Kenneth Woods- A View From the Podium

Dress rehearsal is done and there’s now a bit of peace and quiet before showtime.  

It seems an article of faith (or just a deeply ingrained part of their training) among British orchestras to “save” a little in dress rehearsals. I suppose everyone with a brain saves a bit in a dress, but I’m often stunned in this country by the difference because of the ways in which the dress is different to the concert.

On balance, I think the Ives is really starting to gel, although it needed a fair bit of proper rehearsing today. It is a completely new language for this orchestra, and it’s a more complex and elusive language than say Copland or Shostakovich for that matter.

Likewise, the Shostakovich mostly is feeling pretty good, and the 2^nd movement is going to be very moving. Our principal oboist sounds stunning on the opening solo. I still don’t know what to expect of the last movement- I don’t think people realized I was serious when I told them to go home and listen to Fiddler on the Roof the other night. Shostakovich loved Fiddler on the Roof, and wrote-

“The last time I was in America I saw the film Fiddler on the Roof and it astounded me: its primary emotion is homesickness, sensed in the music, the dancing, the colour. Even though the Motherland is a so-and-so, a bad, unloving country, more a stepmother than a mother. But people still miss her, and that loneliness made itself felt. I feel that loneliness was the most important aspect….”

In the run through, it was all still sounding pretty waspy. Maybe I’m conducting it a bit waspy. Probably, in typical Brit fashion, everyone will bring their soul to the concert.

It has been lovely to return to the Mozart Paris Symphony, which I had some traumatic memories of in my last experience with it (the concert was a miracle, but the rehearsals were terrifying and torturous). It’s interesting all the ways in which it points to later Mozart- the opening is so Haffner-esque, but maybe better, and the Finale is a crazy contrapuntal tour de force, clearly the work of the composer-to-be of the Jupiter. It’s wonderful show-off music for the young composer.

I think the Schumann will be excellent, although by the time we started it, everyone was tired and thinking about dinner. Great horn team. Amazing piece!

I’m attempting some minimal live-blogging from today’s SMP programme.  We’re on our break.

A few brief thoughts….

The acoustic here at the Electric Theatre could not be more different than that at the two rehearsal halls we’ve been rehearsing in. This, predictably, creates quite a few problems, but most annoyingly for the players is the fact that they have to make so many adjustments and play so differently from the way we’ve been rehearsing.

Of course, we’ve all worked here long enough to know what we need to do here, so the question arises as to whether we should spend our time in the rehearsal hall practicing what we will do in the concert. Unfortunately, to do so would mean we would come to the hall with a completely insane idea of what the music is supposed sound like.

Much as I wish we could rehearse in our hall, or at least in a space where we are doing and hearing more or less what we will in the hall, if we have to choose between getting used to what we have to do or what we need to hear, it’s an easy choice for me- we’ve got to build the sound concept of the piece. That may mean in our case the horns have to tip toe through all the rehearsals then belt it out in front of the soft curtain, but they’re smart enough.

The two 20^th c. works on the program- Ives 3 and Shostakovich op 83a- have also posed an interesting question of rehearsal management. As readers of this blog will have noticed, there is an awful lot one can and perhaps should say about these two pieces. On the other hand, I think it is important to let the music speak for itself, and to give the musicians in particular room to find their own connection to the pieces. In conducting school we’re all taught essentially to stick to louder-softer-longer-shorter-faster-slower-sharper-flatter in rehearsal for this very reason.

However, for all the stories of boundless orchestral cynicism, I’m also often struck by even the most experienced, most potentially jaded players saying “I wish he’d tell us what this is supposed to be about,” or, hearing a conductor’s introduction to the audience at the concert, saying “why didn’t we know that at the first rehearsal.”

In many ways, Shostakovich’s music offers conductors the most opportunity to soulfully pontificate from the podium. I’ve certainly fallen into that pattern in the past, but as I get older, I’m struck by Shostakovich’s refusal to do that. I don’t think it was just a survival technique- I think he genuinely felt that if a musician couldn’t find the meaning of a piece from experiencing the music, describing the music wasn’t going to help, and was probably going to cheapen everything.

On the other hand, few composers demand such a complete commitment from the players, and sometimes we have to be reminded that this is music which deals with life and death issues. When I last played the 1^st Cello Concerto, I finally broke protocol, and, with the conductor looking on, found myself really forcefully reminding the orchestra of what the piece meant and what it needed. I ended up completely in tears and with a very shakey bow arm for the next few minutes, but it was worth it at the concert.

Have I said enough in these rehearsals?

When Shostakovich began work on his Fourth String Quartet in 1949 his life and career were at a low ebb.

After spending most of the late 1930’s in fear for his life, painfully aware that Stalin was watching his every move, Shostakovich had become somewhat used to a bit of creative freedom in the war years. The worldwide success of the 7^th Symphony, which the Soviet government welcomed warmly as a pure propaganda coup in spite of its subversive content, had emboldened him to write the deeply tragic 8^th and the bitterly satirical 9^th symphonies.

