Underrated Classical Music 3/6/20

Was on family duty tonight and sadly haven't had time to write the essay I was planning that began our discussion of what non-classical music should now be considered an indisputable part of the canon. Perhaps in the wake of McCoy Tyner's passing today, two musical friends mentioned Bill Evans on social media today. So here is a work every music lover of every genre should know:

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Every time I think about doing another post at the Times of Israel and attempt #10047 at polemical journalism, I get a little queasy. It's not the continued lack of success I mind. We all reap what we sow. If by some miracle it took off this time I'd really rather not expose myself to 50,000 pieces of invective directed at me. No one would have so much invective directed at him so richly deserved, but what purpose would it serve? Would it cause my hopes for the world closer to fruition, or farther away? Better to abuse my friends I guess....

No, what bothers is the futility of it. The futility of knowing that even the smallest parts of what you'd advocate for would never come to pass; that you do not respect most people's points of view and that they obviously don't respect yours in kind. What could possibly be the point of retread #1003 about why it's important that the Democratic Party get its house in order when you know that even if we ever did get it in order, it would be with people who worship gods you find Satanic at the top? Every side of the party, the party that should know better, has betrayed hundreds of millions - moderates have of course betrayed women, racial and sexual minorities, and the poor... All that goes without saying. Like the Republican Party, what's bad about them is not news to anybody but them, and why hammer them yet again when the entire internet does?

But progressives have betrayed all those same people everywhere that isn't within our borders and think the world will somehow take care of itself if America leaves it to its own devices. They've even managed to betray people at home by somehow turning their beliefs into a religion, complete with an invisible system which determines favor and disfavor, ongoing auditions for a messiah who inevitably disappoints them, and since the Obama era doing a 180 from the belief that with enough conversation everyone in the world can learn to respect each other, to somehow believing that the whole world can be shamed into compliance with their view of it, and being completely blind to the fact that everything about their beliefs are unrecognizable from what they espoused just five years ago. In five years, they'll be unrecognizable yet again, embracing a completely different kit of snake oil.

And meanwhile, like the devil, social 'democrats' conjure images of a transformation of society that will never, ever, ever happen, and when it doesn't, yet again, they'll be shocked, shocked(!), when much more militant fringe groups within them demand revolution through mass violence, and enact their demands. There's nothing more to say than that, I've exhausted all my Bernie invective over the years....

And in the meantime, everyone will have accomplished in fantasy what can't be accomplished in reality, while the grip of the Republican Party becomes ever tighter, selfishness turning into corruption, corruption turning into authoritarianism, authoritarianism turning into a cult of personality, a cult of personality turning into.... 

And old-school liberal Democrats like me, guilty of perhaps most drastic betrayal of all for for being too broadminded to take our own side in a quarrel and ever allowing these offshoots to grow like cancers that had to be irradiated or simply cut off before they metastasized. For letting the difficulty of the challenge get in the way of what we knew would eventually become issues of life and death for billions, and even if we were always going to be terribly unworthy messengers at the best of times, letting each wing of the party subtract a little, bit by bit, from the full equation, knowing what was happening, and letting it go on anyway, because it was too personally difficult for each of us to tell people we know 'what you believe is a dangerous pile of shit.'

Not necessarily betrayal by compromise, but betrayal by compromising the conceptual core, the foundational vision, of everything we were working for. It's one thing to compromise on tactics and budgets and alliances, if you don't compromise on that, you've never done anything in your life; but to compromise on core beliefs, to say, for the millionth time, 'maybe they have do a point.' Of course they have a point! They sometimes agree with us! Sometimes they even have a point we've completely overlooked, but we evolve, they stay put. The only change they ever experience is a complete conversion, and somehow everything they once knew was wrong and everything they now believe is right. How many millions of them grew up in the Church and the military; they once were blind, but they awoke, and now they see. How many of their parents once supported Students for a Democratic Society and then became Reagan Democrats, and sometimes even Bush Republicans? Did 10 million of them vote for Reagan? 15 million? Whichever side, their level of belief doesn't allow for hypocrisy, so once they sell out a little bit, they can sell out the whole fucking thing. One of these days, millions of these lemmings are going to find a whole new set of beliefs yet again, and whether it's some perversion of social justice or some pervesion of Jesus, they're not gonna find another soft version of it, they're gonna find the fire and brimstone, and they're gonna use it. They always eventually do, and we let our own fears of how miserable they can make us now let us absolve them of what every history book says some of them will eventually do. 

This is life I guess, and maybe it's all inevitable. Life is disappointment, life is failure. If you're lucky enough to live a long life, you get to watch as everything you value, everything you believe in, everything you love, eventually disappears, and so eventually you disappear, and I do too, and all of us, and everyone we ever knew. 

At this point, I don't believe in progress, certainly not in any linear sort of progress. Life is a series of moving rocks we all try to keep our balance upon so that they don't crush us. The more problems we solve, the bigger the problems get, and the more the rocks lurch, until one day there is nothing again but the rock....

