Adrian Spence on Beethoven, Shostakovich, and putting the canon into context in Camerata Pacifica's final concert of the season

One of the most memorable experiences in my musical life occurred in spring 2012, at a chamber music concert at the Huntington Library. The concert was an eclectic one: a program of music by Claude Debussy, Takemitsu Tōru, Richard Rodney Bennett, and Iannis Xenakis, concluding with the mighty Piano Quintet by Dmitri Shostakovich. All of the works were known to me, save for one: Dmaathen for oboe and percussion by Xenakis. “Difficult” music is where I started as a listener, so it was (and still is) very dear to me, but the work of the Greek composer had never interested me. Too obtuse, too concerned with complex compositional processes for their own sake. That night, however, oboist Nicholas Daniel playing for Camerata Pacifica that night did something that one longs for so often in concerts: He gave a performance of such technical and emotional potency that it became a transformative experience. That’s why today I’m a passionate admirer of Xenakis.

Those kinds of experiences are rare, but Camerata Pacifica seems to have discovered the alchemy to realize these as if on demand. This is no fluke. Camerata Pacific has gathered some of the most preeminent musicians in the country. Each concert is characterized by the sort of superlative level of musicianship that stands at the very best one can hear anywhere in the world.

But what takes these musical experiences into another plane is the vision of Adrian Spence, Camerata Pacifica’s founder and artistic director. There is a three-dimensional quality to his programming, a sense of music transcending the boundaries of art and lunging into the living world of our everyday.

Beginning tonight at Zipper Hall and ending next Tuesday in San Marino, Camerata Pacifica will be performing its final concert of this season, comprising of music by Beethoven, Thierry de Mey, Kenji Bunch, and the final symphony of Shostakovich, the latter presented in a chamber arrangement which will be heard in California for the first time in these concerts.

Last week I had a wide-ranging interview with Spence, a conversationalist whose breadth of thinking and sheer energy is betokened by the programs he assembles for music lovers in Southern California.

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Néstor Castiglione: If there is a single quality that characterizes what Camerata Pacifica is about, I’d say it’s “expect the unexpected.” Or the kind of experience that Artur Schnabel described as “safety last.”

Adrian Spence: Those are the things I aim for as artistic director because I believe that the canon has to be put into context. Especially in something like this Beethoven sonata cycle [performed by Gilles Vonsattel]. At first I thought to myself, “Well, I don’t want to be one of these people that puts on another Beethoven cycle.” The reception history around him has made him so iconic, so people don’t hear how radical his music was. Doing this cycle of his piano sonatas the way we’re doing it — using a hybrid model that mixes some of the sonatas with other works, as well as all-Beethoven recitals — and when you get to hear these sonatas, especially the ones people don’t know, the lesser known ones  —  they’re still genius! When you hear them next to other Beethoven sonatas, when you hear them in context with chamber music by other composers, you’re reminded that Beethoven was single-handedly changing the direction of music of that time.

N. C.: Speaking of “changing the direction in music,” you chose the right work to initiate that sonata cycle.

A. S.: We opened the whole project with the “Hammerklavier.” Gilles just came out and started playing that. And then at the next installment, where the big pieces on that program were works by Schubert and Schumann, and Beethoven’s music in that program had a supporting role, that to my ears was revelatory to hear Beethoven like that.

Dmitri Shostakovich, circa 1970s [Image:Wikimedia Commons/User:Roman Kubanskiy]

N. C.: Here in this forthcoming concert you pair him with Shostakovich, whose music continued that line of musical thinking.

A. S.: Yes. Beethoven and Shostakovich go together so well, in terms of their approach to form, their intensity of expression. People often link Beethoven and Brahms similarly. I have to be careful with this criticism, but to me Brahms only looks back to Beethoven. Brahms is often seen as the logical evolution in this history, but to be quite honest I’d be happy to skip that part of the evolution! What Schubert and Mahler did, for example — that was so much more interesting. Shostakovich, on the other hand, acknowledges Beethoven, but his music had a forward-looking, reactive, acerbic quality that doesn’t exist in Brahms.

N. C.: It’s interesting that you begin this program with a work by the young Beethoven and conclude with a Shostakovich symphonic valedictory that was completed only four years before his death.

A. S.: Think about Beethoven, who lived in a constant state of war. It was raging around him all the time. Vienna was twice occupied when he lived there. There was this remarkable instability in Europe in the late-18th century  — not so different from the kind felt the world over now  — and yet, from all that chaos, there emerged this beautiful music. And no matter what Shostakovich work is on the program, it’s replete with metaphor and symbolism. We all know what his life was like.

N. C.: How did you come to discover Viktor Derevyanko’s arrangement of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony?

