Unwieldy instruments in the news

John Adams looks into the works of the bandoneón, the accordion cousin played by Astor Piazzolla and other Argentine tango masters: "[I]t has a single push-button for each pitch—33 for the left hand and 38 for the right, a total of 71 buttons. The player cannot see these buttons while playing, and their physical arrangement is a confusing matrix that, at least on first encounter, seems to defy logic. . . . [T]he buttons change pitch depending on whether the bellows are being opened or closed. AND the left hand is tuned to F while the right hand is tuned to G. Got it? It’s enough to make you wonder if all those military coups in Argentina weren’t carried out by frustrated bandoneón players who’d gone postal trying to figure out the instrument."

Plus, it weighs 22 pounds:

http://www.earbox.com/posts/91

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In The Washington Post, Anne Midgette samples the American Guild of Organists' convention in DC this week:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/07/AR2010070704949.html

The organ, Midgette observes, is "big, temperamental, idiosyncratic. Its performers play with feet and hands, balanced like bugs on a narrow seat before multiple keyboards, one above the other. And those performers have to adapt to the instrument. One organ may have three manuals (or keyboards), another five, and each has its own panoply of stops – that is, buttons on the console that enable a player to choose a range of sounds to blend in different parts of the piece."

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Joseph Bertolozzi, who "hammered on I-beams and guardrails, whacked thick cables, sent steel pellets down the inside of a bridge tower" of the Roosevelt Bridge near Poughkeepsie, NY, for his composition "Bridge Music," now proposes a similar project with the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The proposal is "being taken seriously" by Paris authorities, The New York Times reports:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/after-music-from-a-bridge-why-not-a-tower/

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And a belated link to Don Harrison’s Style Weekly profile of Larry Robinson, maestro of what may be Richmond’s largest musical instrument, certainly its most highly elevated: the Carillon in Byrd Park:

http://www.styleweekly.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=DB7D237D74E04C40992FB222DD380D26&AudID=C3A7C1EDE4E54E24AF4637F9AAFFD1B6

Where words leave off

The communicative and emotional power of music is felt by people even in a vegetative state, according to a study conducted by the Santa Anna Institute in Crotone, Italy. Wendy Zukerman reports in New Scientist:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19123-classical-music-moves-the-heart-in-vegetative-patients.html

Modernity's adolescent

Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Gustav Mahler. Many are marking the occasion as The Baltimore Sun’s Tim Smith does, with a testimonial on the way that Mahler’s music proved to be life-changing:

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/classicalmusic/

Thinking back on my life and music’s role in it, I can’t say that Mahler was pivotal emotionally. Brahms, Bruckner, Nielsen and Vaughan Williams hit me at my most impressionable and vulnerable.

Mahler did provide my christening in large-scale symphonic music played to roof-rattling effect. As a not-quite-teenager, I saw and heard Leonard Bernstein conduct the New York Philharmonic in Mahler’s First Symphony at the old Mosque (now Landmark Theater) in Richmond. That performance was my first experience of being swept along in a torrent of orchestral sound.

Had puberty hit me a little sooner, or had Bernstein conducted the Mahler First here a little later, I very likely would hear – and feel – this composer quite differently. His music is about coming of age emotionally and spiritually, about viewing the present and anticipating the future through the lens of the past – perhaps a lens tinted by an imagined rather than real past.

The fundamental tension in Mahler comes from his brooding, impatiently breaking out of it, falling back in, breaking out – a cycle familiar to anyone who’s lived through adolescence.

Reading European history and listening to Mahler, it’s tempting to characterize him as the premier artistic adolescent of modernity. By the time Mahler came of age, all the key components and big differences of modern life were in place: rapidly advancing science and technology, urbanization, mobility, the withering of old roots, hierarchies and identities. Their consequences were beginning to be felt, and the sense that some great hammer was about to fall was widespread during Mahler’s working lifetime; but, dying in 1911, he didn’t live to experience the cataclysmic transformation of the old world into the new.

So, much like an adolescent going through the initiations of adulthood and obsessing on his doubts and anxieties, Mahler is all about anticipation, looking ahead with a mixture of hope and fear, looking back keenly sensitive to the loss of innocence, negotiating the present unsteadily, living as much or more in the imagination as in physical reality.

Listen to the final movement, the famous "dying away," of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, and then listen to Richard Strauss’ "Metamorphosen;" of, if you prefer, to "Der Abschied" from Mahler’s "Das Lied von der Erde" and then the "Four Last Songs" of Strauss. Both composers speak to the demise of the old order and the old way of life in the West; but Mahler does so in anticipation – i.e., in his imagination – and consequently with more ambiguity, while Strauss speaks more bluntly from eye-witness experience.

