November 15, 2009: The bitterness of exile

During the First World War many artists sought exile in Switzerland.  This provided refuge from the madness of combat;  but, with the rest of Europe in turmoil, times in Switzerland were physically safe but economically hard.  For artists life in exile was a far cry from "business as usual."

Two of those artists were the composer Igor Stravinsky and the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz.  In the spirit of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney,  the two decided that they might be able to scrape up money by "putting on a show" that would be easy to take on tour, keeping the number of people involved to an absolute minimum.  Ramuz conceived The Soldier's Tale as a retelling of the Faustian legend reflecting the tenor of the times:  A soldier fortunate enough to avoid becoming cannon fodder is on the road for a short leave at home.  He is tempted by a capitalist Devil, succumbs, recognizes the value he has lost, briefly prevails over the Devil, but is eventually marched down to Hell.  With its capitalist overtones the script was an early form of agitprop, making it one of the venerable ancestors of the productions that our San Francisco Mime Troupe mounts here every summer (also by taking a small number of people on tour around the Bay Area).

Stravinsky complemented Ramuz' sardonic text with incidental music as scornful of stylistic traditions as Ramuz had been of socioeconomic conditions.  Only seven musicians were required, not counting the conductor:  a violinist (who serves almost as a concerto soloists), a clarinetist, a bassoonist, a trumpeter, a trombonist, a bass player (the only other stringed instrument), and a percussionist in charge of a modestly equipped battery.  The sound was raw, playing up the sharp distinctions among the instruments, rather than going for any kind of blend.  The structures were frequently repetitive, with little, if any, variation, often pushing the patience of the listener.  Traditional forms of dance, march, and chorale were warped almost beyond the point of recognition.  The finished product was first performed on September 28, 1918.

Today the music is best known through concert performance of a nine-movement suite that Stravinsky extracted.  However, last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the BluePrint Project collaborated with the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) to present a staged version of the English version of Ramuz' text by Michael Flanders and Kitty Black.  The venue was the Recital Hall, rather than the Concert Hall, which was far more conducive to the spare resources required for production and provided better opportunities for the imaginative use of space.  Staging was conceived by Giles Havergal of A.C.T. with choreography by the Conservatory's Michael Mohammed.  As in all BluePrint events, music direction was by Nicole Paiement.

The result was about as true to the spirit of the original project as one could hope to get.  Dramatically the agitprop spirit was honored without being overplayed.  One nice bit of irony is that the Devil's instrument of temptation is a red book that makes one rich and mighty, precisely the color that would get under the skin of any die-hard Maoists!  Musically, this is a score that demands the utmost precision and clarity.  Stravinsky was rarely big on letting performers apply too much of their own expressive interpretation.  Paiement brought her musicians up to the task of satisfying Stravinsky's demands for a real gem of a performance.  With the madness of war once again part of our daily life, there was much to be gained from this jaundiced view of circumstances from almost a hundred years ago.

October 31, 2009: The four-hand repertoire in the twentieth century

ZOFO (which, by virtue of a clever typographical twist, stands for 20FingerOrchestra) gave its first public concert last night in the Osher Salon of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  The program notes provided the following "mission statement" and introduction:

ZOFO is the San Francisco-based musical partnership of pianists Keisuke Nakagoshi and Eva-Maria Zimmermann.  As one of only a few ensembles worldwide focusing on piano duets, ZOFO is reviving hidden gems of the one-piano, four-hand repertoire along with a strong emphasis on performing 20th and 21st Century music.  By also playing arrangements of famous orchestral pieces, ZOFO explores the realm that many composers first experienced their symphonic works.

That last sentence was represented on the program by the four-hand version of The Rite of Spring, which Igor Stravinsky completed before the orchestral score.  I seem to recall that it was in this four-hand version that Stravinsky and Pierre Monteux, Music Director of the Ballets Russes, first introduced the work to General Director Sergei Diaghilev and the choreographer he had selected, Vaslav Nijinsky;  but I have not been able to find a confirming source for this.  This score is so rich in polyphonic voices distributed over such a wide orchestral palette that it is hard to imagine any piano reduction doing justice to it;  but, at the very least, the four-hand version gives a clearer statement of Stravinsky's own conception of what was foreground and what was background in all of that complexity.  In other words the piano version provides some level of simplifying abstraction, which the curious listener can use as a "stepping stone" in learning how to negotiate all of the orchestral levels of detail.  For this reason alone ZOFO has done the community of listeners a great service by providing a new path for appreciation of one of the most important musical compositions of the twentieth century.

