Come on, folks, let's get serious! A to-do about Sir Roger's anti-vibrato movement (or lack of movement, as the case may be)? Don't we have anything better to talk about? Or is it a question of arts journalists frantically searching for copy in August?
Anyone who has read Styra Avins's informed and informative writings on the use of vibrato by Joachim and other string players in the second half of the nineteenth century will know that Norrington's latest campaign is largely baseless or part of an ongoing PR parade -- if not both -- just as anyone who has delved into Beethoven's conversation books will know that the way Norrington straight-armed his way through the recitatives in his recording of the finale of the Ninth Symphony went against the composer's instructions.
Among "authenticists" and "non-authenticists" alike, there are musical and unmusical performers: neither camp has a corner on the sensitivity market. Sir Roger can huff and puff all he likes about this or that offense on the part of the non-authenticists, but, to my ears, he belongs squarely (an appropriate adverb if ever there was one) among the unmusical authenticists.
The long hiatus in this blog is a result of a lot of other work, intense heat in my fifth-floor, under-the-roof walk-up Manhattan apartment, and sheer lethargy.
I've gradually been looking back over some of the performances that I attended during the 2007-08 New York musical season, but I'm taking time out to talk about a few CDs that have recently come to my attention. I'm prompted in part by Tony Tommasini's evocative New York Times article (June 8) about the wonderful American pianist William Kapell, who died in a plane crash in 1953, at the age of 31. And Tommasini's article was prompted, in turn, by RCA Red Seal's new two-CD album, "William Kapell Rediscovered." The recordings heard on these discs were made during live concerts in Australia that took place during the months immediately preceding this amazing artist's death.
I am ashamed to admit that I had paid very little attention to Kapell's recordings until 1998, when RCA issued a nine-CD set devoted to nearly all of the pianist's recordings known at that time, but once I had made his musical acquaintance, I was hooked. Rare are the performing musicians who make you feel not only that they have thoroughly understood the works they are interpreting, but also that they are "speaking" them directly, creating them before your very ears. Maybe you don't agree with this or that detail, or even an entire interpretation; nevertheless, you are swept along by the conviction, honesty, and communicative mastery that have gone into what you are hearing. This is the feeling I have when I listen to Kapell. Take, for instance, Chopin's Barcarolle and E-flat Major Nocturne, Op. 55 No. 2, in this new album -- which I would urge every young pianist to acquire: you feel at every moment that this music is in Kapell's bloodstream, as if Chopin had told him what to do with every nuance in tempo and dynamics, every accent, the shape of every phrase. Afterward, you may ask yourself why Kapell didn't make more of a certain climax, why he slowed down at a certain point -- and these issues do count, for anyone who cares deeply about musical interpretation. But you remain awestruck by the fanatical care with which every detail has been worked out, in itself and in relation to every other detail, and by the apparent spontaneity of the result. So also the performances of works by Bach, Mozart, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev in this remarkable valedictory album.
An exceptionally fine recent CD is a Harmonia Mundi release containing the Jerusalem Quartet's interpretations of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" and Quartettsatz. This is ensemble playing of the highest order: tremendous intensity combined with great interpretive intelligence and unity of intent, not to mention the striking virtuosity of each player (Alexander Pavlovsky and Segei Bresler, violins; Amichai Grosz, viola; and Kyril Zlotnikov, cello). There is a tendency toward exaggerated dynamic contrasts -- even more superfluous in this highly dramatic performance than they would be in blander versions; nevertheless, this is a CD that everyone who loves these astonishing works should have.
Two other string ensembles that I've listened to with pleasure lately are the Moscow and American string quartets, performing music by the American composer Curt Cacioppo on the somewhat out-of-the-way MSR Classics label (easily available through amazon.com, however -- as are several other recordings of the same composer's music). The two-CD album also contains performances by the Friends Chamber Group and by Cacioppo himself at the piano. I've known Cacioppo since we were kids studying with the same piano teacher, back in the mid-1960s. He went on to study with Leon Kirchner and other masters, and he has taught for many years at Haverford College, where his interest in Native American music spurred him to establish a Native American Fund and a related social justice course. His works have been performed by the Emerson Quartet and other eminent musicians. This new recording is made up of viscerally and intellectually stimulating compositions influenced in subtle ways by Navajo, Hopi, and other Native American music. Cacioppo has a unique creative voice that deserves to be heard.
