Squeezing the Strawberry Milk out of the "Vinyl Renaissance"

I’d say that Universal Music long ago abdicated its status as a “major” classical label, except that it never really was one in the first place, since it’s merely a corporate construct dressed up in nostalgia brands whose individual histories meant something to some people once upon a time.

So I was neither surprised to read about its forthcoming The Collector Series, nor surprised to learn that it consists of CD recordings clumsily recompiled into LPs. (Their target audience being the sort of “collectors” for whom recordings are mainly consumerist-identitarian paraphernalia.)

But even I was caught off guard by Universal’s lapse in taste here. I’m not sure which is worse: a Shostakovich LP issued in Bolshevik red vinyl (which may please the still fringe revisionist wing in Shostakovich studies who argues that the composer was more comfortable with the Soviet system than believed by the Western post-Testimony consensus) or that they chose to reissue the forgettable and fallible recordings of his piano concertos by Peter Jablonski. (The fact that these are digital recordings pressed on an analog format will matter little to people who will line up for it on Record Store Day to buy two copies — one to resell on Discogs, the other to play on their Crosley.)

Corporate blurb translated from the Japanese below:

From Decca comes a new concept in classical recordings aimed at new listeners. This series will focus on individual composers and their best-known works, presented in beautiful, expressionistic packaging with the goal of keeping the series running for years to come. Its accompanying artwork is luxurious, yet accessible and engaging to newer, younger listeners. Pressed on red vinyl.

At least it’ll look good in a man cave displayed next to some Shostakovich Funko Pops!.

Weinberg: Post-National Patriot

Prompted by my recent readings of Mieczysław Weinberg: Between East and West, I returned earlier this evening to his opera, The Passenger. Amidst the digital piles in one of my hard drives, there was a recording of the opera conducted by Mirga Gražintė-Tyla, issued last year by Deutsche Grammophon, that suddenly came to my recollection. (I had downloaded it, but somehow never got around to hearing it.)

As with all great operas, there are multiple layers of expression and meaning in Weinberg’s The Passenger, some intended, some not. Aside from its central theme, the traumas of the Holocaust, Weinberg’s opera also seemed to grapple with some of the frictive consequences of globalization. Not for nothing did the 20th century spawn two world wars (and a third if we count the First Cold War). Technology in the last century brought us closer together, occasionally uncomfortably so: distance sometimes really does make the heart grow fonder. Various languages overlap and sometimes interrupt each other throughout The Passenger; they reinforce not only the cultural, ideological, and national conflicts that produced the atrocities around which the opera is based, but imply still unknown, future horrors to come. It’s not so much that “we’re all in this together”, to borrow a pandemic-era mass media slogan, as it is every man for himself.

So what a surprise to be reminded that the interlingual discord in The Passenger was neither the making of Weinberg nor his librettist, Alexander Medvedev — this opera was meant to be sung in Russian. This wasn’t clear in Deutsche Grammophon’s recording; a digital-only release, it confoundingly does not include a libretto, liner notes, or even a track list. (My memory is fuzzy, but I don’t remember whether or not this subject is addressed in the booklet for Roland Kluttig’s recording.) A few key strokes on my computer eventually led me to learn that the multilingual version of the libretto was an adaptation for the 2010 performance in Bregenz.

Earlier this week, my copy of the latest issue of the DSCH Journal arrived in the mail. One of its recurring topics was the collateral damage the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War has inflicted on international research into Shostakovich and 20th-century Soviet Russian music in general. Weinberg, who inhabits an even more delicate nodal point in this yawning civilizational fault line, is also one of its casualties, which is intimated in some recent trends I’ve noticed.

One of them is a noticeable attempt from some quarters to de-Russify Weinberg and his music, or to at least put some air between him and his now problematic adopted country.

David Fanning and Michelle Assay, in their foreword to the aforementioned Weinberg book, point out that the 2010 adaptation the libretto for The Passenger cut most mentions of Russian prisoners at Auschwitz “on the tenuous grounds that they reflect the pressures of Soviet cultural mores on the composer and his librettist”. (Restoration of these passages is unlikely post-2022.)

A few years before the war, Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, described Weinberg as “Polish-Jewish”, only mentioning the Soviet Union in passing as an impediment to the “full expression of his identity”, and bypassing any mention of Russia altogether. Another essay, on the Atlanta Symphony’s website, the third hit in a search for the composer, comes to an interesting conclusion:

By all accounts Weinberg was a modest and generous man, somewhat removed from the Soviet mainstream – he never joined the Communist Party — and with his heavily accented Russian destined to remain, at least in part, an émigré. Shortly before his death in 1996, dispirited by Russia's disregard for him and weakened by a long battle with Crohn's disease, Weinberg converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.

I’m not sure about his party affiliation. Rostropovich insinuated otherwise in Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, labeling Weinberg a party “insider”. (I’ll mention as an aside that his friend and colleague, Georgy Sviridov, who in Western academic discourse is often dismissed as a party hack or a third-rate oddity, was in actuality never a member of the CPSU and was, at least in private, skeptical of its ideals.) 

So if Weinberg was dispirited by how Russia treated him, then why would he convert to its church? And if the Soviet Union inhibited Weinberg personally and professionally, why did it promote his music, at least domestically? Why did he, in turn, compose quite a few works in praise of his adopted homeland, even as late as the glasnost period, not all of which appear to have been in response to official requests?

Alexander Tchaikovsky has noted that Weinberg was a lifelong “patriot” and believer in the Soviet way of life; this is confirmed in his mid-1990s interview with Manashir Yakubov. Weinberg, as it turns out, was not only a genuine Soviet artist — his second homeland was officially multi-ethnic — but also to an extent a post-national one. Polish by birth, Jewish by heritage, Russian by choice, his personal convictions and fluid trans-national identity discomfit those who prefer art that knows its place as easily commodified fodder for propaganda. “Poland is my homeland”, Weinberg once said, “but my second homeland remains Russia”. Caught between fences and international grudge matches in which he had no say, he is a man as much of our time as he was of his.

