My preview of New York University musicologist Suzanne G. Cusick's free talk on "Music and Torture," 3 p.m. Oct. 5 at the University of Richmond's Modlin Arts Center, is in print in Style Weekly, online at:
http://www.styleweekly.com/article.asp?idarticle=17848
Richmond's Cultural Action Task Force is seeking participants in an online Cultural Census Survey of local interests and preferences in the visual and performing arts. To participate (it takes about 5 minutes), start here:
https://app.e2ma.net/app/view:CampaignPublic/id:11535.1344053573/rid:4a378d4451ea0359a8a612eb43319df9
(When you've finished the survey, you can sign up for a drawing, with a prize of $250.)
Sept. 27-28, First English Lutheran Church, Richmond
Alexander Paley’s fall-weekend music festivals in Richmond wouldn’t be complete without at least one selection that tested the pianist’s technical and interpretive capacities and the listener’s comprehension and endurance. In this 11th edition of the festival, that piece was Robert Schumann’s 
Sonata No. 3 in F minor, known as the "Concerto without Orchestra."
As its nickname implies, the sonata draws upon the full range of tonal, coloristic and dynamic resources that a pianist can summon. Its movements are large, often sprawling, and it makes grand, passionate statements. Its passions are most aroused in the first movement, in which a motif of Beethovenian simplicity is repeated with growing intensity, and in a set of variations on a profoundly desolate theme by Schumann’s wife, Clara Wieck.
Music propelled by huge chords and torrents of notes expressing high passion is what Paley plays best. No wonder he was attracted to the Schumann sonatas, which he presented in chronological order as the opening selections in each concert of this festival. (He plans to play all three in a single program in future recital dates.) The F minor Sonata, which he played Sept. 28 concert, is the most challenging of the three; and while the pianist has almost all of its notes securely under his fingers, some of its contours remain sketchy. He has yet to tame the decorative spinoffs from the allegro’s motif, which sound like digressions, or the finale’s tendency to sound like random, hyperactive noodling.
The Sonata No. 2 in G minor, opening the Sept. 27 program, was played with Schumann’s original, relatively undernourished rondo finale. (Afterward, Paley said he will substitute the later, more developed final movement in future performances.) The pianist emphasized the rhapsodic, Chopinesque quality of the sonata’s first and second movements, shaping the latter’s halting phrases quite effectively, and treated the scherzo with suitable impulsiveness.
The Sept. 27 concert centered on two piano trios, in which Paley was joined by violinist Kathy Judd and cellist Clyde Thomas Shaw. In Mendelssohn’s Trio in D minor, moderate tempos highlighted Shaw’s big, bassy cello tone in the first movement and gave both string players expressive space in the andante. Comparably measured tempos in Schubert’s Trio in B flat major directed the ear to the tonal brilliance of Paley’s Blüthner piano – the Schubert was perhaps the best showcase of this German instrument’s uniquely resonant high register – but also drove home the repetitious quality of this piece. (Is there a more endless movement in all of chamber music than the closing rondo of this trio? You’d swear not as it goes around, comes around, and ’round and ’round . . . )
Clarinetist Charles West, the Virginia Commonwealth University professor who has performed with Paley in all his Richmond festivals, delivered this edition’s most polished chamber performance in the final program, playing Brahms’ Sonata in E flat major, Op. 120, No. 2, as a robust, long-breathed stroll on an Indian summer afternoon. West’s command of his instrument’s tonal and expressive resources was on full display here; Paley was a strong but supportive partner.
Paley and his wife, Pei-Wen Chen, presented another cycle in this edition of the festival, playing Weber’s three sets of short pieces for piano four-hands. The first two sets (Opp. 3 and 10) are light, generally cheerful examples of 19th-century domestic keyboard music, the stuff of courtships in the afternoon and family musicales in the evening. The third set, "Eight Pieces," Op. 60, is a bit grander in dimension and technical challenge. The couple’s Sept. 28 performance peaked in the fourth piece of the set, a quasi-gallop, and in the penultimate march, the tune that more than a century later would be revived as the centerpiece of Hindemith’s "Symphonic Metamorphosis" on Weber themes.
Paley and Chen also played Schumann’s "Bilder von Osten" ("Pictures from the East"), capturing Slavic and Magyar accents lurking within the composer’s high-German musical diction.
The pianist and Linus Ellis, associate minister for music at First English Lutheran Church and chief local organizer of the festival, announced that a 12th edition is planned for the weekend of Sept. 25-27, 2009.
Sept. 26, First English Lutheran Church, Richmond
Pianist Alexander Paley is devoting his 11th music festival in Richmond to solo, duo and trio works of the German romantics, a school that packs as much poetry, earnestness, virtuosity and neurosis – and often as many notes – into small-scale works as large ones. Not for nothing did Robert Schumann call his Third Piano Sonata a "concerto without orchestra."
Schumann’s Sonata No. 1 in F sharp minor, with which Paley opened the festival, set an appropriate tone for what was to follow on opening night and in two subsequent programs. The piece calls for a musician with abundant technique, which Paley certainly is, as well as volatility, rhetorical flair and the ability and inclination to project a tonal stream of consciousness. Schumann audibly struggles to confine his poetic impulses within sonata form – struggles, even, to end the work in a finale with at least four false climaxes – as he summons all the dynamism and expressive power of the piano. Paley, who is new to this rarely played music, relished its technical and structural challenges.
