Chamber music in Cleveland

I'm back in Ohio after five wonderful, exciting months in London. Sorry for no blogging: too much to do with students, museums, etc. Hard life!

Thrilled to be back on ClevelandClassical.com, reviewing the great concerts we have in NE Ohio (shameless self-promotion).

The latest: opening night of Frank and Diana Cohen's ChamberFest Cleveland 2014, third year of a two-week festival.

Here's my review:  http://clevelandclassical.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/8811/

Kevin Puts' wonderful trio for Marimba, clarinet, and violin. You might see it in another performance here.

And: the plum of the evening, Faure's great c minor piano quartet!

Here is Gilels, Kogan, Barshai, and Rostropovich from 1958 playing the Faure. Check it out! 

A modernist look for Peter Grimes

Operas are servants of two masters: the plot and the music. That is, the plot often belongs to one period and the music comes from another. Where the two can cross purposes is in the visual design: if the plot is Renaissance, say (think Gianni Schicchi, Don Carlo, or Rigoletto) but the music is opera-house Italian, someone has to make a choice about what kind of costumes or set we are going to see -- doublets or frock-coats? or maybe T-shirts?

Renaissance costume: Don Carlo, Met 2010

19th-century costumes: Glyndebourne, 2004

T-shirts, etc: Bavarian State Opera, 2012

It gets particularly problematic when an opera depends on an essentially realistic source story. So with Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, based on a gritty, naturalist story (albeit written by a poet, George Crabbe, in the Romantic period, whom Byron called "nature's sternest painter"): a gloomy man eking out a subsistence living as a fisherman on the Suffolk coast, whose depression lashes out in violence on his apprentice boys, abusing and eventually killing them in fits of anger. He's driven to these fits in part by his own depressive personality, and in part by the prying, gossiping, judgmental provincial town he lives in (Britten and Crabbe's home town of Aldeburgh).

San Franciso Opera 1976

This is material that in many ways depends on its location in time and place. The obvious choice, then, is to set the opera in early 19th-century coastal England.

But there's Britten's amazingly modernist music to take into account. It's edgy, abrupt, bitterly ironic. Having Britten in the pit seems to demand something other than realism: not Zola but Auden (or even Ted Hughes?) would be the literary equivalent. 

The current Grimes at the English National Opera takes Britten's modernism as the cue for an amazing set, as angular and occasionally nasty as the score. Walls that tilt sharply; tables that are thrust up at horrible angles, on which the singers have to balance; sharp, eerie shadows cast by characters, as if their souls were lurking on the back wall of the set; a bilious and claustrophic lighting, out of Hopper's Night Cafe.

The only video I can find of the production is the ENO trailer, clearly a promotional collage. But its snippets capture some of the asymmetrical, jagged energy of this remarkable modernist production:



The great success of this tragic opera is that it takes this nasty tale about a terrible man and makes it beautiful; even Peter Grimes himself, like Macbeth, shows a soul of beauty. Here, to end with, is Stuart Skelton, who sings Grimes at the ENO (though he was sick the night I heard it, and his understudy did a great job), singing the amazing first-act aria, "The Great Bear."

The text:

Now the great Bear and Pleiades
where earth moves
Are drawing up the clouds
of human grief
Breathing solemnity in the deep night.
Who can decipher
In storm or starlight
The written character
of a friendly fate –
As the sky turns, the world for us to change?
But if the horoscope's
bewildering
Like a flashing turmoil
of a shoal of herring,
Who can turn skies back and begin again? 

Canterbury sounds

Canterbury Cathedral is not only dazzling complex and beautiful to the eye -- the long reach of the nave, the high Gothic arches with their leaping secondary columns, the light pouring in the nave in the intervals of low winter sunshine -- but also to the ear.

The impact of sound, music really, in this cathedral makes me realize that those builders had it in their minds to create acoustic spaces that would thrill and exalt.

