Review: Paley Festival

Sept. 21, First English Lutheran Church

Most accomplished pianists come to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach early in life, and Bach stays with them for life. Many of them avoid playing Bach in public, or wait until middle age before they go public; and in maturity they often filter Bach through the pacing, phrasing and expressive language of other music that they play especially well.

Case in point: In the opening program of this year’s 15th season of his Richmond music festival, Alexander Paley seemed to call up the spirit of Chopin and leave it hovering over his performance of the sarabande of Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B flat major, BWV 825. His tempo was very slow, his touch and phrasing wistfully romantic. The music took this treatment agreeably, even as a sarabande became a reverie.

Paley’s readings of this and the Second Partita in C minor, BWV 826, were liberally garnished with these post-Bachian touches, usually with happy results. At no point did he try to make the piano impersonate a harpsichord. The bright tone and clarity of his instrument, a Blüthner from Leipzig, and the marked contrasts in dynamics that Paley produced, kept these dance suites from sounding pianistically overwrought.

With his wife, Pei-wen Chen, Paley played Max Reger’s four-hands transcriptions of Bach’s “Brandenburg” concertos Nos. 3 and 6. One surprise was that these pieces translate so well to the piano – testimony to both the durability of the music and the ingenuity of the transcriber. Another surprise was that the darker-hued Sixth (whose orchestration omits violins) came off more convincingly than the more cheerful and rhythmically insistent Third, which in this reading sounded too heavy and overly metrical.

The two pianists and the Blüthner seemed to adjust to the church sanctuary’s acoustic as the program progressed – piano sound noticeably improved in the second half – and the Second Partita and “Brandenburg” No. 6 were more satisfying performances.

The second and third concerts of the festival were to include cellist Dana McComb, but she has had to withdraw because of a hand injury. So, scheduled performances of trios by Mozart and Beethoven will be replaced by a couple of Mozart’s violin sonatas (played by Kathy Judd) and works for clarinet and piano (with Charles West). For details, see the September calendar, below.

The Alexander Paley Music Festival continues with performances at 8 p.m. Sept. 22 and 3:30 p.m. Sept. 23 at First English Lutheran Church, Stuart Circle (Monument Avenue at Lombardy Street) in Richmond. Donations requested. Details: (804) 355-9185; www.paleyfestival.info

Review: Han-Setzer-Finckel trio

Sept. 15, Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU’s Rennolds Chamber Concerts concluded last season with one of the last performances of cellist David Finckel with the Emerson String Quartet. The series opened its 2012-13 season with Finckel returning with his wife, pianist Wu Han, and his now-former Emerson colleague, violinist Philip Setzer.

In recent years, the three have been regular collaborators, onstage and in the recording studio, in the piano-trio repertory. They played the two Schubert trios two years ago at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Arts Center; in this return visit, they reprised the Trio in B flat major, Op. 99/D. 898. The VCU date also featured performances of Haydn’s Trio in A major and Mendelssohn’s Trio in D minor, Op. 49.

The Schubert and Mendelssohn are, of course, two of the greatest hits of the piano trio, written within a few years of each other (1828 and 1839, respectively) by composers whose music straddled the classical and romantic styles. The Mendelssohn D minor is, as its key signature portends, more dramatically expressive, and is also quite economical in its development of musical materials. The Haydn also says its piece without much dawdling. The Schubert trio, on the other hand, is one of the preeminent examples of this composer’s working out of materials at “heavenly length,” or with lots of repetition.

Han, Setzer and Finckel produced more variety in inflection and dynamics than might have been expected in this relatively narrow band of repertory. Their collective tonal profile varied very little, though.

The three are master practitioners of what I call New York-standard music-making – pitch-perfect, sonically robust, interpretively straightforward, generally taking a one-sound-fits-all approach with few, if any, nods toward the historical performance practices now frequently employed in classical and early romantic music. Their sound is refined and streamlined. It fills a modern concert space nicely; but its unvarying quality can get monotonous, and one rarely senses real spontaneity in the performance.

The Mendelssohn, a turbulent work full of sharp accents and abrupt attacks, drew the most engaged and expressive performance from the threesome. Violinist Setzer’s finely spun tone and subtle inflections added some variety (not enough) to Schubert’s repetitions. A brisk finale rescued what had been a tidy but humorless reading of the Haydn.

Uniformity

Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony, has commissioned students at New York’s Parsons The New School for Design to craft new outfits for orchestral musicians, in a probably overdue effort to retire the white-tie-and-tails/black gown dress code that has been the symphony night standard since the 19th century, The Baltimore Sun’s Tim Smith reports:

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/classicalmusic/2012/09/marin_alsop_bso_launch_pilot_p.html

I’ve long advocated black or some other dark-colored shirts and trousers for men and pants-suits for women, loose-fitting in the neck and upper body to accommodate the contortions that string musicians, trombonists, et al., go through when playing.

