Review-in-Brief: "Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin's Russia" by Elizabeth Wilson

An invaluable overview of the life and art of Mariya Yudina, one of the 20th century's most original performers, better known by reputation than by actual acquaintance with her work. For many, Yudina might be best remembered for her appearance in Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovichian ventriloquist act Testimony, where she is reduced to a caricature. Wilson restores the dignity that was Yudina's personal credo, rendering her into a three-dimensional figure hitherto unknown in the English language. The author’s profound sympathy for her subject is charismatic enough to suspend the reader’s impatience with her earthbound prose and dispel the whiff of pedanticism that occasionally creeps in. (Does the target audience for this biography of a relatively obscure Russian pianist really need an explanation of who “The Mighty Handful” were?) Shortcomings notwithstanding, this book is an essential read for anybody interested in Russian music, as well as the cultural life and history of the Soviet Union.

Colonialisms, Unintentional and Intentional: On "Sound Storing Machines: The First 78 RPM Records from Japan, 1903-1912"

Months ago, a friend of mine forwarded to me an article reviewing a compilation of historical recordings on the Sublime Frequencies label, Sound Storing Machines: The First 78 RPM Records from Japan, 1903–1912. Japanese music, in particular that of the interwar era, has been a years-long obsession of mine that has rivaled my other enduring passion, classical music. So I had a special interest in reading this article, the most recent of several I’ve read about this release.

The music on that disc is beautiful, but the way Robert Millis, the curator of this compilation, frames it is troubling. He chastises Fred Gaisberg, the original producer of these recordings, as a “colonialist.” In light of the way Millis presents this material, not to mention how he contextualizes it on social media, his comment is ironic. Arguably, what he does is worse since he plays it up as outré gonzo exotica despite knowing better. Gaisberg never consciously stooped to such exploitative tactics. (His recordings were made primarily for the Japanese market.)

Japan during the first two decades of the 20th century was undergoing the final stages of rapid changes which had begun the moment Admiral Perry first set foot on its shores. Some of this can be gleaned from reading the later novels of Sōseki, particularly The Gate and Light and Dark; which explore the sense of confusion, the “in-betweenness” that many Japanese of the period felt. During this period, things like shin min’yō (stylized folk music inspired by the German Volkskunde movement), shōka (instructional music taught in public schools, sort of a forerunner to the Soviet “mass song”), gunka (patriotic music), and opera arias were fast becoming popular across Japan. Theatres which mounted eclectic productions of Western classical music, stylized Japanese music, and Western-style pop such as the Casino Folies, Asakusa Opera, and Takarazuka Theatre were sprouting across the empire during this period. In 1915, Nakayama Shimpei composed “Katyusha’s Song,” the first genuine wasei Western-style pop song. It became an unprecedented hit which moved tens of thousands of records and helped to popularize the gramophone in Japan. Already by then a lot of the traditional culture, in particular the music, was becoming increasingly remote to newer generations of Japanese.

The cutoff point Millis uses for this set is telling. Nipponophone (today Nippon Columbia) began issuing recordings in 1912—the very first ones ever produced in Japan by Japanese. The repertoire on those early discs was mixed: there were some sides cut of rakugo (a traditional genre of comedic prattle and dialogue), kouta (geisha songs), and other traditional genres. Primarily, however, these early domestically produced Japanese 78s consisted of military marches and arrangements of Western music led by Setoguchi Tōkichi, Japan’s “March King.” I think the very first record cut, in fact, was of his Gunkan kōshinkyoku (“Warship March”) played by the Imperial Japanese Navy Band, of whom he was director at the time. I’ve read Millis’ disparaging remarks about this music, wherein these fascinating adaptations of Western music are dismissed by him as cheap imitations which impinge upon “authentic” Japanese culture. It brings to mind a problem that I was confronted with a few years ago. A professor of Japanese 20th century art and myself were attempting to interest museums in a touring exhibit we had devised wherein Japanese culture of the 1930s, especially how the visual arts combined with the dynamic musical culture of the era, intertwined. The focus would have been on nihonga (a genre of painting inspired by traditional woodblock prints but melded with Western perspective and neoclassicism) and on contemporaneous pop music. Although we received highly complimentary remarks on our proposal, we nonetheless kept meeting with rejections. Simply put, the art was deemed not “exotic” enough and its adaptation of Western ideas seen as “imitative.” While well-meaning, Millis similarly and inadvertently dumps out an entire history which continues to have important repercussions to this day simply because the Japanese desire to be part of the rest of the world resulted in something he perceives as “inauthentic.”

The writer of the aforementioned article bolsters Millis’ argument by referencing Tanizaki Junichirō’s In Praise of Shadows:

“Japanese music is above all a music of reticence, of atmosphere. When recorded, or amplified by a loudspeaker, the greater part of its charm is lost.”

A crucial piece of context is missed (or possibly ignored). In Praise of Shadows was mostly composed in the years 1933–1934, then revised and added upon until it was finally published in 1939. It was no coincidence that the 1930s, Japan’s Jazz Age, perhaps its most culturally dynamic years (decades later the literary critic Tanabe Seiko lamented that the period had been the apogee of "Japanese civilization" and that everything after was a sad footnote) had also been the same period when national pride was in the ascendant. As Mishima Yukio later observed, both phenomena were opposite sides of the same coin. Not only that, but by the date of its publication, Japan had become deeply embroiled in war with China. Upon the formal declaration of hostilities in 1937, Japanese leaders had boasted that the war would be won within months. Instead the Japan-China War became their Vietnam or Afghanistan; a “forever war” where, paradoxically, its end seemed to grow more distant with every victory achieved. On the homefront there were divergent responses to the conflict, ranging from repudiation to total embrace of Western modernity, each side seeking the revelation of “true” Japaneseness: the former through a return to traditional culture that was spiritually superior to the poisoned chalice of modernity; the latter by demonstrating that Japan was capable of beating the West at its own game, thereby demonstrating the superiority of the Japanese character. Tanizaki's criticisms of the Western-invented gramophone dovetailed with the growing Japanese skepticism of Western modernity of his times, which was as much aesthetical as it was political. (This theme would be probed much more deeply in the coming years by the "Kyoto School" of philosophers.) Consider, for example, a very widely held view in 1930s Japan that pathological Western individualism was the root of the Great Depression. Tanizaki’s conservativism reflects his times, as well as its own anxiety about defining Japanese cultural “authenticity” in the face of competing global nationalisms. It was also a contradiction of his younger self. In the 1920s he published several essays celebrating Western influence upon Japan, particularly with respect to sexual mores, social dancing, film, and recorded music. A lot of his enthusiasm for things Western can be found in his novel Naomi (Chijin no ai or "An Idiot's Love").

It’s a problem that East Asian art in general, in particular of the 20th century, is regularly confronted with. After all, nobody ever dismisses modern Russian culture as “inauthentic,” even though it is also based on ideas imported from elsewhere in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Donald Keene writes in the forward to his translation of Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku) about the puzzlement felt by some American readers at what they perceived was the incongruous absorption of Western culture into 20th century Japan:

In reading his works, however, we are sometimes made aware that Dazai's understanding or use of these elements of the West is not always the same as ours. It is easy to conclude from this that Dazai had only half digested them, or even that the Japanese as a whole have somehow misappropriated our culture.

I confess that I find this parochialism curious in the United States. Here where our suburbs are jammed with a variety of architecture which bears no relation to the antecedents of either the builders or the dwellers; where white people sing Negro spirituals and a Negro soprano sings Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera; where our celebrated national dishes, the frankfurter, the hamburger, and chow mein betray by their very names non-American origins: can we with honesty rebuke the Japanese for a lack of purity in their modern culture? And can we criticize them for borrowing from us, when we are almost as conspicuously in their debt? We find it normal that we drink tea, their beverage, but curious that they should drink whiskey, ours. Our professional decorators, without thinking to impart to us an adequate background in Japanese aesthetics, decree that we should brighten our rooms with Buddhist statuary or with lamps in the shapes of paper-lanterns. Yet we are apt to find it incongruous if a Japanese ornaments his room with examples of Christian religious art or a lamp of Venetian glass. Why does it seem so strange that another country should have a culture as conglomerate as our own? […]

A writer with such [a modern] intelligence—Dazai was one—may also be attracted to the Japanese traditional culture, but it will virtually be with the eyes of a foreigner who finds it appealing, but remote. Dostoyevsky and Proust are much closer to him than any Japanese writer of, say, the 18th century. Yet we should be unfair to consider such a writer a cultural déraciné; he is not much farther removed from his eighteenth century, after all, than we are from ours. In his case, to be sure, a foreign culture has intervened, but that culture is now in its third generation in Japan. No Japanese thinks of his business suit as an outlandish or affected garb; it is not only what he normally wears, but was probably also the costume of his father and grandfather before him. To wear Japanese garments would actually be strange and uncomfortable for most men. The majority of Japanese of today wear modern Western culture also as they wear their clothes, and to keep reminding them that their ancestors originally attired themselves otherwise is at once bad manners and foolish.

It’s a pity that Millis didn’t heed Keene’s parting advice.