Footfalls of Giants in Beethoven and Alexander Tchaikovsky

Since the 19th century, classical music, perhaps uniquely among Western musical genres, has been defined as much by progress into the future, as well as intense preoccupation with the past. Schoenberg and Stravinsky, each in their characteristic ways, attempted to subvert and render homage to their forebears. A half-century before them there was Brahms and his anxiety about a certain giant tramping behind him. Would it have surprised him to learn that the giant himself felt daunted by the footfalls of his predecessors?

Last weekend, Dudamel conducted Beethoven’s Missa solemnis for the first time. It was a first for me too: I’d never heard the work performed in concert before. Music heard in person, it is sometimes easy to forget, can be an experience quite distinct from hearing it on records. So it was for me hearing the Missa solemnis, a work that I’m well familiar with, yet felt at times unexpectedly new in that Disney Hall performance.

Beethoven’s music isn’t typically thought of as being burdened by history in the way later composers were. After all, he was busy forging the very musical language to which musical developments for over a century afterward would respond to and recoil against. What did he have to worry about?

Brought to life by the combined power of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orfeó Català, and the Cor de Cambra del Palau de la Música Catalana, Beethoven’s struggle to honor and surpass his past suddenly came to my notice.

The Missa solemnis speaks of its composer’s struggle to reconcile himself with Catholicism or at least God, the notion of the Divine; somehow I had entirely missed this until last Friday. (An appropriate enough epiphany at the start of this Lenten season. Incidentally, I haven’t read Nicholas Chong’s The Catholic Beethoven, but it is on my “to-read” list.)

On another level, the work is almost as if Beethoven were trying to measure himself up against the past, to prove — to himself and to those who came before him — that he is a worthy inheritor of its legacy. The work’s dramatic if peculiar use of fugue, its Handelian bravado took on a new dimension for me. Whenever I thought about how Beethoven explicitly referenced the past, as in the Eighth Symphony or the strange minuet that draws the curtain on the Diabelli Variations, it seemed to me that he sort of laughed or shrugged it off. In the Missa solemnis, however, joy and a rare sense of unease pervades much of its music. At least in this work, the past was no joke.

Nor is it a trifling matter in Alexander Tchaikovsky’s The Tale of Boris and Gleb, a work I heard a few days before. (The video I had posted of its performance is now, unfortunately, no longer available.) The composer’s concern there was not so much musical history, as it was time and history itself. “Past”, “present”, and “future” coexist, clash, and oppress one another; neither one existing separately, but all of them threaded into a single, living whole.

Like Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Tchaikovsky’s The Tale of Boris and Gleb also grapples with the nature of faith, but the latter work contains a number of additional implications only imaginable in our postmodern and, possibly, incipiently post-human age, where all of us may soon need to take cover from the footfalls of giants still unknown.

Appreciation

Simply a lovely recording. Even 30 years after first encountering this music, I still keep coming back to it.

The Good Ol' Days?

Within a few hundred feet from each other here in the heart of Old Town Pasadena, there were no less than four record stores at one point. I used to browse through all of them several times a week. They didn’t stock everything. For specialty items and imports, I’d have to take long bus rides to stores in West Hollywood, Brentwood, and the San Fernando Valley. When the premiere recording of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony in the Derevianko arrangement was issued in 1997, the only store that stocked a copy was the Tower Classical Annex on Sunset Blvd. Before the advent of the Gold and Red Lines, it took 3 or 4 buses to get there from Highland Park. Without a car and being largely unfamiliar with places outside northeastern Los Angeles and the western San Gabriel Valley, it almost felt to me like I was wandering off into some exotic, far-away locale.

Nowadays that recording and several others of that arrangement are virtually on-tap whenever I want them.

Had I been told back in the 1990s that the vast majority of human musical achievement could be immediately accessible at one’s fingertips, anytime, anywhere, it would’ve seemed the stuff of delirious sci-fi fantasizing. There’s a price for these comforts, not least in that undefinable quality sometimes referred to as “romance”. Online listening can often feel like one is merely accumulating data. (Or “content”, hideous word, but perhaps appropriate in this context.)

One has to accept that things change — for better and worse.

I was reminded of the “better” last weekend. An auction came up for a bootleg CD-R that purported to contain a live recording from 2006 of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony with the Chicago Symphony conducted by Claudio Abbado. My eyes widened — I had to have it. Evidently I didn’t want it enough, though. My bid lost; some other lucky collector won. Fortunately, a fellow member on a forum I frequent was quick to inform me that the credit on that CD-R was false. Abbado never conducted the Chicago Symphony again after 1991.

I was saved from a potentially expensive lesson. Not that it would’ve been my first one.

At the Pasadena City College Flea Market some time around 2000, I bought a clutch of what purported to be audience recordings of Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts conducted by Carlos Maria Giulini. Only many years later did I learn that these CD-Rs actually contained broadcasts of British orchestras conducted by Kurt Sanderling and a handful of others. Altogether, I had spent around $75 on those discs. (If you trust the CPI index — and I’ve been skeptical since at least 2020 — that comes out to about twice the amount in today’s money.)

YouTube and numerous other sites now have all kinds of bootleg recordings for streaming available. Whether or not the performers listed are indeed the ones playing is no more certain today than it was in the past, but at least now you don’t lose anything by clicking anything to listen.

“Romance” may be a thing of the past, but at least taking your ears off-roading has gotten a little cheaper.