In the picture, you can see a big group of people -- well, colorful dots in the picture -- at the end of the nave. They are just in front of the point where the level of the floor abruptly rises some 16 or 20 feet to the level of the quire. (Further to the east, to add to the topographical complexity, the floor rises again to the high altar, and then again to the shrine of St. Thomas -- Becket, that is).

We heard the dress rehearsal of Messiah with the Canterbury Chorus (a town group, quite good) and the London Handel orchestra, on period instruments. It isn't music designed for this space, and so at times the fugues got muddy, swirling around at random in the vast and intricately reflective spaces.

But parts of it were stunning: particularly the countertenor, Robin Blaze -- who found perfectly the resonance of the space. Here's his performance of "But who may abide" with Tafelmusik...


We did not come back for the concert that evening, beautiful as this rehearsal was. We did, though, stay for evensong, and that was startlingly different. To begin with, the group was much smaller -- a choir of 16 -- and sang, not in the nave, but in the "quire" -- a much narrower, more intimate space, the wooden seats where the monks used to chant eight times a day.

By Vespers, the sun had set, and the nave was in darkness. And then, it was different, too, in that the skies had not only gone dark, but a storm had blown in with thunder, lightning, and hail beating on the roof and the vast, dark windows.

And then, different in that this was liturgical music, service music, sung as part of a meditative event, what we would call worship if we were "churched."

Messiah is Christian in origin and ideology, and sacred in intent, but is not worshipful: educational, theatrical, virtuosic, it is Enlightenment concert-music. The service music of the evensong Vespers is, by contrast, deliberately worshipful, contemplative of what it might mean to be in the presence of God: the Magnificat (Mary amazed by what has happened to her in becoming pregnant with God); and the song (Nunc dimittis) of Simeon, the old priest who sees the child Jesus in the temple and can finally let go his own hold on this life. Even the anthem was contemplative, Vaughan Williams' beautiful and simple setting of George Herbert's poem "Come, My Way, My Truth, My Life."


And again, a difference: while for some 1500 years, all the liturgical music in Canterbury Cathedral has been sung by men (yes, all-- at least as far as I can tell), this Vespers was sung by 16 girls. The cathedral staff seemed delighted that this was happening, finally. I gather the church has to be careful not to offend more conservative parts of the Anglican communion, but this church itself had initiated this change, trained the girls, and welcomed them warmly.

And the acoustic space of Canterbury's quire accepted the sound, as well: the psalms and the other service music resonated quite as richly as the boys' sound would have.

As we walked around the cathedral earlier that day, we heard the church's sound in yet another way: the bells. It was a peal of 8 bells, first at a slowish tempo, and then in what seemed to us a fiercely demanding allegro. Imagine pulling those ropes at just the right time to get your bell in rhythm with seven others!

I made a recording of about two minutes of this exhilarating peal, the sounds pouring out of the cathedral tower into the open air and across the old town.

London as fabric

Walking around the streets of London is a time "warp" in more than the Star Trek meaning (is that the source?): it is as if the streets are warp and weft of a colorful fabric, maybe a batik, that wonderful Indonesian cloth where the threads are laid down, painted or dyed, and then rewoven (I think).

Townhouses (early 19th century?) on Harley Street

What I mean about the fabric is that just as the streets weave in and out of each other, blending, mysteriously changing name and direction, so does the history that each one indicates. Here where we live, north of Oxford Street, it's the late nineteenth-century, the time of the radical writers Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, and of University College London with its non-denominational, radically practical and empirical education.

But go a bit south (we just walked this, home from dinner), and we're in the eighteenth-century: Leicester Square and Covent Garden, the operas, the late night stage parties, toffs in sedan-chairs and actresses in ... well...

Go east to the city, and the world of Christopher Wren and the seventeenth-century is what you find: St. Paul's, and all the other churches with their intricate spires.

Go west to Westminster, and you're in the middle ages: an abbey, after all! and that wonderful pseudo-medieval Parliament building with its impossibly cranky offices, a place you can hardly imagine any work getting done.