However, after the war, things quickly turned to the worse for him. Stalin had taken the 9^th, which was the antithesis of the epic glorification of the triumphant Soviet/Stalinist victory in the war, as a personal insult, and in 1948, Shostakovich was subjected to a second humiliating public denunciation by as part of the “Zhdanov Decree.”

He was forced to turn his hand to propagandistic hack work like the Song of the Forest, but, unknown even to his close friends, continued to compose a private series of remarkable masterpieces “for the drawer.” These were works that would have to wait until after the death of Stalin to be heard at all. Such a work was the 4th String Quartet, later orchestrated by Rudolf Barshai as the Chamber Symphony, opus 83a

Also in the years after the war, Shostakovich watched with deepening horror and revulsion as Russian society rapidly forgot or chose to ignore the horrors and lessons of the Holocaust, and as the cancer of anti-Semitism returned in it’s most vile and virulent and form. Shostakovich is quoted in Testimony, his memoirs “as dictated to Solomon Volkov,” speaking of his love of Jewish folk music and his horror at the return of anti-Semitism-

I think, if we speak of musical impressions, that Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it; it is multi-faceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It is almost always laughter through tears.

This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my idea of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair . They express their despair in dance music… Many of my works reflect my impressions of Jewish music.

This is not a purely musical issue, this is also a moral issue. I often test a person by his attitude towards Jews. In our day and age any person with pretensions to decency cannot be anti-Semitic. This seems so obvious it doesn’t need saying, but I’ve had to argue the point for at least 30 years….

Despite all the Jews who perished in the camps, all I heard people saying was “The kikes went to fight in Tashkent.” And if the saw a Jew with military decorations, they called after him “Kike, where did you buy your medals?” That’s when I wrote the Violin Concerto, the Jewish Cycle and the Fourth Quartet.

None of these works could be performed then. The were heard only after Stalin’s death.

Today, the Surrey Mozart Players and I are performing Rudolf Barshai’s arrangement of the Fourth Quartet, which he called (with Shostakovich’s blessing) “Chamber Symphony op 83a.”

By the way, Barshai has been a vocal supporter of Shostakovich’s memoirs, saying of Testimony “I can hear the authentic voice of Shostakovich.”

Thanks to Maestro Barshai and his son Walter for taking the time to clarify some textual matters via email this week. It’s a stunning arrangement.

When I first got to know the music of Gustav Mahler, I was fascinated by the story of his last years. His most perfect symphony, the Sixth, is also his most tragic. Written at the height of his personal and professional life, its Finale depicts a hero who suffers three terrible blows of Fate, the last of which fells him. Not long after it was premiered, Mahler himself suffered three such blows- the death of his beloved daughter, the loss of his position as Director of the Vienna State Opera and the onset of a fatal heart condition. Nearly destroyed by these events, his last works- Das Lied von der Erde, and the Ninth and Tenth symphonies- were long believed to be a painful document of his coming to terms with his own death.

It is an amazing story, but only ALMOST true. What we now understand is that, after much grieving and soul-searching, Mahler embraced a new life, knowing full well he could never know how much time he had. In his last years, he rebuilt his career in New York, and wrote his greatest, most complex and most innovative music. He continued to learn new repertoire, and to plan for future projects. He knew full well that he had a hellhound on his trail, but to the very end, he worked. When he returned to Vienna while already in the grips of what was to be his mortal illness, he was still looking to the future. In short, he spent his last years, months, weeks and days living, not dying.  He even brought with him on his last journey a number of scores he was learning for the upcoming season in New York.

One of those scores was Charles Ives Third Symphony (“The Camp Meeting”), which the Surrey Mozart Players and I are performing this Saturday at the Electric Theatre in Guildford. With his own Tenth Symphony unfinished, and knowing how ill he was, why did Mahler choose this piece to take with him on his final voyage? Why spend even a minute of his last days on this music?

Mahler was a composer with a conspicuously open mind, willing to support the innovations of younger composers even when he was unsure whether he understood or liked their music. He famously vigorously supported Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony (a work which I often think of as a 90 minute Mahler symphony for 100 musicians condensed down to critical mass of 15 players and 22 minutes, with a commensurate increase in dissonance) even though he admitted he didn’t entirely “get” it. Many commentators have noted that Mahler must have been fascinated by this unknown American composers’ new language- the bitonality, the dissonance, the radically complex poly-rhythms.

Indeed, I’m sure he was impressed and fascinated, but I think Mahler found something of a more personal connection with Ives. On the surface, their music could not sound much more different, and their symphonies exist on profoundly different scales. The whole of Ives 3 is just over half the length of the first movement of Mahler 3, Ives writes for a small chamber orchestra, while Mahler wrote for the biggest orchestras ever used at that time.

