"I think that whenever an artist (and this can apply to the word "artist" in the broadest possible sense), whenever an artist takes his eyes off the ultimate, an absolute, a positive, whenever he takes his eyes from what I would call "the Eternal," then he diminishes himself, and the quality of his art is thereby diminished."
- Jon Vickers (in an extraordinary interview with Bruce Duffie)
(Vickers doing the end of Otello, has anyone ever done it better?)
Saturday, November 12, 2011
De Sabata/Kodaly Addendum
Returning to it now, both Solti and De Sabata have to at least share pride of place with two utterly Hungarian readings. Firstly, Antal Dorati's beautifully nuanced recording with the Philharmonica Hungarica. While not as flashy or effect-driven, Dorati shapes the piece almost entirely without personalized intervention. But he does so knowing that he has an orchestra that obviously knows every detail of the piece and style backwards and forwards. If this reading were done by any combination that didn't possess complete mastery of the stylistic tricks, it would have fallen completely flat. Also, Ivan Fischer does not quite take De Sabata's interventionist hand, but he comes quite close at times. Fischer as always has the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which is even more understanding of Hungarian peasant styles than Furtwangler's Berliners (at least some of whom must have relished the chance to play some gypsy-influenced music under a half-Jewish conductor).
(Fischer with the descendants of those Berliners in a free Europe)
....that reminds me, it might be time to revise and expand Top 20 Conductors (perhaps expanded to a top 25 or 30) list. I'll have to revise to put De Sabata in the top 20, not to mention give higher consideration to deserving past conductors like Nikolai Golovanov, Eduard van Beinum, Karl Ancerl, Adrian Boult, Artur Rodzinski, Kyril Kondrashin, Igor Markevitch, Vaclav Talich, Eugene Ormandy, Felix Weingartner, and Bruno Walter (I'm particularly ashamed that I didn't at least give Walter an honorable mention). And I also have to recognize some present-day conductors I left off the list as well like Christoph Eschenbach, Christoph von Dohnanyi, David Zinman, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Ivan Fischer (or the 'maybes' from the present....like James Levine, Riccardo Chailly, Daniel Barenboim, Franz Welser-Most, Valery Gergiev, etc. and then there's the list of overrated....which since my tastes seem to be rather idiosyncratic should make lots of friends among interneters if I ever dared to post it or get them to read it....). Maybe I should just scrap the whole thing and start over...
...for anyone pathetic enough to be wondering...no it was not my intention to stay in listening obsessively to Kodaly on a perfectly serviceable Saturday night. IIIII was going to a Bavarian beer hall tonight, but I seem to be having my bi-monthly dizzy spells. Don't know why....but Kodaly is a half-way decent consolation....This not quite 30-year-old blogger is not so pathetic that he doesn't have Saturday night plans....but quite pathetic enough that he feels the need to justify this to cyberspace thank you.
(Fischer with the descendants of those Berliners in a free Europe)
....that reminds me, it might be time to revise and expand Top 20 Conductors (perhaps expanded to a top 25 or 30) list. I'll have to revise to put De Sabata in the top 20, not to mention give higher consideration to deserving past conductors like Nikolai Golovanov, Eduard van Beinum, Karl Ancerl, Adrian Boult, Artur Rodzinski, Kyril Kondrashin, Igor Markevitch, Vaclav Talich, Eugene Ormandy, Felix Weingartner, and Bruno Walter (I'm particularly ashamed that I didn't at least give Walter an honorable mention). And I also have to recognize some present-day conductors I left off the list as well like Christoph Eschenbach, Christoph von Dohnanyi, David Zinman, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Ivan Fischer (or the 'maybes' from the present....like James Levine, Riccardo Chailly, Daniel Barenboim, Franz Welser-Most, Valery Gergiev, etc. and then there's the list of overrated....which since my tastes seem to be rather idiosyncratic should make lots of friends among interneters if I ever dared to post it or get them to read it....). Maybe I should just scrap the whole thing and start over...
...for anyone pathetic enough to be wondering...no it was not my intention to stay in listening obsessively to Kodaly on a perfectly serviceable Saturday night. IIIII was going to a Bavarian beer hall tonight, but I seem to be having my bi-monthly dizzy spells. Don't know why....but Kodaly is a half-way decent consolation....This not quite 30-year-old blogger is not so pathetic that he doesn't have Saturday night plans....but quite pathetic enough that he feels the need to justify this to cyberspace thank you.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
De Sabata/Kodaly
The Dances of Galanta with De Sabata and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1939. It's bloody great. The only recording that competes with, and perhaps exceeds, Georg Solti's barn-burning London Philharmonic recording from the 50's. De Sabata was probably the most serious omission on my Top 20 Conductors list. If my head were on straighter he'd probably have been #6, right between Munch and Rattle. Expressive as his music-making is, he's a bit too highly strung and over-precise for my taste - he clearly drives the music in the name of expression, but the result can seem more ennervated than necessary. This is a problem shared by the Carlos Kleiber, Willem Mengelberg, Antal Dorati, and Ferenc Fricsay (extraordinary conductors all of them, to say nothing of contemporary ones like Muti, Gergiev, Pappano and Dudamel...). But when De Sabata produces results of such excitement and personality, what does a complaint like that matter unless you're comparing to the very best of the best?
800 Words: 21st Century Classics - A Personal View - Internet Videos
I could write an explanation about why the explosion of Internet videos are the single most important cultural development of the last decade. But that would be an essay in itself. Perhaps another day. In the meantime, I think it would be much more demonstrative to talk about the videos themselves and why they will be worth remembering. So here are a number of youtube videos that could be destined for ‘classic’ status:
Star Wars Kid: I have no idea whether this video is humiliating or empowering. It is nothing more or less than a fat kid letting his imagination overtake with no regard for who might be watching. But this video is, I believe, as close to an epitome of everything we’ve come to realize about the Internet as exists. Private moments no one should see made public in a manner for maximum humiliation, and we absolutely love it. Apparently, it was never meant to be made public. Then public it very much was made, and has been seen by a whole billion of us. The poor kid, whose name is Ghyslain Raza from Quebec Falls, fell into a crippling depression. He eventually rebounded and is now a law school graduate, but the result is still a Rorschach Test for your view of humanity. It’s a person made vulnerable in a way he never expected. It’s either hilarious, humiliating, perhaps even ennobling, or perhaps all at once.
Dramatic Gopher: Dramatic music, frightened gopher, fast-motion zoom. Perfection in 7 seconds.
The Evolution of Dance: It’s just one guy mediocrely dancing in a bad quality video. This guy calls himself an ‘inspirational comedian’....as comedy, he’s not funny at all. As dancing, it kinda sucks. As a living reminder of history, it’s truly incredible. It’s virtually every dance-move that comprises our era in six minutes, every one of which can cause us all to remember key moments in our lives - moments we can recount to our children, and moments that historians can access in a single video. There would be little point to it if it were a high-quality video. It’s just one guy who can bring summon more memories in six minutes than we thought we were capable of having.
Fail Blog Videos: I have a particular love of this site. The idea is simple: people fail at 90% of the things they try (ex. the fact that I couldn’t find a verifiable statistic on the amount of times people fail). We can all say that we have gotten over our fear of failure. But anyone who says that clearly hasn’t failed enough. The reason we all fear failure is because failure is really, really funny to other people. There is no humor without it being at the expense of someone or something. Failure is funny, has always been funny, and will never stop being funny.
Charlie The Unicorn: I hated this shaggy unicorn video for years. My friends loved it. Finally, Der Schreiber made a point I can’t refute. This has the one of the most perfect endings of any short ever made. The entire time, Charlie realizes that he is being duped into something, but he could never expect what would happen. The conclusion ties the whole video together and makes the entire painful slog of a journey worth the eventual destination....
Don Hertzfeldt Cartoons: We might think of the 00’s as the Age of Pixar. But the best current animation is the really, really bad ones. We’re living in a golden age of badly drawn misanthropy. Beginning with The Simpsons, we’ve seen a steady stream of badly drawn TV cartoons - each successive addition drawn still worse, and holds a still lower opinion of humanity. The ‘nadir’ of this trend was Don Hertzfeldt, cartoons so dark and so badly drawn that they could only find homes in obscure film festivals and the internet. Hertzfeldt is another one that took me a couple tries. Ten years ago, I walked out of this cartoon - an example of tasteless humor at its dumbest. Yet like every Hertzfeldt cartoon, it gets funnier every time it’s watched. Eventually, you just can’t help it.
Bad Day: Technically it's from 1997. But this is the first Internet video I remember becoming a meme, and it’s impossible to forget how hilarious I found this when I was 18. The one ingredient for memedom is here in abundance, somebody acting out on an impulse we’ve all had. Unfortunately, it turned out to be staged. But that does not change the weird feeling of liberation we had to see some anonymous guy in a moment none of us would want anyone to see.
Don’t Tase Me Bro: Andrew Meyer has not been forthcoming as to whether the scene he made was meant to be taken seriously, I can think of a couple good reasons he should keep it that way. At first it looks as though it’s entirely unserious, which is often how insane behavior appears to rational people. But by the end, the video certainly feels serious, as though UFlorida security were brutalizing a student for the crime of his pathology. However small the scale, not even from Iran or Egypt have we seen footage so raw and public of police brutality.
Neda (I'm not linking): The closest we come to that on a larger scale is Neda. We don’t see the Basij (the elite Iranian paramilitary unit) shooting Neda Agha-Soltan, but on youtube we watched her bleed to death in the street. Her friend wails, as do a dozen other people around her. A doctor attempts to revive her. But the finality of death stares at us with with all its stark terror. This video exposed brutality so rawly that it became the desperately needed rallying cry for the Iranian revolution, and a blow against the brutality of authoritarian regimes everywhere. It is called ‘the most witnessed death in human history.’ Not since Rwanda had the world wrestled as one with an image so graphic.
Miss Teen South Carolina: It’s every person’s nightmare - to be caught by the whole world being an idiot. No doubt, the pressure of beauty pageants is terrible, and contrary to belief, no idiot could excel at it. So in its way, it’s a particularly cruel video: the only reason to watch it is schadenfreude. But let’s face it, we humans are scum, men and women alike root for those who rise high to fall. To see a beautiful girl embarrass herself for the sake of an ego-driven title is funny, and whether or not she deserves her comeuppance, our innate reflexes tell us she does.
Michael Richards’ Racist Breakdown: Celebrity achieved a whole new level of undesirability in this video. Before it, we often heard about pampered, insecure stars who lose it at the slightest provocation, but we’d never seen a star melt down in so unguarded a way. It could have been any number of stars yelling similar epithets (and has been since), but after this, we had better evidence of just how Hollywood can warp its stars. Perhaps Michael Richards is in reality a good man who went crazy under the pressure of doing standup, or perhaps he’d have been a bigoted even if he hadn’t become a huge (albeit faltering) TV star. But what mattered was what we saw, and what we saw was disgusting. After that meltdown, the final barrier between the image onscreen and the real person dematerialized. Who’d have expected Kramer to be racist?....on that note....
One Night in Paris (I'm not linking): I’ll plead the fifth as to whether I’ve watched it...but this video was the mirror image of the Michael Richards clip. If Michael Richards demonstrated more definitively that celebrities are not the same as the image they project, it then follows that anyone can become famous. What has Paris Hilton done to justify her fame? She’s an heiress who hangs out with other famous people. In the words of the now cliche term, she’s ‘famous for being famous.’ There were other examples of that in the past, the Gabor sisters being one that comes to mind. But no one has ever gotten that famous for something so....crude? All a person needs for fame is something to get the wider world’s attention. And since acting involves delayed gratification....
One Man Band - You Rock My World: There are all sorts of virtuoso one man band videos, so picking the best is an impossible task. But none which I’ve seen demonstrate the sheer barrage of musical, mixing and editing talent this one must require. Is it more impressive than the original?
Two Girls 1 Cup (Hell no, I’m not linking to the actual thing..): The human brain is one screwed up organ. It reacts to watching the death of Neda with a mixture of sanctimonious horror and morbid curiosity, yet it reacts to sight of people eating feces and vomiting them out with unmitigated revulsion. There is a part of all of us that is curious about watching death, yet for 99.9999% of us, there is absolutely no biological reason to watch excrement. Murder or poo, which should we find more horrifying? Regardless of the answer, 2 Girls, 1 Cup became the ultimate Internet endurance test - such a notoriously horrifying meme that a separate meme sprang up around it of people filming their own reactions (the funniest, albeit one of the cruelest, is embedded above). In the Internet Age, there is no limit to the depraved perversions one can satisfy. The term for this is ‘Rule 34,’ if you can think of it, it exists on the Internet. Whether or not this is a step forward for humanity, it forces us to have fewer illusions about the nature of humans. After all, as Kundera once put it “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit.”
David after Dentist: A parent who films his child while high on Novocaine. Is that harmless fun, or will it lead the kid to being scarred for life? Over 100 million people watched this video online, and that doesn’t even count the people who saw it on television. It’s probable that everyone David will ever meet will have seen this video. The father claimed that he forgot to take the private setting, but whether that’s true is of little consequence. His son will now go through life as ‘the stoned kid,’ with all the benefits and drawbacks such a title affords him.
Fat Kid on Rollercoaster: The ultimate mercilessness of the Internet is on display. A kid in pain, who perhaps justifiably fears for his life. Yet we all (at best) have to suppress the urge to laugh. Why? Because the kid is obese. The woman next to him is laughing the entire time. Is she laughing from pleasure at the ride or is she laughing at the kid? None of us can get through this video without having to suppress a chuckle, but we should all hate ourselves a little more after watching it.
The Landlord: It was only a matter of time before celebrities began to find ways to capitalize on the video explosion. It’s probable that the first to really understand it was Will Ferrell. The whole point of what makes the Internet effective is that it gives platforms to those who would otherwise never have it. Will Ferrell doesn’t need the Internet to get famous, but his two-year-old daughter probably would. So he films her in a skit using foul language, and a sensation is born that Will Ferrell could never have achieved alone.
Thriller in Prison: Is this cruel and unusual punishment? Is it somehow affirmative? This is the textbook definition of how the Internet can give a voice to people who otherwise would not have it.
Elf Yourself Flash Mob: It’s tough to pick a single flash mob video. But somehow, the sight of 150 elves running into Union Square cannot be beaten. The flash mob could only happen at a time when coordination and communication is so easy that hundreds of people can communicate with each other moment to moment. It can take on any form, including some quite threatening ones. But this video, perhaps better than any other I’ve watched, shows what can be done with enough coordination.
Star Wars Kid: I have no idea whether this video is humiliating or empowering. It is nothing more or less than a fat kid letting his imagination overtake with no regard for who might be watching. But this video is, I believe, as close to an epitome of everything we’ve come to realize about the Internet as exists. Private moments no one should see made public in a manner for maximum humiliation, and we absolutely love it. Apparently, it was never meant to be made public. Then public it very much was made, and has been seen by a whole billion of us. The poor kid, whose name is Ghyslain Raza from Quebec Falls, fell into a crippling depression. He eventually rebounded and is now a law school graduate, but the result is still a Rorschach Test for your view of humanity. It’s a person made vulnerable in a way he never expected. It’s either hilarious, humiliating, perhaps even ennobling, or perhaps all at once.
Dramatic Gopher: Dramatic music, frightened gopher, fast-motion zoom. Perfection in 7 seconds.
The Evolution of Dance: It’s just one guy mediocrely dancing in a bad quality video. This guy calls himself an ‘inspirational comedian’....as comedy, he’s not funny at all. As dancing, it kinda sucks. As a living reminder of history, it’s truly incredible. It’s virtually every dance-move that comprises our era in six minutes, every one of which can cause us all to remember key moments in our lives - moments we can recount to our children, and moments that historians can access in a single video. There would be little point to it if it were a high-quality video. It’s just one guy who can bring summon more memories in six minutes than we thought we were capable of having.
Fail Blog Videos: I have a particular love of this site. The idea is simple: people fail at 90% of the things they try (ex. the fact that I couldn’t find a verifiable statistic on the amount of times people fail). We can all say that we have gotten over our fear of failure. But anyone who says that clearly hasn’t failed enough. The reason we all fear failure is because failure is really, really funny to other people. There is no humor without it being at the expense of someone or something. Failure is funny, has always been funny, and will never stop being funny.
Charlie The Unicorn: I hated this shaggy unicorn video for years. My friends loved it. Finally, Der Schreiber made a point I can’t refute. This has the one of the most perfect endings of any short ever made. The entire time, Charlie realizes that he is being duped into something, but he could never expect what would happen. The conclusion ties the whole video together and makes the entire painful slog of a journey worth the eventual destination....
Don Hertzfeldt Cartoons: We might think of the 00’s as the Age of Pixar. But the best current animation is the really, really bad ones. We’re living in a golden age of badly drawn misanthropy. Beginning with The Simpsons, we’ve seen a steady stream of badly drawn TV cartoons - each successive addition drawn still worse, and holds a still lower opinion of humanity. The ‘nadir’ of this trend was Don Hertzfeldt, cartoons so dark and so badly drawn that they could only find homes in obscure film festivals and the internet. Hertzfeldt is another one that took me a couple tries. Ten years ago, I walked out of this cartoon - an example of tasteless humor at its dumbest. Yet like every Hertzfeldt cartoon, it gets funnier every time it’s watched. Eventually, you just can’t help it.
Bad Day: Technically it's from 1997. But this is the first Internet video I remember becoming a meme, and it’s impossible to forget how hilarious I found this when I was 18. The one ingredient for memedom is here in abundance, somebody acting out on an impulse we’ve all had. Unfortunately, it turned out to be staged. But that does not change the weird feeling of liberation we had to see some anonymous guy in a moment none of us would want anyone to see.
Don’t Tase Me Bro: Andrew Meyer has not been forthcoming as to whether the scene he made was meant to be taken seriously, I can think of a couple good reasons he should keep it that way. At first it looks as though it’s entirely unserious, which is often how insane behavior appears to rational people. But by the end, the video certainly feels serious, as though UFlorida security were brutalizing a student for the crime of his pathology. However small the scale, not even from Iran or Egypt have we seen footage so raw and public of police brutality.
Neda (I'm not linking): The closest we come to that on a larger scale is Neda. We don’t see the Basij (the elite Iranian paramilitary unit) shooting Neda Agha-Soltan, but on youtube we watched her bleed to death in the street. Her friend wails, as do a dozen other people around her. A doctor attempts to revive her. But the finality of death stares at us with with all its stark terror. This video exposed brutality so rawly that it became the desperately needed rallying cry for the Iranian revolution, and a blow against the brutality of authoritarian regimes everywhere. It is called ‘the most witnessed death in human history.’ Not since Rwanda had the world wrestled as one with an image so graphic.
Miss Teen South Carolina: It’s every person’s nightmare - to be caught by the whole world being an idiot. No doubt, the pressure of beauty pageants is terrible, and contrary to belief, no idiot could excel at it. So in its way, it’s a particularly cruel video: the only reason to watch it is schadenfreude. But let’s face it, we humans are scum, men and women alike root for those who rise high to fall. To see a beautiful girl embarrass herself for the sake of an ego-driven title is funny, and whether or not she deserves her comeuppance, our innate reflexes tell us she does.
Michael Richards’ Racist Breakdown: Celebrity achieved a whole new level of undesirability in this video. Before it, we often heard about pampered, insecure stars who lose it at the slightest provocation, but we’d never seen a star melt down in so unguarded a way. It could have been any number of stars yelling similar epithets (and has been since), but after this, we had better evidence of just how Hollywood can warp its stars. Perhaps Michael Richards is in reality a good man who went crazy under the pressure of doing standup, or perhaps he’d have been a bigoted even if he hadn’t become a huge (albeit faltering) TV star. But what mattered was what we saw, and what we saw was disgusting. After that meltdown, the final barrier between the image onscreen and the real person dematerialized. Who’d have expected Kramer to be racist?....on that note....