But back to the weaving: although these sound like separate sections as I describe them, but in all of them, a bit of each of them can be found. It's in the texture: an ancient watering fountain by a Georgian house; the home of a radical philosopher by a church with an Anglo-Saxon foundation.

The London eye, the Houses of Parliament, and a northern sunset.

And of course, all around are the often desperately grandiose buildings of the late twentieth-century, sometimes like blots of ketchup on this delicately patterned batik! At least the London Eye is graceful!

Brahms and the still, small voice

Last week I heard the Cleveland Orchestra perform an all-Brahms evening -- the Academic Festival Overture (some thought it was jovial; I found its cheeriness pretty forced); the great 4th symphony (formally structured, massive, earnest, and astonishing); and the violin concerto, with German violinist Julia Fischer.






I think I first heard the concerto (at least, I first really listened to it) when I was home from college and heard the Cleveland Philharmonic, a semi-professional orchestra in which my uncle Frank Griesinger played clarinet, with a distinguished Cleveland surgeon, Dr. Jerome Gross, playing the solo.

Gross was a great amateur, an amateur who could really play. He owned a Stradivarius (which he kindly let me play once), and played chamber music with George Szell. As I remember it, it was a pretty good rendition, probably as good as in Brahms's time, though we've raised the bar since then.



Then, and now, the part that got me was right after the cadenza in the first movement. A cadenza in the late Romantic, of course, has to be agitated, virtuosic, dazzling. And it is in Brahms, whichever version of the cadenza anyone plays (there are many versions). Certainly it was, when Julia Fischer played it. Fast notes in triple and duple and quadruple and sextuples; the whole range of the fiddle; double stops and even little fugues; all from one little instrument. How could it all come from those four strings, I think? Amazing: playing on the edge of technique the whole way through.

And then the orchestra comes back in, and Brahms does the most amazing thing. Bravado yields to utter calm. The orchestra, barely a presence, supports the violinist as she plays the most sublime, high, quiet passage. It's just the very simple theme that starts the movement, as simple as a melody can get, just notes from the D major triad. D, then up to the F sharp, back to the D, past a little off-note, the B, down the triad to A and F sharp, exactly what you'd write if you didn't really feel confident modulating out of the home key.

What you see in this excerpt from the string parts in the score is the solo violin on the top line, and the other strings below it. (I've left out the winds). The second measure is the cadenza -- totally empty, an emptiness that the soloist needs to fill up with all her tricks.  All Brahms writes in is that little trill that ends the cadenza.

Then come those very high, simple, D major triad notes of the theme in the solo violin. No tricks at all. The orchestra (the string parts are below the solo violin in this example) are to play pianissimo, super-quiet. Yes, they do some interesting things (those sharps indicate that they're not really sticking to the D major triad), but mostly we listen to the soloist's simplicity.

Quiet, nothing new, nothing flashy (though, come to think of it, way up there on the fingerboard and not so easy to keep in tune -- and woe betide you if you let it get out of tune, for everyone would notice!).

Here's Julia Fischer playing the cadenza and the magical part that follows it (on YouTube, with Michael Tilson Thomas, conducting the NDR Symphony Orchestra). The transition from the cadenza to the passage I'm talking about occurs at about 4:35 in this excerpt -- but listen to the whole thing if you have time.

As T. S. Eliot writes in a mystical vein, it might be the axis of eternity, "the still point of the turning world." Or as Wordsworth writes, also feeling the mystery of quietude, it's a point at which "we see into the life of things." A moment of great change, but change without the fanfare that sometimes we insist upon.

Writing about music and poetry: Samuel Barber and Robert Lowell

Here's my latest review for Cleveland Classical, about Holst's Planets and Barber's beautiful Cello Concerto.  As you'll see, I keep thinking of ways to link music and poetry -- here, the 1946 Cello Concerto kept reminding me of the great Robert Lowell, whose book Lord Weary's Castle came out in that year as well. These American artists, trying to deal with World War II, with the mid century angst (it's not just the end of the century that matters), writing about torment and yet also trying to put it into a formal relationship, to write with meter and sometimes rhyme, like Barber, writing melodies and yet pushing them beyond what (say) Holst might have thought of doing, pushing beyond towards doubt and anxieties.