The Intersectional Cult of Florence Price

André Hodeir concluded his book Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music—in some ways the triumphal song of the postwar musical avant-garde—not with a swaggering victory lap, but with worry for how one nation’s parochialism threatened the progress of music. “In America, the freedom of expression is so great that one would have expected it to produce a vast creative movement,” he wrote. Instead, he found that not only was hostility to modernism endemic, but its leading composers and musical elite cheerfully accepted the stylistic fetters forced upon their peers in the Soviet Union. His remarks came to mind earlier this month when I read about this year’s classical Grammy winners. What passes for “Best Contemporary Classical Composition” is hardly surprising anymore given how hatred against the perceived anti-populism of Arnold Schoenberg and his successors has practically become a catechism learned by rote for America's young composers. (Whose music, despite their pretenses, is only ever intelligible to other fellow tonsured academics.) However, the winner for “Best Orchestral Performance”—the Philadelphia Orchestra’s recording of African-American composer Florence Price’s First and Third Symphonies—is representative of the emerging intersectional alliance between musical reactionaries on one hand and race-obsessed opportunists on the other. 

Commentators have speculated tantalizingly why Price’s music had been mostly ignored until the 21st century. In spite of graduating with honors (in organ and teaching) from the New England Conservatory of Music, Price’s composing career only began in earnest when she was on the cusp of her 40s. Arguably, her greatest professional success occurred in 1933 when her First Symphony was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at a special concert in that year’s World’s Fair. The conductor was Frederick Stock, its longtime music director. He never conducted the music again. Serge Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director, later ignored Price’s appeal to interest him in her work. 

It is tempting to read Stock’s apparent abandonment and Koussevitzky’s failure to even acknowledge Price as another example of Jim Crow-era racism. She herself probably believed that to be the case. “I have two handicaps—those of sex and race,” she explained to the latter conductor. Yet both men were (along with Leopold Stokowski) the most enthusiastic champions of living orchestral music in the prewar era. Between them, they conducted the world and American premieres of scores by composers that represented a cross-section of 20th century music ranging from the modernist to the traditional: from Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky to Alexander Glazunov and Howard Hanson, among many others. Comparison to any of them establishes that Price’s music is not merely “conservative,” as Richard Evidon generously declared in the Grammy-award winning CD’s liner notes, but simply amateurish. Symphonic architecture, particularly thematic development, is practically non-existent; her orchestration is merely functional, her sense of harmony prosaic. One only has to ask themselves: would anybody even notice this music, let alone play it had it been composed not by an African-American woman, but by somebody like the white, heterosexual male Carl Ruggles, a notorious bigot even by the standards of his time who also happened to compose some of the most transcendentally radical and humane music this country has yet produced? The obviousness of that answer has not stopped some from calling her “inspirational” or even a “forgotten genius.” 

Alex Ross cannily evades this problem by suggesting that the notion of musical greatness is implicitly racist. “The adulation of the master, the genius, the divinely gifted creator all too easily lapses into a cult of the white-male hero, to whom such traits are almost unthinkingly attached,” a feat of intellectual dishonesty that simultaneously ignores the dazzling greatness of countless other non-white composers, as well as inadvertently reinforcing the systemic racism he decries. What “special pleading,” as Ross defensively writes about Price, do composers like Hashimoto Kunihiko, Earl Kim, Mesías Maiguashca, Moroi Saburō, Silvestre Revueltas, Amadeo Roldán, George Walker, or the remarkable auto-didact Luis Humberto Salgado need when the potency of their talent and skill is evident to anybody with ears to hear? Their continued exclusion from recognition within the Western classical music canon by the socially and aesthetically narrow-minded reveals the hierarchy of grievances at the heart of today’s conversations about race, wherein both whites and African-Americans only ever see each other, to their mutual political advantage, while Asians and Latinos are locked out. Moreover, the paternalistic acclamation of the regressive Price comes at the cost of persistently ignored American composers like Wallingford Riegger and Roger Sessions, whose posthumous quasi-official oblivion is now doubled as a result of their unfashionable musical complexity and race/sex. 

As critic Victor Carr Jr. wrote years ago, “Price’s music [...] still holds an important place in the history of African-American concert music, and American music in general, and if it’s not all great, it also doesn’t deserve its current neglect.” The patronizing discourse of Price’s boosters is insulting to her and other non-white composers, not to mention a threat to the very canon of greatness that Price evidently cherished and imperfectly aspired to belong.

Kinderman’s Beethoven, Briefly

The veritable tsunami of historical revisionist cultural biographies which were summoned by the tectonic shift of the 2016 US presidential election, resulting in countless [insert important artistic figure/artistic movement here] as “political” artist/movement or whatever, seems to show no signs of abating even five years later. For all its evident erudition and cleverness, the problem with Kinderman’s Beethoven book is that its subject really isn’t Beethoven; instead the composer is merely a frame around which its reader can see themselves and their pet conceits reflected flatteringly. Thus Kinderman permits his intended audience to believe that not only was Beethoven their precursor, but encourages the delusion that they are the Beethovens of their own time. 

Gregg Pope: In Memory of a Kind Soul

Gregg Pope was neither a classical composer nor musician. It’s doubtful whether he ever seriously listened to a note of classical music in his life. He was simply a decent and kind man—and posterity rarely confers any of its glittering honors for that. 

We worked together at Amoeba Hollywood. He was one of the people in charge of the store’s book department, handling the buying and pricing of used material. Someday the entire Amoeba story will be told; a tale of nepotism, lawsuits, and willful fiscal mismanagement. It suffices to say that almost anybody who was actually knowledgeable and competent was intentionally left out of the cult of Amoeba’s true believers and tonsured acolytes. But Gregg was that rarity: A regular guy who somehow managed to make his way into a position of some power within the store. 

Gregg and I weren’t friends but we talked often, especially on Saturday mornings when I was assigned book duty. We talked about sci-fi a few times, a genre I’m a bit cold toward but for which he had a great enthusiasm. He recommended me some Ursula K. Le Guin; I passed him along a recommendation for John Brunner. One time he saw me drink a can of plain La Croix in the break room by the store’s offices. “You sure like those,” he told me. “Just watch out that the fizz doesn’t make you float away. We need you Saturday.” He smiled his shy grin from beneath the big Buddy Holly glasses which eternally sat upon his nose.

Unless you were one of the “lifers” who were paid well because they had started with Amoeba back when it was flush with money, before the owners flushed their good fortune down the toilet, chances are you were struggling to pay bills. Quite a few of my books ended up being resold with Amoeba price tags thanks to Gregg, who was very generous with trade-ins, giving far more money than whatever it was I had to trade was worth. One day I had brought in a couple bags of books to resell for much-needed cash. A couple of hours later, Gregg came up to me in the jazz room where I tended to the classical section. 

“Hey, I can’t buy your books today. Mark’s here.”

Mark is the buy counter manager and notorious among crate-diggers for his lowball offers, even for obviously valuable collections. He is also incomprehensibly paid six-figures at a record store which, apparently, is struggling financially; he even owns a house thanks to the job. Most Amoebites were lucky if they had enough money to afford a closet to rent. 

I don’t remember what I said to Gregg. It must’ve been some remark which was intended to be uttered as a personal aside but which was loud enough for him to hear. But he heard it. I needed money bad. 

“Are you short?,” he asked me. 

Maybe the money was needed for dinner that night. Or to tide me over to the next payday. I can’t remember anymore. But what I do remember was him asking me:

“How much do you need?”

Gregg then dug into his pockets and offered me $50, no questions asked. I told him I couldn’t take it, that it was fine, and at any rate I didn’t like owing people money. 

“You wouldn’t owe me. Just take it.”

After some further deliberation, I took the money. And Gregg was true to his word—he never brought up the money again. 

A little after that I left Amoeba, under acrimonious circumstances it needs to be added. Occasionally I’d remember Gregg. He was one of the good ones. 

We weren’t friends. But his kindness to me will never be forgotten. It was something which came to mind again and again after I heard what happened to him a few days ago. I don’t know what terrible pain led him to do what he did. All I can sincerely pray for is that wherever he may be, that he has finally found the peace which had eluded him in life. 

CD Review: Bernstein's fascinating but idiosyncratic Stravinsky

“Bernstein’s Stravinsky performances include some of his most indelible recordings,” reads one of the hype blurbs on the back of Sony Classical’s new Bernstein Conducts Stravinsky box. However, the recordings contained therein at times seem to imply otherwise; occasionally they are “indelible” for less than flattering reasons, despite Bernstein’s (and Stravinsky’s) best intentions. Another blurb, this time from Bernstein himself, proclaimed the Russian composer “the last great father-figure of Western music”: An ambiguous remark in the face of the conductor’s own difficult relationships with father-figures, to say nothing of his perceived failure at becoming one himself (at least as a composer).