All that remains is the inner experience, the moments of grace or khen that stand between us and the rock's face. Maybe what we perceive as God is just the face of the rock who inevitably comes to bludgeon us. For better or worse, politics is always necessary, but it only makes life worth living if it's being used to improve people's lives. No Republican has improved a net positive of lives since Eisenhower, and the current Democratic Party has only a couple of used up husks with a bunch of promises that everybody who hasn't drank the kool-aid knows can never be fulfilled. 

What makes life worth living is not the religion of politics, it is not the certainty that we're right and they're wrong. Politics will break the hearts of everyone who believes in it. What makes it worth living is those moments between life's heartbreak when, whether through love, or children, or sports, or games, or knowledge and art for its own sake and no other, we find ourselves connected with the miracles of more hopeful worlds than this one. Perhaps that hope is an illusion, but if it's an illusion, it's the illusion we're all hard-wired to need. If we're all quarantined in a week-or-three, do yourselves a favor. You'll be tempted to use extra time to consume more news. For the love of God, don't do it. Be there for your children, read, listen to music, play games, fall in love again with your spouse. The best hope we have for a better political situation is to do whatever it takes to not think about the situation. 

So back to music and books I at least try to go, hopefully there'll still be a planet on which people can appreciate whatever I come up with.

Underrated Classical Music 3/5/20

So let's talk about Christopher Rouse today. For as long as I've been here, he was a presence around Baltimore, unmistakable either in the concert hall or at Peabody or anywhere else, and occasionally a controversial one. I always heard some grumblings from Peabody student composers about how ungenerous he was to them, though many other composers of every age group clearly felt very differently, including some at Peabody. But grumbling always how the new generation does about the old. By the time I started moving in the circles of Baltimore music professionals, Rouse was the definition of the musical establishment. He was a Falstaffian physical giant with the apposite beard and gut which seemed to grow larger every year, whose personality and music operated in perfect harmony with his presence.

He was a true Baby Boomer, highly erudite on a seemingly infinite number of subjects, but whose knowledge of rock music was as fearsomely encyclopedic as his knowledge of the standard repertoire, a son of enormous privilege whose uncle, Jim Rouse, was an even much bigger presence around Baltimore who designed Columbia, Maryland, perhaps America's most famous planned community which one Slovak friend of mine often described as 'the last Communist state.' Ironic perhaps, because by accounts I heard, Christopher Rouse was one of classical music's few avowed right-wingers.

Was Rouse a truly great composer? Well, are any of us? But he was truly very, very good. Excepting John Adams, he had no peer among his generation of Americans in his ability to write for the orchestra, and the orchestral commissions came flowing to him right up to the end. For every American orchestra, his music was practically furniture adorning its season. And it was probably the Baltimore Symphony and David Zinman who rocketed him into whatever mild stratosphere American composers can ever be launched.

The rock influence in his music was everywhere. Those dark, gothic orchestral sonorities that were clearly composed with Phil Spector's wall of sound in his ears. I don't know how much of what he wrote had depth beyond the noise, but it was certainly memorable dark comedy. American audiences are rarely appreciative of new music, but it wouldn't surprise me if orchestras found it enormous fun to play.

I don't remember the name of the work, but a couple years ago, Marin Alsop premiered a work at the BSO that was dedicated to her. It was utterly different from anything I'd ever heard from Rouse: quiet, elegiac, truly spiritual music. We should have known that something was changing at a very fundamental level.

I think Der Gerettete Alberich (a percussion concerto that crosses themes by Wagner with rock drumming - I was at the world premiere - in 1996?) and Karolju (a suite of original Christmas carols modeled on Carmina Burana) are my favorite Rouse pieces. Rouse wrote an enormous amount of music, and I won't claim to have heard anywhere near everything, but Rouse could orchestrate the phonebook interestingly, and he had a special talent for knowing how to incorporate older composers' material - whether parody or tribute, and there's a little extra affection in those pieces. Maybe it was because at his heart he was, like many of us, a music lover, and his music was the outpouring of deeply devoted fan.

Underrated Classical Musicians 3/4/20

So let's talk about Matthias Pintscher today.



But first, and you'll see why this is important in a moment, Marin is leaving Baltimore. Mention her name online, and the misogynist music trolls come out in full force to declare that she only advanced to her current position because she was a woman. Music message boards are populated with mole people.

