"And life is of a day, and time is fleet": George N. Gianopoulos on his setting of Claude McKay's "Polarity"

California is on the cusp of returning to some semblance of normality, with a full reopening of businesses and events only weeks away. The uncertainty of what that “normality” will exactly look like is reflected in the varying responses of classical music organizations across Southern California. Some are beginning to announce the resumptions of their regular seasons, others are presenting concerts in modified socially-distanced others, while others like the Santa Barbara Symphony are taking a more cautious approach by continuing to stream their performances online.

This weekend the Santa Barbara Symphony under Nir Kabaretti will be streaming their next concert: A program of American composers which starts with Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, and will include works by George Walker, Joan Walker, Robin Frost, Charles Ives, Samuel Barber, and George N. Gianopoulos. The latter is one of the most compelling and refreshing musical voices in Southern California today. He will be represented on this weekend’s program with a performance sung by baritone Cedric Berry of his song “Polarity,” his setting of a poem by Claude McKay. This will be the first performance of the song in its recently completed chamber orchestra arrangement, which follows the debut earlier this year of the original for voice and piano.

Gianopoulos talked with me earlier this week about this forthcoming performance and the contemporary resonances in McKay’s words which elicited his musical setting.

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Néstor Castiglione: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected so many people and has created unexpected challenges for a wide range of professions. Has your work as a composer been impacted as well?

George N. Gianopoulos: There’s a lot of layers to that. Being a composer, one of the most important things is to be able to hear one’s music played, work with performers, and then listen to all the nuances of the decisions one has made as interpreted by musicians. In large part this has gone away. Now that we’re going on over a year with no live performances and no large gatherings on top of that, I’ve been focusing on writing music for smaller ensembles and solo instrumentalists. I’ve even been rearranging some of my older works for ensembles which fit the needs of our present circumstances. 

N. C.: Like your song “Polarity” which is being performed this weekend by the Santa Barbara Symphony?

G. N. G.: That was a really fun project. Long Beach Opera decided, since they can’t have large-scale operatic productions, that for their gala event they would instead commission twenty young composers to compose art songs. They gave a lot of freedom to each of the composers to do what they wanted. 

N. C.: How did you decide upon your setting of Claude McKay?

G. N. G.: I had actually gotten a Dover edition of some of his poems about a decade ago. I had always wanted to set some of them, but never found the right opportunity. His words are so direct, sincere, and purely honest in depicting what he went through, how he saw the world. His poems have always been special to me, so I was glad when an opportunity came for me to finally set them.

N. C.: The timely resonance of his “Polarity” must have appealed to you.

G. N. G.: Absolutely. This was one of three texts for my entire song cycle, America, Op. 43. They all have a certain political slant. The others are called “America” and “The White House.” “Polarity” sits between them. So definitely there are parallels between what is happening now and a century ago and how a lot hasn’t changed.

N. C.: So how did “Polarity” make the trip from Long Beach to Santa Barbara?

G. N. G.: I owe that all to Cedric Berry. When he was offered to sing with the Santa Barbara Symphony, they were discussing repertoire choices and already had an Americana theme in mind. He really wanted to do the Copland Old American Songs, which had been part of his repertoire for awhile. He then suggested my song to the conductor, Nir Kabaretti, who enjoyed it and decided to program it for the concert.

N. C.: How did you meet Cedric Berry?

G. N. G.: We were introduced just before I began to compose the voice and piano version of “Polarity.” Of course, I had been very familiar with him as he’s just been so well-known in Southern California for quite a while. So I was super excited to work with him. The recording process of the original was just incredible. He arrived with “Polarity” totally prepared and completely memorized, as if he had always been performing it. We spoke about the text and it became very clear to me that he was a very committed and thoughtful musician. He studied every detail and gave it a lot of thought. He has a deep appreciation for my song and felt strong enough about it to recommend it to the Santa Barbara Symphony.