A. S.: I was talking with the violinist Paul Huang, who also runs a music festival in Taiwan. He asked me, “Hey, do you know this arrangement of [Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony]?” And I was like, “No  — tell me about it, send the score!” That happened about three years ago. When I learned the music, I knew that it was a keeper.

N. C.: It was immediately apparent that it’d be a good fit for Camerata Pacifica?

A. S.: You know, there are times when I come across pieces of music and can already hear how the musicians of Camerata Pacifica will play this, I can hear their colors. They’re phenomenal artists and they get lots of rehearsal time. So we know this performance will be tight and characterful.

N. C.: The emotive scope of the music — ranging from spine-chilling gallows humor to utter disconsolate tragedy  — is also not only the kind of thing that Camerata Pacifica does well, but seems to get a response from listeners.

A. S.: Imagine being a listener new to the piece and listening to the first movement, then suddenly there it is — the Lone Ranger. That’s a WTF moment! So if you’re a thinking person, you’re going to be struck by that and wonder what it’s all about. You may not get the other references, but you’ll get the Lone Ranger. So there’s a reason this symphony was programmed at the end of the season; the fact that it’s Shostakovich’s final symphony, that it speaks to listeners on so many levels. Yet it’s also a fun piece.

Percussionist Ayano Kataoka [Image:Ayano Kataoka]

N. C.: Your program also implies that there’s more going on there than just fun.

A. S.: So I think as a programmer at this point in time in the 21st century, I feel a responsibility for [Camerata Pacifica’s] programming to be aware of the times we’re in. I don’t necessarily want to be overt about it. Even talking about this with you gives me a bit of pause. While I’m happy to share what my thinking is, I want our audiences to draw their own connections. It is part of the job of an artist working in a serious art form, of a music director, of musicians to reflect the times in music, to contextualize it within this time. To at least acknowledge the time that we’re in. This might be too straightforward, but I think it’s also important to program music by Russian composers at this moment. Delving into it a little deeper, there is this connection to Beethoven. So we begin the program with Beethoven’s [Piano Sonata No. 2]. Early Beethoven, late Shostakovich — that pairing seemed easy. But how to get from A to B? And we have all these percussionists [for the Shostakovich]. Then Huang commissioned this piece from Kenji Bunch, Transcontinental, for violin and percussion quartet. And this is also going to be a fun piece of music. Anytime you put musicians on stage who make their living from pounding the hell out of stuff it’s going to be great fun. Percussionists always make things fun. Bunch has written this piece and its message isn’t covert: It’s about the Chinese people who constructed this nation’s railways. There is meaning in that. Today we have a richness of chamber music that represents a wide breadth of expression from all kinds of cultures, whatever their genders. It’s a richness that, now that we’re 25 years into the 21st century, seems unending. Then there is Thierry de Mey’s Musique de table, the pivot of the concert. Its placement answered a question: How to steer the ship of this program towards Shostakovich? This is really my kind of program! I mean, again, it’s a really fun program.

N. C.: Fun and thought-provoking: You wouldn’t think those go together, but reconciling those kinds of extremes seems to be one of the things that Camerata Pacifica is really good at.

A. S.: The wonderful thing about our concerts is that you can just show up without any awareness of these works, not know anything Shostakovich and his life, and just listen to some really cool music. You will not be sorry to have bought a ticket. And if you want, you could take it a little deeper, go back home, pour yourself a scotch, and talk about and debate this music with your significant other. This is the kind of program that allows a listener to take it as deep as they want to go. I have members of the Camerata Pacifica audience who have been part of our family since the beginning. And these programs provoke that kind of thinking, talking, just like you and I are doing now. I’m thrilled about that. That’s what I think a good concert ought to do. Maybe not every one. That measure of gravitas — it would wipe you out. But I think you can come to this music and choose to take it as deep as you want. That’s the difference between art and entertainment.

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Camerata Pacifica’s final concerts of the season begin tonight at Zipper Hall in Downtown Los Angeles, followed by concerts on May 15 in Santa Barbara, May 17 in Thousand Oaks, and may 19 in San Marino. For tickets and more information, please visit Camerata Pacifica’s website or call (805) 884-8410.

"It’s like scaling a mountain range — and sometimes you can fall off the cliff and die": Gilles Vonsattel on Beethoven's piano sonatas

Last January, as I sat listening to a performance of some Beethoven sonatas at the Huntington Library’s Rothenburg Hall, something Georgy Sviridov once said bubbled up in my mind:

I couldn’t imagine anyone [else] playing with such taste, power, simplicity, and grandeur — just the way Beethoven ought to be played… So it’s true: music can be a loftier thing than all that stuff cranked out … by vapid carnival barkers.