One Night in Paris (I'm not linking): I’ll plead the fifth as to whether I’ve watched it...but this video was the mirror image of the Michael Richards clip. If Michael Richards demonstrated more definitively that celebrities are not the same as the image they project, it then follows that anyone can become famous. What has Paris Hilton done to justify her fame? She’s an heiress who hangs out with other famous people. In the words of the now cliche term, she’s ‘famous for being famous.’ There were other examples of that in the past, the Gabor sisters being one that comes to mind. But no one has ever gotten that famous for something so....crude? All a person needs for fame is something to get the wider world’s attention. And since acting involves delayed gratification....
One Man Band - You Rock My World: There are all sorts of virtuoso one man band videos, so picking the best is an impossible task. But none which I’ve seen demonstrate the sheer barrage of musical, mixing and editing talent this one must require. Is it more impressive than the original?
Two Girls 1 Cup (Hell no, I’m not linking to the actual thing..): The human brain is one screwed up organ. It reacts to watching the death of Neda with a mixture of sanctimonious horror and morbid curiosity, yet it reacts to sight of people eating feces and vomiting them out with unmitigated revulsion. There is a part of all of us that is curious about watching death, yet for 99.9999% of us, there is absolutely no biological reason to watch excrement. Murder or poo, which should we find more horrifying? Regardless of the answer, 2 Girls, 1 Cup became the ultimate Internet endurance test - such a notoriously horrifying meme that a separate meme sprang up around it of people filming their own reactions (the funniest, albeit one of the cruelest, is embedded above). In the Internet Age, there is no limit to the depraved perversions one can satisfy. The term for this is ‘Rule 34,’ if you can think of it, it exists on the Internet. Whether or not this is a step forward for humanity, it forces us to have fewer illusions about the nature of humans. After all, as Kundera once put it “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit.”
David after Dentist: A parent who films his child while high on Novocaine. Is that harmless fun, or will it lead the kid to being scarred for life? Over 100 million people watched this video online, and that doesn’t even count the people who saw it on television. It’s probable that everyone David will ever meet will have seen this video. The father claimed that he forgot to take the private setting, but whether that’s true is of little consequence. His son will now go through life as ‘the stoned kid,’ with all the benefits and drawbacks such a title affords him.
Fat Kid on Rollercoaster: The ultimate mercilessness of the Internet is on display. A kid in pain, who perhaps justifiably fears for his life. Yet we all (at best) have to suppress the urge to laugh. Why? Because the kid is obese. The woman next to him is laughing the entire time. Is she laughing from pleasure at the ride or is she laughing at the kid? None of us can get through this video without having to suppress a chuckle, but we should all hate ourselves a little more after watching it.
The Landlord: It was only a matter of time before celebrities began to find ways to capitalize on the video explosion. It’s probable that the first to really understand it was Will Ferrell. The whole point of what makes the Internet effective is that it gives platforms to those who would otherwise never have it. Will Ferrell doesn’t need the Internet to get famous, but his two-year-old daughter probably would. So he films her in a skit using foul language, and a sensation is born that Will Ferrell could never have achieved alone.
Thriller in Prison: Is this cruel and unusual punishment? Is it somehow affirmative? This is the textbook definition of how the Internet can give a voice to people who otherwise would not have it.
Elf Yourself Flash Mob: It’s tough to pick a single flash mob video. But somehow, the sight of 150 elves running into Union Square cannot be beaten. The flash mob could only happen at a time when coordination and communication is so easy that hundreds of people can communicate with each other moment to moment. It can take on any form, including some quite threatening ones. But this video, perhaps better than any other I’ve watched, shows what can be done with enough coordination.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Quote of the Day:
Jordan: How did the xylophone become the default instrument of Western soundtracks?
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
800 Words: 21st Century Classics - A Personal View - Movies
Slate is attempting to put together a rather lame list of 21st century classics. So apparently we the people must send in our nominations for what will last into eternity about our present-obsessed era. For anybody interested in culture, this will always be a necessary idea to discuss and always makes for a good debate. But unfortunately, posterity is nowhere near as democratic (or as charitable) as we internet users.
It’s usually a more impartial judge of what’s the best about our time than we are, but never fool-proof. After all, posterity never lived through what we did. Its also a merciless judge. Why should our children like what we like? Any intellectually engaged person of my generation ever forced to sit through a Masterpiece Theater miniseries or a Godard/Antonioni/Bertolucci arthouse flick will understand how quickly tastes change. Many things that meant so much to your parents, family members, teachers, older friends are totally nexplicable to you. And in turn, things which you love will be entirely inexplicable to the young people of your life.
And so, I’ll do the only thing I can, which is to make a list of the culture from the first 11 years of our millenium which I would like to pass on to whatever children/nephewsandnieces/students/younger friends I end up having in the course of my lifetime that might make sense for them to see.
So let’s start with the easiest to explain - movies. Whether we watch them in theaters or at home, they are still a huge part of our lives and will be for a long time yet. It’s just unfortunate that we’re living in a pretty poor age for moviemaking...….
…....Now, lest I seem like the terrible snob I no doubt am, let me clarify that statement. This is not the same as saying that everything is crap. Every one of us gets the opportunity to see some amazing new films every year. Nor can I claim to be a particular expert on movies of previous eras (though I think I’ve seen - and liked - a lot more of them than 99% of people my age). But you see, I have a problem, I’d venture it’s a pretty unique problem among people my age. I don’t like a lot of movies which other people love. Here is a partial list of the movies which other people would probably put on this post-2000 list which I would most definitely leave off:
There Will Be Blood
No Country for Old Men
Lord of the Rings
Memento
Spirited Away
Amelie
Requiem for a Dream
Adaptation
Gladiator
Babel
Snatch
Kill Bill
Finding Nemo
Donnie Darko
Amores Perros
V for Vendetta
Avatar
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The Incredibles
Big Fish
A Beautiful Mind
Monsters Inc.
Synedoche, New York
The Reader
The Triplettes of Bellville
La Vie en Rose
The Lives of Others
The Departed
Knocked Up
Syriana
American Splendor
Master and Commander
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Gosford Park
Ghost World
Junebug
Atonement
Hotel Rwanda
The Beat that My Heart Skipped
The King’s Speech
Black Swan
The Tree of Life
So...I think you can see my problem.
It’s not to say that I disliked all the movies on this list (though I disliked a lot of them). These are just movies that I found myself completely underwhelmed in comparison to the hyperbole to which other people greeted all of them. There are plenty of films on this list which would easily make the lists of other people. But for whatever reason, I just didn’t like it as much. There might have been individual scenes or performances I loved, I might have even thought it was a good movie. But for whatever reason, when other people praise it to the skies, my reaction is either ‘meh,’ or ‘f@#$ you.’
And as for the movies I do like, let’s simply say that certain things will date. I don’t know a single person in my agegroup, even the most culturally literate among them, ready to sing the praises of W. C. Fields or D. W. Griffith (maybe you shouldn’t be known by your initials...). Some movies will probably date worse than others to future generations. There are plenty of movies which all of us love which anyone younger than us will never understand. Here are a few examples of some movies which could be more likely to date than others:
(A scene that couldn’t be made now...six years later)
Judd Apatow - Bromance’s Last Stand: I love most of the Apatow movies (the ones he produces at least). I loved Superbad, I loved Pineapple Express, I loved Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I loved Walk Hard, I loved Get Him to the Greek, I loved Role Models, I loved I Love You, Man. I even rewatched Anchorman a week ago and found that I now love that movie too. Apatow’s formula is simple - film guys acting, talking, futzing around exactly as we all do in real life - if we were much much funnier. But in an age which sees the rise of feminism and gay rights, people in future generations will probably be raised on a different standard of what’s permissible to talk about. In the case of Apatow, some scenes which we find hilarious may well seem utterly shocking in 30 years. Than again....Blazing Saddles is still hysterical.
(If everybody’s speaking English, Spanish or Mandarin in 100 years, would this scene mean anything?)
Lost in Translation: It’s a movie I love. But it’s based on a problem that’s disappearing from the world - for the time being at least. Lost in Translation is a movie about feeling isolated and disconnected from an unfamiliar place. But we live at a time when the world grows smaller every day. Unlikely as it may sound, could it happen in our lifetimes being in Tokyo feels almost exactly like being in Mumbai which both feel like Sao Paolo? More unlikely things have happened in the last 75 years.
(What would this scene mean to anybody who didn’t grow up with Westerns?)
Mullholland Dr.: I don’t merely love Mullholland Dr. for the privilege of watching my favorite actress get it on with David Lynch’s wife. Mulholland Dr. is an abstract movie, not necessarily about anything at all. But if there is one thing that it’s clearly about, it’s Hollywood. It is about the romance of Hollywood combined with its nasty realities. To generations who never experienced Hollywood as anything but the purveyors of assembly-line horror movies and craptastic special effects, does the magic of Hollywood mean anything? Without that special frission you get from seeing the dreams and nightmares of Hollywood, would the movie mean anything to anyone?
(Never mind that this scene from Blazing Saddles was written by Richard Pryor, arguably the greatest comedian of all time and one of the great celebrators of black culture. This scene is one of the funniest ever put on film, it should also make us cringe. It could never be filmed today. Is the world a better place because of that? Probably...but that’s what posterity is for...)
Perhaps this is all a moot point. Eventually, enough history goes by that everything disappears. But some memories last longer than others. And occasionally you get the kind of memory that’s durable for thousands of years - for reasons no one can sufficiently explain, a great production of Lysistrata can be just as funny as Arrested Development.
So here are twelve(ish) movies, some of which I’ve written about before, from the last 11 years that might go into my Voyager capsule to be opened either by the Polaoans from the year 4511, or by the local Marty McFly who hangs around a mad blogger:
Pan’s Labyrinth: The more distance I get from it, the more it appears to me thus far as the most moving, questioning movie of my moviegoing life. I will not forget the tears flowing fast and freely from my eyes, only for the lights to emerge and finding The Manning in a similarly soaked state. What is Pan’s Labyrinth about? Fairy Tales? Childhood? The experience of war? Fascism? The nature of good? Of evil? Of sacrifice? Of consciousness itself? This movie is an interior world made new, in which we no longer know what is real and what is imaginary. Nothing I have ever seen in the theater shook me to a deeper foundation than this.
The Social Network: I wrote about it here and here. That's enough for one decade.
The Pianist: Schindler’s List has become a piece of history in itself - a movie that both announces to the world that the Holocaust was very real and also a message about the good that can be done in the worst of circumstances. And even if it is a great, moving movie, there is something about Schindler’s List that trivializes the Holocaust. Nobody really needs to know about the good that happened during it. What we need is a movie that demonstrates what it was like to experience it. We’ll probably never get a movie that approximates what it was like to die in the Holocaust. But Roman Polanski made a movie about what it’s like to survive it, and it’s perhaps the closest we will ever get to understanding what people must have had to endure to go through it.
Borat: Like Some Like it Hot, The Producers, Animal House, The Naked Gun and There’s Something About Mary, this is a movie that pushes the bounds of what’s permissible. Every taboo we can think of is violated, and some we’d have never thought, and we invariably feel as though we’re getting away with something huge. I never bought the kind of self-righteous explanation Sacha Baron Cohen gave for Borat - that he’s doing it to demonstrate the bigotry of others. He certainly is demonstrating their bigotry, but Borat is not satire. It is purely about getting away with things you should never do, and in spite of all the lawsuits, that’s exactly what he did.
WALL-E: Let’s tell some truth here. None of the Pixar movies were quite as great as people say. Don’t misunderstand, the Pixar movies are brilliant family entertainments. But just like the best Disney, its family friendliness is a smokescreen for something that isn’t quite so benevolent as its image. It’s difficult to say that Pixar ever made a movie that strove for any message deeper than that which you could find on the back of a fortune cookie. But that simplicity is part of Pixar’s appeal - a world of sugary fairy tales in which everyone can clear up misunderstandings simply by learning a lesson. But that rule’s shining exception is WALL-E. Why does WALL-E stand out in the Pixar Canon? Because it’s a movie about nothing less than the likeliness of mankind’s destruction, yet it still has all the plays with all the same light entertainment you see in every other Pixar production. Pixar’s been backing away from the harsh truths of WALL-E ever since, first releasing UP, a movie which tells us that the elderly can be loveable so long as they aspire to be young. And recently we heard the news that Pixar will mostly be dealing in sequels. As with Disney, the dream can last only so long, but the board of directors will try to prop it up forever.
The Jason Reitman Movies: Jason Reitman gets America.
Nick Naylor: Right there, looking into Joey's eyes, it all came back in a rush. Why I do what I do. Defending the defenseless, protecting the disenfranchised corporations that have been abandoned by their very own consumers: the logger, the sweatshop foreman, the oil driller, the land mine developer, the baby seal poacher...
Juno MacGuff: Oh, *wicked* pic in the PennySaver, by the way. Super classy - not like those people with the fake woods in the background. Honestly who do they think they're fooling?
Vanessa Loring: You found us in the PennySaver?
Ryan Bingham: How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.
….the defense rests.
Slumdog Millionaire: My ignorance of Indian cinema is total. I’ve heard figures that Bollywood releases twice, perhaps three times, as many movies a year as Hollywood. It is a segment of world film of which I’ve gone through three decades in complete ignorance. I also know that many Indians were disgusted with Slumdog Millionaire. It’s easy to see what’s wrong with this movie: it’s a Western view of India with a completely ridiculous plot, it marches straight into the Indian slums and portrays them as they are, with no time to assemble the appearance of dignity. And yet it portrays India with enormous sympathy. It refuses to exonerate Western attitudes at the same time that it shows the unbridgeable divides in Indian society - wealth and poverty, Hindu and Muslim, honest work and criminal corruption. This is the India of transition, and just as it took Europeans like Tocqueville to point out the promise of America, it may take Westerners to point out the incredible things that might lay in India’s future. Like Tocqueville, there are many things that might seem wrong or ridiculous about it. But ridiculous as the plot may seem, people like Jamal exist all around India; people who have known nothing but misfortune, only to find their way into privilege of which they’d never dared to dream. And as many Americans and Europeans once did, this newly privileged class must contend with the question, ‘Why me?’ Why has he been lucky enough when everyone he knew was left behind? Like the America of a century ago, it displays a magnificent country whose possibilities are waiting to explode. Yes, this is a Western view of India, perhaps it takes overprivileged Westerners to explain to other Westerners what is fascinating about India. As India’s position in the world continues to rise, it will continue to explain just that for a long time to come.
Bad Education: I love Talk to Her and All About My Mother. But we have to face that Bad Education is another level of Pedro Almodovar moviemaking. Whereas the other two brush off the subject of sexual abuse with humor, Bad Education is an all-out confrontation. It is a movie about the lives that are ruined, the trauma incurred, sacrifices made, and bearing witness for the possibilities spoiled within its victims. It is a devastating movie, at times as unpleasant as any experience one can have in a theater. But it is also a movie about how memory and love can help sustain people through the worst experiences.
Hero: I don’t get offended easily by movies, but this one managed to do so, and do it brilliantly. This is a movie about violence, but there is hardly any real violence to be found. Some movies dras us into an abyss and make us glad we took the journey, but in Hero there is no abyss to go down. The movie seems nothing more than its appearances. Because in Hero the seductive pageantry of the movie is all that matters. The movie peels back layer upon layer of distrust and lies to reach a conclusion that is as dishonest as any which the movies have ever told us. The precision of American special effects is often employed to evoke chaos of fights, but the precision of Hero evokes nothing but precision. Swordfighters clash with each other without so much as a single spurt of blood that leaks out of place, violence is made to seem beautiful and seductive. Through it we see a glorification of violence, the ecstacy of death, and the justification for mass murder. In a movie of such over-controlled precision, is it any wonder that it ends up justifying the slogans of a thousand tyrants? Cruelty born out of love? War that achieves eternal peace? Orwell said it rather differently. But then again, so have many great artists through history in far more approving terms than Orwell. I disagree with everything about this movie, but I think it’s a great one all the same.
Brokeback Mountain: For all the larger than life landscapes, Brokeback Mountain is a very small movie about wrecked lives, unfulfilled dreams, and compromises that should never have to be made. Our generation can only speculate about the hardships of gay people at a time when they were lethally compelled to keep their identities secret. But thankfully, this movie does not simply howl with anger. It duly notes the terrible injustice, and maintains a passive, resigned acceptance of the situation. Life goes on, with all its grueling banalities intact, until it’s finally too late to create a better life.
Sin City: Like Taxi Driver, Blue Velvet, and Pulp Fiction, this is a movie that speaks on an almost subconscious level to the time in which it was made. There was once a time when Americans viewed cities as inviting, familiar places. Our grandparents might have watched film noir and read Batman comics, but the violence of those genres was playacting - far more cartoonish than the real thing. They feared violence, but they slept soundly in the beds of their tenement houses all the same. But families with luck on their side long since decamped to suburbs when cities got too violent; and we’ve been growing more fearful of cities ever since our grandparents told us some horror story about the ‘old neighborhood.’ As the economic downturns grow longer, we lucky Americans may find ourselves back in the tenements. And if we do, we’ll quickly have to face our fears of what cities are. In the Bush era, we began to awaken from the comfort which middle-class suburbia afforded us. Perhaps all that corruption and violence never went away. Rather, it festered in our absence, and one day we shall wake up to find that our whole world is controlled by a conspiracy of violent lowlives and debauched elites from whom we can never escape. Which brings us to...
City of God: If Sin City is the nightmare view of urban life, then City of God is the documentary view from the harsh tropical sun - yes, life is fragile, but it’s all the more precious because of it. We’re seduced and terrified by a place where life means everything and nothing. It is a story all the more horrific for being true to reality, and gives incredible charisma and dignity to all the characters within it. Within it, we see the story of Latin America, of slums everywhere, of the entire third world. If there is one movie thus far of the 21st century of whose survival I’m absolutely certain....
It’s usually a more impartial judge of what’s the best about our time than we are, but never fool-proof. After all, posterity never lived through what we did. Its also a merciless judge. Why should our children like what we like? Any intellectually engaged person of my generation ever forced to sit through a Masterpiece Theater miniseries or a Godard/Antonioni/Bertolucci arthouse flick will understand how quickly tastes change. Many things that meant so much to your parents, family members, teachers, older friends are totally nexplicable to you. And in turn, things which you love will be entirely inexplicable to the young people of your life.
And so, I’ll do the only thing I can, which is to make a list of the culture from the first 11 years of our millenium which I would like to pass on to whatever children/nephewsandnieces/students/younger friends I end up having in the course of my lifetime that might make sense for them to see.
So let’s start with the easiest to explain - movies. Whether we watch them in theaters or at home, they are still a huge part of our lives and will be for a long time yet. It’s just unfortunate that we’re living in a pretty poor age for moviemaking...….
…....Now, lest I seem like the terrible snob I no doubt am, let me clarify that statement. This is not the same as saying that everything is crap. Every one of us gets the opportunity to see some amazing new films every year. Nor can I claim to be a particular expert on movies of previous eras (though I think I’ve seen - and liked - a lot more of them than 99% of people my age). But you see, I have a problem, I’d venture it’s a pretty unique problem among people my age. I don’t like a lot of movies which other people love. Here is a partial list of the movies which other people would probably put on this post-2000 list which I would most definitely leave off:
There Will Be Blood
No Country for Old Men
Lord of the Rings
Memento
Spirited Away
Amelie
Requiem for a Dream
Adaptation
Gladiator
Babel
Snatch
Kill Bill
Finding Nemo
Donnie Darko
Amores Perros
V for Vendetta
Avatar
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The Incredibles
Big Fish
A Beautiful Mind
Monsters Inc.
Synedoche, New York
The Reader
The Triplettes of Bellville
La Vie en Rose
The Lives of Others
The Departed
Knocked Up
Syriana
American Splendor
Master and Commander
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Gosford Park
Ghost World
Junebug
Atonement
Hotel Rwanda
The Beat that My Heart Skipped
The King’s Speech
Black Swan
The Tree of Life
So...I think you can see my problem.
