In Praise of Tradition - part 1

Claudio Abbado leads the Berlin Philharmonic in the last movement of Brahms's Second Symphony. The Berlin Philharmonic has honed their sound for Brahms over a period of a century and a quarter. When Brahms sounds like this, who'd want to listen to anything else?

Martin Scorsese's Sesame Streets

Submitted Without Comment.

Beeker Sings the Ode to Joy

Lenny's got nothin on this.

No my name is not Matt McCarthy

I always live in dread of Fios commercials coming onto the television....

I can't be the only choral director in America to watch Glee and think: ka-CHING!

Baltimore is the New Brooklyn

Why I'm contemplating the move permanently...

Charles Ives in a Levi's Commercial?

And Walt Whitman reading his own poetry. And it works perfectly! Is America getting cultured on me?

For the record. I would have liked to have gone to high school in an era when Charles Ives and Walt Whitman could sell Levi's.

Lenny and the Berlin Wall (good band name)

Leonard Bernstein was born a year after the Soviet Union was founded and lived only a year after its demise. Nearly his entire life was spent as an American who lived under the shadow of a looming Soviet threat. He was in so many ways the epitome of of a Cold War progressive, often idealistic to the point of blindness, but never blind to the responsibility which his eminence endowed him to make the world a better place.

While at Harvard in the late thirties, he became involved in the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee which engaged in often all-too-futile attempts to grant amnesty to refugees from fascist governments all over Europe, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. In his senior year, he mounted the second production of Marc Blitztein's censored left-wing opera, Cradle Will Rock (Orson Welles mounted the first). In 2948 he threw himself into the work of creating a Zionist state in Palestine when such a belief was considered the acme of progressivism - and made a number of trips to Israel/Palestine to play for Israeli troops at great personal risk. In 1948, he threw himself equally hard into the cause of promoting Henry Wallace as a presidential candidate. Such activities landed him as a prize candidate for HUAC blacklisting, and in the early 50's Bernstein's career appeared stymied forever.



But only a few years later came Candide and West Side Story, dramas with volumes of social commentary erupting barely beneath their stylized surfaces. Soon after that the New York Philharmonic came calling and Bernstein found himself with the largest bully pulpit ever bequeathed to a classical musician in America. And did he ever use it! Cancelling concerts to march in Selma, using his television program to advocate for arts education, hosting benefit dinners for the Black Panthers, playing Mahler's Resurrection Symphony on national television after JFK died, playing Mahler's Adagietto at RFK's funeral. And then, perhaps inevitably, for gay rights and AIDS research even as he led the public life of a family man. He had, of course, more musical friends than any musician in history, but many of his closest friends had much less to do with music than he did with politics. He numbered among his friends not only Jack and Jackie, but also Bobby, and Teddy, and Gore Vidal, and Norman Mailer, and Arthur Schlesinger, and Huey Newton, and Willy Brandt, and Bruno Kreisky, and Helmut Schmidt, and Michael Dukakis, and John Lindsay, and Richard Burton, and John Kenneth Galbraith, and Teddy Kollek, and many many more.



As a musician, he was a man ahead of his time. As a public figure, he was quite squarely of it. He was a modern liberal in the first American generation for whom advocacy was expected of its public figures. And he lent his name to causes with extravagant nondiscrimination. And in his later years, when the political commitments he espoused showed that they needed unglamorous pragmatism in order to succeed, he seemed to withdraw from his commitments as so many of his compatriots did as well. He abandoned both his television show and his post with the New York Philharmonic to rededicate himself to composing. But the flood of new compositions never came. Had he wanted it, he could have used his music making for practical applications galor: promoting younger musicans and composers, bringing music to the inner city, giving popular musicians the chance to experiment with classical sounds, promoting arts education in schools. Perhaps all that would have even given him the impetus he needed to relaunch his composing career.



Instead, he traveled the world as an itinerant conductor, feted everywhere as the legend he was. In his own words, his job as an older conductor was to 'show the English how to play Elgar, show the Hungarians how to play Bartok, the French how to play Berlioz.' He would travel from world capital to world capital and lay to waste the prim and proper interpretations of less risky conductors. Audiences had not heard a conductor interpret the score with such a free hand since the days of Furtwangler and Mengleberg.

But his last great statement as a conductor was in the aftermath of Communism's fall. Bernstein assembled an international ad-hoc orchestra of musicians from many of the best orchestras from either side of the iron curtain and lead them in two performances of Beethoven's Ninth. The first performance was done in West Berlin on Christmas Eve. The second performance was done in East Berlin on Christmas Morning.