The six, fairly short, LP-length CDs in the box alone speak of Bernstein’s sincere but guarded appreciation of Stravinsky. As expected, the big three early ballets are all represented (The Rite of Spring appears twice). Missing, however, are any works from the final four decades of Stravinsky’s life, a period of restless and often surprising stylistic turns which produced some of the finest works to flow from his custom-built nib. From 1947 on his amanuensis Robert Craft would turn him on to a wide array of interests, including early music and Webern. Unsurprisingly, given Bernstein’s well-known (and wrong-headed) aversion to Schoenberg and his successors, none of the late kinetic late serial scores are heard here. (Although he did appear uncredited conducting a section from Stravinsky’s The Flood in the composer’s recording for Columbia.) The most recent score included in this set is the Symphony of Psalms, composed nine years prior to the composer’s emigration to America in 1939 and 41 years before his death in Manhattan in 1971. 

To say that Stravinsky was, for his part, sometimes no less guarded of Bernstein's efforts on his behalf is putting it mildly. Stravinsky’s first encounter with the then up-and-coming maestro, at a Hollywood Bowl performance of the suite from The Firebird, was not auspicious—both he and his wife left disappointed. A few years later, during a performance of Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety under the direction of the composer in Venice, Stravinsky bolted out of his seat and headed right out the doors of La Fenice after only a few minutes. 

Of the first disc which opens this set, comprising The Soldier’s Tale and the Octet, Stravinsky acidly confided to Craft that he was “praying those records are never published.” Made early in his career with members of the Boston Symphony, Bernstein’s readings are softer-edge than one would expect, forecasting his later approach to other Stravinsky works. Beautifully pastel-colored though they are, they also evince unease with their brittle textures and expressive dryness. Almost as if Bernstein had attempted to stuff Stravinsky into an ill-fitting costume sewn together from the respective wardrobes of Brahms and Debussy. The results are especially surprising (and Stravinsky’s irritation understandable) with The Soldier’s Tale, a work whose tart harmonies and proto-jazz rhythms would seem ideal for the young Bernstein.

The second and fifth discs both include Bernstein’s justifiably renowned recordings of The Rite of Spring, from 1958 and 1972 with the New York Philharmonic and London Symphony respectively. Even Stravinsky, for once, generally approved of the results, at least of the former. (He had been dead for a few months by the time of the recording sessions for the latter.) Unlike many of the conductors who had recorded Stravinsky’s most famous score prior to him, Bernstein was among the first generation of conductors for whom The Rite of Spring had been an established fixture of their musical history. From the strained, falsetto opening notes of the solo bassoon to the final bludgeoning tutti, Bernstein is all unflagging swagger; with orchestra and conductor streaking before the listener like blazing rockets. Of the two recordings, the edge of danger is sharper and more menacing in the earlier, its blade digging into the flesh deeper thanks to the unanimity of purpose of both orchestra and conductor. The later English recording sounds better (it was originally mastered for quadraphonic sound), downright lush at times but the orchestra sounding less committed to Bernstein’s feverish vision.

As fine as those recordings are, however, it is in the splashy and exuberant second of the big Ballets Russes scores where Bernstein seems most in his element. His reading of Petrushka (1947 version) is alight with that joyous flash which makes Bernstein at his best so compelling. Throughout he charismatically conveys a sense of wide-eyed wonder over the pratfalls, side-slips, and unexpected pathos in Stravinsky’s panoramic musical description of the eponymous doomed puppet, whose antics bubble up as if within a dream amidst the revelry of a pre-revolutionary Russia; itself a doomed dream which, only a few years after the ballet’s premiere, would collapse into nightmare. 

Less successful is the disc containing the Concerto for Piano and Wind Orchestra and the suite from Pulcinella. The latter is colorful enough, although Bernstein misses a lot of the mordant irony of the music, inadvertently making it a spiritual companion to the genial nostalgia of Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances and Tommasini’s The Good-Natured Ladies. At first anyway, Stravinskian neoclassicism was not so much return and renewal of tradition as it was subversive commentary upon it; which furthermore made clear that not only was going “back to Bach” futile, but that those forms had already been exhausted by repeated use and their own accrued cultural baggage. 

Seymour Lipkin joins Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in the Concerto but the conductor’s tendency to foist a Papa Brahms beard upon Stravinsky resurges. Lipkin’s passagework, especially in the finale, sounds muddy; the direction from the podium reticent, as if prudish embarrassment kept the conductor from embracing the music’s Roaring ‘20s insouciance. Better but still not ideal is Bernstein’s recording of the Symphony of Psalms, although it is still heavier and more legato than the best recordings (starting with the composer’s own with a pick-up ensemble consisting mostly of an earlier iteration of Bernstein’s band, also available on Sony Classical).

Preceding the Symphony of Psalms on disc 6 is Bernstein’s Boston Symphony recording of Oedipus Rex. Simply put: It is unbeatable. While Stravinsky may have intended for action in this opera to unfurl impassively, the characters treated as singing statues, Bernstein was having none of that. Rather than a “tragedy” encased within ironic commas, the conductor casts them off. Bernstein’s interpretation is unapologetically, compellingly emotional, even sensual. No other conductor better delivers the majesty and latent terror in Creon’s aria or in the “Gloria” choruses which divide the work. When the snare of destiny finally snags Oedipus, Bernstein drives the closing, tarantella-like chorus straight into the depths of Hades; leaving one’s speakers practically reeking of sulphur. His cast is uniformly superb. René Kollo’s Oedipus is simultaneously heroic, moving, and weak-willed; deftly conveying the character’s vainglorious denialism, only to despair when he realizes too late that the game is up. His Jocasta, Tatyana Troyanos, is regal and alluring. No marble statue she, but a flesh and blood woman right out of Verdi. Tom Krause is rich-toned, playing up Creon as a well-meaning Grand Inquisitor determined to raze Thebes and the whole of Earth in search of the truth.

Listening to these recordings one gets the impression of hearing Bernstein grapple no-holds barred with Stravinsky, with the latter occasionally eluding the conductor’s grasp. If not the last word in Stravinskian interpretation, they are fascinating documents nonetheless (and in the case of Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Oedipus Rex essential). Stravinsky and Bernstein completists will have likely already acquired this set by the time I finish this review. Others would do well to acquaint themselves first with other recordings, especially those by the composer himself, before committing to Bernstein’s idiosyncratic but devoted Stravinsky.

CD Review: Finnissy and Gershwin, lone wanderers at the end of musical history

Classical music composers in the 21st century find themselves in an unenviable position. Can there really be anything new under the sun? After the disintegration of the mid-20th century avant-garde, followed by the implosion upon tonality that was the minimalist movement, it can sometimes seem as if the composers of today are lone wayfarers on a landscape decimated by the tramping of the giants which had preceded them. Some composers have sought their way out by finding refuge in a past which provides some semblance of order; others, like Michael Finnissy, rummage through the wreckage of musical history and ponder what it all meant.

The jumbled kaleidoscopic visions of Finnissy’s Gershwin Arrangements and More Gershwin are no straight transcriptions, not even “rambles” in the style of Percy Grainger. Even when they are at their most exuberant, the prevailing mood is that of a post-mortem. The once living human being known as “George Gershwin,” these works suggest, has been obliterated by the sheer weight of his own success; his resulting absorption into postwar consumer culture stripping him and his legacy of their original organic meaning. Instead, what Finnissy creates here are edifices that are the aural equivalents of a mobile sculpture composed of trash, akin to Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers: Recontextualizing detritus into something entirely new and strangely beautiful. Gershwin’s melodies are treated like random found objects repurposed with newly devised incongruous, often audacious results that their original creator could never have possibly dreamed of. Musical history is over, one often feels listening to these works, and all that is left is to write the obituary.

Pianist Lukas Huisman is a compelling and clear-eyed guide through these wondrous, phantasmagorical scores; dancing sure-footedly through this complex music which sounds as if the Roaring ‘20s were processed through a meat grinder. He also provides the disc’s excellent liner notes. Piano Classics’ sound is close-up, but not garish, allowing enough reverberation to impart a mildly hallucinatory quality to the proceedings.

There is no woe or despair in Finnissy’s declaration of death as proclaimed by Huisman. Rather, both composer and pianist invite the listener to consider how a new music could arise from the ashes of the old. Classical music is dead, long live classical music.

CD Review: Pristine's latest urges second look at Schnéevoigt

One typically thinks of conductors from the 78 RPM era as having been conferred a halo of greatness which sometimes seem to glow brighter the worse the quality of their recordings get. But in the case of Georg Schnéevoigt, the reception of his posthumous legacy is, at best, “mixed.” If he is remembered at all, it is for his championing of the music of his compatriot Jean Sibelius, of whom he was a pioneering proponent on records. But unlike his colleague Robert Kajanus, whose recordings remain touchstones of Sibelian authenticity, posterity has been not as kind to Schnéevoigt’s shortcomings. His 1934 recording of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 4, for example, was privately criticized by the composer, leading HMV to withhold its commercial release. It was not hard to hear why it remained in the vaults for so long upon its eventual release over 40 years later: Simply put, it was a sloppy and ragged performance. (Small wonder then that HMV engaged Sir Thomas Beecham and his London Philharmonic for a remake which remains a classic.) Further tarnishing his reputation was the retrospective view of his helming of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “The bland Finn,” was local critic Gilbert Brown’s pithy appraisal of Schnéevoigt’s abilities. It does not help that the conductor made few recordings.