It’s not to say that I disliked all the movies on this list (though I disliked a lot of them). These are just movies that I found myself completely underwhelmed in comparison to the hyperbole to which other people greeted all of them. There are plenty of films on this list which would easily make the lists of other people. But for whatever reason, I just didn’t like it as much. There might have been individual scenes or performances I loved, I might have even thought it was a good movie. But for whatever reason, when other people praise it to the skies, my reaction is either ‘meh,’ or ‘f@#$ you.’
And as for the movies I do like, let’s simply say that certain things will date. I don’t know a single person in my agegroup, even the most culturally literate among them, ready to sing the praises of W. C. Fields or D. W. Griffith (maybe you shouldn’t be known by your initials...). Some movies will probably date worse than others to future generations. There are plenty of movies which all of us love which anyone younger than us will never understand. Here are a few examples of some movies which could be more likely to date than others:
(A scene that couldn’t be made now...six years later)
Judd Apatow - Bromance’s Last Stand: I love most of the Apatow movies (the ones he produces at least). I loved Superbad, I loved Pineapple Express, I loved Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I loved Walk Hard, I loved Get Him to the Greek, I loved Role Models, I loved I Love You, Man. I even rewatched Anchorman a week ago and found that I now love that movie too. Apatow’s formula is simple - film guys acting, talking, futzing around exactly as we all do in real life - if we were much much funnier. But in an age which sees the rise of feminism and gay rights, people in future generations will probably be raised on a different standard of what’s permissible to talk about. In the case of Apatow, some scenes which we find hilarious may well seem utterly shocking in 30 years. Than again....Blazing Saddles is still hysterical.
(If everybody’s speaking English, Spanish or Mandarin in 100 years, would this scene mean anything?)
Lost in Translation: It’s a movie I love. But it’s based on a problem that’s disappearing from the world - for the time being at least. Lost in Translation is a movie about feeling isolated and disconnected from an unfamiliar place. But we live at a time when the world grows smaller every day. Unlikely as it may sound, could it happen in our lifetimes being in Tokyo feels almost exactly like being in Mumbai which both feel like Sao Paolo? More unlikely things have happened in the last 75 years.
(What would this scene mean to anybody who didn’t grow up with Westerns?)
Mullholland Dr.: I don’t merely love Mullholland Dr. for the privilege of watching my favorite actress get it on with David Lynch’s wife. Mulholland Dr. is an abstract movie, not necessarily about anything at all. But if there is one thing that it’s clearly about, it’s Hollywood. It is about the romance of Hollywood combined with its nasty realities. To generations who never experienced Hollywood as anything but the purveyors of assembly-line horror movies and craptastic special effects, does the magic of Hollywood mean anything? Without that special frission you get from seeing the dreams and nightmares of Hollywood, would the movie mean anything to anyone?
(Never mind that this scene from Blazing Saddles was written by Richard Pryor, arguably the greatest comedian of all time and one of the great celebrators of black culture. This scene is one of the funniest ever put on film, it should also make us cringe. It could never be filmed today. Is the world a better place because of that? Probably...but that’s what posterity is for...)
Perhaps this is all a moot point. Eventually, enough history goes by that everything disappears. But some memories last longer than others. And occasionally you get the kind of memory that’s durable for thousands of years - for reasons no one can sufficiently explain, a great production of Lysistrata can be just as funny as Arrested Development.
So here are twelve(ish) movies, some of which I’ve written about before, from the last 11 years that might go into my Voyager capsule to be opened either by the Polaoans from the year 4511, or by the local Marty McFly who hangs around a mad blogger:
Pan’s Labyrinth: The more distance I get from it, the more it appears to me thus far as the most moving, questioning movie of my moviegoing life. I will not forget the tears flowing fast and freely from my eyes, only for the lights to emerge and finding The Manning in a similarly soaked state. What is Pan’s Labyrinth about? Fairy Tales? Childhood? The experience of war? Fascism? The nature of good? Of evil? Of sacrifice? Of consciousness itself? This movie is an interior world made new, in which we no longer know what is real and what is imaginary. Nothing I have ever seen in the theater shook me to a deeper foundation than this.
The Social Network: I wrote about it here and here. That's enough for one decade.
The Pianist: Schindler’s List has become a piece of history in itself - a movie that both announces to the world that the Holocaust was very real and also a message about the good that can be done in the worst of circumstances. And even if it is a great, moving movie, there is something about Schindler’s List that trivializes the Holocaust. Nobody really needs to know about the good that happened during it. What we need is a movie that demonstrates what it was like to experience it. We’ll probably never get a movie that approximates what it was like to die in the Holocaust. But Roman Polanski made a movie about what it’s like to survive it, and it’s perhaps the closest we will ever get to understanding what people must have had to endure to go through it.
Borat: Like Some Like it Hot, The Producers, Animal House, The Naked Gun and There’s Something About Mary, this is a movie that pushes the bounds of what’s permissible. Every taboo we can think of is violated, and some we’d have never thought, and we invariably feel as though we’re getting away with something huge. I never bought the kind of self-righteous explanation Sacha Baron Cohen gave for Borat - that he’s doing it to demonstrate the bigotry of others. He certainly is demonstrating their bigotry, but Borat is not satire. It is purely about getting away with things you should never do, and in spite of all the lawsuits, that’s exactly what he did.
WALL-E: Let’s tell some truth here. None of the Pixar movies were quite as great as people say. Don’t misunderstand, the Pixar movies are brilliant family entertainments. But just like the best Disney, its family friendliness is a smokescreen for something that isn’t quite so benevolent as its image. It’s difficult to say that Pixar ever made a movie that strove for any message deeper than that which you could find on the back of a fortune cookie. But that simplicity is part of Pixar’s appeal - a world of sugary fairy tales in which everyone can clear up misunderstandings simply by learning a lesson. But that rule’s shining exception is WALL-E. Why does WALL-E stand out in the Pixar Canon? Because it’s a movie about nothing less than the likeliness of mankind’s destruction, yet it still has all the plays with all the same light entertainment you see in every other Pixar production. Pixar’s been backing away from the harsh truths of WALL-E ever since, first releasing UP, a movie which tells us that the elderly can be loveable so long as they aspire to be young. And recently we heard the news that Pixar will mostly be dealing in sequels. As with Disney, the dream can last only so long, but the board of directors will try to prop it up forever.
The Jason Reitman Movies: Jason Reitman gets America.
Nick Naylor: Right there, looking into Joey's eyes, it all came back in a rush. Why I do what I do. Defending the defenseless, protecting the disenfranchised corporations that have been abandoned by their very own consumers: the logger, the sweatshop foreman, the oil driller, the land mine developer, the baby seal poacher...
Juno MacGuff: Oh, *wicked* pic in the PennySaver, by the way. Super classy - not like those people with the fake woods in the background. Honestly who do they think they're fooling?
Vanessa Loring: You found us in the PennySaver?
Ryan Bingham: How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.
….the defense rests.
Slumdog Millionaire: My ignorance of Indian cinema is total. I’ve heard figures that Bollywood releases twice, perhaps three times, as many movies a year as Hollywood. It is a segment of world film of which I’ve gone through three decades in complete ignorance. I also know that many Indians were disgusted with Slumdog Millionaire. It’s easy to see what’s wrong with this movie: it’s a Western view of India with a completely ridiculous plot, it marches straight into the Indian slums and portrays them as they are, with no time to assemble the appearance of dignity. And yet it portrays India with enormous sympathy. It refuses to exonerate Western attitudes at the same time that it shows the unbridgeable divides in Indian society - wealth and poverty, Hindu and Muslim, honest work and criminal corruption. This is the India of transition, and just as it took Europeans like Tocqueville to point out the promise of America, it may take Westerners to point out the incredible things that might lay in India’s future. Like Tocqueville, there are many things that might seem wrong or ridiculous about it. But ridiculous as the plot may seem, people like Jamal exist all around India; people who have known nothing but misfortune, only to find their way into privilege of which they’d never dared to dream. And as many Americans and Europeans once did, this newly privileged class must contend with the question, ‘Why me?’ Why has he been lucky enough when everyone he knew was left behind? Like the America of a century ago, it displays a magnificent country whose possibilities are waiting to explode. Yes, this is a Western view of India, perhaps it takes overprivileged Westerners to explain to other Westerners what is fascinating about India. As India’s position in the world continues to rise, it will continue to explain just that for a long time to come.
Bad Education: I love Talk to Her and All About My Mother. But we have to face that Bad Education is another level of Pedro Almodovar moviemaking. Whereas the other two brush off the subject of sexual abuse with humor, Bad Education is an all-out confrontation. It is a movie about the lives that are ruined, the trauma incurred, sacrifices made, and bearing witness for the possibilities spoiled within its victims. It is a devastating movie, at times as unpleasant as any experience one can have in a theater. But it is also a movie about how memory and love can help sustain people through the worst experiences.
Hero: I don’t get offended easily by movies, but this one managed to do so, and do it brilliantly. This is a movie about violence, but there is hardly any real violence to be found. Some movies dras us into an abyss and make us glad we took the journey, but in Hero there is no abyss to go down. The movie seems nothing more than its appearances. Because in Hero the seductive pageantry of the movie is all that matters. The movie peels back layer upon layer of distrust and lies to reach a conclusion that is as dishonest as any which the movies have ever told us. The precision of American special effects is often employed to evoke chaos of fights, but the precision of Hero evokes nothing but precision. Swordfighters clash with each other without so much as a single spurt of blood that leaks out of place, violence is made to seem beautiful and seductive. Through it we see a glorification of violence, the ecstacy of death, and the justification for mass murder. In a movie of such over-controlled precision, is it any wonder that it ends up justifying the slogans of a thousand tyrants? Cruelty born out of love? War that achieves eternal peace? Orwell said it rather differently. But then again, so have many great artists through history in far more approving terms than Orwell. I disagree with everything about this movie, but I think it’s a great one all the same.
Brokeback Mountain: For all the larger than life landscapes, Brokeback Mountain is a very small movie about wrecked lives, unfulfilled dreams, and compromises that should never have to be made. Our generation can only speculate about the hardships of gay people at a time when they were lethally compelled to keep their identities secret. But thankfully, this movie does not simply howl with anger. It duly notes the terrible injustice, and maintains a passive, resigned acceptance of the situation. Life goes on, with all its grueling banalities intact, until it’s finally too late to create a better life.
Sin City: Like Taxi Driver, Blue Velvet, and Pulp Fiction, this is a movie that speaks on an almost subconscious level to the time in which it was made. There was once a time when Americans viewed cities as inviting, familiar places. Our grandparents might have watched film noir and read Batman comics, but the violence of those genres was playacting - far more cartoonish than the real thing. They feared violence, but they slept soundly in the beds of their tenement houses all the same. But families with luck on their side long since decamped to suburbs when cities got too violent; and we’ve been growing more fearful of cities ever since our grandparents told us some horror story about the ‘old neighborhood.’ As the economic downturns grow longer, we lucky Americans may find ourselves back in the tenements. And if we do, we’ll quickly have to face our fears of what cities are. In the Bush era, we began to awaken from the comfort which middle-class suburbia afforded us. Perhaps all that corruption and violence never went away. Rather, it festered in our absence, and one day we shall wake up to find that our whole world is controlled by a conspiracy of violent lowlives and debauched elites from whom we can never escape. Which brings us to...
City of God: If Sin City is the nightmare view of urban life, then City of God is the documentary view from the harsh tropical sun - yes, life is fragile, but it’s all the more precious because of it. We’re seduced and terrified by a place where life means everything and nothing. It is a story all the more horrific for being true to reality, and gives incredible charisma and dignity to all the characters within it. Within it, we see the story of Latin America, of slums everywhere, of the entire third world. If there is one movie thus far of the 21st century of whose survival I’m absolutely certain....
Monday, November 7, 2011
Il Grande Inquisitore
James Morris and Samuel Ramey having a deep voice-off. Awesome for that even if the orchestra is second rate and there is no attempt at an actual presentation. Over their careers they've both been rather underrated: Americans aren't supposed to be this good. But listen to them. Morris could easily be mistaken for Cesare Siepi, Ramey for Boris Christoff.
There's no Don Carlo performance that completely satisfies me (though the legendary Royal Opera Giulini performance from the mid-50's probably comes closest). We're still coming to terms with this sprawling monster which has at least four different editions. Like Boris Godunov, there can never be a perfect performance because the composer's ultimate intentions are so unclear. What's probably needed is a chronically visceral conductor to forget the score and create his own version of it the way Nikolai Golovanov, Ettore Panizza, Dobrowen and Gergiev did for Boris. Don Carlo has attracted most of the biggest names of the last half-century: Karajan, Fricsay, Solti, Giulini, Abbado, Haitink, Muti, Levine, Pappano. But by and large, they've been a timid lot that treats the piece with kid gloves - as though it's the same kind of perfect masterpiece you get in Otello and Falstaff where the score merely has to be followed to achieve maximum impact.
In any event, there are moments when I (and thousands of others) think that this scene is...well if not the greatest single scene Verdi ever did, then the scene where Verdi stretched his imagination to its final limit. After Don Carlo comes Aida, the Requiem, Otello and Falstaff - each displaying a different kind of perfection. But in the whole realm of art, this is the only companion scene to Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor (both based on a play by Schiller that is nearly forgotten by now). The primary subject of the scene is the relatively light one of filicide, but within it are all the same issues of tyranny, subjugation, the misery of the world, and the absence of God. Once this scene is experienced, it is never forgotten.
COUNT DI LERMA
The Grand Inquisitor!
INQUISITOR
Am I in the King's presence?
FILIPPO
Yes; I sent you, father!
I am in doubt.
Carlo is filling my heart with bitter sadness;
The Infante is rebelling against me,
He has taken up arms against his father.
INQUISITOR
What mode of punishment do you choose?
FILIPPO
Extreme measures.
INQUISITOR
Let me know them!
FILIPPO
Let him escape or let the axe...
INQUISITOR
Well?
FILIPPO
If I send my son to death will your hand absolve me?
INQUISITOR
The peace of the Empire is worth a rebel's life.
FILIPPO
Can I, a Christian, sacrifice my son for the world?
INQUISITOR
To redeem us God sacrificed His.
FILIPPO
But can you put into force such a stringent law?
INQUISITOR
Everywhere it will have force, as it had it on Calvary.
FILIPPO
Can nature and love be silenced in me?
INQUISITOR
Everything must be silenced in order to exalt the faith.
FILIPPO
Very well!
INQUISITOR
Has the King nothing further to ask me?
FILIPPO
No.
INQUISITOR
Then it is I who will speak to you, Sire,
On Spanish soil, heresy has never prevailed, but there is one who wishes to undermine the divine edifice.
He is the King's friend, his constant companion, the demon of temptation who spurs him on to ruin. Carlo's treason, which has enraged you so, in comparison with his, seems a futile sport. And I, the inquisitor, I who have often raised my powerful hand against the vile hordes of miscreant for the great men here below, forgetful of my faith allow to go uncurbed a dangerous rebel... and the King!
FILIPPO
To help pass sorry days, in which I live, at my Court I have sought in vain what I long for. A man! A loyal heart! Then I found him!
INQUISITOR
Why a man? Why, then, have you the title of king, Sire, if a lesser man be your equal?
FILIPPO
No more, priest!
INQUISITOR
The ideas of the innovators have tainted your mind! You wish to break with your feeble hand the sacred yoke extending over the Roman Catholic globe! Return to your duty: The Church can offer to the man who has no hope, who repents, complete forgiveness: I demand of you the noble Posa.
FILIPPO
No, never!
INQUISITOR
O King, if I were not with you in the royal palace this very day, I swear to God, tomorrow you would be before the Grand Inquisitor at the Supreme Court.
FILIPPO
Friar, I have suffered your harsh words too long!
INQUISITOR
Why then evoke the shade of Samuel?
I have already given two kings to your mighty realm!
Madman, do you want to destroy the work of years?
Why am I here? What does King want of me?
FILIPPO
Father, let there be peace between us again.
INQUISITOR
Peace?
FILIPPO
You must forget what has passed here.
INQUISITOR
Perhaps!
FILIPPO
So the throne must always bow to the altar!
There's no Don Carlo performance that completely satisfies me (though the legendary Royal Opera Giulini performance from the mid-50's probably comes closest). We're still coming to terms with this sprawling monster which has at least four different editions. Like Boris Godunov, there can never be a perfect performance because the composer's ultimate intentions are so unclear. What's probably needed is a chronically visceral conductor to forget the score and create his own version of it the way Nikolai Golovanov, Ettore Panizza, Dobrowen and Gergiev did for Boris. Don Carlo has attracted most of the biggest names of the last half-century: Karajan, Fricsay, Solti, Giulini, Abbado, Haitink, Muti, Levine, Pappano. But by and large, they've been a timid lot that treats the piece with kid gloves - as though it's the same kind of perfect masterpiece you get in Otello and Falstaff where the score merely has to be followed to achieve maximum impact.
In any event, there are moments when I (and thousands of others) think that this scene is...well if not the greatest single scene Verdi ever did, then the scene where Verdi stretched his imagination to its final limit. After Don Carlo comes Aida, the Requiem, Otello and Falstaff - each displaying a different kind of perfection. But in the whole realm of art, this is the only companion scene to Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor (both based on a play by Schiller that is nearly forgotten by now). The primary subject of the scene is the relatively light one of filicide, but within it are all the same issues of tyranny, subjugation, the misery of the world, and the absence of God. Once this scene is experienced, it is never forgotten.
COUNT DI LERMA
The Grand Inquisitor!
INQUISITOR
Am I in the King's presence?
FILIPPO
Yes; I sent you, father!
I am in doubt.
Carlo is filling my heart with bitter sadness;
The Infante is rebelling against me,
He has taken up arms against his father.
INQUISITOR
What mode of punishment do you choose?
FILIPPO
Extreme measures.
INQUISITOR
Let me know them!
FILIPPO
Let him escape or let the axe...
INQUISITOR
Well?
FILIPPO
If I send my son to death will your hand absolve me?
INQUISITOR
The peace of the Empire is worth a rebel's life.
FILIPPO
Can I, a Christian, sacrifice my son for the world?
INQUISITOR
To redeem us God sacrificed His.
FILIPPO
But can you put into force such a stringent law?
INQUISITOR
Everywhere it will have force, as it had it on Calvary.
FILIPPO
Can nature and love be silenced in me?
INQUISITOR
Everything must be silenced in order to exalt the faith.
FILIPPO
Very well!
INQUISITOR
Has the King nothing further to ask me?
FILIPPO
No.
INQUISITOR
Then it is I who will speak to you, Sire,
On Spanish soil, heresy has never prevailed, but there is one who wishes to undermine the divine edifice.
He is the King's friend, his constant companion, the demon of temptation who spurs him on to ruin. Carlo's treason, which has enraged you so, in comparison with his, seems a futile sport. And I, the inquisitor, I who have often raised my powerful hand against the vile hordes of miscreant for the great men here below, forgetful of my faith allow to go uncurbed a dangerous rebel... and the King!
FILIPPO
To help pass sorry days, in which I live, at my Court I have sought in vain what I long for. A man! A loyal heart! Then I found him!
INQUISITOR
Why a man? Why, then, have you the title of king, Sire, if a lesser man be your equal?
FILIPPO
No more, priest!
INQUISITOR
The ideas of the innovators have tainted your mind! You wish to break with your feeble hand the sacred yoke extending over the Roman Catholic globe! Return to your duty: The Church can offer to the man who has no hope, who repents, complete forgiveness: I demand of you the noble Posa.
FILIPPO
No, never!
INQUISITOR
O King, if I were not with you in the royal palace this very day, I swear to God, tomorrow you would be before the Grand Inquisitor at the Supreme Court.
FILIPPO
Friar, I have suffered your harsh words too long!
INQUISITOR
Why then evoke the shade of Samuel?