The heart of the program contrasted two trios with French horn: Johannes Brahms’ familiar Trio in E flat major, Op. 40, for piano, violin and horn, and Carl Reinecke’s obscure Trio, Op. 274, for piano, clarinet and horn. Horn player Patrick Smith, a member of the Virginia Commonwealth University music faculty, brought rich sonority and gratifying technical control to both pieces.
Smith, Paley and violinist Kathy Judd made especially fine work of the Brahms, maintaining balance (always tricky in Brahms’ chamber music with piano, especially so with this combination of instruments) and playing expressively without dragging and, in the scherzo and finale, with real playfulness – a relatively rare commodity in Brahms, but one that needs to be fully exploited when it arises. Judd performed with refinement and assertiveness, notably in the instrument’s lower register, and Paley reined in the piano without underplaying.
Reinecke’s late-romantic opus (written in 1903) is unusual not just in its instrumentation, but in its projection of German-romantic Sturm and pathos without some inner demon guiding the proceedings. The piece is Brahmsian in style, but lacking Brahms’ volatility and emotional nuance. It sounds to be music awaiting a narrative, wanting to tell "a tale" (as Reinecke titles its slow movement), which the composer isn’t quite inspired to supply. Paley, Smith and VCU-based clarinetist Charles West played the piece as a lively, expressive and (when appropriate) stormy exchange.
Paley and his wife, Pei-Wen Chen, closed the opening-night program with the first of three samplings of Carl Maria von Weber’s music for piano four-hands, "Six pieces faciles," Op. 3. The set recalls Mozart and Schubert in its abundance of melody, and is decidedly Mozartian in its joyfully witty interplay. The inevitable highlight of the set its andante, with its variations on a tune that seems to be the source of the "All Things Considered" radio theme. Paley and Chen performed with clarity and affection.
The Alexander Paley Music Festival continues with music of Schumann, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Weber at 8 p.m. Sept. 27, and works by Schumann, Brahms and Weber at 3:30 p.m. Sept. 28, at First English Lutheran Church, Monument Avenue at Lombardy Street (Stuart Circle). Admission is by donation. Details: (804) 355-9185; http://personal3.stthomas.edu/mmshvartsman/paleyfest.html
Christoph Eschenbach, formerly music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Houston Symphony, will take on the same role with the National Symphony in Washington. He also will occupy a newly created post, music director of the Kennedy Center.
The 68-year-old German conductor and pianist will serve as the orchestra's music director-designate until Iván Fischer's term as the NSO's principal conductor expires at the end of next season. Eschenbach's initial contract runs from the 2010-11 through 2013-14 seasons, Anne Midgette reports in The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/25/AR2008092504161.html?hpid=topnews
The Post's Marc Fisher liberally links to varying views of Eschenbach in Philadelphia:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/?hpid=topnews
Stephen Hough's secret for summon excitement in recording sessions? “I usually have quite a lot of chocolate around. It is a way to have a bit of manic energy," the pianist tells The Times of London:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article4821290.ece
(No word from Hough's dentist.)
Sept. 24, The National
Mikhail Agrest, first-in-line of the nine candidates vying to become the Richmond Symphony’s next music director, led the first of two concerts in his second tryout program in the opening of this season’s Kicked Back Classics casual-concert series. The event also marked the orchestra’s debut at The National, the former movie and vaudeville theater in downtown Richmond that reopened earlier this year as a music hall.
As in his Masterworks concerts, the 33-year-old Russian-American conductor displayed dynamism on the podium and showed himself to be an engaging talker, quick with a joke; at times, though, he seemed so stoked on nervous energy that he didn’t quite finish his thoughts.
Agrest framed the mini-concert with Beethoven, opening with the perhaps obligatory but nonetheless mediocre "Consecration of the House" Overture, closing with the far more substantive and potent finale of the Fourth Symphony. In between came bits of Mozart (the finale of the Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola and orchestra), Prokofiev (the gavotte from the "Classical" Symphony) and Shostakovich (his orchestration of "Tea for Two"), and several bits of original and adapted Rossini.
Aside from the Beethoven symphony excerpt, the program’s largest-scaled offering was Rossini’s "La gazza ladra" ("The Thieving Magpie") Overture, the first great symphonic treatment of a waltz tune. In his Masterworks dates, Agrest distended the waltz theme of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony; here, he gave Rossini’s waltz a thoroughly idiomatic swirl across the floor.
Agrest emphasized colorful and characterful details in the Shostakovich and in Benjamin Britten’s potpourri of Rossini themes, "Soirées Musicales." The conductor led animated, interpretively straightforward accounts of the two Beethoven selections and the Mozart, which featured the refined, well-balanced duo of concertmaster Karen Johnson and principal violist Molly Sharp.
The National is an oddly configured space for classical music, with no seating on the ground floor, VIP-only seating in the front balcony (largely vacant on this occasion) and regular seating only in the upper balcony. A lot of empty space separated the orchestra from most of its audience. (The Sunday-afternoon family edition of the series presumably will draw a lot of youngsters who don’t mind sitting on the floor.)
Unamplified orchestral music sounds warm and full-bodied but short on brilliance and resonance in this hall, making The National an acoustical near-twin of the nearby Carpenter Center, at least as it sounded before its closure for renovation. An acoustical upgrade is part of the renovation of that hall, which will be the symphony's principal venue when it reopens as the Carpenter Theatre in the Richmond CenterStage arts complex.
The family edition of this Kicked Back Classics program begins with pre-concert activities at 3 p.m., followed by the concert at 4 p.m., Sept. 28 at The National, 708 E. Broad St. Tickets: $17. Details: (804) 788-1212, www.richmondsymphony.com
