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.

Paley's 12th

Alexander Paley is Richmond’s unlikeliest impresario. In 1998, Paley, a Moldovan-born pianist best known for his fiery interpretions of Russian and romantic literature and virtuoso showpieces of the 19th century, was in town for a recital at Virginia Commonwealth University. Walking downtown, he came across the old Books First shop on Grace Street, decided the place would be ideal for salon-style musicales, and persuaded the owner to stage a late-summer, three-concert festival.

The bookstore closed before a second installment could be presented there; but Paley has played on, working on low budgets (sometimes no budgets) with local volunteers, using a variety of church and school venues before settling into First English Lutheran Church several years ago.

His festival returns for a 12th season of three concerts, Sept. 25-27. Admission is free (although donations would be welcome).

Programming this year, as always, centers on repertory for piano four-hands, played by Paley and his wife, the Taiwan-born pianist Pei-Wen Chen, and by a duo of guest pianists, Ivo Kaltchev and José Ramos Santana.

Paley and Chen will play the "Brilliant Grand Sonata" in C minor by Carl Czerny on opening night, Hindemith’s Sonata (1938) on Sept. 26, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s keyboard transcription of a suite from his opera “The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya” on Sept. 27. Kaltchev and Santa will play dances by Grieg, Dvořák, Brahms and Mortitz Moszkowski in the Sept. 26 program. Paley will survey Rachmaninoff’s 24 preludes for solo piano on Sept. 25.

Three of Paley's regular collaborators, Washington-based violinist Kathy Judd, Audubon Quartet cellist Clyde Thomas Shaw and VCU-based clarinetist Charles West, return to join the pianist in Mendelssohn’s Sonata for clarinet and piano, Anton Arensky’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor and Rachmaninoff’s "Trio élégaique" on Sept. 26; and Brahms’ Clarinet Trio and Chopin’s Piano Trio in G minor on Sept. 27.

Paley Music Festival concerts begin at 8 p.m. Sept. 25-26 and 3:30 p.m. Sept. 27 at First English Lutheran Church, Monument Avenue at Lombardy Street (Stuart Circle). Details: (804) 355-9185; www.paleyfestival.info

'High-concept' Met 'Tosca' booed

The Metropolitan Opera launched its new season with a production of Puccini's "Tosca" by the Swiss director Luc Bondy, whose "high-concept staging featured stark, spare, cold sets," replacing a lavishly decorous old production by Franco Zeffirelli. Bondy seemed to be "looking for every pretense to flesh out, literally, the eroticism of the lovers and the lecherous kinkiness of Scarpia," Anthony Tommasini writes in The New York Times. The opening-night audience did not approve:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/arts/music/23tosca.html?hp

Crisis in Philadelphia

The Philadelphia Orchestra is in a "dire financial crisis," Peter Dobrin reports in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Sagging ticket sales and fund-raising that doesn't measure up to that of other orchestras Philly's size leave the orchestra facing a $7.5 million deficit this season. The board hopes to raise a quick $15 million from its members:

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment/20090919_Phila__Orchestra_needs__15_million.html

UPDATE 1: Dobrin reports that Allison Vulgamore, outgoing president of the Atlanta Symphony, is in negotiations to fill the vacant CEO's post at the Philadelphia Orchestra:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20090922_Phila__Orchestra_settles_on_CEO_candidate.html

UPDATE 2: Dobrin summarizes Philly's woes as he reports on its annual meeting, the real business of which took place behind closed doors:

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20090924_A_brief__bleak_state_of_the_orchestra.html

The greatest conductor?

The Guardian's Ed Vulliamy profiles Valerey Gergiev, terming the Russian maestro "the greatrest conductor of his generation":

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/20/valery-gergiev-london-symphony

I would call Gergiev the greatest living throwback to the generations of Mengelberg, Toscanini, Stokowski, Karajan, Bernstein and Solti – figures who imposed a personal sound and grand scale on orchestras, and who presented the public with an oversized personality. Like them, Gergiev can be intoxicating leading one of "his" ensembles (the London Symphony, the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra) in a big, brash score. Basically, he has upgraded the Soviet-style leviathan orchestra into a more refined and fleeter-footed 21st-century model – the ultimate Shostakovich machine.