I have already given two kings to your mighty realm!
Madman, do you want to destroy the work of years?
Why am I here? What does King want of me?
FILIPPO
Father, let there be peace between us again.
INQUISITOR
Peace?
FILIPPO
You must forget what has passed here.
INQUISITOR
Perhaps!
FILIPPO
So the throne must always bow to the altar!
Sunday, November 6, 2011
800 Words: The Weekend America was Young - Too Big To Fail - Part II
Jacapo: It’s difficult for us in 2072 to imagine what it must have been like to live in a country where accountability didn’t exist.
Esteban: Oh yes. The United States was a country which invaded Iraq in 2003 simply because it thought it could remake the Middle East in its own image.
Jacopo: But that was a mere eighteen months after the world watched the tallest buildings in its largest city destroyed.
Esteban: Precisely. When the idea to invade Iraq occurred, 70% of the country supported it. For fifty years, Americans were told that they were the world’s dominant nation on a daily basis. After the plane attacks of 2001, or 9/11 as we used to call it, Americans desperately needed to hold onto the notion that we were invincible. That kind of hubris takes a lifetime to build up, and the ramifications of being showed that they weren’t took another lifetime to recover from.
Jacopo: But didn’t the United States already have the experience of Vietnam to show them that they were not invincible?
Esteban: Vietnam is one of the most contested episodes in American history, now as then. Some Americans, mostly conservatives, thought America lost because it was not committed enough and should have sent millions of troops into the country. Others, mostly liberals, thought America lost because it had no business there at all. It was ultimately the dividing issue that caused the fissure that led to the USA’s dissolution a half-century after the war ended.
Jacopo: How did my greycer Zaydie and Bubbie feel about it.
Esteban: Vietnam was a routinely debated issue in my family. My mother was very much what the turn of the century used to call a neo-conservative, so she always advocated the hardest possible line against Communism, Islamism, and crime. But my father got a PhD to avoid the draft. He was a moderate-to-liberal Democrat who marched with Civil Rights and against Vietnam.
Jacopo: Wasn’t he a Republican?
Esteban: He registered purely as a joke. We lived in an area where the Republican party hardly existed, so I suppose he did it purely to shock people. My mother, on the other hand, registered as a Democrat because no Republicans were ever elected to anything in our area. So she registered as a Democrat purely so she could vote for the most Conservative candidate.
Jacopo: Sounds like an interesting family to grow up in.
Esteban: You don’t know the half of it....In any event, let’s get back to the topic.
Jacopo: Indeed.
Esteban: Everyone accepted that boom and bust were inevitable, but over a period of 30 years, bank lobbyists persuaded government to lift regulations.
Jacopo: What kind of regulations?
Esteban: The kind that separated investment banks from commercial banks.
Jacopo: For those who don’t know, what does that mean?
Esteban: Many things. But there are two that are especially worth noting. The first is that the ultimate difference between a commercial bank and investment bank is that a commercial bank must have a certain level of money in reserve so that people’s deposits can be a safe investment.
Jacopo: But didn’t America of your youth not require commercial banks to have that reserve?
Esteban: Yes. In 1999, the Glass Steagall act was repealed.
Jacopo: What is the Glass Steagall act?
Esteban: The act that separated commercial banks from investment banks. And that brings us to the second point. When the Glass Steagall act passed in 1932, the major investment firms were banks in which deposits could be made, and the banks could invest the entirety of your money in any way they saw fit. So when the stock market tanked, the banks lost most of their money.
Jacopo: Which caused a run on banks.
Esteban: Exactly. If people wanted to ever see their money again, they had to withdraw their savings from banks immediately. So the Glass Steagal Act ensured an unprecedented level of economic stability in world history. By keeping a certain amount of money of reserve, commercial banks would be a safe investment: low reward but low risk. And with the high rewards of investment banking came high risk, a fact that banks now had to make people realize.
Jacopo: What made them repeal it?
Esteban: The usual: hubris, utopian thinking, libertarian economics...People had forgotten the simple rule that high reward leads to high risk.
Jacopo: What were the arguments against keeping Glass Steagal?
Esteban: The exact same arguments that Republicans from Reagan onward used for lowering taxes. The regulations were too confusing.
Jacopo: Were they confusing?
Esteban: Of course. Interpreting laws always is.
Jacopo: So what was the real reason?
Esteban: Well,...I hate to reduce it so terribly, but.....greed.
Jacopo: That was predictable.
Esteban: But they didn’t view it as greed. Again, the whole point of the libertarian philosophy was to provide a religion for businessmen which assures them that greed is a virtuous sentiment. And their high priest was a man named Alan Greenspan.
Jacopo: Who’s Alan Greenspan?
Esteban: The late-20th century just cried.
Jacopo: Seriously, who is he?
Esteban: He was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve for 20 years.
Jacopo: What’s the Federal Reserve?
Esteban: It was America’s national banking system, in charge of printing money to decide how many dollars will be in circulation at any given time.
Jacopo: How was he the high priest of libertarians?
Esteban: Well, firstly, he learned his personal brand of economics at the feet of Ayn Rand, the founder of libertarianism herself. But more importantly, his policy was generally that there was no such thing as accountability when it came to prosperity. As a libertarian, he technically did not even believe in the necessity of the Federal Reserve. But once he became the Federal Reserve Chair, his solution to every problem was to flood the United States with dollars.
Jacopo: Isn’t that a direct contradiction from his beliefs?
Esteban: Yes. But no moreso than neoconservatives of the time who believed that democracy should be put into practice everywhere, except in places where people would vote against America’s interests.
Jacopo: Libertarianism and Neoconservatism sound very much alike.
Esteban: They were very much alike. And at the turn of the century, they were virtually interchangeable philosophies on different playing fields. Libertarians believed in the absolute goodness of the free market against all evidence, neo-conservatives believed in the absolute goodness of democracy against all evidence.The result of Libertarianism was the second great depression that nearly became a superdepression. The end result of Neoconservatism was the backslide of Russia and Iraq into authoritarianism.
Jacopo: That reminds me, I wanted to ask you what would have happened if the Arab Spring occurred while George W. Bush was president rather than Obama?
Esteban: I have no idea except that World War III would have turned into the destruction of the world.
Jacopo: (laughs uncomfortably) If you’d allow me, I’d like to take things in a slightly different direction. My next question is, how close did the US come to a run on the banks like in the great depression?
Esteban: Countless times they were on the precipice. They were on the ledge after the 2008 housing crisis with Lehman Brothers. They were on the ledge again after the debt ceiling collapse in 2011. They were on the ledge in 2018 when President Bachman threatened military action against China because the Central Committee would not allow for the import of American products. In response, China and Russia placed economic sanctions on the United States and placed trade blockades around their coasts and said that the sanctions would not be lifted if America did not start paying its debts.
Jacopo: Didn’t Obama and Romney pay off the debt?
Esteban: Hardly. After five years, the end result of Obama’s emergency austerity measures was to resurrect the American economy, balance the budget, and pay off a couple trillion from the debt. But there still was well more than 10 trillion dollars outstanding and US citizens held more than 35 trillion dollars of private debt.
Jacopo: So during that period, America had to make its own products again?
Esteban: For about a month, yes it did. There were all sorts of pundits, particularly a journalist named Thomas Friedman, who said that the sanctions were a blessing in disguise that would reignite American industry. But what Friedman never factored in was that no company had the money to pay even a minimum wage to the amount of workers that required. It’s not like our era when we have Second Geneva Convention to mandate a minimum wage throughout the globe that’s generally well-upheld. It’s a shame those sanctions didn’t happen ten years earlier when Americans still had unlimited access to capital. It might have saved the country.
Jacopo: Also, let’s go back to Greenspan for a moment. When he flooded the market with dollars for twenty years, how did that not lead to stagflation?
Esteban: You have to view the Greenspan approach a bit like an arms-race. Every time there was a new liquidity crisis, Greenspan would raise the interest rate, thereby creating more money. When the crisis was over, people would stand to make that much more money because the rate would stay at its new level. Until there was another crisis, at which point Greenspan would raise the rate again to stimulate the economy. The stimulation worked, and there seemed to be no need to put it back to the old level because we were out of the economic crisis and the growth of money was simply the new reality.
Jacopo: So paradoxically, we’d put so much money into the economy as to be stagflation-proof. But since there was now too much money in the economy, everything becomes too easily bought even when the prices are ludicrously high. So it was only a matter of time...
Esteban: ….Before deflation sets in. Yes, deflation can be still more terrible than inflation. In inflation, the value of money goes down, so people want to spend because their money while it’s worth something. And by spending it, eventually the money is turned into foreign currency and the supply of dollars corrects itself. In deflation, the value of money goes up, so nobody wants to spend money because the price of goods will be less at a later date. Once that spiral starts, there is no known way of getting out of it.
Jacopo: Y’know...this discussion is becoming very dry.
Esteban: Indeed it is. The Ravens are playing the Steelers so I think I’m going to watch a bit of that.
Esteban: Oh yes. The United States was a country which invaded Iraq in 2003 simply because it thought it could remake the Middle East in its own image.
Jacopo: But that was a mere eighteen months after the world watched the tallest buildings in its largest city destroyed.
Esteban: Precisely. When the idea to invade Iraq occurred, 70% of the country supported it. For fifty years, Americans were told that they were the world’s dominant nation on a daily basis. After the plane attacks of 2001, or 9/11 as we used to call it, Americans desperately needed to hold onto the notion that we were invincible. That kind of hubris takes a lifetime to build up, and the ramifications of being showed that they weren’t took another lifetime to recover from.
Jacopo: But didn’t the United States already have the experience of Vietnam to show them that they were not invincible?
Esteban: Vietnam is one of the most contested episodes in American history, now as then. Some Americans, mostly conservatives, thought America lost because it was not committed enough and should have sent millions of troops into the country. Others, mostly liberals, thought America lost because it had no business there at all. It was ultimately the dividing issue that caused the fissure that led to the USA’s dissolution a half-century after the war ended.
Jacopo: How did my greycer Zaydie and Bubbie feel about it.
Esteban: Vietnam was a routinely debated issue in my family. My mother was very much what the turn of the century used to call a neo-conservative, so she always advocated the hardest possible line against Communism, Islamism, and crime. But my father got a PhD to avoid the draft. He was a moderate-to-liberal Democrat who marched with Civil Rights and against Vietnam.
Jacopo: Wasn’t he a Republican?
Esteban: He registered purely as a joke. We lived in an area where the Republican party hardly existed, so I suppose he did it purely to shock people. My mother, on the other hand, registered as a Democrat because no Republicans were ever elected to anything in our area. So she registered as a Democrat purely so she could vote for the most Conservative candidate.
Jacopo: Sounds like an interesting family to grow up in.
Esteban: You don’t know the half of it....In any event, let’s get back to the topic.
Jacopo: Indeed.
Esteban: Everyone accepted that boom and bust were inevitable, but over a period of 30 years, bank lobbyists persuaded government to lift regulations.
Jacopo: What kind of regulations?
Esteban: The kind that separated investment banks from commercial banks.
Jacopo: For those who don’t know, what does that mean?
Esteban: Many things. But there are two that are especially worth noting. The first is that the ultimate difference between a commercial bank and investment bank is that a commercial bank must have a certain level of money in reserve so that people’s deposits can be a safe investment.
Jacopo: But didn’t America of your youth not require commercial banks to have that reserve?
Esteban: Yes. In 1999, the Glass Steagall act was repealed.
Jacopo: What is the Glass Steagall act?
Esteban: The act that separated commercial banks from investment banks. And that brings us to the second point. When the Glass Steagall act passed in 1932, the major investment firms were banks in which deposits could be made, and the banks could invest the entirety of your money in any way they saw fit. So when the stock market tanked, the banks lost most of their money.
Jacopo: Which caused a run on banks.
Esteban: Exactly. If people wanted to ever see their money again, they had to withdraw their savings from banks immediately. So the Glass Steagal Act ensured an unprecedented level of economic stability in world history. By keeping a certain amount of money of reserve, commercial banks would be a safe investment: low reward but low risk. And with the high rewards of investment banking came high risk, a fact that banks now had to make people realize.
Jacopo: What made them repeal it?
Esteban: The usual: hubris, utopian thinking, libertarian economics...People had forgotten the simple rule that high reward leads to high risk.
Jacopo: What were the arguments against keeping Glass Steagal?
Esteban: The exact same arguments that Republicans from Reagan onward used for lowering taxes. The regulations were too confusing.
Jacopo: Were they confusing?
Esteban: Of course. Interpreting laws always is.
Jacopo: So what was the real reason?
Esteban: Well,...I hate to reduce it so terribly, but.....greed.
Jacopo: That was predictable.
Esteban: But they didn’t view it as greed. Again, the whole point of the libertarian philosophy was to provide a religion for businessmen which assures them that greed is a virtuous sentiment. And their high priest was a man named Alan Greenspan.
Jacopo: Who’s Alan Greenspan?
Esteban: The late-20th century just cried.
Jacopo: Seriously, who is he?
Esteban: He was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve for 20 years.
Jacopo: What’s the Federal Reserve?
Esteban: It was America’s national banking system, in charge of printing money to decide how many dollars will be in circulation at any given time.
Jacopo: How was he the high priest of libertarians?
Esteban: Well, firstly, he learned his personal brand of economics at the feet of Ayn Rand, the founder of libertarianism herself. But more importantly, his policy was generally that there was no such thing as accountability when it came to prosperity. As a libertarian, he technically did not even believe in the necessity of the Federal Reserve. But once he became the Federal Reserve Chair, his solution to every problem was to flood the United States with dollars.
Jacopo: Isn’t that a direct contradiction from his beliefs?
Esteban: Yes. But no moreso than neoconservatives of the time who believed that democracy should be put into practice everywhere, except in places where people would vote against America’s interests.
Jacopo: Libertarianism and Neoconservatism sound very much alike.
Esteban: They were very much alike. And at the turn of the century, they were virtually interchangeable philosophies on different playing fields. Libertarians believed in the absolute goodness of the free market against all evidence, neo-conservatives believed in the absolute goodness of democracy against all evidence.The result of Libertarianism was the second great depression that nearly became a superdepression. The end result of Neoconservatism was the backslide of Russia and Iraq into authoritarianism.
Jacopo: That reminds me, I wanted to ask you what would have happened if the Arab Spring occurred while George W. Bush was president rather than Obama?
Esteban: I have no idea except that World War III would have turned into the destruction of the world.
Jacopo: (laughs uncomfortably) If you’d allow me, I’d like to take things in a slightly different direction. My next question is, how close did the US come to a run on the banks like in the great depression?
Esteban: Countless times they were on the precipice. They were on the ledge after the 2008 housing crisis with Lehman Brothers. They were on the ledge again after the debt ceiling collapse in 2011. They were on the ledge in 2018 when President Bachman threatened military action against China because the Central Committee would not allow for the import of American products. In response, China and Russia placed economic sanctions on the United States and placed trade blockades around their coasts and said that the sanctions would not be lifted if America did not start paying its debts.
Jacopo: Didn’t Obama and Romney pay off the debt?
Esteban: Hardly. After five years, the end result of Obama’s emergency austerity measures was to resurrect the American economy, balance the budget, and pay off a couple trillion from the debt. But there still was well more than 10 trillion dollars outstanding and US citizens held more than 35 trillion dollars of private debt.
Jacopo: So during that period, America had to make its own products again?
Esteban: For about a month, yes it did. There were all sorts of pundits, particularly a journalist named Thomas Friedman, who said that the sanctions were a blessing in disguise that would reignite American industry. But what Friedman never factored in was that no company had the money to pay even a minimum wage to the amount of workers that required. It’s not like our era when we have Second Geneva Convention to mandate a minimum wage throughout the globe that’s generally well-upheld. It’s a shame those sanctions didn’t happen ten years earlier when Americans still had unlimited access to capital. It might have saved the country.
Jacopo: Also, let’s go back to Greenspan for a moment. When he flooded the market with dollars for twenty years, how did that not lead to stagflation?
Esteban: You have to view the Greenspan approach a bit like an arms-race. Every time there was a new liquidity crisis, Greenspan would raise the interest rate, thereby creating more money. When the crisis was over, people would stand to make that much more money because the rate would stay at its new level. Until there was another crisis, at which point Greenspan would raise the rate again to stimulate the economy. The stimulation worked, and there seemed to be no need to put it back to the old level because we were out of the economic crisis and the growth of money was simply the new reality.
Jacopo: So paradoxically, we’d put so much money into the economy as to be stagflation-proof. But since there was now too much money in the economy, everything becomes too easily bought even when the prices are ludicrously high. So it was only a matter of time...
Esteban: ….Before deflation sets in. Yes, deflation can be still more terrible than inflation. In inflation, the value of money goes down, so people want to spend because their money while it’s worth something. And by spending it, eventually the money is turned into foreign currency and the supply of dollars corrects itself. In deflation, the value of money goes up, so nobody wants to spend money because the price of goods will be less at a later date. Once that spiral starts, there is no known way of getting out of it.
Jacopo: Y’know...this discussion is becoming very dry.
Esteban: Indeed it is. The Ravens are playing the Steelers so I think I’m going to watch a bit of that.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Schwanda the Bagpiper
I frankly love this little concert opener. Mitropoulos does circles around Reiner's famous recording. Only Mackerras comes close to this. Reiner is extremely regimented (as always), Mackerras is perhaps the best of all - as dramatic as any, but more fun. Mitropoulos is more dramatic. Both quite valid. ....has anyone ever heard the full opera?
Friday, November 4, 2011
Some Old Proms Reviews
I have to work on a WaPo review this afternoon. So there will in all likelihood be nothing new. In the meantime, enjoy 16,000 words of old proms reviews from my blog from Voices of Washington's day.
Prom 5: Semyon Bychkov and the WDR Symphony
Wagner, Mendelssohn, Schuller and Strauss
Poor Semyon Bychkov. He was supposed to be the great conductor of his generation. Twenty years ago he was world-famous as an example of moral courage for standing up to the Soviet system at great risk to his career, and so respected as a conductor that Herbert Von Karajan designated him as his handpicked successor at the Berlin Philharmonic. But Karajan resigned and died before he could make up with the Berlin Phil, and shortly thereafter the Soviet Union fell and Valery Gergiev took Bychkov's spot in the public imagination as the 'Great Russian Conductor.' After twenty years of declining reputation, his career seems to have resuscitated with newfound life that is mostly due to his partnership with the anachronistically-named West German Radio Symphony of Cologne. But this concert was his very last as their Music Director. Why is he leaving? If this concert was any indication, the partnership is not quite as fruitful as is generally alleged. It began with a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin Act I Prelude that was beautifully played but so efficiently paced that it begs speculation as to whether Bychkov cared at all. Like Lothar Koenigs a few days before in Die Meistersinger, Bychkov simply didn't even seem aware of or care how much power can be unleashed by Wagner. This was a followed by an exceedingly odd performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto by German violinist Viviane Hagner that was only intermittently inspiring. Hagner's wide warble of a vibrato was entirely inappropriate for Mendelssohn, as was her pacing - far too slow in the first movement, too quick in the second, and quite variable in the third. Furthermore, if you end the concerto with an enormous acceleration, why not do the same at the end of the first movement? The odd results made for occasional excitement, but far more often made this wonderful piece sound flat and uninvolving. Following the Mendelssohn was a piece by Gunther Schuller - the archetypal member of America's musical establishment. Now in his mid-eighties, Schuller has been an insider on the American scene since joining the horn section of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at the age of sixteen. He is not only a composer and horn player of renown but also a teacher, conductor, arranger, editor, bandleader and writer of considerable abilities. The work of his played in this concert , 'Where the Word Ends' got quite a bit of bad press in the British press, not all of it deserved. To be sure, it's not an instant classic. But Schuller's eclecticism can be rather confusing at first hearing. This piece was nearly as much Blues as Berg, Satchmo as Stravinsky. It functioned as though Schuller constructed a stream-of-consciousness echo chamber in which all the various influences of a mid-20th century classical musician in New York were thrown together. In its way, it was a mass of fascinating raw material constructed far too chaotically to create a great work. Even so, a piece that should make people curious to hear a lot more Schuller. Lastly came a performance of Strauss's Alpine Symphony that was bound to be as fine as the fine recording these forces made together a few years ago. The Alpine Symphony is one of those pieces very easy to dismiss, and even harder not to love. It is Strauss's enduring paean to nature, vulgarity and Mahler. The kitsch and the sublime meld seemlessly in this piece, and for those qualities I love the work passionately . This was not nearly as hard-driving a performance as was given last year by the Staatskapelle Dresden as conducted by Fabio Luisi, and perhaps suffered as a result. It was a performance with the type of Wagnerian style that Bychkov should have loaned to the beginning of the night. His tempos were almost uniformly broad, with beautifully lush string textures and incredibly characterful solo winds. Under Bychkov's hands, the work emerged as a piece of hallucinatory tone-painting. A mountain painted by the more disturbed cousin of Van Gogh and Munch. Bychkov leisurely journey gave us a uniquely vivid picture of Strauss's mountain, unfortunately the vividness was offset by a lack of vitality which more propulsive tempos would have given. Semyon Bychkov may yet prove to be a great conductor (the Sergiu Celibidache of our age?) but he needs much greater than what was on display here.