Sviridov, of course, has been dead for nearly 30 years and, in any case, had someone else in mind. But I suspect that had the Russian composer still been among us, he would’ve thought much the same about Gilles Vonsattel’s playing on that chilly night in San Marino.

A laureate of the Naumburg Prize, Vonsattel has spent his life in the company of Beethoven’s music, something that is immediately evident in his balance between architectural control and expressive strength. The pianist’s playing of Beethoven is free of overwrought contrivances. One hears not an “interpretation” but something like the expression of nature itself; resounding untrammeled, raw, and breathtakingly beautiful from Vonsattel’s fingers. Art enfolds art here, for that illusion of spontaneity depends on the exceptional intellectual and technical resources of a sensitive musician. No mean feat this. As the Swiss-born pianist told another journalist back in 2014, “The rhythm of what I’m doing is very intense.”

Artur Schnabel remarked that Beethoven’s sonatas were better than they could ever be performed, so when during the course of the interview I brought up a flippant quote that Vonsattel’s younger self had casually made to the press, he laughed it off. Yet something of the directness implied in that comment, as if he and Beethoven were on a first-name basis, endures in the Vonsattel’s mature artistry.

Last week, the pianist spoke with me over the phone, between practice sessions, including for his forthcoming Beethoven recitals for Camerata Pacifica. The performances on Friday and Sunday, are the next in the pianist’s continuing cycle of the composer’s piano sonatas.

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Gilles Vonsattel [Image: Camerata Pacifica]

Néstor Castiglione: Southern California is very lucky to have you play all the Beethoven sonatas over the next few years. It’s been a while since we’ve heard them as a cycle. I was reminded of something you told the Salt Lake Tribune in 2002: “With Beethoven, I can sit back and enjoy it while I’m playing.” Do you still feel that way about his music?

Gilles Vonsattel: No! I no longer feel that way! Absolutely not. There’s an element of structural control in even Beethoven’s small-scale efforts that I’m much more aware now in my 40s than in my 20s. There is this need to hold the music together. Nothing in Beethoven's music is taken for granted. His music follows this principle where development springs from the smallest ideas, either composing something immense or compact. Which means a pianist really has to sit there and imagine being in the composer’s shoes. For the audience, too, it’s really important for them to get a sense that the piece is being composed right before them in real time.

N. C.: You talk about that sense of control even in small works. How do you convey to a listener that they should listen deeper to a piece that may sound simple on the surface?

G. V.: There are different layers of engagement that happen for me: the initial layer of simply playing it. Then you have to start considering a lot of questions. A movement like the [first movement of the Piano Sonata No. 19 in G minor, Op. 49, no. 1], an “Andante” — that’s an ambiguous tempo. Is it going to be moderately flowing? Can it be quicker? What can be exploited by choosing a slower tempo? What mood are we creating? What sonorities are going to be highlighted? Beethoven also moves so easily between homophonic and polyphonic textures. How should those be conveyed? If one tries playing everything at a uniform tempo, it sounds too simplistic. His music also requires a lot of tempo control. How does one deal with that? These questions multiply the deeper you get as an interpreter. For me, I’m much more aware now of how hard it is to convey musical character and nuance to an audience. It’s one thing to believe you’ve accomplished that, another for the audience to actually feel that message. In the “Waldstein,” it should be clear to a listener what an exciting ride that music is; its dimensions are epic. But in a smaller and more ambiguous work like [Op. 49, no. 1], it can be very tricky.

N. C.: Hearing you play it in January, I can tell you that the quiet intensity of that deceptively simple sonata reached the very back of the hall. Playing Beethoven’s sonatas in a cycle has its own challenges apart from playing them as individual works. How familiar are you with each one?

G. V.: Every pianist in the tradition of [Beethoven cycles] encounters these works early on, when they’re still students. They open up your vocabulary of playing and introduce you to classical forms. A lot of young pianists, for example, are introduced to the “Pathétique” sonata, which I’ll be playing at my next recital, because it establishes the Beethoven “C minor mood”, that atmosphere you hear in the Fifth Symphony and so on. There’s a lot of early sonatas that pianists play. And maybe if one’s talent develops enough, you’re given the “Appassionata” to learn. I learned it at 15; it was so thrilling and so much fun to play. At the time, I just loved playing for people, and that thrill, more than anything structural, was so appealing. I was very lucky to have had a great teacher to guide me through it. Because of its drama, its contrasts. And that’s why Beethoven’s middle period is so well known, so popular. You can play this music to anybody without giving them any background and its power comes through. It has universal themes and ideas we can all connect with. So over the years, I’d add a sonata or two to my repertoire. But I certainly didn’t know all of them when [Camerata Pacifica] asked me to play them in a cycle. When we talk about all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas, they are absolutely not created equal. It’s like scaling a mountain range — and sometimes you can fall off the cliff and die!