So what to make of Pristine Classic’s latest release, comprising of an all-Sibelius program led by Schnéevoigt with the NBC Symphony? The concert was part of Finland’s contribution to the 1939 World’s Fair, the crowning moment of an entire “Sibelius Week,” with Schnéevoigt appearing in New York City as a musical ambassador. Miles Kastendieck, reviewing the concert the following day in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, proclaimed it a “virtuoso performance of striking brilliance” in which Sibelius’ genius was “revealed in all its greatness.” Schnéevoigt’s Carnegie Hall audience seemed to agree, lavishing warm applause upon the performance. Whatever his faults may have been, on this evening at least Schnéevoigt was anything but “bland.”

His readings here are direct, unaffected, controlled, and powerfully inflected. Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 opens up with an almost Stravinskian clarity and dryness, starkly prefiguring the comparatively more severe sound world of this score’s successor; although the big, muscular moments in this music (especially the recapitulation of the mighty theme in the finale) emerge all the more impressively for it. No less fine is Schnéevoigt’s interpretation of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7, which surges forward as if in a single breath. Its restraint makes for telling contrast with Serge Koussevitzky’s BBC recording from around the same period (another Sibelian classic). Only the omission of the symphony’s opening minutes—the unfortunate result of NBC needing to accord space to its announcer—mars what would otherwise be an essential recording. Preceding the symphonies are two movements from what eventually became designated as part of the Lemminkäinen Suite. The movements—“Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island” and “Lemminkäinen in Tuonela”—had only been recently published after having been withdrawn by the composer shortly after their completion. Schnéevoigt’s was their first American performance and while his reading has plenty of brawn, it is tempered by a sense of dignity. Opening the concert was a carefully proportioned and unsentimental interpretation of Finlandia.

Andrew Rose’s transfer sounds splendid over speakers. The balance of the mid-range and the definition of the treble are especially good.

Was Schnéevoigt unjustly maligned by posterity? This important release makes abundantly clear that at the very least his art deserves a second look from committed Sibelians.

CD Review: Yunus Kaya's gorgeous Brahms recital

Pianist Yunus Kaya is a name I had not encountered before this recent album of Brahms’ late piano music on Ars Produktion. A quick search for the name on Qobuz turned up a single track of Eurotrash EDM—perhaps another Yunus Kaya? 

At any rate, in his brief remarks included in his own recording of Brahms’ late piano works, this Yunus Kaya writes: “It is important to me that my interpretation seems spontaneous, almost improvised.” How exactly one goes about to achieve this or even to define what “spontaneous” and “improvised” sound like are not explained. Likewise, the artist’s biography in the same liner notes are filled with airy marketing mumbo-jumbo about his interpretations evolving “between inner silence and intimate communication with the audience.” Huh? 

Kaya’s recording, at least, is an excellent contribution to the distinguished discography of these winsomely autumnal works. He seems to have a natural feeling for their smoky, interior world; with an easy, but never facile command of their sometimes tricky polyphony and unostentatious melancholy. His playing sounds deeply considered, to use my own critical mumbo-jumbo, with carefully balanced voicing and unhurried pacing which allows the rich harmonies of this music to bloom. The impression is one of beauty borne out of nobility; even in the occasional tempestuous passages in these late works, nothing ever sounds ragged or coarse. 

Ars’ production matches the beauty of these interpretations with lush sound to match. The stage sounds deep, with enough air around the piano, but not excessively resonant. Kaya’s instrument—a Steinway D—sounds lovely.

In short, a very welcome recital by a name which, hopefully, will become better known to music lovers in the coming years.

Concert Review: Americana "Common" and "Uncommon" from Santa Barbara

In good traffic you can reach Santa Barbara in less than two hours. Its Mediterranean atmosphere, excellent wineries in its environs, and mild water beaches are reasons plenty to cruise up the 101, but classical music may not be what first comes to your mind. It should, though, because it is a city which has long cultivated a lively classical music scene, with many distinguished institutions and ensembles calling the area affectionately known as the “American Riviera” its home, not least of them being the Santa Barbara Symphony. I have not heard them in a long time, not since taking the former Amtrak San Diegan in January 2000 to hear a four-day festival devoted to the still neglected Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, which was conducted by the orchestra’s former music director Gisèle Ben-Dor. At the time the Santa Barbara Symphony was a cracking, gutsy ensemble with a touch of warmth around the edges of its attacks. Their most recent concert, streamed live this past weekend, demonstrated that current music director Nir Kabaretti has not only preserved these qualities, but also enriched the mellow blend of its corporate sonority. 

Given the contemporary diminishing of this country’s collectively assembled mythos, resulting in our once marmoreal heroes being looked upon as worth little more than the avian excreta accumulated upon their now oft-tumbled monuments, last weekend’s Americana program was a little surprising, even quaint. As it happens, the grand figures of American classical music have not been spared the present’s restless inquisition of the past. 

Aaron Copland struggled his whole life long to remain on the right side of ever-fluctuating history. A dedicated supporter of communism and the workers’ movement in the 1930s – 1940s, he quickly dropped out of leftist organizations after being called upon to testify by HUAC in 1953; openly gay, he nevertheless remained discrete about his personal life in public statements, even well after the Stonewall riots. Facing each other across the epochal divide of 1945 were Fanfare for the Common Man and the Old American Songs which opened the Santa Barbara Symphony’s concert: The former a full-throated assertion of his earlier commitment to “socialist realism,” the latter a seemingly apolitical retreat into nationalist nostalgia meant to quell postwar paranoia. Fanfare is one of those fortunate musical works which are virtually invincible to bad performances. Santa Monica’s was very fine, with neatly balanced brass and percussion imparting nobility as well as power. 

Trickier are the Old American Songs which in the wrong hands can sound cute and saccharine. Baritone Cedric Berry, however, possesses amply the savvy and vocal charisma required to convince in this score. In the lead-up to the concert, a Chicago Tribune review praising his voice “of considerable power and agility” was much trumpeted by the Santa Barbara Symphony’s marketing team. But his art is considerably deeper than what that blurb implied. Berry’s rendering of Copland’s Old American Songs—artless and direct, beguiling the ear into believing this music is an authentic expression of the soil rather than the urbane facsimile it really is—was a masterclass in miniature. Listen closer and one hears more: The natural plasticity of his voice, its evenness, the evocativeness of his word-painting, and the sureness of his interpretive instincts. 

He followed the Copland with “Polarity” by George N. Gianopoulos, extracted from his song cycle America, Op. 43. “He took a Harlem Renaissance poet and set it to music,” Berry remarked about the song prior to its performance. “The music captured some of the swag from that era. He does it in just such a smooth, cool way.” The performance was as smooth and cool as the song itself. In his setting Gianopoulos drew out the music inherent in McKay’s verse, rather than impose music upon it. With its long melodic lines and shimmering orchestration the song was a haunting “Gotham Nocturne”; the glint of a silvery trumpet reflecting off the moonlight evoking the glamor, as well as the decadence and disillusionment that rapidly subsumed Roaring ‘20s America. 

The hope which also surged during that period, then lost amidst the Great Depression and subsequent mass annihilations hitherto unprecedented in human history, until resurging briefly before the onset of the Cold War was apparent in the Lyric for Strings by George Walker. “Hope” may seem an odd quality to ascribe to this music: It was written in memory of the composer’s grandmother. Yet the mood throughout is restrained, speaking of dignified grief rather than emotive lashing out. Perhaps it was a tribute to as much as reflection of a woman who had endured slavery in the flesh but managed to live long enough to see the emergence of a better world in which her grandson could eventually triumph. 

The relaxed lyricism of Samuel Barber’s Summer Music and Robin Frost’s Serenade eventually gave way to Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question, which (unintentionally or not) was answered in ironic fashion by the Fanfare for an Uncommon Woman, No. 1 by Joan Tower. Its tone and title also turned Copland’s utopian collective vision on its head; the “Me” vanquishing the “We.”

Maybe the better answer was Ives’ unanswered one. As the Santa Barbara strings coolly phrased the impassive yet obsessive chant of the “Druids who know, see, and hear nothing,” the call and response between the solo trumpet (played straight and without affect by Dustin McKinney) and wind quartet interrupted combatively until finally exhausting themselves in futile effort. Yesterday’s progress become the failures to be mended of the present, which in turn sow the seeds of unforeseen failures of a future yet to come. In Ives as in history, multipolar despite (and in spite of) us, eternity which knows, sees, and hears nothing always has the last say. 

Latin American music facing off against clickbait-creators and lazy critics

The recent debut recordings of the masterly symphonic cycle by Ecuadorean composer Luis Humberto Salgado reminded me—yet again—of the persistent neglect (and condescension) classical music and musicians outside of Europe and especially Anglo-America are regularly subjected to. Why this occurred historically is a complex matter, but that it should continue today is inexplicable, much less excusable. Especially when various talking heads have taken to fashionably lambasting classical music for reasons that curiously coincide with larger issues that media outlets would never dream of exploiting cynically for page-clicks and ad revenue. But however one may feel about such criticisms, what makes no sense is why virtually none of these critics have done anything meaningful to rectify what they believe are classical music’s obstructions to being more diverse and inclusive. For example, would it not make sense to simply start programming and regularly champion music from outside Anglo-America and Europe? Not in some special interest series treated as something apart from mainstream repertoire, but sitting side-by-side with Beethoven and Brahms where such music belongs? Will the New York Philharmonic make good on the “classism” it purported to decry in a recent podcast it co-produced and give a symphonist like Salgado a central place on its programs? 

