Tag Archives: orchestra

“Postmodernism” is a catchall word that seems to have lost all meaning, especially because it hardly seems “post-“ at all. In the popular mind — if it thinks about such art-historical buzzwords at all — it means paintings of “Donald Duck Crossing the Delaware,” a mashup of pop culture and the history of fine art.

But such things are hardly new. In fact, rejiggering the past has been a central tenet of Modernism for more than a century. Old wine in new bottles. It could be argued that remaking the old is central to all art for as long as it has existed. Virgil remade Homer and Milton remade them both, and Derek Walcott’s Omeros does it all over again. And even the Iliad is the result of its previous oral tellings and retellings. Churn and rechurn.

This is true in music, also. Not just the parody masses of the 15th century, or all those Baroque composers “borrowing” tunes from themselves or their contemporaries, or the many recomposings of La Folie, but more recently, Tchaikovsky rescoring Mozart and Glazunov turning Chopin into the ballet Les Sylphides.

Of course, all the arts build on previous, if not through quoting or re-use, but at the very least just by existing in a continuum of culture. You could not have had the Renaissance without Classical Rome, or Hedda Gabler without As You Like It. All one forward surge.

All art is, on one level, a conversation with the past. Even Jeff Koons’ sculptural portrait of Michael Jackson and Bubbles is a gloss on Pheidias’ statue of Dionysos from the east pediment of the Parthenon from the Fifth Century BCE.

Or, take Manet’s Olympia, which ironically quotes Titan’s Venus of Urbino. (I wrote an exhaustive essay in “Meme and Variations,” from this blog in 2014. Link Here)

Manet was tweaking his nose at the Renaissance painting, and in 1920, Igor Stravinsky was doing something similar to what he assumed was the music of Giovanni Pergolesi, in his ballet score, Pulcinella.

In 21 movements, he rebuilt and re-orchestrated the 18th-century music and made it sound utterly Stravinskian. “Uncle Igor’s Asymmetry Machine,” as Leonard Bernstein called it. Catchy tunes and astringent orchestration. (The fact that the source-music wasn’t Pergolesi but mostly keyboard music by Milanese composer Carlo Ignazio Monza and trio sonatas by Domenico Gallo, a lesser known Venetian composer, both of whose works were sometimes bootlegged under the more salable name of Pergolesi. A YouTube video with the original compositions is available. Link here)

It’s surprising how little Stravinsky changed his originals, except by a little nipping and tucking, and using brilliant and cheeky orchestration.

But this habit of updating ancient music was a frequent technique among composers, especially in the 20th century. Stravinsky himself applied the spice to Tchaikovsky in Le Baiser de la Fée (“The Fairy’s Kiss”) from 1928.

When I was a young recent college graduate, with little or no money in my pocket, I found a battered LP in a castaway bin of a local bookstore. It was on an Eastern European recording label, perhaps a Soviet one, lost to time and my ancient loss of memory. It cost 98 cents and contained William Walton’s The Wise Virgins on one side and Domenico Tomassini’s The Good Humored Ladies on the other. That LP’s fate is lost to 60 years of peregrination, and I only recently found a CD with these works on it. I was emotionally transported to another time and place.

The Walton was a re-orchestration and revamp of work by Johann Sebastian Bach, and the Tomassini did the same with music by Domenico Scarlatti. Both were designed as ballet scores.

(Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas were first orchestrated in 1743 by English Baroque composer Charles Avison in 12 Concerti Grossi After Scarlatti, but Avison did the opposite of Stravinsky: He smoothed over Scarlatti’s pungent harmonies and expressive dissonances, to make them “pretty.” Avison did the same for a dozen violin sonatas by Francesco Geminiani.)

All this piqued my interest, and I spent the past week listening to recordings of all the refurbished music I could find, and there is a lot of it. Two people, in particular, are the source for a great deal of it.

The conductor Thomas Beecham performed the music of Handel back in the early 20th century when Baroque music was practically unheard, outside of the annual Messiah productions. But Beecham not only recorded whole Handel operas and oratorios, he brought excerpts of them into ballet scores he compiled, with his own modern re-orchestrations of them, but often played bits in his concerts.

The best known is probably Love in Bath, a ballet score made from arias, choruses and sinfonias from various Handel works, in rescorings much less snarky than Stravinsky’s, and entirely pleasant on the ear.

He began with The Gods Go a’Begging in 1928, then The Origin of Design (1932), The Faithful Shepherd (1940), Amaryllis (1944), The Great Elopement (1945) and finally, Love in Bath (1956). They often varied each time he presented them, changing suite movements according to his pleasure each time they were programmed.

The other popular champion of ancient music was Ottorino Respighi, who made popular hits out of Renaissance and Baroque lute and keyboard music, most famously in his three suites of Antiche danze ed arie (“Ancient Airs and Dances”) which he wrote from 1917 to 1931. They remain popular in concert and have often been recorded. It’s hard not to love them and whistle the tunes for the rest of the day.

Then, there’s Gli Uccelli (“The Birds”) from 1928, in which Respighi orchestrated keyboard pieces by early (mostly) Italian composers from the 17th and 18th centuries. And Vetrate di chiesa (“Church Windows”) from 1926, based on Gregorian chant and plainsong.

Richard Strauss wrote two suites updating and orchestrating keyboard music by François Couperin. First, Tanzsuite (“Dance Suite”) from 1923, consisting of eight movements, and then Divertimento, from 1942, with 25 keyboard pieces arranged in eight movements.

In 1935, Francis Poulenc wrote a suite for wind band, called Suite Français, using the tunes of 16th century composer Claude Gervaise.

And among the most popular pieces from the 20th century was a four-movement guitar concerto, based on six compositions by the 17th century Spanish composer Gaspar Sanz. It was written in 1954 by Joaquin Rodrigo and titled Fantasia para un Gentilhomo (“Fantasy for a Gentleman”) Dozens of guitarists have recorded it.

Rodrigo also put together an eight movement suite called Soleriana, orchestrating the harpsichord music of 18th century composer Antonio Soler. I had a hard time tracking down a recording, but I found one and have to say it was just as catchy and memorable as the Fantasia.

Finally, among works of this kind, I should mention Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite, built, according to the composer, on tunes in Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchésographie, a manual of Renaissance dances.

But all this rewriting and modernized orchestration wasn’t only applied to antique music. There’s plenty of 19th century music that gets reworked, usually to accompany a ballet. And a lot of them get named some form of “ianna.” Like Mozartiana, Rossiniana, Paganiniana, Soleriana, and Offenbachiana. (Not to mention Bachianas Brasileiras, but that’s another thing.)

Gioachino Rossini wrote 39 hugely profitable operas by the age of 39. Then, in 1832, he retired to live comfortably for the next 40 years. But starting in or about 1857, he began writing short pieces, songs, piano works, choral works — some 150 of them — meant for friends and family and never intended for public performance. He called them his Péchés de vieillesse – “sins of old age.”

In 1918, Respighi orchestrated nine of these “sins” for a ballet, La Boutique Fantasque. It remains enormously popular with dozens of recordings. Later, in 1925, he dove back into the collection to “freely orchestrate” his Rossiniana.

Benjamin Britten used bits from Rossini’s late works for his Soirées Musicales from 1937, and later, his Matinées Musicales from 1941.

Strangely by default, French composer Manuel Rosenthal was tasked with selecting and orchestrating music by operetta champion Jacques Offenbach for a Massine ballet, Gaité Parisienne, in 1938. It remains popular in concert. Then, in 1953, he dipped once more into the well for Offenbachiana.