I note that "Roger," commenting on an earlier blog entry, protested my description of the "constantly shouting" Joseph Calleja as Macduff in a Met performance of Verdi's Macbeth this past spring and attributed my words to "ignorance," rather than allowing for a difference of opinion. A musician who attended all the Macbeth rehearsals and performances wrote to me privately that he found Calleja "'promising' but green and monochrome, and does he think he always has the melody?" And yet another musician, who was sitting next to me at the performance I attended, had a more negative opinion than mine of Calleja. So that makes at least three ignoramuses. I have no idea whether or not "Roger" is ignorant or knowledgeable, but he must have learned about democracy by reading Mein Kampf.
The first installment of my backward glance at the just-ending New York musical season was all about the Met. This time I'm thinking about some of the events that I attended at Carnegie Hall in 2007-08 -- first and foremost, Andras Schiff's four magnificent recitals (two in October, two in April) that covered, more or less chronologically, the first 17 of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas.
Schiff often does "bulk programming" of composers -- cycles of works by Bach, Schubert, Bartok, and others. Although I am sure that he has been familiar with the Beethoven sonatas since student days, he waited until he was about 50 (he was born in 1953) to consider and then perform these monuments of the keyboard repertoire as a single corpus.
Which is not to say that he places these monuments on pedestals. On the contrary: his interpretations are characterized above all by enlivening freshness -- a freshness that can be achieved only by artists who are willing to contemplate a work from every angle and, for each detail, to discard one solution after another until they hit upon the one that seems to fit most naturally into the whole concept. Intellectual rigor, emotional intensity, and musical imagination abounded in all of these performances, which were conveyed with the tremendous conviction and technical security that are part of this great artist's basic equipment. I am already looking forward to the remaining four recitals next season.
Among other fine piano recitals at Carnegie this season, Radu Lupu's January appearance was memorable for a brilliant performance of Book I of Debussy's Preludes. The following month Alfred Brendel movingly performed a mixed program (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert) as part of his final American tour; he will retire completely from the concert circuit next January. In March, Emanuel Ax, whose artistic growth in recent years has been practically exponential, gave outstanding performances of two Beethoven sonatas (Op. 2, No. 2, and the "Appassionata") and Schumann's Humoreske and Papillons. And in April, Leif Ove Andsnes presented a mixed program of which the highlight, as in Radu Lupu's recital, was a series of luminous interpretations of Debussy's Preludes -- in this case, a selection of eleven pieces from Books I and II. Far less successful, to my way of thinking, were recitals, in Carnegie's beautiful, mid-sized Zankel Hall, by Stephen Hough, who played on the surface of Mendelssohn's Variations serieuses and Beethoven's Sonata Op. 111, and Till Fellner, whom I had heard play beautifully in Switzerland a few years ago but who now, in a strange potpourri of a program (Mozart, Schumann, Liszt, Holliger, Ravel) seemed intent on demonstrating that he isn't "merely" a serious, Central European pianist but also a brilliant virtuoso. Virtuosity and depth ought to be mutually beneficial, but in this case the former often seemed to have been achieved at the expense of the latter.
I apologize if I'm boring you, but my enthusiasm for James Levine's work in the Met's pit this past season was carried over to his Carnegie concert appearances. Particularly noteworthy was a program in October by the MET Chamber Ensemble at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall: the first half consisted of amazingly accomplished performances of complex works by three living American masters -- Elliott Carter (nearly 99 at the time), Milton Babbitt (91), and John Harbison (a babe of 69), all of them present at the event -- and in the second half the same three composers became Soldier, Devil, and Narrator, respectively, in an exhilarating interpretation of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale; the narration, rewritten for the occasion, was witty enough that it would surely have won the composer's approval. I confess that I still can't get the hang of Babbitt's works, but the soprano Judith Bettina deserved a medal, at the very least, for her virtuosic and virtually non-stop traversal of his densely packed, 22-minute The Head of the Bed. In January, the same ensemble, again under Levine, played six Second Viennese School works, including Berg's Chamber Concerto, with pianist Yefim Bronfman and violinist Gil Shaham, and Schoenberg's Pierrot luanire, with soprano Anja Silja, with polish and conviction. The following month, Levine and the whole Met Orchestra gave a shattering performance of Webern's Six Pieces, Op. 6, at the start of a memorable concert that also comprised Mozart's C minor Piano Concerto, K. 491, with Brendel (a few days before the aforementioned recital); Berg's Three Pieces, Op. 6, and the final scene from Salome, with Deborah Voigt in top form.