Stubborn Earworm

Small thing. Earlier this morning, I found myself unable to yank a persistent earworm from my mind. The track was by Vince Guaraldi, but its opening riff referred to a classical work. A minuet, the sort of thing a beginning pianist would learn. Who composed it and which work was it?

The whole day it played in my head. Still no answer. I suppose I could’ve looked it up online, but I refused to do so. Partly out of pride; partly out of conviction that dependence on machines isn’t healthy.

Finally, before the day ended it suddenly hit me: Beethoven. It was his Minuet in G major, WoO 10, no. 2. No wonder Guaraldi’s wistful piece was the theme for Schroeder in the Peanuts television specials. Now it all made sense. Finally.

A Scottish Acquarelle

One of the happiest discoveries I made last year was the music of the Scottish composer John McEwen. Took a chance on a CD of his piano music, played by Geoffrey Tozer, and was immediately enchanted by it.

However unjust though it may be, a composer’s neglect usually has perfectly understandable reasons. Too advanced, too astringent, too subversive, too in the shadow of someone else. McEwen’s neglect, on the other hand, really has no good reason. Sure, he was self-effacing. But so were other composers.

McEwen’s music is utterly distinct without straying too far from the parameters of Late Romanticism. Perhaps Chausson and especially Séverac com closest to inhabiting similar aural realms. Perhaps because of the unassuming figure he cut in professional circles, some of his most telling attributes are heard best in small-scale works.

“Petite chérie”, the first movement of McEwen’s La Côte d'Argent is a lovely example. A brief little musical watercolor, it outlines all those traits that sound unlike anyone else — his sense of melody, orchestration, and especially harmonic color and movement — and establish why his music is so dear to those who know it.

"A talent second only to Shostakovich"

Last Saturday, my copy of Mieczysław Weinberg: Between East and West arrived and it has scarcely left my grasp since.

While on my second reading of the book, I took notice of a detail that escaped my previous reading of Tommy Persson’s essay, “Meeting and Promoting Weinberg”. Namely, that in 1990 he petitioned Rudolf Barshai to conduct some of Weinberg’s music in future Gothenburg Symphony concerts. The conductor never replied.

Considering that Barshai and Weinberg had been friends back in the Soviet Union, the conductor’s slight seems especially hurtful. Or had he forgotten his old friend after all?

A few weeks ago, I mentioned how Barshai in 1984 had declared his intention to introduce Canadian audiences to Weinberg’s music. (Which he was not able to do for reasons explained in that post.)

A month after that interview with the Canadian Press, an article by Ilya Gerol, a Russian émigré turned Canadian Kremlinologist, appeared in The Province that contained Barshai’s extensive reminiscences of Soviet life. According to the byline, the article was an excerpt from a forthcoming book. If it was ever published, I’ve not been able to find it. The most extensive recollection is devoted to a composer only referred to as “N”. Although it differs in a number of details, it’s unlikely that Barshai was referring to anyone else but Weinberg. (Perhaps he obscured certain things so as to stymie potential overseas informants.) The opera at the end of Barshai’s anecdote likely corresponds to Weinberg’s Pozdravlyayem!, which had been completed in 1975, two years before Barshai emigrated to Israel.

Below is the full text of this passage:

This story’s about a Soviet composer whose talent is second only to Shostakovich. We'll call him “N”, for reasons that will be clear as the story unfolds. He's still living in Moscow.

In 1952, Stalin had started a crackdown on the Jews in the Soviet Union.

Jewish doctors were accused of trying to poison the Soviet leadership. Jewish writers, musicians, and actors were said to be the agents of the CIA and world Zionism. Jews in general were said to be responsible for food shortages and everything else that was bad.

“N” was too occupied with his music to notice this. He had just completed his symphony and Shostakovich had told him that its first performance would be the musical event of the century.

Late one night in 1953, “N” was arrested by the KGB and locked up in the Lubyanka prison. All the interrogators wanted him to do was sign a confession that he was a liaison officer between the CIA, MOSSAD, and Zionists in Moscow. He did not sign, because he thought it was all a misunderstanding. He explained to his interrogators that he didn't know what the word Zionist meant. And the names CIA and MOSSAD he learned first from his interrogators.

After two weeks of sleepless nights and endless interrogation, he was put naked in a cell full of hungry rats. He was put in the cell at midnight. At six o'clock in the morning he signed the confession. For the next two months he signed confession after confession describing his participation in a plot to overthrow the Soviet government and to make the USSR a colony of the United States and Israel.

Then, suddenly, everything stopped. No more interrogations. No more visits to the prosecutor's office in the middle of the night. No more learning by heart the role he had to play at the show trial coming up soon.

When a new interrogator one day offered “N” a comfortable seat in his office, “N’s” terror was greater than ever. What else were they going to do with him? But the interrogator told “N” that all the charges against him were to be dropped and that he had to sign a document stating that all his confessions were null and void. Then he would be free to go, with the apologies of the KGB.

But “N” remembered the rats too well. “I was a liaison officer between the CIA, MOSSAD, and the Zionists”, he insisted. “I plotted to overthrow the government”.

This went on for days, until the interrogator asked “N’s” wife to help. She sent her husband a note with only two words on it: “Stalin died”.

Then he signed the paper repudiating his confessions, was freed and received the official apologies. His rights and privileges were restored. He was free to compose and his compositions could be performed in public.

But he was never the same man. He was too frightened to talk to even close friends, rarely allowed his work to be performed and categorically forbade performances outside the USSR.

“Don't tell me about audiences and fame”, he once told Barshai, “You say fame and I see rats. That’s the difference between you and me”.

Just before he left the USSR, Barshai went to see “N”, who showed him a new folk opera he had composed, based on Jewish themes. “It's a work of genius”, Barshai told “N”. “Give it to me and I will see that it is performed in the West and it will be your masterpiece. I will say that you didn't give it to me and that I smuggled it out”.

