Concert Review: Mehta leads Mahler 2 at Disney Hall

When I watched Zubin Mehta make his way across the Disney Hall stage last Friday night—his precarious, careful shuffling lending him an air of dignity, of wounded nobility—the question suddenly rose: Has there ever been a more dichotomous conductor than he? 

With that brash confidence bestowed only upon arrogant youth, Mehta streaked across the musical firmament of the mid-20th century. His early recordings for Decca, his appointment as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the still tender age of 26 augured the arrival of a talent of earthshaking proportions. 

Then—the brilliant comet Mehta somehow, despite its once celestial trajectory, landed on the ground with a dull, resounding, disappointing thud. 

Once dazzling Southern California audiences (and others beyond the Sierra Nevada who kept a watchful, hopeful eye) with his bracing programs—Beethoven and Brahms rubbing shoulders with Varèse, Kraft, and Frank Zappa—he suddenly turned timid in middle age; a champion diver who got cold feet when he became aware of the dizzying height from which he had once plunged so fearlessly. 

His appointments to the head of the New York Philharmonic, then later the Israel Philharmonic witnessed him in comfortable retreat. The insouciant edge that had once defined the best of his work turned bland; he turned his back on aesthetic candor, embracing instead the commercial. Also-ran recordings of tired warhorses; overblown and questionable stagings of Turandot and Tosca long on spectacle, short on musical integrity; and the three-ring Three Tenors circus act which tossed out the remaining shreds of that integrity in exchange for an easy payday. 

At age 83 he remains among the last stragglers of a generation that had followed the passing of the Mengelbergs, the Furtwänglers, the Klemperers; sometimes receiving their mantle with alacrity, at other times chafing reluctantly beneath its weight. Claudio Abbado is gone, Mariss Jansons breathed his last just as 2019 dimmed to a close, Bernard Haitink finally hung up his coat and tails weeks ago, and Daniel Barenboim chugs along—sometimes indifferently, sometimes brilliantly—but who knows for how much longer? Of all of them, Mehta is arguably the most representative, for better or worse. 

And yet the heart of the old Mehta—that is to say the young Mehta—still beats within his chest, defying time’s remorseless tread. A few seasons ago he challenged jaded ears here in Los Angeles with a Schubert Ninth so lovingly phrased, so engagingly paced that he made one sit up at attention for once through this often heavenly bore of a work. Then on Friday night, as the din of applause that greeted him at Disney Hall had yet to recede, he launched into Mahler’s “Resurrection,” its growling opening string tremolo instantly searing off the decades that had weighed upon him only moments before. 

For the next 80 minutes, the youthful Mehta—and the youthful Mahler who conceived this epic score—returned. The funereal dithyramb of the “Todtenfeier” movement moved along solemnly, passionately, without a moment of slack. Lamentation without sentimentality, tearless grief. Mehta observed the composer’s luftpausen at its hair-raising climax, imparting to the proceedings a sense of wild desperation like that of a caged animal howling against its destiny. The middle movements swayed firm—sweet, sarcastic, and sacred by turns—even if one wished at times that the Los Angeles Philharmonic strings weren’t so seemingly allergic to the expressive vulnerability conveyed by the string portamenti that Mahler demands. In the final movement, a symphonic fresco depicting Judgment Day, the orchestra was roused to heights of virtuosity that outstripped its already world-beating standards. 

In recent years, Mahler’s music itself has become a bit shopworn; its originality and power dimmed by mediocre and perfunctory run-throughs; and by too many, much too many performances that have dulled the listener’s senses to its might. But on this night, both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its former music director lived out Mahler’s credo that a score is only the blueprint and that a performer must search beyond it for its music. Together with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, soloists Chen Reiss (soprano), and Mihoko Fujimura (mezzo-soprano) they grasped towards it, found it, and evangelized its otherworldly gospel to their audience with the zeal of an apocalyptic prophet. 

The listener was humbled; reminded that behind Zubin Mehta the global brand, so often the herald of the mediocre and perfunctory itself, is a musician of genuine class. For moments like those visited upon the audience in Downtown last Friday, Mehta’s usual schlock and awe is quickly forgiven and gratefully forgotten. 

A “blonde-crowned star” in West Germany: Lola Bobesco at WDR Köln

Listening to her recordings, one would find it difficult to believe that the unmistakably original artistry of Lola Bobesco did not set the world afire. Her lushness of tone, intensity of expression, rich phrasing, and the seemingly natural ease with which she commanded her instrument—as if it were an extension of her physical self—all would seem to augur a career that would have at least been every bit as starry and glamorous as that of any of the 20th century’s greatest masters of the violin. Instead, when she died in 2003 at the age of 82 in her adopted home of Belgium, her name by then had mostly become faded from international recognition (save for her home country of Romania and also in Japan, where interest in her art had bloomed late in her life).

Tutored first by her father, Bobesco eventually entered the Paris Conservatory where she counted Ginette Neveu among her classmates. After graduation she made the rounds of the competition circuits, avoiding the Wieniawski Competition, but making distinguished efforts at the Queen Elizabeth and Ysaÿe Competitions. In 1939 she made her concerto debut by performing the Beethoven under Paul Paray, then soon followed that up with collaborations with conductors such as Willem Mengelberg and Ernest Ansermet. She also performed as a member of a short-lived, but star-studded trio with Antonio Janigro and Dinu Lipatti.

When hostilities broke out between France and Germany in 1939, Bobesco decided to stay in what by then had become her second homeland; when it was subsequently occupied, she served as a courier for the French Resistance. In 1944 she married Jacques Genty, pianist, chamber partner, and fellow Resistance member. After the war, Bobesco turned her focus onto Belgium, where she would permanently settle by the late 1950s. During this period, she and Genty would divorce. Nevertheless, they remained good friends and continued performing together long afterwards.

She was in many respects a citizen of the world, not only because of the wide distances she traveled during the height of her career, but also because of the sophisticated and cosmopolitan blend of influences which had shaped her as an artist. Georges Enescu and Jacques Thibaud both had been among her teachers, with each being the embodiment of what their respective national backgrounds imparted to the mature Bobesco: Romanian emotive power on the one hand, Gallic flexibility on the other. Of course, Romania itself has been fertile soil for artists; a gateway land where Latin, Slavic, and Ottoman civilizations all met, fought, and left their permanent imprint.

By the time these Cologne broadcasts from the late 1950s and early 1960s were made, Bobesco had established herself among the top practitioners of her instrument. The impression she made upon audiences in her German concerto debut was dramatic and immediate. One reviewer who was, evidently impressed as much by the violinist’s presence—heralding as a “mannequin slender, blonde-crowned star”—as much by her artistry, was luxurious in his praise.

“The bejeweled lace of sound, the honeyed sweetness of her singing line, the trills, double-stops, the entire effort of this violinist of art for the sake of art… here is the sparkling play of a fabulous violinist,” reported Hermann Lindlar of the Deutsche Zeitung. “The beauty of her glow, swept under the quivering hand of Bobesco, who sobbed on her Guarneri del Gesù.”*

Another critic behaved more circumspect, but nonetheless permitted himself to compare her to Heifetz and Menuhin. “Terrifying dexterity, musical sensitivity, and an endearingly beautiful, limpid, and warm tone,” lauded yet another.^

The repertoire she chose for these two broadcast sessions for WDR Köln demonstrate her lifelong affection for Franco-Belgian repertoire, much of which was rarely played during the mid-20th century, and remain on the fringes of the repertory today. 

There is also on this compilation a touching tip of the hat to a friend who himself endured—and survived—the German occupation of his adopted homeland.

Ignace Lilien’s music begins the second disc of this set in the guise of a score which hardly betrays the darkness of the times from which it emerged. Originally from the Ukraine, Lilien settled after World War I in Holland. After the German invasion of the Netherlands in World War II, the composer was permitted to live a normal life, and was left unmolested despite his Jewish parentage. He also had developed a warm friendship with Bobesco and Genty; in 1955 he dedicated to them his Concerto for Violin, Piano, and Orchestra. His slim and elegant Violin Sonata No. 2 from 1945 glows with gentle light and whimsy, with only a moment or two in the central “Larghetto” darkening its otherwise cheerful countenance. 

Bobesco and Genty handle it gracefully, allowing it to float overhead, where it charms the listener as does a passing flock of birds across a sunlit morning sky.

Play and sparkle, too, mark Albert Roussel’s Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 11—an “early” score despite the fact that its composer was nearly 40 when he penned it. Later renowned for the sharp rhythms, biting harmonies, and bracing juxtapositions of instrumental color in his four symphonies, this early chamber work is suffused with a tender sensuality modeled on Cesar Franck and Vincent d’Indy. Yet already emerging is the mature composer that in time would erupt into the passionate roar of Bacchus et Ariane and the last two symphonies.

Also tending towards the mild and agreeable is Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 2; although like the Lilien score it, too, is the product of war and its resulting chaos. It was originally composed for the flute in 1942 when Prokofiev was being evacuated from Moscow to Almaty because of the German offensive on the Soviet Union. Two years later the composer arranged it for violin upon the suggestion of David Oistrakh. (Bobesco herself had competed against the Soviet violinist in the 1937 Queen Elizabeth Competition. They both lost out to her classmate, Neveu.)

It is not surprising to find on this collection her teacher Georges Enescu’s Violin Sonata No. 2, Op. 6. During his life and even beyond, Enescu had defined the modern school of Romanian violin playing. Less appreciated, at least outside of the land of his birth, was his no less estimable genius as a composer. The opening theme of the work came to composer at the age of 14 while he wandered in the gardens of Prince George Mourousi. However, it took him another three years to finally devise the structure of the work that eventually became the Violin Sonata No. 2, whereupon he dashed it off in a matter of two weeks. Enescu was proud of the score and the stylistic breakthrough he felt it achieved. “I became myself,” he exclaimed. 