But let’s face it, this becomes a rabbit hole: There are endless workings and reworkings of music, turning piano pieces into orchestral showpieces, or chamber works into ballets. I should mention just a few of the most famous or popular.

Maurice Ravel took Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and did such a number on those short keyboard works, that some people are shocked to discover they weren’t originally written for the orchestra.

Leopold Stokowski made a career of turning Bach organ works into hyper-lush symphonic showpieces. (He was also not shy about changing around, cutting, or adding cymbals or tam-tam crashes to established symphonies.)

Arnold Schoenberg decided to orchestrate Brahms’ G-minor piano quartet because, he said, “1. I like the piece; 2. It is seldom played; and 3. It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.” He was also commissioned to do it by L.A. Phil conductor Otto Klemperer, where it was first played in 1937.

And finally, I should mention Duke Ellington, who recorded his jazz-orchestra versions of both Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, and Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. Both hugely fun.

It never ends. Kismet, a broadway musical with songs borrowing tunes by Borodin. A nearly infinite number of variations by a nearly infinite number of composers on Paganini’s 24th Caprice for solo violin. All those “Reminiscences” of various operas for solo piano by Franz Liszt. Charles Gounod’s Ave Maria built on top of Bach’s C-major prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier. Franz Waxman’s Carmen Fantasie. Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Weber.

And let’s not leave out Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, which was on a theme Haydn had borrowed in the first place. He didn’t write it.

A quick check of Wikipedia lists hundreds, perhaps thousands (too many for me to count and still have a life) of “variations on” or “hommage to” or quotations from or transcriptions of orchestral music for home piano, or vice versa, piano music turned orchestral. No Haydn, no Beethoven, no Beethoven no Wagner, no Wagner, no Schoenberg, no Schoenberg, no Lutosławski. Piles on piles.

So, this idea that anything Postmodern is new needs to be chucked out the window. Postmodernism is a catchall phrase, with rather more meaning in architecture than in art or music. After all, we’ve been feeding on the past since the beginning.

60 years of music

September 17, 2025

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I have been listening seriously to classical music since 1965, and I have attended hundreds of concerts and recitals since then. Most of those were enjoyable, well-played, musical and provided emotional nourishment, yet almost every one was ultimately digested and forgotten. How could it be otherwise? It takes an exceptional performance to register permanently on the psyche, so that, even 60 years later, they are still resonant in the memory. Now that I am 77, I think about them again.

I grew up in a household with very little music, outside of watching Perry Como or Dinah Shore on the TV. But my high school girlfriend was a musician. She was studying bassoon with Loren Glickman, the man who played the opening notes of The Rite of Spring on the recording conducted by Igor Stravinsky. (She later studied with Bernard Goldberg, primary bassoonist with the Philadelphia Orchestra — she was the real deal). She later went on to work with both PDQ Bach and Philip Glass.

She and I often took the bus into Manhattan to attend concerts. We heard Emil Gilels play the Liszt sonata at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and we went to the very first PDQ Bach concert at Carnegie Hall, hearing both the Concerto for Horn and Hardart and the cantata, Iphegenia in Brooklyn. (For about 20 years after that I went to at least one PDQ Bach concert each year, no matter where I was living). But most of all, we went to the New School concerts led by violinist Alexander Schneider. Tickets were $3 and we could afford them.

And on Christmas Eve, Schneider held an annual midnight concert which allowed me to escape to New York and avoid the boring evenings with my coffee-drinking repressed Norwegian aunts and uncles.

Schneider has always remained my ideal of committed musicianship. He led his chamber group from his seat, with his leg wrapped around the chair leg like the serpent of a caduceus, leaning forward into the music with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb. The music was always exciting. (To this day, I seek out the rare Schneider recordings, such as his Handel op. 6 Concerti Grossi and his Haydn quartets. Schneider was a force.)

New York Times critic Howard Klein wrote about Schneider at the time, “… the playing was that rare ideal of single-mindedness, give-and-take, technical polish and heart. There were a few slides to Mr. Schneider’s melodic playing, just enough to remind one of his romantic tradition. Some scholars might object to the rhythmic liberties that were taken, those marvelous pauses, the slackenings of pace, then the eager striding forth into a fugue, or slipping into a dance rhythm. But this was not romantic Handel, just human warmth. As usual, Mr. Schneider was totally consumed with playing, putting his back into every bow stroke and exhorting the others from his chair to join in the fun. Mr. Schneider is one of the city’s most valuable musicians.”

To this day, Schneider remains my touchstone.

I owe a lot to that first serious girlfriend, but high school romances notoriously don’t last, and this one didn’t, but the music did. I became a serious classical music junkie, going to concerts, recitals, chamber music, and buying endless reams of LPs, tapes and CDs.

Shelly and Benny

In my college years, most of the music I heard, at Greensboro Symphony concerts, under first Sheldon Morgenstern and then Peter Paul Fuchs, was what you would expect from a community orchestra, although I was still happy to hear the music live. I also heard Benny Goodman play the Weber Clarinet Concerto in F-minor there (and after intermission, play the rest of the evening with his jazz trio).

Morgenstern became director of the Eastern Music Festival held each summer at Guilford College in Greensboro, where I was a student, and I heard some world-class soloists come to play with the festival orchestra. The Hungarian Wunderkind Miklos Szenthelyi played the rarely heard Bartok First Violin Concerto and I fell in love with it. Szenthelyi was the most dignified soloist, with the most erect posture I’ve ever seen and played like the music was the most important ever written. It was wonderful. Szenthelyi is now the elder statesman of Hungarian violinists. It has been that long.

Beyond the EMF, one concert stands out from that time. A still-teenage Yo-Yo Ma played both Haydn concertos with the High Point Symphony, one before intermission and one just after and the tunes became ear worms for weeks. Yo-Yo Ma has been a constant ever since, and I have heard him live over and over throughout my concert-going life.

Over the next decades, I moved around quite a bit, often with low-paying jobs, or none at all, and could not often afford tickets. But I still managed to hear Bernstein and the New York Phil play La Mer, and later the same orchestra under Kurt Masur play Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night and Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. Masur had a reputation as a mere Kappelmeister, a time-beater, but he played Beethoven’s smallest symphony as if it were a tiger as big and muscular as the Fifth. I was surprised and blown away. Ever since, I have had greater respect for the power possible to be found in the Eighth.

Haitink and the LSO

There is a class of musician whose recordings have a reputation for being bland, but hearing live, they take the chances they never do for records. Masur was one. Bernard Haitink was another. All the CDs I had of Haitink were safe and, while well-played, were kind of boring. But then I heard him with the London Symphony at the Salle Pleyel in Paris playing the Eroica with all the fire and passion that could be wrung from the piece. Completely changed my mind about the Dutchman, although it didn’t make the CDs better.

I have to admit that my cherished Yo-Yo could be that way, too. Not that his recordings are bad or boring, but they never capture the buzz and excitement of hearing him live, where he is electric. I heard him playing the Dvorak concerto in Phoenix and I was in tears, almost shaking with emotion after hearing it. It was one of the greatest concert performances I ever attended. His recording of the concerto is really good, but nothing like the live beast.

He has recorded the Bach cello suites three times over his career. The first two are dependable, even excellent, but I’ve heard him doing them live several times and the metaphor again shows up: Played with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb. In his third recording of the six suites, he finally got something of that adventurous power into the CD.

