The NEA, again

The National Endowment for the Arts has shed its communications director, Yosi Sergant, after the airing of a teleconference call in which he “urged members of the arts community to help Obama's efforts to spur volunteer community service,” Mike Boehm reports on the Los Angeles Times’ Culture Monster blog. But Sergant’s departure has not headed off political aftershocks:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/09/more-than-one-fifth-of-the-us-senate-all-11-of-them-republicans-is-now-on-record-as-being-alarmed-that-the-nea-has-turned.html

A few observations about this kerfuffle:

* The communications director – i.e., chief publicist – of the NEA does not participate in the endowment’s grant-making process, except, maybe, to advise groups of the procedures for applying for a grant. Peer-review panels consider applications and recommend awarding of grants. So Sergant, who had been an operative in the 2008 Obama campaign, wasn’t really in a position to “politicize” the key function of the NEA. That said, merely mentioning a political campaign while speaking for a government agency is asking for trouble; and Sergant, an experienced cultural publicist, must have known that gunning for the NEA is a favorite pursuit of right-wing talking heads and grassroots organizers.

* It’s pretty rich, though, for Republicans to complain about politicizing federal agencies. The Bush administration placed operatives, not just in PR jobs but in posts whose occupants control policy formulation and implementation, in numerous agencies that are supposed to be insulated from the usual partisan give-and-take. Remember Bush-era manipulation and/or suppression of data from scientific, medical and environmental agencies? Remember loyalty to Bush and the GOP being made a key qualification for getting a job in the Justice Department?

* However loudly the usual suspects kvetch about it, the NEA isn’t going away. It survived the Gingrich-era Congress and the Bush presidency. Now it has cultivated good will by awarding a series of one-time grants to recession-rocked arts groups as part of the Obama administration’s stimulus package. Many recipients of these grants reside in the communities whose congressional representatives would be most inclined to de-fund or abolish the NEA. Most elected officials are not keen to offend the community leaders and philanthropists who support mainline arts organizations, because a lot of those people are also major donors to political campaigns.

Congressional liberals and moderates will keep the NEA intact. Conservatives will try to minimize its budget, and use its existence to rally their populist base whenever the opportunity arises. And this mini-uproar, or something like it, will be recycled again and again.

Review: Paley Music Festival

Sept. 27, First English Lutheran Church, Richmond

Pianist Alexander Paley’s 12th Richmond music festival concluded much as it had started, at least stylistically.

Paley, joined by violinist Kathy Judd and cellist Clyde Thomas Shaw, wrapped up three days of music-making with Chopin’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 8. In this and other early works (most familiarly, the two piano concertos), Chopin decorated impassioned and/or sentimental themes with florid treble figurations. This compositional style was inherited from a previous generation of Central European pianist-composers, among them Carl Czerny, whose "Brilliant Grand Sonata" opened this year’s Paley Festival.

Passionate expression and busy fingers are two qualities Paley thrives on, and the Chopin brought out the best in his keyboard technique and his collaborative gifts in chamber music. This piece is essentially a concerto for piano with bare-bones string accompaniment; it’s scarcity in concert programs may stem from the challenge string players face in being heard alongside the elaborate piano lines, while not getting more than a few cameo solos. Judd and Shaw used their moments constructively, the violinist especially soaring nearly to the pianist’s expressive elevation.

Clarinetist Charles West joined Paley and Shaw in a reading of Brahms’ Clarinet Trio that was both emphatic and lyrical. West played with his characteristic balance of refined tone and vigorous projection. Paley emphasized the grand scale of Brahms’ piano writing, but also sensitivity to the harmonic explorations found in the composer’s later works.

Paley and his wife, Pei-Wen Chen, frequently use the Richmond festival to revive obscure arrangements and transcriptions for piano four-hands. This year, the featured obscurity was a suite that Rimsky-Korsakov arranged from his opera "The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya." The opera, rarely staged in Russia and hardly ever elsewhere, may be the most Wagnerian score written by a Russian composer, a kind of "Rheingold" in Slavic dialect. This piano version also plays up the melodramatic quality of Rimsky’s depictions of passion and conflict. The duo’s performance was sweeping, if at times a bit unruly.

Paley and his small crew of church and community volunteers rounded up the largest audiences in the festival’s history – no mean feat on the weekend of Yom Kippur and the Richmond Symphony’s first concerts in the renovated Carpenter Theatre, which conflicted with two of three Paley Festival programs. Not long ago, this festival was in dire straits. Now it seems to be in good shape for a long run.

Review: Richmond Symphony

Sept. 26, Carpenter Theatre, Richmond CenterStage

Now that the Richmond Symphony again has a downtown hall to call home, the orchestra’s next challenge is to learn how to exploit the sound of the space. The opening-night program made it vividly clear that acoustically the Carpenter Theatre is not what it used to be.

