July 9, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shelagh  Goodwin

I’m celebrating the week by book-ending the week with performances of the Cello and Violin concertos. Schumann seems in many ways to be sinned against more than almost any other major composer- what is it about his voice that again and again leads performers and listeners to take short-cuts in getting to know and to understand his music?

Schumann had one of the most sophisticated, unique and distinct voices of any composer. His music spans a huge range of expressive characters, from dreamy introspection to learned severity to naïve exuberance. Understanding his choices is not always a quick process, but I can honestly say that I can scarcely think of a choice in any of his music that doesn’t prove to be the right one on careful reflection.

Of course, one of the most frequently repeated, and completely wrong-headed, criticisms of Schumann is that he was somehow an inept or unimaginative orchestrator. I remember buying Lynn Harrell’s recording of the Schumann as a teenager and reading in the liner notes by one Lionel Salter that “Schumann wrote his concerto rapidly within a fortnight: it is true that the solo part is not very grateful to play, and that he solved the question of balance by allotting a markedly subordinate role to the orchestra (in fact, the accusation of “drabness” in the orchestral color led Shostakovich to re-score the work)”

Hmmm….

First, having just played it, I want to go on record as saying that it is tremendously challenging but absolutely wonderful to play- it has everything for the cellist, from lyrical passages that are unmatched in the repertoire to pure virtuoso writing to keep the fingers busy. You get to seduce, sing, cry, scream, bellow, scamper, sigh, roar and laugh through the instrument. What could be more grateful?

But, this question of Shostakovich’s re-orchestration has haunted me for over 20 years since I read about it. On the one hand, Shostakovich is my hero. On the other hand, I think the Schumann Cello Concerto is a perfect piece, and flawlessly orchestrated, full of the most original and subtle touches of color. I couldn’t imagine an improvement on Schumann’s own work, but everyone knows  and agrees that Shostakovich was a great orchestrator- even those who dislike his music.

Finally, 2 years ago I was conducting the Schumann and a member of the orchestra brought in a sketchy looking Russian disk of the Shostakovich orchestration of Bobby’s Cello Concerto. At last, I had the chance to hear what one genius could do to improve the work of another.

Not much, it turns out.

In fact, the expression “does more harm than good” would come to mind if, in fact, it did any good anywhere in the piece.

I’ll settle on “does more harm.”

Now, two caveats before we proceed…. First, this recording is pretty bad- the orchestra doesn’t even make a very good case for the existence or orchestras, let alone for the existence of this arrangement. Second, although the disc clearly claims to be the Shosty orchestration, I still haven’t gotten my hands on a score, so it could be Krennikhov or someone like that.

First, Salter’s comment that Schumann didn’t give the orchestra enough to do while the soloist is playing isn’t really addressed in this orchestration. Most of the big, bad and insane changes are in the tuttis and interjections between soloist and orchestra.

But the real point is that this orchestration shows again and again that the arranger didn’t understand the piece on many, many levels. Take the first orchestral tutti- it’s quite short, but feels like it covers a huge amount of ground as it carries the narrative from the agitation of the first subject to the tender introspection of the second. Shostakovich sexes up the orchestration by passing the tune around from section to section, changing every few bars, which destroys the sense of this tutti as a single passionate and long-breathed epic outpouring and instead creates a sense of a distracted and impatient child as he jumps from wind choir to strings.  The winds sound so much less passionate in the melody in DS’s version than the violins do in RS’s

First Tutti- DSCH

First Tutti- RS.

Note that while Schumann’s orchestration is less varied, with the melody staying primarily in the first violins, the whole tutti sounds like a single unit, and the countermelodies in the low strings are heard as more equally important, where in the Shostakovich, only the top melodic line is really treated with any care or interest. One sounds like film music, the other like art music, one pleases the ear (sort of) the other shakes the soul.

The next solo section emerges from delicate reverie into a moment genuine virtuoso triumph- an outpouring of confidence that is immediately shattered by the second orchestral tutti. In Schumann’s original, this tutti alternates between claustrophobic agitation with the triplets in the violas and second violins to violent explosions of anguish in the whole orchestra. It is music that applies incredible psychic and emotional pressure. Shostakovich gives the triplets to the clarinets, which sounds simply comical and grotesque. Then, he goes beyond re-orchestration into re-composition, adding ludicrous Rimsky-Korsokov-esque scale flourishes in the forte outburst. It sounds like we’re alternating between bits of The Nose and Scheherezade. But it’s not the complete lack of style that is most upsetting, it is the fact that, as in the first tutti, Shostakovich lowers the emotional intensity by several levels of magnitude because the focus is on making something that is pleasing- this is music that is supposed to be shocking, upsetting, anguished and extremely tense, not film music.

Second Tutti- DSCH

Second Tutti- RS

Schumann’s sublime 2^nd movement fairs even worse. I find this very strange, as I’ve never heard a criticism of this movement from anyone, ever (other than cellists, myself included, remarking on the difficulty of sustaining the dbl stop passage when playing with orchestra). I find it hard to believe that Shostakovich had anything to do with this travesty- he replaces the delicate and very Schumann-ian pizzicato string accompaniment with a  gaudy portato arco rendition. Then, wait for it—– he adds harp.

HARP!?!?!?!?!??!??!

Why not just add Wagner tubas while you are at it?

It really all sounds like an entr’acte from a Glazunov ballet played by a provincial Russian pit orchestra. One of the most personal, honest, intimate and moving movements in the repertoire is transformed into a saccharine, sentimental, cheap and self-indulgent sounding travesty. It also significantly dimishes the impact of the dialogue between the soloist and the principal cellist, a duet that is the concerto’s most memorable and touching feature, and one that has a powerful symbolic impact on all listeners

2^nd Mvt- DSCH

2^nd Mvt- RS

In the 3^rd Mvt Shostakovich’s concern for the welfare of his fellow man comes to the fore. In particular, his profound concern for the attention span of trumpet players. I have a number of dear friends amongst the world’s trumpet sections, and I too hate to think of them as not getting enough chances to shine and showcase their mighty chops. But I wonder if this was the piece to do it in? In the first tutti, there are brief worrying signs that we’ll be hearing more trumpet that we are used to- perhaps more than we want to-

Finale Tutti 1- DSCH

Finale Tutti1- RS

But it is at the recap that his purpose becomes apparent, when suddenly, we find ourselves not in the Schumann Cello Concerto, but the Artunian Trumpet Concerto, or something like that. In Schumann’s original, this is a very moving and powerful transition- in this arrangement, it is more comic relief.

Finale Tutti 3 DSCH

Finale Tutti 3 RS

I think this is as good a place to stop as any. I don’t want this post to be read as a rant- Shostakovich will always remain one of my favourite composers, but he himself wrote in his memoirs that “composers should orchestrate their own music.” He refused to take on the completion of Mahler 10 for that very reason, and most of his work on music not his own is on Mussorgsky, whose language he understood better, it seems.

The point I really wanted to make is that everywhere Shostakovich makes a change we can argue whether or not it is in good or bad taste (although I doubt it will be a long argument). What seems certain, however, is that each change lowers the emotional temperature of the piece as a whole. Schumann himself could have added piccolo and harp (his piccolo writing in the Konzertstucke for Horns is quite brilliant!), but he knew that to do so would make the music less intense, less moving and less original.