With typical irony, too, the chattering clickbait-creators reveal their ignorance by overlooking how important the likes of Beethoven were to non-white composers. “From a very young age I loved Bach and Beethoven,” wrote Silvestre Revueltas. “I enjoyed wandering about with large strides through the romantic boulevards of Chapultepec, hair tousled, and arms folded behind my back. Those lithographs and etchings which showed poor Beethoven looking like a loner always had a great influence upon me. I could do no less.” Moroi Saburō, perhaps one of the greatest of Japan’s composers, not only bears the strong imprint of Beethoven in his own symphonies, but also wrote several books of biography and commentary on Beethoven which remain highly regarded in his homeland to this day. Luis Humberto Salgado was in some ways Beethoven-obsessed, yet found his own creative and highly original musical voice, his idol becoming an inspiration rather than a burden. If Beethoven is such a symbol of racial oppression or whatever, how does one explain his formidable influence on composers from such diverse racial and national backgrounds? 

Sometimes what well-meaning bien pensants in classical music tend to say about composers from Latin America is even more revealing. It has become a cliché, for example, to liken the music of the region, whatever the actual individual style of the composer in question, to the “magical realism” of Gabriel García Márquez. According to Wikipedia, “magical realism” is “a style of fiction and literary genre that paints a realistic view of the modern world while also adding magical elements, [and] often deals with the blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality.” The term has become a reliable catch-all for our redoubtable Mark Swed for whenever he is confronted with music south of Calexico:

• “Southwest Chamber Music has just issued an all-[Gabriela] Ortíz recording, "Aroma Foliado," in which you can hear the past sneak up on the present through a kind of musical magical realism.”

• “[Alberto] Ginastera's Piano Concerto No. 1, written in 1961, is a work of brutalist, magical realism.” [Swed continues by describing the music’s “unusual evocations of eerie rain-forest weirdness,” which is funny as Ginastera was born and raised in Buenos Aires, a city as much a rain forest as Manhattan, lived in the United States for long stretches of time, and spent his final years in the curiously un-tropical climate of Switzerland. Not exactly the sort of places where Swed may have expected our presumably spear-chucking composer to have lived.]

• “It is a little easier, although still somewhat problematic, to come to terms with [Daniel] Catán's old and new in the L.A. Opera revival. Part of what made it easier was the outstanding conducting of Grant Gershon, who unraveled new layers of wonder in Catán's orchestration. The pit, more than stage, is where most of the magical realism is realized.”

• “The text for “Cantata Criolla” is an important Venezuelan poem by Alberto Arvelo Torrealba, the director’s grandfather, that celebrates the dusty, perilous, mysterious llanos (plains) of Venezuela and presages magical realism with a singing contest between a brazen coplero (a troubadour of the llanos) and the devil.” [In that case, why are Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale or Gounod’s Faust also not forecasts of “magical realism?”]

The less a critic or musicologist knows or cares about Latin American music, the more you can expect them to describe it as “magical realism.” Not exactly an enlightened attitude.

CD Review: Luis Humberto Salgado—From Ecuador to the World

Eric Salzman, in his otherwise excellent Twentieth Century Music: An Introduction, devoted barely two pages to Latin American composers. What little space he afforded them seemed mostly begrudging. When the author was not criticizing them for being inadequate or fully realized, he subtly chided them for being derivative. Although over half a century has passed since Salzman’s book, Latin American classical music still suffers from an image problem north of the Rio Grande and across the Atlantic. The achievements of its composers—and they are considerable in both quantity and quality—are usually sneered at or, at best, doted upon patronizingly for a brief, fashionable moment. That is if they are ever played at all. 

Luis Humberto Salgado (1903 – 1977) was the dean of composers in Ecuador during the mid-20th century. Across his 75 years, Salgado composed a large body of work in diverse genres: chamber music, operas, ballets, concerti, piano works, vocal works, and the nine symphonies presented here for the first time on records on this 3-CD Brilliant Classics set. Despite never having personally traveled beyond the borders of his homeland, Salgado was a composer whose work was global in scope. As the Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca under Michael Meissner make emphatically clear on this release, Salgado’s work is a vital contribution to 20th century art.

Like Brahms and Vaughan Williams, Salgado was a late-bloomer as a symphonist. His First Symphony was not completed until his 46th year. He initially was an adherent of the "Streamline Moderne" style of post-neoclassical musical nationalism which was popularized in the New World by Copland during the 1930s – 1940s. His early symphonies are packed with native rhythmic motifs and recollections of folk music which are not only very attractive, but are also fused together into compelling musical statements. By the time of his middle symphonies, Salgado wanders off into more interesting, gnarlier paths. In these works he reminds me a little of Vagn Holmboe, Irving Fine, or Roger Sessions, but make no mistake—Salgado is very much his own man. 

Part of what has inhibited the composer’s international recognition, Meissner writes in his excellent liner notes, is that none of Salgado’s sizable compositional output totaling over 200 works have ever been commercially recorded until now. Aggravating this dilemma is the apparent inattentiveness with which the composer’s manuscripts have been preserved. Sometimes a movement is missing, other times a particular work or movement exists only in a sketch score. Occasionally there are scores which are lost altogether.

Salgado’s Symphony No. 1, nicknamed the “Andean,” is one such example: Its finale is extant only in a revised and simplified version which was recycled for a much later unnumbered Symphony of Vernacular Rhythms (not included in this set). For all that, it is a stirring and colorful work. As the nickname suggests, motifs and dances from regional indigenous folk music are threaded with their urban counterparts, along with snatches of twelve-tone rows which forecast similar methods Shostakovich employed in his late works. The result is earthy and sophisticated; colorful, vibrant, but never stooping to picture postcard musical nationalism. As Salgado himself remarked: “Obviously, it would be foolish to assume that simply orchestrating elements of folk music in the order expressed would be sufficient to obtain a symphony. The result of such would not even be a suite, but just a mere collection of vernacular airs.”

The Symphony No. 2 represents a considerable leap in Salgado’s prowess with symphonic form. Dubbed the “Sintética” for its synthesizing of the traditional four-part symphonic form into a single, concise, and unbroken movement, it is a tighter and somewhat more austere work than its predecessor. Its chiseled Beethovenian cast is punctuated by a pair of solo cadenzas, first for solo violin, then later for celesta, before concluding with a stylized alza, Ecuador’s national folk dance.

Somewhat of a curveball is his Symphony No. 3, which he dubbed “A-D-H-G-E: sobre una tema pentafónica en estilo Rococó” (A-D-B-G-E: On a Pentatonic Theme in Rococo Style). The four-movement work is Salgado’s whimsical spoof on the Classical style, although its good-natured cheer is closer to Prokofiev’s “Classical Symphony” by way of Raymond Scott’s “In an Eighteenth Century Drawing Room” than the acidulous irony of Stravinskian neoclassicism. Salgado uses the colors of his orchestra with child-like glee, tossing in harpsichord and harp against each other for good measure. Remarkably, this charming and original work was not premiered until 2017, over 60 years after it was composed. 

Nationalism returns to the forefront in his aptly nicknamed “Ecuadorian” Symphony No. 4. Initially it seems as if the relative terseness of the “Sintética” has given way to a generosity of instrumental color and texture which are closer to his “Andean.” These quickly subside, however. There are throughout telling moments of relatively spare orchestration in two voices. Rumblings of cellos and basses set starkly against plaintive woodwind lines; later violins twitching haunting ostinati, which draws the response of bare flute and celesta chords, before suddenly returning to the earthiness of the movement’s opening. There is nothing here like the tub-thumping confidence which one typically associates with “nationalist” music.

No less paradoxical is the Symphony No. 5, starting with its nickname. In its ambiguity of mood, sparseness of texture, and its mobile tonal gravity, it is hardly the reactionary score that the name “Neoromantic” would betoken. “[The symphony is a] cold shower for those who expected a Romantic gesture in the old sentimentalist style,” Meissner astutely observes. If not “sentimentalist,” the symphony is certainly highly expressive, although Salgado here rigorously fuses feeling into architectural logic. Its Sibelian economy of gesture represents another significant development, although how it was originally intended to sound like will probably never be known: The orchestral score has since been lost. Meissner has instead orchestrated the composer’s reduction of the symphony for piano two-hands. Very skillfully, it needs to be added, as one would be hard pressed to guess that the instrumental colors had been devised by anybody else but the composer himself, so idiomatic do they sound. 

Austere unto bleak is the Symphony No. 6 scored for strings and timpani. It opens with a foreboding hymn-like theme, which is followed by a dry, neatly-cut theme; part Classical, part folkloric which is soon lost in a thicket of string polyphony before being reprised. One senses that the play here is darkened by the composer’s own sense of mortality. Or perhaps not. There is something ultimately tight-lipped, outwardly impassive about Salgado’s music which defies the easy stereotype of Latin Americans as an emotionally exuberant and ostentatious people. 