C+
Prom 6: Beethoven Nite
Paul Lewis Piano: BBC Symphony Orchestra Conducted by Jiri Behlolavek
Beethoven Piano Concertos and Overtures
"It was as though Lewis gave the performance I heard in my head from the time I was six years old. It is probably impossible to put into words how wonderful this was, so I won't even try. This performance had every possible quality this concerto requires and held them all in near-perfect balance. This was worthy of the greatest masters of the keyboard. Keep your ear on Lewis, he may already be a master." This is what I wrote about Paul Lewis's performance of Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto two years ago. I wish I could say that lightning struck twice but this performance was not quite on the same level. Perhaps Lewis, having now recorded the concertos, suffers from a bit of over-familiarity. Or maybe he was exhausted from having already played the First piano concerto earlier in the concert. Complaining about musicality on this level is quibbling, but effects which Lewis integrated seamlessly into the whole stood out from one another as though the pianist were going through a checklist of things to remember in each individual phrase. His performance of Beethoven 4, easily the most difficult of Beethoven's piano concertos from a musical point of view, was nothing less than very good and occasionally inspired. It was paced almost perfectly, holding poetry, form and drama in equal balance. But that highest level of magic that he provided two years ago in spades was missing. All the evidence necessary was to listen to his other performance in the same concert. Lewis's performance of Beethoven's 1st piano concerto had all the brio and poetry his performance of the fourth seemed to lack. The performance of the 4th sounded like a performance by an extremely intelligent, conscientious but calculating musician (Aimard?). But the performance of the 1st sounded as though this were how Ray Charles would have played Beethoven. Paul Lewis still may be a master, but even the very greatest have better and worse trips to the stage. If this was a worse trip, Paul Lewis is still one of the very best around. The rest of the concert was filled by two Beethoven overtures = Egmont and The Creatures of Prometheus which the BBCSO performed under the baton of Jiri Behlolavek of surprising vitality. Behlolavek has been responsible for some Beethoven snoozers over the years, so it was a delightful shock to hear the BBCSO playing Beethoven under him with such life.
A-
Prom 7: Maria Joao Pires plays the Chopin Nocturnes
Alicia De Larrocha is dead, and Martha Argerich doesn't give recitals anymore. So Maria Joao Pires is now the Grand Old Lady of the Piano. Like De Larrocha, she has that easy natural fluency that seems to adapt to the challenges of any composer, something can only happen with the aid of a fearsome musical mind. But like Argerich, she plays with an easy freedom, not so much adapting completely to the composer but adapting the composer to her own personality. But whereas Argerich's persona can seem volatile and neurotic, Pires is elegant and unperturbed. She's one of the keyboard's natural poets, able to conjure a gorgeous singing tone from the piano that few in history have ever matched. With Alfred Brendel now retired, she's almost indisputably the world's most accomplished Mozart pianist, and she does many other composers almost as well. Pires has been known for her Chopin for many years. She brings an incredibly sensitive lyricism to these pieces, creating a dream-like haze of sound that suggests far more than it states. But all the same, it's not the whole story. This is a perfect representation of the perfumed, 'French' side to Chopin - the delicate dreamer and seductive romantic par excellence. This is the Chopin of Alfred Cortot and Ivan Moravec, and it is great piano playing of a type. But where in this playing could you find Chopin the revolutionary? Chopin the Polish Nationalist? Chopin with the Slavic soul? No doubt Richter and Claudio Arrau would have made something far different sounding out of these pieces. But my favorite Chopin players: Hoffman, Rubinstein, Lipatti, Ashkenazy, Pollini, Zimmerman and maybe Yundi Li, found ways to combine the best of both approaches. Chopin's genius lies in the fact that right beneath his immaculate elegance was a volcano precipitously on the edge of eruption. Those pianists, for all their differences, always found ways to suggest the huge emotions lying just beneath the elegance. Pires seemed to cover up the explosiveness in a surfeit of beautiful sound.
B+
Prom 8: BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Conducted by Thierry Fischer
Britten, Prokofiev, Shostakovich
Two overrated pieces and a flat-out masterpiece I used to think was overrated. Let's put the cards on the table: I don't like Prokofiev. Yes, he certainly has better and worse pieces. But I can't escape the feeling that a lot of his music is noise that expresses nothing except empty gymnastics, worship of technique for its own sake, and mechanical bombast. Listening to his first piano concerto is an experience for me not unlike fingernails on a chalkboard. Even a great pianist (and surely Alexander Toradze is one) can't make me like his music any more. I go out of my way to avoid lots of music by Prokofiev, and this piece is near the top of my blacklist. I'm sure that the fault is mine, many artists I deeply respect champion his music all the time. And certainly the RAH audience, who gave a rapturous ovation, totally disagreed with me. The Prokofiev concerto was preceded by Benjamin Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem. I am, as ever, a huge Britten fan. I think he's one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century, but this piece is far from Britten at his strongest. It was Britten's first purely orchestral piece, and he wrote few more after it, perhaps learning from this experience that it wasn't for him. The piece is in three movements, and the middle movement is a fantastic and terrifying roller-coaster that these musicians rode out at maximum intensity (BBCNOW seems to have a wonderful brass section). But the outer two movements bare the marks of an immature composer who couldn't yet develop music over a large-span. Most of it sounds like long-winded filler with minimal material spread incredibly thinly. Then there's Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony: a 80-minute loose baggy monster of a piece that sounds to many people as though it's 90% filler. It amazes me how dense people can be when Shostakovich comes up. They point to the Leningrad Symphony as a perfect examples of Shostakovich's long-windedness, banality and bombast. But this is a war symphony, how else could he have written it? If it's a little too long, who cares? In any event, this was the kind of performance that does supporters of this symphony no favors. It was a slow, reasonably well-played performance that seemed appallingly short on Shostakovichian qualities like humor, violence and menace. There are many ways to approach this piece, but Thierry Fischer managed to pick one that gives its critics as much ammunition as they need. Ultimately, this was not a prom for me.
D
BBC Philharmonic
Vassily Sinaisky Conductor
Parry, Scriabin, Tchaikovsky
Vassily Sinaisky is one of those Soviet-era conductors who subsist on the international circuit by playing a steady diet of Russian composers. Nobody really cares how they would play anything else, and they generally don't try. But conductors like him, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Yuri Temirkanov and Valery Gergiev have earned their crust by travelling the world and introducing musicians and audiences not only to forgotten Russian music but also to forgotten Russian performing styles. Dynamics are more exaggerated, tempos are more flexible, and the sound of the instruments much more raw. Their musicmaking is provincial in the best sense. So it was doubly surprising that Sinaisky chose to begin not only with British music but unknown British music. Hubert Parry is now probably best known for being the mentor of Ralph Vaughan Williams, but he was a fine composer in his own right and still sometimes worth hearing. In this case, Parry's 5th Symphony was surprisingly engaging - Parry is a thoroughgoing Romantic who composes like a cross between Elgar and Tchaikovsky. Unfortunately the work is hardly a masterpiece, plenty of good ideas but Parry never seemed to know what to do with them. Even so, Sinaisky and the BBC Phil clearly appreciated the work for its good qualities and played it for everything it was worth. Then came the Scriabin Piano Concerto, a work Scriabin completed when he was still very young and not yet the firebrand he became in middle age. The slow movement is a beautiful theme and variations that foreshadows the genius Scriabin would later become, savored wonderfully by pianist Nelson Goerner. But I'd still rather hear these musicians play the Poem of Fire because the other two movements were made in the "Generic Romantic Piano Concerto Assembly Line." The concert ended with a surprisingly disciplined and restrained performance of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony. I was expecting a performance in the Svetlanov/Gergiev mould with lots of tempo shifts and huge brass firepower. Instead we got a beautifully shaded performance in the mould of Rozhdestvensky and Ivanov that hewed closer to the score than most other performances ever dare (though hardly without individual touches). It was all in a far more classical style than we're accustomed to hearing Tchaikovsky, an equally valid and sometimes more effective way to approach Tchaikovsky that shows him for the great composer he is in addition to being a very emotional one. It wasn't the most searing Pathetique I've ever heard, but it was a damn fine performance and many conductors could learn a thing or two from Sinaisky's way with this over-interpreted score.
B
Proms 10 & 11:
Doctor Who Prom
I hear Doctor Who's an incredible show. But something tells my that I won't figure out how to appreciate it by listening to its soundtrack.
Prom 12: Sir Charles Mackerras Memorial
Schumann, Johann Strauss, Dvorak
BBC Philharmonic
Vassily Sinaisky Conducting
I nearly didn't listen. This was supposed to be conducted by Sir Charles, who until earlier this month was arguably the greatest living conductor and an inspiration to musicians everywhere. Unfortunately Sir Charles died less than a week before the Proms began. So this concert that promised to be a highlight of the season couldn't help but be a low point because of his absence, or so I thought. Not that it could ever be bad: Sir Charles chose the music - there's not a musician in the entire world with better taste - and Vassily Sinaisky is certainly not a bad conductor. But so many wonderful memories are bound up with listening to Sir Charles that you can't help but listen to passages and think of how the orchestra would have played them under his baton. In Schumann's Overture, Scherzo and Finale, I found myself missing things as simple as the extra spring Sir Charles always brought to the dance rhythms, particularly in the Scherzo, which was, to say the least, lead-footed. Even so, the other two movements were much better and Sinaisky didn't fall for the trick of blunting Schumann's rough edges which only succeeds in making the music boring. Then came an account of Schumann's Piano Concerto with the great musician-pianist Christian Zacharias. This was always going to be a highlight, and even if Mackerras is not there Zacharias is. This is Schumann as he should be played: always fresh, no lingering, always flexible but never so much that breaks up the line. I've heard slightly more dramatic accounts of the Schumann Piano Concerto, but never have I heard a rendition that made the piece sound so coherently a whole - the first movement particularly is often played as thought Schumann were delivering a manic-depressive rant with contrasts played up for maximum effect. The second half began with one change to the program: Sir Charles had devoted an entire half of the program to the music of Johann Strauss (try to imagine Claudio Abbado or Bernard Haitink doing that...) but one work was replaced by a Dvorak's E-minor Slavonic Dance as a tribute to Sir Charles - a wonderful and tasteful tribute since it has one of the saddest and most beautiful melodies ever written. I don't think anybody would have ever guessed that Vassily Sinaisky would turn out to be a great conductor of light music, but as it turns out, he is. Indulging in a much freer hand than Sir Charles would have, Sinaisky gave Romantic life to these old Viennese gems. A wonderful, and absolutely surprising, concert.
A-
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Thierry Fischer Conductor
Cherubini, Schumann, Holt, Richard Strauss
I was beginning to wonder if Thierry Fischer would ever come back to life. Early on in the BBCNOW partnership I remember hearing some wonderful Beethoven and Berlioz, but in these past few years they've seemed to check out, phoning in more dull performances than are worth anybody's time. But all you need to do to hear what this partnership is capable of is to listen to their performance of Cherubini's Medea overture. Cherubini hasn't gotten much good press these past...oh...150 years, and the reason for it is as clear as it ever was. The fault lies almost entirely with Berlioz, the prodigal student of the Paris Conservatoire, who also wrote the most entertaining composer biography in the history of music. The autobiography casts Cherubini, the Conservatoire director, in the role of the sputteringly pathetic conservative villain. It would be nice to believe that the portrait is more memorable than Cherubini's music, but fortunately that's just not true. Cherubini's music seems to combine the best elements of Mendelssohn with Beethoven, and BBCNOW seemed to relish the novelty, tearing into the dramatic piece like a pack of ravenous wolves. Next came a very crisp and nimble performance of Schumann's Spring Symphony. Fischer hued extraordinarily close to the score markings, and the romantic poet who relished getting his hands dirty suddenly sounded like an elegant ultraclassicist. It's not the only way to perform Schumann (many people think the tempo markings come from his wife Clara), but it made for a limpid, virile performance in a piece that makes many supposedly better conductors come unstuck. Then came a performance of a percussion concerto by Simon Holt, called "A Table of Noises". I've heard a couple pieces by Holt before, and this one unfortunately this one was no diffferent than any other piece by him in that I can discern no coherent sense of form or structure. It's nothing more than a chaos of noise to which he tags a title, and people are supposed to froth at the mouth at how deep it is. And judging by the reviews, some people do. It got some glowing reviews and I don't doubt this was in no small part due to Colin Currie's percussion performance. But one should pity any performer who has to memorize pieces full of so much complication that it would sound no different than a random improvisation. More's the pity, since the concert ended with a performance of Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel that captured its light heart as few in the world have. Fischer set a daringly fast tempo to which BBCNOW seemed to have no trouble keeping up. This performance had that one special quality that can't be faked: fun. It was relieving to hear these forces play at such a high level after their first concert was at such a low one. Let's hope for more nights like this in the future.
Holt F, Everything Else A
German Chamber Philharmonic of Bremen
Paavo Jarvi Conducting
All Beethoven
Beethoven looks to be having a pretty good year at the Proms. Paul Lewis gave an excellent Beethoven concert last week, and now Paavo Jarvi brings one of the 233453 orchestras of which he's music director for a very good performance of nothing but Beethoven. The Beethoven cycle released by these forces makes clear that Jarvi is one of the world's great Beethoven conductors. Jarvi 'gets' what makes Beethoven tick. There's no tacked-on late-Romantic pathos, this is Beethoven as he should sound: explosive with all the jagged edges in tact. The concert began with a performance of Beethoven's 1st symphony that was simply one of the finest anyone will ever hear. Most conductors slow down the tempo markings in an effort to make it sound like his later music, but Jarvi seemed to know that this is Beethoven when he was still in Haydn's sway. Beethoven 1 is Haydn on steroids, and that's precisely what this wonderful performance sounded like. This was followed by a performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto by my mortal enemy. Now, I should probably specify that Hilary Hahn has in all likelihood never been notified of our mutual enmity (to say nothing of existence). But for any ambitious violin student of a certain age from Baltimore, Hilary Hahn is a name that still strikes terror. The 'little miss perfect' of violin studies continues to be more 'with the program' than the rest of us can ever dream. In possession of a golden tone, awesome accuracy of intonation, and a musical intelligence that leaves mere mortals in the shade. Everything about her seems so perfect, it doesn't seem quite human. And that's precisely what was missing from this performance - the sense that this musician is unaware that the incredible piece of music she's performing can express any feeling higher than the perfection which she seems to achieve so easily. Everything was so perfectly in its right place that there was no reason to care. Some people love Hilary Hahn because she plays like a goddess, but that's precisely what gets in the way of my appreciating her. I'm always awed by her, but I've never been moved. The concert ended with a rare performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that was too hasty. There have been many great performances of Beethvoen 5 over the years, and many more awful ones. Jarvi's performance was very nearly a great, but not quite. No doubt after years of suffering through turgid, murky performances it's nice to occasionally hear a Beethoven 5 that zips through it with too much blunt force. It can't be denied that Jarvi's tumultuously fast tempos and volcanic dynamics (especially for a chamber orchestra of 40) were awesome. But in order to get the full power of the work's enormous contrasts, there has to be more moments of repose than Jarvi allows for. But this performance got much closer to the reality Beethoven than many performers ever do.
B+ (Beethoven 1 gets an A+)
Prom 15: BBC Symphony
Oliver Knussen Conducting
Stockhausen, Birtwistle, Luke Bedford, Colin Matthews, Zimmerman, Schumann
Oliver Knussen is a fine musician. He writes extremely dissonant music that can still manage to be charming (he wrote an opera of Where The Wild Things Are), and his conducting never fails to have interesting insights into oft-misunderstood pieces. But it often occurs to me that in its way Knussen's insistence on all things avant-garde is a bit like political theorists who still think Communism is the most desireable system even after the Gulags. Knussen can make atonality sound more reasonable, but he can't make us forget what we already know. His concert began with Karlheinz Stockhausen's Jubilee Overture. It should be said, Stockhausen was hardly a terrible composer, he was merely a raving lunatic who endured terrible childhood traumas and wrote some decent music in his day. But even at his best Stockhausen is monumentally overrated - charmingly eccentric music is touted as prophecies for a new musical epoch. Sadly, this piece is Stockhausen at his most boring: nonsensical patterns scrawled around the score, piles of musical white noise which any listener can place upon whatever meanings they like. That's not music, that's a Rorschach Test. Then came a piece by Harrison Birtwistle called "Sonnance Severance" which was dissonant, loud, and mercifully brief. I enjoy a Birtwistle in small doses, he knows how to orchestrate and how to build to climaxes, but his refusal to allow for anything but the most stringent atonality leads to some crippling monotony. But this piece was all of three minutes long, and enjoyable for its duration. Then came the London premiere of Colin Matthews's Violin Concerto by Canadian violinist Leila Josefowicz. Josefowicz is the polar opposite of her contemporary Hilary Hahn: her playing is full of eruptive fire, it takes enormous risks, and it effortlessly draws in the listener. I have doubts as to whether Colin Matthews's Violin Concerto is a masterpiece, but it is a fine composition and a wonderful vehicle for Josefowicz's overwhelming talents. The piece is not unlike Thomas Ades's violin concerto, lots of dominant suspensions piled one atop the other, but it seems to be done without Ades's genius for organizing them into great paragraphs. After that came Luke Bedford's six-minute "Outblaze the Sky." Far be it for me to say that some composers use 'too many notes,' but the human ear must always have a point of reference in order to make sense the musical content. Without pandering, this piece is far more intelligible than the other two new pieces on the program because it's organized around the principle of the 'glissando' (slide), and the orchestral strings slide from note to note as the other instruments intone a series notes in a single large chord that builds to a climax of real beauty. It is a wonderful piece that I hope we hear many more times, so I'm keeping my ear on Luke Bedford. Then came Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Rhenish Fair Dances. Though fundamentally a German atonalist, Zimmermann was too individual a voice to subscribe to dogma. Like Ligeti, he bristled at the strictures of the Darmstadt School, and was a finer composer than either Stockhausen or Boulez. This piece, like Ligeti's Concert Romanesc, shows the composer as a young man in a far lighter mood than we're accustomed to hearing him. If Concert Romanesc sounds like Bartok in his Balkan folk mode, then the Rhenish Fair Dances equally channel the more Teutonic volk moments in Hindemith. They're small, impish little pieces that take Bavarian folk melodies and put them through all sorts of weird polytonal paces. Finally came Schumann's Rhenish Symphony, and while not without moments of sloppy execution, it was a completely galvanizing performance and in all seriousness perhaps the most understanding performance I've ever heard, with all the German warmth of a Daniel Barenboim performance without Barenboim's droopy tempos. Knussen wisely performed the first movement at top-speed so that we could enjoy the hemiola (three against two) rhythm on which the whole work is based. Knussen followed the metronome markings in each movement as any period performance conductor would have, but with much more vibrant playing than the period crowd ever allows for. The Rhenish symphony suddenly achieved a fruitful, glorious life which this problematic work seldom does under less perceptive musicians. This concert is vintage Knussen, an always interesting musician who takes enormous risks, introduces us to unfamiliar repertoire and shows us unfamiliar facets of repertoire we knew backwards. Would that he'd apply himself to better music.