The brief, evocative Cinco comentarios for violin and piano by Joaquín Nin round out this recital. Like Roussel, he counted d’Indy among his teachers. Later in life Maurice Ravel would be an admirer of his music, as well as a personal friend. During his lifetime, his art had been highly esteemed in Spain and Latin America. Posthumously, he is best remembered for the incestuous relationship he carried on with his daughter, the writer Anaïs Nin.

The partnership between Bobesco and Genty is here, perhaps, at its refined best here, beguiling the listener with teasing charm, polishing these miniatures to a lustrous gleam. It is often in the seemingly small works that the essential quality of a musician is sometimes revealed: One is left no doubt here that in the golden-lined clouds of violin paradise, Bobesco holds her own among in a place of honor.

*: Deutsche Zeitung; April 9, 1963

^: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger; April 10, 1963

This essay will appear in a forthcoming Weitblick collection of Lola Bobesco’s chamber music broadcasts in Cologne. The author would like to cordially thank the Unternehmensarchiv des WDR for graciously permitting access to documents and reviews pertaining to Lola Bobesco.

Of Lise Davidsen, Lily Pons, and the Decline of Opera

As this year’s days dwindle down to a precious few, a music critic can dependably count on being asked by their editors to submit various journalistic round-ups summarizing their experiences over the past 12 months: Best recordings, most memorable concerts, and so on. Things are no different for me. The sun peeked out briefly, then slipped away beyond the horizon while my fingers busily typed away at drafts for two such articles to be published later in the week. In many respects, 2019 has been an unforgettable year for me personally; defining within it all the myriad connotations of the term “interesting times.” Like a popcorn kernel defiantly wedged in one’s molar, some experiences linger longer in the dusty and dimly lit corridors of memory despite themselves. 

Take the ghastly production of The Magic Flute at Los Angeles Opera which I attended last month. A good friend and devoted lover of opera asked me shortly after this performance if I believed that the level of singing in this art form had declined in the last half century. A tricky question with predictably even trickier answers. On the whole, the calibre of singing today is probably higher than it has ever been. Conservatory and university-trained singers today in general have a holistic grasp of varied genres of their art—their instruments being able to turn on a dime with constant professionalism from Puccini, to Penderecki, to pop—that would have been unimaginable to an Urlus or Galli-Curci. It is enough to consider that there are probably more superlative classical singers active today in Southern California than there probably ever were in all of Central Europe during the heyday of Mozart and da Ponte. 

So why the uncomfortable guilty conscience which dogs me after attending most operatic performances today? Is there something amiss today after all?

Next month, I’ll be walking down the street a few blocks from my home to see the Metropolitan Opera’s January production of Berg’s Wozzeck. Looking through the company’s website, I’m startled by the sight of all the performers, from the title lead down to the conductor: They are nearly all so glossily photogenic. Luigi Dallapiccola was already griping in the 1960s that opera had become something that people went to see rather than hear. Recalling the aforementioned Magic Flute, it was interesting to note that the vast majority of critical noise swirled around the visuals. Even the city’s de facto big boss of music criticdom was mostly agog over the sight of the thing, expending comparatively little space on the singing, and virtually nothing on the conducting and orchestral performance. Perhaps this was a polite omission. The Dorothy Chandler’s acoustics are notoriously awful, presenting a formidable challenge for any singer to surmount. That said, with the exceptions of the superb Tamino and Sarastro, the singing was mostly mediocre; one unfortunate singer was audibly being pushed beyond what her modest instrument was capable of. In such a situation, common today even in the most exalted opera companies, a regieoper production can arrive like a hero to the rescue, salvaging a middling musical performance with the trappings of dazzling visual distractions; the less relevant to the composer’s intentions, the better. It was quickly apparent at The Magic Flute, at any rate, that neither the singers, orchestra, conductor, nor even the composer were the stars of the show. Like junking a painting in order to admire the frame, the producers treated the opera as a prop to self-indulgently mug the spotlight for themselves. Not that the audience ever cares about such trifling details—they apparently loved it. Maybe it was best this way. In their own garish way, the producers may have felt that discretion was the better part of valor. 

My thoughts also turned to Lise Davidsen, who lately has had the opera world at her feet. Comparisons to Flagstad and Nilsson, two of the mightiest voices that ever drew breath, run thick in print. Opera Now described her as being “a once in a generation Wagnerian.” Which makes me wonder whether these same critics have ever actually heard Flagstad and Nilsson—or even Davidsen for that matter. Receiving a copy of her Decca recording of Strauss’ Four Last Songs earlier this year, I was surprised to hear a fine, but ordinary voice which, moreover, is persistently hooty and wooly. If such a thing as “once in a generation Wagnerian” even is possible, then the few Millennials that care about such things may be made to wait just a little longer for the Isolde of their dreams. At least to my tin ears, Frida Leider she ain’t. 

Way back in high school, I recall watching a Classic Arts Showcase clip of Jussi Björling and Renata Tebaldi singing through the great duet in La bohème. She was pleasantly matronly in appearance, if not quite the delicate young girl envisioned by the opera’s creators; Björling looked like Bob’s Big Boy. But what singing! Despite the cheap sets, their ages, and their bulging waistlines, they two suspended reality with every breath they took. This was no “performance”—in those few minutes before those ancient kinescope cameras, both of them melting underneath the blistering heat of the studio lamps, they simply were Mimì and Rodolfo. 

Before going to bed last night, I thumbed through the pages of Lily Pons: A Centennial Portrait that my friend had gifted to me the day before. It could be argued that in some less than obvious (and flattering) ways, she was among the progenitors of today’s professional and drab style of singing. As even her admirers confessed, she earned her role at the Metropolitan Opera as much as for her singing as for her physical appeal. In her prime she was a remarkably beautiful woman, a quality which Pons shrewdly capitalized upon. Indeed, she won the Metropolitan job over another coloratura in great part because her competitor’s figure was “considered impossible for the standards of such a sophisticated audience.” Pons’ voice was nimble and sweet, if chalky white above the staff, with shallow low notes; she had neither the girlish color and evenness of production of Erna Berger, nor the stunning top notes which Erna Sack enjoyed. Nevertheless, a great singer she was all the same. Not only did Pons preserve her voice until well into her late years, but she also had made a careful study of her talents, taking close measure of its virtues and faults. “Actually, because I treasured and protected what God had entrusted to me,” she confided to a friend, “the silver flute in my throat lasted much longer than I could ever have hoped or anticipated.” There was something else, too, something which no conservatory training, no matter how thorough can teach: Natural charm in performance and sincere affection for music in general. Before embarking upon her career as a singer, she had been a formidable enough pianist in her teens to have earned a first prize at the Paris Conservatory. The totality of contextual thinking that the piano fosters—to consider not one, but multiple threads of musical thought, and weave them together into a cohesive whole—stayed with Pons her whole life, allowing her to become an ideal ensemble player who humbly understood that hers was simply another texture, however important, in the fabric that makes up an opera. In spite of her reticent musicianship, she adroitly manipulated the press to her advantage, becoming that which few opera singers even in those golden years were able to achieve—a genuine public figure, a star, and deservedly so. 

A few years before her sudden death from pancreatic cancer in 1976, Pons reflected on the fading of the artistic values that had shaped her craft, as well as those who came before her: “You and I know that the best is behind us. We are fortunate to have lived when there was still a certain amount of style and manners, and people still had a heart. Now it’s all so cheap, tawdry, shoddy, and people do not seem to have any feelings left. As for the world of opera, I cringe.” It would be tempting to dismiss these as the thoughts of an exhausted geriatric whose gaze is turning away from this world and peering into the next. Yet our contemporary preoccupation with visual spectacle, the diminishing and even cold-hearted mockery of musical integrity would appear to suggest otherwise. That guilty conscience is nipping at my heels once more…

For all the sensation that Pons’ physique once inspired, all we have left now is her voice—as fresh as it ever was. Miles Kastendieck of the New York Journal-American wrote on the day after she celebrated her 25th season at the Metropolitan that she was “perhaps the last of a long line of coloraturas who made their singing the be-all and end-all of their art.” A timeless lesson for aspirants to operatic greatness: The beauty which Lily Pons, her singing contemporaries, and their forebears embodied was more than just skin-deep. 

Lily Pons (right) with Bidú Sayão in New York City, spring 1972.

A Brief Overview of The Most Recent Carl Nielsen Cycles

I first encountered Carl Nielsen’s music at the age of 13, courtesy of Paavo Berglund’s masterly recording of the composer’s Symphony No. 6. It was love at first hearing. Since then a lot of things have changed. Quite a few composers I loved then are barely tolerable to me now; my enthusiasm for others has since been tempered by a more soberly critical spirit. But my adoration of Carl Nielsen’s music has remained steadfast for the past quarter of a century. If anything, my appreciation for his genius, for the humanity of his art only increases with each passing year.

What is it about Nielsen’s music that is so special? It is the restlessness of the man’s spirit, his eagerness to explore, his readiness to roam ever further beyond the horizon. Whereas his great Scandinavian contemporary Jean Sibelius seemed to have spent his entire career retracing his steps with each symphony and tone poem in the hope of making the ascent towards the summit of his elusive perfection better still, Nielsen sought to venture through different paths with each new score, tearing up the maps from prior journeys, and guided by his unquenchable thirst for aesthetic wanderlust. “Give us something else, give us something new,” he once stated, “and let us feel that we are still alive, instead of constantly going around in deedless admiration for the conventional.”

His body of work contains a multitude of genres—concerti, chamber music, songs, solo instrumental works, and brilliant operas which rank with the best of the 20th century’s—but his six symphonies are perhaps the backbone of his kaleidoscopic art. Each one documents a remarkable stylistic leap from the last; taken cumulatively, the evolution from the youthful buoyancy of Nielsen’s Symphony No. 1 to the unsettlingly dark, embittered grotesquerie of his final “Sinfonia semplice” is dramatic to behold.