Of course, Schumann’s original is challenging to pull off. Shostakovich shows how easy it is to get things to leap of the page in Technicolor, if that is what you want. In fact, I’ve chosen a recording I don’t like for that very reason. In the tuttis in the first movement, the orchestra doesn’t sustain out fortes before subito pianos very well. In the Finale, the balance is not good, and the chords are rushed. However, those are not Schumann’s fault but those of the performers. Just because something is difficult, it does not follow that it is bad. If something doesn’t work in Schumann’s music, as in Shostkovich’s, the fault is always with the performer.

Tune in next time, when I play extracts from Satie’s re-orchestration of Shostakovich 7.

First, let me be clear- although this was a first for me, I’m not trying to assert that this is an original idea. In fact, a friend of mine just did the piece in Schumann’s transcription for violin and orchestra with her orchestra in Denmark last week- also without conductor. Joseph Swenson and Thomas Zehetmair are just two violinist conductors who have been performing and recording huge swaths of the concerto repertoire, up to and including Stravinsky, directing from the violin.

But on visual grounds alone, violinists have an unfair advantage- the violin can itself be used as visual tool. Just as a baton functions as an extension of the motion of the arm, a violin can serve as an extension of the bob of the head.

The Schumann Cello Concerto does have a reputation as a difficult accompaniment for conductors, mostly because of the need for flexibility and rubato in the solo part. I suppose the most urgent worry of this project was whether I would have to play the piece too straight in order to keep it together with the orchestra without the help of a beat-keeper. This turned out not to be true- having watched the footage of the concert, I can say I’m pretty happy with the balance between rhythmic poise and structure on the one hand and poetry and flexibility on the other, and in many areas, I think the orchestra was more responsive to subtle shifts of emphasis and timing than when I’ve done the piece before.

Lest readers think that I’m making myself as a conductor irrelevant, let me just make perfectly clear that not all is easy and better and perfect in the conductor-less universe. And, I was conducting- with my skull. It is a good lesson in learning how little conducting one can get away with, as less is often more.

On the one hand, the very areas in which one would think that a conductor would be most essential- navigating the ins and outs of coordinating the orchestra with a flexibly rendered solo part- turned out not to be a problem at all. On the other hand, there were areas where a conductor was probably more missed. Of course, having a confident conductor can create a layer of safety at key moments, just as a confident concertmaster can save a conductor in others. The risk factor without a conductor is certainly higher.

Also, it simply takes more time to put things together without a conductor- working this way depends on all the musicians having the piece in their ears, and on their being able to hear what they need to. That means that in rehearsals they need enough repetition to really learn the solo part- not countless hours, but more than usual. That said, I loved rehearsing the orchestra with the cello in my hand- it is so frustrating explaining a bowstroke or a kind of vibrato in words when you could show it, and for once, I could show it. It was very cathartic and liberating to get to do that.

Also, one has to allow for changes in hearing between the regular rehearsals and dress rehearsal. I sat facing the orchestra for the working rehearsal, then, in a different venue, sat facing the audience (as one does!) for the dress rehearsal and concert. That meant that in the dress the players had to get used to both the hall and to me facing away. It took time- not countless hours, but more than usual.

However, what I found the most different was the intensity of the experience. It was, to put it simply, much more tiring than just playing in every rehearsal, and completely exhausting on the day of the concert.  In a perfect world, my goal is always to get through a rehearsal, whatever happens, nailing my part all the way through. If only life were like that! However, when little things happen in a normal rehearsal, you can use the tuttis and those minutes when the conductor is working with the orchestra to relax, review what went wrong, think through a fingering or just take a few slow breaths. Doing both jobs means that for the duration of the rehearsal you are “on” for every second. It’s much harder to right yourself if something goes wrong, and much more tiring in general. I came away from this with a new respect for artists who do this all the time. I’d done Haydn without conductor a few times before, but Romantic repertoire is much more demanding in this way.

So, is this something I would do again? Absolutely! But only with the right orchestra. You need to trust your colleagues and to know they’ll learn the piece and be there for you. I also learned that one has to allow for fatigue and not overshoot when programming or planning the schedule for the week. I’m glad I didn’t program a crazy overture- we started with Telemann’s Don Quioxte Suite, which I led from the cello (on the same rostrum, but facing the orchestra). It felt much better than conducting the Coriolan Overture before doing Haydn D last time I played a concerto without conductor.

What about other repertoire? CPE Bach and Vivaldi always await. Dvorak will always need a conductor- even if the orchestra could follow every twist and turn, I think the piece needs the tension between the personality of the soloist and the personality of the conductor. I suppose Saint-Saens 1 is possible, but is it worth the trouble? Brahms Double and Beethoven Triple can both work, but the Beethoven is best led by the pianist, who has almost nothing to do anyway! The one piece that I keep thinking about is Shostakovich 1. Pieter Wispelwey has recorded it without conductor using a great chamber orchestra with a very strong leader. I’d love to take a shot at it some day, but first, I can use a few days off!

For the first time, I’m doing it without conductor (yes, I realize I am a conductor, so perhaps I should say I’m doing it without anyone conducting).

Is this a musical suicide mission?

Schumann’s language thrives on flexibility, fantasy and freedom, and his unique rhythmic vocabularly can easily obscure the location of the barline, or even the beat. For this reason, this work is considered a notorious conductor killer. I know that the one time I played with orchestra before, in spite of trying to be sparing with rubato, the conductor, a good friend and a good conductor, was deeply and possibly permanently traumatized.

I guess this experiment is predicated on the idea that the solution to the difficulties of this piece might be as simple as the soloist (me) knowing where there are opportunities to be flexible and where there aren’t- without a conductor standing there to put it all together, I’m forced to make sure that what I’m doing makes sense and is natural and easy to follow. It also forces the musicians to learn the solo part, and to really, really listen.

I don’t know if it will work!

It’s been a cello intensive year to date- the Dvorak concerto took up a lot of my energies in January, and I’ve been busy with the trio in March and April, so the cello universe has been very much on my mind. I’ve been really excited to learn that one of my cello heroes, Lynn Harrell, has started a blog. One of his recent posts expresses his frustration with young cellists who don’t bother to try to understand the intentions of the composer-

One thing that has always irked me whenever I give Master classes at different conservatories and Universities while on tour. And it is starting to concern me more deeply than before. What is that you ask? It’s a seemingly deliberate disregard for how a composer has marked his music. For example, directions and hints to the would-be performer on how to play the piece, what speed to take, what balance, goodness; even what notes are correct.

What we’re talking about here is a basic level of respect for the text but what seems to be more and more common these days is just guessing at the meaning of metronome markings and foreign words. The result is an increasing number of would-be performers feeling more and more entitled to change what has been left by the original creator and to feel as though their flimsy, novel approaches are legitimate simply because they are novel.

The idea that a composer doesn’t have de facto the best and most illuminating approach to the work is fundamentally ridiculous. But that doesn’t seem to stop these musicians from thinking that it might be Brahms’ way but they have the right to disregard him and substitute their own view! This is to propose that their way is as good as ,well…Brahms.

I find this more and more distressing because without at least first trying to understand and recreate the text means that our knowledge of a composer’s use of the notational language is diluted and made fuzzy. We have a big enough problem with numerous corrupt editions and while efforts to find more accurate editions continue, the movement to disregard composer’s intentions makes these efforts more and more difficult, or worse, seemingly not important or necessary.

