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.

An Infamous Anniversary

My recent dive into Roy Harris almost led me to overlook that today is the 90th anniversary of the “Muddle Instead of Music” article that effectively ended the first stage of Shostakovich’s career. As with everything else relating to the composer, the notorious op-ed has acquired a certain mythos, including that it forced Shostakovich to turn away from modernism (he had already moderated his style significantly since the Second Symphony) and that the essay was penned by Stalin himself (not true; in fact, Marina Frolova-Walker has shown that, compared to his deadlier interest in film and literature, he kept comparatively aloof from musical affairs).

I thought it’d be interesting to share some excerpts of contemporary coverage of the event. Some things never change: political biases warped Western Shostakovich scholarship and reportage in the 1930s just as much as they often do now.

One of the earliest reports was a brief from the Associated Press published on February 16, wherein it stated that the attack on his music had been extended against other composers, including Gavriil Popov and Alexander Mosolov.

A fuller report followed on April 6 from Sergei Radamsky in the New York Times, which provided an outline of the now familiar saga.

A week later in the same paper, Olin Downes, who had been one of the fiercest critics of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, began his analysis with cautious approval:

Now we learn that Stalin, a man of some musical experience, and, one would say, common sense, saw Lady Macbeth and instigated, in a direct or indirect manner, newspaper disparagement of it.

Downes’ mood turned to outright glee as the article continued, taking swipes at “our brethren on the left” and at Shostakovich himself, who, the critic said, now had shun the modernists and, instead, reconcile himself to the classics. Perversely, Downes viewed the persecution of Shostakovich as being indicative of diminished official interference in Soviet cultural life.

The columnist Bruce Catton echoed those sentiments in an op-ed that barely concealed its glee over the humiliation visited against a presumed ideological adversary:

Until a few days ago, Shostakovich was the darling of the radicals. His music embodied the purest spirit of Communism, and when capitalist outfits like the Philadelphia Orchestra played some of it, the world revolution drew perceptibly nearer.

But Shostakovich has gone off the front page and is back among the want ads, and no good Communist will listen to him.

A few months over we swing from one deep end over to another.

On November 8, the Daily Worker printed an essay by the artist Jacob Burck of his recent visit to the Soviet Union. He began by relating the festive atmosphere, the material plenty, and beautiful women he encountered in Moscow, which he said was “quite a change from the depression atmosphere” in the United States. A few paragraphs later, he touched upon the “Shostakovich case”:

[It] was merely an incident in a campaign by the Soviet press to jolt the Russian art world into an appreciation of sensible art values. Shostakovich was evidently a good example to begin with. This campaign didn’t stop with Shostakovich. Famous writers, artists, and architects who were going arty à la Paris and other centers also got it in the neck. Contrary to predictions in the capitalist press none of these are living in garrets and Shostakovich is at the present time busy on a new opera.

Pauline Fairclough, in her recent monograph on Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, noted that the commotion over the opera quickly dissipated. The campaign against the work served as a useful template for Soviet officialdom, which then repeated and modified it against figures in other sectors of the fine arts. Unlike Burck’s cheerful report, however, Fairclough sketches the real-life consequences this had for Shostakovich and those in his immediate circle. “He was permanently scarred by the trauma of what happened to him”, she said, “and his youthful confidence would never fully return”.

Review of last Friday's LAPO all-Americana concert

My Bachtrack review of last Friday’s all-Americana concert, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by John Adams, was posted earlier today.

One of the high points of the concert was Adams’ masterly account of Roy Harris’ Third Symphony:

The conductor’s penchant for disruptiveness also paid off in greater linear clarity, important in this rigorously constructed fusion of drama and symphonic logic. Evidently an admirer of the symphony, Adams took care with the presentation of this highly original music; the Harris Third was as much celebrated as it was played.

Adams the composer was also on excellent form. I’m by no means an admirer of his music, much less an uncritical one, but his After the Fall made for enjoyable and thoughtful listening. This is probably my favorite Adams score after Naive and Sentimental Music.

You can read more of my review here.

Linking a pair of recent personal passions

Two concerts last weekend, both superb. My head is still swimming over my first time hearing Harris’ Third Symphony live. That was at Friday night’s all-American concert, conducted by John Adams at Disney Hall. A review should be online soon. (I sent it out to my Bachtrack editors over the weekend, but sometimes there can be a delay pending concert photography.)