In Seattle, I got to hear the Berlioz Requiem, a piece, because of its logistical demands (expanded orchestra and chorus, four extra brass bands at the four corners of the hall and eight tympani blasting away) I never expected to hear live. It may not have been the best performance of the piece ever, but it yanked my hair back. In the late 1970s, when I lived in Seattle, my regular date was a former professional violinist, turned bicycle messenger, and we went to many concerts together. Unfortunately, although we were good friends, she played for the other team.

By the late 1980s, I was living with my late espoused saint in Phoenix, Arizona, and was the art critic for the major daily newspaper, and later became to classical music critic as well. When you don’t have to pay for your tickets, you get to go to a lot more music. And I heard some great music, not only from local Arizona musicians and from touring groups, but because the paper sent me all over the country, I got to hear music in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia (and Boulder, Colo., too).

One of the most unforgettable experiences was hearing the Philadelphia Orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch play Richard Strauss’ Don Juan. If I ever needed to be persuaded that live music offers something recordings cannot, it was the great horn call in Don Juan, when eight French horns sound off in unison and one doesn’t just hear the sound in one’s ears, but vibrating through the fundament: It was music with a physical presence of a brick wall. No recording can capture that shudder. You have to be there.

I heard Maurizio Pollini in LA playing a first half of all the Chopin Preludes and a second half doing Stravinsky’s Two Scenes from Petruschka (with an intermission of over an hour while, from the lobby, we heard a piano being tuned to his satisfaction in the emptied hall) and ending with the Prokofiev Piano Sonata No. 7. That was the single most daunting program I had ever heard up to that point.

At least until I heard pianist Jeremy Denk at Zankel Hall, part of Carnegie Hall, when the first-half of the recital was Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata and the second half Beethoven’s Hammerklavier — two of the longest and most difficult pieces in the repertoire. He then re-played the “Hawthorne” movement of the Concord Sonata as an encore. His fingers must have been bloody stumps after all that.

I later heard Denk in Scottsdale playing Beethoven’s Eroica Variations, and showing their comic side, and several Ligeti etudes, showing that composer was more than the film score to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Some of these memorable cases come in pairs, like the Denk’s.

At Carnegie Hall, I heard the Israel Philharmonic play the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony under Gustavo Dudamel, and it was pure magic. The 80 or so old Israeli pros were turned back into teenagers by the young enthusiasm of the Dude. They played their hearts out for him. At the end, Dudamel did not take the customary audience bows, but ran up into the orchestra, shaking the hand of every musician, making them all stand up and accept the applause.

Later, with the LA Phil, I heard him lead the Mahler First. These were two of the greatest orchestral concerts I ever heard.

One might expect great sounds from these orchestras, but two of the best live performances I have under my belt came from the Phoenix Symphony and its concertmaster Steven Moeckel, under the direction of Music Director Michael Christie. Moeckel played the greatest version of the Beethoven Violin Concerto I ever heard live, perfect in every expressive detail, and powerfully emotional. I was so blown away that I came back the next night to hear it again, but the magic had passed. It was a very fine performance, but not the same. You are not allowed back into Eden.

Several times, I had lunch with Moeckel and we talked of many things. He mentioned that he had always wanted to play the Elgar concerto, a piece I didn’t know, having always thought of Elgar as a stuffy English imperialist. But he persuaded Christie to let him do it, and I was transfixed and realized how much I had been missing all my life. The Elgar Violin Concerto is one of the five or six greatest ever written, up there with Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berg, and Mendelssohn. And Moeckel’s performance couldn’t have sold it any better. It changed my musical life.

Then, there were two concert opera performances by the Phoenix Symphony and Christie. They engaged Dawn Upshaw to sing in Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar, about the death of Spanish poet Gabriel Garcia Lorca at the hands of the Fascist forces of Franco.

As the music critic for The Arizona Republic, I often had issues with conductor Michael Christie over 19th century classics — Christie had not a Romantic bone in his body — but he was brilliant with contemporary music. I fell in love with Golijov’s eclectic style.

And Christie led a great semi-staged version of John Adams’ Nixon in China, one of the rare contemporary operas to make it into the mainstream repertoire. What a great piece, and the Phoenix Symphony played the daylights out of it.

Twice I heard Itzhak Perlman give recitals in Mesa, Ariz. and each time the same thing happened. He opened with a slight sonata, at the first recital a Bach sonata for violin and keyboard and at the second, one of the op. 12’s of Beethoven. I don’t remember which exactly. Perlman played them expertly and even brilliantly, but he just didn’t seem all that involved. I thought, Oh, he’s playing for the boonies and just phoning it in.

Then, the second piece on the program he played like the Greatest Living Violinist, with all the deep engagement, excitement and power anyone ever had. I realize those first pieces were just warm-up. In one recital, it was Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata and in the other, it was the Strauss Violin Sonata, a piece generally ignored as turgid and overlong, one of the composer’s less inspired works. Well, not when played by Perlman: This was one of the great musical experiences of my life. Geezus! Who knew this was really great music? If I ever had any doubts about Perlman, I lost them completely.

Of course, all that makes up for after intermission, when Perlman puts on his embarrassing Borscht Belt act. The program just says, “selections to be announced from the stage,” which means the violinist plays a series of short schmaltzy pieces once played by the likes of Fritz Kreisler, Ole Bull or Bronislaw Huberman, catchy virtuoso show-off pieces that once fit on a single side of a 78rpm record: Hora Staccato, Liebeslied, Salut d’Amour. And worse, Perlman spends even more time with a pile of dad jokes and cornball puns, as if he really wanted to be a baggy-pants vaudeville comedian rather than a great fiddler. A comic he is not. I shoulda left at intermission with the warm memory of the Strauss still in my mind.

Finally, I want to mention three pianists I heard, whose appearances have permanent real estate in my psyche.

The first is Andre Watts, who I heard several times, but once at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts playing the same Liszt sonata I heard Gilels play at the beginning of my listening life. This time, I understood what I was hearing, and watching Watts’ fingers on the keys, dancing and pouncing. It was a wonderful, performance of clarity and power.

Second, quite different, was Olga Kern playing the Rachmaninov Paganini Rhapsody with the Phoenix Symphony. It is clearly a 20th century piece, but often played as if it were late Romanticism, like his famous concertos. But it is an ironic masterpiece, and Kern played it with such lightness and humor that it was reinvigorated. And the audience gasped at the audacious ending when Kern began standing up even before knocking out the last cadence as if it were an afterthought. Yes, it was a coup de theatre, but it worked and perfectly summed up the tone of the piece as she played it.

And third, a problem performer. You never know what you’re gonna get with Lang Lang. He is often seen as a flashy product of PR and promotion, and doesn’t help himself by often showing off and posturing for audiences, making faces as he stares at the ceiling and waving his arms around. I’ve heard Lang Lang live four times and sometimes he is very good and earns his credit, and sometimes you just wanna slap him. But one time, he played the first Chopin concerto with the Phoenix Symphony and time stopped still for the entire slow movement. Dead still. The world disappeared. Eternity opened up. It cannot be played better or more affectingly than Lang Lang did it that evening. I am forever grateful for what he gave me — one of the greatest performances I ever heard.

Of course, the next time he came to town, it was the other Lang Lang who showed up.

Lollipops

June 30, 2025

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Over the past few decades, the programming at our symphony concerts has become routine and predictable. I’m certainly not the only one to notice this, but almost every program follows one of two patterns: Either overture, concerto, intermission, symphony; or, overture, smaller symphony (perhaps Mozart), intermission and then big concerto (like Rachmaninoff Third). Over and over, this pattern holds, which leaves a lot of great music never played. Programming has become stultified.