The opening work on the program involved, on the other hand, a four-hand reworking of incidental music for a poetry recitation scored for two flutes, two harps, and celesta (far from the usual chamber music ensemble).  The texts were the twelve Chansons de Bilitis by Pierre Louys, most of which were first read and then followed by a musical reflection;  but there are a few instances of the interleaving of text and music.  Debussy selected six of the uninterrupted reflections and reworked them into the four-hand version that ZOFO performed.  Needless to say, most of the color of the original sound has been lost;  but how often can an ensemble be assembled for the original version?  To compensate for the lack of text, Debussy assigned titles that basically summarize the spirit of Louys' words;  so this is a work in which it helps to follow those titles as the individual pieces are performed.  From this point of view, ZOFO did well in capturing the spirit of both those titles and, through their keyboard technique, the original conception of the composition.

The remaining work on the program was conceived as four-hand piano music.  It was a sonata composed by Harold Shapero in 1941, which he first performed with Leonard Bernstein.  Like Bernstein, Shapero was educated at Harvard University.  Between his Harvard experience and subsequent work with Nadia Boulanger, he cultivated his own take on that "American sound" that flourished during the second quarter of the twentieth century.  This sonata is an excellent example of that sound, even if its nature is never particularly adventurous.  Like many of the works of its time, it deserves listening to the extent to which it sets the context from which American music departed so abruptly in the second half of the twentieth century;  so, as had been the case with the Stravinsky offering, ZOFO provided a great service to serious listeners by offering this music for consideration.

ZOFO will provide another opportunity to hear the Shapero sonata at the Red Poppy Art House this Thursday (November 5) at 7 PM.  They will also perform their own "reorganization" of the Opus 39 waltzes of Johannes Brahms and a four-hand arrangement of Astor Piazzolla's Suite Troileana.  Information about further concerts is available at their Web site.

October 21, 2009: A new approach to the virtual concert experience

re-rite is a new experiment by the British Philharmonia Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.  It tries to confront the problem that most concert-goers not only are passive but also lack any sense of how they can actively engage through listening.  re-rite tries to solve this problem by turning a recorded performance into an activity space.  Here is how it is described on the Philharmonia's Web site:

re-rite, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Digital Residency, will allow members of the public to conduct, play and step inside the Philharmonia Orchestra with Esa-Pekka Salonen through audio and video projections of musicians performing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

Opening to the public at the Bargehouse on London’s South Bank on Tuesday 3 November, the project will show every section of the Orchestra performing The Rite of Spring simultaneously ‘as live’ throughout a four-storey warehouse building. The public will able to sit amongst the horn players, perform in the percussion section and take up the baton and control sections of the Orchestra as they play.

The ambitious project, made possible through the support of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, is the brainchild of the Philharmonia’s Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who has developed the concept with the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Digital Department.

This "official story" has now been supplemented by a review on the Web site for the London Telegraph by Ivan Hewett.  Hewett's account provides a good sense of how the above "statement of theory" has actually translated into the "practices" of the audience:

Many people, I think, are bored by the sight of an orchestra because they can’t hear it. By hearing, I mean really hear it, in the sense of understanding how this instrument reinforces that one, how this sound over here is in dialogue with that one over there. People are blind to the orchestra, because they’re deaf to it.

Now the Philharmonia Orchestra has come up with a bold idea that actually addresses that issue. They’ve made a filmed performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which will be on constant show at the Bargehouse on London’s SouthBank from Nov 3. Sponsored by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, it was made using 29 cameras placed within and around the orchestra, including some placed on the players’ heads.

The various rooms of the Bargehouse lead to different sections of the orchestra – here a horn room, there a woodwind room. Each one has screens showing conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen along with the players, while the total sound is remixed to highlight the players’ particular contribution. In the percussion room, visitors can even join in. There’s also a “control room”, where all the elements can be seen and heard simultaneously.

It’s a real-time education in seeing and hearing a piece, done in the most thrillingly immediate way.

The above photograph, by the way, is the view from that "control room;"  and, at the very least, it should provide the audience with an appreciation of the problems of attention that confront every conductor.  This may have been what Salonen had in mind when he first conceived of the project.

I find it particularly appropriate that this project has been based on a composition by Igor Stravinsky.  Stravinsky understood the problem as Hewett stated it but expressed it in terms of a distinction between hearing and listening.  Here is the way he put it:

Others let the ears be present and they don't make an effort to understand. To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

It is unlikely that future audiences will be as engaged in that "effort to understand" as any performing musician (including the conductor) must be;  but, if this particular project leads to even an awareness of the path that leads to such understanding, then it may be remembered for defining a paradigm shift in the very nature of the concert experience, whether physical or virtual.