Anyone who calls Marin Alsop a terrible conductor needs their ears checked. Nobody at this point can call her underrated, but there are a number of other American conductors in her generation who have given just as many uninspiring performances as she, yet get nowhere near the same drubbings. No second guesses as to why.... do her musical accomplishments make her deserve to be the first woman director of a major American orchestra? Probably not when Joann Falletta has achieved so much while so many fewer breaks have gone her way, but anybody who believes that Marin is any more humdrum than Alan Gilbert, Robert Spano, Gerard Schwartz, David Robertson, is not listening properly. If you need a Carlos Kleiber every time you go to the concert hall who gives inspiring performances of pieces you already know like the back of your hand, she's not that. But if you want someone who gives fabulously unconventional experiences, with unconventional repertoire, and unconventional presentations, then by that metric, yes, Marin Alsop is as great as it gets, and will quite possibly be remembered as a better and more important conductor than many traditional 'maestros' who neither advanced nor preserved classical music in the manner Marin did. She deserves so much better than she got here, and even if we don't realize how much we miss her yet, this very volatile town will realize very quickly the stable and generous presence that we had and lost. If classical music is going to survive past 2030, Marin Alsop is the kind of conductor America needs, and it's thoroughly selfish to demand this art form be judged by metrics of a past that has died out so very quickly.

My violin teacher in college was the sometime concertmaster of both the Baltimore and Washington operas, and she would simply rate conductors on a out of ten numerical scale. When Alsop arrived, she was a 7, now that she's leaving, she's an 8. If that's damning with faint praise, there are a lot of 6s on the international circuit, even a few 5s and 4s, and every musician has to work with 2s and 3s. Marin's clearly worked very hard to improve both the orchestra and her music making, she's given the community of Baltimore more by far than any other BSO director, and in terms of taking her responsibilities to her organization seriously, she may be the best we've ever had, and even if she wasn't the music director a lot of musicians wanted, she was the faithful steward the organization and its city direly needed. May she go in peace and receive a more respectful reception than we ever gave her.

The probable favorite to replace her is the British-Canadian Peter Oundjian, an 8/10, the old director of the Toronto Symphony, a fine musician and a bigger name than this town could reasonably expect to get considering our recent troubles, but Oundjian would be nearly 70 by the time he would come here. He's a violinist who only became a conductor at 50 because of an injury, his musical ideas were always better than his conducting technique, which is rather elementary and probably hampered by his injury. He sometimes gives extraordinary performances, in both their insight and execution. He also can be quite bland.

I yearn for our old principal guest, Markus Stenz, an 11/10 who very well might be the world's greatest conductor. He plays literally everything, and seems to interpret it all with incredible imagination and render his interpretations with literally awesome execution. But I've heard from multiple musicians that Stenz is not to be. I dearly hope Markus reconsiders over the next year. Even the Berlin Philharmonic would be lucky to have Stenz as their music director, and whichever of the world's orchestras gets him next will become one of the world's greatest.

There are a number of other interesting names in the mix: the Austrian David Danzmayr, a 9.5/10 unknown who is my age, or 10/10 veterans who need a crowning achievement to their careers like the Spanish Juanjo Mena (who nearly was the MD instead of Alsop). Other promising names have appeared on the schedule that could be nearly or just as interesting like the 910/10 Finn Hannu Lintu, a 10/10 Romanian named Christian Macelaru, and an extremely little known young Norwegian named Rune Bergmann who may himself be a 10. The 9/10 mad genius, Mario Venzago, is returning, but sadly Venzago is well over 70 now, and while he was a contender to replace Zinman twenty years ago, it's pretty much unfeasible now. The conductor of color on this schedule is Canadian of Tridnidadian extraction named Kwame Ryan, he strikes me as an 8/10 who is slowly but surely amassing a quite distinguished career. Were he our next music director, I would probably not complain. There are two women conductors on the schedule, both very young. One is the extremely well-resumed Korean, Eun Sun Kim, former assistant to both Daniel Barenboim and Kirill Petrenko, and just appointed director of the San Francisco Opera. I recently heard her lead The Magic Flute at the Washington Opera, I wish I could say I found her conducting better than terrible. More promising though is the still much less known is the extremely young Russian Anna Rakitina, current assistant to Andris Nelsons in Boston, who on brief acquaintance strikes me real talent, but still too inexperienced to implement

But the most fascinating name I've heard rumors about is one of the world's pre-eminent avant grade composers, whom my contacts told me has expressed serious interest in being the music director for this very good orchestra in this very dangerous American city. Matthias Pintscher, German but based in New York, professor of composition at Juilliard, and current music director of Ensemble InterContemporain, the most famous modern music ensemble in the world. Is Pintscher a great conductor? Well, composers are generally terrible conductors, and for a composer, he's fucking Furtwangler. Pintscher is a soft 9. But in terms of gifts as an all-around musician, Pintscher is a 12, a musical unicorn who seems to be one of those rare complete packages that composes, conducts, teaches, plays piano.

German modernism is not an aesthetic for everybody, it's sometimes not an aesthetic for me. Pintscher's music, (which, to my shock, is often based on Jewish themes), will never be to any taste but those who have a penchant for the 'out-there.' If your tastes lean toward art rock and acid jazz, I imagine you will take very well to Pintscher. I would also imagine that his music would go down at the Baltimore Symphony about as successfully as drano.