And even the list of symphonies and concertos that do regularly make the cut has shrunk to a roster of “fan favorites.” When was the last time you heard a live performance of, say, the Bruckner Sixth or the Joachim Violin Concerto? They used to be played — they show up in old programs.

Of course, you can find recordings of everything. If you want an Atterberg symphony, there are multiple CDs on Amazon. But go to Symphony Hall and you will wait a very long time and grow your beard very gray.

There is a particular class of music that has suffered by this development: those shorter, once-familiar staples of both concerts and Looney-Tunes animations. They used to be a regular part of symphony concerts but now are seen as “not serious enough” for well-bred audiences seeking morally and spiritually uplifting artistic experiences. That is too bad, because a lot of this music is absolutely brilliant, and what is more everyone loves it, to the point of being able to whistle the tunes.

The conductor Thomas Beecham once said, “Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.” And, “Music first and last should sound well, should allure and enchant the ear. Never mind the inner significance.”

Beecham was one of the greatest conductors of the 20th Century, and could lead a great performance of a Beethoven symphony, so he wasn’t a mere light-weight. But he regularly included in his programs what he called “lollipops,” which are the smaller, brighter pieces that get short shrift nowadays, pieces such as Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite or Handel’s Largo from Xerxes. There were excerpts from longer pieces, and shorter concerted works for piano or violin soloists that weren’t full-lengths concertos. When was the last time you heard a live performance of Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso? It is a brilliant show piece for a virtuoso violinist.

There are several registers of concert music. At the top sits the top-hat and tails music of Brahms and Beethoven. At the lower end are the Pops concerts with their orchestrated show tunes and movie scores. Arthur Fiedler ruled that kingdom, and included lightweight but catchy music by Leroy Anderson or Albert Ketèlbey. In between there are the New Years concerts of Strauss waltzes and polkas. Fiedler often included some of the more serious music in his Boston Pops programs, but those works have all mostly disappeared from Carnegie or Severance halls.

If you look at symphony programs from a hundred years ago, or two hundred, you find these shorter pieces sprinkled in among the symphonies and tone poems, with no apologies made for their simple popularity. Concerts, after all, are meant to be entertainment.

In Haydn’s day, when middle class supplanted the aristocracy as the prime audience for concert music, his programs included singers, soloists, maybe a chorus and a symphony (then called an “Overture”), which often had its movements split up, with bits of song or violin music in between. It was a varied experience, more like a music hall show than a serious artistic event. They were meant to be popular; meant to sell tickets.

Even in the earlier 20th century, concerts featured both heavy and light classics. But the helium has fizzled out of the balloon.

In the LP era, Beecham released several records made up solely of these lighter, brighter gems, in albums titled “Lollipops.”

They were once the common cultural inheritance of American and European culture. They made up the bulk of recordings from the first half of the 20th century, when 78 rpm records could contain only about 5 minutes on a side, which made recordings of entire symphonies or complete operas both exorbitantly expensive and with 20 or 30 sides on 12-inch discs, really, really heavy to haul around. And so, shorter, popular pieces, like the encores of violinist Fritz Kreisler, became best sellers. I am old enough to have once owned piles of 78 rpm classical music recordings.

A last vestige of that can be found in the recitals of Itzhak Perlman. I’ve seen him several times and it’s always the same. A warm-up sonata, played very well, but nothing special, followed by a major piece performed to blow your socks off (I heard him do the Strauss Violin Sonata — a piece not thought of as among Strauss’ best work — and make it sound like the greatest thing every written for the fiddle); then, after intermission, he spends the last half of the recital playing old short pieces, sometimes requests, and tells corny jokes in between — real Borscht-Belt material. And so, we hear Hora Staccato and Liebesfreud, pieces otherwise consigned to history.

But why couldn’t symphony orchestras do something similar, make half a program of shorter tchochkes and tuneful shorter pieces. Perhaps load them up in the first half of a concert and follow that with a second-half major symphony.

Or, do it like Perlman and leave the audience warm and fuzzy as they leave the auditorium humming the old familiar tunes of Offenbach or Ferde Grofé.

Somehow, symphony programs need to be decongested, and let breathe more freely. And there is all this wonderful music that is kept in storage that should be pulled out and given some sunshine.

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It’s not all the same

February 21, 2024

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No, classical music doesn’t all sound the same. In fact, sometimes it’s hard to find any relationship at all between the far corners of the field. What do Gregorian Chant and Karlheinz Stockhausen have in common?

When someone complains that “it all sounds the same,” you can be pretty sure that the reason is simply lack of exposure. A sample group too small to generalize from. So, I thought, as a followup to my previous blog entry about classical music, I should try to stretch the boundaries of the subject, to stretch out the definition tightly from end to end to see how far it spreads.

If you listen to the items on this catalog, you will find music so different as to be hard to assign a common category.

In the previous blog entry, I attempted to move from one suggestion to the next in the most contrasting way, from, say, Renaissance polyphony to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring — a clear jerk from one mode of hearing to the other.

This time, I hope to provide some framework to see how what we call classical music, or art music, developed over time. You may object that about half of the music comes from the 20th- and 21st-centuries, but that is only being fair: You should remember that the Rite of Spring — which is the traditional mark for the beginning of Modernism in music — is actually closer in time to the death of Haydn than it is to us today. Twentieth Century music is no longer new — it is classical.

(I’ve chosen a single piece from each of the large clumps of music history, varying both style and genre, including keyboard, chamber, vocal, choral and symphonic. From each period, I have supplemented the examples with two contrasting pieces for further listening.) Beginning with:

Vivaldi: Gloria in D Major, RV 589

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) wrote at least three settings for the Gloria, but this one is the version everyone remembers, with its chugging motoric drive and its brassy fanfares. It is built from 12 short movements split between choral numbers, solos and a duet for soprano and contralto.

Its catchy opening “one-TWO-three-four, one-TWO-three-four” with its octave leaps, returns later to unify the work. The Baroque era ran from roughly 1600 to 1750, although styles evolve slowly and overlap. It’s not like everyone stops writing one way and begins writing the new way. This piece, from 1715 lasts about 30 minutes and exemplifies the energetic forward motion of the Baroque.

Alternates:

J.S. Bach (1685-1750), The Goldberg Variations (1714), a set of 30 variations on a repeating bass line, for keyboard; and George Friedrich Handel (1685-1759), Musick for the Royal Fireworks (1749), a suite for a large band of wind instruments, for outdoor performance during a famous fireworks display meant to celebrate the end of the War of Austrian Succession. The crowd loved the music, but the fireworks caused a building to burn down, blinded a soldier and injured several others. Later performances often added strings to the wind band, with no further reported injuries.

Haydn: Quartet in D major, op. 64, no. 5 “The Lark”

It is often said that Joseph Haydn and Mozart wrote music in the classical style (roughly 1750-1828), but in fact, they created the classical style. If Haydn didn’t singlehandedly invent the symphony, he made it what we think of today; and he did the same for the string quartet — music for two violins, viola and cello.

This is music generally less cluttered or fussy than the earlier Baroque, and seeks a kind of modest tastefulness, along with, in Haydn’s case, a witty sense of humor, as in the imitation bird calls at the start of this quartet, which was written in 1790 and has the usual four movements: an opening allegro, a dance movement, a slow movement and a jaunty finale.

Alternates:

W.A. Mozart (1756-1791) Serenade No. 10 for 13 Winds in B-Flat, known as the Gran Partita (1781), which, in Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus, he has Antonio Salieri react by saying, “It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.” Or Franz Schubert’s (1797-1828) Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat (1816), which is a really tuneful symphony built on Haydn’s model.

Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) is the perfect Romantic composer, the greatest piano virtuoso of his time, and a matinee idol that all the ladies were in love with — something of which he took great advantage. His music, as in this 1855 concerto, is filled with all the wild emotion that the classical era avoided: over the top, loud, brash, and with a solo part for the triangle — it scandalized its first audiences. The jangle of the triangle was considered bad taste — but bad taste is the goal of much Romanticism. Audiences loved being scandalized.

Alternates:

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) wrote a cycle of songs, telling a sad love story, called the Dichterliebe, or “A Poet’s Love,” in 1840, and includes a song claiming over and over, “I’m not angry,” to some of the angriest music ever. Clever. Or Bedrich Smetana’s (1824-1884) Moldau, an orchestral portrait of the Czech river (now usually called the Vlatva or Voltava), which is a perfect example of the Romantic Nationalism that swept over Europe. Great tunes.

Debussy: Images for Piano, Book II

In the late 19th century and the 20th century before the First World War, music went through several changes. One of them is a rejection of Romantic excess, and the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) came up with his own style — usually called Impressionism — of ambiguous tonality, exotic scales, and an approach to the piano that was soft and non-percussive.

He wrote a great deal of piano music, including the famous Clair de Lune, but I’m offering the three pieces in his Images, second series (1907): Cloches à travers les feuilles (“Bells through the leaves”); Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (“And the moon descends on the temple that was”); and Poissons d’or (“Golden fish”).

Alternates:

Some composers went in the opposite direction, with larger orchestras, more chromatic harmonies of profound longing, in what is often called Late Romanticism, or Post-Romanticism. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) often added voices to his orchestral music, or wrote orchestral song cycles, such as his Songs of a Wayfarer (1885). Richard Strauss (1864-1949) used huge orchestras and explodes out of the gate with Don Juan (1889), a musical version of a Don Juan more idealistic than lecherous. It is an avalanche of sound, with a huge six-horn signature that, in live performance, you feel through you fundament as much as hear with your ear.

Janáček: Sinfonietta

Now we are ripe in the 20th Century, and Leos Janáček’s Sinfonietta (1926), a five-movement piece for huge orchestra, including 25 brass instruments. The first movement has 10 trumpets alone, playing a hair-raising fanfare.

All five movements are built from catchy tune-bits, extended and repeated. And although the music is clearly modernist, I’ve never come across anyone who didn’t instantly love the Sinfonietta.

Alternates:

French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was imprisoned by Nazis during World War II, and in prison camp, wrote his Quartet for the End of Time, for piano, clarinet, violin and cello (the instruments available in the camp). It is a hugely idiosyncratic piece, written to Messiaen’s own music theories, but can be overwhelmingly emotional in a good performance. And for the double-dip experience of atonal music, try Alban Berg’s (1885-1935) Three Pieces for Orchestra (1914), for something like what people used to call “modern music.”

Penderecki: Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima

Classical music, or art music, is still being written, and responds to life in the current world. We live in a post-Hiroshima age, and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020) summarized the feeling in his 1961 string-orchestra piece, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, although you may have some difficulty recognizing it as string music made by violins, violas, cellos and double basses. It shrieks of the horror.

It masses its 52 string players in tone clusters and dissonances, various vibratos and odd bowings, for 8 and a half minutes, that is not meant to be beautiful, but to evoke intense emotions. It is, nevertheless, beautiful. (Remembering Tom Robbins notion: “The ugly may be beautiful; the pretty, never.”)

Alternates:

Minimalist composer Philip Glass (b. 1937) also reacts to the modern world in his film score for the Godfrey Reggio film, Koyaanisqatsi (1982). The modern world is a crazy world, as the film and music underline, but with quite a variety of minimalist techniques. The horrors of war fill Henryk Gorecki’s (1933-2010) Third Symphony (The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) (1976), in which a soprano sings Catholic laments and words by victims of the Nazis, all to music so slow and so inexorable as to be almost a force of nature. Its 1991 recording by the London Sinfonietta sold more than a million copies. Gorecki, surprised at the popularity of such a sorrowful piece of music said, “perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music…. something they were missing. Something, somewhere had been lost to them.”

Epilogue

Of course, this diversity is among the European tradition of art or concert music. Most cultures have their own classical musics, such as the sitar or sarod music of India, the Chinese opera music, and Japanese flute music. Each is a tradition handed down from master to student and carried forth, with development and variation. That is what makes it classical.

If I were to think of a purely American classical music, it would be jazz. It, likewise, has a wide range of styles and sounds, from Louis Armstrong through Duke Ellington and down through Ornette Coleman.

But it is what we call classical music in the West that I am best familiar with and love. And writing this has given me the chance to listen once more to each of the pieces I’ve written about, and more joy me.

What does a symphony conductor do?

May 13, 2015

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He stand up on stage, his back to the audience, raises his arms, flicks a thin shaft of wood and the orchestra sounds. As he beats time, the musicians keep up. He slows his arms, they slow the music; he speeds up, they race forward.

What is the magic of a symphony conductor?

The single most-often asked question I got as a classical music critic by a non-musician is: Just what does a conductor do? Is he necessary? Could I do it?

And this is a difficult question to answer, because orchestras differ, conductors differ and the music they play varies. No single answer is quite right.

For instance, when a Leonard Bernstein stands up in front of the venerable Vienna Philharmonic and gives a tiny wiggle of his wrist, the music stirs, just as if the baton were a swizzle stick; if a journeyman conductor stands in front of, say, an orchestra in Muncie, Indiana, and waves his arms like a madman, the players likely puzzle what the dickens he is trying to accomplish, or worse, are forced to ignore him.

(Or her — there are finally a growing number of women maestros, or maestras).

We say the conductor “leads” the orchestra, but what that means can vary quite a bit.

In current times, many conductors find themselves primarily in the position of traffic cops, keeping the music running on time, slowing the aggressiveness of the brass, or encouraging the timid violas to speak up.

In past times, the podium-master was a magician, drawing from the orchestra a singular and personal reinterpretation of the score.

But, you say, aren’t the musicians professionals? Don’t they know how to play the music? And, of course, in a good orchestra, they are. If it is an “old hand” group, with a long history of playing together, the orchestra may decide they know better than the tyro conductor how that Mozart symphony should go, and then, no matter what the minimaestro signals from the stand, they ignore him and go their own way. This often improves the performance; old hands often DO know what they’re doing.

It also depends on whether the conductor is attempting a “standard model” performance, matching the so-called Platonic ideal performance that almost every classical music fan has in his head — in such cases, the orchestra can run on auto pilot quite well — or whether he is an idiosyncratic baton waver, who will be asking the musicians to rethink the warhorse, in which case, if they are a conscientious orchestra, they will attempt to follow the baton.

Some famous conductors were notorious for changing their interpretations during performance. Wilhelm Furtwangler, most notoriously, could ask them to do the opposite of what they had rehearsed. He often defended this by saying he doesn’t know what will happen in the hall, where acoustics can change with the audience, how full it is, or how much wool overcoat the crowd — and the reverberant sound — may be buried under. He also depended on momentary inspiration for his performances: This gave the Berlin Phil under his stick a presence and vitality rare in the industry: Every moment was alive with possibility, and never a routine run through.

Or Sir Thomas Beecham, who famously hated to rehearse, and would spend the time running quickly through each piece and then announce, “That sounds about right,” and then, during performance, ask them all kinds of somersaults and bounce from the podium.

Needless to say, not everyone can get an orchestra to turn on a dime, follow the baton like a setter on a leash, and roll over the interpretive cliff with the arch of an eyebrow. The major maestros can and could do this. The itinerant guest conductor is not often in that league (make that “almost never” and then cross out the “almost”).