“I would rather burn it”, replied “N”. “Better that it dies with me”.

He went to the window and saw the militiamen guarding the area reserved for composers, actors, and writers. He was looking at the militiamen, but he saw rats.

Alexander Tchaikovsky in very brief

While briefly browsing YouTube earlier this morning, I stumbled on a live feed of a concert celebrating the 80th birthday of Alexander Tchaikovsky. No relation to that Tchaikovsky, but he is the other one’s nephew.

I first fell in love with Alexander Tchaikovsky’s music a few years ago, via a recording of his Piano Quintet from 1989. Appropriately enough, as I soon found out the piece has a stateside connection: it was commissioned by an American chamber ensemble, who played the world premiere in Dallas.

The work I heard today, an opera-oratorio, was far more epic in scope, right down to its title: The Tale of Boris and Gleb, their Brothers Yaroslav the Wise and Sviatopolk the Accursed, of Daring Bandits, and the Good Russian People. It was all impressively conducted by the Ecuadorian conductor Freddy Cadena, previously known to me only through an obscure recording of Luis Humberto Salgado’s Sixth Symphony, with an excellent multimedia semi-staging that heightened the score’s blurring of time-space.

Having only listened to the last two-thirds of it, my thoughts are still not totally collected about this work. (I intend to hear it in full tomorrow.) There is no doubt, though, that this is vital music; its glittering, luxurious scoring and harmonies making its essential savagery all the more potent.

Tremendous.

Debussy: In Hac Spe Vivo

When I interviewed Paul Lewis earlier this week, I felt a bit tongue-tied. He’s one of my favorite living pianists. What he does sounds so simple: his playing is persuasive, captivating, as if the score were sounding out unimpeded by any intermediaries. He revels in the beauteous potential of the piano, yet never makes a fetish of this. Everything he does is in service to the music. In a world consumed by vainglory, Lewis’ introspection and scrupulousness are all the more precious. You can read my interview with him here.

One of the things that Lewis said that stayed with me was his desire in middle age to head in a new creative path by returning home. Which led me to dwell on the Debussy on his Sunday afternoon program at Zipper Hall.

“Pleasure is the only law”, the composer famously retorted to one of his teachers.  (Ernest Guiraud, I believe?) Perhaps that’s why my mind, more responsive to the recognizable architectural forms of music from the Austro-German lineage, struggled for years to fully appreciate Debussy. There was no difficulty in enjoying pieces like Clair de lune, the Arabesques, and Rêverie, which I first discovered via Rudolf Firkušný’s elegant Capitol recordings around 30 years ago. Pélleas et Mélisande was also an instant revelation. What proved more difficult for me to understand was the pleasure Debussy enjoyed from freedom of form, not just sensuousness of sound, and his surprising, idiosyncratic late rapprochement with the traditions he had long rebelled against. Where he would’ve headed next after his final proto-neoclassical works, in a transformed postwar France, is anybody’s guess. There are few greater musical “what ifs?”.

In 2014, when I read Eric Frederick Jensen’s biography on Debussy, the impression I got was of a composer whose visionary scope exceeded the span of time he was granted — he was dead barely past the mid-point of his 50s. Debussy’s mind brimmed with fantastic ideas, many of which, had they been realized, would’ve likely been as epochal as Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, La Mer, and his single completed opera.

As I turned the pages of Jensen’s book, the Debussy that emerged therein was disconcertingly familiar, even contemporary. With each success, each rung climbed on the ladder of public esteem, his life was increasingly involved in personal dramas: love affairs, the public polemic over his divorce, bills and more bills. Reading about his struggle against time and a quotidian life greedy for his attentions left me feeling profoundly sorry for him; it also brought me much closer to his music.

Bruno Leonardo Gelber once said in a recent interview (the exact one escapes me at the moment) that he felt sorry for the youth of today, who, enmeshed in a society of distraction, very rarely have the opportunity to realize themselves. Had Debussy lived today, there would be no Debussy to speak of, at least none that deserved to be remembered by posterity. So that Debussy managed to create at all — in spite of tawdry personal dilemmas and endless hustling in search of material security that he never quite secured — is a miracle for which we should all be thankful.

Debussy’s life might even, perhaps, be a source of edifying solace for all of us in our harried 21st century.

A new Prokofiev Sixth for next month

Every morning, the classical section of the Tower Records Japan website is usually one of my first internet stops. Mostly to browse. My eyes tend to be bigger than my budget and dwindling space allows. So each month I select only a few “must have” discs — and one of March’s picks just materialized.

Ōno Kazushi has been gaining wider attention in recent years for his fine work in Brussels. Before then, he made some distinguished recordings of Mahler and Shostakovich for Altus with orchestras in Tokyo and Barcelona. His latest CD for the label is a live recording of Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony, scheduled for release next month.

Just like Tchaikovsky is generally known as the composer of “three symphonies”, so Prokofiev is the author of only “two” — the First and Fifth. General audiences are largely uninterested in his other symphonies, despite their craft and expressive beauty.

Of these, maybe the Sixth is the most often performed. Curiously, outside of the “Classical”, it is the one I’ve heard the most in concert: four times since my first in 1996, conducted by Jorge Mester in Pasadena. My recollection is that even with a student discount, a Pasadena Symphony ticket was around $40 back then. Later, when I worked at a local record store, I became friends with a gent who was studying with Mester and, consequently, got to attend rehearsals and performances for free as his guest. But in 1996 I was still in high school; my weekly allowance was $20 and needed to last all seven days. So it took effort to save for the ticket to hear Mester conduct this symphony, which I had only read in score. Those were golden days in Pasadena — we had no idea how good we had it back then. Mester regularly spoiled us with all kinds of wonderful 20th-century works that he conducted with enthusiasm. His Prokofiev Sixth was no different. It’s still one of my most cherished concert memories; certainly it was the best performance of that symphony I ever heard in person.