September 10, 2009: Three waltzes and a spectacle

The San Francisco Symphony Opening Night Gala at Davies Symphony Hall has always been primarily a social event, first out of the gate to mark the beginning of the concert season.  The visual feast for the society pages tends to take priority over what is actually happening up on the stage.  Nevertheless, Michael Tilson Thomas cannot fail to bring his dedicated approach to listening to every event he conducts;  and, on this particular occasion, he dared to complement the social Glitzkrieg with program choices that would both fascinate the ear and tweak the little grey cells at the other end of the auditory cortex.  That he achieved all this while holding to a relatively familiar repertoire makes his achievement all the more impressive.

Given the festive nature of the evening, the choice of three waltzes for the opening half of the program seemed a natural one;  but the devil was in the details, in more ways than one.  Thus, while Salzburg could begin its festival with a Josef Strauss assortment, coupled with Franz Schubert's earlier settings of German dances (albeit orchestrated by Anton Webern), Thomas' selections were as removed from Viennese Gemütlichkeit as one could get.  Indeed, the very decision to begin with Franz Liszt, who honored the spirit of his native Hungary's efforts to rid itself of Austrian control, was contrarian, if not diabolic;  but "The Dance in the Village Inn," the second of two orchestral episodes based on Nicolaus Lenau's 1836 Faust:  A Poem, better known as the first of the four "Mephisto" waltzes for piano, sealed the deal for the devil.  Inspired by Lenau having Mephisto play a violin for the drunken inn patrons, Liszt has Mephisto play the whole orchestra with that same sense of excess that Liszt brought to his own piano performances, providing Thomas to show off the full capacity of our orchestra from the very beginning of his program.

The second waltz came from Maurice Ravel, who, as a veteran of the First World War, was no more keen on Austria than Liszt's Hungarian compatriots were.  "La Valse" was composed in 1919;  and the spirit of the work was brilliantly captured in a single sentence by the late Michael Steinberg in the notes for the program book:

Waltzing Vienna was no longer to be seen in quite the same way, and so La Valse became a bitter and ferocious fantasy, a terrifying tone poem that helped define a new language of musical nightmare.

Ravel wrote the work on a commission from Serge Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes;  but, to reduce the devil-in-the-details theme to the bare vernacular, Diaghilev had no idea what the hell to do with it.  Bronislava Nijinska eventually choreographed the work for Ida Rubinstein in 1929;  but the choreographer who really "got it" was George Balanchine, who conceived it as the Dance of Death that was latent in the music.  I was fortunate enough to see the New York City Ballet perform this work during my student years.  It remains the scariest Balanchine work I ever saw, if not the scariest of all the ballets I have seen.

Ravel conceived the work as one of images emerging from obscurity.  As they become clearer, their nightmarish qualities become more and more evident.  By the final bars the entire orchestra is acting out a conflict between succumbing to and driving off what has become an obsessive presence of the waltz' three-beat pulse.  Taken has a whole, the work is one long crescendo at the climax of which all falls lifeless, just as Balanchine has his lead ballerina do.  This is a work that demands intense control;  and Thomas' control was so effective that it elicited gasps from his party-festive audience.

In preparing this text, I consulted Balanchine's own description of his ballet in Balanchine's New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets.  When the girl dies, her lover raises her body and turns around in place while holding it above his head.  Balanchine concludes:

About the circling center, the group races in a fateful, fantastic carousel.

To say that this sentence influenced Thomas' to select Richard Rodgers' "Carousel Waltz" as his third waltz would be way too much of a stretch.  This latter waltz served as the overture for one of the darkest of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, and there is a fair amount of French influence in Rodgers' music, particularly in his orchestrations.  In this work there are even hints of the polytonality of Darius Milhaud.  However, this is neither the stuff of Ravel's nightmares or of Liszt's devil-worship.  Indeed, it is the closest we got to echt Gemütlichkeit in the program that Thomas prepared, which may explain why it was so popular in Vienna when the Symphony played it there on their 2007 tour.

For the second half of the program, Lang Lang was the featured soloist in a performance of Sergei Prokofiev's third C major piano concerto, Opus 26.  In a historical context Ravel composed "La Valse" within the period of time it took Prokofiev to complete this work (begun in 1917 and completed in 1921).  However, if Ravel wished to draw his images from out of the shadows, all is crystal clarity from beginning to end in this concerto, which is probably the most popular of the five Prokofiev composed.  That clarity is evident in the solo piano work and its balance against a rich palette of orchestral colors.