Two of the works on the program, the Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’ "Samson et Delila" and Orff’s "Carmina Burana," are sonic spectaculars, studded with exclamatory winds and percussion, boasting wide palettes of tone color, surging dynamism and, in "Carmina," a variety of unusual solo-vocal and choral effects. They are also, mostly, very loud. Tucked between them is Brahms’ "Variations on a Theme by Haydn," a sample of Austro-German classical-romantic orchestration at conventional concert volume.

Alastair Willis, the seventh of nine conductors auditioning to become the symphony’s next music director, took all three works at measured tempos, outright slow in much of the Brahms. He placed great emphasis on dynamism and phrasing, and seemed especially intent on producing warm string sound. He also played an old orchestral showman’s trick, quickening the pace as the music got louder, too indiscriminately for my ears.

The orchestra was audibly pumped for the occasion. The wind, brass and percussion players sustained rounded sonorities and maintained ensemble and balance at high volume, and the strings projected brightly and energetically. Woodwind choirs in the Brahms sounded perfectly balanced and beautifully tinted, and solo winds – notably Gustav Highstein’s oboe and Mary Boodell’s flute in the Saint-Saëns – were striking in their clarity and timbral shading.

The Richmond Symphony Chorus and Children’s Festival Chorus, collectively about 130 voices, sounded rather distant in the early going of "Carmina," but came into clearer focus as the performance progressed. (Was amplification being used and adjusted?) It sounded as if the children occupied a sonic sweet spot on the stage, while the Symphony Chorus’ sopranos inhabited more brittle-sounding space.

The vocal soloists were outstanding. Baritone Richard Zeller, who has performed with the symphony in several previous programs, made a meal of his prominent role here, delivering everything from near-crooning to rattling speech-song. Soprano Anya Matanovic was rich and quite sensual, with Earth Motherly inflections. Tenor Marcus Shelton sang his cameo for maximum effect, both in his urgent vocalizing and physical shtick that extended to a pratfall off the stage.

Commenting on the Carpenter Theatre’s acoustics, based on this program, is tricky. The orchestra is much larger than that heard in most symphony concerts, and Orff’s choral voicings are louder and less subtle (or differently subtle) than those in most symphonic choral writing. Saint-Saëns’ orchestration is also exceptional. The Brahms was the only "normal" work in this concert, so it’s from that performance that I'll make some preliminary observations about acoustics.

Orchestral sound in this hall is significantly more reverberant – a short, loud chord takes nearly 3 seconds to decay to silence, about 1 second longer than before the renovation. High-frequency instruments, such as flute, oboe, trumpet, violin and cymbals, sound noticeably brighter. But high frequencies clustered densely, as they are in "Carmina" and the Saint-Saëns, can produce a shattering effect at high volume (over, say, 90 decibels). Bass sound, especially in the strings, is comparatively weak. When the stage is extended into the hall, as it is in this weekend’s concerts, instruments or voices directly under the proscenium arch sound with extra prominence and clarity – beneficiaries on this occasion were flutes and oboes.

This is a space the symphony can work with; but it’s going to take months of work in a lot of different music, probably with the musicians moving to different locations, maybe elevated, maybe not, adjusting their sound with every move. We may not know how the orchestra really sounds in the Carpenter Theatre until this time next year.

The Richmond Symphony’s season-opening Masterworks program repeats at 3 p.m. Sept. 27 at the Carpenter Theatre, Sixth and Grace streets. Tickets: $17-$72. Details: (804) 927-2787 (Ticketmaster); www.richmondsymphony.com

Alicia de Larrocha (1923-2009)

Alicia de Larrocha, the pianist best known for her interpretations of Mozart and music of her native Spain, has died at 86. By the time she retired in 2003, her performing career had spanned three-quarters of a century. Her obituary in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/arts/music/26larrocha.html?_r=1&hp

Review: Paley Music Festival

Sept. 25, First English Lutheran Church, Richmond

Alexander Paley is a pianist of seemingly boundless stamina, and he asks a lot of staying power of his audience – at least the audience of his annual festival in Richmond.

The opening concert of this year’s installment consisted of the massive "Brilliant Grand Sonata" of Carl Czerny and all 24 of Rachmaninoff’s preludes, altogether about two and a half hours of high-intensity piano music (mercifully, with two intermissions).

Czerny, generally known for his keyboard exercises, packs both dexterous busyness and rhapsodic expression into this Sonata in C minor for piano four-hands. The composer and his most accomplished pupil, Franz Liszt, frequently played this piece (Liszt doing the treble busyness). In this performance, Paley played the glittering treble figurations, while his wife, Pei-Wen Chen, played the bass line, which contains most of the work’s thematic and structural content. The piece, especially its large opening movement, anticipates the style of Chopin, and the two pianists made that linkage clear in their interpretation.