On records, the Sixth has been pretty lucky. Ormandy, Ansermet, and Leinsdorf all made fine recordings. Mravinsky is, of course, sui generis; close behind is Rozhdestvensky. Most critics disliked Slatkin’s excellent National Symphony recording. To me it’s one of the best things in his discography. I especially like the way he intensified the frantic finale by nudging the basses to step on the orchestra’s toes. In the 21st century, the Sixth has been persuasively recorded by Gergiev (twice), Litton, and Oramo. Somewhere in one of my hard drives is a live recording in Rotterdam conducted by Kurt Sanderling from circa 2000. Someone should issue that commercially — a performance of incredible power.

Now Ōno is on his way. Looking forward to adding it to my collection soon. Good thing I make more than $20 a week now!

Impromptus for a Winter's Day

After a few weeks of unseasonable, if enjoyable warmth, an overcast sky greeted me upon rising from bed this morning. It’s still winter, after all — this was my reminder.

Something about the melancholy cast of these waning days of winter, accentuated by creation’s almost palpable collective yearning for a spring close at hand, yet far away, turns my ears towards music to match the mood. Schubert seemed especially appropriate. I pulled my box of Paul Lewis’ Schubert from my shelf and played his recordings of the Moments musicaux and the D. 935 Impromptus. A doubly appropriate choice since I was scheduled to interview him later in the day. You can read that tomorrow, so do watch this space.

Lewis will be playing a program of Mozart, Debussy, and Poulenc at Zipper Hall this Sunday — not the typical repertoire he has been most celebrated for. Lewis, like Brendel, to whom he has often been compared, displayed a more eclectic repertoire in his younger days. Foremost is a magisterial Liszt Sonata in B minor that was among his earliest Harmonia Mundi efforts, and a recital of Schumann and Mussorgsky that followed a few years later. Turn back the clock a little further back and one finds more surprises: concerti by Grieg, Shostakovich (Op. 35), and Schnittke. Some of the plain-spoken introspection that characterizes Lewis’ best work is already incipient in the Shostakovich’s slow movement; his sense of stillness, of flow between action and silence would be wonderful to hear in the composer’s cryptic Second Piano Sonata.

This trajectory from flash to contemplativeness reminded me of another favorite pianist, the short-lived William Kapell. First staking his career by playing Prokofiev and Khachaturian, his later discography turned towards more inward-looking repertoire. Among those pieces he set down in the studio was Schubert’s A-flat Impromptu from the D. 935 set. Kapell’s recording is alive with an awareness of flickering light soon to be dimmed by everlasting night — a quality that Lewis also brings out with unforced eloquence in his own dazzling recording decades later.

Way back in my last days of high school, Kapell introduced me to this music of heartbroken joy; Lewis is the confirmation I need of the enduring grace of Schubert’s music. Take a listen to both recordings.

The WSJ to the Kennedy Center: "Shut it doooooown!"

Newspapers today are primarily useful as barometers of the ruling class. (Max Reger, famously, had another practical use for them, now largely impossible in the digital age.) Whatever nominal objective to report the truth to the public was abandoned long ago, regardless of what political faction any of these media organizations claim to represent. Which would be a moot point anyway — most of their readers are unable to parse text, and an increasing number are only semi-literate besides. (If there is anything edifying in the recently released tranche of documents relating to a certain disgraced and deceased “financier” it’s that, apparently, the very rich can barely spell.)

No wonder that the Wall Street Journal, whose slogan ought to be “every bad idea must be countered with an even worse one”, published an op-ed last Friday by a Tim Foley that advocated for the closure of the Kennedy Center. The capsule biography at the end of his column, incidentally, stated that he “is chairman of the NTC Group, a private-equity firm”. 

Another fine idea from the despoilers of the nation.

Unsurprisingly, Foley’s argument is based on willful fatuity: the Kennedy Center is ugly and out-of-date, to start.

By that logic, the wrecking ball should also be taken to venues across the United States, from the Lincoln Center in New York City, to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. And talk about being architecturally passé — New York’s Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Vienna’s Musikvereinsaal, and St. Petersburg’s Shostakovich Philharmonia, to cite a few examples, weren’t even built in the last century.

An additional reason cited by Foley was especially risible:

The way the [Kennedy Center]’s leadership is chosen is another problem. The board [...] is a mix of political donors, former politicians, high-level bureaucrats, and Washington social aspirants. Appointed board members are motivated not by an interest in the performing arts but by the honor and prestige of being on the board and, in a town where officeholders run the show, the value of it as a social calling card for non-officeholders.

With minor modifications, the aforementioned could just as well describe the boards of most performing arts organizations.

Money and power, or at least proximity to them, not artistic acumen, are usually the most attractive qualities in any prospective candidate to a performing arts board. That isn’t a slight against performing arts organizations. Access to the wealthy and connected is a matter of survival in an environment where the intrinsic worth of something or someone is defined only by dollar signs. If the Kennedy Center is “guilty” of recruiting board members based on these considerations, so are countless other arts organizations.

Following Foley’s beliefs to their ultimate conclusions, “recreational” dispensaries, 5-over-1 mixed use development eyesores, bars featuring “exotic dancers” — anything that serves the basest and most easily profitable impulses would be “better” than public spaces that present the noblest expressions of the human spirit.

Foley’s op-ed reminded me of Jon Taffer’s signature “shut it doooooown!”, except that this utterance is salvational, not destructive in intent. 

Glenn Gould was sort of right when he said that the future of music was in recordings. So they are — as the bricks for personal fortresses that buttress the life of the mind from cultural vandalism.