N. C.: And even within a particular period there can be enormous differences.

G. V.: Absolutely. Beethoven also by that point took much longer to compose sonatas and he wrote them less frequently. His rhythm of writing them at the piano was changing. The music was, perhaps, more costly for him somehow to create. A lot of my work has been a triage situation. I had played Opp. 110 and 111, but I hadn’t played Op. 109. I had played Op. 101, a very challenging sonata, only a few times. There is another thing that one has to address — that the perception of difficulty isn’t necessarily the truth. For example, somebody might hear the “Waldstein” and come away thinking it must be one of the most difficult things to play. And while I don’t think anyone would call it “easy,” Opp. 101 and 106 are orders of magnitude more difficult. But not in a way that the audience might be able to tell.

N. C.: That anticipation of Schumann in Op. 101, whose individual movements sound like precursors to his charakterstücke, must be a challenge to make into a unified statement.

G. V.: Yes. You have this dream-like opening that makes you question what exactly is happening. Then there’s a canon in the trio. What does this succession of moments mean?

N. C.: Then there’s the challenge of playing music which is so beloved, like two of the works being played in your next recital. Back in 2014, you told the Springfield Republican that, “There is so much expected of us in the age of recorded music.” That’s especially true when you play something like the “Pathétique” or the “Appassionata,” isn’t it?

G. V.: I think it’s helpful to play works like that in the context of the cycle. Because when heard and played that way, it really helps you to understand what is going on there. The creation of the Beethoven “C minor mood” [in the “Pathétique”], the jarring contrasts between the “Grave” introduction and the propulsive “Allegro di molto e con brio.” Then there’s the slow movement. A few months ago, I heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and could hear in the slow movement the bass line from this sonata’s slow movement. There’s the odd, ghostly finale. There are a lot of things that are still surprising, even now, in the context of his creative career. It’s really important above all that performing this cycle helps to ward me off clichés. If you ask me whether I’d program the “Pathétique” outside this cycle, I likely wouldn’t have. Just because, unfortunately, it’s a piece often assigned to gifted students, which has condemned it as being kind of overrated in the repertoire, something the sonata doesn’t deserve. When I was examining all the sonatas, I can’t say I was thrilled to look at it, but now I’m really getting a lot out of it. It’s an amazing work. It’s so balanced, the way its movements refer to one another. I have a newfound appreciation for it. The “Appassionata”, because it’s unabashedly in Beethoven’s “heroic style” — I don’t think I’ll ever get over the fact that I get to play that. It’s just so wild, so thrilling.

N. C.: It’s interesting that you chose to perform these sonatas with another that is a relative obscurity to most listeners. Playing the Piano Sonata No. 13 “Quasi una fantasia,” Op. 27, no. 1, must require a rather different approach.

G. V.: On this program, the “Pathétique” in a way is the only true exemplar of Beethoven’s early period. There is this transformation in Beethoven that occurs. After he finished Op. 22, a work that marks the conclusion of his post-Haydenesque music, he wrote, “I must seek new paths.” You also have his impending personal crisis, his deafness is worsening, there’s a lot happening in this period. And that’s when he begins composing these extraordinarily experimental sonatas, of which we’ll be hearing two [next recital], Opp. 26 and 27, no. 1. This is really a key moment of him trying things out. The latter is a piece that is through-composed in its totality; each movement flows into one another. You also hear something of the fragmentation that is more prominent in the late music, these mercurial shifts in mood and textures that jump from one to the next, then concludes with a tiny coda. This sonata’s structure is very special. If one were to drop the needle on any one of these moments in the work, a listener won’t hear anything so shocking as can be heard in some of Beethoven’s other music, but his choices in how he maps everything out is really revolutionary. This sonata forecasts Op. 101; a lot of things that happen in the later work could be traced to this sonata composed in 1801. Playing and listening to it can be a little like sitting in somebody’s workshop. Really the process of how the piece was composed is part of the performance.

N. C.: You sound like a man in the fresh throes of love for this music.

G. V.: I really have not been fatigued by this music. Its inspiration is inexhaustible. And if I could meet my 21-year-old self who said the quote you cited at the beginning of this interview, well, I’d take him aside and talk to him patiently.

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Gilles Vonsattel’s next installment in his Beethoven cycle for Camerata Pacifica will take place Friday, March 20, at the Music Academy of the West’s Hahn Hall in Santa Barbara, then Sunday, March 22, at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall in Los Angeles. For tickets and more information, please click this link or call Camerata Pacifica at (805) 884-8410.