There are those who decry an overly demonstrative baton-waver (Bernstein used to alarm an army of critics, who found him frantic on the podium, only later to change their initial opinions of him when they discovered he could draw life-altering performances from his charges). And there are those who praise the Laconian reserve of others, believing that there is some virtue in not hamming it up.

The truth is, either approach can create great music.

A symphony conductor has several jobs, not all apparent to the audience.

Let’s take them one at a time.

First, the major part of his work is done in rehearsal, not in performance. While working with the musicians, the conductor lays down the outlines of what he wants in the performance, things such as how fast they should play, how loud, and when the oboe should play louder to be heard over the horns, and when the horns should tone it down, so the oboe can be heard.

They work over phrasings, over such arcane things as the bowings to be used by the string players, the amount of vibrato, or when to alter the scorings (there are times when the parts must be gently rewritten for better effect — each conductor has his own conscience on such matters, but even the score-fanatic Arturo Toscanini regularly touched up his Beethoven).

They also decide when to take marked repeats and when to ignore them. (Failure to make such things clear can create disaster, as when Beethoven screwed up a repeat during the premiere of his Choral Fantasy and had to stop the music altogether and restart the band.)

In rehearsal, the conductor’s personality and approach can make a difference. In the past, some conductors were absolute dictators, brooking no backtalk from the galley slaves. Others were more collegial, asking in conversation with the musicians what might work best. (Sometimes the orchestra, for instance, knowing the hall better than the visiting conductor, can help him understand the idiosyncrasies of the performance space).

Nowadays, dictators are rare. Musicians unions and simple common-sense have toned town the tyrants. A conductor cannot easily get away treating his subordinates like dogs. This is better for the poor musicians, but not always better for the music.

Second, during the actual performance, the conductor tries to keep the music running on the schedule he has set during rehearsals, and tries to keep the musicians from straying too far from the plan. He beats time with his baton and uses his free hand to give hints, such as “more vibrato, please,” or “you, up there with the trombones, a little humility, please, we’re trying to listen to the cellos.”

But there is a third job the conductor has, and it is sometimes overlooked, indeed, oftentimes derided. That is the conductor’s duty to the audience. And I mean his visual duty, not merely his sonic one.

That is, the conductor, who knows the music well, can help the unsuspecting public understand what is going on in the music. Regular concertgoers don’t need much help with Beethoven’s Fifth, but especially in less familiar music, the body language of the conductor can point the listener in the right direction. The motions of the conductor can be theatrical for the audience, not merely technical for the players.

Certainly, there is a level of puritanism rampant in the classical music world that frowns on conductorial theatrics with the same disapproving hauteur that it reserves for those neophytes who applaud between movements, or leave the hall before the encores in what is sometimes called a “standing evacuation.” But a certain amount of theater can be a great help for the audience, who are often in the process of falling into a “confused slumber” while the music is droning on, and they can wake up for those moments when the conductor is hovering mid-air like an apache helicopter.

The magic a great conductor can create is one of those things, like charisma, that we have all experienced but can never explain. Some got it, some don’t. The pretenders are embarrassing.

There are fashions in classical music, just as there are with everything else. Currently, there is a widespread prejudice that a good conductor shouldn’t “interpret” the music, but should let the music speak for itself. This sounds nice, but it is rather like telling an actor playing Hamlet, just speak the words clearly, don’t “interpret” them. There is a reverence for the score that would do a hardshell Baptist proud speaking about holy writ.

Yet, some of the greatest recordings to come down to us demonstrate that the personal vision of the conductor can make the music, not only come alive, but provide for the audience such a profound and moving experience that they are willing to shell out the price, often dear, of a ticket for the next concert, in hopes of something equally thrilling, even life-changing.

And anyone who actually looks at a score will know, there are hundreds of details that need interpreting. A score is by necessity a rather vague document. It tells us the notes, but not the music.

Click to enlarge

Let us take a well-known example: the first page and a half of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. We can point out a few of the puzzles a conductor must deal with. Sure, he can rely on his memory of a thousand other performances, but a conductor should always start with the score, and this one has lots and lots of questions for him.

Right from the get-go, there are those four opening notes: “Dah-dah-dah-Dum.” Then repeated a step lower.

They are usually played as a triplet and a downbeat: “ONE-2-3-ONE.” But notice that the score actually begins with a rest. This is in 2/4 time and there are four eighth-note beats before the bar line. It is “(rest) 1-2-3-ONE.” Which throws the rhythm slightly off and turns it from a triplet to a pair of iambs. The first and third beats of a bar are accented; the second and fourth are recessive. The first note is on the second beat, so, the first bars go like: “I CAME to PLAY; I’m HERE to STAY.”

OK, but that creates a problem. As the symphony progresses, we hear that four note motif hundreds of times, and often so fast, piled one on the other that keeping the fine point of the rhythm is very difficult, especially for lesser orchestras. And when we hear it so often as a pattern, we tend to hear it as a triplet and downbeat.

Further, if we look deeper into the symphony, we find that the four note motif is repeated in all four movements, and in the third, it comes in a triple meter: It actually becomes ONE-2-3-ONE.

So, perhaps Beethoven always intended it to sound like three-and-one. Here is a decision that has to be made in rehearsal: The orchestra has to all agree, or at least the conductor has to decide which way he’s going to play it.

You can hear different recordings of the symphony and in some, you can hear the triplet-and-downbeat and in others you hear the pair of iambs.

The next decision you have to make concerns those two prominent fermatas (the “eyebrows”) over the second bar and the fifth bar.

They indicate Beethoven want you to lengthen those notes and hold them longer than their measured length. But how long should you hold them? This will depend on how you see the rest of the symphony, or at least the rest of the movement.

Look at the first page and a half and notice how often there are rests and fermatas. This is a very odd symphony. It begins with a lot of ambiguities. Not only the issue of triplet or iamb, but what key is the damn thing in? The first four pitches are G to E-flat and F to D. There is no bass note to tell us whether we are in the key of E-flat major or in C-minor. It could be either. And with all those pauses and fermatas, we can’t initially tell whether the movement will be fast or slow.

As Professor Peter Schickele says in his sportscast of the Fifth Symphony, “I can’t tell if it’s fast or slow, because it keeps stopping.”

This brings up a major interpretive choice the conductor has to make. Should he try to smooth things out to make a continuous movement with a propulsive sense of drive, or should he emphasize the herky-jerky stop and go? After all, Beethoven intentionally put all those stop signs along the road.

You can get an immediate idea of what your conductor thinks with how he handles those two first fermatas.
If he wants to drive the thing forward, he will barely hold the E-flat and D under the eyebrows, and keep the rhythm as propulsive as possible. Otherwise, he may tend to hold those notes a very, very long time, breaking up any sense of forward motion.

Listen to two extremes: First, conductor Benjamin Zander, with a student orchestra plays the first movement like a bat out of hell, running through the stop signs. It is exciting and propulsive. It’s hard not to be caught up in the excitement.

Listen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gXdWELSgEQ

Then, listen to Wilhelm Furtwangler and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1947, in the first performance the conductor was allowed to lead, after being finally cleared of Nazi leanings. The emotions, not just the thrill, are deep and profound. The world has just survived the worst war in history and the man who loved music and Beethoven above all else is finally allowed back with his beloved musicians. What a deeply moving performance, but how utterly different from Zander’s.