N. C.: When was the commission to orchestrate “Polarity” received?

G. N. G.: It was towards the end of March, around the 21st. I had to submit the score by April 1. It was a hectic two weeks of orchestrating, preparing the parts, and the whole process.

N. C.: Had you already been thinking of orchestral colors for “Polarity” prior to getting this commission?

G. N. G.: Originally when I conceived this cycle, Long Beach Opera gave us carte blanche to do whatever we wanted. So the way I approached this piece was to employ the same instrumentation as Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. The circumstances of the pandemic made that impractical at the time, however. So I decided to compose the version for piano accompaniment, then thought I could arrange it for larger instrumental forces later. Before I knew it, this opportunity came about, and the orchestration kind of came by default. I’m actually more happy with “Polarity” this way just because the amount of colors I can use with a larger orchestral setting is more gratifying as a composer. 

N. C.: How interesting that The Soldier’s Tale, whose instrumentation was partly borne from the limitations presented by the Spanish flu epidemic, was on your mind. 

G. N. G.: That’s funny. I didn’t think about those unique circumstances. There ended up some unintended parallels in my thought process about it.

N. C.: Did new challenges present themselves in now having to balance voice against a chamber ensemble instead of only a piano?

G. N. G.: One of the concerns I had while I was orchestrating “Polarity” was that the page was becoming a little too black, that there were too many notes, the tutti sections may have been too frequent or long. So I was worried that it would be a little too thick against the voice. But my instincts proved right and after the first rehearsal I could hear Cedric Berry’s voice just cut right through. There really was no issue with balance or combat between voice and orchestra. I also have to give credit to Maestro Kabaretti who balanced this superbly as well.

N. C.: How did social distancing affect the rehearsals?

G. N. G.: Obviously there were strict COVID-19 protocols observed: All the string players have their own stands, winds and brass are behind plexiglass. There were definitely some challenges. Sitting in the audience sometimes it would be more difficult to hear because of the nature of social distancing and the physical barriers required to mitigate the spread of aerosols for the sake of safety. Yeah, those were difficult. This was my first time collaborating with a large orchestra on my own music. I found it easy to work with people, hear their suggestions during the rehearsals, and incorporate their ideas into the performance. Despite the challenges and difficulties, the quality of their performance is still high.

N. C.: As is the quality of their programming on this concert. 

G. N. G.: The program is very unique in that there are very well-known pieces and others less known. A wonderfully diverse program to be a part of. Musically quite exciting.

George N. Gianopoulos’ website

Digital tickets to stream performances by the Santa Barbara Symphony

Recording for Long Beach Opera by Cedric Berry and Stephen Karr of Gianopoulos’ “Polarity”

Oscar Strasnoy on Love, God, and Messiaen in the Age of Social Distancing

Anybody who has ever heard or seen it cannot but be, at least initially, overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise. “Six transcendent hours,” declared the headline in El País upon the Spanish premiere of the composer’s only opera. Even gazing upon the eight volumes of full score—themselves dazzling exemplars of the engraver’s art, which intimate at the bejeweled sonorities codified therein—totaling some 30 lbs. are enough to convey the awe-inspiring grandiosity of a work which the composer had intended as the culmination of his artistic life, the most fervent declaration of his religious belief. With the mass of resources, not to mention the stamina required on the part of performers and audience, this monument of 20th century musical creativity is difficult to mount as it is in the best of times. But in the midst of a global pandemic of epochal proportions?

Theater Basel in Switzerland last year was faced with a dire dilemma. Cancel their forthcoming run of Saint François d’Assise, which had been scheduled far before COVID-19 up-ended normality across the globe, and scrap the massive investment, artistically and financially, they had already made? Or did these extraordinary times require an extraordinary solution?

In steps Oscar Strasnoy, a French-Argentine composer who was a product of the Paris Conservatory, the institution where Messiaen himself had graduated from and later became one of its most respected professors. The task was unenviable, seemingly impossible: to trim the instrumentation of Saint François d’Assise without eliminating a single strand of Messiaen’s web of counterpoint. In other words, to bring as close as possible the sonority of the original while making do with only about a third of its resources.