At least this Foley guy can spell.

Interviews, more CDs, and farewell to SLO

Today is my last full day in San Luis Obispo; by this time tomorrow, I’ll be back home in Pasadena. Just in time to catch Sunday afternoon’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concert: Thomas Adès conducting his own music and that of other composers, with soloist Yuja Wang dropping in. Among the works on the program will be William Marsey’s Man with Limp Wrist, an eight-movement work inspired by the art of Salman Toor. You can read my interview with the composer here.

While up here, I also enjoyed a wide-ranging phone interview with William Henry Curry, the music director of the Durham Symphony Orchestra, and indefatigable Roy Harris booster. His National Symphony performance of Harris’ Third Symphony on September 6, 1979, on a program that included music by Adolphus Hailstork and George Walker, was confirmed by the Roy Harris Archive to be the last during the composer’s lifetime. An essay on Harris’ ill-fated “Bicentennial Symphony”, with Curry’s invaluable insights, will be posted in the next couple of weeks, timed for the 50th anniversary of the symphony’s premiere. In the meantime, I recommend watching this fascinating video of Curry discussing his origins and initial conducting efforts.

Boo Boo Records [Image:My wife]

Back to the Central Coast: my dive into the aisles at Boo Boo Records yesterday apparently wasn’t enough. (Can you blame me? I only have around 35,000 CDs in my collection.) So I returned earlier this evening. The picks this time were:

• Holst’s The Planets conducted by Ozawa (Philips) and Maazel (CBS): For a lot of listeners, Holst’s suite is an entry-level work, a splashy introduction to classical music. I never paid it serious attention until a couple of years ago, and even then only because I was first captivated by Holst’s Egdon Heath. Now I’ve become a bit of a completist for recordings of The Planets.

• Slatkin conducts Piston: I had a rip of this on one of my hard drives, but wanted a physical copy.

• David Alan Miller conducts Harris’ and Gould’s Second symphonies: You can guess why I grabbed this CD. On top of that, I’m a great admirer of the protean Gould.

• Andrew Litton playing and conducting piano concertos by Ravel and Gershwin: Scratches my itch for Litton and original Virgin CDs.

• Edo de Waart conducting Respighi in San Francisco: I like de Waart’s discography in the Bay Area and Minnesota.

• Edward Gardner’s first volume of his Janáček series for Chandos: I already have the other two discs in this series. Now my set is complete.

• Annie Fischer playing piano concertos with the NHK Symphony: It’s been a decade since I started collecting King Records’ NHK series. This was a real surprise to find; the price was right too — and the obi was tucked inside the booklet.

• Fujieda Mamoru’s Patterns of Plants, played by Sarah Cahill: Not too familiar with Fujieda’s music; haven’t heard it in about a decade. Mainly bought it because I’ve enjoyed Cahill’s recordings since her New Albion days.

Today’s CD buys [Image:Me]

I’m already dreaming of my next visit to this lovely town. For now, though, I have lots of listening to catch up on this week.

Central Coast CD haul

My wife and I are here in San Luis Obispo for the next few days. We come up here two or three times a year. Everything here is generally so idyllic, the traffic so comparatively light (non-existent, actually), the surrounding area so gorgeous, that I wonder if people here are aware of how lucky they are to live here. (Well, Pasadena isn’t so bad either.)

One of the things I love checking here (and, really, anywhere I visit) are the local record stores and thrift shops. One of my most rewarding finds here was a private press CD issued by the San Luis Obispo Symphony Orchestra of recordings of orchestral music by Joseph Clokey, better known as a composer of sacred music and as the stepfather of Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby.

What I turned up this time was less exotic, but still interesting enough to pry open my wallet.

One of the discs I decided to get was Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s Conversations with Bill Evans album from the late 1990s, one of the last in his long series of recordings for Decca. I turned my nose up at this sort of “crossover” in years past, but my tastes have turned less puritanical with each passing year.

Another disc I picked up was an Andrew Litton album with the Bournemouth Symphony that featured Bernstein’s Second Symphony. Two reasons. First, the excellence of Litton’s Prokofiev and Shostakovich recordings for BIS prompted me to reevaluate the conductor’s discography. (I’ve also been fond of collecting original pressings of Virgin Classics CDs recently.) Then there’s Jeffrey Kahane as the soloist in “The Age of Anxiety”. His leadership of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra lingers fondly in my memory. Even more so is a solo recital he played in Disney Hall about a decade ago, with the most gorgeously shaded and nuanced performance of Bach’s French Suite No. 5 I’ve ever heard.

Christoph Eschenbach is another conductor I’ve been reevaluating in recent years. Especially his discography with the Houston Symphony; he made some truly superb recordings of Prokofiev’s and Shostakovich’s respective Fifth symphonies for the orchestra’s house label. For some reason, his recordings with the same orchestra of music by the Second Viennese School are a little harder to find, at least in the wild. This is the second disc in the series I’ve acquired.

One of the CDs I bought mostly based on my good will for the label than the music itself. To be honest, I’m not very familiar with Nikolai Kapustin’s music. The few times I’ve heard it, it left a lukewarm impression. Sort of interesting, especially given from where it came from, but also with a strong whiff of kitsch. More than anything, it seemed like “piano nerd” music: repertoire beloved mostly by pianists and pianophiles, than by non-specialist listeners. More than a decade has passed since I last listened to any Kapustin, but maybe this Boheme release played by the composer himself will change my mind.

The Harris CD speaks for itself as the latest evidence of my rapidly developing love of this composer’s very humane music.

Most of these discs were in the dollar bin at Boo Boo Records on Monterey Street; none were more than $4. Good finds. I may go back tomorrow.