But remember that one of Mahler’s most important innovations, and surely the one he took the most criticism for throughout his career, was his introduction of popular, even banal or kitschy styles of music into the symphony. Imagine his surprise when reading the Ives for the first time. Where Mahler draws from Klezmer tunes, country dances and urban waltzes, military marches and ceremonial funeral music, Ives uses church hymns, Stephen Foster songs (albeit, not in the 3^rd), jaunty marches and naïve sounding chorales.

However, even their shared use of the profane (yes, in the hallowed halls of classical composition, the inclusion of American church hymns in a symphony would certainly qualify as profane!), and their shared exploration of new techniques would not, in my opinion, be enough to tear Mahler away from his Tenth for even ten minutes.

What I think must have fascinated Mahler was not the materials and techniques Ives was using, but the meaning Ives found in them. In Ives, he found another composer who was wrestling, in a very profound way, with the same questions of musical space and time, of the intersection the controlled musical world on stage with the world around it.

In the Finale of his 2^nd Symphony, Mahler gives us one of he most radical passages in any symphony (it’s Figure 22 in the score). On stage is a passionate lament, while off stage, a noisy marching band stomps by in a completely different meter, key and tempo. It is an extraordinary inversion of reality- we perceive the onstage (which should be the most public of spaces!) music as intimate and private, as if a man stricken with grief seeks a moment to weep alone, while outside (backstage- unseen by the audience) the world bashes on, mocking the pain and the loss, making that loss all the more real, the pain that much agonizing.

Ives was the first other composer Mahler found to fully understand this- that those intrusions into moments of deepest feelings actually make those emotions truer, more powerful and more difficult. At the end of the 1^st mvt of the 3^rd, Ives writes the most beautiful and simple chorale in all its pristine perfection. In a piece that is ultimately about the idea of pilgrimage and the quest for spiritual enlightenment and peace, it is a deeply moving evocation of reverent prayer, of focusing all one’s energy, with ferocious gentleness, on seeking quiet and clarity. However, all around this chorale, Ives weaves unrelated music, first in the flute then in shadow lines on the solo violin. In the tent of the revival, we may have peace and perfection throughout the congregation, but in the night outside, the world is still wild and unknowable.

And surely Mahler must have loved the marches in the 2^nd mvt of the Ives. Again and again, a march that begins with true country-bumpkin naivety disintegrates into something menacing and dangerous and rather complex, with bar lines obscured by strange metric shifts. Ives called this movement “Children’s Day.” Mahler’s own musical depictions of childhood, such as the third movement of the First Symphony or the first movement and Finale of the Fourth remind us that childhood is experienced in a world that combines wonder and terror, innnocence and menace in ever changing proportions. So too, does Ives’ movement.

Inspired as the first two movements are, I’m sure it was the Finale of the Ives (Ives called this movement “Communion”) that most fascinated Mahler. Most of the first two movements of the Symphony are quite tonal- we hear any dissonance as an intrusion into or a disruption of the world of simple hymns, easygoing songs and cheery marches. The Finale is more chromatic, denser, much more contrapuntal and altogether more weighty. Coming in the midst of such an overtly religious symphony, perhaps Mahler was reminded of his friend, the greatest of all religious symphonists, Anton Bruckner. It is far too facile and simplistic to write of Bruckner as a “devoutly Catholic composer,” for if he were only that, his music would hardly be worth listening to. It is not the expression of faith that draws us again and again into Bruckner’s symphonies, it is the expression of doubt.

Mahler himself knew something about doubt, and about the sometimes desperate struggle for faith, for something to believe in. In Ives 3, he would have seen a composer who’s first two movements are in many ways touching evocations of a naïve faith in spirituality revealing himself in the Finale as full of doubt, full of uncertainty, full of existential terror and unable to find his faith. From the slow, chromatic and contrapuntal opening, in many ways evocative of Brucker or late Beethoven, the music moves inexorably towards a shattering cataclysm of the kind of searing dissonance that was still new and shocking in 1911. It is a journey full of longing, full of sadness, even despair and one in which there is never a sense that we know where we are going or what awaits us.

After the devastation, anguish and terror of the climax of the movement, we are left without any reason for faith or for hope. And it is at this very moment that faith reasserts itself- when we can no longer assert it ourselves. It is a moment not unlike the end of the Adagio of Bruckner 9.

The coda is imbued with tremendous tenderness, and as the final lines disintegrate into ever more infinite shades of softness and slowness (so close in spirit and technique to the last page of Mahler 9!), we finally feel that we are at peace and that we can believe- not even that we can believe but that we find ourselves again believing. And, perfection attained, Ives allows one last intrusion from the outside world. No noisy band this time, nor sounds of ambivalent nature. Simply the gentle ringing of nearby church bells.

Ives transcribed “Communion” as a song called “The Camp Meeting.” The text of the Coda (from the hymn “Woodworth”) seems to speak of this idea of surrender and of faith as something given, not something made-

“Just as I am without one plea,

But that Thy blood was shed for me,

and that Thou bidd’st me  come to Thee,

O Lamb of God,

I come,

I come