Last October, Benedikt von Peter, Artistic Director of Theater Basel, charged ahead against the odds, staging Saint François d’Assise in Strasnoy’s daring yet faithful new guise. The production was as much a testament to the ingenuity of artists confronted with difficult choices, as it was to the power of Messiaen’s music, which emerged, according to reviews, unscathed. “As a result of this reduction,” one critic wrote, “the musical structures, which remained intact, stood out more clearly and. . . often sound softer, more poetic than the original.”

A few days ago, Oscar Strasnoy kindly took the time to talk about this remarkable project, which he hopes may continue to serve Messiaen even long after that day, hopefully sooner rather than later, when we can leave the face masks and hand sanitizer behind once and for all.

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Néstor Castiglione: Had Messiaen’s music crossed your path previously in some meaningful way?

Oscar Strasnoy: Absolutely. I was in the [Paris Conservatory] from the early 1990s to 1998. So most of my teachers, I would say all of them, were Messiaen’s students. So even if I didn’t have any direct contact with him, his presence was everywhere. Everyone in the conservatory was connected with him. I had direct contact with his music in the class of Michaël Lévinas, who is a great composer and was teaching musical analysis at that time. That was my first deep, direct contact with Messiaen. Then I studied in Germany with Hans Zender, one of the best conductors of Messiaen all around, one of my most important teachers of music. He was very much keen on Messiaen’s music. 

N. C.: Had you seen Saint François d’Assise before?

O. S.: I’ve never seen it live, but have seen parts on video. It’s such a massive opera. Very seldom done, as you know. Our production [with Theater Basel] was only its ninth production altogether in its 40 years of existence. Not very much at all, especially for a composer like Messiaen.

N. C.: Was this reduction of the work something that had been planned prior to the current global pandemic?

O. S.: No, this project was the direct result of the COVID-19 situation. Initially, Theater Basel’s goal was to perform Saint François d'Assise in its original form. Messiaen’s estate, a committee, would never allow my reorchestration in any other situation. But the pandemic presented a very peculiar situation for Theater Basel. They debated whether to cancel or to proceed, but with a reduced arrangement. Then it was a question of obtaining the rights to do this. The estate thought it over for about a month until they agreed to let us do this, but only for this exceptional occasion. However, I doubt that performing this arrangement will be possible in the future. I have to say, it’s such a huge opera, it’s quite impossible for most theatres to mount it under normal circumstances. As we were preparing Saint François d’Assise in Basel, already there were five other theatres expressing interest in performing this reduced version. So there is demand for this, but there are legal issues to consider. And I understand perfectly the zeal of Messiaen's heirs, whose primary function is to protect the integrity of his œuvre.

N. C.: What were some of the challenges you faced in making this reduction?

O. S.: The orchestra was a little less than 50 musicians altogether, about a third of the original; the choir was about a fifth. The singers on stage, of course, weren’t touched. What I did mainly was to thin out Messiaen’s orchestration. Apart from his use of percussion and some rarely used woodwinds, like the contrabass clarinet, for example, his orchestra is fairly traditional. Honestly, in some ways it’s very much like Richard Strauss. Nothing that unusual. There are so many lines which are scored for several instruments playing simultaneously. You look through every note in the score and you always find two to seven instruments playing the same thing. So what I had to do was to let in a little air, allow a continuation of the music. To turn this massive thing into a kind of chamber opera. Even so, there are still about 50 instrumentalists needed, which is more than one hears in Mozart. But still it sounds like chamber music. The textures of Saint François d’Assise aren’t actually that dense. One thinks that it is, however, because of the huge orchestra. I swore to the committee of heirs on Messiaen’s Bible that I would respect the musical material, that nothing insofar as the lines, the contrapuntal layering would be removed. Everything would remain. Just that I would make the instrumentation lighter. Which isn’t so simple, because sometimes you have 56 lines sounding simultaneously, and in this case not very many instruments to redistribute them to. What I used was three keyboards as a kind of glue, just to be sure I could include everything. Sometimes I’d use them to hide certain chords and to fill out the textures. 