As the adolescent is a rough sketch of the adult, Mahler is a sketch of modernity, in both the musical and emotional-spiritual senses. Today’s listener knows what Mahler could only imagine; and so it is up to the listener to fill in the details, to clarify the colors and contours, of the picture.

With Mahler, as with few other composers, you have to invest your emotions and life experience to get the benefit of his.

Pianist faces pedophilia charge

Mikhail Pletnev, the pianist and founder and artistic director the Russian National Orchestra, has been charged with sexual assault of a 14-year-old boy in Thailand. The accusation, which Pletnev denies, stems from an investigation by Thai police of a suspected pedophile ring in the resort town of Pattaya, where the 53-year-old musician has a home and owns several businesses.

The Guardian's Tom Parfitt reports on the case:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/07/mikhail-pletnev-child-molesting-thailand

Cesare Siepi (1923-2010)

Cesare Siepi, the Italian bass who was the pre-eminent mid-20th century voice and figure of Don Giovanni in the Mozart opera, and also excelled in roles such as Mefistofeles in Gounod's "Faust" and Don Basilio in Rossini's "The Barber of Seville," has died at the age of 87.

An obituary by David Ng in the Los Angeles Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-cesare-siepi-20100706,0,7859813.story

On disc: Bruckner, differently

Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 ("Romantic") – Minnesota Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä (BIS 1746)
Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 – Frankfurt Radio Symphony/Paavo Järvi (RCA Red Seal 88697389972)
Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 – Frankfurt Radio Symphony/Paavo Järvi (RCA Red Seal 88697542572)

The customary aural vision of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, as bequeathed by Wilhelm Furtwängler, Eugen Jochum and other German Brucknerians of the early and mid-20th century, is expansive in tempo, declarative in tone, "mystical" (or, at least, mystique-susceptible) in conception. These new discs alter that sound-picture in significant ways.

The first interpretive choice that a conductor makes with Bruckner is textual: Which of several editions, or what combination of them, will be used for the performance?

For his Minnesota Orchestra recording of Bruckner’s Fourth ("Romantic") Symphony, Osmo Vänskä chooses the third version of 1888, long derided as "inauthentic" by musicologists but lately receiving more positive appraisals. Paavo Järvi, meanwhile, uses an edition by Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs in his recording of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. The Järvi-Frankfurt disc of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony uses the familiar Leopold Nowak edition.

What these choices mean, for the non-musicologist listener, is that the conductors opted for tightly constructed (well, tightly for Bruckner), less thematically rambling versions of these symphonies.

Not that we’re talking no-surprises Bruckner. Vänskä and the Minnesotans pace and articulate the Fourth almost as if it were Schubert – or even, at times, as if it were Haydn! This is one of the most vividly animated performances of a Bruckner symphony ever recorded; consequently it will strike some listeners as sounding less "romantic." The work stands up well to this brisk, rhythmically precise treatment, much better than Bruckner’s Third Symphony fared in a comparably crisp, animated reading that Vänskä recorded 10 years ago for Hyperion.

I wouldn’t make this my reference interpretation of the Fourth, but I’ll be tempted to make this BIS Super-Audio disc my reference recording of Bruckner in general. Järvi's Frankfurt discs are also Super-Audio, but not as strikingly "super" as the BIS recording.

Järvi and the Frankfurters – known at home as the HR (Hessischer Rundfunk) Sinfonie Orchester – gravitate in a slower, gentler direction, sublimating meter and treating long-breathed phrases, including brassy ones, with a high-romantic sighing character, more commonly heard in Wagner or Tchaikovsky. Järvi also tends to blur contrasts between fast and slow tempos, giving these symphonies a tone of voice that's more dreamy than dramatic.

This approach is more successful in the Seventh, which could have been called the "Romantic" had Bruckner not already given that title to the Fourth. The pronounced influence of Wagner on this symphony, both in phrasing and motific writing, is accentuated in Järvi’s interpretation. The Frankfurt horns breathe wondrously in the longer-than-usual notes and phrases required of them.

The notes for Järvi’s recording of the Bruckner Ninth say nothing about the Cohrs edition being used. Cohrs is a conductor and musicologist, co-editor since 1995 of the Anton Bruckner Complete Edition, of which this score, from 1998, is part. (He also participated in a "completion" of a final fourth movement for the Ninth Symphony, not played on this disc.) I haven’t parsed this version in comparison with others, but I hear no startling differences.