Lang's popularity made him a perfect choice for a Gala concert.  Nevertheless, I had quite a few problems with his performance of Frédéric Chopin's first (Opus 11) piano concerto in E minor, which he played with the San Francisco Symphony this past December;  and I have used my blog to try to analyze my discontent in the context of the observations of other critics.  My biggest problem was that his physical performance tended to distract from the musical to a point where it almost seemed as if it had been choreographed and therefore came off as contrived.  From this point of view, his Prokofiev was far more satisfying;  and I can think of at least one good way to account for this.  The technical demands that Prokofiev makes on the pianist are so intense in both detail and physical challenge that any superfluous movement would be enough to bring the tightrope walker down from his heights.  The work can only succeed with maximum focus.  Lang brought that focus to his performance, and the result was all that one could wish from this concerto.

Thus, whatever the society columnists may write, this was an evening that demanded and rewarded serious listening;  and that speaks well for the promise of the season to come!

August 20, 2009: Listening to Stravinsky in his proper context

We have become so familiar with concert performances of the music that Igor Stravinsky composed for ballets created for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes that we tend to think of them as concert, rather than theatrical, compositions.  There is no doubt that there is much to listen to in these works, but there is something missing when the listening experience is divorced for the choreography for which the music was created.  Unfortunately, there are few opportunities in which we can experience this more complete account of the synthesis of music and dance;  but an excellent one is now available in cyberspace as one of the offerings of Classical TV.  One of the Premium Video offerings is entitled The Ballets Russes at the Mariinsky.  It presents three ballets for which Stravinsky composed the music, each for a different Ballets Russes choreographer:

1. The Firebird by Michel Fokine, regarded by many (including myself) as the Father of modern ballet.
2. The Rite of Spring by Vaslav Nijinsky, one of his few choreographic efforts and probably Stravinsky's most famous succès de scandale.
3. Les Noces by Nijinsky's sister, Bronislava Nijinska, one of the most interesting (for both its choreography and its music) works to enter the Diaghilev repertoire following the First World War.

This Mariinsky effort is probably as close as we are going to get to faithful reconstruction of the original choreography and original performance practices;  and, with Valery Gergiev in the orchestra pit, we also have the benefit of a conductor who understands the Russian roots of the music and delivers performances that serve both the dancers and the listeners in equal measure.

Each of these ballets is revolutionary in its own way.  On the surface The Firebird is a setting of a traditional Russian folk tale;  but, from a dramatic point of view, it is far from routine.  Althought the Firebird herself is critical to the plot, we see relatively little of her;  and, while the story is told in such a way that creates abundant opportunities for virtuosic dance, the concluding wedding scene is practically static.  However, when we see this ballet, rather than just listen to the music, we appreciate just how skillful Stravinsky was in complementing Fokine's approach to narrating this tale through dance.  This score is probably Stravinsky at his most motivic;  and those motives tend to keep "narration time" valuably coupled to both "narrative past" and "narrative future."  Furthermore, while the appearances may seem a bit too stylized, both the music that the performances by the dancers establish this as a ballet that, while now one hundred years old, is very much a work of the present.

What we know best about The Rite of Spring is the riot it sparked on opening night.  Stravinsky's Autobiography would have us believe that his music was the primary provocation, beginning with its first notes played by a bassoon in a very high register.  Stravinsky was not particularly kind to Nijinsky in this account, giving the impression that he never quite knew what he was doing and that the choreography would be better off forgotten.  However, in 1987 the Joffrey Ballet performed the result of Millicent Hodson's effort to reconstruct Nijinsky's choreography;  and, while she has taken a fair amount of criticism for her results, I personally enjoyed the Joffrey performance the first time I saw it on Public Television.  The decision of the Mariinsky to stage her reconstruction gives the work a certain imprimatur of authenticity.

I suspect that some of the criticism directed against Hodson had to do with the fact that the choreography did not, in any way, look like classical ballet.  As I see it, this takes the spotlight away from Stravinsky in accounting for why the audience rioted.  The work abounds in rhythmic stomping and jumping, giving all the impressions of a primitive society with none of the refinements that would later be called "art."  This vision seems perfectly consistent with the folk source material that Stravinsky concealed within his polyrhythms and raucous orchestration.  Most important, at least in the Mariinsky performance, is that the premise of the "rite" itself, a virgin selected to sacrifice herself by dancing herself to death, was surprisingly credible.  We should all be thankful that this particular resource is now so readily available to anyone curious about it through the good graces of the Internet.