Here's an excerpt from Lowell's Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket -- notice how it's still formally exact -- meter and rhyme -- and yet how dark it is about his own New England history, and the history of the whalers. Not pleasant, and yet ... unmistakably lyrical. That "flail" in the fourth line could have been from one of the early preachers of New England, for it's a biblical image -- and also one from 19th century New England farming.

The bones cry for the blood of the white whale, 

the fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,

the death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears 

the gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail, 

and hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags 

and rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,

gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather.

Here is the second movement from the Barber concerto, played by Raya Garbousova, who premiered it. 

Amherst Early Music

I'm with Sue at Amherst Early Music Festival, which is not in Amherst, Mass., where it originated, but in New London, Connecticut. The weather is as beastly hot as I guess it is everywhere except San Francisco this summer. But the trees grow big and rich, Long Island Sound is blue and lovely (and produces a breeze), and the nubbly surface of the Connecticut topography is fascinating to one (like me) who normally lives at the edge of the Great Plains where a little dip and rise in the road is a major event.

Here are some of the trees, on the campus of Connecticut College. 

I went walking this morning at 6:30 along the "Old Norwich Road," on the west side of campus. 

The road is, according to the sign, the second oldest "turnpike" in the USA. Quieter than the Ohio Turnpike! 

The first day is mostly over: four classes in which I am singing and playing recorder. I'll try to get some pictures of classes for tomorrow. Lots of learning!

A meta-note: I am blogging here as an experiment in various blogging platforms and possibilities, with an eye to what my students might do. I'm interested in the pedagogy of digital multi-media: that is, how to encourage extending the analysis that I normally restrict to paper-writing (one medium, essentially) to include visuals, audio, video, drawings, maps, etc. This one is produced with Blogspot, a pretty standard blogging platform. I'm also wondering what other ways of producing text, image, etc, in combination, would be like. Tumblir, maybe?

Summer Music

I'm spending this week as a student (studying recorder playing) at Oberlin's Baroque Performance Institute, founded in the 1970s and responsible for producing (or at least stimulating) many of the great early music performers of the subsequent four decades.
This year: "In the valley of the Danube" -- the Austrians who preceded Haydn and Mozart. I'm working on Telemann, though, even though he's not a Danubian composer!

One of the great things about BPI is that they welcome old amateurs like me and put us in ensembles with excellent young players. Keeps me going, for sure.



On Sunday, after auditioning for my ensemble placement, I went to Cleveland for the ChamberFest concert: now in its second year, a pretty fabulous collection of young musicians from around the country. It's organized by Cleveland Orchestra principal clarinetist Franklin Cohen and his daughter Diana, concertmaster at Calgary.

Here's my review of that concert at ClevelandClassical.

Now back to practicing!

Leaving Paradise

Massaccio, The Expulsion

I wrote the poem below to keep pace with my students in my Milton course, who were creating poems, paintings, and pieces of music based on/working off their reading of Milton.

It's my way of putting a new spin on the ending of Paradise Lost (the last four lines of which are quoted as the epigraph).

It wasn't till after the course ended, on Sunday, that I realized it was not just about Adam and Eve leaving Paradise, it was also about me leaving this course on Paradise Lost and Milton.




Adam and Eve Walk Out of Paradise

The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

-- Milton, Paradise Lost

We left that evening, late, on foot.
The sun had set, but there was light
enough to see our way. We put
our faces east, to the coming night.

Looking back west, we saw the path
was guarded: angels watched us leave.
Who had arranged for all that wrath?
And why? To reinforce our grief?

To our surprise, the apple trees
had burst in bloom like white-hot balls
of flame against the darkening sky.
Some petals had begun to fall.

We had no clue of where to go,
but, really, we thought, how hard
could exile be? there was a road,
there were the trees, the earth, the stars.