N. C.: Was Messiaen’s estate closely involved in the making of this reduction?

O. S.: They were not involved at all. That would’ve been impossible with our tight schedule anyway. Once they gave us their consent, we only had about three months to assemble all of this. It was almost an impossible job. Just in the amount of copying, for example. You have to know that the score is around 1,500 pages. A massive thing. Then you have 19,000 single pages for the musicians’ parts. Just to copy it was an unbelievable amount of work for my assistants. I had five assistants helping me to copy the music.

N. C.: Did this commission originate from the Messiaen estate?

O. S.: Actually, the commission came from Theater Basel. I’d done a number of things in Switzerland and they had come to know me. They asked me, first of all, if I thought such a chamber arrangement would be possible. I really had to think about it carefully. My first thought was that it would be impossible given the short timeframe. But then I considered that for me as a composer, it would be the only opportunity I would have to look at this score in such an intimate, detailed way, as if from the inside. Even as a conductor I’ve never been able to see a score in this precise and minute way. It was fantastic to study and live with this score, which is such an incredible achievement.

N. C.: Was it difficult for you to put aside your own compositional prerogatives and subsume yourself into the work of another artist?

O. S.: No. This had nothing to do with composing. I never assumed anything like an artistic view on this. This could’ve been done by any person who had the technical knowledge. You don’t have to be a composer to do that. I never put myself into this. It was just like a technical adventure, a kind of service, not an artistic work, in a way. Especially because it was never approached in the manner that Zender, for example, would reinterpret or rewrite music by Schubert or Schumann. This was just a reorchestration which strived to sound as close to the original as possible. But in some respects this is even more challenging: to create the illusion of sounding like the original with so much fewer musicians.

N. C.: Were the performers supportive?

O. S.: They were very positive and supportive. Above all Clemens Heil, a fantastic conductor and an unbelievably patient person, very important traits when realizing a work like this. He advocated for me constantly. The singers were totally convinced too, very important. The instrumentalists were coping with very rudimentary material, because the parts were often copy and pasted from the original, sometimes in a rough way because of the tight schedule. My assistants were overwhelmed. The orchestra musicians were very patient, but sometimes practically collapsing from my additional difficulties in Messiaen’s already technically challenging score. Theirs was a doubly difficult task because the instrumentalists had to take on additional lines from instruments which had been omitted. I had to redistribute these parts to whoever could take a breath and pick them up.

N. C.: Do you think your version could stand up as a viable alternative in a post-COVID world?

O. S.: Look, I think this version works. In a different way from the original, of course. The piece is transformed into a kind of chamber opera. Almost Mozartian. Which for me works much better with this libretto. As you know, it’s about a saint who was a hermit. On stage there are only eight characters, but really the opera focuses on only two: Saint Francis and the Angel. So it’s a very intimate story. This reorchestration basically fits that, I believe, much better. Of course, you miss some of the greatest moments of the work. You cannot replace a 150-piece orchestra. There’s no other way of getting that sonority. But, on the other hand, you have clarity here you couldn’t get otherwise. That said, I think if this were allowed and it would be established as an alternative to the original, I’d like to have at least a year to correct and improve some minor details. But when this work is done, I’m convinced it could be a good alternative that would be convincing and viable for smaller theatres.

N. C.: Put another way, the original is like a universal, cosmic vision of God; yours is like a personal revelation.

O. S.: If you’d like. I mean, I don’t think you need such a huge apparatus to commune with God, as it were. In our days one can have contact with God, if you want, just being alone on stage. I have a feeling that Messiaen was granted this opportunity and just channeled all his resources and knowledge into it. He wanted to be huge, Wagnerian. But that doesn’t necessarily have to do with the subject or even our world. For the sake of the piece’s survival, it would be important to have this more realistic version, with its economy of resources. Something which is more connected to our present.