I do hear Järvi’s brand of expansiveness, and the orchestra’s refined and blended tone, sapping this music of much of its emotional intensity.

From ArkivMusic (Bruckner Fourth):
www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?ordertag=Comprecom1598-494821&album_id=502943

From Amazon.com (Bruckner Fourth):
www.amazon.com/Symphony-No-4-Hybr-Bruckner/dp/B003PBYTA8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1278436818&sr=1-1

From ArkivMusic (Bruckner Seventh):
www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Drilldown?name_id1=1598&name_role1=1&comp_id=8323&bcorder=15&name_id=57504&name_role=3

From Amazon.com (Bruckner Seventh):
www.amazon.com/Bruckner-Symphony-No-SACD-HYBRID/dp/B001H26FZE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1278436881&sr=1-1

From ArkivMusic (Bruckner Ninth):
www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Drilldown?name_id1=1598&name_role1=1&comp_id=670&bcorder=15&name_id=57504&name_role=3

From Amazon.com (Bruckner Ninth):
www.amazon.com/Bruckner-Symphony-No-SACD-HYRBID/dp/B002K9C0Q6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1278436881&sr=1-2

On disc: Gershwin via Grofé

Gershwin-Grofé: "Rhapsody in Blue," Piano Concerto in F major; Gershwin: "I Got Rhythm" Variations – Jean-Yves Thibaudet (piano), Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/Marin Alsop (Decca B0014091-02)

This disc will stir some Richmonders’ memories. On Oct. 17, 1988, Marin Alsop, at the time the Richmond Symphony’s newly minted assistant conductor, led a program of long-lost orchestrations of George Gershwin’s concert and show music. The highlight was the Piano Concerto in F major, as orchestrated by Ferde Grofé, who had orchestrated "Rhapsody in Blue" for its 1924 premiere with Paul Whiteman’s jazz band, and would produce the familiar symphonic orchestration of the rhapsody in the 1940s, after Gershwin’s death.

Alsop subsequently led a recording of the Grofé-orchestrated concerto, with pianist Leslie Stifelman, who had performed in the Richmond concert. (That 1993 EMI Classics disc is available on an ArkivMusic reissue: www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=167254)

Now, Alsop returns to the Gershwin-Grofé scores with her Baltimore Symphony and Jean-Yves Thibaudet as the piano soloist.

Thibaudet is the big-time concert pianist of choice for jazz and jazz-inflected compositions. His interpretations of Bill Evans and Duke Ellington echo in these performances, especially in Gershwin’s more lyrical material, which few pianists on record have phrased as flexibly. Thibaudet’s interpretive bent, as well as the rarely heard Grofé version of the Gershwin concerto, make this disc unique.

Grofé was working with an ensemble that was hardly a symphony orchestra; but Whiteman's group also was unlike later jazz bands in that it had strings and more "orchestral" wind choirs and percussion. The sound texture of the ensemble was edgier and more transparent than that of swing-era bands, and less plush than a symphony orchestra’s.

Gershwin exploited this hybrid orchestral sound in the rhapsody; but he had symphonic forces in mind when composing – and preparing his own orchestration of – the concerto. Grofé’s orchestration, made for Whiteman, was not approved by the composer, and went unplayed for more than 50 years after Gershwin’s death.

Thibaudet and Alsop make a persuasive case for the Grofé-orchestrated concerto; but this piece is almost certainly destined for a half-life as an alternative version (for one thing, few orchestras are going to bring in the extra saxophones it requires). It’s different enough, and Thibaudet’s interpretation is distinctive enough, to earn this disc shelf space alongside a standard version. (The vintage RCA Victor recordings by pianist Earl Wild with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops still pace the pack.)

The Thibaudet-Alsop readings of the "jazz-band" version of "Rhapsody in Blue" holds its own against competitors such as Michael Tilson Thomas (RCA and Sony Classical), Lincoln Mayorga (Harmonia Mundi) and Peter Donohoe (EMI Classics); and this production’s use of the original manuscript version of the "I Got Rhythm" Variations is a plus, albeit a minor one.

These recordings, from concerts last November at Baltimore’s Meyerhoff Hall, offer good concert-hall aural perspective.

From ArkivMusic:
www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Drilldown?name_id1=4337&name_role1=1&comp_id=1093&bcorder=15&name_id=58841&name_role=3

From Amazon.com:
www.amazon.com/Gershwin-Piano-Concerto-Rhapsody-Blue/dp/B0035F0MU0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1278429894&sr=1-1