One possible warrant for the claim that Nijinsky's choreography consisted heavily of that "rhythmic stomping and jumping" is that his sister's choreography of a more recent traditional wedding ceremony ("Les Noces") draws upon similar rhetoric.  Nijinska's composition is more disciplined than her brother's, particularly in the way she contrasts intense activity with equally intense stasis;  but both works rely fundamentally on the "raw basics" of movement itself.  This is one of Stravinsky's most complex works, setting four solo voices and a full chorus against four pianos and four percussionists;  but Nijinska's choreography distills all of that complexity to a ritual that is simpler than Nijinsky's and far more familiar.  The pairing of these two works is all the more interesting for the different strategies of control that Gergiev brings to managing their respective musical resources.  I would guess that anyone willing to take the time to watch the almost two hours of video available in this offering will not listen to Stravinsky in concert quite the same way again;  and, from the point of view of our all trying to be better listeners, I would take that to be a good thing!

April 23, 2009: Concerts on a tight budget in cyberspace

When I write about music on my blog, I tend to be emphatic about the fact that audio capture technology is still not adequate enough for any recording to be as effective a listening experience as a "live" performance;  and I recently reinforced this position here in writing about the San Francisco Symphony performance of Maurice Ravel's orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition suite.  Nevertheless, I cannot deny that concert tickets tend to be expensive;  and these are times when we need to worry about spending our money wisely.  Therefore, whatever my misgivings about the technology may be, I feel it is worth examining some of the options available to those of you reading this on a computer interested in having a "concert experience" in cyberspace.

Many of you have probably already discovered that there is quite a lot of material available through YouTube.  These are, for the most part, amateur recordings;  and they tend to capture performances on a small scale, such as recitals.  They thus tend to work best for recordings of encore material at the end of a concert.  However, if one of the objectives of concert listening is to broaden our individual attention spans, the brief clips of YouTube do not provide the best experience.  Indeed, while the YouTube Symphony Orchestra captured their entire Carnegie Hall performance, the videos were uploaded  in two large chunks, the first of which was almost an hour and the second almost an hour-and-a-half.  Trying to view these videos turned out to be a very frustrating experience, probably because the servers were not up to delivering an uninterrupted feed for such extended durations.  I have to confess that I gave up when I realized that I could not get past the third movement of Brahms' fourth symphony (the first work on the Carnegie Hall program) without those interruptions.  Fortunately, there are other sites where one can find better feeds;  and some of them are as free as YouTube!

One of the more interesting sites I have discovered is a Streaming Video Web page for the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.  This School has a reputation for providing some of the best education in music performance in a setting of an excellent overall university curriculum.  The current catalog of available performances is relatively limited, but it covers both ballet and opera as well as orchestral performance.  The video capture is not always the best, as when I found it hard to see very much when the camera was pointed in at the dimly-lit orchestra pit for the overture of Otto Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor;  and not all of the opera performances seem to have subtitles.  However, the sound is excellent;  and I have yet to run into the problem of interrupting pauses.  In the latter case this may be due to the fact that the servers are not experiencing very much demand, so I may be running a risk in spreading the word about this site!  (More likely, however, is that the managers of this Web site can take advantage of the expertise of the Indiana University Computer Science Department.)

For the best virtual experience of a symphony orchestra concert, however, I have yet to find anything better than the Digital Concert Hall created for the Berliner Philharmoniker.  This is the perfect combination of a first-rate ensemble, imaginatively stimulating programs, and the sort of camera work that assists the ear in the listening process.  The major down-side is that it is not free.  On the other hand the "admission" is charged to the computer, rather than the people sitting around the screen;  so this definitely qualifies as an option for a tight budget if the cost (which is about 10 Euros for a full concert) is shared.  Concerts can be viewed through either a "live" stream or from an archive of past performances.  Given the difference in time zones, most folks on the West Coast will probably prefer viewing from the archives.  (I decided to spring for a season pass, which cost a little less than 100 Euros and gives me full access to all live streams and everything in the archive.)

The Metropolitan Opera has now picked up on this model with their Met Player option, which apparently supports both conventional video and high-definition signals.  It also supports a much larger archive;  and I do not think it supports a live stream (which might take business away from the HD broadcasts to movie theaters).  Again, this is not free;  but the price is in the same league as the Berliner Philharmoniker.  A year's subscription costs $149.99;  but you can also subscribe for a month for $14.99.  A single opera rents for $3.99, unless you want HD, which is $4.99.  The one caveat I offer here is that I have not yet tested this option, because I only just learned about it (from SF Opera Examiner Cindy Warner).

My guess is that there will be more virtual concert-going sites appearing on the Internet, some of which will be free.  I have not tried to be exhaustive with this summary.  Anyone who has discovered a favorite site that I omitted is free to spread the word through a Comment!