N. C.: Will there be any further performances of your version?

O. S.: I don’t think it will be performed again. For one thing, even this smaller version, just for the role of Saint François, it requires a lot of time. I felt sorry for the singer who sang the role, Nathan Berg, a fantastic baritone from Canada. He worked on this role for almost a year, there were only a few performances, and the theatre was forced to drastically reduce the audience capacity [due to Swiss social distancing regulations]. It’s one of the few operas where you have the protagonist in almost every moment on the stage. There’s not even an instant to have water backstage. A huge investment of energy, time, and study. You know, it was done a few times in Basel and that’s it. It’s unclear whether they’ll do it again.

N. C.: So I suppose there is no published version of your score?

O. S.: It isn’t published, no. Not at the moment. Oddly enough, Messiaen’s publisher, Éditions Alphonse Leduc, is in the same publishing group, Wise Music, as my first publisher. I know them very well. They’re all very nice people. They want, of course, the work to be performed in as many theatres as possible. They would like to publish my version, so long as the committee of Messiaen’s estate would permit it.

Steven Vanhauwaert on Busoni, Zeisl, and what's "after the turn" from COVID-19

Ferrucio Busoni’s years in Switzerland were, arguably, among his most difficult. With World War I roaring around him, this born citizen of the world for the first time in his life felt adrift. Europe, scarred by razor wire and trench warfare, had become in his eyes a “monster madhouse”; its citizens hopelessly intoxicated by a lust for war which he feared would lead them and their civilization into oblivion. The United States, from where Busoni had recently returned, seemed to him in some ways worse. He was disillusioned by what he perceived as the country’s bankrupt intellectual life; its obsession with avarice and triviality disgusted him. Nevertheless, he eventually settled into his new surroundings in Zurich, and from his small apartment on Scheuchzerstraße began to create for himself a small oasis wherein the life of the mind would remain unsullied.

Just a little over a century later, pianist Steven Vanhauwaert looks in the mirror and finds shadows of Busoni looking back at him. The world in 2021 is a vastly different place from the one where the great composer-pianist lived in. Yet with the COVID-19 crisis still engulfing the world, the present historic moment has provided an unexpected moment for Vanhauwaert to contemplate the meaning of his role as musician, of the future of music itself.

“The reality of my profession is that most concerts have disappeared,” he explained to me during a recent phone interview. “There are people who are literally suffering. I’m already so fortunate, but I try to be careful. Now that concert life has stopped, I took the time to reassess my feelings about music, why I play.”

Part of that reassessment has been helped along by his lifelong fascination with Busoni, which had been sparked in his childhood.

“I had been very fascinated by the playing of pianists of the golden age,” Vanhauwaert recalled. “Their sound was imprinted with a big signature, a unique way of stating themselves. Of course, as a young pianist, I was aware of his incredible transcriptions. These are famous, putting him in the category of romantic superhero pianists.”

And then a brief pause on the line.

“But my father had an LP with Busoni playing his own works and arrangements on piano rolls. They gave a good sense of who he was as a performance artist. It was profoundly inspirational, my introduction to his playing. Very unique.”

In life Busoni was not only one of the great pianists, composers, and musical thinkers of his time. For many, he was also their beloved mentor; a teacher who understood as too few teachers do that teaching itself is an art, one which requires the greatest care, practice, and discipline. Instead of imposing himself upon his students, he developed each student’s unique abilities so they could fulfill their own artistic destinies. From him emanated countless rays which helped light the way for the manifold contradictory paths of 20th century music. Dimitri Mitropoulos and Otto Luening. Kurt Weill and Stefan Wolpe. Percy Grainger and Edgard Varèse. All were among his pupils.