I agree with everything he says, except for the notion that there is anything new with this. Sadly, I don’t think that young cellists are to blame, but their teachers, our conservatory system and  (Harrell correctly points this out!) our music publishers. I’ve gotten more and more militant about learning concertos from the full orchestral scores- it makes such a huge, huge difference. I know that turning pages is a pain, but it’s worth it. A cello part should just be like a cheat sheet to be used only for run-throughs once you’ve learned the piece properly.

So, I got out my cello part to the Schumann for a run through this week- it’s the old International Edition edited by Leonard Rose (a great cellist, an immortal recording artist and hugely important teacher by any measure). I suppose 80% of American cellists have this edition and grew up with it. After looking at the score for a week, the differences were distressing. There are wrong notes and changed notes, moved slurs, different rhythms and invented articulations, and nowhere in the text does Rose tell the cellist what is his suggestion and what is actually from Schumann. Where changes have been made, the player is not told there has been a change, nor is there any record of what has been taken out.

Worse yet, Rose suggests a whole-scale recomposition of the last movement. He advises a massive and pointless cut in the development which can only have been made by a musician who doesn’t understand the structure of the piece, then gives two suggested cadenzas before the end. Schumann pointedly wrote a very short accompanied cadenza before the coda- he didn’t want a long solo improvisation. Rose does include Schumann’s original, but only as a “last option” after the two cadenzas, and nowhere does he mention that the existence of a long cadenza is his idea and not Schumann’s.

Sadly, this is nothing new- the celebrity edition has always been a great selling point for publishers (and I’ve griped about it before), but if you want to know why young cellists don’t respect the text, look no further. Times haven’t changed- Breitkopf and Hartel have come out with a new Urtext edition of the Dvorak and Schumann concerti, but sell with them a cello part edited by Heinrich Schiff. Like Rose, he’s a great player and musician, but his suggestions, additions and alterations are presented in the same print as those of the composer. At least he doesn’t change the chords in the 4th bar of the cello part of the Dvorak (an unforgivable sin in both the Rose and Starker editions- really, who changes a note written by Dvorak!?!!?). For instance- there are bowings in the concerto that come from Dvorak himself- in the new Schiff solo part, Schiff’s bowings, and his changes of original markings are marked in exactly the same way as Dovrak’s originals, without comment. Why a publisher would go to great expense to put together an Urtext edition then suggest cellists prepare the solo part from another corrupt edition is beyond me.

Perhaps most depressingly, these mangled solo parts are written evidence of the very same thought process Maestro Harrell bemoans- these great, great artists have taken to changing things that they seem not to understand. If you go through the Schumann part with a score, you can see that Rose (or the graduate student who actually edited it!) wasn’t working from a score when he edited the solo part. Dynamics that are moved no longer line up with important musical and harmonic events in the orchestra. The cut disrupts a clear, simple and coherent musical structure. Far from improving on the composer’s original ideas (the notion of improving the Schumann Cello Concerto or Dvorak is simply beyond absurd!), what these editions do is simply immortalize misreadings and mistakes.

Not only do these sloppy old editions evince a depressingly casual disregard for the composer’s intentions, they also show a  very limited knowledge of the piece itself. The single line of the cello part is not the Schumann Concerto- the Schumann Concerto is the whole score. If you’re just thinking in single-line terms and leaving it to some hapless conductor to reconcile your wayward discoveries with the rest of the music, you’re not doing the music justice.

This doesn’t mean there is no room for creativity, spontenaity or waywardness. Schumann wrote this great work in his usual fervent burst of creative energy, so there is actually a lot left to the soloist to work out in terms of dynamics and phrasing. Likewise, some of the metronome markings are very problematic. It is a piece in which you do have to struggle with the text, and may even have to go beyond the text, but surely the starting point for that process is knowing the text.

To appropriate Harrell-”The idea that a composer doesn’t have de facto the best and most illuminating approach to the work is fundamentally ridiculous.” Equally true whether the offender is a  legendary cellist and recording artist or a struggling young cello student playing in a masterclass

“Is Mahler’s music more difficult to conduct than that of other composers?”

When I was asked this question just the other day it was by no means for the first time.

It is not hard to understand why a listener might suspect that Mahler’s music is harder to conduct than that of most other composers- he writes much of incredibly complexity, subtlety and variety on a vast scale. There is a lot going on all the time, and it goes on for a long time. The sheer psychophysical impact of a work like the 2^nd Symphony is so powerful that it seems that it must be the most difficult thing in the world to perform.

So is it uniquely hard to perform?

Well….. Mahler is a composer of paradoxes and dichotomies, so it probably won’t surprise you if I tell you that it is, and it isn’t….

One thing that is not obvious when you hear a Mahler symphony in the concert hall or on the stereo, and something that many writers who think of him as a high-strung, Romantic neurotic forget completely, is that Mahler was an incredibly practically minded musician. He was one of the few truly great composers ever to hold a complex administrative position, not only serving as the chief conductor of the Vienna Opera, but as the General Director.

Mahler understood, and dealt with, budgets. He set schedules, he booked soloists and had to watch the box office receipts. He knew how much an orchestra could accomplish in a rehearsal- under his unique leadership and under that of lesser talents. More than anything, he understood the painful truth that resources for art are finite.

The impact of this hard-won understanding on his artistic output is easy to see. Many writers see Mahler’s “Retouchen” or re-orchestrations of pieces like the 9^th Symphonies of Beethoven and Schubert or the symphonies of Schumann as evidence of Mahler’s megalomania, showing him trying to make the music of past masters conform to his sonic ideal. Far from it- Mahler’s changes, while far more extensive than many of us feel are necessary (I make no changes in Schumann), are not intended to make those works sound like Mahler symphonies, but to allow his orchestra to realize them in the performing conditions of Mahler’s time with the greatest clarity and ease. Rather than use up rehearsal time verbally asking some players to play less and others to play more, or to pencil in a doubling, he does it all beforehand so that they can read it down in rehearsal and have it work.

Mahler transcribed two string quartets for string orchestra- the “Serioso” Quartet of Beethoven (op. 95 in F minor) and the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet of Schubert. On the one hand, he was clearly hoping to use these transcriptions to bring these important works to a larger audience, but on the other hand, he often takes advantage of the larger forces to simplify the practical demands of the instrumental writing. In its original form, “Death and the Maiden” has a first violin part that borders on the impossible- in particular, Schubert often demands that the 1^st violinist repeatedly leap from the bottom of the instrument’s range to the top. It can be a sort of painful musical target practice if one’s nerves falter. Mahler takes advantage of his increased numbers by simply letting half the players play the high material and half stay in the lower register. Something that could have required weeks of preparation becomes sight-readable.

And of course, this kind of thinking permeates his own works, particularly in his orchestration and in his handling of the conductor. Mahler was the first major composer to address the conductor directly- his scores have plenty of the kind of character markings long found in the scores of others, but also specific technical warnings and instructions, many added after his own early performances. If bitter experience has led him to discover a helpful solution, he always shares it with the conductor to follow him.

Likewise, his instrumental writing is first and foremost, practical- he wants to achieve his musical ideas in the most natural way possible, but he never sacrifices the musical idea in the name of convenience. He is never sentimental or defensive about his own writing- if he found a more effective way of realizing something in a performance, he changed the score. His vast experience not only as a conductor of a great orchestra (the Vienna Philharmonic) but as a builder of regional opera orchestras meant that he knew each instrument’s quirks inside out. He writes things of astounding difficulty, but, with a bit of practice, everything works.

In this sense, there is an interesting comparison to be drawn with two of his contemporaries, writing in a similar style.

