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!