“Busoni never formed his own school of thought, as it were. He was too original, too independent for that.”

Although born decades after Busoni’s death, Vanhauwaert, too, fell under the sway of his magnetism.

“I was really struck by his mastery of composition. He composed this music which seemed to be really not based on anything else.”

Among the works which Vanhauwaert fell in love with was “Nach der Wendung (Recueillement)” (or "After the Turn" in English), the first of Busoni’s seven Elegies for solo piano. Together with that set’s closing “Berceuse,” they bookend Vanhauwaert’s recent recording of Busoni for Editions Hortus.

“If you look at the score of ‘Nach der Wendung (Recueillement),’ you can hear what Busoni is trying to do, charting out an acoustic effect which is complex, enigmatic. That was really the piece he wrote to strike out a new path, his vision of where music could go. Busoni’s thinking became really influential for a lot of composers. He advocated for a lot of avant-garde techniques. He himself didn't pursue their ultimate extremes.”

On the same disc, Vanhauwaert gives equal say to the side of Busoni which he described as “full of flash and virtuosity”: his transcriptions.

“In these works Busoni demonstrates exactly how to create something in order to get a reaction from his audience.” Another quick pause. “But sometimes at the end,” and here Vanhauwaert’s tone changes in a slight, but perceptible way, as if to reflect that which he is about to describe, “he shies away from that surface brilliance, suddenly placing unexpected chord changes which take the listener into an entirely different direction.”

Vanhauwaert then told me that he felt a lot of recordings of Busoni’s music tend to emphasize the composer’s extroversion, but that he sought to highlight the introspective qualities of his music, his subtle handling of harmony.

“Busoni thinks like a colorist,” he tells me. “It’s very complicated music to wrap your head around. Hardly any of his music is straightforward in expression.”

More straightforward, perhaps, but emerging from another troubled time are the works which Vanhauwaert recorded together with his friend, violinist Ambroise Aubrun.

Fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe, composers Darius Milhaud and Erich Zeisl each found refuge in a California that was quickly transforming from rural backwater along the sea into the cosmopolitan cultural and technological center it would become in the postwar. It was the era of Hollywood, the first freeways, the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge, the early roots of what would decades later be called Silicon Valley.

“For a lot of composers here in Southern California who attempted to work in Hollywood, the reality they confronted was fraught with terrible complications, often resulting in them not getting credited or even paid.”

Milhaud landed a teaching position in Mills College in Oakland. A little later he was also one of the co-founders of the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. Zeisl had a harder time at first, struggling to find his footing in his adopted home. With the help of his friend Milhaud, he eventually found work in the shadows of the film studios, before finally settling into teaching positions at Los Angeles City College and at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute (later known as the American Jewish University).

A miniature from this period, which Aubrun and Vanhauwaert found in the special collections of the UCLA Music Library and subsequently recorded, hardly indicates the tumultuous times from which it came. It opens a recital, also released by Editions Hortus last year, which includes music by Milhaud and Mozart.

“It stood out to us,” Vanhauwaert said of the "Zigeunerweise" movement from Zeisl's Suite for Violin and Piano, Op. 2. “It charmed us so much that we recorded it right then and there. It’s a very different work from the Brandeis Sonata on the same album. It speaks to the heart.”

Across the vastness of time, the worries of Zeisl, Milhaud, and Busoni parallel many of the concerns of our own transitional times; wherein old truths have suddenly crumbled into dust, and new ones emerge to take their place. Vanhauwaert, through it all, remains hopeful — for his own future, as well as that of music.

“I’m optimistic for the success of the vaccines and hopeful that concert life can slowly resume. The current situation is not sustainable. Concert life, social life are not just small details in our existences. Our lives need those connections with others. Now we have these Zoom meetings which may seem like the future. I’m grateful to do things like that, but being online is no substitute for actually being in the hall and listening to music live. I want that visceral energy of that moment back.”