Because of the wide disparities in texture, mood, and form, his symphonic cycle are a formidable challenge for any single conductor to render. That has not stopped them from trying. Beginning in the 1970s with his fellow countryman Ole Schmidt, many conductors have attempted to wrangle together these multifaceted scores. (A couple—Leonard Bernstein and Chung Myung-Whun—attempted to do so, but left their cycles incomplete for varying reasons.) But unlike Sibelius, who counted on the support of a network of powerful admirers, critics, and conductors in England and America, appreciation of Nielsen remained largely confined to Scandinavia. Consequently, his symphonies arrived relatively late to records and international recognition of his importance continues to lag behind other composers of his generation. At least here in Los Angeles, his music—save for the Wind Quintet—is rarely performed.

Fortunately, despite all that, Nielsen’s symphonies do not lack for excellent recordings. Schmidt’s aforementioned cycle comes to mind. But two of the finest cycles of his symphonies came along during the sesquicentennial of his birth in 2015. While the pioneering recordings by Danish conductors such as Thomas Jensen, Erik Tuxen, and Launy Grøndahl ring with an authenticity that demand the attention of dedicated Nielsenites, these newest recordings not only interpretively hold up on their own, but the sheer polish of their orchestral execution would have dazzled the composer had he lived to hear them. Nielsen is a first-class composer whose music demands to be played by first-class orchestras.

The following is a brief overview of these recordings from 2015, ranked in order of personal preference.

• BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/John Storgårds [Chandos]: The Icelandic conductor’s set is perhaps the most consistently satisfying with respect to persuasiveness of interpretation and excellence in sound. Storgårds’ Nielsen is brawny, square-jawed, and muscular, leaping from height to height. He is at his best in the first three symphonies, where his clear-eyed approach fits well with the unbuttoned, open air mood of the composer’s pre-World War I music. His recording of the Symphony No. 1 is a delight, one of the best since André Previn’s; while the surging power of his “The Four Temperaments” ranks comfortably with Morton Gould’s. In the final two symphonies, however, Storgårds tends towards the prosaic. Though still very fine recordings, his rendering of the Symphony No. 5 lacks that last spark of wildness, of primal energy that fuels the best performances by Bernstein, Tuxen, and Kondrashin, among others. Additionally, the cavalcade of unsettling ironies in the Symphony No. 6 are presented at times with poker-faced plainness, their incongruous edges smoothed out. Nevertheless, both recordings are still quite good. The Chandos sound, as usual, is bold and splashy, with a sonic perspective that seems to sit the listener face-to-face with the orchestra. Insightful and informative liner notes by David Fanning round out this superb set.

• Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Sakari Oramo [BIS]: Oramo, on the other hand, is at his best in the last three Nielsen symphonies. His Symphony No. 6 might be the very best ever committed to records; more than earning its favorable rank alongside the splendid recordings of this tricky work by Schmidt, Berglund, Jensen, Jascha Horenstein, and Tor Mann. Like Berglund, Oramo seems to regard the composer’s final symphony as proto-Shostakovichian, highlighting the streak of disillusionment and anger that courses throughout. The Royal Stockholm brass are superb as are its winds, which chatter vividly in the “Humoreske.” Oramo’s “Inextinguishable” and Symphony No. 5 would be among the very best if not for the somewhat shallow, boxy sound that BIS unfortunately imposed upon these performances (and which was subsequently much improved in this cycle’s later installments). Nevertheless, Oramo’s razor-sharp dynamic contrasts and general sympathy for Nielsen’s late idiom shine through despite these drawbacks. The early symphonies are also excellent, but it is in the late scores where Oramo is most in his element.

• Various soloists; New York Philharmonic Orchestra/Alan Gilbert [Danacord]: It is sad to report that the New York Philharmonic’s first complete Nielsen cycle ended up being a bit of a bungled opportunity. The orchestra, to be sure, is gorgeous: Powerful and noble brass, characterful winds, sleek strings, all of them blended into a rich, oaken tone that amply highlight Nielsen’s debt to Beethoven and Brahms. Danacord’s production is as good as one can find these days, with a spacious sonic perspective that balances ensemble blend with telling individual textural detail. The problem, however, is the cipher helming the podium. Gilbert, at least in my personal experience and estimation, is one of the blandest, most boring conductors alive today. His autopilot cruise through Nielsen’s symphonies is especially woeful in the last three. Simply put, Gilbert’s anonymous run-through of these scores, which demand a level of interpretive verve and direction that is simply missing here, can often be a cheerless slog for the listener to endure. Fortunately, he is not all bad. Gilbert’s hands-off approach is less of an impediment in the early symphonies, where at least the orchestra is allowed to sing out beautifully. Shockingly, the “Sinfonia espansiva” somehow manages to rouse him out from his usual somnambulism, drawing from him a performance which unfurls with a majestic, unforced brilliance and a natural sense of pacing that places it among the very best recordings of that work. He also proves to be a sensitive partner for his soloists in the Nielsen concerti, all of which are excellent; the Violin Concerto with Nikolaj Znaider might be my favorite recording of all.

• Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra/Paavo Järvi [RCA/Sony]: Decent, but somewhat faceless performances in OK sound. Especially disappointing given that his father Neeme recorded a very fine cycle for DG some 30 years ago. Admittedly, I have not listened to this set again since early 2016, so if given another listening to today I may, perhaps, feel differently enough to revise my opinion. Suffice to say that Oramo and Storgårds keep me coming back. Even Gilbert does once in awhile (especially for the concerti). But not Järvi fils. [EDIT 12/12/19: Sometimes I’m just full of it. Having reacquainted myself with this set over the past few days, I’m struggling to understand why these recordings failed to move me back in 2016. Aside from the graininess and occasional garishness of the production, the performances themselves are masterly. Paavo Järvi’s Nielsen is some of the most gripping I’ve ever heard, with especially splendid recordings of Symphonies Nos. 2, 4, and 5. The latter is easily one of the finest on records, its last movement bounding dynamically from the inertness of its predecessor. (The only quibble I have is one that crops up in even the best recordings of the work: A much too reticent snare drummer at the end of the first movement. For a truly terrifyingly wild take on that solo, listen to the classic Jascha Horenstein recording on Unicorn, or the otherwise forgettable reading by Adrian Leaper on Naxos.) From now on this cycle will be ranked alongside Schmidt, Storgårds, and Oramo among my personal favorites.]

• London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Colin Davis [LSO Live]: Davis’ Nielsen is a dry, loveless affair. The sound from the Barbican is expectedly horrid. With his utter lack of aptitude or sympathy for these works, you have to wonder why the conductor even bothered to perform, much less record them.

A Nielsen cycle for our time: A photograph of my personal copy of John Storgårds’ excellent Nielsen symphony cycle for Chandos.

Monsieur Furtwängler, Debussyiste

During spare free moments over the past week I’ve been dipping into the Library of America’s omnibus of one of the grand old men of American musical criticism, Virgil Thomson. My appreciation of his work is mixed. On the one hand I admire his knowledge, his passion for the new music of his time. But on the other, his dry, one-damn-thing-after-another style of writing leaves me cold. Then there was his pettiness in print towards his rival composers; his barbaric view that the worth of a work of musical art was only commensurate with its economic value. Every now and then, however, one finds a surprising and valuable insight. 

In a review of a mostly French program with the New York Philharmonic from March 1947, Thomson takes the guest conductor to task for the “Romantic liberties” he permitted himself in interpreting the works of Debussy and Ravel. The performance of the former’s Ibéria, Thomson argued, “sacrificed color to dynamics, and metrics to accent.” 

“This was all disappointing from a conductor who has been both a first-class musician and a Frenchman long enough to know better,” the review continued. 

It is remarkable enough that the conductor coming under Thomson’s withering criticism was none other than Charles Munch, whose stylish recordings are considered models of French orchestral performance. But even more remarkable was the conductor whom Thomson praised as Munch’s superior in the rendering of French music: Wilhelm Furtwängler. 

“[Munch] certainly plays French music better than any of the German conductors now working in Germany,” Thomson opined. “Though many a German not now working in Germany, Furtwängler included*, has had a sounder understanding of the French Impressionist style.”

This opinion wasn’t an anomaly in Thomson’s critiques. Elsewhere in the collection, one finds other instances of the critic’s high regard for Furtwängler’s performances of French music; at one point ranking his excellence in this repertoire alongside that of Pierre Monteux’s, referring to them both as “magical.”

The German conductor is, of course, famous for his recordings of Austro-German music. However, his surviving discography hardly suggests the breadth of his repertoire, which even in his late years included Bartók (tapes of a Swiss broadcast of the Concerto for Orchestra existed at some point, but were destroyed), Korngold, and Shostakovich. Nor does it suggest the affinity he apparently did feel for Debussy, whom he regarded as a “modern Schumann.” This is borne out in his notebooks, even if his esteem for the composer is at times mingled with personal misgivings. 

In his blistering (and, frankly, jealous) critique of a Toscanini concert in Berlin, Furtwängler’s most passionate outburst against his rival is reserved not for his performances of Haydn and Beethoven, but for his rendering of Debussy’s La mer.

“[Toscanini’s] even, primitive, and unintellectual manner so consistently, and with such a naïve lack of awareness, ignored Debussy’s sensitive tonal language, that one could only wonder why he performed the work at all,” Furtwängler jotted down in a notebook entry from 1930. 

Unfortunately, little evidence remains of Furtwängler’s persuasiveness in the French repertoire. Yet what is extant does appear to corroborate Thomson’s opinions. 

A live Berlin Philharmonic performance in Italy of the first two movements of Debussy’s Nocturnes is among these precious few testimonials. One would think that the dark and sometimes rough blend typical of Furtwängler’s sound would have been a poor fit for Debussy. Instead, the results are startlingly revelatory. Rarely does one hear the sense of gauzy, pregnant mystery, the dazzling juxtapositions in tone color in “Nuages” and “Fêtes” that one finds here. Debussy’s smoky part writing seamlessly wends before the listener, emerging from the darkness before it nearly imperceptibly retreats into it again. The effect is almost that of a music permanently imprinted into the air, only awaiting the moment for a listener to step in momentarily to draw it in. Whereas so many contemporary orchestral performances of Debussy renders his art into staid prose, here his music is delivered as the hushed, ecstatic poetry it certainly must be. 