Heavy Light Listening

Between my return from Phoenix last night and my departure for San Luis Obispo this afternoon, I managed to squeeze in just enough time to listen to music.

Somehow I’d never heard András Schiff’s ECM cycle of the Beethoven piano sonatas. When it was commercially available, I wasn’t interested. Then I was — but by then it was out-of-print. Took me a while to track down a physical copy, which arrived this morning.

I first listened to Op. 31, no. 1, one of my favorite works by Beethoven. While the recording played, I looked through the box set and came across the last CD in the set, entitled Encores after Beethoven, which suggests a collection of “lollipops”. The program is anything but. Which was no surprise. (My eyebrows would have raised right off my forehead had the disc included Schiff recordings of things like Étincelles and Polka de W. R.)

Schubert’s late Allegretto in C minor, D. 915 is the second track. Compact, moody, and emotionally potent, it arguably overshadows the one Beethoven work on the program (the “Andante favori”). Truly remarkable and original music, composed in the valley of death: Beethoven’s and, imminently, Schubert’s.

Heavy music for a little encore.

Sound and Place in late Stravinsky

We arrived from Phoenix late this afternoon; the flight back to Burbank lasted barely an hour. Most of our final day was spent driving around, our eyes soaking in as much of the city and its environs as possible before our departure.

For some reason, I kept thinking about the kind of music a composer could compose here. Would the heat, the ubiquitous grackle calls, the rock formations jutting amidst the cityscape, the wide boulevards somehow inform a resident composer’s music?

Donald Vroon of the American Record Guide made a snide comment in some review from over 20 years ago — I no longer recall the exact context; maybe it had something to do with Ernő von Dohnányi? He said to the effect that Florida was hardly an environment to inspire great art. That reminded me of a question once put to Stravinsky during a visit to Chile: did the country provide him with any musical inspiration? (Speaking of “snide”, Stravinsky was a prodigious master of bitchy commentary.)

While I listened to the newest Pentatone CD of Stravinsky’s late music, it occurred to me that this music might’ve sounded quite different — or would’ve never have existed — had its composer chosen to live anywhere else but in Southern California.

From Ventura to Riverside, the region today is relentlessly subjugated by human development. Hard though it may be to believe, especially to recent transplants from elsewhere, this urbanization, especially in the San Gabriel Valley and Inland Empire, is relatively recent. There were unpaved streets well into the 1990s in Highland Park, where I was born and raised. Turn back the clock a couple of more decades and the contrast with today’s Manhattanization is even more dramatic. Jack Webb shows like Adam-12 and Emergency! reveal an environment that resembled the Midwest more than the East Coast, even in neighborhoods within the radius of Downtown. In the 1950s and 1960s, parts of the Greater Los Angeles area were still untamed enough that they plausibly served as rural backdrops in Perry Mason and The Andy Griffith Show. 

So in 1940, when Stravinsky became a permanent resident in Los Angeles, he found a city that, geographically and, to an extent, culturally, was the furthest away he ever settled beyond his known world. He was far from the observation posts on the Old World in the East Coast, let alone the European capitals where the composer once strode through as a magnate.

It was Agatha Fassett, I think, who once said that among the aspects of American life that most chafed her teacher Bartók was the inescapable smell of chili con carne. Did Stravinsky have similar misgivings about the place that received him as a recent émigré? Or was he energized in some way by a place so distinct from cities like Paris and Berlin; a locale that upon his arrival must’ve looked like a cowtown overrun with tamale carts, improbably wedged between desert, mountains, and a Mediterranean coastline?

Stravinsky hung onto neoclassicism for another decade after he settled in Los Angeles, but almost immediately his American style evinced a break from the preceding French period. Further interesting transformations can be heard on this Pentatone disc, whose program spans Stravinsky’s transitional late-neoclassical and final serial periods. Is there a correlation between the composer’s ultimate development and the possibly concomitant transformation of his adopted hometown from relative backwater into a global cultural capital in its own right?

It’s something I’ll be thinking about as memories of Phoenix recede behind me during my drive up to San Luis Obispo tomorrow.

Hello from Phoenix!

Greetings from sunny Phoenix! This is my second time in the city. It’s also my first time ever posting anything with a pre-scheduling function. So, actually, if you’re reading this, I wrote this post about 48 hours ago. How very Back to the Future. (Still waiting on my Mr. Fusion home energy reactor...)

Even as we approach the 21st century’s fourth decade, the belief that high culture only happens on the East Coast, mostly New York City, is persistent. Ask your average out-of-towner from east of the Rockies what they think about culture in Los Angeles and you’re likely to be met with a contemptuous sneer. There’s all kinds of classical music history under our feet in Southern California; some notable sites are only a short distance away from my home.

Phoenix, a much younger city, would be easy to similarly dismiss. When my wife and I were here last year, we spent a long while driving around, especially in the Mesa and Tempe areas, taking in a dynamic topography where outcroppings of the 20th century press against the burgeoning 21st, punctuated at intervals by dramatic rock formations and the edges of a Sonoran Desert that refuses to submit to concrete and steel.

On our first night during that trip last year, we had dinner at Organ Stop Pizza in Mesa, a local favorite insulated from the passing of time. To the right of the entrance, there was a dining hall booming with music. As we entered, we saw a large stage. Suddenly, an organist playing away at a console emerged from a trap door below. Accompanied by pizza and appetizers that were pleasantly nostalgic, we listened to a wide ranging program that covered everything from Grieg and Mendelssohn to John Williams to Tico-Tico to Kondō Kōji to contemporary Top 40 — further enhanced by occasional dance numbers from animatronic cat puppets.