For these performances, Bernstein not only contradicted the score but also Schiller's text. Everybody who knows classical music knows how Schiller's Ode to Joy begins: 'Freude, schoene gotterfunken, tochter aus elysium' (Joy, thou source of light, immortal daughter of elysium.) But Bernstein changed the text to 'Freiheit, schoene gotterfunken.' Freiheit being the German word for Freedom. For this day, the Ode to Joy became the Ode to Freedom. It was Bernstein's last unforgettable gesture. Ten months later, Bernstein would be dead and the entire world would mourn his passing as no classical musician had been mourned in half a century.

Rafael Kubelik: f@#$ yeah!

One more 11/9 tribute today:



A concert that perhaps dwarved even Bernstein's Beethoven 9 with combined orchestras from East and West Germany. Rafael Kubelik returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990 after six years of complete retirement and 42 years of self-imposed exile. He returned for a concert in which he was reunified with the orchestra he directed before leaving, The Czech Philharmonic, in the opening concert of the famed Prague Spring Festival, which he co-founded five decades earlier. The opening program does not change from year to year, it is Bedrich Smetana's Ma Vlast (My Country), but never had the piece been endowed with more significance than it had in that concert. Rafael Kubelik is one of music's great heroes. Here is a short thing I wrote about him a couple years ago:

This is a clip of The Moldau – the second in a series of six symphonic poems from a cycle called Ma Vlast (My Country) by the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana (1824-1894). The orchestra is the Czech Philharmonic and they are conducted by Rafael Kubelik. The Moldau is the river that flows through the center of Prague and is the lifeblood of the Czech Republic. The music is not abstract, it is meant to represent the flow of The Moldau through what Smetana hoped would one day be the Czech nation. It begins with a musical representation of the river's formation at its mouth, and then depicts a forest hunting scene, a peasant wedding; a romance by the river's moonlight, and the violent torrents and currents of St. John's Rapids. All throughout, a beautiful melody is repeated that Jewish listeners will easily recognize as the inspiration for the Israeli National Anthem, Hatikva.

Rafael Kubelik (1914-1996) was not only perhaps the greatest conductor in a generation that teemed with them, but he was also a great dissident and patriot. In 1946, he helped to found the "Prague Spring" Festival, a legendary music festival that continues to be one of the glories of the music world. In 1948, at the advent of the Soviet coup, Kubelik went into exile, vowing not to return until democracy was restored and declaring that "in order to protect my country I had to leave it."

In 1953 the communist Czech government tried and convicted him in absentia of "taking illicit leave." But in 1956 the regime invited Kubelik to return with a guarantee of total creative freedom. Kubelik responded with an open letter stating that he would only consider the government's offer when all political prisoners were freed and all Czech exiles could return on similarly generous terms.

In 1968 when the Soviet invasion put an end to Dubcek's liberalizing 'Prague Spring', Kubelik organized an international boycott by musicians of performances in Communist regimes.

After 42 years in exile, Rafael Kubelik returned to Prague in 1990 to lead his old orchestra - the Czech Philharmonic - at the festival which he created. He was buried at Vysehrad cemetary in Prague alongside many of the great Czech patriots. He once said to an interviewer that he believed "only conscience can produce great art."

...as I said, I never get tired of The Moldau.


(a recording of Kubelik conducting the Vienna Philharmonic from 30 years before the legendary Prague performance)

Happy Anniversary

Bernstein: Norton Lectures

4 minutes of him talking about putting programs on absolute music. Bernstein's Norton Lectures remain essential listening for anybody interested in music.

Animaniacs President Song

Animaniacs!!!!

How have I forgotten thee??????


...the (ever-on-the-prowl) pedant in me can't help noting that a couple things here they got wrong. Not so pedantic that I'll point them out though.

Christopher Walken performs Lady Gaga's Poker Face

Probably waaaaay behind the curve on this. But here it is.

Seiji Ozawa on Sesame Street

And this is probably the most responsive an orchestra has been to Ozawa in the last thirty years....ZING!

Looking For Two Other Chamber Choirs

Just a quick note. The Washington Collegium is looking for two other roughly chamber-size choirs to collaborate on the DC premiere of Golijov's La Pasion Segun San Marcos, which requires three seperate choirs of roughly 25-40 each. If you are a member of another chamber choir and find this music interesting, please contact me and start lobbying your conductor for this piece. It will be an event DC will never forget.