“The Germans are rather messy when they play their own music,” Thomson wrote in another review earlier in the 1940s. “Some are excellent with French music; Furtwängler, for instance.” Listening to this Debussy broadcast, one can only agree—and deeply regret the typecasting that the conductor was subjected to by EMI and Deutsche Grammophon. 

(*: When Thomson wrote this review in 1947, a number of Germany’s most famous conductors had still not been able to resume their public careers pending the outcomes of their respective de-Nazification tribunals.)

Feeling The Spirit: Toscanini’s 1939 Beethoven Cycle

If ever there was a single figure of whom it could be said was the representation in music of what Henry Luce had famously dubbed the “American Century,” then no better example could be found than the Italian-born conductor Arturo Toscanini. Throughout the last decades of his life‍, and even years after his death in 1957, the diminutive, mustachioed, white-haired man was in the United States practically the embodiment of the art over which he ruled virtually unchallenged. Even in a time and place where men like Leopold Stokowski, Serge Koussevitzky, Bruno Walter, and many others were not only active, but commanded their own wide legions of admirers, Toscanini stood apart. His purported ideal of com’e scritto—fidelity to the score, eschewing of personal idiosyncrasies, consistency of tempi—became the defining paradigm of musical performance in the postwar era, with its echo continuing to resound into our present day. 

While this remarkable achievement was owed primarily to Toscanini’s blend of musicianship and sheer tenacity in achieving his artistic objectives, there is no doubt that he was also aided enormously by the American press machine. Practically from the time of his arrival in the United States, Toscanini was spoken of by the nation’s critical establishment mostly in tones of adulatory praise that verged on the hysterical, some of it embarrassing by contemporary standards. 

“Only American audacity would dare to approach the god of all conductors; and having won, proceed to build an orchestra worthy of him‍,” gushed Marcia Davenport in a 1937 issue of Stage magazine wherein she reported on the orchestra that David Sarnoff had created for Toscanini. While it would be tempting to dismiss this as merely an example of NBC’s marketing, the American cult of Toscanini worship was thriving years before the advent of the Peacock Network’s flagship orchestra. In the late 1920s, Lawrence Gilman of the New York Herald-Tribune declared the conductor to be the “custodian of holy things” and “vicar of the immortals.” Meanwhile his counterpart at the New York Times, Olin Downes, rhapsodized: “If ever there was a man who justified the theory of aristocracy built upon the fundamental conception that men are not born free and equal, that some are immeasurably superior to others, and that their superiority is justification for their control of others’ acts and destinies, that man is Arturo Toscanini.” Not for nothing did an anonymous Musical Times author sarcastically roll his eyes when commenting upon the conductor’s recent appearance at the London Music Festival for the June 1939 issue of the periodical: “Can the king do no wrong?” 

As we approach the third decade of the 21st century, the luster of Toscanini’s legacy has dimmed concurrently with the dramatic reappraisal of conductors like Wilhelm Furtwängler and Willem Mengelberg, rivals who were each in their respective ways the antithesis of the Toscaninian ideal. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the fact that the most widely available of Toscanini’s recordings, his RCA sessions from the 1950s, can sometimes not quite match the hype that surrounded them long ago. One must regret the timing of the conductor’s retirement, which occurred at the very dawn of the hi-fi era. How his posthumous legacy would have been enriched had he been given the chance to record in “Living Stereo” can only be guessed at. Suffice to say that though his late recordings reward the careful listener with their own hard-won beauties and insights, the Apollonian brilliance and energy, the near Technicolor panoply of sound that had so excited his admirers is rarely found there. To find that Toscanini, one must turn to his earlier recordings from the 1930s. Among these, perhaps nowhere else is his art displayed at its consistent finest than in this 1939 Beethoven cycle for NBC which, gratefully, has been preserved. 

Expectations for the cycle ran high at the time. Many anticipated it to be the most important showcase to date of this musical partnership, while others hoped it would symbolize the fulfillment of Sarnoff’s stated hope that the orchestra would “further stimulate and enrich musical appreciation” in America. 

Writing to his mistress, Ada Colleoni Mainardi, Toscanini expressed his wonder over this already virtuoso ensemble’s development: “Impossible though it seems, I can tell you that the orchestra has improved even more.” 

By this point, the composer’s symphonies and orchestral works had become long-recognized specialties of the conductor’s, and he was much in demand to perform them. In fact, this NBC cycle had been preceded by another that he had led across the Atlantic only months earlier with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Notably, this 1939 cycle was also one of the rare occasions in which Toscanini led his own arrangement of the Septet, and was possibly the only time he performed the Choral Fantasy. (Vladimir Horowitz had recommended to his father-in-law the engagement of his friend, Ania Dorfmann, as soloist for the latter work.)

The hectoring inflexibility and dullness of tone that sometimes mars his late recordings is nowhere to be found on this cycle. Nevertheless, the listener must permit certain allowances, such as the powder-dry acoustic of Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8-H. Even after the acoustic modifications performed upon it in 1939, its cramped sound could hardly mislead anybody into thinking that it was the Musikvereinsaal or Concertgebouw. 

Caveats notwithstanding, the melodic suppleness, rhythmic flexibility, and variety of nuance on display here have few equals in Toscanini’s discography. 

Critical and popular reactions were predictably rapturous, with NBC’s marketing team ever ready to capitalize on the occasion. 

“Toscanini’s Beethoven ‘heard’ by Helen Keller,” blared a New York Times headline from November 1939, which described in breathless prose the deaf-mute author-activist’s attendance of one of the Beethoven cycle concerts. “You are just as I always pictured you,” she was quoted saying of Toscanini, adding that his conducting had left her “overcome with joy” for allowing her to “feel the spirit of Beethoven.” 

The enthusiasm of American musical critics was only slightly less euphoric. Olin Downes led the way, remarking in a review of the cycle’s final concert: “Every element in the score took its place as part of one thought and design. Every idea glowed with life and beauty…. Each element was merged in the conception of a single despotic spirit—that of Toscanini—and, together with Toscanini, glorified Beethoven.”

Even at the time, this 1939 Beethoven cycle was considered one of the peaks of Toscanini’s already storied career. Posterity has only confirmed this verdict. He himself had accorded tremendous importance to the cycle, sparing no effort in its preparation. 

“Oh, how hard it is to repeat the same music after a short lapse and to find a way to make new life flow into all of it!,” he wrote on the eve of the first concert in the cycle. “I can still bring off this miracle! At least I think so!!!” 

Eighty years later, the miracle he pulled off in this series of six concerts continues to burn as brightly as ever, a vivid testimonial to the truth and vitality of Toscanini’s art. 

This essay will be included in the liner notes for a forthcoming reissue by ATS of Toscanini’s 1939 NBC Beethoven cycle.

Review: Regieoper Vs. Mozart/Schikaneder at LA Opera

Five hundred years ago, artists and thinkers of the Renaissance revived and examined the works of the distant Greco-Roman past with a respect that bespoke not only of their sensitivity to its beauty and wealth of feeling, but also of their gratitude that these things had somehow managed to survive centuries of neglect and intellectual ruin. Naturally, we in 2019 know better than all that now. Because if the inexplicable and seemingly unstoppable triumph of regieoper—illustrated hereabouts last Saturday by the revival of Barrie Kosky’s and Suzanne Andrade’s production of The Magic Flute for Los Angeles Opera—has taught us anything, it’s that the accumulation of toils, struggles, labors, joys, and sorrows that comprise our past exists today only for us enlightened moderns to laugh and sneer at. 

Mozart and Schikaneder’s singspiel—like a lot of products of the German late 18th century; those twilight hours of the Enlightenment, before the night of Napoleon and Metternich cast the whole of it in darkness—is simultaneously silly and profound: A dashing prince and a girl-crazy guy in a bird suit are commanded by the king of some vaguely Egyptian land to submit themselves to a host of trials in order to gain the wisdom to love. Thus from these unlikely roots does one of Mozart’s most human creations spring forth. But instead of allowing this Rasselas-meets-Soupy Sales spectacle to stand on its own strange feet, Kosky and Andrade straightjacketed it into an ill-fitting vision of confused F. W. Murnau and Tim Burton tropes which latched parasitically off the score, feeding off of it zombie-like.

Masking their evident embarrassment and chagrin at the sincerity, loveliness, and even weirdness of Mozart and Schikaneder’s original vision, Kosky’s and Andrade’s hypercapitalist irony also drew with sheepish self-consciousness a veil over the comparative emptiness of their own. Los Angeles Opera’s previous production by Gerald Scarfe, a vivid technicolor riot which rendered The Magic Flute into an enchanting, living children’s storybook was sorely missed.

The musical performance itself was better, if not without its own significant problems. 

Music Director James Conlon lead a performance of admirable moderation and proportion, even if the score’s earthy bounciness came off a little flat-footed at times. Bogdan Volkov, as the sweet-toned and expressive Tamino, and Ildebrando d’Arcangelo, the imposing and fatherly Sarastro whose voice radiated like a column of pure light that cut through the production’s ironic fog were by far the best of a mixed singing cast. Zuzana Marková’s Pamina was good, if a tad matronly and wooly; while the unidiomatic grit in Theo Hoffman’s Papageno was more suggestive of Baron Scarpia than bumbling bird-wrangler. Miscast altogether as Queen of the Night was So Young Park, whose vocal resources were audibly strained to its limits by her challenging role. Unable to cope with the crystalline etching of Mozart’s coloratura writing, she settled for blurring through it, and only managed to punctuate its top Fs by sheer dint of screaming. 

In her prefatory notes for the production, Andrade tellingly described the device she contrived to replace the score’s dialogues—silent film-style intertitles accompanied by stylistically anachronistic music by Mozart, along with an inexplicable bit of the infamous “Oriental riff” for another dash of (bad) taste—as a “gimmick.” The Cambridge English Dictionary defines the word as: “Something invented especially for the purpose of attracting attention and that has no other purpose or value.” I couldn’t have described this production of The Magic Flute better myself. 