In the morning, I spoke to two persons who played crucial roles in Harris’ life and posthumous legacy: the conductor Murry Sidlin, and the community activist and arts advocate John Malveaux, who befriended Harris in his later years. The former was drafted last minute into conducting the premiere of the composer’s last symphony, the “Bicentennial”. Quite a bit of drama behind that event. Over thirty years later, Malveaux organized the second-ever performance of the “Bicentennial”. (Joseph Taylor, a fascinating musician in his own right, conducted.)

An essay will be forthcoming on the “Bicentennial” next month, in time for the 50th anniversary of its premiere. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I caught the Harris bug bad; my mind has been mostly preoccupied with his music the last few days. Although very different stylistically, it occurred to me that he shared some important commonalities with another composer I’ve recently become an admirer of: Robert Simpson.

Both were composers with similar political orientations. Both had strong convictions about the artist’s civic duty. Both constantly tinkered with their music. (Lionel Pike said that “Simpson confessed to using the eraser very widely”. Similarly, Dan Stehman noted that Harris had a “proclivity toward constant revising and rewriting”.) Both turned to explorations of overtones in their later music. Above all, as symphonists both based themselves on principles of autogenesis.

Simpson listed in his two-volume overview, The Symphony, what he considered were the establishing factors of symphonic form:

1. The fusion of diverse elements into an organic whole.

2. The continuous control of pace.

3. The reserves of strength necessary to achieve [the first two factors] are such as to express size.

4. In the first place, it was the dynamic treatment of tonality that made all this possible: it was a reaction against the passivity of earlier music.

5. Perhaps the basic observation one can make about a true symphony is that it is active in all possible ways.

Harris’ symphonies — particularly the purely instrumental ones — embody these ideas. Of course, Simpson’s symphonies also fulfill the above criteria. Just as obvious, too, are the divergent ways in which each composer ultimately explored the implications of these principles. The Englishman, ultimately, was a more consistent composer; the American wider ranging and, in some aspects, more experimental.

Earlier today, I listened to a broadcast of a rehearsal by the Boston Symphony conducted by Serge Koussevitzky of Harris’ Third. In the middle of the broadcast, the host, Olin Downes, recalled the first time he encountered Harris and his music back in 1925. At the time, Marian MacDowell was considering granting Harris a scholarship to study at the MacDowell Colony; she asked Downes for his opinion on the young composer’s music. “All I could tell her”, he recounted, “was that it had a certain spaciousness and ideality of character by a composer who had yet evidently learned little of the actual technique of composition”. As Downes admitted, he could not foresee the mastery that Harris would later develop, much less that his music would compare favorably with the best the old continent had to offer:

[I]n the year 1942, the Boston [Symphony] played on the same program the Third Symphony of Roy Harris [...] and the Sixth Symphony of [...] Shostakovich. And I was not alone among my colleagues in writing that the Third Symphony by Roy Harris [...] was a score more strongly and compactly written than the Sixth Symphony by Shostakovich.

Downes’ insights into Harris’ Third are worth quoting more fully, as they also encapsulate well aspects of his other symphonies:

And [the Third Symphony] has, in fact, some very special attributes [...] [I]t’s quite austere in its style and there are quite learned devices of composition employed in it. [...] That thing — Harris’ ideality — his lack of the merely topical, or jazzical, or realistic in American music, the distance he looks into the future, or — let us say — life itself is the thing which puts him in a special place of his own among American composers.

Again, I’m reminded of Simpson. As Calum MacDonald observed of the “aggressively anti-pessimistic” English composer’s music, it expressed “human character that is sane, honest, downright, tender, humorous, immovable on things that matter, dealing seriously and responsibly with profound issues, embodying the best of which human beings are capable”.

Much the same could be said of Harris. Though it’s unlikely that either composer knew the other’s work well, if at all, their shared commitment to the noblest qualities of the human spirit is uncanny. Not to mention prescient. Because with the world being what it is these days, we could all benefit from being edified by the aggressive anti-pessimism of Harris and Simpson.

"An embarassment, a caricature of music...": On Roy Harris' "Bicentennial Symphony" and the implications of its reception

In my previous post, I briefly sketched out the shifting fortunes of Roy Harris and his Third Symphony, particularly here in the Los Angeles area. Tonight’s Los Angeles Philharmonic performance, conducted by John Adams, appears to be the first in the region since 1998.