Salgado’s Symphony No. 7 from 1970 (dedicated to the bicentennial of Beethoven’s birth) takes the atmosphere of its predecessor and pushes it to nearly saturnine extremes which would not be out of place in Pettersson. The residue of Ecuadorian folklore remains, but these elements are seamlessly blended into the musical material, never calling attention to themselves for their own sake. Salgado abstracts them, employing them as simply another sound element which has no especial value in and of itself. 

One wonders what Salgado’s peers and listeners must have thought when they first heard his Symphony No. 8. Composed to mark the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Pichincha, the event which secured Ecuador’s independence from Spain, there is little in the symphony which is immediately “celebratory.” Instead there is throughout a sense of anxiety and restlessness, further underlined by Salgado’s free use of dissonance which verges on atonality. Only in the march-like finale does he allow the music to brighten up, but even then there is an inescapable sense of irony which darkens the proceedings; its closing stretto recalling Hanns Eisler at his most caustic.

Salgado’s compact, single-movement Symphony No. 9 “Sintética 2” is his last. A masterly work wherein the composer permits himself a slight grimace, it synthesizes much of the elements of his late style into a statement of compelling power. Like many of Salgado’s works, it was not premiered until well after his death.

The playing by the Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca is alight with passion and profound commitment to the cause of evangelizing this inexcusably neglected composer, but one must admit their limitations. There are moments of wayward intonation and less than perfect ensemble which may unsettle listeners accustomed to the illusion of perfection which recordings so often conjure. Brilliant’s close-up miking and resultant powder dry acoustics only further magnifies these flaws. There are also Meissner’s occasional “retouchen” of Salgado’s scores to grapple with. In his notes for the Symphony No. 3, for example, the conductor states that certain string passages had to be rescored as the composer’s demands “exceed what is technically possible or reasonable [emphasis mine].” Whether this is true or not is impossible to say as there are no published scores of Salgado’s symphonies (at least to my knowledge) readily available to consult. But it is hard to believe that the skillful orchestrator heard in these works could have been so clumsy as to make unrealistic demands of his performers. All these notwithstanding, the enthusiasm of the Cuenca players is so great, the repertoire so rare as to make these drawbacks insignificant. 

There is no good reason that these works should not be part of the international orchestral repertoire. That they are presently excluded is no fault of the music; only the lack of curiosity of performers is to blame, not to mention a classical industry bent on milking the hits. Salgado’s symphonies arrive at a timely moment too. Classical music bashing has become all too trendy the past year. (Cynically, it needs to be said. I doubt that very many of these academics, musicians, and other talking heads would ever be committed to doing anything meaningful to change a genre which also happens to provide them a healthy source of income and prestige.) The problem—at least one of them—is the fact that white and non-white "folx" alike think classical music is all "dead white males" because that is all they ever bother to know. In fact, especially from the 20th century on, classical music is far more ethnically and racially diverse than its detractors are willing to give it credit for. Salgado for his part needed no infantilizing. He unapologetically idolized Beethoven, modeled his music upon his example, and sought to continue his ideals in a language for his own time. Can we expect any of the big American or European orchestras to take up Salgado’s symphonies for the sake of inclusion and shattering "white supremacy" in classical music? I wish they would, but I am not holding my breath. That is not where the money is, after all.

In the meantime, we have this treasurable release. The Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca, Micheal Meissner, and Brilliant Classics have here delivered what is one of the most memorable and important classical releases of 2021. Let us hope that more Salgado is coming our way, sooner rather than later.

CD Review: Lise Davidsen overcomes hype in her second Decca album

Lise Davidsen’s debut album—with Strauss’ Vier letzte lieder as centerpiece—was met with ecstatic critical praise last year. It all went over my head, however. She sounded mannered to me, hooty, with an unpleasant hollowness to her tone. For somebody already being compared to the likes of Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson, her voice was less than expected. So I was less than thrilled to hear this disc when it arrived. Who wants to hear another earful of an artist who may not be quite ready for the world stage? But how wrong I was this time around!

The voice that poured out from my speakers was opulent, warm, secure, with a glint of sunniness to her middle and top registers. How nimbly and naturally she can wield her instrument was immediately apparent in her reading Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, the heart of this disc. With a flexibility that is nothing less than astonishing, she deftly turned from strength to vulnerability and back, sounding as if she were born to inhabit this quietly anxious chromatic music (to say nothing of the female lead in the opera this score was a test-run for). “Im Treibhaus” is rent with unfulfilled passion verging on heartbreak, which leads into a “Träume” that is as dreamily ecstatic as I have ever heard; a release of breath, desire which Davidsen conjures a miniature “Liebestod” out of, vanishing into the air of a spring night. The expanse of feeling she conveys between “Daß sie wachsen” to “Und dann sinken in die Gruft” defies efforts to pin down in mere words.

Davidsen sounds no less at home in the excerpts of Cherubini, Verdi, and Mascagni which fill out this recital. Her evenness of tone, the suavity which her voice modulates registers, and her impeccably controlled pianissimi in “Pace, pace” from La forza del destino, for example, is the kind of feat which few sopranos active today could match. None could surpass Davidsen. Her “Ave Maria” from Otello is another superb display of vocal virtuosity and minutely calibrated emotional power.

My impressions of Davidsen were so sharply divergent from what I heard in her previous Decca disc, that I fished it out to relisten and compare. Maybe I was wrong back then too. But, no, the same problems I had with that recording remained. Perhaps she was feeling more tense, less trusting of her formidable instincts and talents. What is certain is that Esa-Pekka Salonen, a superb musician, was simply the wrong choice to accompany Davidsen on her debut. His emotional aloofness and clipped phrasing are deadly in Wagner and Strauss. For the most part Mark Elder is a much better partner, although there are moments when one would have preferred that he had given Davidsen just a little more give with respect to tempi.

Make no mistake—these are very minor complaints which, in the face of Davidsen’s achievements, are insignificant. My hope is that she (and her handlers) carefully stewards her voice and builds upon the foundation which is her birthright. Is she really the next [enter your choice of Wagnerian prima donna of the past here]? I cannot say. What I do know is that she is a very remarkable Lise Davidsen right now; capable of earning the respect she merits without relying on cheap marketing hyperbole. Long may this artist continue to thrive.

The Most Beautiful Brahms Cycle?

Shortly before the global pandemic brought concert life to a halt, I experienced the unexpected pleasure of hearing Zubin Mehta conduct live. “Unexpected” because in my mind Mehta’s name had become synonymous with the well marketed schlock and awe that classical record labels in the 1990s desperately hawked. Tarnishing the well-deserved lustre his name had garnered in his earlier career were The Three Tenors circus, the awful Turandot in Beijing’s Forbidden City, and middling recordings with the Israel Philharmonic. But the octogenarian whom I watched step onto the rostrum of Disney Hall was no flim-flam man, but a genuine artist who drew from the Los Angeles Philharmonic a vitality which seems to regularly elude colleagues decades younger than he. 

Impressed, I spent some time sifting through his discography in order to find further confirmation of how wrong I had been about him. And wrong I was, but sometimes my former self was also right. In the event, what I discovered were two Mehtas: scrupulous sound artist on one hand, cunning hustler chasing the bag on the other, both inhabiting the same person. While these divergent sides of his musical personality were not quite apparent in his younger days, by the time he transplanted himself from the West to the East Coast, he was already a Two-Face on the make.

Excepting the wizardry of Leopold Stokowski, who as if by osmosis could transform any ensemble into the Philadelphia Orchestra, it wasn’t until Pierre Boulez took the reins of “Murder, Inc.” in 1971 that an ensemble of ornery individuals otherwise known as the New York Philharmonic could be made to play beautifully together. Mehta, his successor, took this achievement a step further and cultivated a richly blended, solidly centered, oaken tone which the orchestra has, gratefully, preserved ever since. 

Among the dwindling, but avid fanboys who care about this sort of thing, Mehta’s tenure is often regarded — especially after the energy of the Bernstein and Boulez years — as one of the duller periods in the New York Philharmonic’s history. (His programming, studded with new and contemporary works, many whose complexity are no longer welcome at David Geffen Hall, would seem to indicate otherwise.) Some blame Mehta for losing the orchestra’s decades-long contract with Columbia Records, but the fact is that irreversible economic and audience demographic changes had already led to similar situations with orchestras in Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. (There also was no “loss” of anything as the orchestra would soon rebound to Teldec.) So what of Mehta’s New York discography? Much of it is actually quite good, about as consistent as his work in Los Angeles; with albums of Wagner, Strauss, and a voluptuous rendering of Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder among the highlights. But, perhaps, their finest collaboration on records is the Brahms cycle which they recorded across the late 1970s and early 1980s for Columbia (reissued in 2019 on compact disc by Sony Classical). 

Mehta’s heady interpretations luxuriate unabashedly in the collective sonority of the New York Philharmonic, which by then had banished any memories of the “cast iron string tone” that Virgil Thomson had once infamously decried. When listening to these hefty (but never heavy), bronzen recordings, beguilingly tilted towards the mid-range and bass, one would never guess that the polished, Old World-ish orchestra under the mikes had once been a pretty scrappy band. 