We knew so little then, and yet,
the only things that mattered were
that we were there; that something lay ahead;
that nothing, then or now, was sure.

Admissions: Warning: spoilers and harsh critique

The supposedly 'feel-good' film Admissions (directed by Paul Weitz, with Tina Fey as Princeton admissions director Portia Nathan) seemed to me a gratuitous set of cruelties perpetrated on any woman unfortunate enough to be in camera's range. (Read on with spoilers...)

Space and the Vespers of 1610

 This post is motivated by the spectacular Vespers performance by the Green Mountain Project, Jolie Greenleaf, artistic director, and Scott Metcalfe, music director. I heard them in Cambridge, Mass., but they also sang in New York City. Here is the New York Times review by CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM.

Monteverdi apparently wrote his Vespers to get out of Mantua—some say, to get a job in Rome, some think in Venice.

He wanted some breathing room, literally: Mantua was unhealthy, surrounded by stagnant water, and becoming too provincial for Monteverdi. Working for the Duke, his primary musical space would have been the beautifully decorated but small assembly rooms in the duke's palaces.

So one might well imagine that space was on his mind as he thought about his musical portfolio.

What spaces might he have thought about? In Rome, surely, the Sistine Chapel. As the Papal chapel, that would not have been the right space for the Vespers, but Monteverdi included a more appropriate piece in his dossier publication, the Mass for six unaccompanied voices, in the conservative musical tradition favored by the Pope. Not as exciting as the Vespers  — or as flamboyant as Michelangelo's ceiling!— but safe and elegant.


And also in Rome, surely St. Peter's would have come to mind — vast, grand, not so much solemn as stirring. It would have been a great place for Monteverdi's newly theatrical music to resonate in.




But no job surfaced for Monteverdi in Rome. He did end up, though, in one of the greatest spaces of Italy for music: Saint Mark's in Venice. And for that acoustically and historically resonant space, the Vespers were a perfect job-application piece. The space, like the music, was versatile and complicated: capable of big gestures and intimacies alike.


Here is a clip of part of the Vespers, starting at the tenor solo, "Nigra Sum," performed in Saint Mark's (Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner). You can hear the wonderful reverb that supports the tenor and the theorbo. Added bonus: you can see some of the gorgeous mosaics. And notice one of the many ways Monteverdi has written space into the music: the tenor sings "Surge" -- "get up!"—on a repeated rising scale. Vertical space is right there in our ears!


More about this wonderful piece in another post!

Messiah as theater

I almost didn't go to Apollo's Fire's Messiah this Christmas. I get tired of the endless repetitions of the Christmas section, which so debilitates the power of this complicated and not altogether holiday-friendly oratorio. But Cleveland Classical asked me to review it, so we went.

We loved it. The performance had integrity and drama. Every part seemed rethought for the moment. And beautifully performed. Photo of Apollo's Fire by Roger Mastroianni.

As usual, here's my review. If you like it, I hope you'll subscribe to ClevelandClassical.com.

One of the stars was the soprano Meredith Hall, a wonderful convincing and utterly musical singer. Here's a clip from her website of her singing "Rejoice greatly" from the Messiah.

Another star was the wonderful baroque trumpeter Josh Cohen. Here's him playing "The trumpet shall sound" with another group:

Oberlin Musical Union

It's no wonder that Amadeus featured the Mozart C Minor Mass. Like so much of Mozart, this piece transcends its occasion (a commissioned mass in Salzburg, the town Mozart was so glad to have left).

Here's the throbbing, opening Kyrie (John Eliot Gardner):


And that spectacular solo he wrote for his wife Costanze-- the Christe eleison! Here's Salieri "listening" to it: http://youtu.be/vNaXQQbcgw0

Oberlin's Musical Union performed the mass last night.













My review is here: http://www.clevelandclassical.com/121112omunjrev.  Don't forget to sign up with Cleveland Classical while you're there!

The high point was Ellie Dehn's gorgeous singing of Et incarnatus est. (She's an Oberlin graduate!). On her website, here is her rendition of this "concerted" piece for flute, oboe, bassoon and soprano...