Also in February, two concerts by the Chicago Symphony under Pierre Boulez included the New York premiere of Matthias Pintscher's Osiris, which I found hard to fathom (the limitation is mine, of course), and music by Bartok (the Third Piano Concerto, with Mitsuko Uchida, in a performance that began too preciously but intensified from movement to movement), Debussy (all three of the Images), Berio, Berlioz (Les Nuits d'ete, beautifully interpreted by Susan Graham), and Stravinsky (the 1911 version of Petrouchka). I doubt that I will ever hear clearer, more luminous, or more brilliantly executed performances of the Debussy or the Stravinsky, and yet both suffered from that lack of forward movement that afflicts Boulez's interpretations when he seems to be concentrating more on bar-by-bar sound than on a work's overall architecture: you can't see the forest for the trees. It was like listening to a brilliantly analytical rehearsal rather than to a completely communicative performance.
In November Zankel Hall was the site of a fine performance by the Zehetmair String Quartet (Mozart, Hindemith, Schumann), but the most remarkable event that I witnessed there this season was the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble's performance, in January, of Boulez's Le Marteau sans maitre and sur Incises under the composer's direction, and with a pre-performance conversation between Boulez and Ara Guzeliminian, Carnegie's former artistic administrator. To my taste, sur Incises is a much more attractive work than Le Marteau, which has become a classic of the 20th century's avant-garde; in any case, both were played with apparent ease by these virtuosic young musicians from all over the world, under the nearly 83-year-old master's guidance.
For me, the Carnegie/Zankel season ended pleasantly on May 11 with a concert by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by Douglas Boyd and with Dawn Upshaw as the fine soloist in some Stravinsky songs (Two Poems of Konstantin Balmont and Three Japanese Lyrics), Ravel's Three Poems of Stephane Mallarme, and Osvaldo Golijov's not terribly effective arrangements of four Schubert lieder. (Why has there been a resurgence of interest in old and new orchestrations of Schubert's songs? No matter how skillful the arranger, the pieces simply don't sound as good with orchestral accompaniment as they do in the original voice-and-piano blend created by the composer.) The other works on this program were Dvorak's Serenade for Winds and Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite (1949 revision), deftly and arrestingly executed by this fine Minnesota ensemble.
A few performances to remember - 1
i have been remiss in updating this blog because I was participating in a seminar on "The Musician as Listener" at the Orpheus Institute in beautiful Ghent, Belgium. I discovered that in addition to van Eyck's celebrated altarpiece in the cathedral, Ghent has a lovely art museum that contains first-rate works by Bosch, Brueghel, van der Weyden, van Dyck, Rubens, Hals, Gericault (one of the extraordinary portraits of mad people that he was working on when he died), Corot, Courbet, Rodin, Redon, Ensor, Kokoschka, Magritte, and many others. And of course I had to devote a great deal of concentration to the task of stuffing myself with Belgian chocolates.
But back to musical matters. As New York's 2007-08 musical season draws to a close, I would like to take a backward glance at some of the performances I attended this year. In this blog entry, I'll limit myself to a few of the 14 or 15 Met productions that I observed.
Two new productions -- Lucia di Lammermoor and Macbeth -- were memorable above all for the conducting of James Levine. This statement may cause some surprise, because the Donizetti work in particular and to some extent also Verdi's earliest Shakespearean foray are considered primarily "singers' operas" rather than "conductors' operas," and most of the critics' attention in both cases was understandably focused on the singing and the new productions. Certainly Natalie Dessay was remarkable as both singer and actress in Lucia (as also in Donizetti's La Fille du regiment toward the end of the season), but her voice is not a huge one. Levine not only balanced the orchestra to match the soprano's capabilities -- a relatively easy task for any competent opera conductor: he actually adapted the dynamic levels of the entire opera to Dessay's resources, so that the orchestra wasn't suddenly playing noticeably softer for her. That, my friends, requires large quantities of experience and intelligence. And it means that one of the golden rules for singers -- The Softer You Sing, The More Clearly You Must Enunciate -- was also being obeyed by Levine and his magnificent orchestra. The Lucia production, directed by Mary Zimmerman and designed by Daniel Ostling, had its beauties (the wintry first act, for instance), but it was marred by numerous absurdities, of which the most noteworthy was the photo op for Lucia, her family, and the wedding guests, who mugged calmly while singing the grandiose, emotionally charged sextet in Act II. This error of judgement made me think of the Italian director Giorgio Strehler's statement to the effect that you can stage a great work as arbitrarily as you like, but please remember that your miserable ideas will look very, very small next to the work itself. The production's other principal cast members (Marcello Giordani as Edgardo, Mariusz Kwiecien as Enrico, and John Relyea as Raimondo) did not match Dessay's technical level, but all were well prepared
Strehler created a brilliant production of Verdi's Macbeth at La Scala in 1975; the setting was medieval but highly stylized, and every movement the singers made had a reason for existing, By contrast, Adrian Noble's new Met production, set in modern times, teemed with visual effects that, to this audience member, seemed largely gratuitous. With the exception of the young tenor Dimitri Pittas (Macduff), the principal singers (Zeljko Lucic and Maria Guleghina as Macbeth and his lady, respectively, and John Relyea as Banquo) were unexceptional; once again it was Levine's handling of the orchestra and the entire ensemble (including the chorus, excellently prepared by Donald Palumbo) that made these performances worth hearing -- truly dramatic, and with none of the heavy-handedness of Claudio Abbado's conducting of that way-back-when Scala production. A later run of Macbeth performances had a less worn-out-sounding Macbeth (Carlos Alvarez), a dramatically intense but vocally rough Lady (Hasmik Papian), a magnificent Banquo (Rene Pape), and a constantly shouting Macduff (Joseph Calleja), but the ensemble was, if anything, even more dramatically convincing than in the fall.