(Mahler’s friend in student days- Hans Rott)

His classmate in Anton Bruckner’s counterpoint studio was the young Hans Rott, who died tragically young, having never heard a performance of his only symphony. Mahler knew Rott’s work well, and once wrote that Rott was “the inventor of the modern symphony as I understand it.” In fact, he often quoted from the Rott symphony- something that almost nobody realized until my teacher, Gerhard Samuel, made the first recording of the Rott in the 1980’s.

Unlike Mahler, Rott was never a performer, and never had the opportunity to watch his music be rehearsed and performed. As a result, where even Mahler’s most difficult music “works” for the players, even Rott’s most straightforward passages are full of frustrations and challenges for everyone. It takes 2-3 times as much rehearsal time with a first rate orchestra simply to bring the Rott up to an acceptable technical standard is a Mahler symphony does, and would even if the players weren’t already more familiar with the Mahler.

A similar case is the early music of Arnold Schoenberg, including Verkarte Nacht, Gurrelieder and the marvellous tone poem, Pelleas und Melisande. Pelleas shows an incredibly imagination for color, texture and sound, but the practicalities of making all those ideas perceptible to the audience are left entirely up to the conductor. Simply playing the ink will lead to disaster. A wise conductor preparing this work will always have a trusted set of ears in the audience to help with balance- that’s a wonderful luxury in Mahler, but a necessity in Schoenberg.

So at this point, you might be concluding that Mahler’s music is less difficult to perform than that of Schoenberg and Rott. It seems the question stands answered- Mahler’s music is not more difficult to conduct or play than that of other composers.

Well, let’s not be hasty….

Let’s go back to Mahler the administrator and Mahler the conductor. If it were true that Mahler’s practical mind meant that his music was simpler to play than music in a similar style by less grounded professionals, it might also follow that working in Mahler’s opera houses would have been easier than life under a less well-prepared, well organized and self-disciplined conductor. You might imagine that Mahler would come in with those carefully retouched parts of his, run the pieces through with the orchestra, and send the players home early (orchestra musicians do love that approach).

Interviews with players who worked for him tell a different tale. Veterans of the Met and the NY Philharmonic testify that Mahler worked them harder than even Toscanini (only when his health failed did he start to shorten rehearsals). Every problem that was solved before rehearsal only meant he could tackle two more in the newly available time. His artistic drive and ambition were never satisfied.

Similarly, as a composer, even on the same page that he’s obviously gone to great lengths to make something as idiomatic as possible, you will find something that pushes the musicians to their absolute limits. This apparent contradiction becomes wider and wider throughout his works- as his experience grows and he becomes ever more efficient, he simply expands the boundaries of the possible again and again.

And hard to conduct? The music for offstage band in the Finale of the 2^nd Symphony is some of the first truly polymetric and mixed meter (music that is 2 meters at the same time and where those meter(s) change from bar to bar) music ever written. Those complexities pale in comparison to the rhythmic hornet’s nest in the Scherzo of the 6^th Symphony, where for page after page of the score, the meter changes almost every bar.

Then there is the 7^th- a piece to make most conductors quake with fear. I recently heard Valery Gergiev on Radio 3 discussing his recent Mahler cycle with the LSO. He said that when the series was planned, he had two huge worries- how to manage the acoustic of St Paul’s Cathedral, where they were playing the 8^th Symphony and, his words “how on earth I was going to conduct the 7^th Symphony.” One of today’s most famous Mahlerians was very humbled by the 7^th when he recorded his cycle. Having finished a run of performances and several days of recording sessions with one of the best orchestras in the world, his producers concluded that the last movement simply didn’t work. Fortunately for him, this was in the era when record companies had money to spend, and they re-recorded it a few years later after he’d done the piece a few more times. What a luxury! (Yes, it is a true story, yes it was a very famous conductor, and no. I’m not telling who it was…. Yet…..)

Late Mahler poses even greater technical challenges- the meter changes in the 2^nd Mvt of the 10^th Symphony are wilder than anything by Stravinsky, and there is simply nothing else like the final movement of Das Lied von der Erde in all of conductor-dom. Rite of Spring is but an exercise by comparison. In this instance, the music sounds simple and serene, but is, in fact, incredibly complex, as Mahler creates a new form of counterpoint in which sections playing the same or similar material come in and out of focus with each other- a sort of calculated blur. The conductor is beating so slowly in 1 that it feels like anything could happen between beats- it is a new kind of difficulty, and almost the opposite of the challenges of Stravinsky.  Mahler’s calculated chaos means the players aren’t sure wether to trust their eyes or their ears, and may try to fix things that aren’t broken. It is the difficulty of fusing complexity with near stasis. It pushes concentration, awareness and focus for everyone on stage to the limits of what the mind can achieve. Mahler may push the ship farther out to sea than any of contemporaries in terms of funky meters, but what really sets his music apart is the difficulty of doing musically complex things in an emotionally demanding setting. The end of Das Lied can only work if everyone is in complete command technically and in the exact right place spiritually.

We live in a time that is uncomfortable with contradiction- Mahler was a great master at managing and manipulating contradiction to communicative ends. Today we say that this composer’s music is consonant and that composer’s music is dissonant- Mahler’s music is both, and therefore when consonant feels more consonant and when dissonant feels more dissonant. Likewise, the more he simplified his music, clarified his notation and refined his means of execution, the more he could demand and get from his performers.

So, you heard it here on Vftp-

Mahler’s music is harder to conduct than that of other composers….. and it isn’t.

The Views expressed in these postings are solely those of the author, and may not reflect the policies and opinions of any other organization, including The Bridgewater Hall or its resident orchestras.

“What,” they say, “no Mahler 9, no Beethoven 9, no Bruckner 9?”

No, no 9ths!

Here are Five Easy Reasons why I’m going out with a bang with Bobby.

1-       It is as perfect a symphony as ever written, and as good a candidate for the best symphony ever written as you are going to find.

2-       I’ve never done a Schumann symphony in Pendleton, and that cannot be allowed to stand.

3-       I ended my tenure with the Grande Ronde Symphony with Schumann 4, so I can make it my policy now to terminate all music directorships in Eastern Oregon with a Schumann Symphony.

4-       The piece explores profound themes of hope, redemption and love that I think are somehow relevant to my own life experience during this long chapter of the book of being Ken.

5-       It rocks. It will kick you apart. It stands 11 feet tall, weighs 600 pounds, eats whole rhinos for breakfast, smells like roses, drives a thousand miles an hour up hill, pays your taxes for you, changes babies, walks dogs, lifts hearts, destroys prejudice and restores promise.

Here is an earlier blog post that explores just one aspect of this amazing piece. 

http://kennethwoods.net/blog1/2008/06/20/schumann-and-bach-in-the-2nd-symphony/

I suppose my biggest concern is that this is our first Schumann symphony together. I can’t tell you how far we’ve come at the SMP by working through so much of his music. The learning curve is huge, even though everything you need to know is there in the music. Schumann’s music doesn’t need help, it needs rescuing from those who would help it. People have read so much crap about him, his mental stability, his orchestration and his conducting that they either ignore his markings, which seem to be all perfectly logical and incredibly effective in this piece, or they start changing things without first making an honest effort to realize his intentions. If I can get the band to take his markings just as seriously as they take Mahler’s, I think we’ll have a fine show on our hands.

Not long ago, the drama was a plague of flies, which, last I heard, were still annoying the citizens of swish Altrincham.