But I can think of many composers, whole periods and schools of music, from Bach and Mozart to Debussy and Bartók, that I would rather not hear given the Gergiev treatment. And that list is long enough to disqualify him, in my book, as "the greatest."

Review: eighth blackbird

Sept. 16, University of Richmond

Launching its sixth season in residence at the University of Richmond, the contemporary music sextet eighth blackbird offered a sampler of six pieces, three of them in first or second performances by this group, all of them posing unusual demands on the musicians’ techniques and attentiveness to the playing of their colleagues.

The ’birds named the program for its most accessible work, Marc Mellits’ “Spam” (1995), a tuneful, mostly exuberant opus in which layered minimalist figures coalesce into a kind of latter-day boogie-woogie, and then trail off into a wistful climax.

A similar tone, but with spikier harmonic language and more complex textures, pervades “Grazioso” by Mark-Anthony Turnage. Introduced this summer at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, which commissioned the piece for eighth blackbird, the piece is one of a series written by the English composer under the influence of the iconic 1970s rock band Led Zeppelin. (The title refers to the name of Jimmy Page’s guitar.) “[T]here is a very slight allusion to the group’s 1971 ‘Black Dog,’ ” Turnage writes, as well as a vaguely bluesy harmonic tint throughout the piece; but its syncopated rhythms and bright voicings might just as readily be heard as an homage to 1920s jazz.

Much subtler technique, especially in string parts, and finer balances among instruments were needed in the four other works of this program – particularly in “Toward the Flame,” a new piece by the Newport News-bred, Chicago-based composer Shawn Allison. This four-part work, evoking four kinds of moths, is full of fine-grained, fluttering figures for flute, violin and cello, supported by atmospheric percussion. At its best, the piece conjures tonal magic. Its third section, “Atlas,” sounds like an orchestral tone poem in a germinal stage.

“The Deserted Churchyards” (1990) by the Danish composer Bent Sørensen, inspired by visits to abandoned coastal churches about to be consumed by the North Sea, is tone poetry in more fragmentary form – indeed, it sounds to be more fragment than form, at least on first hearing. Its instrumental writing is very busy but generally cyclical, producing movement without a clear destination. Rather astringent voicings for flute and clarinet echo the late work of Carl Nielsen, the great early modern Danish composer.

The other two works on this program were more playful. In Mayke Nas’ “Twelve Hands” (2008), six musicians produce “moaning, giggling and groaning,” as the composer puts it, by stroking and striking the innards of a piano with brushes, spoons, coffee strirrers and other implements, and by scraping cards along the edges of the keyboard. No sounds are produced by actually depressing the keys or pedals of the piano. In this performance, percussive effects came off nicely, but string resonance was quite muted. A concert grand doesn’t sound like the ideal instrument for this piece. How might it sound played on a lighter keyboard, such as a fortepiano or harpsichord? Or, better yet, on a harp positioned horizontally?

“Catch” (1991) by Thomas Adès is two games at once: Musical tag, with “it” played by a clarinetist flitting around the stage, hovering briefly over a pianist, violinist and cellist; and name-the-mystery-composer haunting the piece, a pastime that Adès sometimes pursues in his chamber music. I caught distinct whiffs of Brahms in the clarinet writing and its role in the ensemble, and more faint aromas of some English pastoralist – Butterworth, maybe?

The ’birds – pianist Lisa Kaplan, violinist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos, flutist Tim Munro, clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri and percussionist Matthew Duvall – negotiated this ever-shifting musical terrain with their usual technical mastery and uncanny sensitivity to the tone and spirit of the music at hand.

Hicks to N.C. Symphony

Sarah Hicks, formerly the associate conductor of the Richmond Symphony and currently the resident conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, has been named the new associate conductor of the North Carolina Symphony, a statewide ensemble based in Raleigh:

http://www.ncsymphony.org/news/index.cfm?nid=312

Another Richmond Symphony alumnus, William Henry Curry, is the North Carolina Symphony's resident conductor.