Afternoon in Two “2” Time

One composer is currently being feted as a “neglected genius” whose music possesses the “potential power to… change lives for the better [author’s emphasis].” Another’s music is derided as “facile, badly orchestrated, and comically derivative.” Within a span of five years in the 1940s each of them penned their respective second symphonies. A couple of weeks ago, I spent a few hours listening, then re-listening to each one, coming to some surprising personal conclusions.

Mieczysław Weinberg, whose music has garnered wider attention in recent years, managed to live long enough to see the first flickerings of interest in his work outside of Russia, which began shortly before his death in 1996. At the time his name was known almost exclusively to Shostakovich experts. Not only was the elder composer a mentor and personal friend of Weinberg’s, he also had esteemed his talent very highly, ranking him among his own personal favorites. 

Discussion of Weinberg’s tragic biography, with his early years being disfigured first by the aggression of Hitler, then by the paranoia of Stalin, has become difficult to disentangle from the music. In light of this, one can only marvel at Weinberg’s sheer fecundity and sense of craftsmanship, which alone are an eloquent testament of civilization’s tenacity in transcending barbarism. Remarkably, he managed to be the sole survivor of his family and even more remarkably went on to live a full life; eventually penning over 150 numbered works, some with laudably humanist themes like his opera The Passenger and his final symphony from 1991. 

Putting aside these extramusical considerations, however, it is hard to ignore the fact that he never seemed quite able to come out from under the Shostakovichian shadow which looms over all his work (although one could argue that it was he who influenced the elder composer as Weinberg’s early music sometimes eerily prefigures his mentor’s late music in texture, if not exactly in quality). Whereas Shostakovich’s absorbs and unifies various disparate elements—Honegger, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Krenek, Mahler, jazz-flavored pop, Russian folk song, and Soviet mass choruses—into a single, unmistakably original artistic voice, the only significant influence readily discernible in Weinberg is Shostakovich. So derivative is his music that one is tempted to view Weinberg’s catalog as a grand, extended musical commentary on Shostakovich.

His Symphony No. 2, Op. 30 from 1946 (recently recorded and issued by Deutsche Grammophon) vividly illustrates this problem. Composed only a handful of years after Weinberg escaped his native Poland, the symphony bares its emotional scars with uncompromising directness. Facile and badly orchestrated it most certainly is not, but the symphony’s derivativeness brings to mind how César Franck, in a fit of frustration, scrawled “poison” across the title page of his copy of the score to Tristan und Isolde, so threatened was he (and many other French composers) by the force of Wagner’s style, which he feared would reduce him to a mere imitator. If the Soviet cartoon of “Shostakovich clones” that graces the cover of the book Shostakovich In Context is any indication, the Russian symphonist’s music was similarly believed by at least some of his contemporaries to be a stifling influence on younger composers. Even those who emerged into maturity with a distinctive style haven’t been safe. One is reminded of the lamentable decline in Krzysztof Penderecki’s music after his Symphony No. 1. A few, like Tigran Mansurian or Boris Tchaikovsky, came under the influence of Shostakovich, but also possessed the willpower and strength of personality to resist being subsumed by it, instead forging ahead with their own highly individual idioms. 

Ian McDonald perceptively noted in his The New Shostakovich—by way of critique of his subject’s Symphony No. 8—that composers whom he considered, like Penderecki, to be the elder’s epigones were “one-dimensional.” 

“The tragic earnestness is laid on too thickly and too monotonously; there is little sense of perspective; and no ironic contrast, characterisation, or humor.”

He could very well have been describing Weinberg’s Symphony No. 2 which—at least to me—swings a heavy black brush relentlessly against its canvas in a manner which Shostakovich himself rarely indulged in. Worse it (and by extension most of Weinberg’s music) has little of the structural tightness, rhythmic zest, and playful surprise which his mentor had to a seemingly limitless degree. 

Listening to Tikhon Khrennikov’s Symphony No. 2, Op. 9 from 1942, on the other hand, proved to be a surprisingly enjoyable romp.

For most of his life, Khrennikov was best recognized at home and abroad not for his compositions, but for his over forty years as Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, becoming essentially the face of Soviet musical policy. As such, he was equally courted and disliked, the latter much more so and with a vengeance once his power crumbled along with the former USSR’s. 

Disagreeable and reprehensible though he may possibly have been as a man, the professional quality of his music is beyond reproach, and is anything but “badly orchestrated.” Khrennikov in this symphony displayed an uncanny ear for orchestral brilliance and sparkle. (Not for nothing did Leopold Stokowski champion his Symphony No. 1 long before its composer became the top musical bureaucrat in the Soviet Union.) His thematic material is clear-cut and memorable; many more talented composers would have been envious of his ease with melody. And if it isn’t going to be setting the world afire with its originality, Khrennikov’s Symphony No. 2 is less derivative of, say, Dmitri Kabalevsky and Gavriil Popov than Weinberg’s corresponding symphony is of Shostakovich. Rhetoric about “Socialist Realism” and heroism notwithstanding, the symphony purports no metaphysical profundities which require searching beyond the music itself. It is simply an exuberant collage of marches, mass songs, and folk melodies which ingratiates itself to the listener with an appealingly abstract quality; contenting itself with being accepted at face value, and without having need of socio-political props.

Having spent over 20 years listening to Weinberg—not only his symphonies, but also his vast catalog of chamber, vocal, and piano music—I find that not only is his music mostly unable to dispense with those props, but that sweeping them away reveals nothing but the aesthetic void they had concealed. When the listener arrives at the coda of his Symphony No. 2, one comes to the uncomfortable realization that its composer’s desire to vent his emotions exceeded his ability to impose order and cogency upon them, that the sum of his good deeds in life amounts to precious little in the cold retrospective gaze of musical posterity. 

On the occasion of what would have been Shostakovich’s 70th birthday, Khrennikov declared that to follow in his late colleague’s tradition was to commit to “uncompromising service to his affairs, to his calling as an artist of the socialist epoch.” That he himself—more Czerny than Shostakovich; his character streaked with a pungent Mephistophelian aroma—contradicted these lofty aims is a delicious irony that is positively, well, Shostakovichian. 

A skin-deep smile for skin-deep music: Tikhon Khrennikov’s moment in the spotlight in the film The Train Goes East (1947). [Wikimedia Commons]

The Double-Edged Sword of Classical Marketing

Marketing for classical music may very well be one of the most thankless jobs around. I can think of no better (worse?) example of a “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” kind of a situation than that experienced by these people who attempt to foment interest for a genre whose capacity to interest a wider audience becomes more difficult by the day. And rather than blame the irreversible historical processes which have led to this result, to say nothing of the endemic structural problems within the classical music business itself, it’s the marketing teams which are the first and most loudly blamed for any slump in donations and ticket sales. 

Still, their often times shrill, tonedeaf, or just plain clueless approach to the promotion of classical music makes it difficult to muster much sympathy. 

Case in point: The online calendar for the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Orange County. Did the person(s) who wrote this bother to actually read this before making their blurbs public?

“Filled with deep emotion, profound complexity and beautiful melancholy, Brahms’ 4th symphony finishes with a finale that will leave you speechless.”

This kind of hyperbole is self-defeating on a number of levels. Not least of which is that if somehow this kind of hype were to be effective in getting the kids to drop Lil Nas X and Lizzo, and come running to hear Brahms, they’ll more than likely be disappointed to find a work that is, at least on the surface to somebody who knows no better, a standard classical work, and a rather stodgy one at that. Then there is the performance itself which—unless Carl St. Clair has become the second coming of Mengelberg or Golovanov in the years since I last heard him—will definitely be neat, immaculately played, but hardly leave anybody “speechless” (unless they find themselves dozing off). I don’t think Brahms 4 left anybody “speechless” even while the ink was still wet. And as for Brahms’ “deep emotion” and “beautiful melancholy,” Tchaikovsky, for starters, would like to politely object, while Webern hardly saw much beauty in the composer’s “grey on grey” orchestration.

Even for somebody who enjoys classical music, Brahms can be a tough slog to understand; sort of like a musical oat bran or granola antipode to the luxurious culinary offerings of, say, Tchaikovsky or Wagner. I started listening to classical music at age 12, but couldn’t wrap my mind around Brahms until starting when I was 18. Even then, not all of it was immediately approachable or intelligible. It was only this year, for example, when I finally came around to understanding and enjoying his chamber music. 

Well intentioned though it may be, marketing hype is dangerous in classical music because, let’s face it, to the uninitiated it’ll rarely live up to the actual experience of the thing itself. To a young listener reared on Top 40 and the various addictive aural hooks offered by a standard 3-minute song, what excitement can a middle-of-the-road interpretation of an approximately 130-year-old work by a composer who is on the record about prioritizing structural perfection over expressive power hold? And if the music doesn’t live up to the hype the first time, what are the chances that this non-classical listener will bother to try again?

Marketing hyperbole to leave anyone “speechless”. [www.scfta.org]

In the Trenches of the Format Wars

Francis Fukuyama may have been wrong about the inevitability of global liberal democracy and its implications on future societal developments, but when it comes to playback formats, music lovers may indeed wonder whether we have reached the “end of history.” As I type this, I have just finished losslessly streaming through my phone an album of Beethoven’s wind music conducted by Karl Haas. The notion of being able to stream anything at CD quality would have seemed unthinkable to me even five years ago. But even as up-to-date though such an act may appear, the FLAC file format upon which my streaming service depends upon is nearly two decades old, and is based off of predecessor digital formats whose roots go even further back. Historical progress in musical reproduction has today converged into a static horizon point of possibility.