But there is a truly fearsome musical mind at work in his music. It weird to say that the avant-garde is now a reactionary force, but when listening to Pintscher, I feel as though I'm listening to the mathematically functional atonality of our grandparents generation - Pierre Boulez, Toru Takemitsu, Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Kurtag, even Anton von Webern.

This ten minute piano piece, 'On a Clear Day' is a perfect example. It feels like immersion in perfectly distilled cold water. The shock of this purity is something one doesn't recover from easily. Pintscher's harmonies may be extraordinarily dissonant, but the color of the sounds he instructs the performer to make practically glisten in a way that makes his dissonances almost luminous. If your mind is at a properly ascetic and meditative headspace, this is beautiful, glowing music of the spirit.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I honestly thought I'd be happier by Biden's victory, but I'm not getting any pleasure out of it. We're too far from where we were in 2016 to turn the world back to the way it was, we're also too far away from away from any solid ground to turn the whole ship upside down without us all drowning. The best chance by far is a candidate both sides of the party find at least acceptable, and Warren ws, is, the only possible choice. It's highly probably that 1/4 or more of primary voters would never vote for Bernie, and that a different 1/4 or more of primary voters would never vote for Biden. The math just doesn't add up to victory. And even if Bernie endorses Biden, it would now be so easy for a Tulsi Gabbard to get 4 million votes in the general. Even if COVID-19 is every bit as bad as some experts think, would that really, at this point, be enough to focus people's minds on how much still worse things can get, and that, compared to what could happen, we're all still muddling through?

Whether or not one views the other side of any disagreement as unconscionable, democracy is dependent on hundreds of millions of people holding their noses and casting a vote for a people they don't particularly care for, whom they know make promises they won't keep, so that they stop people with a cultish gleam in their eyes from fulfilling promises they do keep, and convincing all their friends, acquaintances, irritants, and even enemies, to do exactly the same thing. All those other things: inspiration, intention, love, those are meant for our personal lives, not for national movements and presidential candidates who, should they ever be elected, will never stop disappointing us. An abstract image we see on our TV's and phones has no idea who we are, and can never truly love us back. 

Even at its best, life is kind of miserable; it's a lot of pointless responsibilities, loved ones who let us down, doors of opportunity slammed in our faces, and yes, all kinds of systems calibrated to work against our well-being. And there are two even bigger injustices than all this: one is that the more good times a person has, the less accustomed one is to tragedy and the more those miserable moments feel shocking and hurtful for people for unaccustomed to experiencing injustices than for people who've grown used to it, and the other, still bigger, injustice is that those moments full of personal betrayals and hopes dashed are the good times. The bad times are when the whole thing breaks down and it's every person for themself in a situation of life and death that could go on well past the moment you and everyone you love is killed. It hasn't happened in America in our lifetime, but it's happening in Syria, it's happening in Yemen, it's happening everywhere the Mexican Drug Cartels are located, and yes, it's happening in Afghanistan. Politics is the cure to all that, it's also the cause. Politics is inevitable and necessary, but it is so very dangerous, what choice is there but to be extremely careful about every move we make? 

But through all those vicissitudes, there are a few people who have better lives than the rest of us, and seem to go through life with nary a scratch. And almost by definition, they're usually the ones who rise to positions of power, and because they have no idea what life's like for the rest of us, we don't have much reason to trust them. Joe Biden was a Senator from literally (not 'Joe Biden Literally') before his 30th birthday to the day he become Vice President at 66, when he literally (again, not 'Joe Biden Literally') became President of the Senate. That is one side of Joe Biden, the guy who has absolutely no clue how easy he's had it, and therefore sees no reason why he should be circumspect in what he says, and finds it all too easy to walk back his commitments to the people whom he claims to champion. 

The other side to Joe Biden is the side that lost his daughter and wife and almost lost his two sons just days before he took the oath of office. Joe Biden talked constantly this past year about a battle for the soul of America, and like a lot of privileged people, he doesn't necessarily realize that the battle for the soul of America is really a battle for his own soul. Biden was not shaped by the sixties, but by the 'early sixties', by the idealism of John Kennedy, and unlike Bill Clinton, I think he really believes in it. He's clearly gone his entire life believing in the adage Clinton coined, 'there's nothing wrong with America that can't be cured by what is right with America.' But that's obviously not true, and that is why I didn't trust him enough to support him.

But at least to a certain extent, life and America are both what we form them into. If Biden becomes President, he at least has a chance to prove some of his belief in America correct. Biden, like America, is now very old, and has a very long, detailed, and complex history. Every generation has new priorities and looks at yesterday's progressives as reactionaries. A generation ago, Biden was an impediment to everything from desegregation, to gay marriage, to women's treatment in the workplace, to financial regulation, and half-a-dozen more things whose problems seem obvious now. Our generation wasn't there, we only have vague memories and the stories of our elders to understand what it was like to live in 1990 and why our parents made the decisions they did, all we know is the effects their decisions have. One day, our children's generation will judge our choices just as harshly for reasons we can't possibly fathom yet. 