By 1951, Harris’ reputation plummeted into what John H. Mueller, in The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History of Musical Taste, described as “inevitable decline”. It wasn’t all bad news. Although no longer a virtual household name as during wartime, Harris continued to enjoy a significant level of prestige in American music. As late as 1973, Walter Arlen in the Los Angeles Times reported that BMI statistics confirmed over a thousand performances of Harris’ music the previous year — impressive for any living composer. His Third Symphony continued to be regarded by insiders as the flagship of the American symphony, at least through the 1970s. One of the work’s last great triumphs was on September 16, 1973, when it became the first piece of American orchestral music ever played in China (performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy). Harris himself also earned a growing list of official distinctions in his final decade: he was designated composer-in-residence at Cal State Los Angeles, composer laureate of the city of Covina, and later the state of California.

In spite of all this, Harris, even his Third Symphony, is today mostly forgotten to the general classical music public. What happened?

Criticisms of Harris’ stylistic development, as well as changing tastes among academics and listeners, were crucial in this decline. Reputations almost invariably sink after a composer’s death. Harris was no different and, despite the efforts of his widow and a few others, his music was quickly marginalized from the mainstream repertoire after his death in 1979.

Something else occurred in Harris’ final years.

A Los Angeles Times article from 1977 noted that Harris as a composer was concerned with matters of “social injustice”. Small wonder, then, that his final symphony, the Thirteenth, focused on that subject; it was composed for the National Symphony Orchestra in commemoration of the American bicentennial in 1976. Audiences expecting a rousing tribute were instead met with a work of concentrated outrage against the poisonous legacy of slavery and the Civil War.

Dan Stehman, in his Roy Harris: An American Pioneer, was circumspect about the symphony and its reception:

Although the Bicentennial Symphony is the least substantial of all Harris’ symphonies in musical invention, a clear manifestation of the declining powers that set in during the 1970s, it cannot be dismissed entirely, for it constitutes one of the strongest statements on racial intolerance yet made by an American composer. Though the work ends on a characteristically positive note, it is doubtful if audiences wished to be reminded, during the jingoistic excesses of the Bicentennial Year, of one of the ugliest episodes in American history, an episode whose ramifications, in spite of decades of progress, are still felt today.

The “Bicentennial Symphony” was, in fact, one of the worst failures of Harris’ career.

Perhaps sensing trouble, National Symphony music director Antal Doráti, who was scheduled to conduct the symphony’s premiere, pulled out citing illness; Murry Sidlin, resident conductor, took his place.

Harris’ Thirteenth Symphony was premiered at the Kennedy Center on February 10, 1976. “For the first time in my experience, there were boos at a National Symphony concert”, reported George Gelles, music critic for the Washington Star. He thought some of the audience’s fury at Harris was “justified” and added that the texts the composer set were “nothing but beauty and truth platitudes and racist exhortations”. Paul Hume in the Washington Post was not much more generous. He called the symphony “an embarrassment [...] a caricature of music, [...] and a travesty of all it sets out to do”.

If Harris was bothered by any of this, he didn’t make it obvious. “I don’t analyze my music,” he told an interviewer for WGMS. “That would be like pulling potatoes up to see if they’re growing”.

A subsequent performance that same month at North Texas University, to be conducted by Anshel Brusilow, was canceled at the last minute. Harris’ “Bicentennial Symphony” was replaced by a work by Benjamin Lees. According to news reports, the performance was cancelled because the sheet music for the symphony did not arrive, but given its stormy reception it isn’t hard to imagine that this reason may have been a face-saving ruse.

The symphony wasn’t performed again until 2009, when concert organizer and activist John Malveaux arranged a performance in Long Beach. Even then, ill feelings persisted. “[The symphony is] a piece of crap”, an anonymous patron told the Long Beach Press-Telegram. “I can see why it hasn't been done for 33 years”.

Harris’ Third and Thirteenth symphonies are distinct works, of course. Yet it’s difficult to avoid speculation: did the poor reception of the latter work contribute to the erosion of esteem of the former, and possibly of the composer’s work as a whole? Harris’ belief in the role of the American composer as a civic and artistic responsibility may have antagonized audiences in his lifetime, but that personal commitment to ideals beyond music is something that today’s listeners ought to reexamine with an open mind.