Even as we are on the cusp of entering the third decade of this current century, the old 20th century’s grip on music appears stronger than ever. The “vinyl renaissance” will immediately come to mind for many, of course, but perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this phenomenon is the nearly forty-year-old compact disc which, for all the disdain and snobbery it incurs from today’s “vinyl” snobs, remains stubbornly alive. Despite posting declines of sales overall, it persists as the top physical music format sold globally. We may eventually find that it will also be the last physical musical format to earn widespread public adoption, the final step in a long evolution that began with the wax cylinder. It’s worthwhile to recall at this moment that forty years into its existence, the LP was on the verge of becoming obsolete. What would the average listener in 1980 say if one had told them that people would still be listening to music in generally the same way in 2020—and with no flying cars, to boot?

All this came to mind earlier today when I took a break from writing to watch a video from Techmoan, one of my favorite YouTube channels. His latest upload deals with the format wars of the late 1940s: Namely, between Columbia’s 33 ⅓ RPM long-playing discs and RCA Victor’s 45 RPM discs. Each sought to succeed the 78 RPM format; both ultimately “won,” although the retelling of this history typically overlooks the crucial role played by classical music. 

During this period, classical music was not only an important “prestige” genre, it was also a very financially lucrative market that record labels could not ignore. Even by the 1930s, the 78 RPM was beginning to look (and sound) behind the times, with mostly classical musicians expressing their frustration with its limitations. From its very inception, many of them were skeptical or outright disdainful of a format they felt was plagued by poor quality sound reproduction and short duration. The roster of musicians whose distrust of the then comparatively primitive state of recording technology—a process which Bruno Walter late in life likened to being made to sit in “animal cages”—could not be overcome is a long and painful one. 

Because of these limitations, many larger symphonic works or operas were prohibitively expensive to record, or altogether impossible to do so, at least profitably. In 1937, Electrola recorded Act III of Wagner’s Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg with the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Dresden State Opera under Karl Böhm’s direction. Even a single act from the opera took up 15 heavy and fragile double-sided discs. Around the same time, RCA Victor recorded Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. That recording exceeded 50 discs, if I’m not mistaken. Their cumbersome bulk, not to mention price (a single 78 RPM disc in the 1930s would on average cost the equivalent of approximately US $25 – $30 today) placed such recordings far beyond what all but a very few people and institutions could afford. 

It was these problems that spurred a development mentioned in the video: RCA Victor’s failed attempt in 1931 to popularize the Victrolac, its own long-playing format. There are several reasons why they were unable to gain traction at the time, but perhaps among the most important was the growing power of the pop music market. Because while the Victrolac resolved some of the issues posed by the 78 RPM disc, it opened up new ones which alienated the pop music audience

With its comparatively modest demands in length and production, the pop music of the era was as if tailor-made for the 78 RPM format. Understandably, the average fan had no need for expensive multi-disc albums, no concerns about length. Single discs were sufficient to contain the music they desired to hear.

So when RCA Victor (in conjunction with Bell Laboratories) began experimenting, then attempted to market extended playback (and stereophonic sound), it was no surprise that instead of enlisting the pop musicians of the era to push the Victrolac, they instead relied on men like Leopold Stokowski and Sir Thomas Beecham. Even had classical listeners been won over to the Victrolac format and managed to overlook its significant flaws, the prohibitive cost of this new format would have precluded any possibility of winning over fans of pop music, whose support was crucial to make it a viable competitor and successor to the 78 RPM. 

This become clearer when fifteen years later Columbia succeeded with its LP, which owed its triumph to two main reasons. Firstly, because the vinyl surface of its playback materials and its duration—with a single album comfortably fitting a standard-length symphony—were an undeniable improvement in fidelity over 78s. Because of that the label could count on the support of their talent roster to court the classical audience, with Igor Stravinsky, Bruno Walter, Eugene Ormandy, and George Szell (who appears on the far right of a group photo with LP pioneer Edward Wallerstein in the aforementioned video) all being prominently featured in their marketing. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the LP was affordable. Not only was it significantly cheaper than the Victrolac had been a decade earlier, it promised to eventually be cheaper than the 78 RPM it hoped to replace, thereby making the format accessible to an unprecedentedly broad audience. 

At the same time, RCA Victor also succeeded with the 45 RPM precisely because most pop listeners at the time had no use for albums, instead wanting to only hear the latest hit song. It’s telling that pop/jazz musicians wouldn’t really learn to effectively take advantage of the LP format until well into the 1950s. Even deep into the 1960s, many non-classical LP albums were ramshackle things consisting of a hit song or two accompanied by ten or so tracks of filler. Likewise, the possibilities afforded by tape were first explored by the seemingly irreconcilable opposites of the experimental electronic composers and easy-listening orchestras of the 1950s, with rock musicians finally bringing together elements of both in the 1960s.

The classical market, while much diminished after the 1960s, would continue to be an important force in the recording industry as late as the early 1990s. The advent and durability of the CD bears testimony to this fact. Later attempts at physical format improvements—DVD Audio, SACD, Blu-spec, and Blu-ray Audio—have only managed to appeal to a very niche audience, or have simply failed precisely because the classical audience, which tends to prioritize playback duration and fidelity of sound, has itself become an extreme niche in the wider music industry. Many, perhaps most pop music fans today appear to be quite content streaming music at low-quality bit rates. Some pop music today is even mastered on mp3. 

If present trends in listening and musical taste continue, it could very well come to be that in forty years from now, the CD, LP, and various successors to today’s present digital formats (if not the present ones themselves) will still be with us. And somehow our dreams of flying cars will, mystifyingly, remain unfulfilled. 

“He wants you to enjoy the full beauty of his cello.” Gregor Piatigorsky helping to sell the Columbia LP, 1947.

Cat and the fiddle

“Cats are beautiful creatures. They mean so much to me, sometimes even more than music. ”

— Silvia Marcovici during a phone interview with me on October 19, 2019.

Silvia Marcovici’s feline friends. (Photos courtesy of Silvia Marcovici.)

Wilhelm Furtwängler in Stockholm

Tod und Verklärung

As Wilhelm Furtwängler was laid to rest at the Heidelberg Bergfriedhof on December 4, 1954, few among his mourners could have anticipated the dramatic reversal of fortune his legacy would begin to enjoy within two years of his death. 

In those immediate postwar years, many perceived Furtwängler as having been tarnished by the ambiguity of his public conduct in Germany during the Nazi period; which resulted in endless fodder for squabbling by subsequent generations of listeners, musicians, and music critics. In a private diary entry from 1933, Thomas Mann excoriated Furtwängler as a “lackey” of the Third Reich. A few years later Arturo Toscanini would harshly admonish his colleague face-to-face for his political vacillation. He would not be the only conductor to do so. 

“Please bear in mind that your art was used over the years as an extremely effective means of foreign propaganda for the regime of the devil,” Bruno Walter wrote to him in 1949. “The presence and activity of a musician of your standing in Germany at that time lent those terrible criminals cultural and moral credibility, or at least helped them considerably in its acquisition.”

Despite enduring a bruising de-Nazification trial which in 1947 would clear him of all charges, antipathy to Furtwängler remained strong in former Allied territories, especially in North America where a vociferous and well-coordinated campaign had prevented him from taking the reins of the Chicago Symphony from Artur Rodziński in 1949. The memories of that incident remained at the forefront of his mind as the Berlin Philharmonic prepared for its first tour of the United States, which was scheduled for the winter of 1955. 

There was another subtler, yet perhaps more significant reason why some audiences were wary of Furtwängler. Already before the First World War, Arturo Toscanini’s career had become in the United States the glittering stuff of legend. By the year of Furtwängler’s death—which coincidentally was also when Toscanini retired—he had become the Colossus of Rhodes of the symphony orchestra, his career straddling imposingly across the Old and New Worlds. He was “The Maestro,” a symbol not only of the intense respect he had earned in America for his music-making and defiance of fascism, but also of the effectiveness of NBC’s marketing during his tenure with the Peacock Network’s flagship orchestra. Whereas Toscanini promulgated the notion of the performer as faithful servant, Furtwängler regarded his role akin to what a later age would refer to as an auteur: An executant who interprets the vagaries of musical notation with the authority of a collaborator to the composer. More importantly (and despite the fact that he was nearly 20 years older than Furtwängler) Toscanini’s manner of music-making—propulsively paced, sharply-etched, and direct—was reflective of the chrome-plated optimism that fueled the Atomic Age’s pursuit of the logical, its technocentric crusade against the mystical. Furtwängler’s art, on the other hand, with its subjective and tragic connotations seemed a sepia-tinted relic from a time long bygone. The fact that much of his postwar studio discography, most of which had been produced by EMI under strained circumstances, failed to live up to his reputation did not help. Next to the phonogenic polish and precision of the likes of Toscanini and Karajan, Furtwängler’s studio recordings can sound stodgy and insecure. 

As the last mounds of dirt piled upon the casket being buried in the shadow of the Königstuhl, even Furtwängler’s family and close friends would probably have at least conceded that at the time of his death his reputation had seen better days. 

Auferstehung

Yet the same label with which he had a testy relationship in life would prove to be the catalyst for the posthumous reevaluation of Furtwängler the man and artist. 

Less than two years after his death, EMI would issue a recording under his direction of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, assembled from the rehearsals and concert for the Bayreuth Festival’s postwar inauguration in 1951. Although presented in less than ideal sound even for the twilight of the mono era, Furtwängler’s searching, wayward, occasionally fallible, and often visionary performance was a thunderous retort to Toscaninian objectivity. It also revealed something else that his previous officially released recordings had failed to disclose: Furtwängler was far more charismatic and compelling live than he was in the studio. 

With listeners’ appetites whetted, record labels—some of them with the approval of Furtwängler’s estate, others sneaking under the radar in ephemeral bootleg issues—began mining public and private archives in Central Europe for more broadcasts under his direction. Over the next decades various hitherto unheard live performances would be released on LP and, later, CD. 

Now in 2019, 65 years after his death, nearly all of Furtwängler’s extant recordings have been discovered and made available commercially to the public. With this abundance of riches, it would seem that his admirers (and his detractors) have by now heard everything there is to hear from this great and often controversial figure. 

Or have they?