Listen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qMwGeb6SfY

Some will say that it is Furtwangler’s emotions we are hearing, not Beethoven’s, but perhaps they need to be reminded that what we’re really talking about is emotions we all share. The audience had just been through a great conflagration. Their nerves were shot, emotions were near the surface. The performance acknowledges that: It is music for the NOW of the moment, and not a recreation of some 19th century moment. Surely this is the true purpose of the concert. If Furtwangler makes the undercurrent all the more palpable, he is truly giving us the heart of the music.

This may seem like a lot of fuss to be made over four lousy bars of music, but they are essential to understand the music.

Now, if you look at the succeeding bars, you will see that the four-note motif gets tossed around the string section, from second violin to viola to first violin, and then repeats, as if it is piling the motif up on itself.

Taking approach No. 1, you want the motif to build into a theme, and you want the pattern to play as if it were performed by a single instrument, in a single singing line. If you take approach No. 2, you want to phrase the thing so that there is just a little hitch between violin 2, viola, and violin 1, so they can be heard as separate voices.

That phrase repeats, and then the four-note motif goes through its first metamorphosis, and becomes not three repeated notes, but in the treble, two repeated notes, and descending eighth note and then the downbeat note. It is a slide downhill. It is answered by the bass notes doing two repeats and a rising eighth note before the downbeat. Going uphill. Approach No. 1 is to play these patterns almost as a sine-wave down-up, down-up, again as if it were a single singing voice. Approach No. 2 plays treble against bass, as if they were arguing, “I’m going downhill!” “NO! I want to go UP!” Back and forth.

Again, you accomplish this by phrasing the notes with a little hitch between the parts. That hitch is too short to be notated, and in fact, doesn’t necessarily alter the beat at all, but rather you simply hesitate a microsecond before each entry, creating a minuscule gap between the phraselets. Disintegration, not the through-line, is the guiding metaphor for this version of a performance.

You might notice in the score that underlying this sine-wave/argument the cellos and bassoons are playing an alternating C and B, which are the home note and leading tone of the key of C-minor. The conductor has to decide how prominent to make this counter-melody. Is it merely background, or is it something paying auditory attention to?

You might also notice that until this point, the double bass has had nothing to play, outside underlining the opening motif notes. Since then, they have been silent. But now, the whole orchestra lights up in a tutti cadence, and we come to a natural “joint” in the structure of the symphony, a big gesture rounding off a section of the musical argument. (You don’t need to understand this, but the cadence uses a D-major chord, technically the dominant of the dominant, to end the cadence on a G-major chord, the dominant chord of C-minor — for the first time, Beethoven has used a chord outside the key of the symphony).

But wait, as Ron Popeil might say. That cadential G-major chord includes a whole note with fermata on the first violin section, which seems to have taken it upon itself to play “outside the box,” as it were, refusing to punch out that G-major with the same brusk hit that the rest of the orchestra uses, it holds on, as if it were a misbehaving child.

Again: How long should the violins hold that fermata? Approach No. 1 says, not long, we don’t want to slow things down. Approach No. 2 says “But we’re trying to interrupt the flow as often as we can.”

While we are on that half-note G that the violins hold, a decision has to be made whether the note should be played at a constant dynamic level, and a constant intensity, or whether it should include a bit of a climax: Should they slightly increase the volume as they hold the note, or slide the bow lower on the string to change the intensity and timbre of the tone as they hold it; should they do a slight decrescendo on that note, letting it die away; should they do a slight increase and then decrease in volume or intensity, making a kind of whoooOOOOooo out of the note; and should they just end the note, or let it die away, or should they punctuate the end with a kind of plosive end, as if they ended in a “T” or “P” sound? The choice will depend on what the conductor believes the symphony is trying to accomplish.

So, with that fermata, does the conductor hold up the next series of notes a bit, or does he dive ahead as strictly as he can? Of course, the next notes are the four-note motif again, and another fermata and another stutter and hold.

One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is the basic tempo. Beethoven gives us a metronome marking for the movement, where a half-note beat registers 108 on the Maelzel metronome. This is very fast, indeed. There is a problem — or at least a question — about Beethoven’s metronome markings. They are all rather fast, compared to the way the symphonies have been traditionally performed. The HIPP (“historically informed performance practice”) crowd believes the metronome markings should be taken seriously and biblically. The traditional crowd notes that Beethoven didn’t come up with these metronome markings until late in his career — they are retrofit to the scores — and that when he came up with them, he was stone deaf. They point out that the early metronome Beethoven had may have been malfunctioning. And that if you hear music only in your head, it is likely to be heard faster than you would experience it in a working ear.

When he actually tried to perform the allegro of his Ninth Symphony at the tempo marking he originally indicated, he realized it was off by a third, and reduced it from a metronome marking of 120 to 88. We should keep that in mind when we proscribe any variations from the printed metronome numbers.

Either way, Beethoven made clear that he wanted the tempo indicated to refer to the beginning tempo only, and that he expected his musicians to alter the tempo as the music progressed to further its expressivity.

The quote: “My tempo markings are valid only for the first bars, as feeling and expression must have their own tempi,” he wrote.

Beethoven was no fan of metronomic performance.

And, how can you have a meaningful metronome marking when the music keeps stopping and notes are asked to be held against the prevailing metronome beat?

A lot of decision have to be made even in this first page and a half. Many of them have to be hashed out in rehearsal, so the orchestra is on the same page with the conductor.

But others can change during performance.

The phrasing has to be agreed on before the performance, but things like how long to hold the fermatas may change during performance depending on many factors.

You know in theater, how the audience can affect the actors’ performance. A good audience brings out a better performance; a bad audience can turn the actors into automatons or can make them exaggerate their performances to try to force a reaction from a recalcitrant audience.

The same in music, and the conductor may alter his tempo, the length of holds and rests, in order to underline some interpretive detail that he believes the audience is not paying attention to, or conversely, is so in tune with the music, that he can risk some interpretive byways he would not attempt with a less attentive group.

Or, it could be the occasion: Some national figure has just been assassinated, or some city has been bombed: the ritual significance of the music may make for a deliberately more emotional performance.

Furtwangler recorded the Fifth at least 12 times over the course of his career, from 1926 to 1954, and anyone who cares about the music deeply wants to have as many as possible, because they are each different. There’s one from before the war, during the war, the one just after the war when the conductor was first freed to perform again, and then recordings from the 1950s, in better sound, but as the conductor was aging. In 1943 in Berlin, the war was in everyones’ hearts and minds, and Furtwangler brings greater intensity to the music, with longer fermatas and more intense phrasing. Other recordings he made at different times are quite different. The particular way he plays the music was most likely spur of the moment, created during performance and not in rehearsal, as he asked the orchestra to “feel” along with him what he was attempting to do.

I hope I haven’t bored you with too much detail, or patronized you by saying things you already know quite well. I just want to help you enjoy classical music as much as I do. I cannot imagine life without it: As Nietzsche said, “Life without music would be a mistake.”

Enough! Or Too Much!

September 24, 2013

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There are rainstorms, and then there are hurricanes.

There are symphonies, and then there is Gustav Mahler.

The Austrian composer is like nothing else in classical music, and his unique brand of emotional fury inspires a cultish following. You may love Mozart or Chopin, but if you’re a Mahler fan, you are in love. Devoted. An acolyte; it’s akin to religious conversion.

“I love all composers,” said the late music critic Dimitri Drobatschewsky, “but the composer for whom I will make the greatest effort, or spend the most money, is Mahler. There is nothing in life that can replace what Mahler’s music does to and for me.”

It is almost an addiction.