As I drove into Pendleton yesterday, I was struck by the vast devastation of the outer reaches of the city. The whole network of main roads connecting the interstate to the heart of town were torn up. It looks like a war is on. Huge diggers ripped loose giant slabs of asphalt to be carried away in waiting dump trucks, to be piled on a mountain of rubbish behind the local Wal-Mart.

On arrival at the orchestra’s home, the Vert Auditorium, I was further struck by the precariousness of life in Pendleton. Should I have been surprised? I think not- in years past, our offices have been razed, our libraries reduced to ashes. No random destruction is too great, no pointless injustice to extreme to happen within this cozy burgh.

Now, our Hall was little more than a construction site- some wise engineer had condemned the fly system in the theatre. Our acoustic ceiling above the stage, at best a barely-effective death trap, had been condemned and removed, but the promised reinforcements and repairs had yet to appear, and won’t do so until after my tenure here reaches its grizzly end on Saturday. How much of Bobby Schumann’s genius will be lost when all those timbres are heard only by the timbers of the roof when the sound floats up rather than pours out on Saturday?

Then, there is the plumbing.

It is a time honored tradition, now reaching its end, to save any and all bad news for after Ken’s arrival.

With that in mind, I listened somewhat wearily as I was told of pipes blocked and pipes leaking, of corrosion, leakage (what a vile word!) and collapse. As the waters of the local aquifer threatened to drown our modest concert hall, a fateful decision was made- the City would re-plumb the entire building in time for our final concert. When I arrived on Tuesday afternoon, a team was working feverishly, replacing fixtures, pipes and insulation around sinks, johns and water fountains alike. The steam heating in the office was working for the first time in many weeks.

But, on Wednesday, dark clouds gathered. Nary a hairy man-cleavage was in sight. Hours, and then a day went by without any sign of progress, or, of effort. I finally implored Lisa-Marie to call the City and remind them that destiny awaits us all- there is a concert in this building in 72 hours, and one thing classical fans demand at every concert in every venue is plumbing. Peeing in a field is for rockers. Classical fans don’t do port-a-potties.

Will we have running water? Will those toilets and sinks be re-connected again to the walls that have housed them for so many years? Will the floorboards rot from seepage, or our ceiling collapse? Will our more elderly patrons have a place to answer Nature’s most urgent call?

Anything is possible in Pendleton. Readers often comment on the ambition of our many Mahler concerts, but Carmen was in many ways the biggest project we ever did here- an army of soloists, children’s choirs and grown up singers joined the band that week. The day before the performance, a City engineer, without warning, condemned our stage extension, then in use for 11 years. He threatened to wrap our esteemed venue in yellow “condemned” tape- can you imagine Carnegie in such a predicament?

But Pendleton can rally- in all of fifteen minutes a team of men, none paid nor looking to be, arrived with saws, power drills and lumber. Within one hour, they had rebuilt the extension to code, not because they owed us a favor, nor because we could pay them for their time, but because this is Pendleton, and that’s what you do here. You answer the call. You fix what needs fixin’. Miracles can happen here.

Still, with destruction and delay all around today, I find myself fantasizing about a truly Wagnerian finale to my Pendleton adventure.

We are finishing Schumann 2 in a blaze of glory, when the ceiling finally collapses, the walls of the ancient auditorium crumble and the long-defective plumbing explodes with pent-up rage. Great geysers of tap water and raw sewage  explode from half-plastered walls in as-yet-un-re-opened bathrooms.

Meanwhile, the brass section is building a great, raging pyre of violins, pianos, contra-bassons, stage-flooring-saturated –in-the-blood-of-the-conductor and pops charts, and, shrieking the battle cry of the Valkyires, I slide the Ring onto my finger, wave to those sexy Rhinemaidens, don my brass brassiere, mount my noble steed Grane, and ride to my immolation on the shore of the raging river of who-knows-what, as the walls of Valhalla itself fall forever into the raging inferno.

Wouldn’t you want to see that?

7:30 PM this Saturday, Vert Auditorium.

Tickets on sale at Armchair Books and the OES office.

On top of this, they both seem masters of those moments that make you want to stop in the middle of the concert (or even just 10 seconds before the end of the concert!) and say “did you hear that!?!?!?!?! That is pure genius! Let me show you what Haydn just did! Let me show you what wonders Schumann has tucked away in the texture here.” There are so many moments of magic in these pieces that probably get missed on first, second and tenth hearing.

My mentor and friend Michael Steinberg would not have approved of this program- he cautioned me against overusing one key throughout the program (the Schumann is in E major, everything else tonight was in D major). I say that, but he did like my pairing of the Elgar fiddle concerto with Firebird, both of which are in B. In the end, I tried to make the best of the peculiar ending of Mozart’s Idomeneo Overture, which was intended to lead seamlessly into the drama of the opera, by segueing directly into the Haydn Symphony. Both are in D, but the D major ending of the Mozart possibly takes away from the carefully crafted tonal ambiguity of the Haydn, which starts without a third, then settles in D minor until the Allegro. Did the sunny Mozart take away from the tension in the Haydn introduction? I don’t know, but I did think the moment of tension between the two pieces was interesting and fresh (and full of page turns).

We’re getting close to the end of our Schumann project, which has been a deeply inspiring adventure. Most of all, it has made me want to do the whole thing over again- we worked in great detail on the opening of the Overture, a piece I’ve done before, but I still feel like we’ve only scratched the surface. Schumann says so much with so few notes in so little time, and everything is so rich with possibility and mystery.

It’s been interesting listening to the features on Gergiev and Kleiber in the same week. Both are essentially creative, almost improvisational performers, but Kleiber insisted on extensive rehearsals- more than any other conductor could get. For him, this was the only way to unleash true freedom. Gergiev almost refuses to rehearse- for him, the rehearsal could dull reactions. Gergiev’s methodology depends entirely on a fantastically disciplined orchestra, completely attuned to his inner chemistry. Kleiber, well, nobody else could ever get that time with an orchestra, but we dream- what could we do if we could really dig deeply into each work before unleashing our fantasy in concert?

In the end, most of us fall somewhere between being best on 20 rehearsals or none. What most of us have in common is this burning, elemental desire to find that situation where we have the  right balance of time, focus and freshness. Rehearsal time is not always productive- we had one moment in rehearsal that was perfect, which we paid for in the performance. It was the end of a movement where the orchestra plays 3 staccato chords, 2 eighth notes and one quarter note, all with dots. In the rehearsal we got a perfect and subtle differentiation between the note values without it sounding like we were making a point.

One good soul couldn’t resist asking “so, is the crotchet longer than the two quavers?” I could feel our little miracle evaporating in a swamp of good intentions, but the question begs an answer.

“Probably, but best to just play exactly what I show.” It’s the sort of answer that is ambivilant enough to piss off the whole orchestra, but what few realize is the ambivilance is on purpose- I need the orchestra to stay responsive and attentive, not to simply re-create something we’ve drilled in during rehearsal.

But, I answered….. With that, pencils swirled in mid-air to mark a little line over that last crotchet.

Sure enough, in the concert, the moment came- short, short, slightly-less-short. So far so good, but just as the sound disappeared, I could hear the lonely sound of a single violinist earnestly and diligently holding that crotchet “longer’ than the quaver. I’m sure nobody in the audience knew, but for us, a little bit of magic just died.