B (Stockhausen gets an F, Bedford, Zimmerman and Schumann all get A+'s)
Prom 16: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons Conducting
Wagner, Beethoven, Dvorak
Has the CBSO done it again? Thirty years ago they hired a little-known Liverpudlian in his mid-twenties to direct them, this unknown turned out to be Sir Simon Rattle. After eighteen fabulous years under Rattle, they hired Sakari Oramo, who only a few years before was an orchestral violinist in Finland and is now the director of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and one of the most underrated conductors in the world. Now they hired a thirty-year-old Latvian who until then had only conducted the orchestra at an acoustical tune-up. The world is already ready to proclaim a third miracle in Birmingham, but perhaps I'm a bit more guarded in my optimism. Nelsons is a pupil of the great Latvian maestro Mariss Jansons, Nelsons looks, sounds, and moves almost exactly like his mentor does right down to the same Latvian accented basso on the radio. Nelsons has his mentor's talent for eliciting great orchestral playing, but interpretively Nelsons is far more willful. Jansons is very severe (too severe?) in his refusal to indulge in adjustments that diverge from the score, a practice about which Nelsons seems to have few scruples. Jansons didn't become a star until his mid-40's, and had decades to develop his craft away from the spotlight. As a result, there is nothing Jansons does on the podium without considerable forethought. Andris Nelsons is doing everything at once - Bayreuth, Vienna, Dresden, the Met - as though he already has a fully-formed musical personality. It began with Wagner's overture to his opera Rienzi, and where was the Wagnerian grandeur? Maybe too much Wagner can make anyone silly, but I missed those massive Wagnerian chords that hit the listener right in the solar plexus, on my laptop (a Toshiba A665 with fabulous speakers by any standard) this orchestra rang as hollowly as a toy orchestra. Critics around the world have already gone wild about Nelson's Wagner, but I'm not yet impressed that we've seen the birth of a natural Wagnerian. Then came a characteristically superb performance from - who else? - Paul Lewis, of Beethoven's second piano concerto. Numbering aside, it's really Beethoven's first concerto, and the most Mozartean work Beethoven ever wrote. Lewis plays Beethoven with an astonishing elegance that could easily be transferred to Mozart, and to my delight Nelsons was with him every step of the way. It was every bit as wonderful as Lewis's performance of the first concerto last week. Finally we came to a performance of Dvorak's New World Symphony that was exciting and alarming in almost equal measure. The slow movement in particular was absolutely magical and showed that Nelsons is a natural musical talent potentially of the Furtwangler/Bernstein level. He obviously has a wonderful feel for inspiring players, setting moods, and creating just the exact right sound for the right moment. But at the same time as that was an unmistakable sense that mannerisms were creeping in that would be easily solved. There's nothing wrong with pushing tempos around so long as it doesn't distort the musical material (often its necessary just to clarify it), but Nelsons tempo manipulations sometimes felt arbitrary, as did the way in which players phrased the same musical material differently. Many phrases were beautifully formed, but others seemed to go by without a second thought, a practice that would send Mariss Jansons into a rage. Nelsons is obviously a fabulous natural talent capable of giving enormously theatrical performances. He could be a Willem Mengelberg for our time, but like Gustavo Dudamel he's not yet fully formed as a musician, and it would be a terrible mistake to expect too much of him too soon.
Prom 17: Scottish Chamber Orchestra Winds
Douglas Boyd Conducting
Dvorak and Mozart
This was to be Sir Charles Mackerras's second and final Prom of the season, and had he been able to go on a little while longer he couldn't have picked better music with which to exit. Anybody who's never heard Mozart's 'Gran Partita' is missing out, but most people have heard it without knowing it as it's his famous Serenade for Winds which Salieri describes so memorably in Amadeus. Even by the standards of Mozart, it's a miracle. But before that came Dvorak's Serenade for Winds, which he wrote as a complementary piece to Mozart's when he was still very young. Dvorak's essay isn't on Mozart's level, but it gives just as much pleasure as anything else written by this most natural and human of composers. Some composers - Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Bizet, Dvorak, Faure, Vaughan Williams, Poulenc, Ned Rorem...to say nothing of Kander & Ebb, Duke Ellington, Van Morrison, Sam Cooke, The Beach Boys, Otis Redding, The Beatles, and Louis Armstrong - express themselves so directly that the simple act of listening to their music without contemplating any meaning gives overwhelming pleasure. Maybe Sir Charles would have given the rhythms a bit more spring, but it was perfectly enjoyable under Doug Boyd - who was also the principal oboe of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe before becoming a conductor. But Sir Charles's absence was keenly felt in the Mozart, a masterful piece that needs the hand of a master. A few years ago the conductorless London Mozart Players gave a reading of this piece which I will never forget, every note well-placed, every phrase thought through to build upon what preceded it. This performance was not conductorless, but far it was far more characterless. The piece can work equally well in a variety of interpretations, but the players have to bring commitment and fervor to however they choose to play it. In this performance, phrases were lobbed off with all the care of a dorm room slob. It was a routine performance, and no composer exposes the rote more mercilessly than Mozart does. If only we could have heard Sir Charles in this music, that would have been pleasure as only Mozart can give.
C+
Prom 18: Australian Youth Orchestra
Sir Mark Elder Conducting
Brett Dean, Mahler, Shostakovich
It really is amazing that so many countries are able to round up their best young musicians for orchestral training. The Australian Youth Orchestra is yet another country where the young players can be put through an intensive program so that they can emerge with the ability to compete on the world market with the very best from everywhere else. Where do they get the money for these things? In any event, for this concert they were conducted by Sir Mark Elder who is quickly becoming one of British music's most venerable institutions. Having put the Halle Orchestra of Manchester on the map with its greatest period since the legendary 27-year tenure of Sir John Barbirolli, and having done similar things before at the English National Opera, he is poised to take his place with Sir Simon Rattle and Tony Pappano at the forefront of British conductors. But even the best don't hit it out of the park every time (as we Americans say), and this concert with the Australian Youth Orchestra was nearly as dull as concerts get. The prom began with the London premiere of Australian composer Brett Dean's Amphitheatre. In recent years, Brett Dean has become the undisputed composer laureate of contemporary Australia. But in a previous life he was a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic, and before that he was principal violist of the Australian Youth Orchestra, a tenure during which he played under Mark Elder in his previous performance with the orchestra. The piece has many fine ideas, but it jumps from one to the next without fully exploring how to develop them. It did, however, seem to be excellently played by the AYO. Following that was a performance of six songs from Mahler's cycle: Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Young Russian mezzo Ekatrina Gubanova had a voice much too shrill for Mahler's music and sounded indifferent to interpretive nuance. Elder's Mahler conducting could only be described as 'too goyish.' It is wooden conducting, unsympathetic to the inflections Mahler needs. Judging by this effort Sir Mark, who can be so perceptive in Wagner and Elgar, doesn't seem to 'get' Mahler. And yet, there was still a Shostakovich 10 with memorable attributes. The 10th, one of Shostakovich's greatest works in a career of masterpieces, is not a work that easily yields its secrets. With it's brutal violence sandwiched between endless stretches of deliberate longueurs, it requires the hands of only the very best to be brought to life. For those reasons, I generally prefer my Shostakovich fast and fierce and I think Shostakovich did too, but Mark Elder never ceases to amaze me at his ability to sustain tension at the slowest possible tempo. In Elder's hands, the usually twenty-minute first movement was a full five minutes longer, yet Elder had these young musicians playing with the most fragile control in quiet dynamics. In its own way it was an incredibly impressive feat of musicmaking, but this movement is far too long to be able to withstand such treatment without getting bored of it even from the very best conductors. And unfortunately, the playing was not matched by equal commitment in the loud sections, which generally sounded far too refined to be healthy for any youth orchestra. Perhaps we could get the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra to fill in for them in the loud passages. The rest of the symphony continued in much the same way. Certain passages sounded wonderful, but they were intermittent throughout whole parts of the symphony that sounded listless and tired.
D+
Proms Chamber Music #2
Navarra Quartet and pianist Francesco Piemontesi
Debussy, Haydn, Schumann
Originally this prom was supposed to showcase the interestingly named Finnish quartet, Meta4. Unfortunately the cellist took ill, and Meta4 cancelled their proms debut. In their place came the debut of a young British quartet named the Navarra Quartet. Not that the replacement gig was tough, it consisted of filling in on two repertoire chestnuts. Before the quartet was due to come onstage, young Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi gave us some bravura renderings of four Debussy preludes. Piemontesi played with enormous expressive freedom and charisma, perhaps it was the type of playing that seems better suited to Liszt at first-glance, but it was tremendously exciting pianism all the same in some of the greatest works ever written for the instrument. Then came a performance of Haydn's String Quartet op. 20 no. 3 - one of Haydn's darkest works from his Sturm und Drang period, it is one of Haydn's most difficult quartets to bring off in performance because of its many odd quirks in construction. The Navarra Quartet's approach sounded too careful by half, with tempos and dynamics that were the last word in moderation in a piece that demands Beethovenian contrast. Even with this extremely cautious approach, they caught the oddities in this quartet only inconsistently, with noticeable lapses in ensemble. Things finally woke up in the final movement, but by then it was too late to rescue the performance. Then came a performance of Schumann's equally difficult Piano Quintet that brought to mind an image of the pianist dragging the string quartet along kicking and screaming into taking some risks. The whole ensemble had a fantastic sense of the same ebb and flow that Piemontesi brought to the Debussy, but which the Navarra Quartet lacked almost entirely in the Haydn. It was a performance that was romantic in the best sense of the word, with lots of flexibility but always within the parameters of the piece's structure. The result was still perhaps a bit small-scale, but far better than the Haydn.
B (Piemontesi gets an A+, this kid's going places)
Prom 19: Sondheim at 80
Lots of Stars and the BBC Concert Orchestra
Stephen Sondheim
The older I get, the more I think that if there is such a thing as 'The Great American....' whatever, it's Stephen Sondheim, at least in my parents' lifetime. There's nobody in any other artistic line of work that has either his long-term consistency or his all-reaching poetic gift. How many creators of any genre are so gifted that they can show you the whole world? A creator who can make you laugh and cry, be terrified and become wiser, show us awe and create characters in which we see ourselves, and make it all seem as though it's second nature. Dylan and Springsteen can't do all that, neither can Steve Reich and John Adams, or Roth and Pynchon, or Woody Allen and Scorsese. But not only can Stephen Sondheim make listeners feel all that, but he can make us feel all those emotions at the same time. The only other American I know who can do all that is Steven Spielberg, but for whatever reason Spielberg has far more difficulty relating to adult problems. How many artists in history can do what Sondheim does? Shakespeare?...Mozart?...Goya?...It's probably time people started talking about Sondheim in that class (a fact that Judi Dench seemed to agree with when she spoke about Sondheim during the broadcast). But this is precisely why this approach seemed so pathetically inadequate to Sondheim's requirements. Some opera composers whom the bleeding chunk approach flatters (desperately avoiding a sardonic Wagner reference here, I gotta stop railing on him every day on this blog, it's almost like I like him too much to change the subject), nothing is more harmful than stripping these impeccable songs of their context and cumulative impact. Without knowing what these songs describe, there's nothing that separates a venture like this from a dinner-theater revue. You can class it up with the presence of the composer and Bryn Terfel, with Judi Dench and Simon Russel Beale, but it's still just a presentation out of music theatre 101. Those who gravitated to the classical world and unfairly malign composers like Stephen Sondheim do so more than anything because of presentations like this - that are completely meaningless except as a parade for the egos of stars. Classical music is no less susceptible to ego than any other musical genre, but with that comes a long and incredible history of integrity and searching for truth. And one day soon, Sondheim will be considered as important to the fabric of that culture as anything by Schubert or Brahms.
D- (would have been an F if it weren't for the informative interview with Sondheim at the break)
Prom 20: Wayne Marshall plays Wagner on the Organ
It's impossible not to like Wayne Marshall - a great organist, pianist and conductor, still one of the only black stars in a genre that desperately needs more diversity, and a fearless champion of both new music and new interpretations of old music. Marshall is a rare artist in the classical music world not content to play it safe. He takes enormous risks, and when those risks succeed they succeed brilliantly. But sometimes his risks fail to reap rewards for what he invested, and that's a shame as it was in this concert. There are few good reasons to play Wagner on the organ. It might seem like a good fit with the massive Wagnerian sound, but Wagner requires far too much of a particular kind of delicacy for the organ to provide. Whatever one's opinion of Wagner, it can't be denied that he was one of the greatest orchestrators of all time, and his particular techniques for part-writing would not work in virtually any other instrumental combination than the one he provided. Royal Albert Hall is a massive behemoth whose echo can swallow any number of orchestral details, but the RAH organ is a behemoth within a behemoth, and the organ itself is perhaps too massive to be delicate. To Marshall's credit, he didn't try to compensate for the loss. This was Wagner made into pure organ music, and if the all-important contrapuntal lines of Die Meistersinger were made into a wash of sound, at least there was some gusto to compensate. After playing the overtures to Meistersinger and Tannhauser in organ transcriptions, Marshall played improvisations on themes by Wagner - both from Tristan and from The Ring. But I'm sad to report these improvisations were barely any more interesting than what preceded them. Musically, it was impressive, but I'm still not sure as to why Marshall felt the need to do this. There's amazing music for the organ that the Prom audiences rarely ever get to hear: why not a recital of Bach, or Buxtehude, or Louis Vierne, or Charles-Marie Widor. Or for that matter, why not improvise something a bit jazzier. If you're going to improvise on Tristan, why not juxtapose it against Duke Ellington or Thelonius Monk? It wasn't terrible, but it could have been so much better. We need more musicians with adventurous spirit like Wayne Marshall's, but this recital would never explain why that is.
C-
Prom 21: Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Sir Simon Rattle Conducting
Berlioz and Wagner
Is it just me, or is it no longer easy being Simon Rattle? Even ten years ago Rattle had established himself as the pre-eminent, and perhaps the best, conductor of his generation. He his pick of any orchestra, any repertoire, any soloists, anything he wanted. But Rattle wasted no time using his leverage to tie himself down with the world's most pretigious position, Chief Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. It probably was a decision he made with noble aims, but nobody should envy Rattle the time he's had in Berlin. For the past eight years now, Rattle has now been locked in a desperate struggle to preserve his maverick identity in a city that wants him to be more like Daniel Barenboim. But more on that when the Berliners come to London. In the meantime, let's focus on Rattle's one remaining permanent connection with his home, as a principal artist with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The OAE is a much easier fit for Rattle - a period instrument ensemble that exists to reinvent tradition rather than preserve it - and the quality of their performance bespeaks their mutual aims. The concert began with a performance of the Love Scene from Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet which would have made Charles Munch proud. It was a manic performance with enormous contrasts in dynamics, pulse, and color. Not for Rattle is the severe structuring of Colin Davis. After the love scene, it was time for intermission (couldn't they have given us a little more?), and after they returned came Act II of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. For reasons probably having to do with expense, the period instrument crowd has virtually ignored 19th century opera and especially Wagner. The benefits of period instruments were immediately felt when we heard natural horns that actually sounded like hunting horns - this is exactly what Wagner wrote for! What followed did not disappoint save in one area. Living up to his reputation as my favorite living conductor, Sir Simon gave a reading of Tristan that was neither the violent thrill-ride of Bohm and Kleiber or the slow German philosophizing of Furtwangler and Knappertsbusch. Rattle said that he viewed Tristan as Schubert on steroids, and for once we got to hear Wagner with a human face. There was drama aplenty, but this was not a vision of Wagner that tried to overwhelm us, it was moving in a way I had never thought Tristan und Isolde could ever be. Rattle had mostly able singers, with a visceral Isolde that lacked a little introspection from Violetta Urmana, and a solid King Marke from Franz-Josef Selig that did what it could to make the most of his boring twenty-minute monologue. But it was truly sad to hear the once-impeccable instrument of Ben Heppner's Tristan reduced as it is to such a state. Heppner has finally found a conductor with a conception to match his own, if only they had found each other ten years earlier the results would have been truly something at which to marvel. Heppner's voice is now in such disrepair that it seemed to crack midway through every phrase. It was a very sad thing to hear from this once incredible singer. Will there ever be a well-sung Wagner opera again?
B (Rattle gets an A+, Urmana gets a B+-, Heppner, sadly, gets an F)
Prom 22: BBC Symphony
Jonathan Nott Conducting
Mozart, Ligeti, George Benjamin, Ravel
Jonathan Nott is probably too intelligent, too curious and too self-effacing to be a great conductor. His music-making seems far too aware of the risks involved in great performances to take them. His concerts almost invariably look better on paper than they are in practice. The performances are invariably polished and well-organized, the programs are intelligent in the extreme, and yet you're left wondering how a person can be so intelligent and yet miss the essential element of what makes music worth experiencing. The concert began with a performance by Pierre-Laurent Aimard as a pianist, the perfect counterpart to Nott - who can make sense of the thorniest avant-garde pieces yet sound totally adrift in Bach and Schumann. They performed Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 27 - his last - in a matter that suggested nothing so much as Mozart played with kid gloves. There was no sense of fun or play, just the sense that two musicians wanted to contribute as little personality to the proceedings as possible. The result was curiously quaint, like those old-fashioned romantic performances by Karl Bohm and Walter Gieseking that created a perception of Mozart as a composer of sweet ditties. This was followed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing a solo Ligeti piece: the Musica Ricercata no. 2 - made famous by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut leading straight without applause into the London Premiere of George Benjamin's Duet for Piano and Orchestra. The change in character was immediate. Aimard's playing, which sounded confused and board by Mozart's simple cadences, sounded engaged and wholly convinced by this more complex fare. Even so, there are passages in the Benjamin piece of very sparse simplicity, and yet Aimard sounds wholly sympathetic to Benjamin's simplicity in a way he doesn't to Mozart's. I wouldn't call Banjamin's piece a masterwork, but it's still a pretty remarkable piece of writing in its way. What I find amazing about Benjamin is that he is able to extract music that is as interesting as it is without surrendering even momentarily to the lure of tonal contrasts. The concert resumed after the interval with an ingeniously-constructed snippet of Ravel looking toward Viennese culture in two separate pieces. Nott's fastidiousness dovetails well with Ravel's, and he was in his element, but I can't escape the feeling that these are not the Ravel pieces for which he's best equipped. It began with an elegant performance of the Valses nobles et sentimentales that was quite pleasant if hardly the last word in excitement, and it ended with a lucid performance of La Valse that was forthright, brought out lots of inner voicing and made all the right noises. But it was all a bit austere, this is Ravel without the blue suggestiveness, Munch and Monteux wouldn't have seen the point. But between the two works was sandwiched a pointilistic movement from Miroirs which Nott approached like a master builder and created ravishing excitement out of pure musical craft. What was missing from all this was the Ravelian charisma, the whiff of sensuality without which Ravel attains the arid precision of a swiss clock. And as enjoyable as clocks can be, Ravel without the sex is just not as fun.