In the meantime, I’ll be at Disney Hall later tonight listening to the return of this great American symphony to Los Angeles.

The "Great American Symphony" revived

John Adams will be visiting Disney Hall tomorrow; he’ll be conducting an all-American program that will include his recent concerto, After the Fall. Perhaps even more notable is the inclusion of the Third Symphony by Roy Harris. 

For decades after its premiere in 1939, Harris’ Third was hailed as the great American symphony; its impact similar to the one Thomas Wolfe made in literature with his Look Homeward, Angel. The latter half of the 20th century saw a reversal of fortunes significant enough that the symphony — and its composer — can now be fairly described as semi-obscure, at least to a non-specialist audience. The latest edition of The Grove provides context:

Widely acclaimed in the 1930s and 1940s, Harris’ stature is still a matter for debate[…] Some observers believe he failed to fulfill his early promise, suffering an arrested technical and stylistic development, while others perceive an increasing mastery of technique and a growing sophistication (sometimes at the expense of raw originality and vitality of the earlier works) as his career unfolded. 

The Los Angeles Philharmonic only played the Harris Third a handful of times in the final decades of the last century: conducted by David Zinman in 1976, Garcia Navarro in 1984, Erich Leinsdorf in 1990, and Esa-Pekka Salonen in 1995. The last time the work was heard in the region seems to be Jorge Mester’s 1998 performance with the Pasadena Symphony.

For the Harris performance alone, tomorrow’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concert promises to be an interesting one.

Bargain Boogie Thoughts

As I mentioned in another blog post a few days ago, thrifting is now one of my primary sources for new CDs: an unexpected boon from the “vinyl renaissance” and its resultant present unfashionability of my beloved little silver discs. Hunting for CDs at a thrift store these days can feel like a lottery, only with better odds than the real thing. I’ve enjoyed some grand hauls at thrift stores for a pittance.

Not just classical music either. Bach, Beethoven, and the boys occupy most of my listening, but I keep my ears open for all sorts of things that appeal to my eclectic tastes, spurred on by my enjoyment of blind buys. So when I saw a CD compilation of songs by Wynonie Harris, whom I’d never heard of before, peeking through the stacks at a local thrift store, I figured there were worse ways of spending a dollar.

This Harris CD was issued thirty years ago on the Chronological Classics label. Almost as long ago, I was working my first stint as a record store clerk, at a store that specialized in classical, jazz, and various curiosities of the 78 RPM era. Chronological Classics CDs, highly in demand by our customers, were well stocked and prominently displayed. For some reason, though, I never did listen to them, although their uniform cover designs — catnip for collectors with completist streaks — embedded themselves into my memory. It wasn’t until a later record store job many years later that I began to listen and collect them.

Harris was an interesting figure. Born in 1919, he began his career as a night club comedian and dancer, before he shifted to singing in the late 1930s. His career peak occurred in the immediate postwar years, carried by a string of bawdy, proto-rock ‘n’ roll hits. By the end of the 1950s, his career plunged, his plight aggravated by business failures and mounting debt. After living in New York City, where he owned a diner, he returned to Los Angeles, the site of his greatest professional successes. Times and tastes had changed, unfortunately, and he no longer drew the level of attention he enjoyed in earlier years. Further misfortune followed a few years later when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer; its progression eventually robbed Harris of the ability to sing. He died in 1969, mostly forgotten.

The personnel on these songs is impressive: they include Freddie Webster, Jack McVea, Illinois Jacquet, and Charles Mingus. Even more impressive are the songs themselves, which are in a declaimed sprechstimme that hearkens back to a fire-and-brimstone sermon at a Sunday church service.

There is a temptation to regard the past as a domain free of blemishes and disappointments. Everything was better back then, we like to think. And, maybe, that's the truth. Or a truth. Listening to Harris’ songs peopled by alcoholics, prostitutes, violent domestic partners, the unemployed, and the merely deranged, another truth emerges, one that complements and completes the whole. Here is a past that is strikingly recognizable and consistent with our present; a Charles Wright novel erupting into sound.