Biden should not be President, but he's the perfect incarnation of America right now: old, forgetful, and narcissistic, and the fact that he ultimately seems to mean well makes the hypocrisy of his failures that much harder to bear. So therefore, Biden is the perfect emblem of the Left's choice. Would you rather to see America back on the old track: hypocritical and self-aggrandizing, but still the fairest superpower the world ever had, even if there's an inherent injustice in being a superpower who lords it over everybody else; or would you rather chance that we become a dystopia like Syria or Russia? Biden is a representative of an America so old that it remembers what those dystopias were like, they fought those dystopias abroad and won, they still can win against dystopia at home. 

Mediocre as Biden often is, mediocre as America often is, you may think that America as it used to be was never good enough to fight for with everything you've got. You're wrong. You may or may not care for this country, but it's the one the vast majority of you have always lived in. And like America, like life itself, there's still a chance to make it a little less disappointing. Against total failure, a little less disappointment is always worth fighting for.

Underrated Classical Musicians: 3/3/20

On this last day of our first "underrated works by rated composers 'festival'", we'll do Dvorak, whose music I love ever more and more and more. Some composers, even great ones like Wagner and Stravinsky, can be cold of heart, they do not soothe the soul, they inflame it. But Dvorak is so warm and open of heart that his music can never cease to be a welcome presence. If I had to listen to one composer's chamber music for the rest of my life, I'd miss Schubert very much, but I would not hesitate to pick him. If I had to listen to one piece of chamber music for the rest of my life, I would probably pick the Dumky Trio (which ends with a theme that John Williams shamelessly appropriated for the main theme of ET). 

Everybody who goes regularly to classical concerts knows the 'American Quartet,' but you have to be pretty advanced before you know about the 'American Quintet.' Both of them were written during Dvorak's time in America when he headed the first American conservatory. This was also the period when Dvorak wrote his two most famous works, the 'New World Symphony' and the Cello Concerto. I think the American Quintet is worthy to stand alongside them. 

Not that any comparison is necessary, but I think it's probably the better of the two works. All I can say is that it's just so beautiful, from first bar to last. I'll get out of the way and let you listen.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Warren is easily the closest, but there is not a single candidate in this election who represents me. And of course there rarely is. I wonder if there's been a candidate like that since Hubert Humphrey in 1968. I adored how Warren went after Bloomberg, but I want someone who goes as hard after Bernie and Bloomberg in equal measure. Unless it's a true political necessity, no concessions to vulture capitalism, no concessions to Marxism. No concessions to the religious right, no concessions to the culture of intersectionality and social justice. Using government to provide essential social services which are much greater than those we currently have, and also creating the circumstances where businesses can thrive in (fair and well-regulated) competition. Well-funded education so that the standard of living can vastly improve, tempered by the realization that there is no improvement in standard of living without properly trained and funded rule of law. Fighting for human rights at home, and at very least aiding human rights abroad before their human rights concerns become ours - and on seldom occasions of necessity, that means fighting abroad too. Lincoln and FDR would have gone after it all. And so, believe it or not, would Nancy Pelosi were she running for President. Policies to favor the growth of a huge middle class, with social programs to aid the poor and and acceptance that some people will simply accumulate wealth and we tax them therefore accordingly. To improve the world, you need someone who has the vision to dream big, the stomach to fight big, and the brains to do it all smart. And if America's progress has stalled, the reason is very, very clear. There was a dominant political ideology during the mid-century, made possible by prosperity but tempered by hardship that spurred the biggest leap forward humanity ever took. And like all great things in the world, the moment after we 'got it', we lost it. And for fifty years we've lost our way. Warren, like Obama, is a lot of that package, but Obama was either naive about his opponents, or he didn't have the stomach to fight his enemies, both domestic and foreign. Warren is, if anything, a more complete leader than Obama, but on foreign policy, Warren and her most passionate followers are breathtakingly naive if they think we can cut and run from all sorts of military commitments without Russia and China stepping into the vacuum, or that Russia and (in a different way) China will not continue to do everything within their power to subvert our democracy and liberal democracy everywhere else. Maybe circumstances will change her, but if she thinks we're going to scale back our military commitments when dictatorship is simultaneously knocking on the door of every democracy in the world, she's too naive to represent me.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

At this point I'm beyond getting mad at the Israeli election results, but Jews have always been advance scouts or weather vains for troubles in the rest of the world. This is an example of a chief executive who doesn't like the results, so he keeps getting chance after chance to get the results he wants. I doubt I need point out what that portends for us. 

There's plenty more to say about this, but for now I'll just say that in 2020, there is no such thing as impartiality and bipartisanship when you're advocating for a country that is at least arguably a dictatorship now, to a US Presidential administration with a chief executive who would probably like to be a dictator. There are, I'm sorry to say, valid and legitimate arguments for supporting dictators, but anybody who collaborates with a dictator cannot fool themselves about what they're doing, because they're fooling nobody else.