B-
Prom 23: BBC Scottish Symphony
Donald Runnicles Conducting
John Foulds, Vaughan Williams, Elgar
The shock that Donald Runnicles has returned to Edinburgh is still with the music world. It is so rare to see a major maestro exhibit loyalty to his hometown that the people were plainly puzzled at his motivations at what seemed to many like a step down the career ladder. But it's clear that Runnicles's principle motivation was to return home, and perhaps to give Scotland it's first authentically great orchestra. After year one, the results are impressive, while still remaining a work very much in progress. The concert began in a manner impressive in its own way. John Foulds's rediscovered piano concerto, the Dynamic Triptych, is one of the cornerstones of the very recent revival of this English composer who has known only neglect since his death seventy years ago. But the little I've heard of Foulds's music is frankly not very interesting. Like Alexander Scriabin, Foulds uses harmonies very creatively and like Scrabin his new ideas are probably born out of a lifelong fascination with eastern mysticism. But unlike his Russian contemporary Foulds seems to have very little idea how to put these harmonies together into a meaningful musical paragraph. The result sounds a bit like musical traction - a composer who doesn't know how to keep his pieces moving. The performers, including pianist Ashley Wass, sounded as though they did the best they could with limited raw materials. This piece was followed by two works written by a composer who certainly knew how to create meaningful musical paragraphs. Vaughan Williams is very much the great composer Foulds is clearly not, and any occasion to hear his gorgeous Serenade to Music - the piece by the way with which I made my non-college conducting debut...I was a little too ambitious no doubt - is not an occasion to listen idly. During the broadcast Runnicles spoke with great eloquence about how understated this piece is. But there was something a little too understated about the proceedings, the performance lacked a measure of that high-Victorian lushness and pomp which makes the piece so much fun. The soloists, from Scotland's Royal Academy of Music and Drama, sounded far more impressive as a group than as individuals. It was simply a disappointing performance. But a different performance materialized after the interval, beginning with the much-heralded debut of young Scottish violinist/pinup Nicola Benedetti. Concerns that Benedetti is a more photogenic phenomenon than artistic are unfounded, and she gave us a reading of RVW's The Lark Ascending that will not be easily forgotten. It's arguable that such a high-calorie sound as the one she makes on the violin is not appropriate for Vaughan Williams, but her playing was unfailingly passionate. The concert concluded with a dramatic though not quite searing performance of Elgar's First Symphony. Runnicles is an unfailingly visceral musician for whom passion is at least as important as intellect, so he and Elgar would seem like a natural fit. The performance had wonderful parts, but Runnicles seemed uncomfortable with Elgar's rambling discursiveness and the weak sections of the performance stood in marked relief to its strong passages. The scherzo, taken at a seemingly impossible clip, was thrilling and the slow movement had visceral passion in abundance but the outer movements sounded listless and longwinded. A disappointing concert all told, but there's still plenty of hope yet for this partnership and there's always Mahler....
C+
Prom 24: BBC Scottish Symphony
Donald Runnicles Conducting
Mahler
I ought to confess that I wasn't much looking forward to this performance. I remember a performance of Donald Runnicles with the BBC Symphony in a lethally dull Mahler's Das Lied von Der Erde. It was worrisome that a conductor so persuasive in so many other German composers couldn't seem to get a handle around the greatest of all symphonists. But I needn't have been concerned because Runnicles was very much in his element in this huge, Wagnerian symphony. Like Wagner's Ring, Mahler 3 is a world in itself, a gargantuan epic which Mahler fills with as many different states as creation can contain. His invention was never as ripe as it was in this symphony and it comes to us without the fatalism of his later works. For me, much as I love everything by Mahler, the third and the fourth symphonies are for me his very greatest pieces, the closest he ever came to the human universality of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Any performance that captures even a portion of Mahler's enormously vivid world is pleasure worth making enormous sacrifices to hear, and even if Runnicles isn't yet quite among the greatest interpreters of this most challenging score (Bernstein, Haitink, Gielen, Horenstein, Levine, Kubelik...my personal list obviously) he sank his teeth into it with relish. Right from the beginning, it was clear that the players had few scruples about making the most of Mahler's most outrageous sounds. In the hands of unsympathetic conductors this movement can seem positively droopy, but Runnicles took the march sections at a heady Kubelikesque clip and the movement's full 35-minute outrageousness came to us in Technicolor. Another highlight of the performance was the incisive second movement, which was performed faster and far more dynamically than usual. Finally, this movement was much more like a sardonic Mahlerian phantasmagoria than the twee-and-cutesy way in which it's often performed. The third movement scherzo, perhaps my single favorite movement in all of Mahler, was a bit less satisfactory. The BBCSSO didn't play at the same level of character and Runnicles seemed to be pulling the tempos in the wrong direction (gradually slowing down rather than speeding up a la Leonard Bernstein), but the famous post-horn solo was wonderfully evocative - with Runnicles admirably refusing the temptation to linger on it. The vocal movements also had some problems, with playing that was too loud to be evocative in the Nietzsche movement and a tempo that was simply too fast for the Knaben Wunderhorn setting. But the contralto, Karen Carghill was a real contralto (for once) and the chorus sang with admirable clarity, if not enough exuberance. The performance ended with a breathtaking reading of the final slow movement. Runnicles coaxed a huge range of color, dynamics and tempo variation out of the players, and it was easily one of the finest readings of the last movement I've ever heard (notwithstanding a doozy of a trumpet crack in the extremely difficult brass chorale at the end). One day soon, these forces may be capable of giving a reading of this piece for the ages. As it stands now, not bad Scots, not bad at all.
B+
Prom 25:
Prom 26: The World Orchestra for Peace
Valery Gergiev Conducting
Two Mahler Symphonies (!!)
There had to be some schadenfreude in Valery Gergiev's decision to put on a concert with two Mahler Symphonies for the London public. Less than five years ago the choice of this great Russian to be chief conductor of the London Symphony was met with hosannas from the press. But just a year into the appointment Gergiev received the critical savaging of his career for his year-long Mahler cycle, which the press almost unanimously proclaimed a disaster. The results of their performances were captured on record for everyone to hear, and truth be told Gergiev's Mahler isn't quite as bad as all that. But as always Gergiev has some extremely individual ideas about how these much discussed scores should go - some are revelatory, some sound stupid, but Valery Gergiev is never boring. His lack of care for technical matters, his impulsiveness in performance, and his unfashionable provincialism just adds to the qualities that make him a unique figure for our time, as crucial to the way we think of orchestral music as Leonard Bernstein and Wilhelm Furtwangler were to theirs. Unlike Bernstein and Furtwangler, Gergiev is hardly a musician with an intellectual basis for his decisions. But in an era of impeccably trained musicians for whom repressing instinct is the norm, Valery Gergiev stands out as one of the few musicians great enough to always feel comfortable expressing his own ideas. And no concert idea is more individualist than putting two Mahler symphonies on the program. It's a nearly impossible challenge for any orchestra, let alone one that meets together for only a few weeks a year. Fortunately, the World Orchestra for Peace is a "superorchestra." It was an idea that originated with Sir Georg Solti (another much-drubbed Mahlerian) to take the best and brightest from each of the world's great orchestras (the first violin section alone contains the concertmasters of 15 different orchestras), put them together a few weeks every year, and conduct them under the banner of the United Nations. Unfortunately Solti died having conducted the orchestra only once, and in his place Gergiev has been the orchestra's director since 1998. Gergiev's Mahler 4 with the LSO came under particular drubbing, but I frankly never saw what was so wrong with it. It's an old-fashioned romantic performance after the manner of Mengelberg and Bernstein with enormous tempo shifts and exaggeratedly characterful playing. It's far from my first-choice Mahler 4 (that will likely always be Paul Kletzki) but it was a valid interpretation and quite preferable to the anonymous sort of Mahler playing that one often gets. Mahler 4 is Mahler's smallest symphony, meaning that it's an hour long and has an orchestra with a size comparable to Tchaikovsky's. Many musicians think that Mahler's scaling back is a cue to scale back the way the way the symphony's approached in relation to other Mahler pieces - a sort of Mahler approach for people who hate Mahler. But Mahler is still the same manic-depressive postromantic he ever was, only fitted into a slightly smaller box. Gergiev is one of those conductors who stretches the 'manicness' of Mahler to the height of its capability (and admittedly sometimes past it). Slow sections are slower, fast sections are (much) faster, contrasts are larger, the character of each episode is played up, and form is of secondary consideration - this is not Bernard Haitink's Mahler. But what am I missing? Why is this so terrible? The opening movement was fairly average, especially compared to the roller-coaster performance on the LSO recording with lots of Central European schmaltz and rhythmic vitality. The second movement had an unforgettable gypsy-fiddle solo from Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster Reiner Kuchl, who seemed to have no inhibitions of playing out-of-tune and with a truly ugly sound like an untrained country fiddler. The third movement was beautifully shaded with enormous contrasts of dynamics and pacing, the last movement was equally beautiful with gorgeously subdued orchestral playing and a wonderfully rustic contribution from soprano Camilla Tilling. The kinetic energy of their Mahler 4 did not quite ignite on the same level. Between the two symphonies, Mahler had changed substantially as both a composer and a human being. Having arrived at the top of his profession, having married the most beautiful woman in Vienna, Mahler began to realize that the fulfillment of his dreams did not guarantee the satisfaction he had hoped, and from then on a gloomier fatalism revealed itself in his music. The challenge of bringing both works off in performance is damn near impossible because the two pieces are so different. The opening funeral march leads us into a far more animalistic, terrifying world than the 4th symphony. Gergiev and his orchestra sounded far more cautious and tepid in the opening. The wreckless abandon for which Gergiev is so well known gave way to an unnecessary restraint. But the soggy first movement gave way to an exceptionally volatile second. Gergiev obviously saw the proximity to the tragic music that would come in the sixth symphony (which he does exceptionally well). The third movement, the twenty-minute nightmare of a dance, was similarly energetic but Gergiev's penchant for extremes finally did him in. The movement is simply too sprawling to carry the listener through without being very careful about where rubato is liberally applied, but it can't be denied that lots of passages were exciting on in of themselves. The famous adagietto was played with far more passion and contrast than is typical, with an unusually large amount of flexibility in tempo and dynamics. And it was wonderful to hear a such a wonderful string section tear themselves into Mahler's purple-prosed melody with real abandon. The last movement - a fifteen minute rapid fire fugue - was taken at a ferocious clip with lots of raw, nervy playing. The Gergiev of the final two movements is the conductor that stuns people, bending pieces like taffy to his peculiar visions of how they ought to sound, and doing so because under his sheer force of personality makes music sound like a natural phenomenon that erupts unpreventably. It's a once-in-a-generation talent, a gift that only Leonard Bernstein and Wilhelm Furtwangler shared among conductors in the era of recording. The result in Mahler isn't to everybody's taste, but it's a particular type of Mahler playing from a highly talented outsider to the Mahler tradition. It was often fascinating, sometimes insightful, occasionally revelatory, and certainly not dull.
Mahler 4: A-
Mahler 5: B
Prom 27: The Halle
Sir Mark Elder Conducting
John Foulds, Beethoven, Richard Strauss
It's a general rule, though hardly a failsafe, that provincial cities throughout the world boast better orchestras than the capitals. There are fewer other cultural institutions with which to compete and therefore more funds to be diverted. London's six full-time orchestras have to compete with one another for attention, performance space and donations. At any given time four or five may be on the verge of bankruptcy, all of them work the sort of concert schedule that would make American musicians cringe, and a London orchestral musician still makes less money than rank and file players in a provincial American orchestra. The Halle Orchestra of Manchester (now just The Halle) has existed apart from the London bustle as perhaps England's most historic orchestra. It was founded in 1857 and its former directors include Hans Richter, Sir Thomas Beecham, Sir Hamilton Harty, Sir Malcolm Sargeant, and of course Sir John Barbirolli. In 1908 the Halle premiered Elgar's First Symphony and Vaughan Williams was said to have marveled many times at how well these Mancunians played his music. The Halle has seen somewhat more troubled times in more recent eras but during the last decade the orchestra by all accounts began yet another golden age under the baton of Sir Mark Elder. Elder made enormous waves as a young man when he guided the English National Opera to a successful fourteen-year period belying the prevailing thought that the ENO was an impossible organization to run. Elder is a musician with a flair for the dramatic, but he seems to prefer long-breathed music-making. He seems to prefer slow tempos and opulent sounds, and it should come as no surprise that he is so successful in ultra-romantic music like Wagner, Elgar and Sibelius. But Elder also has a lighter side, with an enormous passion for the bel canto works of Donizetti and Bellini. I suppose it was natural that Elder would take to the ultra-luxuriant music of a composer like John Foulds. The Foulds piece that opened the concert, April - England, sounded like a lush piece of music with a tinge more Irish than English. Frankly, it reminded me of nothing so much as Riverdance. A lot of very respectable musicians sing the praises of Foulds's music from beginning to end, so I will persist. It was a pleasing concert opener, but as with everything else I've heard by John Foulds, I just don't get it... After Foulds came the great Beethoven we're now taking for granted this Proms year. Out again came Paul Lewis to give yet another Beethoven reading of a lifetime. This time it was the third piano concerto, and Lewis played it with mastery that I'm beginning to take for granted. How does this guy do it? The pacing is natural, the phrasing is always meaningful, and the tone is always exactly right for the moment. If the music calls for infinitely delicate sensitivity, that's precisely what Lewis provides. If the music calls for explosions, Lewis can do that too. It's matters that seem so simple, and yet they pose problems for every major pianist since the beginning of time. Great Beethovenian as he was, Lewis's teacher Alfred Brendel could never match his pupil's Beethoven playing (Schubert's another matter). Mark Elder and the Halle sounded a bit lackluster in the first movement, but in the second movement they provided wonderful delicacy and by the third they woke up and gave a reading that matched Lewis's energy watt for watt. Finally came Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) by Strauss, the composer's apparently autobiographical portrait. Over the years a lot of ink has been spilled about Strauss's motivations for writing such a shameless piece of self-promotion. Many music writers seem to think that this piece is a sort of Nietzschean portrait of himself as a superman, a sort of Mein Kampf in sound that foreshadows the right-wing Nazi sympathizer he would become in his dotage. But these people never fail to take into account one small problem: Strauss was probably kidding. Few composers ever had a less heroic conception of themselves, and in nearly all his programs Strauss would append literary descriptions that proved him as atrocious a philosopher as he was a great composer. If one swallows the philosophy Strauss claimed for his music without imagining his tongue firmly in his cheek, the music becomes unbearable. My love of Strauss was born after I was able to extricate myself from a conception of his music as being a more bombastic ersatz-Wagner, a conception supported by far too many Karajan recordings. But Strauss was far too earthy and cynical a man to believe in the sort of transcendent Wagnerian mumbo-jumbo he claimed for it. I often wonder if the heavy-duty philosophical pieces: Death and Transfiguration, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Ein Heldenleben, The Alpine Symphony etc. - are not just ways of mocking the people who take his music so seriously. It's as though Strauss is privately laughing at these people for falling into the kinds of pranks that would have made Till Eulenspiegel proud. Since I have such particular feelings about the composer, I suppose it follows that I have particular feelings about performances of his music. For me, the best Strauss is light on its feet, far closer to the world of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Johann Strauss than Wagner. Ein Heldenleben is a particularly deadly work if the conductor takes it too seriously. I was worried that Elder, the celebrated Wagnerian, would approach it earnestly, and the worry was absolutely confirmed by a pre-concert interview in which the broadcaster put the question 'Was Strauss Kidding?' point blank. But as far as bombastic Strauss performances go, this was not as bad as Karajan. The Halle strings were particularly wonderful, and the music at least got suitably nasty during the woodwind-chirps that portray the villainous critics. But Ein Heldenleben is a 45-minute piece with the flimsiest musical structure to hang it together. Anybody who approaches it too heavily will bore the audience by minute 8. A lot of the playing was really wonderful, the war scenes made a suitable noise (at a too slow tempo), but no attempt was made to rein in Strauss's rambling paragraphs in a piece that consists of very little but rambling. After this performance I don't think Elder 'gets' Richard Strauss any more than he 'gets' Mahler. I'd have much rather heard Don Runnicles in this piece and Elder in Elgar 1. In the meantime, back to Fritz Reiner to get the taste out of my mouth.
C (Elder gets a D, Lewis gets an A)
Proms Chamber Music 3
Brahms and Berg Lieder
The alien walks up to the German composer and says 'Take me to your lieder!'...As usual I think I'm hilarious even if nobody else does. Brahms would understand me, he always does. Whatever one thinks of Brahms, it can't be denied that his music a cornerstone in the repertoire of every musical genre save opera. You can make arguments that the 'real Brahms' is to be found in the symphonies, or the concertos, or the chamber music, or the solo piano pieces, or the songs, or the choral works. But the truth is that the 'real Brahms' is found in everything he wrote. There is no composer in history who wrote music that was so consistently of high quality. The four songs offered here were set to texts by Heine, who is now generally considered the 19th century German poet least likely to put readers to sleep (Goethe lovers address hatemail c/o Voices of Washington plz). Like nearly all Brahms's songs that I've ever heard (and I freely admit I probably haven't heard half of the 193 in my life) they are profoundly moving - less songs than mini-dramas in which Brahms tells a story. If Brahms was never write an opera, it wasn't from lack of dramatic ability (and he was, he even considered collaborating on an opera with Turgenev - depending on Turgenev's German, that would have been an all-time great collaboration.). I remember a comment from Pierre Boulez stating that Brahms was a fantastic developer of ideas but the ideas themselves were paltry. Clearly, Boulez doesn't listen to many lieder... The lieder were performed by Dutch baritone Hank Neven, who possesses a gorgeous lyric high baritone that reminds me of Christian Gerhaher with a bit more DFD-ish weight. This was followed by the Berg's seven early songs, sung ravishingly well by Swedish lyric soprano Malin Christensson. I always wonder if people who summarily dismiss Berg realize that his music is in fact...well...tonal. Schoenberg is close enough to Debussy to make the reputation far more intimidating than the music. But Berg's music is the lovechild of Mahler and Debussy, much closer to cabaret than "Modern Music." His music, particualrly the songs, are some of the most beautiful music ever written...that is until you start listening to Hugo Wolf. Hugo Wolf is one of those musicians whom you forget is around until his music starts playing and suddenly you wonder how you could have spent so much of your life without this music. The Italian Songbook contains some of the most beautiful songs ever written, and they were well-performed by the two aforementioned singers (though not on the level of the Brahms and the Berg). But I wonder whether all this Hugo Wolf is too much of a good thing. Lieder recitals are stupendously difficult to program. Most songbooks are not meant to be heard in quick succession, and after a while I was exhausted by hearing so many of these songs in a row. There was precious little musical contrast, and eventually you start wondering if they couldn't put in a bit of Paolo Tosti or Abba.
B+ (I'm wondering if I've finally gotten to that point everybody warned me about that chamber music becomes more fun than orchestral music...)
Prom 29: National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
Semyon Bychkov conducting
Dukas, Julian Anderson, Berlioz
I was looking forward to this prom, the best and brightest of Britain's young musicians are always worth hearing, and on youtube you may find a Proms performance done by this orchestra with Simon Rattle on the podium that is the single greatest performance of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand that I've ever heard. There are certain orchestras for which the Symphonie Fantastique is particularly designed, and a youth orchestra with 165 musicians is one of them. Combine this orchestra with Semyon Bychkov on the podium and this could have been a night worth remembering. Sadly, it was far from all one could have hoped. Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice (think Mickey Mouse and a broom) just might be the most perfect tone poem ever written - with all due respect to Richard Strauss. It's a shame that Dukas destroyed so much of his music, because a few more pieces on the same level would have made the Debussy-Ravel axis into a triptych. This performance, unfortunately like most, was simply too slow and heavy to do full justice to the delicacy of this piece. This piece requires a Pierre Boulez at the podium who can give the X-ray precision this piece requires. It needs an orchestra of prodigious control, and it's simply a bad idea to put such a delicate work into the hands of a 165-piece teenage orchestra, no matter how talented. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't Dukas either. Next came a Julian Anderson piece, a composer whom I've liked in the past. But this was simply brassy Dada chords that had very little organization or coherence. I have no doubt that the orchestra worked very hard on the music but I wish all that hard work would have better payoff. Then came the Symphonie Fantastique, a wonderful but undeniably flawed piece of music. When one hears the Symphonie Fantastique in a great performance, with all its manic drug-addled passions brought to the fore, it sounds like a perfect piece. Great conductors of this work like Bernstein, Munch and Muti know that following the score in this work is a deadly mistake, and the gaping mistake is in the dead center of the work: a 16-minute evocation of nature at its calmest, featuring music so still that barely anything happens as you wait breathlessly for the dark drug trip in the last two movements. But great performances will make you forget the work's flaws and let you focus on the orgy of invention by putting all sorts of unwritten accelerandos: sometimes to heighten the excitement, sometimes to fast-forward through the dull parts. Bychkov, unfortunately, took Berlioz's score at its word. The result was a mightily impressive roar in Berlioz's louder sections, lots of expressive playing, and lots of incontrovertibly dull moments. I kept wishing for Bychkov to turn into Valery Gergiev and whip the orchestra into the kind of frenzy for which a youth orchestra was born for this piece. But alas, my alchemical wishes continue to fall upon the deaf ears of rationality.