Swedish Rhapsody

Most of Furtwängler’s recordings were made with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras. Another smaller, but sizable portion was made with the Philharmonia and Lucerne Festival Orchestras. Frequently overlooked, however, are his small, but revealing set of broadcast recordings that he made with yet another ensemble: The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. Though sporadic, their relationship would last from 1920 to 1948—nearly three decades.

When Furtwängler first appeared with the orchestra then known as the Stockholm Concert Society, he was 34 years old and a rising star in the German musical firmament. Already he was among the most sought after conductors in Europe, boasting not only recent appointments to the Wiener Tonkünstler Orchestra and the symphony concerts of the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, but also an impressive tenure as music director of the Mannheim National Theatre. Despite these artistic successes, the young Furtwängler was eager to earn foreign cash as Germany, still reeling from the Treaty of Versailles, was suffering its worst economic crisis since reunification. When Scandinavia beckoned him with a guest series of nine concerts and payment in kronor, the opportunity was simply too good to pass. 

Furtwängler enjoyed his stay in Stockholm, as well as the kindness of his Swedish hosts. Nevertheless, admiration for this city he described as “likeable and cozy” mingled with scorn over what he considered was the poverty of its cultural life. “Everything else [here], especially the so-called ‘spiritual’ interests exist only on the surface. A thousand times would I rather live in vanquished, depleted Germany than here among wealth and well-being which suffocates everything,” Furtwängler wrote to his mother, adding disdainfully in a foretaste of his later, deeply held skepticism of Anglo-American cultural priorities that in Sweden “you get a good idea of how things look like in England and America.” 

Despite his reservations, Furtwängler’s Stockholm Concert Society programs—aided by a healthy complement of musical works by local favorites including Franz Berwald, Ture Rangström, and Andreas Hallén—were a sensation. Eager to nab this magnetic talent, the ensemble’s board quickly offered him the role of music director. This piqued the ire of Georg Schnéevoigt, then the current holder of the title, who was chagrined at being blindsided by a young upstart. Bolstered by his own supporters, Schnéevoigt managed to make a scandal out of this unsolicited designation of successor, eventually forcing the resignation of his opponent’s supporters from the orchestra’s board. 

Aside from a pair of concerts in 1921, Furtwängler would not return to conduct the Stockholm Concert Society until 1925, a year after Schnéevoigt had finally departed. By then Furtwängler would have little time for Sweden. Not only had he succeeded Arthur Nikisch as chief of the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras, but he was taking on increasing responsibilities with the Vienna Philharmonic, and as if that were not enough he would soon cast his ambitions across the Atlantic to conduct the New York Philharmonic. (Stockholm would, at any rate, appoint the talented Václav Talich as its next music director.)

Another 16 years and the initiation of hostilities in a Second World War would pass when Furtwängler again sailed the Baltic Sea to stand before Swedish audiences. He would conduct only a single concert in Stockholm in 1941, but in 1942 and 1943 would lead five and four concerts in the city respectively. At the time of his return, the armies of the Third Reich were sprawled across a wide swathe of Europe, and Furtwängler was under pressure to act as a cultural ambassador in newly conquered regions. Sweden, with its delicate state of official neutrality, would be one of the few European countries where Furtwängler, who was unwilling to be used as a propaganda figure in German-occupied territories, would perform as a guest in wartime. 

After the war, Sweden would be one of the first countries he appeared in after his de-Nazification tribunal. He conducted the Stockholm Concert Society in 1947, and would return for a final appearance the following year. A further scheduled engagement with the orchestra in 1953 was cancelled because of medical problems, although Swedish audiences managed to hear him one last time in 1950 when he led the Vienna Philharmonic on tour through Scandinavia. 

Stora landsvägen

Whereas wide variances in tempi, articulation, and textural nuance can occur in the discographies of other major conductors of the early to mid-20th century, including Walter and even Toscanini, Furtwängler’s recordings—whether in the studio or in the concert hall—demonstrate a consistency of approach that may be surprising. Far from being the improvisatory things that they are often described as, Furtwängler’s various performances of the same score generally hew to an established interpretational road map, differing only in small, but crucial details from performance to performance. His work with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Philharmonia benefit not only from being made with ensembles which were among the world’s finest, but also by their intimate familiarity with Furtwängler’s working methods. Each one had learned to intuitively and successfully respond to his array of physical gestures and occasionally inarticulate utterances in rehearsal. The result was as if composer, orchestra, and conductor had seamlessly fused into a single, indivisible entity. 

Today’s Royal Stockholm Philharmonic has taken its place as one of Europe’s finest orchestras, with a distinguished and growing discography providing ample testimony of their virtuosity. However, the Stockholm Concert Society of the 1940s, was a fine, but undeniably scrappy ensemble that, comparatively speaking, was considerably below the calibre of the best European orchestras from that period. Because of that, these recordings are often looked upon by collectors as being the stepchildren in Furtwängler’s discography. Closer and unbiased examination of these Stockholm performances, nevertheless, reveal not only a number of insights into the conductor’s art unavailable elsewhere, but they also possess qualities which make them worthy of enjoyment in their own right. Despite—or perhaps because—of the orchestra’s limitations and their comparative unfamiliarity with Furtwängler’s performing approach, there is a sense of playful risk-taking evident here, an awareness of walking a tightrope with no safety net below that the conductor’s better-known recordings in Berlin, Vienna, and London do not quite match. Moreover, whether by design or by default, these Stockholm performances bear a sunny glint unique among Furtwängler’s recordings. 

Consider the performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 on disc 1 of this set. The bright uplift of this Swedish performance from December 8, 1943 is worlds away from the tragic intensity of the famous Berlin performance from 20 months prior. True, the Stockholm Concert Society is pushed to the limits of its abilities here, with its woodwinds notably sounding taxed, especially in the finale. But the joyous energy of this performance, auguring the conductor’s ebullient postwar readings of this symphony, is infectious. Even Furtwängler himself seems carried away by the euphoric jubilation of it all, with his gravelly baritone audibly joining the choir in the coda. The sound, too, is an improvement over Berlin 1942; better realizing the wide spectrum of Furtwängler’s dynamic shadings, and improving significantly upon the compressed sound that mars the former recording. Newly remastered in this set, this performance takes its rightful place among the conductor’s finest. 

On disc 2 is included a program of Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8, which was a favorite pairing of Furtwängler’s in his late years. His 1951 Vienna recording of the former score, like many of his EMI productions, has its virtues, but lacks the sense of headlong adventure that this Stockholm recording from November 12, 1948 has in abundance. While the thin Swedish strings are no match for the richness and depth of their Viennese counterparts, their articulative bite, to say nothing of the entire orchestra’s willingness to treat this occasion as anything but routine makes this among the more immediately thrilling outings of Furtwängler’s postwar career. What would be ponderous in the studio is here weighty and muscular, surging with purpose. Listen to the taut lines of the “Allegretto,” which evince none of the droop of the later performance; and with orchestra and conductor erupting at its expressive nodal points like the impassioned oratory of an evangelist exulting in the unvarnished truth of religious scripture. The might of the scherzo and finale, meanwhile, hurtle forward like a champion athlete in full stride, conquering and transcending all. 

Thanks to its perennial inclusion in the conductor’s Beethoven cycle for EMI, this Stockholm reading of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 has been the best known of Furtwängler’s Swedish broadcasts. Its familiarity bears no loss of freshness and vigor for all that. A tricky stumbling block for many conductors, Furtwängler is among the few alert to the symphony’s complexities and deeper implications. The wild harmonic modulations in the first movement’s development, for example, swing between daring and danger, foreshadowing the much later music of Carl Nielsen (somewhat appropriate given the Scandinavian provenance of this concert). Under the direction of most conductors, Beethoven’s Eighth sounds like a misfire, a curious stylistic hiccup. In Furtwängler’s hands the symphony is revealed as a remarkably prescient neoclassical statement, anticipating by a century Stravinsky’s and Hindemith’s works in that vein; its irony a potent and unsettling statement on the Enlightenment’s twilight and the horizons of human reason. 

From November 19, 1948 comes one of three extant recordings of Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem that emerged from his baton. Although it is hobbled by comparatively inferior vocal soloists, this Stockholm performance is also the only one that has survived complete, and in fairly decent sound no less. It is fitting that Furtwängler’s final guest appearance before the Stockholm Concert Society should also be his most successful, with the orchestra clearly playing at the utmost of their collective powers. The sound which emerges from this tape is simultaneously dignified and richly expressive, making palpable its deeply felt mourning, limning its sorrow with the glimmer of a gentle, consoling trust that even death, too, will pass. Every breath tells, even in those long moments of stillness when conductor and orchestra both seem to look over the edge into the hereafter; beautifully molding each movement into a human-scaled monument to the impermanence of our existence, and the grief of those from whom we must inevitably take leave. 

We return to wartime in the first two tracks of the final disc on this set. Strauss’ Don Juan and the Prelude to Act I and “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde were Furtwängler specialties and no stranger to his admirers. Both these recordings from November 25, 1942 exhibit the fine, if at moments strained playing (especially audible in the virtuoso Strauss score) that is displayed in more attractive light elsewhere on this set. 

The disc’s final track, however, affords the listener a valuable opportunity to hear Furtwängler in rehearsal. This excerpt of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 is all the more fascinating because it displays the conductor in a more talkative mood than on surviving rehearsals with the Berlin Philharmonic. Given that the Stockholm Concert Society had nothing like the almost familial bond that their German counterparts enjoyed with the conductor, his more communicative demeanor here ought not to come as a surprise, although his very matter-of-fact remarks to the musicians concerning phrasing and shifts in tempi may just be, especially considering the metaphysical qualities ascribed to his art. More than words, Furtwängler relies mainly on singing to the musicians in order to convey the sounds he wishes to hear from them. Apart from being simply stunning, the results of this rehearsal—as the Stockholmers set upon the overture’s coda at first tentatively, then bursting forth with incandescent brilliance—serve as a vivid and touching memento of a partnership that, intermittent as it was, was of lasting consequence for both Furtwängler and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. 