Underrated Classical Musicians: 3/2/20

Just listen to the opening four minutes. If you're not hooked you need a drug stronger than music....

So after one guy kept bugging me about doing underrated music by well-known composers and wouldn't take no for an answer, I decided to do an experiment is that on the first three days of the month, that's exactly what we're going to do. And now this guy seems to be nowhere to be found....

So here is one of my favorite pieces of music in the world, The Wooden Prince, a ballet by Bartok that conveys Bartok at his essence: simultaneously modern and ancient. Bartok does not, as Stravinsky does, reach back into ancient history and update it for the present. Bartok reaches back to a prehistory so ancient that we can only speculate its essence, and updates it into a future so distant that we have barely begun to speculate its properties. Stravinsky’s music is full of ‘intentional wrong notes’ and chords, but the notes are so clearly wrong that they operate by a harmonic framework Bach would recognize. Not so Bartok, and if you’d never heard Eastern European folk music, you’d think Bartok invented his own tonality.

Bartok can only be understood through the oral musical traditions who surrounded him. His music may seem ultramodern, but it is so old in spirit that it predates history itself. No amount of reading on wikipedia can give you a way into Bartok’s music – it has to be experienced to be appreciated. At the beginning of his career, Stravinsky made immersions in the oral traditions of Russia as Bartok immersed himself into the Balkans; but the ever schematic Stravinsky turned so many Russian and Ukranian folk songs into something antithetical to their spirit, copying their notations out from books assembled by other musicologists so he could put ultramodern spins on the ancient.

Bartok was incapable of any such apathy to folk roots. His modernism is grounded in fidelity to ancient traditions. He notated the music of folk songs as closely as possible to the way the musicians played them, and from the folk music he recorded so precisely, he created music that is an expands upon the spirit of their inspiration. Stravinsky takes us well into the past, but Bartok takes us into eternity. Stravinsky always winks to us that he is truly a musician of the here and now, Bartok tells us that the here and now is an illusion.

And this is why I suspect that Bartok still keeps his face half hidden from us. We are still not global enough a world; too monoglot, too uncomprehending of music and art outside our traditions, still not respectful enough of the other cultures and social classes who live amongst us, and our scientific age is completely uncomprehending of any aspect of the humanities that cannot be quantified. We are still generations away from a true reckoning with Bartok.

To the average American who is not exactly seventy-three, folk music seems like a drudge. But Hungarian/Gypsy folk music is folk music as you’ve never heard it – completely out of place with hippies in an American coffeeshop. Like Indian Classical Music, African Drumming, or Javanese Gamelan Music, this is music with facets so incredibly complex that one has to wonder if any composer in the West ever caught up to it. And yet, unlike the ancient musical traditions of East Asia, this is truly folk music, a popular music of the people.

And it is from this soil of southeastern Europe that Bartok grows these unique sequoias and poplars. I use this purple prosed metaphor because Bartok’s music sounds as though it comes from the wild, subject to forces so complex no applied science can quantify them.

Again and again, Bartok went on his rural trips to through the Carpathian Mountains and Basin, recording the music of Hungarians, Slovakians, Romanians, Transylvanians, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Wallachians, going even further afield to record Greeks and Turks and Algerians. If you spent decades of your life collecting folk music obsessively, you’d have a completely unique musical perspective too.

To an exponential level beyond any before him (and nearly any after), Bartok operates by a different frame of reference. There’s no mistaking his music for anything but tonality (with a very few exceptions…), but normal rules of harmony don’t apply here. To do s Bartok does, you need vast experience with alternate scales, tunings, rhythms, exactly the sort of training few classical musicians get.

Generally speaking, if you play something different than classical music in the West, you’re playing jazz and rock, which still operates in the same world of Western harmony and rhythm. Bartok, on the other hand, learned the music of the Balkans, a landscape dominated by the world of the Roma (or Gypsies as they’re more commonly known). The Romani people hailed originally from Northern India. It’s impossible not to hear vague echoes of Indian ragas. Along the way to Eastern Europe, they passed through Arab countries. Many lived under Muslim Caliphates. under Byzantium, under the Ottoman Empire, and many lived under the moors of Northern Africa and Spain. The larger Western World, with all its alternate perspectives, is bound into the Romani experience, and therefore in the experience of Romani music.