The music hits closer to the experience of being alive than almost any other: deeper, more emotional, more direct. The Mahler addict measures a performance not so much by whether he leaves the hall whistling the tunes, as whether he has lost control of his lacrimal glands and has to hide his face as he leaves, so as not to show himself weeping in public. Mahler’s music is personal; it batters your heart.

He asks you the questions you think about only at the most extreme moments of your life: Why are we here? What is death? Love? How has the child become the man? It isn’t the intellectual answers he seeks, but the emotional landscape of the questions themselves.

There is nothing moderate in music or performance. Leonard Bernstein, often credited with starting the modern Mahler revival, was a particularly passionate exponent of the music.

“People are always saying that I exaggerate Mahler, which is so stupid,” he said, “because you cannot exaggerate Mahler enough! To play a Mahler symphony, you have to give it your whole heart and body and soul and everything.”

As William Blake said, “Enough or Too Much! Less than all cannot satisfy.”

‘3 times an outsider’

Gustav Mahler was born in 1860, one year before the American Civil War began, to a Jewish family in what now is the Czech Republic. He rose to prominence as a conductor in Vienna, where he was alternately lionized and vilified. By all accounts, he was one of the greatest conductors of his time, but a vicious element of anti-Semitism conspired against him, despite his careerist conversion to Roman Catholicism.

“I am three times an outsider,” he famously said, “as a Bohemian in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans and as a Jew throughout the world.”

He finished his first symphony in 1889, and he put into it much of his life up to that time. Every Mahler symphony is in some way autobiographical. It’s not just abstract music; the symphonies are his life.

Even in the First, the opening section depicts recollections of his childhood, of taking walks in the woods in Moravia with his father. So those high harmonics in the violins depict the wind blowing through the pine needles, and the clarinet depicts cuckoo calls, and then an offstage trumpet plays a fanfare because, in the woods they used to walk, there was a distant army barracks.

Mahler himself said, “A symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.”

It must be made the musical version of D.H. Lawrence’s “bright book of life.”

A challenge

Mahler presents an initial challenge to the newcomer, who is used to attending a concert for the purpose of hearing the great abstract artform left to us by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky, Copland, Prokofiev. But nothing in Mahler is merely abstract: It is all personal. All life. All extreme. The composer asks his audience not to enjoy his melodies, but to use the music to search their own lives for the return of serve he rockets into your court.

The Fourth Symphony is the best entry point for the neophyte: Mahler’s shortest symphony, filled with all the things that make the composer so compelling. There are great tunes, inspired orchestration, a vocal part and many of the deeper themes that pervade all his symphonies: Nature, nostalgia, tragedy, death and innocence.

From there, you can move on to his more intense symphonies, where he feels compelled to throw at you everything he knows, everything he’s ever felt.

For him, that meant adding to his already huge orchestra such things as sleigh bells (which open the Fourth Symphony), cowbells, mandolins and — in his tragic Sixth Symphony, hammer blows that “fell a man like an ax cutting a tree.” The First Symphony has everything from klezmer bands to military marches.

He was trying to make a world, and that world is as much marching bands, elegant waltzes and earthy landlers as it is soaring, breathless melodies.

There is Mahler counterpoint, too: layers of tunes and snippets of tunes, less like the long line of a Bach fugue, and more like a Picasso collage, with torn fragments overlapped.

That mixture of high and low is both the hallmark of Mahler’s world view and our own Postmodern world. Perhaps that is why Mahler feels so contemporary to us. For Mahler’s contemporaries, his symphonies too often seemed to be infected by the worst sort of vulgarity. They had come to hear hochste deutsche Kunst — high German art — and got tin whistles and banjos thrown in in the bargain.

The “unmedicated” Mahler

If Mahler is about anything, it is about these extremes: sublimity and camp, aspiration and despair, irony and sentimentality.

In his famous essay about the composer, Bernstein wrote: “Think of it, Mahler the creator vs. Mahler the performer; the Jew vs. the Christian; the believer vs. the doubter; the naif vs. the sophisticate; the provincial Bohemian vs. the Viennese homme du monde; the Faustian philosopher vs. the Oriental mystic; the operatic symphonist who never wrote an opera.”

Mahler can whip you around these opposites, turning his music on a dime, snapping your emotions back and forth like a pennant in a Wrigley Field bluster. Not only between movements, but he can be ecstatic for three bars, and, suddenly, you’re in the deepest depression for six, only to snap to attention with 12 bars so alert that they seem electrified.

If he were alive today, he’d probably be on medication.

The slow movement of the Fourth Symphony is that way: It is a theme and variations on two themes, one elevated and serene, the other devilish and taunting. The two themes merge in variations, finally both stopping as the orchestra bellows a loud cry — for some, it is the gates of heaven opening. Time, and the music’s forward motion, stop dead in glory.

All that is followed in the finale by a song sung by a soprano, directed to sing in a childlike, innocent way, about the wonders of that heaven, imagined by a child, where “the angels bake the bread.” From the sublime to the ridiculous in one easy step.

Exhausting pinnacle of art

You can leave a concert humming Mozart’s tunes or inspired by Beethoven’s nobility, but after Mahler, you are simply spent. You’ve been “rode hard and put up wet.” He has dragged you from pillar to emotional post, pounded your deepest fears, pointed with your most fervent hopes. Mahler exhausts.

For those who are up to it, it is the pinnacle of art. For those who ask for something less exaggerated from their music, Mahler can be interminable and exasperating.

The symphonies are long — some single movements are longer than whole Beethoven symphonies. Mahler is an acquired taste.

Yet, while they are sonically splendorous, they are spiritually deep, and if music is an expression of the human spirit, Mahler is exploring its deepest depths.

For Drobatschewsky, it is summed up in the Mahler Ninth that he heard conducted by Claudio Abbado in Amsterdam.

“I am not a religious man, but what other people get out of religion, I get out of Mahler: solace, joy, every feeling that’s known to man.

“All out of Mahler’s music.”

NAG NAG NAG: An ADDENDUM

Gustav Mahler was a control freak.

Look at most music scores and you see not only notes but some basic instruction: tempo markings, how loud to play, whether to speed up or not.

Look at a Mahler symphony score and you see enough writing to fill a book. He was a micromanager.

The Dover miniature score for his Fifth Symphony, for instance, has four pages of small-print glossary to translate Mahler’s German instructions. Hardly a bar goes by without some nudge by the composer.

In the first four bars alone of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, he asks the orchestra to play “Moderately, not rushed,” and with “Grace notes very short,” “staccato” and “piano” (“quietly”), followed by “sempre piano” (“always quiet”), followed immediately by a diminuendo (“get quieter) — which would seem to contradict the sempre piano by asking the orchestra to change. Meanwhile, he asks that the music be played “grazioso” (gracefully), while also asking for a “poco ritardando” (“slow down a little”).

That’s in three bars. In the fourth, he asks for a return to the original tempo, but it should also now be “comfortable.” Meanwhile, he throws in a reminder: “Expressively.”

That’s only four bars out of an hourlong symphony.

You have to give yourself over to Mahler’s intentions, perhaps more than for any other composer, due to the sheer volume of specific instructions he has left us.

The markings can be difficult to interpret, however. The very first instruction Mahler gives for his “Songs of a Wayfarer,” before he says anything else, is “Faster.” Faster than what? That is followed by “Slower” and, two bars later, “Faster,” and back and forth until he gets to “Smoothly agitated.”

Most conductors mark up their scores with little notes to themselves to remember this or that detail in the music. Mahler was a conductor, too, and has given the performer the benefit of his own marking up.

Basically, Mahler was a backseat driver.