This sort of thing happens all the time- the genius of Kleiber (okay, part of the the genius) was that he seemed to be able to use the hours of rehearsal to put the musicians more in the moment, more attuned to an improvisational and organic freedom. In the Radio 3 piece today, there was an example of a CSO musician asking if the upshot of a long metaphorical description was that an entrance should be louder or softer. In this instance, Kleiber, probably in despair, answered “louder.” I bet in his soul the answer was “just right.” The answer is listen, the answer is trust, the answer is watch, the answer is to doubt and not doubt, but most of all, to just listen to what the music is telling you and to reconcile what you hear with what you see. The answer is to rehearse, but not rehearse, to prepare but wing it, to sort everything and leave all to chance and inspiration. The answer is probably not just “louder” or “longer”….

My glee is due to the fact that with more than half our Schumann exploration now behind us, I could really feel that first rehearsal was proof positive that we have accomplished something together in terms of learning the grammar of Schumann’s music language. Having just done another Schumann symphony with a fine orchestra who have done almost nothing by Bobby S in recent memory, it really hit home how much I had had to explain and ask for with the other band, and how much the SMP were doing right off.

So what is the key playing Schumann well?

It’s depressingly simple- play it like the great music it is. All the complete and total condescending and inane crap we’ve all heard about Schumann’s orchestration, sanity and supposed weaknesses as a composer means that most musicians, completely without malice, read his music with terribly low expectations. They disregard dynamics and tempi, and don’t throw themselves into the music as they would if it was Beethoven or Brahms. Not long ago I did a Schumann work with a guest timpanist, nice guy, who asked me about possible note changes saying “well, we all know Schumann was pretty careless with timpani notes.” WTF?!?!?!??!?! The result is grey and grim playing and tedious rehearsals, all of which reinforces those same sad, wrong preconceptions. Last night the SMP ripped into the piece as if they fully expected it to be great, and why shouldn’t they? Our last 2 Bobby S symphonies left the audiences screaming and hollering.

So, the secret to being a Schumann specialist is to trust him and take what he wrote seriously. No secret insight is required. Likewise, I remember vividly studying Bloch’s  Schelomo with Parry Karp, who is in my opinion, the world expert on Bloch’s string music. I was so excited to find out the “secret handshake” of Bloch playing, which turned out to be playing exactly what the dead guy wrote in the score. The results were stunning! Depressingly, many teachers seem to think that holding out the notion that somehow they are the keepers of secret knowledge not in the score is often the norm. They put power over their students ahead of teaching the truth of the music.

I mentioned yesterday that we are playing the first Leonore Overture (no. 2) on the same concert, giving us a chance to juxtapose two pieces that were famously revised. The original version of Schumann 4 has come back into fashion in the last 15 years, and has been recorded many times. It’s quite interesting, but as so happens with Schumann, the re-emergence of this version has been used as a new hammer with which to beat the reputation of the great Bobby S.

Anytime a piece exists in more than one version there are bound to be things in the original that, on their own, are cooler than in the revision. Usually, when they disappear in the revision it is because they caused problems for the piece as a whole- perhaps they overpowered what was to come, or revealed too much of where the music needed to go, or brought the form to a halt. For instance, Leonore 2 is full of things that are extremely cool but demand incredible concentration from the audience- like the vast silences after the ff chords in the introduction. I think one night with a coughing, shuffling audience probably convinced Beethoven that he needed to fill those gaps, but in the concert hall or on recording, the effect can be stunning. Also, the piece was too dramatic and complete to serve as a prelude to the opera which followed it.

That said, I find it remarkable how much better the revised version of Schumann 4 is- not because I expected Bobby to botch the re-write, but because the new, trendy view seems to be so solidly that the original is in some ways better (this started with Brahms, who was also badly wrong about the Violin Concerto- many of the misjudgements about Bobby come from his 3 closest soulmates, Joachim, Clara and Brahms, all of whom were too close to his final illness and badly misjudged the work of his later years).

The fact is that the revision is much more coherent, powerful, focused and lucid. The transitions all work better, the counterpoint is stronger, the sense of direction more compelling. I last did this piece on my final concert with the Grande Ronde Symphony. It’s placement on a momentous night of my life tells you something of how much I love it, but I still long considered it a slightly lesser work than the 2^nd and 3^rd symphonies. Now I’m not so sure- like Brahms, it’s almost impossible to pick the best Schumann symphony. The D minor is intentionally slight in some ways (he considered calling it Symphonic Fantasy), but somehow it’s structural tautness means that the whole is far more than the sum of the parts. Where the 2^nd is truly epic, the 4^th moves ahead with almost cinematic alacrity, which meant the cumulative energy of the symphony is titanicly explosive.

Most stupidly, many critics (following Brahms misguided lead) seem to think that the orchestration of the revision is inferior to that of the original. Both versions are beautifully orchestrated, but the revision is clearly better. Schumann wanted a bigger, more robust sound, and he got what he wanted. Schumann was an early Romantic composer- orchestration had not yet attained the status of almost a separate art that it would once Wagner arrived, but his imagination is astonishing. Remember, we just did the Konzerstucke for 4 Horns last month, which, considering the valve horn was a brand new invention, is quite simply the most creative and effective writing for horn quartet in musical history. The 4^th is full of great orchestral moments, particularly his compelling dramatic use of the trombones at the key moments of the piece, as well as the wonderful colors in the Romanze, particularly the mixture of solo cello and oboe, and the beautiful violin solo in the b section. Karajan got it- he made a point in his recordings of all the Schumann symphonies not to re-touch anything. The results speak for themselves.

Too often, though, the audience doesn’t get to hear what a good conductor can see on the page because conductor and orchestra approach Bobby’s orchestration with scandalously low expectations, and they get what they were after. When we play a Mahler symphony or a Strauss tone poem (or even a Beethoven overture, whose orchestral writing is far more problematic), we expect the orchestration to be great, and that translates into a kind of hyper-energized playing that brings the musical content vividly to life. Schumann deserves the same treatment, and now SMP seem to get that- they’re playing it with the swagger that comes from knowing that the audience is going to go berserk for it. Fun.

As regular readers will know, the SMP is in the midst of a multi-season survey of the major works of Robert Schumann- we’ve recently done the concertos for piano and cello and the 2^nd and 3^rd Symphonies as well as some shorter works. Later this year we’re playing the Konzertstucke for Four Horns and the Fourth Symphony (final version). When this project first came to mind, I knew the violin concerto would have to be part of it, if only because, after a lifetime as a professional musician, I had yet to hear a live performance of it.

In fact, it was nearly lost to history completely thanks to the intrigues of Joseph Joachim, for whom it was written. Schumann wrote it in 1853 and Joachim read it with his orchestra that year, but had not learned it properly, and claimed his arm was tired from conducting (I’ll remember that one for my own use). He promised to give Schumann a better hearing, admitting “I did it such injustice,” but despite repeated promises to play it to Schumann at the asylum in Endenich, Schumann never heard it again. Joachim did occasionally read parts of it with colleagues, and played the piece through with Clara Schumann in 1855 in celebration of the Schumann’s 15^th anniversary.

However, Brahms, Joachim and Clara eventually came to the conclusion that the Violin Concerto was a failure- Joachim went so far as to use phrases like “mental lassitude,” “bewildering passages,” “morbid brooding,” and “tiresome repetitions.” Together, the three decided the piece should never be published, and the manuscript was finally bequeathed by Joachim to the Prussian State Library with the stipulation that it not be published until 100 years after the composer’s death.