The Hungarians, speaking a language completely unrelated to any European language until you get as far afield as Finland, are truer than any other European peoples to their pre-historic roots, and there have so little need for high arts when their folk arts are so incredibly wonderful. Compare just one minute of Hungarian or Gypsy folk music to its German equivalent, and you understand why classical music reached its apogee in Germany rather than Hungary. Hungarian/Gypsy folk music is so fascinatingly rich and perfect, German folk music sucks. Look at Magyar/Romani dancing, look at traditional Hungarian costume and embroidery, listen to the fascinating complexity of Hungarian folk tales. These are traditions that were fully modern millennia before modernity, all of it existing since time immemorial as a civilization that needs no modernity to make it more sophisticated. Had modernity not interrupted Hungary so rudely, they could probably keep existing and evolving into an infinite future, accumulating the new flavors of its surrounding environs with every generation; having already been positioned historically and geographically to accumulate influences Germanic, Latin, Slavic, Arabic, Central Asian, and Indian into their own unique cultural voice over a period of millennia. Shall we as a species ever have anything like Bartok’s humility before a natural evolution too complicated for us to ever understand? Have we been spoiled by living apart from the land? Have we ruined the natural evolution of the world by ignoring it?

And this is what The Wooden Prince is about. The plot, like most ballets, is incredibly simple: a human prince falls in love with a princess, who is in love with a 'wooden prince' who comes to life and seduces the princess with the miracle of his being brought to life. A fairy takes pity on the prince's unrequited love, and brings the 'Wooden Prince' to his natural, wooden state, and dresses the Prince in better finery so that he may seduce the princess himself.

In such simple stories amid such powerful music, a wooden prince is surely a metaphor for something. So much of Bartok's music imitates the sounds of nature, often with breathtaking realism. I believe The Wooden Prince is, both the character and the work itself, a metaphor for nature itself, awesome, dangerous, terrific, its destructive capability being precisely what can often make it beautiful, and always capable of transformations we'd never thought possible unless we saw them with our own eyes. In our rationalist, scientific age, it would seem that we've mapped every natural miracle, and yet, here may come the age of climate change, rising sea levels, more and more forceful hurricanes, mass fire, mass extinction, mass pandemics, in which nature works humanity's very ingenuity against itself. So long as we exist in nature, we will always wait and hope for some supernatural being to take pity on us.

Underrated Classical Musicians 3/1/20

(Note: in retrospect, this is the finer Inbal performance. It's perhaps not quite as idiomatic - but it's still one of the most idiomatic ever, but it's with his own orchestra who understands his style better, so the playing is much more incisive as there's no chance for miscommunication, and thus has an electricity nearly unmatched among Mahler 5's.)





So who's the greatest Mahlerian of them all?

I suppose the obvious answer is Lenny, he's certainly the center of the Mahler revival, no matter what Europeans of bad conscience claim. To deny him that place is akin to denying Mendelssohn that role in the Bach revival - sure, people were playing Bach beforehand, but with nothing like the same frequency, widespread appeal, or critical esteem. He was a cult favorite, championed by an educated few, and met by the wider public with bafflement. But even so, there's something about Lenny's Mahler that's pas nicht.... the early recordings are a little brash. the music is still too new, even after all those performances with Walter, Mitropoulos, Barbirolli... the New Yorkers are still awakening to what the music means and just how great it is. The late ones are perceptive on a level the earlier can never approach, but so greatly does Lenny believe in this music (and perhaps himself) that they're like listening to ideal Mahler in slow motion. There can be something a little too serious and pompous about them. Those 70s-Vienna videos? Well, a lot of it is nearly ideal, but not even Lenny can get the Viennese to accept those modernist facets of Mahler they clearly dislike. The gemütlich, the ironic, the gentler sides of Mahler, sound like Mahler played on the Aolian jew-harp. But the harsher, more modern elements often sound as though played on damp squibs.

Perhaps Kubelik has a better claim. His studio cycle is like ideal Mahler on fast-forward, but his live Munich recordings are another level still better. It's perhaps as close as we'll ever get to capturing Mahler in its natural habitat. But even if Kubelik is almost unique in his Mahler perception, he can never get his Bavarians to completely shed their goyisher accent, and they clearly still haven't mastered the music. If the Bavarians always sounded completely idiomatic, the technical mishaps wouldn't matter so much. Kubelik gets them so close, but suddenly you hear a too blended brass chorale or a too legato staccato passage, and the spell can be broken as easily as its cast.

If you want goyisher Mahler, nobody is better than Tennstedt. Tennstedt may be Teutonic to the titwillow, but nobody believes in Mahler the way Tennstedt does. Nobody performs him with greater fervor and force. It is far too heavy-handed, but the drama is never not compelling. Mahler by way of Wagner perhaps, but even if Tennstedt's Deutscher irony can be overbearing, the power sears the ear.

If you want Shostakovichian Mahler, with the visceral drama and irony at the forefront (to say nothing of the brass...), nobody shows that crucial kinship better than Kondrashin. But it is as much an adaptation of Mahler to the needs of a newer generation as the slow and lush Beethoven of the Wagner school. It is truly wonderful, it's also not the full story.

Had Bernard Haitink, god forbid, passed away at 60, he might have been the great Mahlerian for all time. Like Lenny in Vienna, or Kubelik live in Munich, the Haitink Christmas broadcasts from the Concertgebouw in 80's Amsterdam are a one-off event, a near-ideal rendering in so many ways from an ideal Mahler band. But then came the endless remakes in Berlin, London, Chicago, Dresden, Munich, all slower, more restrained, duller. This was a conductor who once said that Mahler was played too often and conductors make too many remakes, only to make a sixth or seventh go-round on the Ninth or the Third...