"An Evening with Shostakovich"

A long time ago, I made a difficult choice: collect CDs or collect LPs. But not both. Because unless I became wealthy enough to acquire several warehouses to store every recording in every format that crossed my path, my passionate collecting habit would eventually be conflictive with my limited space, to put it lightly. So tens of thousands of relatively small CDs are perfectly fine. Anything more, though, and I’d risk becoming an ex-colleague of mine who faced a dire choice between his record collection and trimming it for the sake of living with his significant other. (Guess what he chose?) For the same reasons, I also don’t collect films on Blu-rays and 4Ks. (My brother collects enough of those for us both.) So streaming films is perfectly fine with me.

The other day I came across a film noir from 1946 that was new to me: Black Angel, starring Dan Duryea, June Vincent, and Peter Lorre. Posterity tends to romanticize the past. Things were better, films included. Sometimes that’s true, but Black Angel proves that wasn’t always the case. Not that it’s bad. On the whole, it’s an entertaining enough potboiler and Lorre is never anything less than fascinating to watch. But an immortal masterpiece it is not.

About two-thirds in, though, something caught my attention. During a tense scene between Lorre and Vincent, another character appears and invites the former to a Hollywood Bowl concert. “Oh, Shostakovich?”, Lorre replied; the work being performed is the Seventh Symphony. “Perhaps an evening with Shostakovich will prove very enlightening.”

Debates about whether or not classical music is “dying” or at least in decline have been ongoing for decades. Whatever one’s feelings on the subject, it is telling that the film’s creators dropped this classical music reference — and of a living composer at that — with the reasonable expectation that their audience would understand it. Hard to picture something like that appearing in a mainstream Hollywood movie of today. (Imagine a reference to, say, Michael Torke or James MacMillan in a modern potboiler.)

The mention of Shostakovich is fascinating in itself. At the time of the release of Black Angel, the din of mass media attention on the “Leningrad” was still fresh in the popular memory. A few years later, John H. Mueller in The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History of Musical Taste observed that Shostakovich’s fame had peaked. He added that he believed that the composer’s reputation was heading into a steep decline “from which there is obviously no immediate prospect of recovery”.

At least on that account, things turned out differently to say the least!

"How are you going to spend Martin Luther King, Jr. Day?"

As we were having coffee together this morning, my wife asked me, half-facetiously, how I intended to spend Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. She knew I was mostly thinking about the Busoni review I had to knock out before the end of the day. In fact, I’d never given her question any thought before.

The first Martin Luther King, Jr. Day occurred while I was still in pre-school. Only vague memories linger now of coloring exercises featuring Dr. King’s face and of a song about him that we learned (and I’ve since forgotten). These and my elementary school years don’t seem so far away in time, despite the passing of over forty years. Reflecting on it, though, they really were different times.

I recall my second grade teacher, a snow-haired woman, with features like cut glass, and piercing eyes of sapphire behind massive Sally Jessy Raphael-style glasses. To me she was kind; it was because of her that I was moved into a program for gifted children, but she was also of her time in ways that today are less appealing. She was the last teacher I encountered who used corporal punishment. (I well recall the large wooden paddle that she kept hung next to her desk.)

An event I still remember vividly was our first day of second grade. Each student was asked to introduce themselves. At one point, a friend of mine, a girl of mixed parentage got up to speak. Our teacher immediately noticed her appearance and asked about her parents — where were they from? When my friend said that her father was Vietnamese and her mother was white, our teacher’s face quickly turned red. “It’s because of people like your mother and little half-breeds like you that this country lost the war”, presumably in reference to the Vietnam War. My friend, who was probably as confused about what had just happened as the rest of us, simply sobbed.

