not without its flaws, but I cannot in good conscience choose another version.

The problem is that it is actually quite impossible to tell where Mozart leaves off and Sussmayr picks up- we know that any mistakes are Sussmayr, but those are easy to fix. However, it doesn’t take much effort to prove pretty conclusively that Sussmayr was lying when he claimed to have written the last three movements himself.

The simple fact is that, Sussmayr’s own music shows him to have been a Singspiel composer first and foremost- almost an 18^th c. Broadway composer. His music is simple and relatively one-dimensional. There is nothing anywhere in his own music as sophisticated and learned as what we find in the Sanctus, Bennedictus and Agnus Dei.

It is the thematic makeup of these movements that make it clear that Sussmayr could not have written them. The main theme of the Sanctus is the same as that of the Dies Irae- a transformation that Sussmayr had neither the talent nor imagination to come up with. Likewise, the Osanna fugue subject begins with the first four notes of the Recordare theme, followed by the theme of the Requiem in inversion. In the Bennedictus, the bridge material in bars 18-20 is taken from the “Et lux perpetua” music of the Introitus.  Finally, the Agnus Dei is not only partly paraphrased from an early Mozart work (K 220), the bass line is the Requiem theme, and the violin figuration ends with the Requiem theme in retrograde and includes an elaborated quote of the fugue theme of the Kyrie. On top of that, the harmonic writing is some of the most sophisticated in all of Mozart- Sussmayr could never, ever have conceived of, let alone executed.

In fact, there is plenty of testimony from Mozart’s wife that he attempted to instruct Sussmayr in how the piece should be completed, and that he left “scraps of paper” with musical ideas for the rest of the work. The sketch for the Amen fugue proves there were sketches for the piece beyond what Mozart had completed- I’m quite sure that Sussmayr had access to sketches that he lost or destroyed for the entire work, including these movements. Based on that, I feel very uncomfortable saying- “this is from Mozart and that is from Sussmayr,” because we just can’t know. For instance, Beyer keeps the repeated notes in the upper strings which follow the choir’s “Sanctus” (which remember, is a quote from the Dies Irae). Levin replaces those with a seemingly more “Mozartian” counter melody (listen here to Levin, and here to Sussmayr). In principal, I can see his point, but his solution sounds quite unconvincing to me. More importantly, in the Dies Irae, the melody (remember, it’s the same melody- in the most harrowing and hopeful moments of the Requiem) is also answered by repeated pitches in the strings (you can hear the opening of the Dies Irae here). Given that (and the fact that the new music sounds out of character with the movement, in my opinion) I think Levin’s got it wrong here, unless he wants to insert that little twirly gesture into the Dies Irae.

To me, it’s not the kind of piece you want to get things wrong in- again and again scholars have rationalized why this or that bit of the piece was “inferior” and therefore Sussmayr, only for later historical or analytical information to come to light which proves it had to be Mozart.

Finally, on a poetic note- we know that the Requiem is, among other things, a harrowing document of a race and a battle against its creator’s death- and a horrible death at that. Sussmayr was clearly much less accomplished in the study of counterpoint and orchestration than modern scholars like Levin and Beyer, but he was a witness to Mozart’s final struggle. Remembrance, bearing witness- these are q fundamental part of the human experience of death and dying (Gerhard Samuel’s “Requiem for Survivors” is a fascinating study on the place of the “survivor” and is based on the last bars of the Lacrimosa- “music written by a survivor.” *). I do think there is something real in the contribution of the younger man, whose compassion and horror at the master’s suffering seems to have imprinted itself into the piece. I can suffer a few parallel fifths to keep that kind of a human document a part of our musical life.

* An interesting story about Gerhard, the Mozart Requiem and his Requiem for Survivors (available here on CD). Gerhard paired these two works for his final concert as conductor of the CCM Philharmonia when we went on tour to Portugal in 1998. Gerhard used the Beyer version of the Requiem (it was through Gerhard that I got to know the Beyer) because he felt the orchestration was more Mozartian than the NMA/Sussmayr. However- although Beyer keeps the Lacrimosa we all know, he re-writes the last two bars. It wouldn’t make sense to have a piece based on music from the Requiem in the first half of the concert and then not have that music make its rightful appearance in the second half, so Gerhard restored the original Sussmayr ending. Incidentally, the Sussmayr ending is also better, in my opinion, than the Beyer- again, as with the Levin Sanctus, if you’re going to change something, make sure it’s clearly better, which is not always as easy as it sounds.

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The Robert Levin version of the Requiem can be heard on this recording from Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.