Try the gorgeously colored and weighted chords which open the Third Symphony, launching the first theme like a rocket across the sky. It then segues smoothly into the second subject, whose phrasing Mehta imparts just a touch of (Johann) Strauss to. Listen to the waves of autumnal gold and brown that Mehta and his New Yorkers ride aloft in their traversal of the opening movement of Brahms’ Second. Theirs is a marvel of subtly shaded colors, seamless transitions, and carefully sculpted phrasing. Everything sounds so unforced, yet evinces the care which was lavished by everyone involved. Then there are the deep hues they impart to the shifting, almost magical harmonic modulations preceding the redevelopment in the opening of the Fourth Symphony; like a twinkling nocturnal cityscape peering through a veil of fog. Perhaps most impressive of all is their traversal of the First, a work which in the wrong hands can sound blustery and tub-thumping. This interpretation, on the other hand, is anything but; sounding elegant and heroic, bold with a touch of introspection. The finale’s closing theme is here a full-throated song of joy, progressing inexorably to a brilliant coda which sweeps the listener along, without ever feeling as if one were being pressed along by the performers. 

Credit also goes to Columbia for a deep and wide production that hones in on the individual felicities in Brahms’ orchestration, without ever sacrificing ensemble sound. Compared to their, frankly, ugly productions with the same orchestra during the Mitropoulos and Bernstein eras, it seemed that Columbia Records, too, had come a long way.

Around the same time in the next time zone to the west, Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra recorded a Brahms cycle which has its own admirers for their corporate beauteousness of tone. For me, at least, their sleekness treads too close to being slick; amounting to a heap of lovely components signifying nothing greater than themselves, with Maazel’s auto-pilot direction disappointingly forecasting the much later work of his successor in “The Forest City,” Franz Welser-Möst. With Mehta there is an unforced sense of purpose, architectural line, and dramatic cogency which are missing from their rivals. To my ears, this set has few rivals and no superiors; remarkable those this may sound, there probably hasn’t been a more beautifully rendered cycle of these works since.

Brahms once wrote to a friend that in his music he strived to be beautiful when possible, but that perfection was a must always. Mehta and the New York Philharmonic eloquently demonstrate that in his four symphonies the great bearded master accomplished both these goals handily. 

Apology and Explanation

Not content to grapple with a global pandemic of historic proportions, my body decided to increase the difficulty setting for yours truly. A dormant chronic condition of which I had been ignorant began to assert itself last year, then erupted into full force this year; its symptoms swelling to such a degree that it made it impossible to work, or even think, and left me despairing whether my days were dwindling down to a precious few. September, November…

To the great relief of my loved ones and myself, the condition, while bothersome and permanent, is also non-life threatening. Better still, a drastic dietary change can make my flare-ups more manageable, although my specialist says that it may take about a year for their intensity to begin receding. It has been only in recent weeks where I have been able to begin feeling and functioning like my old self.

Regrettably, I had no choice but to abruptly drop out of a few projects, including tending to my humble website. Being able to type anything at all and managing these few words of explanation is a small achievement for which I am deeply grateful.

I hope in the next few months to begin returning to work and, hopefully, sharing more about the art which has sustained my energies through this difficult time.

Allan Evans (1956 - 2020)

I never met Allan Evans and will always regret not having been able to. We were supposed to have met last October, but insurmountable obstacles on my end prevented this from happening. “I’d be glad to have you sit in on one of my classes [at Mannes] whenever you’re able to,” he said to me over the phone shortly before concluding an interview with him about a musical mentor from his youth. That was just over six weeks ago.

At the age of 12 I was bit by the classical music bug and life has never been the same since. Through a series of chance happenstances, I quickly ended up diving into the proverbial deep end: Specifically mid-20th century avant-garde music and historical recordings. Both of these youthful loves were combined in my discovery of Ignaz Friedman, by way of the Pearl Records set which Allan Evans produced and wrote his splendid liner notes for. Hitherto my only encounter with Chopin’s Mazurkas had been through Arthur Rubinstein’s late RCA recordings, which presented this music as desiccated relics caked beneath a thick layer of formaldehyde. (It was not until about 20 years later that I finally began to love Rubinstein’s Chopin—except for his Mazurkas.) Hearing Friedman’s fingers, however, was something else altogether. Chopin’s bristling rhythms and harmonies (in the late Mazurkas sometimes closer to Schoenberg’s Vienna than the Paris salons of his own time) came alive. Suddenly one wasn’t hearing a neatly curated museum curio kept tidily under glass. Friedman understood the performance of Chopin not as the reenactment of esoteric rituals encoded in a ceremonial dead language, but as documents of joys and sorrows uttered in a living lingua franca. Here was Chopin the lover, the poet, the dreamer, the frustrated patriot whose music drew a starlit patina over subversive nationalist yearnings of a future Poland resurgent. Heady stuff for an 8th grader!

Somehow I managed to collect my thoughts and scribble out a fan letter to Allan Evans, which was sent in care of Pearl Records, who then happily forwarded it to my hero. What I wrote has since vanished into the recesses of my memory, but Allan Evans kindly replied to me, patiently answering a number of questions, and encouraging me further on my adventures in listening. 

A co-worker at a record store gig long ago once chided me for my musical preferences. “If you listen to classical music now, what are you going to listen to when you’re old?,” he snickered. Presumably he had never heard Rachmaninoff’s sweetly rueful observation: “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.” (And that in a time well before today’s present atomization of music and the listening audience.) Yet it was precisely because of classical music that I needed to hear and absorb other styles in order to better contextualize it. Over the next quarter of a century I used my ears, to borrow a phrase from Charles Ives, like a man. Coursing through my cochleas like an unstoppable torrent were tangos, milongas, Weimar-era cabaret songs, psych-folk rock from the 1960s, easy-listening instrumentals for bluehairs long gone, experimental noise from East Asia, mournful prewar Japanese gunka, electronic novelty amusements, languorous romantic ballads from a Latin America now the dust of eternity—alongside Shostakovich, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Boulez, Feldman, Webern, Brahms, Beethoven, Revueltas, and Carter. Although he was unaware, Allan Evans presided over it all, my distant spiritus rector.

A few years ago at another record store job, a co-worker inducted me into the mysteries of blues music. As my head swirled with the frisson of hearing this music for the first time, my thoughts turned to musicians from another, seemingly unrelated time and place. It struck me that there was a thread of kinship, however unlikely it appeared, between Rev. Gary Davis, Washington Phillips, and Blind Willie Johnson; and the likes of Ockeghem, Wolkenheim, and Josquin. One could call the latter representatives of “Western European roots music,” if you will. (With Bartók, arguably, being its final practitioner and synthesizer.) This epiphany, vividly illustrating the “only two kinds of music” quote apocryphally attributed to an ever-expanding who’s who of musical notables, was the kind of deep listening personal experience fostered by Allan Evans. 

He was a gentleman scholar whose restless intellectual curiosity touched countless people, some even afar and unknown to him; an individual who is a rarity in any age, but especially so in our strident and vulgar times. We shall not see the likes of him again.

I never met Allan Evans and will always regret not having been able to.

Wilhelm Furtwängler: German Refugee in Switzerland

In those years when Central Europe began to rebuild itself upon the rubble of World War II, a number of German conductors—emigrés and wartime remainers alike—had already fled to their homeland’s alpine neighbor to the south. Switzerland, memorably gibed by another postwar cultural figure as a five-hundred year peaceful democracy whose greatest contribution to world culture was the cuckoo clock, would be the setting where Otto Klemperer, Carl Schuricht, and Hans Rosbaud all breathed their last. 

Although his dying weeks were spent in Wiesbaden, Germany (and was ultimately laid to rest about an hour’s drive south in Heidelberg), it was in Clarens—today a suburban municipality of Montreux, the second largest city in the majority Francophone canton of Vaud—where Wilhelm Furtwängler made his final home. He had known the country well since his journeyman days as third conductor at the Opernhaus Zürich, a brief and rocky engagement which drew to an abrupt close after a disastrous performance of The Merry Widow. As a lifelong mountaineer and skier, the Swiss Alps were naturally his frequent vacation destinations. But the chain of events which made Switzerland his adopted homeland was borne out of more worrisome considerations. 

On January 23, 1945, Furtwängler led his last concert in Nazi Berlin. Allied bombing had pulverized the old Philharmonie and Staatsoper, forcing the Berlin Philharmonic to decamp for the Blüthner-Saal. At the concert’s intermission none other than Albert Speer, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, came to pay the conductor a visit in the green room. He pointedly asked Furtwängler what his plans in the near future would be. Only days before, Speer had learned of the Soviet capture of the strategic industrial region of Silesia, an outcome which terminated any wild hopes the Nazi leadership may have entertained for a conclusion to the war that resulted in anything other than Germany’s unconditional surrender. When Furtwängler replied that he was engaged to conduct in Switzerland in a matter of weeks, Speer subtly suggested that he extend his stay there. “After all,” he coolly remarked to the conductor, “you look so very tired.” The hint was taken. 