Paley will be taking the Rachmaninoff preludes on tour in the spring; this was the first time he has played the early Prelude in F major, the ten Op. 23 preludes and the 13 of Op. 32 as a cycle. It is a deep immersion in both Rachmaninoff’s psyche and his piano style, at least as they manifested themselves before he left Russia. The preludes, played in sequence, veer between visceral energy and bittersweet reverie; dark timbres prevail, but there are surprising flashes of light (and lightness of touch).

Paley pounced on the big sonorities and animal vitality of the more assertive pieces – at times, to the point that his bright-toned Blüthner piano was swamped in overtones. At more moderate tempos and quieter dynamics, the instrument, and his handling of it, revealed a palette of tone colors one rarely hears in Rachmaninoff.

The Alexander Paley Music Festival continues with piano and chamber works by Hindemith, Mendelssohn, Arensky and others, at 8 p.m. Sept. 26, and by Brahms, Chopin and Rimsky-Korsakov, at 3:30 p.m. Sept. 27, at First English Lutheran Church, Monument Avenue at Lombardy Street (Stuart Circle), in Richmond. Donations requested. Details: (804) 355-9185; www.paleyfestival.info

Passing 'the newspaper test'

As the Utah Symphony announced the appointment of the Swiss conductor Thierry Fischer as its new music director, the chairman of the search committee listed three standard gauges of desirability in a maestro – conducting talent, organizational leadership mettle, commitment to the community – and a fourth that you rarely see acknowledged in public: "the ability to 'pass the newspaper test,' in that he [is] a person of integrity who wouldn't some morning appear on the front page in a scandal," David Burger and Catherine Reese Newton report in The Salt Lake Tribune:

http://www.sltrib.com/arts/ci_13410800

A first-rate second-rate composer

The Richmond Symphony will usher itself into and out of its first season in the renovated Carpenter Theatre at Richmond CenterStage with works by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns: the Bacchanale from his opera "Samson et Delila" in the opening concerts (Sept. 26-27), his "Organ" Symphony (No. 3) in the closing concerts (May 15-16).

This might seem a somewhat eccentric choice for alpha and omega placement in the orchestra’s program schedule. Maybe not, though, in a celebratory season in this particular space. Saint-Saëns’ music sounds like the Carpenter Theatre looks. (If I were booking a bacchanalia, it would be my venue of choice.)

Saint-Saëns knew his craft, knew how to engage an audience, and knew how to write a good tune. But musicians and critics tend to consign him to the class of first-rate second-rate composers, alongside the likes of Max Bruch or Alexander Borodin.

Like them, Saint-Saëns was a product of a distinctive musical culture, spoke its accumulated dialects fluently, and manipulated its musical materials with ingenuity and technical mastery. His music draws on the long French tradition, from Lully to Rameau to Berlioz, of colorful timbres and vivid representational effects. Saint-Saëns was also deeply grounded in classical form and style; the frameworks of his concertos and symphonies were modeled after Mozart’s and Beethoven’s. At the least, Saint-Saëns was a first-rate French classical-romanticist.

Born in 1835, the year Donizetti’s "Lucia di Lammermoor" premiered, Saint-Saëns lived long enough (until 1921) to hear Stravinsky’s "Rite of Spring" and Ravel’s "La Valse;" and was active as a virtuoso pianist and composer, and an attentive listener, through most of those eventful years.

Saint-Saëns was one of first composers of film music – in 1908 he scored an 18-minute silent film, "L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise" – and film-makers have not been shy about exploiting his music. The "Samson et Delila" Bacchanale cycled through countless cartoon soundtracks to become the stereotypical belly-dance music. "The Swan" and other pieces from his "Carnival of the Animals" similarly made their way into the popular musical vernacular. The spooky atmospherics at the opening of the "Organ" Symphony echo through horror-movie scores, and its exuberantly resolute finale morphed into the theme song for the Australian animal adventure "Babe." The big tune in the finale of the Fourth Piano Concerto begs for use as the theme of a swashbuckler or super-hero movie. (Maybe it has been and I missed it.)

Late in life, Saint-Saëns came to personify, to younger French composers, an outdated, hidebound traditionalism, which they were eager to discredit and overturn. One of those younger fry was Claude Debussy, who as a young critic was a bête noire of Saint-Saëns, and subsequently matured into a first-rate first-rate composer. Respectable critical opinion has accepted his verdict on Saint-Saëns, more out of respect for Debussy, I suspect, than disrespect for Saint-Saëns. For a lot of highbrows, the old man's music is a guilty sensual pleasure.

It will be a treat to hear the Bacchanale, as it was when the symphony played it 30 years ago in its first tryout of the old Loew’s movie palace as a concert space; and the "Organ" Symphony can be an spectacular experience, a total immersion in sound and dramatic gesture. I look forward to them with pleasure, and without guilt.