* * * 

Meanwhile, a Farmington, NM, middle school has told an 11-year-old orchestra student that she may not play her purple violin because it doesn’t look like all the other fiddles. John M. Glionna reports in the Los Angeles Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-school-purple-violin-20120912,0,6370815.story

Bates wins Heinz Award

Mason Bates, the Richmond-bred composer known for his mixture of traditional symphonic orchestrations and electronic sounds, has been named the arts and humanities recipient of the 18th round of Heinz Awards from the Heinz Family Foundation.

The 35-year-old Bates, who now lives in Oakland, CA, is Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and 2012-13 Composer of the Year with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. He will receive $250,000 from the Heinz Foundation.

Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers and the Pittsburgh Symphony, Leonard Slatkin conducting, will introduce Bates’ Violin Concerto on Dec. 7. Before the premiere, the composer will curate an electroacoustic music program in Pittsburgh.

Last Night of the Proms online

The Last Night of the Proms, the final concert of the BBC Promenade Concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall, is one of the iconic musical events of every season and the most delightfully rowdy affirmation of Britishness to be seen and heard.

This year’s Last Night took place on Sept. 8. Jirí Belohlávek conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with Nicola Benedetti playing Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G minor and the Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja (in Olympic track suit) leading the mass sing-along of Thomas Arne’s “Rule, Brittania!”

The BBC’s video stream of the Last Night concert is not available outside Britain, but the audio stream is online here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/b01mk7zr

So far, only video snippets are available on YouTube. Go to http://www.youtube.com  Search for “Last Night of the Proms 2012.” Leave out the year and you’ll get a treasury of past performances.

My favorite “Rule, Brittania!” from 2011 with Susan Bullock in Anglo-Valkyrie garb, is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnY83VTHSTM

Richmond's orchestral all-star

Neal Cary, principal cellist of the Richmond Symphony, is one of 95 musicians from more than a dozen U.S. orchestras playing in the All-Star Orchestra, an ensemble selected by conductor Gerard Schwarz to perform for a forthcoming public-television series on the symphony orchestra and the music composed for it.

The first season of “The All-Star Orchestra,” produced by WNET in New York, is expected to air on PBS next year. (Dates have not been announced.) There will be eight one-hour episodes, each of which will contrast familiar works by Dvořák, Brahms, Schumann, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Stravinsky and Ravel with pieces written recently by American composers, among them Philip Glass, Joseph Schwantner, Ellen Taafe Zwilich, Robert Beaser, Bright Sheng and Augusta Read Thomas.

“I felt very lucky to be asked to play,” said Cary, who has worked with Schwarz at the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina, where Schwarz is music director. Cary also has taught the conductor’s son, cellist Julian Schwarz.

Cary recently returned from four days of sessions at the Manhattan Center, a familiar venue for recording sessions in New York since the 1950s. Schwarz and the orchestra spent six hours a day taping, with 19 cameras shooting the sessions, Cary said.

“We had no rehearsals, but [Schwarz] had marked all the [instrumental] parts very carefully . . . and with the standard pieces, all of us were quite familiar with the music.”

The All-Star Orchestra drew musicians from such leading ensembles as the Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera’s MET Orchestra. The All-Stars’ first violin section boasted concertmasters from 10 orchestras, and its wind section included a number of principals of major orchestras.

“The standard of playing was just incredible,” Cary said. “One of the most memorable moments for me was from the first taping we did. I was seated between Steve Honisberg of [Washington’s] National Symphony and Maria Kitsopoulus of the New York Philharmonic. His cello is a Stradivarius; hers is a Testore. It was quite an experience to hear such wonderful instruments at such close range.”

The series will be unusual in its mixture of standard and contemporary works. “It’s been a long time since I had played a contemporary piece that was any good,” the cellist remarked, “but these were all home runs.” Cary was especially impressed with a new cello concerto by the Texas-based composer Samuel Jones, which featured Julian Schwarz as the soloist.

Other than “Live from Lincoln Center,” which regularly features the New York Philharmonic, and the Michael Tilson Thomas-San Francisco Symphony series “Keeping Score,” U.S. orchestras rarely are seen and heard on network television these days. European ensembles still perform frequently on telecasts, and those make their way onto cable channels and the DVD market.

The forthcoming series “should increase the profile of American orchestras,” Cary said, and its educational format “might help increase attendance for our concerts.”

To learn more about the All-Star Orchestra, visit its website at www.allstarorchestra.org

Cage's 100th

Today is the 100th birthday of John Cage, perhaps the most original, certainly the most provocative, composer that American music has produced. At Deceptive Cadence, the NPR classical music blog, Anastasia Tsioulcas assembles a sampler of music and words by Cage, whom she describes as a figure who “forces you to reconsider your expectations and assumptions” about music:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/

Here in Richmond, the principal celebration of Cage’s centennial week comes on Sept. 7, when organist David Sinden performs “Organ 2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible),” beginning at 10 a.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Ninth and Grace streets.

Sinden’s rendition, expected to last about 10 hours, is high-speed compared with the most (in)famous performance of the piece, which began in 2001 at St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany, and is projected to conclude in 2640, a duration of 639 years. The original “As Slow as Possible,” for piano, typically lasts just over an hour.

More compact Cage programs are scheduled for March 21 and 27 at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Arts Center.