Five days later in Vienna, Furtwängler conducted his final concert in the crumbling German Reich: A program of Franck, Brahms, and Beethoven with the Vienna Philharmonic (an event gratefully preserved for posterity). Earlier that day, he had slipped on ice and suffered a concussion. Not only did this threaten to derail the concert, but it also jeopardized his ulterior motive for which the performance had served as pretext. Recuperating at the city’s Hotel Imperial, which only a few weeks later would be among the many structures damaged and destroyed in the Allied bombing of Vienna, he received an urgent call from a mysterious bureaucrat at the Foreign Office in Berlin demanding to know who signed off on Furtwängler’s exit visa. In the early hours of the next morning, the conductor was surreptitiously led out of the hotel, placed on a milk train, and (after a number of stops and changes) eventually arrived at the town of Dornbirn along the Austro-Swiss border. Days later, after a last burst of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, Furtwängler crossed over into Switzerland. 

While he and his family were grateful for the safe passage provided to them by the Swiss authorities, the country’s press and many of its citizens were less than thrilled about receiving a man they considered a Nazi cultural grandee. Leftist publications and political groups called for a ban on his performances, claiming that the purity of Swiss neutrality was at stake. In late February, a Furtwängler concert in Winterthur was disrupted by protesters with stink bombs, dispersing only when local police turned water hoses on them. Heeding the advice of friends who suggested that he step away from public life at least for a time, the conductor checked himself into a sanatorium in Clarens where he waited out the inevitable end to the war. 

By the time of this Lugano concert on May 15, 1954, that animosity had long dissipated. Thanks to friends and colleagues such as Ernest Ansermet and Edwin Fischer, Furtwängler firmly established himself in Swiss musical life, becoming especially associated with the Lucerne Festival. Few in the audience at the Teatro Apollo that day would have guessed that this would be among the conductor’s very last public performances, although his intimates were well aware of the hearing loss which was making him increasingly despondent. Whether his sorrow over that played a part in the valedictory tone of these performances (or in his death six months later) is impossible to ascertain. But there is a sense, such as one hears in this performance of the Beethoven Pastoral, of its “cheerful and thankful feelings” for life made bittersweet by one’s awareness of its transience. It would be a mistake to believe, however, that these performances are exhausted, weak. While his earlier studio recordings of Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel are more polished, neither matches this performance’s fusion of tragic power and grim irony. Equally rewarding and revealing is his accompaniment to Yvonne Lefébure’s magisterial interpretation of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20, the best known part of this concert, as well as the only recorded collaboration between these two extraordinary artists. 

One wonders whether Furtwängler was familiar with Miguel de Unamuno’s Of the Tragic Feeling of Life: “Only the weak resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death.” Regardless, something of that permeates this concert; a testament to the inextinguishable lifeforce of music, of the artists documented here, long since vanished into the eternity of history.

This essay will be included in the liner notes of a forthcoming reissue of Furtwängler’s May 1954 Lugano concert on the Japanese ATS label.

Furtwängler (left) with Ernest Ansermet shortly after fleeing to Switzerland, February 1945.

CD Review: Kabalevsky delights from Korstick and CPO

Like Stravinsky and Prokofiev before him, Dmitri Kabalevsky cast his gaze across the Baltic Sea towards France, although unlike them his inclinations were generally towards musical conservatism. Had his world been a kinder one, his lightness of touch and skill at crafting melodies could very well have made him a latter-day Russified Massenet or Chabrier. Reality was otherwise, of course. Instead he spent a significant portion of his career squandering his considerable talents on musical agitprop, although not without also composing a number of works which have managed to nudge their way onto permanent places in the concert hall and recording studio.

Pianist Michael Korstick, whom CPO has kept busy with various recording projects (including two previous Kabalevsky programs), presents here a compilation of all of the composer’s piano preludes, some of which are well known in piano pedagogy, but are otherwise on the periphery of the performing repertoire. The centerpiece here are the Twenty-four Preludes, Op. 38, which according to the informative liner notes by Charles K. Tomicik, was composed at the height of World War II in 1943. One would never guess: This joyful and guileless music betrays nothing of the harrowing times from which it emerged.

Each prelude uses a Russian folk melody as its basis (including an unexpected appearance from Stravinsky’s The Firebird in Prelude No. 13), which the composer develops into miniature tone sketches. Among the most delightful are the étude-like Prelude No. 12, the skittering Prelude No. 23, and tongue-in-cheek martial color of Prelude No. 24. Whether listened to individually or as a whole, Kabalevsky’s Twenty-four Preludes exude an easy-going charm rare in music of the 20th century.

Serving a more didactic purpose, but no less a pleasure to listen to are his later set of Six Preludes and Fugues, Op. 61 which cleverly makes sophisticated musical principles appealing for children to play. Take a listen to the wistful little chorale which makes up “Becoming a Young Pioneer,” or the closing fughetta of “A Feast of Labor.”

The end of the disc turns back the clock to the beginning of Kabalevsky’s career with his Opp. 1 and 5, consisting of three and four piano preludes each. The mood of these works are heavier, their idiom more searching than the preceding ones; both sets being strongly redolent of Myaskovsky and Scriabin, and leaving one wondering how the composer would have developed his talents had he not become an enthusiastic proponent of “socialist realism.”

What is remarkable about Korstick’s recordings for CPO are their consistently high quality, with none of the featureless workman-like qualities that are often the poison pill in these sweeping recorded surveys of neglected piano repertoire. His warm touch and sympathetic performances, with great care lavished upon phrasing and textural color (abetted winningly by CPO’s excellent engineering), are perhaps the finest these works have yet been treated to on records. 

Could CPO and Korstick be persuaded to look over the piano works of Mikhail Nosyrev, Vladimir Shcherbachev, Nikolai Rakov, or the still criminally neglected Gavriil Popov next? One can always dream.

Kabalevsky turns up the Soviet charm.

CD Review: Daugherty’s Tendentious “This Land Sings”

Michael Daugherty was perhaps among the most promising of the young American post-minimalists that came into prominence in the 1990s. His irreverent, yet subtly moving scores, bespeaking of the baby boomer generation’s see-sawing derision of and nostalgia for the postwar plastic-fantastic culture of their youth, were among the new music gems of the short-lived revival of the Argo label. His art is consumed by a boundless fascination with Americana, the mythos of America and what it all means, fact and tall-tale alike. 

Over the past decade Daugherty has become closely associated with Naxos’ American new music arm, the latest offering in that series being his This Land Sings: A WPA-meets-Pierrot Lunaire-style distillation of the life and music of folk singer Woody Guthrie. Although the score may echo another Naxos release from years ago called Mr. Tambourine Man, which fatuously reset the lyrics of Bob Dylan to newly composed music by John Corigliano, Daugherty’s score is something else entirely; being only his most recent in a long line of works that takes a figure from American popular culture, pins them down, and scrutinizes them, sometimes ruthlessly, as a lepidopterist would with a rare butterfly. In the finest of these works, such as Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover and Jackie O, Daugherty walks a careful line between satire and pathos, passing no judgment on his subject and leaving it to the listener to sort out the sometimes unsettling ambiguities. 

“The music I composed gives haunting expression, ironic wit and contemporary relevance to the political, social, and environmental themes from Woody Guthrie’s era,” the composer writes in his prefatory notes for This Land Sings; “haunting expression” and especially “ironic wit,” however, are qualities sorely lacking in this music. Instead the pokerfaced restraint of his younger self has succumbed to the ongoing pandemic of political hysteria; a scourge to which geriatrics under the toxic spell of 24-hour news channels and the never-ending torrent of cynical faux-outrage clickbait, whatever their political bent, seem especially prone to. 

A brief instrumental overture based on This Land is Your Land gives way to a series of vignettes—sometimes sung, sometimes rendered in sprechstimme—which purport to depict various aspects of Guthrie’s characters and biography. Whether the use of a skillful librettist would have helped the final result is anybody’s guess, but Daugherty’s decision to provide most of his own libretto was unfortunate. The dismaying puerility of “Hot Air” and “Silver Bullet” are like Facebook boomer screeds made manifest in sound, the kind of thing one silently shakes their head at and wishes a responsible loved one had counseled against sharing.

How Daugherty’s music is connected to Guthrie’s, if at all, is difficult for me to determine as the latter is a name I know only slightly by repute, and his music (save for one or two songs I learned in elementary school) virtually not at all. That said the composer of This Land Sings has wandered far off the path of his zestful earlier works; its ramshackle gaucheness would not be out of place in a production by Corky St. Clair. 

The performance here by Dogs of Desire, the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s new music ensemble, is as fine as one could imagine, though the contributions from the vocal soloists leave a bit to be desired. Baritone John Daugherty (no relation to the composer) is mostly adequate, despite an occasional tendency to bark. Annika Socolofsky’s hooty and thin soprano, on the other hand, quickly becomes wearying on the ear. 

As has occurred with a lot of good people over the past 20 years (and especially so since 2016), Daugherty’s apparent obsession with the trivialities of the perpetual (and partially manufactured) culture wars has caused the onset of what seems to be chronic brain rot. Let us hope for the sake of this talented composer that the diagnosis is not terminal. 

Big oof.