Decades later, I was out on a date with an Asian girl I’d met online. We were having dinner at a steakhouse and things were going very well. At one point a server arrived and, noticing his faulty English, I began to speak to him in fluent Spanish. Out of my periphery I could see that my date’s demeanor changed. As soon as the server left, she asked me where I’d learn to speak Spanish so well. “What do you mean where I learned?”, I replied. “From my parents — they wouldn’t let me speak anything else at home.” Apparently, this was the wrong answer. “You’re not white?”, she asked me. No, I told her, I’m Hispanic; my parents are from Chile. A frost set in between us. “I thought you were white”, she said before continuing: “I wouldn’t have replied to you if I’d known you weren’t.” A lot of feelings swelled in me at that moment, a lot of things that I was desperate to loose from my mouth. But somehow I maintained my composure and just chuckled. “Oh, I see”, I told her. A few awkward minutes passed. Then I excused myself to go to the men’s room. When I turned the corner, I headed instead back towards the entrance. Our server was standing there with the maître d’. I thanked him, gave him a substantial tip, then told him that I needed to leave, but that my friend would cover the bill for us both. Not my finest moment, but I behaved better than my initial impulses were imploring me to do.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” As is evident from attacks on his legacy from both sides of the political spectrum, we now have the luxury of being able to take Dr. King’s hope for granted. Despite the differences, resentments, envy, and manipulated polarization, today we largely live together far more peacefully than at any point before in history. We’ve come a long way from a time when the likes of Johnny Otis had to cross state lines in order to find a jurisdiction that would grant a marriage license to an interracial couple. Dr. King may not have lived to see it, and although a lot of it has yet to be fully realized, much of his vision came true after all.

So my Filipina wife and I will quietly celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day — with gratitude for the ordinary joys we enjoy today, which are the result of the struggles of a past for whom such things could only be dreams.

Second-Hand Abbado

The desktop computer I’ve used for the last six years finally went kaput yesterday. It had been running on hopes and prayers the last few months, but 2026 was the year the thing finally said no more. QEPD.

I started to use a new computer earlier today, but 21st-century technology is a struggle for my stubbornly analog mind to grasp at times. After a while, I needed to get some air, so I went thrifting with my wife.

We still have a few record stores in Los Angeles (the “vinyl renaissance” shops don’t count in my mind) where classical CDs can be found, but some of the best finds I’ve had in the wild in the past decade have been at thrift stores. This disc is one of them: a private press CD of Abbado conducting Beethoven 9 in Lucerne back in 1998. (A good year, by the way. I had more hair, Pasadena’s short-lived meikyoku kissa was still around, and my wardrobe was filled with stylish duds from Aaardvark’s Odd Ark.) This performance doesn’t appear to have been reissued. Haven’t listened to it yet, but it scratches a two itches: my ongoing reevaluation of Abbado’s discography and my longstanding interest in niche private-press CDs. How did this end up at a random thrift store deep in the suburbs?

For Grown-Ups Only

Earlier today, I briefly read a Wall Street Journal article about the change in command at Disney’s Lucasfilm. This was big news because a lot of people really care about the studio’s flagship franchise, Star Wars, and were apparently irate about recent creative decisions that it took. I never watched any Star Wars movies until well into my 30s. Entertaining enough, I thought, some interesting themes are revealing of American society, but nothing that became essential viewing for me. Honestly, the inescapable Star Wars fandom mystifies me. Isn’t one supposed to grow out of this?

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Of course, there are a lot of composers I first listened to as an adolescent that are still part of my daily life. Stravinsky, Ravel, Webern, Shostakovich — I wouldn’t call their music childish. But there are some whose music seem especially grown up.

Busoni is one of those; his music didn’t finally make sense to me until sometime late in 2023. Virtuosic as it is, his music is short on the flash that typically captivates the young. His Piano Concerto, which will be played this weekend ay Disney Hall, is an ecstatic summation of the genre (how many piano concertos include a chorus?) as well as a meditation on its history and meaning. It is music and commentary about music. One could imagine Borges having penned something like it had he been a composer and pianist.

This weekend’s performance of Busoni’s Piano Concerto appears to be the local premiere. Interestingly, Furtwängler’s Symphonic Concerto, a deeper cut, has been played more here than the Busoni.

Shostakovich/Derevianko in North America

Yesterday, while talking to Libby Huebner, press officer for Camerata Pacifica, I brought up the fact that the group’s forthcoming performance of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony, in the arrangement by Viktor Derevianko, will be the California premiere. Of course, being a fanatic of Shostakovich and this symphony in particular, I’ll be there.

This May 2026 performance will be only the fifth in the Western Hemisphere. It was preceded by the following:

• June 2000: Austin Chamber Music Festival (Western Hemisphere premiere)

• April 2006: Seattle Chamber Players (in commemoration of the centennial of Shostakovich’s birth)

• May 2013: Members of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (Canadian premiere)

• May 2019: Played by Sergey Khachatryan, Alicia Weilerstein, Colin Currie, and others at the Kennedy Center