And of course, there's Abbado, who would be many Mahler-lovers's responses. But young Abbado or old? Chicago/Vienna, Berlin, or Lucerne? There's just so much Abbado Mahler, and every Mahler-lover has a different pick for good Abbado and bad Abbado. This Mahler lover has his own Abbado picks, doubtless different from everybody else's, but perhaps the reason that there's no consensus on what is Abbado's best Mahler is that his Mahler is not entirely Mahlerian - it's too pristine, too well-scrubbed. A Mahler so clean that every note registers pellucidly like the result of a perfectly-oiled machine misses the point. Mahler needs his dirt and battle-scars.

Michael Gielen was a wonderful Mahler conductor who got better and better as he aged, but if Kondrashin was Mahler by way Shostakovich, then Gielen was Mahler by way of Schoenberg. Expressionist Mahler that savored Mahler's bizarre with relish, but if you're looking for good humored nostalgia, you won't find it in Gielen.

There were all sorts of early Mahlerians who clearly responded to Mahler the visionary, but you can almost hear the orchestra's protests. Before 1970, only the Concertgebouw and the New York Philharmonic seemed up to Mahler's challenges. And now, even semi-professional orchestras can play Mahler with more technical mastery than the Berlin Philharmonic could until Karajan picked Mahler up in the 70s.

The fact is, Mahler is played much too often now. He's barely an event anymore, just another great composer played too often for the performances not to sound ordinary. The frission of Bernstein and Kubelik and Tennstedt is no longer there. A lot of conductors play Mahler as though they're giving a alternative view of the music when in fact, all they've done is flatten out everything that makes Mahler interesting and replaced it with nothing at all.

But as always, there are exceptions to mediocrity. But of those who really 'get' Mahler, any of them truly in danger of capturing an ideal? Well, maybe Simon Rattle at times, but Rattle, however great, will always be inconsistent, as any conductor who conducts that much music must invariably be. Markus Stenz has a similarly huge repertoire, and is if anything much more consistent than Rattle, but however good his Cologne recordings, they're too propulsive for ideal Mahler, while Michael Tilson Thomas would be very near the top of the pantheon if he sped up occasionally... Ivan Fischer's Mahler is wonderful but too gentle, Manfred Honeck's Mahler is wonderful but too forceful. But they all must take a back seat to Eliahu Inbal.

Eliahu Inbal is now in his 80s, he began his first cycle of Mahler recordings nearly forty years ago. Forty years ago, he was very good. Twenty years ago, he was great. But now, I wonder if there has ever been a Mahlerian this good. No matter whether the orchestra is in Tokyo, Singapore, Madrid, or Berlin, Prague, or Naples, the idiomaticity he conjures is without precedent in the entire history of Mahler. This is a musician who 'speaks Mahler' more fluently than any conductor ever has, and perhaps ever will. When you hear Inbal perform Mahler, what you' re hearing is closer to the thing in itself than any Mahler has ever been. Mahler is the ultimate janus-face in music, and there is no room in Mahler to stand on solid footing. A Mahlerian must effortlessly weave through the ambiguity between primary emotions, tragedy and comedy, nostalgia and irony, humor and solemnity, heaviness and lightness, dance and song, for a composer so human that nothing is alien to him.

Inbal never had the career of Abbado or Haitink. He's an Israeli, and was clearly too opinionated to attain their easy eminence - he was probably too difficult to be as well-liked as Mehta or Blomstedt, and not difficult enough to be as feared as Maazel or Dutoit, but he was easily the equal of them all, and on any given night could be their superior. Watch Inbal in this performance (which you should probably listen to with headphones as the sound is quite distant). I've heard from some orchestral musicians over message boards that Inbal is a hard conductor to follow, but look here, Inbal is clearly giving them every detail with pellucid clarity. If it's hard to follow, it's because he's subtly doing all sorts of spontaneous things. None of them are so erratic as to stand out in performance, but he is indicating so many subtle dynamic shades, bends of rhythm, atypical instrumental blends, that this performance is like a conducting master class. The demands being made here are so intense that I have to imagine most orchestras would find it exhausting, but to my astonishment, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin seem to be following him to the letter of the dotted i with a sound so idiomatically Mahlerian that the Berlin Philharmonic still can't achieve it after thirty years under Abbado and Rattle. Just listen to those overwhelmingly passionate strings in the Adagietto, listen to how adroitly Inbal bends the tempo in the Scherzo. Perhaps the finale is a little too fast for much of it, but Inbal slows down whenever the music needs a little relaxation, and listen to this manic virtuosity (minus one botched trumpet entrance) and try thinking this is anything but joy personified. This is what conducting truly means.