I went to Midori's recital at Cleveland Institute of Music last night. My review on Cleveland Classical is here.

It was incredible playing, astoundingly controlled. Her bow hand is unbelievable.

But oddly, the fire was not there, even in the Kreutzer.

My pet peeve (you've heard this before): don't program the most intense piece for the end of the concert. Ears like mine get tired. Performers get tired. The juice runs out.

I think the second part of the first half is the key: it's when we're warmed up as listeners, and at our most attentive.

Frankly, I think recitals should be shorter, too: under two hours. We pay a lot  to hear these performers, but we don't pay by the minute.

More thoughts from readers are welcome!

Brandenburgs!

I had the chance to hear, and review, Apollo's Fire's latest concerts, featuring Bach Brandenburgs 1, 2 and 5. So many NEW experiences of some very familiar works!


Want to know more? Check my review at ClevelandClassical.com.


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Trio sonatas and other delights

Oberlin's a tiny place that also happens to hold many of the world's joys. Great libraries, art museum, residents, students -- and visitors. Two recent visitors brought great Baroque music -- with two of my good friends who live here!


If that's enough of a teaser, link over to ClevelandClassical to read more:
Review
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Early Music -- Cleveland

It's astonishing, the wealth of early music performances at a high level in the Cleveland area. There's Oberlin, of course (more soon on that). There's Apollo's Fire, Jeannette Sorrell's prolific 20-year old baby. There's the relative newby, Debra Nagy's Les Délices, specializing in oboe and French music. And now, Burning River Baroque. I'm not sure I'm happy about the name (memories of the OLD Cleveland!), but the group is promising and fun.

My review of their concert this weekend is here, at Cleveland Classical.

Sunday in London

Three highlights today:

First: Manet (and more) at the Courtauld.



Second: strange sighting of Queen Victoria at Guildhall.




Third: a compressed, intense and fully committed performance of 'the Duchess of Malfi' on fringe theatre. This is the mad duke with his sister the duchess. You don't want to know what he's on about.

London

Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious Sumer by this sun of York.
The sun of England shone today and we were at the Globe to see Richard III, unabashedly rhetorical, performative and thrilling. Mark Rylance as a funny, wheedling, smarmy duke on his way to an unhappy kingship. Things moral and historical, as we know, catch up with him at the end, and what a shame. He's so entertaining to be around!




We sat in the Lords' rooms right over the stage!




-
Southwark Cathedral: tombs, history, no pretensions of being St. Paul's. loved it. This is the medieval poet John Gower.


And then, at the site of the Rose Theater, where Marlowe's plays were acted, in a tiny room above the excavated foundations, another strange excavation, the play 'Cardenio' by Shakespeare? fletcher? Who knows? Spoiler: ALL the characters were dead at the end.

This is the underground excavation, the outlines of the original Rose in red lights, lurid and dank like the play.



Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new. Well, not actually: another Jacobean tragedy, Duchess of Malfi.

London, day 1. Three cool things

One. St. Paul's reigns over the skyline of London as usual. I think of it as the original London Eye.



Two. Near there at the National Theatre, a bizarre, disturbing production of Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's least-read, least-liked play. Brilliantly acted by Simon Russell Beale although the production had problems. Did we need a rebellion as 'Occupy Athens?' Relevance but not enough scariness to the threats of the rebels to do nasty things to Athenians. The play is nasty enough without my saying more about those nasty things.



Three. The Wallace Collection, of decorative art (end tables to beat even Ikea!) and painting, in the house of the people who collected it, a house that is beautiful in itself. And such paintings! Hals, the laughing cavalier, Rembrandt, Boucher, Bonington... The galleries are newly papered with the most gorgeous silk, and hung in such interesting ways. Now, how do I get my Oberlin students past the opulence, which is pretty intense, to the payoff? ( note, in the picture, the dad earnestly talking with his, maybe, eight year old about...Canaletto! Home for nerds. I love it)





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