This essay was previously published as the liner notes for Weitblick’s reissue of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s broadcast recordings with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic (formerly the Stockholm Concerts Society Orchestra). The 4-CD set is available for export from Amazon Japan, HMV Japan, and Tower Records Japan.

Arctic Daydreams of a Los Angeles – Yerevan Freeway

Not more than a few days had passed after Chile’s historic 1988 plebiscite that my parents quickly made plans to return to their homeland. Not that the dictatorship had ever been any reason for them to keep away.

Arriving in the United States in the late 1970s, they hardly were the leftist political refugees that had made up most of Chile’s emigrés in those post-Allende years. My mother, who had no strong feelings either way about the journey, simply followed my father, who had left his studies in jurisprudence, as well as a stable job in their hometown’s city hall to pursue an American adventure (I hesitate to refer to it as his “American Dream”) of dubious merit; in his mind he had erected a hedonistic mosaic that he now wanted to enact in the flesh; composed of Coca-Cola, Studebaker, John Wayne, Brian Wilson songs, and (I have always suspected) scantily-clad beach bunnies who would presumably be awaiting this rakish, new arrival in his late 20s, perhaps willing to overlook his marriage that was then going on its fifth year. Weren’t American girls supposed to be fun, after all?

Despite the distance, the presence of “Pinocho,” as my father often referred to the then Chilean head of state, was never very far away. My father alternated between lavish praise and demonical denunciation as his mercurial moods saw fit. One day, he was the destroyer of democracy; the next, he was the saviour of the nation. Mother, on the other hand, was more consistent—she was an unabashed and steadfast supporter, no surprise coming from the eldest daughter of a family with a longstanding military tradition.

Chile is an anomaly among Latin American nations in that its authorities are largely free of corruption, and are therefore widely respected. Even to this day, polls in the country regularly demonstrate that the military and carabineros—the national police—are the most trusted branches of the government. For years, Chileans had considered that those guilty of the excesses committed during the Régimen Militar were other people; not our neighbors, not our fathers, not our sons. (Although the skepticism of authority commonplace in Anglo-American countries is starting to gain a foothold in that stretch of land tenaciously clinging onto the edge of the Andes.)

My mother often told me about how she was caught in the crossfire between rebels and military in Valparaíso’s Parque Italia on September 11, 1973; how the army summoned buses to ferry her and other civilians out of harm’s way.

“For your own safety, citizens, please keep your heads ducked under the window,” she recalled one uniformed officer telling her. An irrepressible metíche—a Spanish word whose inexact meaning in English combines implications of “nosy,” “gossip,” and “busybody”—as well as contrarian, she couldn’t resist peering just over the windows.

“That’s when I saw all the bodies,” she recalled.

As the days grew closer to our trip in January 1989, I pleaded with my father to consider alternatives to a journey to Santiago by flight. Wasn’t there a ship, a freeway, a Greyhound that could take us, please? Didn’t he care about his family, about me specifically? My eyes glued to the news even at that young age, Lockerbie, Cerritos, and Korean Air were names that I knew well, names which evoked the deepest terror, far exceeding the usual nighttime disturbances of ghosts and goblins that children ordinarily feel. My father, a loving, but firm man with a streak of Old Testament discipline, quickly shot me down.

A few weeks later, hours after the Bush I inauguration, our LAN Chile flight touched down in Arturo Merino Benítez Airport. As it turned out, the flight, according to the captain on duty, had experienced an unusual degree of turbulence. Even the touchdown was rocky, so much so that the entire cabin spontaneously erupted into applause and cheers, grateful not only that their 14-hour flight was over, but that they had made it in one piece. My father kissed the ground and recited the Lord’s Prayer as soon as we had stepped off the plane. Digging into my seat in silent terror throughout the flight, I gave way to an uncontrollable fit of giddiness as soon as the wheels gripped the tarmac, cackling as if somebody had just cracked the funniest joke of my young life. I had just avoided my much too untimely demise by the skin of my teeth, so I thought.

As I type these words, the heart of my 8-year-old self is practically leaping out of my mouth. My Qatar Airways flight to Doha is approaching Baffin Island, soon to be followed by Greenland. A few hours later, our plane curves south around Finland to begin its descent into the Arabian peninsula. Ever since we began to stride along the Rocky Mountains, our plane has been beset with prolonged periods of strong turbulence. Stronger than this 38-year-old chronically terrified of air flight would prefer, at any rate.

The notification to fasten our seatbelts has lit up once again. Turbulence, strong enough to rouse mild alarm among the passengers, with the woman next to me clutching her daughter with her right arm as her left holds for dear life onto the seat in front of her, smacks our vessel about. “Isn’t it time they build a highway to Armenia?,” a childish voice from within me asks.

We’re about to cross the Davis Strait. Four hours down, eleven to go.

Qatar, not “Qatar”…

“Qàter,” the Lyft driver reminded me as she winded down the narrow, razor-sharp turns of the Pasadena Freeway. “It’s pronounced Qàter.”

This was actually the third time in the past few days that I was reminded of my mispronunciation of Qatar, the small nation which daintily extends out like a pinky from the palm of the Arabian peninsula. A friend of mine earlier this week was the first to correct me, having erroneously rendered it previously as sounding akin to the Spanish catarro—“catarrh,” or nasal congestion. My mind was weighed with a number of other matters this week, so my usual attentiveness to such details ended up on the wayside. Here’s to hoping I remember the proper pronunciation by the time we touch ground in Doha.

The heart of the Middle East will only be a temporary waiting station on the way to my ultimate destination: Yerevan, Armenia. For the next week I’ll be walking the roads of a country whose people already existed in classical antiquity, a detail which reminds me of the Basques from whom I am descended many generations ago.

“We are close, the Basques and Armenians,” Vatsche Barsoumian, whose generosity allowed me to travel to Armenia this week told me earlier this year. “We both have endured so much.”

Indeed, Armenians have been fought over and ruled by Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Greeks again, Persians, Turks, and Russians, before finally eking out their hard-fought independence. Through it all they have managed to retain their very unique culture, swinging with outsize heft in the arena of global culture.

Chile, from where my parents came, has existed since the 16th century, around 500 years, barely an eyeblink within the span of Armenian civilization.

This will be my first time venturing outside of the U. S. in 15 years; my first ever trip outside the American continent. It is also my first journey to a country in which I have no command of its language. My accrued rudimentary knowledge of Russian and Armenian will hopefully help me through the next week. I practiced the former for a bit with my Hungarian landlord a few days ago.

“Khorosho,” he told me with a light chuckle, “a little more and maybe you make it into military service.” A student protester during the 1956 uprising in his country, he was arrested, sent to Siberia, then pressed into service in the Red Army upon his release.

Feelings of anxiety mingle with even stronger ones of anticipation.

We are beginning to board. The next time I post, I’ll be in the sweltering 118°F heat of—Qatar (pronounced similar to “cutter”).

Jörg Demus (1928 – 2019): A Personal Appreciation

Nothing lasts forever. A hard lesson repeated since time immemorial which each generation, each individual must learn as if it were new. Not only is our personal existence an impermanent thing, but as the burning of the Notre-Dame de Paris illustrated to a horrified global audience, the very world upon which we hinge our existences, too, is a transient one.

The death of Jörg Demus last month was, perhaps, a similar reminder of the ephemerality of our existence, as well as a loss of comparable magnitude.

Not that his was a household name even among the rarefied coterie of admirers of Western musical arcana. It is a testament to the man’s humility that his best-known work is, paradoxically, not as glamorous soloist, but as the eloquent and unassuming partner to such performers as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elly Ameling. Not that he had anything to hide. As these or the number of solo recordings which remain highly prized amongst record-collecting congnoscenti readily testify, Demus was a musician devoted to the cultivation of beauty. His cycle of Schumann’s piano works—the first ever integral set—remain a model of poetry and poise.

But it is, perhaps, in the work of the composer whom Wilhelm Furtwängler once referred to as a “modern Schumann” where the breadth of Demus’ art is unfurled to its fullest.

That some of the greatest interpreters of Claude Debussy’s piano music were German or German-trained would have been a rueful irony to the great musicien français. Pianists like Gieseking and Arrau were among the few who most closely approximated the composer’s velvety ideal of a piano without hammers. (Comparatively, French pianists often seem to equip their instruments with ice picks.) In his own traversal, Demus follows in that Teutonic tradition, conjuring through his fingers a Debussy of poetic reveries on the verge of becoming mist.

Listen, for example, to the panoply of veiled hues he elicits in Voiles; his Des pas sur la neige of soft-focus blurs slowly coming into focus; the simple charm of his Arabesques or Rêverie; the warmth and human scale of his Études. Threading through it all are those sensitive hands carefully constructing subtly variated textures, drawing long-breathed singing lines, and shaping a dynamic flow as natural as breathing itself.

Here, as in all his best recordings, is the illusion woven by the greatest musicians, who by dint of their virtuosity of body and mind, subsume themselves seamlessly into the composer. In our time when classical music is beset by crude, egomaniacal keyboard-bangers and hair-tousslers who treat their art as merely a prop to frame their Botox-infused, PR-managed “sex appeal,” the plain sincerity of Demus’ art seems not so much as from another time, as it is from another planet. Would that more of his kind light up ours.

The late Jörg Demus at the piano. [Image credit: International Jörg Demus Festival]

Michael Gielen (1927 – 2019)

A few years ago at a record store job I once held, a customer approached me asking for recommendations of Mahler recordings. I led him over to the composer’s section in our store and began going through several which were personal favorites. He asked if there were any integral sets of the composer’s symphonies which I could suggest. We happened to have Michael Gielen’s cycle in stock and held that one out to him.

The customer just looked at me puzzled.

“Who is he?”

I replied with a very brief summary of his life and work, adding that he was to me the greatest conductor then living.

“He can’t be that great,” this customer shot back in irritation. “I’ve never even seen him on social media.”

Requiescat in pace.

Michael Gielen with the Chicago Symphony. [Photo courtesy of the CSO Archives]