It was Joachim’s niece, Jelly d’Aranyi (for whom Bartok wrote both of his violin sonatas and Ravel wrote Tzigane) who first brought the lost concerto to the world’s attention. An avid spiritualist, she claimed Joachim had told her about it in a spiritual visitation. In the end, however, her Jewish heritage meant she could never give the first performance in Germany in 1937. Instead, the utilitarian Georg Kulenkampf premiered the piece, but with cuts and with the solo  part extensively re-written by Hindemith (whose contributions had to remain uncredited because he had since become labeled as a degenerate musician by the Nazi state).

The first performance of the score as Schumann wrote it was finally given a month later by Yehudi Menuhin , first in a violin and piano reduction at Carnegie Hall, then with the New York Philharmonic under another great violinist, Georges Enescu.

Since 1937, the work has had its champions, notably Joshua Bell and Gidon Kremer in recent years, but it remains a rarity. Even now, there is no full score available(UPDATE- as of 10.10.2009 Breitkopf has finally published a new Urtext edition of the work, which is wonderful news), only a pocket score. As I’ve gotten to know the piece, I’ve found that I completely disagree with Brahms, Clara and Joachim- it’s a wonderful, deeply moving piece, although I think that had Joachim come through on his promises of a premiere while Schumann was still well enough to hear it, he might have made a few small revisions.

Its continuing neglect may be the lingering effects of a painful birth. Perhaps the piece was a reminder of a painful time that the three friends wanted to forget- there is too much great music in it for them to have mistaken it so badly otherwise. Critics and commentators have always been tempted to outbursts of rare stupidity on the subject of Schumann in general, and his late music in particular, and it is very difficult to play for the soloist (Joachim obviously found it too challenging, and this was the man for whom Brahms wrote all his violin music).

On the other hand, I think it will always be music for a special state of mind- like the late music of Beethoven, long passages of it seem to already be part of another world, particularly the almost unbearably tender and fragile slow movement. Like the best late music of many composers, Schumann already seems to be living partly in the beyond.

Though I knew I wanted desperately to program the piece with the SMP, I was doubtful as to whether I could find a soloist- Josh and Kremer are out of our budget and few fiddle players have the time or technique to learn a work that so daunted Joachim and that they may never play again. Impressed by her performance of the Prokofiev G minor Concerto with us two years ago, I asked the young British violinist Alexandra Wood if she was interested in learning an impossibly hard piece she might never get to play again for a very modest fee. To my delight, she wrote back that she loved Schumann and would be delighted to take it on.

The first movement shares some of the rhapsodic and otherworldly qualities of the first movements of the Schumann Piano and Cello concertos, but the key of D minor (Schumann was very conscious of the historical associations of keys in the music of the past, and this movement has references to D minor works including the first movement of Beethoven 9 and the Bach Chaconne) gives the music an extra dimension of  power, existential dread and struggle. The brief slow movement, on the other hand, is intimate and fragile- one of the most beautiful in the repertoire. This is music that lives in a twilight realm of ephemeral visions, longings and hauntings. However, as in the other two concerti, Schumann leaves behind the sensitive and vulnerable side Eusebian side of his nature in the Finale, in which his confident, extrovert and optimistic Florestan persona comes to the fore in a jolly, virtuosic finale that pushes the soloist to the limits of the possible.

KW

Advice for the curious- the best resource on this work I know of is the marvelous essay by my drinking buddy Michael Steinberg in The Concerto, on which I have leaned heavily in writing this.

Here is a brief sample of the slow movement from Joshua Bell’s fine recording- buy it.

Surrey Mozart Players
Saturday, June 28, 2008
7:30 PM
Electric Theatre
Piston- Sinfonietta
Mozart- Sinfonia Concertante
Oliver Heath- violin, Gary Pomeroy- viola

The first thought is a reminder to local listeners to get your tickets today if you possibly can, as the concert was close to sold out on Wednesday, in spite of the fact that we’re doing a work by Walter Piston (hopefully it is partially because of the fact that we’re doing a work by Walter Piston, as it is an amazing piece).

I voiced concerns here on Wednesday about cycles in general, and mentioned that it felt like the first manifestations of cycle-phobia were appearing in this rehearsal sequence. I needn’t have worried- Bobby (Bobby Schumann) has seen us through. The 2^nd Symphony has proved to be an irresistible force. All 4 of the Schumann symphonies are great, but the 2^nd is the greatest. Much as it might be nice to finish the cycle with the best piece, maybe it is good to put such a miraculous piece in the middle to lift us all on to the final stages of the cycle. When one of our bassoonists asked me “are all his symphonies this good” on Wednesday, all I could say is that all his symphonies are pretty damn good, but……

I asked my colleague in the orchestra what she disliked about rehearsing Schumann and we had a good chat. To my delight, she said she was loving rehearsing this piece and that it was just the scrubando writing in the 3^rd she found exhausting.

One can’t rehearse Schumann’s orchestral music without recalling all the many clichés about his problems as an orchestrator. To me, Schumann has one of the great ears for color of any composer. Think of the brass writing in the 4^th movement of the 3^rd symphony, or the slow movement of the cello concerto where the soloist and the principal cellist of the orchestra link hands for one of the most miraculously beautiful passages in any piece.

Where Schumann is most often faulted is in the area of balance, but poor orchestral balance is not a composer’s fault but a conductor’s, especially in music of this period. Symphonies from Haydn to Brahms were expected by their authors to be played by orchestras ranging in size from 30 to 110 players. Any of these composers would have expected a good conductor to make adjustments- Beethoven himself used alternations of full and reduced string sections in performances of his symphonies with large orchestras, but not with small groups where everyone played all the time. Any 18^th or 19^th century composer would have doubled the woodwinds, and in some cases even the brass for a performance with a huge string section, but might have reduced the wind dynamics for performances with a small one.

If you hear a Schumann symphony in a 3000 seat modern hall, you are already hearing something Schumann would not have planned for- halls in his day were much smaller than that. It’s up to a conductor to decide the best balance of forces for that space- if you get the right size band on stage, you can make fewer adjustments throughout a piece.

I don’t think of adjusting dynamics within a texture (such as having the brass release a long chord after an attack, or having the first violins play a sustained high note softer so that an inner voice can come out) as making changes- Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann or Mendelssohn would have all expected the performer to do that, as they wrote what they expected the audience hear, not what they expected the players to do, unlike Mahler, who tells the players what to do in order for the audience to hear what he wanted them to. Having 4 oboes play an ff passage instead of 2 is not re-orchestration, nor is changing a string accompaniment of a wind solo from mf to mp in a performance with a huge string section (or, even only using half the section).

Beyond that, I’ve never been tempted to change a bar of Schumann’s orchestration- his ear for color is too imaginative and inspired, and it has just never been necessary. Even with a passage that seems impossible for balance, the price of taking shortcuts is always high. In the last movement of Schu2 there is a passage at bar 134 where the horns and bassoons alternate bars of triplets in a quite noisy texture. The horns are easily heard, the bassoons usually lost- they’re softer by nature than the modern horn and in a weaker register. I just heard a fine recording where the conductor had brought in 2 extra horn players and given the bassoon part to them to solve the problem, but he created bigger problems than he solved. The triplets became quite overbearing, and the lack of variety in the color was clearly un-Schumannian. He should have hired two extra bassoons to double there and changed them to ff and the horns to mf- that is the adjustment Schumann would have expected, and therefore NOT a change…

Finally- we’re rehearsing Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola tonight, which I just conducted last week with the LCO. It is very unlike me to do this piece 2 times in such close succession, as I try to avoid it. Yes, it is beautiful, especially the slow movement, but it seems one of those pieces that is cursed. Most performances I hear have some HUGE indulgences, flaws and fiascos that you don’t tend to hear in other Mozart concertos.