More specific highlights of the Met season, for this listener, were the singing of Susan Graham and Placido Domingo in Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride and of Anthony Dean Griffey and most of the other cast members in Britten's Peter Grimes. A serious disappointment, on the other hand, was Karita Mattila (an artist I greatly admire) in the title role of Puccini's Manon Lescaut -- a role that simply does not lie right for her voice. And I confess that I would rather spend a week in jail (if I could have writing materials with me) than listen to another performance of Philip Glass's Satyagraha. I tried -- I really did -- but I found it a crashing bore. For me, however, the season ended wonderfully with Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, splendidly sung by the amazing Susan Graham and the rest of the cast (Ramon Vargas, Tamar Iveri, Heidi Grant Murphy, Anke Vondung, and Oren Gradus), incisively conducted by Harry Bicket, and still beautiful to watch in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's 1984 production.
I've looked up a note I wrote to myself on June 22, 1976, after having observed Riccardo Muti (who was then not quite 35) rehearse the orchestra of La Scala. Bear in mind as you read the following excerpts from those hastily jotted-down pages, that I myself was active as a conductor at the time, although at very modest levels, and that I had previously followed the rehearsals of George Szell, Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Karel Ancerl, Claudio Abbado, Carlo Maria Giulini, Karl Boehm, Carlos Kleiber, Georges Pretre and many other conductors.
"I had heard many good things about him [...] and was prepared to shake my head and wonder what all the fuss was about - as is usually the case. I am delighted that the reverse is true: I feel that he has not been praised highly enough.
"[...] He knows exactly what sound he wants and he knows exactly how to get it - and this not only in regard to the general, overall picture (which he never loses sight of) but in regard to every detail. His mastery of the score is complete, his ear absolutely first-rate, and his way of dealing with the orchestra just right - firm, always demanding the best they can give, but totally unauthoritarian. His attitude in front of the orchestra is unegocentric - it is that of working towards a common goal, and he never loses sight of that. He has the ability and self-possession of a Szell or a Boulez, but far greater naturalness and humanity than the former and a sense of conviction that the latter seems to be lacking in a considerable chunk of the repertoire. [...] And as much as I admired Carlos Kleiber's work here earlier this season, I must say that I think Muti's natural gifts, certainly insofar as balance, intonation, and sheer memorization of detail are concerned, are greater than Kleiber's. They both communicate enthusiasm to the orchestra very well, but in completely different ways. Kleiber is more 'personal,' one has more of a sense of his own psychological make-up [...], whereas with Muti what radiates is more a sense of drama [...]. Muti seems more a phenomenon of nature."
During the intervening 32 years, I have had dozens, perhaps hundreds, of opportunities to observe Muti at work in Milan and elsewhere, in the opera house and concert hall, and my initial impression of his complete seriousness, competence, and musicality has remained unchanged. Do I always, automatically, agree with his repertoire choices or interpretations? Of course not. But what is most important in conductor-orchestra relationships is the feeling on the part of individual musicians that the person in charge is guiding them expertly and with conviction - that that person can be trusted completely to do the job in an outstanding way and can therefore communicate the need to do likewise to the people who are playing the instruments. Over the last three years, watching and listening to Muti work with the grateful and enthusiastic Orchestra Cherubini (a youth ensemble) in the small town of Piacenza, Italy, was an absolute delight, and then observing him electrify the New York Philharmonic - which, like most other first-rate professional orchestras, can often be ungrateful and unenthusiastic, usually with good reason - was simply amazing.
As a New York resident - and despite my esteem for Alan Gilbert and high hopes for his forthcoming tenure with the Philharmonic - I am sorry that Muti will be diminishing his appearances with the local band, but at least we will be able to look forward to frequent visits by him with the magnificent Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
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