Organ Stop Pizza bills itself as being the home of the world’s largest Wurlitzer organ, a copy of the “Fox Special”. My first thought was that Virgil Fox was somehow involved, but the instrument’s name originates from having been specially designed for 20th Century Fox’s sound stage. Just looking at this mighty instrument is an experience; to hear this complex, two-story tall mechanism come to life with music is beyond impressive.

Phoenix has other musical experiences as well. The city and its environs have, according to my count, at least three symphony orchestras with regular seasons. Arizona State University, which was the site of the second-ever American performance of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Quartet (erroneously credited as the US premiere), has an active schedule of orchestral, chamber, and solo instrumental concerts. Other organizations, like the Phoenix Chamber Music Society and Yavapai Symphony Association lend further support, promoting Arizonan musicians, as well as bringing in luminaries from farther out such as the Takács Quartet and the Miró Quartet.

Last time I was here, I didn’t have too much time to explore the record store scene. Truth be told, I couldn’t manage it. Phoenix was blistering through a heat wave that averaged around 110°F every day — not the sort of weather that encourages exploration by foot or even in a vehicle. Zia Records is a regional institution. I visited a couple of locations and, while their shelves weren’t stocked with rarities, they did have a good number of Telarc CDs I’d been hunting for. Better luck was had at the Deseret Thrift in Glendale, where there awaited a cache of BIS and Hyperion CDs, mostly of music by James MacMillan and Kalevi Aho, each priced $1.

Part of me wants to go to the ASU Symphony Orchestra concert occurring on the afternoon we arrive, if only to hear Carlos Simon’s Amen!, which opens the program. I just might after all, in spite of possibly running on fumes from my early morning flight into Arizona.

Whatever the case, I hope to have more musical experiences to relate when I get back to manning my website Tuesday night. Phoenix is a beautiful city.

Stravinsky's Late Music: Put Your Ears to Work

I hardly spent a moment at home for most of the day. Went for coffee and a stroll with my mother, then accompanied my wife for errands. By the time we returned home, the sun was setting on another unseasonably warm January day in Southern California. As we approached our driveway, an Amazon driver emerged from inside, rounded the corner, and quickly vanished. And when I approached my doorstep, there it was: the new Pentatone CD conducted by Daniel Reuss.

Stravinsky’s late music is among my most cherished. Recordings of this vital, nourishing music are infrequent; live performances in my area even rarer. A few years ago, Salonen devoted a program to some of these late works in a Stravinsky series he conducted with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Disney Hall was filled to around 80% capacity. Did these people know what they were about to listen to?, I wondered. Evidently they didn’t. No sooner did the Requiem Canticles begin than the hall started emptying out — conspicuously. Because the program was played without an intermission. An hour and twenty minutes later, only about 30% of the audience remained.

“Stravinsky, after all these years, is still is not very popular with audiences”, wrote Harold C. Schonberg in 1967. “Everybody will say he is the world's greatest composer, and almost everybody will make enormous detours to avoid his music”.

But Stravinsky is one of the greatest composers and his late music among his finest. That most people don’t think so is irrelevant. (A quick browse at the various quack theories, beliefs, “lifehacks”, sociopathic behaviors, and so on that are amplified by social media is enough to make any rational person permanently skeptical of the vox populi.) It took decades for listeners to begin to come around to late Beethoven. So when Milton Babbitt wrote that he didn’t care if people listened, he had a point. Some people will only ever like that which is instantly gratifying — or vetted by consensus. For a serious composer, why even bother trying to please listeners like that? Artistic creation isn’t a democracy, much though people seem to believe it is. That which is beautiful, great, and enduring simply is. If it goes over their heads or they simply refuse to grapple with it, that’s their loss. Art lives on.

Schonberg concluded his essay by predicting that Stravinsky’s legacy would endure because of his impact on music history rather than on listeners. Even if, that achievement alone is a lot more than most composers can ever dream of. And if someone like myself, who did not come from a musical background and dropped out of high school on top of that, can enjoy works like Threni or the Requiem Canticles, then maybe there’s hope for those listeners for whom these works continue to mystify.

All it takes is the willingness to put your ears to work.

Late night listening with Eresko

An interesting personal discovery I made last year was the pianist Viktor Eresko, a Russian pianist. He made a number of excellent recordings for Melodiya in the final decade of the Soviet Union, a few of which were reissued on CD.

Unfortunately for “vinyl renaissance” resisters like me, a good portion of Eresko’s discography remains locked on LP. (Much of which is also not readily or cheaply available.) A shame because everything I’ve heard by him is excellent. His sweep and richness of tone are positively Romantic; especially attractive are his pearlescent fingerwork and silvery octaves, both qualities vividly apparent in his recording of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. That, along with the torso of the Third, were reissued on a late 1980s Melodiya CD — it’s a favorite of mine and well worth seeking. Eresko’s recording of the Second regrettably appears to never have been reissued on CD. One can imagine that this work would’ve been especially well suited to his talents.

Easier to find is Eresko’s cycle of the Rachmaninoff concertos, with the underrated Gennady Provatorov conducting. Somewhat more rare is his recording of the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto conducted by Lazarev. It might be even finer than the version with Provatorov. Eresko plays with just a shade more momentum, his phrasing and voicing a touch bolder. This is merely a question of personal taste; both recordings deserve space on your shelf.

If YouTube suffices for you, Eresko’s recording with Provatorov is linked above. There don’t appear to be any videos of his recording with Lazarev.

As for Eresko, his performing career seemed to dwindle after the fall of the Soviet Union. I haven’t been able to determine why this happened. A masterly and very distinctive musician, if his recordings are accurate; he sort of reminds me of a Russian John Browning. Eresko seems to have done fine personally, though. Today he teaches and resides in France, which awarded him the Order of Arts and Letters. He also continues to serve on the juries of major music competitions, most recently at the 17th Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

Anyway, if you come across any Eresko CDs, don’t think twice.