First, more often than not, the soloists are poorly matched or not matched at all. Think of all those performances by an orchestra’s concertmaster and principal violist that simply hammer home the fact that they were born in different centuries, studied on different continents and don’t like each other. Then there is the “reward for good behavior” soloist pairing- when 2 members of the local youth orchestra get to do it before they head off to college where they would have learned how to play Mozart. Then there is the “it’s really a viola concerto” performance- the violist gets so over-excited that they become a little obsessive about the piece and plays insanely loud, while the violinist, flush with 5 concertos of his own, comes in unprepared and undermotivated, skidding all over the string and playing horrible out of tune. This week, we’re doing it with 2 members of the Heath Quartet, which should be a good match.

Then there are the horrible traditions and performance clichés that have been piled on this poor work, ones that have long since been eradicated from most of the other Mozart concerti. All those annoying, un-Mozartian tempo changes in the first movement…. Yuck!

And then there is the poor slow movement- one of the great ones in the literature. It’s just Andante, which, as we all know, doesn’t mean slow, it means walking. Piu andante in Mozart means go faster!

I once got in terrible trouble over a Mozart Andante. I was doing one of the flute concerti, and the soloist’s teacher gave me the video of Galway playing it with the Mostly Mozart orchestra to study. Aside from the heavenly flute playing, it was pretty dire, and the slow movement was beyond funereal. I was sure he didn’t mean me to copy that tempo. We got to the rehearsal and I started the movement at a normal-ish Andante clip and the teacher barked from the hall that it was too fast. In my best nice-guy voice, I said something like “but it is Andante and not Adagio…” Just that, nothing more…The next morning he called my boss and yelled for 20 minutes about my arrogant attitude. My boss then pulled me in and asked me point blank “so how slow did he want you to go?” I played him the tape and he warned me to be more diplomatic in future…

My revenge came about a year later when Emmanuel Pahud did the same piece in town, with a lovely flowing Andante. Well, he’d become the flutist of the day, surpassing Galway by this point, and the next I’d heard the same flute teacher was telling other conductors- “it’s too slow, Andante and not Adagio….” Just goes to say that who says a thing means more than what gets said.

One reason the piece was so highly esteemed in its day was that it is what I call a “crafty” piece- that is, it is not only exciting and emotionally shattering music, it is also music that contains an extraordinarily rich array of musical touches of compositional craft.

For instance, the piece is full of ciphers, codes, quotations and references to other music. The master of cipher and quotation is, of course, JS Bach, and, as it turns out, Schumann 2 is the most Bach-ian of the Schumann symphonies, and one of the most Bachian of all symphonies ever written.

There is a biographical reason for this. In 1844, Schumann had become terribly ill. Writers often speak, to my mind, rather glibly, of Schumann’s history of mental illness, and musicians and critics lacking in both good musical taste and human decency often seem to link Schumann’s health problems to what they wish to criticize in his music. “Of course Schumann couldn’t orchestrate,” they often say, “he was crazy…”

What I find particularly offensive in so much writing on Schumann is the intimation, or outright accusation, that Schumann’s mental illness was the manifestation of weakness on his part. As anyone who really understands the nature of mental illness can tell you, such an interpretation represents a sick misunderstanding of mental illness and brain chemistry.

Make no mistake about it- in 1844, Robert Schumann fell ill, nearly mortally ill, as much so as if he had developed cancer. That he recovered from this illness to write his greatest masterpiece shows an almost superhuman strength of will and great personal courage, not weakness.

At the height of his illness, Schumann was unable to listen to or work on music, tortured as he was by auditory hallucinations. As he began his recovery, he turned to an intense personal study of the music of JS Bach. Inspired by Bach, Schumann began work on his masterpiece while still ill, and composed his way back to health. Throughout the work, Bach seems to stand in the background, alongside Haydn and Beethoven as a trio of guardian angels, guiding Schumann back to his muse.

Bach is invoked in the very first bars of the symphony as Schumann writes an introduction at is, in essence, a chorale prelude, one of the most Bachian of forms. Above an endlessly self-reinventing and re-developing melody in the strings, we hear a simple and declamatory theme. Just as Bach would use a Lutheran chorale theme not of his own creation in his chorale preludes, Schumann’s chorale theme is also a quote- of the opening of Haydn’s last symphony, no 104.

One work that we know Schumann spent a lot of time with during his convalescence was Bach’s Musical Offering. The following Allegro ma non troppo is a study in perpetual motion, most of it generated from a simple four note theme which is treated almost as an ostinato. As it happens this ostinato rhythm is taken from the Trio Sonata of the Musical Offering, a piece that we’ll hear more of later in the symphony.

Other than the first page of Don Juan, nothing has brought more stress into the lives of violinists than the Scherzo of Schumann 2, the bane of orchestra audition-ers around the world. Sadly, I think the trauma of all those tapes and auditions have slightly blinded many players to the wonders of the  Scherzo as a piece of music.  It is a brilliant, endlessly inventive movement with two very different Trios- one spry and witty, and the second soulful and rarified. The second trio begins with a beautifully crafted four part chorale, the theme of which is then made the subject of a brief contrapuntal episode. Again, the spirit of Bach is felt in every bar, especially once we realize that the second part of the theme is a quotation of the musical BACH motive (Bb-A-C-B natural). All the more remarkable is that we can see that the BACH theme is almost identical to the main theme of the first movement, especially when it is transposed up a fourth later in the trio (Eb, D, F, E natural here, E, D, F, D in the first movement, surely no accident, given Schumann’s love of developing new themes by changing one note at a time)  The movement reaches its joyous culmination in a return of the Haydn fanfare.

The third movement begins with what seems to be among the most heart-wrenching and Schumann-esque of melodies. If only Schumann had written it! In fact the violin melody is an almost note for-note quote of the same Trio Sonata of the Musical offering as he quotes in the first movement. In it’s pathos, espressivity and long-breathed lines, it is the quintessential (and perhaps the greatest) Romantic slow movement, but throughout the movement the independence of voices recalls the presence of Bach again and again.

The Finale was the movement in which Schumann said that for the first time since his illness began that he began to feel himself again. It begins with a bracing march theme which has a striking resemblance to “Es lebe Sarastro” from the Magic Flue, and that celebration of life seems very much the mood of the movement. Then, one by one, Schumann works his way back through the symphony- first reworking Bach’s Musical Offering theme, then gradually returning to the ideas of earlier movements. Along the way we find two songs, one by Schumann himself- Widmung (Dedication) presented to Clara on their wedding day, and Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (To the Immortal Beloved), where Beethoven sets the words “Take them then, these songs.” As with the BACH-motive quote in the 2^nd movement, Schumann seems to discover the Beethoven quote almost by accident, gradually changing a note or two of his own melody, until Beethoven’s cantus firmus emerges. “Take them then, these songs” says the poet to his beloved. A dedication indeed, of love and gratitude, a song of thanksgiving and love to Clara- Beethoven’s great hymn of thanksgiving was the Heiliger Dankesang from the op 132 quartet, a reverent and deeply personal statement of thanks. Schumann sings of love and gratitude to the whole world, and when Haydn’s fanfare returns at last, we know it is a call to celebration. At the end, Schumann has taken his place alongside those mentors, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and most of all, Bach.