C-
Proms 30 & 31, PCM 3
This is, inevitably, the time of the festival that I develop 'Proms Fatigue.' Alas, due to work-related...well....work, I had to skip Prom 30 and part of 31. Prom 31 was just getting interesting when I had to turn it off (one does occasionally need sleep...). The BBC Singers did not sound at their best for Poulenc's Figure Humaine. One of the great choral masterworks of the 20th century sounded rough, underrehearsed, unblended, and badly in need of a conductor who will disabuse Soprano I's of the notion that they should take the final high-E even if their voices are not up to it. It was followed by a brass piece by Takemitsu, a composer I admire, that was so far from his best that I wondered why I didn't fast-forward. Finally, there was a world premiere by Stephen Montague of a piece called Willful Chants for chorus and brass. I was beginning to wonder if I'd finally become an old fogey who officially lost his taste for contemporary music, but this piece, an intimidatingly diverse melange of styles from atonality to gospel, was really quite catching. When we have the money I wouldn't mind....ah well. PCM 3 was similarly uncongenial, the focus allegedly being the Bach family. But well, maybe I just don't have much sympathy with early classicism, but the Bach sons are hardly a major focus in my own listening. Der Bachvater was represented by an tedious-sounding trio sonata (in this case violin, flute, harpsichord/cello) , and trio sonata from A Musical Offering that was, obviously, much more interesting. I love an enormous amount of Baroque music, but I have enormous trouble listening to Early Music concerts. Occasionally, they contain fabulous discoveries, but so often pieces are revived simply for the sake of having something to revive. With the exception of A Musical Offering and an encore by Telemann, the music consisted of period pieces that had no particular reason to interest people today (or me anyway). In 300 years, I doubt people will listen to Jakob Dylan or Sean Lennon, but I'm sure there will be some 'early music' buffs interested in reviving their music simply so they can say they did.
Prom 32: European Union Youth Orchestra
Matthias Bamert Conducting
Tchaikovsky, Janacek, Berlioz
Q: What's the World's Longest Viola Joke?
A: Harold in Italy
I wasn't looking forward to it. This was supposed to be Colin Davis's prom. It would have been something to hear the 83-year-old dean of English conductors in a program so directly up his alley. But Davis cancelled before, with rumors of a death-in-the-family. In steps the Swiss Matthias Bamert (whom along with the similarly initialed Martyn Brabbins is invariably the conductor who takes over these concerts), and I stopped expecting anything truly memorable. But after a shaky start came some Tchaikovsky of rare power. Perhaps it takes a youth orchestra to play Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet with the requisite passion (there are lots of dull performances), but for whatever reason, this orchestra was clearly inflamed. Tchaikovsky demands enormous commitment from the players, and I have rarely heard Tchaikovsky played with this level of visceralness. Some of the credit must go to Bamert, who imposed some dramatic tempo shifts which obviously paid off. Next came Janacek's Taras Bulba. Janacek is a composer I love beyond reason, but I never get my ears around Taras Bulba, a twenty-five minute tone poem that doesn't quite gel. There are all of hsi trademark strange effects in the music, but it never reaches the orgy of unrestrained passion we get in so much other Janacek. This performance was, well...better than most. Big-name conductors rarely tackle Janacek because his music is so difficult to ignite, but in a piece that is nearly-impossible, Bamert nearly succeeded in putting together a Taras Bulba of enormous (if intermittent) vitality. After the break came a similarly iffy piece by a particular favorite of mine. Harold in Italy just might be my least favorite Berlioz piece. The Symphonie Fantastique is the work of a young genius inflamed with the discovery of his own powers, but with Harold in Italy Berlioz took his first steps into maturity. The result is pleasant, but it feels like a rough draft containing all sorts of passages which he would later rework into greater music. This was the only piece during which I felt as though Colin Davis was acutely missed. This piece requires a level of precision that the Symphonie Fantastique does not, and what would no doubt have sounded like rhythmic vitality in Davis's hands sounded shaky and awkward under the baton of Matthias Bamert. It was, however, a performance that improved as the piece went on, and the "Orgy of the Brigands" generated a good head of steam. For all its flaws, this was a good concert and I'm quite glad I didn't miss it.
B
Prom 34: German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin
Ingo Metzmacher Conducting
Schrecker, Korngold, Mahler
Ingo Metzmacher is one of the great conductors of our time and it's a shame that the world is likely never to realize this. He has now established a pattern of going into a second-tier organization, pulling stunning work out of them only to stun them with a sudden resignation after only five years on the job. In his latest appointment, he had only reached Year 3 with the inevitable paeans hailing his work as genius before he suddenly announced, gasp!, that he must resign because the city of Berlin was unable to meet his demands for funding. Now that Metzmacher has done exactly the same thing with the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester as he did with Ensemble Moderne, the Netherlands Opera, and the Hamburg State Opera, it may be time for people to wake up to the fact that this uncompromising maestro would rather stand on principle than make great music. And so, for the second time this Proms season, we listened to a fine conductor giving his last concert as the director of a fine orchestra which he is leaving for no good reason. Was this the awe-inspiring concert that such an event would merit? Certainly not, it was even far from the best concert Metzmacher's given at the Proms in recent years. It began with much-underrated the overture to an opera by the much-underrated Franz Schreker. Wouldn't it have been a far bolder gesture to bring a Schrecker opera to the Proms? Now that Janacek is finally a mainstream composer, Schreker is the next great genius of the opera-world ripe for rediscovery. But you could never tell from this rambling, over-orchestrated overture to Die Ferne Klang. One day, a champion will come to the aid of Schreker and give him the platform he deserves (in much the way Metzmacher has done for Karl Amadeus Hartman), but I can't help feeling disappointed that this is the most Schreker we'll get at the Proms for a while longer. After a disappointing opening, the great Leonidas Kavakos came out to perform the Violin Concerto of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a piece with special meaning for me because it's my 90-year-old grandmother's favorite piece of music. All due credit to Kavakos, who bathed the work with as much Hollywood schmaltz as the work would allow. But I wish I could tell Bubbie that I love this piece with as much fervor as she does, but the truth is that I only love the last movement. Whatever genius Korngold is considered in a parallel universe, in this universe his greatest music accompanies movies. Thelast movement is a real 'toe-tapper' of an Irish jig, and elucidates to concert audiences that Korngold was a true purveyor of light music in the Grand Manner. But the other two movements are rather generic, and not even Leonidas Kavakos can make me listen with interest. Then came Mahler's much-maligned and misunderstood Seventh Symphony, a performance that won uniformly ecstatic reviews in the press. No doubt, it was a damn good performance. Metzmacher made fantastic sense out of the enormous outer movements of this sprawling five-movement masterpiece (and yes, the M-word applies here), with a Kubelik-esque manic edge to it. Furthermore, the second and third movements, taken at light speed, were fantastic. Textures were displayed with Boulezian clarity (not withstanding some brass clunkers), and the symphony's many dramatic qualities had enormous momentum. All that we missed was warmth, and comparison with Kubelik in this piece readily shows what was missing. This is Mahler with a touch of Stravinsky, done without the mitteleuropische warmth which you'd expect would come to these performers like second nature. And it is invariably in the fourth movement, the Andante Amoroso, where lack of passion/sincerity/whatever proves most damaging. It was in every sense brilliant performance, but IMHO not a great one.
C (Mahler gets a B+)
Prom 35: The Danish National Symphony Orchestra
Thomas Dausgaard conducting
Ligeti, Tchaikovsky. Rued Langgard, Sibelius
The moment the Tchaikovsky concerto began, I knew we were in for a rare concert. Rare is the time when hearing Tchaikovsky can shock anyone, but after two Ligeti pieces for chorus, the sudden intrusion of Tchaikovsky's ever-familiar violin concerto came as a complete shock to the system. The first two Ligeti pieces, Morning and Night, were slight examples of this choral master operating at his cosmic greatest. Ligeti's choral music is still almost entirely the province of professional organizations, but these pieces are early examples of the Transylvanian master operating at his most tonal, and they were sung with wonderful technique and spirit by the Danish National Chorus (which seems to be blowing the BBC Singers out of the water). Then came a rare fever-pitched performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto that can make you listen afresh. I had never heard of Hagen Kraggerud before tonight, but rest assured I will be searching for recordings. Kraggerud's playing was positively Oistrakhian - an impassioned high-calorie sound, with enormously full tone and sensuously wide vibrato, and a total willingness to bend the rhythms (and occasionally entire notes) spontaneously in the heat of momentary intensity. He seemed totally unafraid of 'getting dirty', straining his fiddle well past the point of elegant sound with the rough Russian timbre this piece requires. The accompaniment from Dausgaard and his Danish orchestra was just as fantastically idiomatic. Then came the concert's centerpiece. First the Ligeti Lux Aeterna - a terrifying setting of a text that is usually used for consolation. It's not my favorite Ligeti piece, I like my Ligeti with more humor, but it is classic middle-period Ligeti in which he attempts to lay the demons he left behind the Iron Curtain to rest. It is a profoundly disturbing work, continuously producing ugly sounds that seem to emanate from the realm of the undead. It is not music on the level of Beethoven and Schubert, or even on the level of Ligeti's own Etudes or Clocks and Clouds or Melodien, but it is a type of great music that should never be ignored just because it disturbs. The Ligeti lead immediately into a piece by an early-twentieth century Danish composer so neglected that Steven Schwartz's guide to neglected composers doesn't even list him. At the beginning of his career, Langgaard was lauded as the heir to Carl Nielsen. But by the time he reached thirty, Langgaard was already forgotten. By the time he died in his mid-sixties, he was a church organist in rural Denmark who'd written sixteen symphonies and lots else, little of it ever performed in his lifetime. I'm not sure if the piece of his we heard tonight - the half-hour Music of the Spheres for two orchestras, chorus, organ and soprano - is a masterpiece, but it was fascinating. It was episodic and discursive with material that was never developed, but it was music that sounded like no one else's. Apparently Ligeti was a committed fan of this piece, and he recognized many of his own techniques in this work. Finally came a reading of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony that was among the finest I will ever hear. Very few conductors (Vanska, Berglund, Karajan) are able to reach so far into Sibelius's depictions of nature that the music itself sounds like natural phenomena. The playing of the Danish National Symphony was truly unbelievable, zeroing in on the fundamentals of the Sibelian sound world in a way that would even make Finnish orchestras green with envy. The tone coloring and dynamics were so precise and so extreme that you can only wonder at how they achieve such results. Dausgaard was equally at home and kept things moving flexibly and quickly (occasionally too much so). With his swift assertive approach, I was reminded of those old recordings from Sibelius's first great champion Robert Kajanus - though Kajanus could only dream of an orchestra this good. All in all this was hardly a perfect concert, but it was a pretty magnificent one which showed amply that Dausgaard and his Danish forces are likely among the most exciting partnerships in the world today.
A
Prom 36: BBC Symphony
Lionel Bringuier Conducting
Berlioz, Chopin, Roussel, Ravel
I'll never forget the day I first saw his name announced as the assistant conductor to Gustavo Dudamel. Bringuier was the first conductor to get international attention who was younger than me. And he wasn't just younger, he was four-and-a-half years younger, closer in age to my brothers than to me. A week later I found out that one friend of mine sent an article about Bringuier to another with the caption "Don't show it to Evan, he might jump out a window." Well....is this kid as talented as all that? Probably, but it's tough to tell in a program like this, because I'm not fond of much of the music on offer here. But even so, the light touch, the elegant sounds, the emphasis on precision and the fleet pacing immediately stamp Bringuier as a certifiably French musician. The overture to Les Corsaire was in every sense, a whirling dervish. Berlioz based it on Lord Byron's autobiographical The Corsair, and if the music does the poem any credit, it shows that Lord Byron was an exceedingly noisy man. Le Corsair is an exciting piece of music, but it's barely music. There was no attempt in this performance to disguise the lack of substance. The orchestra made joyful noises at an extremely rapid tempo. Then came Chopin's Second Piano Concerto with the underrated Brazillian pianist, Nelson Friere. Much as I love Chopin, I don't care for his piano concertos. The final two movements are always fine, because all Chopin has to do is write an extended piano miniature with orchestral accompaniment. But Chopin was emphatically not a long-form composer, and the opening movements are bloated beyond any reason for what their material can sustain. But Chopin could not have asked for finer advocacy from Nelson Friere. Friere is one of the great living pianists - always spontaneous but never mannered. Nobody can make the opening movements interesting, but Friere phrased the slow movement with Cortotian panache and finale with Rubinsteinian elan. After the break came another work of which I'm none-too-fond. Albert Roussel's Third Symphony is a work that sounds like Prokofiev: great craftsmanship, lots of noise, not much fun, I'm not sure why I'm listening. The performance made some impressive noises, but the piece has simply never spoken to me. Finally, a work I love unequivocally, at least in part. For all its occasional longeurs (except when Charles Munch conducts...), it's one of the sexiest pieces of music ever written. Ravel never made more beautiful sounds, and unlike Prokofiev, Ravel invariably puts his incredible craftsmanship to the service of something deeper than itself. This was a blatantly virtuoso performance with fast tempos and extreme dynamics, it was extremely impressive in its way. Perhaps it was too brash, Munch's tempos without his imagination, but it does show that Bringuier has the chops to bring off a piece this challenging. So let's keep an eye on him.
C+ for my tastes, A- if you take the concert seriously.
Proms 37, 38, 39, 40 Proms Matinees 1 and 2
Alas, work made me miss Bach Day. And nothing about that was more tragic than missing John Eliot Gardiner perform the Brandenburg Concertos. Gardiner has grown as a Bach conductor in recent years, leaving behind his image as a tense and unimaginative martinet in the 1980's where that reputation belongs. He was once a good Bach conductor who had an unfortunate tendency to overlook delicacy. But he is now an old master in Bach who performs with imagination and understanding, fully an equal to the Harnoncourts and the Herreweghes. I also missed most of the BBC Philharmonic's concert with their outgoing conductor Gianandrea Noseda. Noseda does wonderful work, and I was very happy to hear an early Dallapiccola piece before he met serialism. But I didn't finish the piece, so no oracular pronouncements for that either. Then came Prom 40 the next night, featuring my favorite young conductor with the orchestra whose fortunes he's revived as they have not been in many decades. Vladimir Jurowski is 38 and already the undisputed superior of some conductors twice his age. Like most great Russian musicians, he comes with all the passion for which one can ask, but it's coupled with a rare analytical mind. Perhaps Valery Gergiev reaches even more volcanic heights in his chosen repertoire, but Gergiev does not have Jurowski's all-processing brain. Unlike Jurowski, he can neither get inside the head of composers to which he does not relate viscerally, nor does he have the analytical mind to clarify formal relationships. So it's with great regret that I missed half this all-Russian concert, even if the first half didn't quite promise the great things I'd hoped. Jurowski began with a rare (at least, rare these days) outing of Rimsky-Korsakov's rearrangement of Mussorgsky's St. John's Night on Bare Mountain (or Night on Bald Mountain as it's usually known), but Jurowski did Mussorgskian things to the arrangement which Rimsky would never recognize. The playing was uncommonly vivid, with tempos pulled about like taffy. It was an uncommonly dramatic performance of an arrangement that fundamentally exists to take some of the drama away, so I wonder why Jurowski just didn't do the Mussorgsky version. Then out came Julia Fischer to perform Shostakovich's 1st Violin Concerto. I think Shostakovich's 1st Violin Concerto is both one of the all-time great works for the violin, and one of the greatest pieces ever written by Shostakovich. Jurowski's idiomatic accompaniment provided ample evidence of why that is, entering Shostakovich's stark world with all-too-natural aplomb. Unfortunately, Julia Fischer is tempermentally unsuited to the work. Fischer is like a German Hilary Hahn. She's a violinist of enviable intelligence and fearsome technical abilities. But her playing invariably errs on the side of cool delivery. Shostakovich requires a David Oistrakh who can imbue the work with more passion than people ever thought could come out of a violin. Give me Leila Josefowicz or Janine Jansen any day over this. Even so, the orchestral contribution is important enough in this piece that it was entirely worth hearing at any point. Unfortunately this weekend was concert preparation so I didn't have a chance to listen to the second half, which I looked forward to even if I don't like Prokoviev's Third Symphony. Sigh...
Prom 5: Semyon Bychkov and the WDR Symphony
Wagner, Mendelssohn, Schuller and Strauss
Poor Semyon Bychkov. He was supposed to be the great conductor of his generation. Twenty years ago he was world-famous as an example of moral courage for standing up to the Soviet system at great risk to his career, and so respected as a conductor that Herbert Von Karajan designated him as his handpicked successor at the Berlin Philharmonic. But Karajan resigned and died before he could make up with the Berlin Phil, and shortly thereafter the Soviet Union fell and Valery Gergiev took Bychkov's spot in the public imagination as the 'Great Russian Conductor.' After twenty years of declining reputation, his career seems to have resuscitated with newfound life that is mostly due to his partnership with the anachronistically-named West German Radio Symphony of Cologne. But this concert was his very last as their Music Director. Why is he leaving? If this concert was any indication, the partnership is not quite as fruitful as is generally alleged. It began with a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin Act I Prelude that was beautifully played but so efficiently paced that it begs speculation as to whether Bychkov cared at all. Like Lothar Koenigs a few days before in Die Meistersinger, Bychkov simply didn't even seem aware of or care how much power can be unleashed by Wagner. This was a followed by an exceedingly odd performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto by German violinist Viviane Hagner that was only intermittently inspiring. Hagner's wide warble of a vibrato was entirely inappropriate for Mendelssohn, as was her pacing - far too slow in the first movement, too quick in the second, and quite variable in the third. Furthermore, if you end the concerto with an enormous acceleration, why not do the same at the end of the first movement? The odd results made for occasional excitement, but far more often made this wonderful piece sound flat and uninvolving. Following the Mendelssohn was a piece by Gunther Schuller - the archetypal member of America's musical establishment. Now in his mid-eighties, Schuller has been an insider on the American scene since joining the horn section of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at the age of sixteen. He is not only a composer and horn player of renown but also a teacher, conductor, arranger, editor, bandleader and writer of considerable abilities. The work of his played in this concert , 'Where the Word Ends' got quite a bit of bad press in the British press, not all of it deserved. To be sure, it's not an instant classic. But Schuller's eclecticism can be rather confusing at first hearing. This piece was nearly as much Blues as Berg, Satchmo as Stravinsky. It functioned as though Schuller constructed a stream-of-consciousness echo chamber in which all the various influences of a mid-20th century classical musician in New York were thrown together. In its way, it was a mass of fascinating raw material constructed far too chaotically to create a great work. Even so, a piece that should make people curious to hear a lot more Schuller. Lastly came a performance of Strauss's Alpine Symphony that was bound to be as fine as the fine recording these forces made together a few years ago. The Alpine Symphony is one of those pieces very easy to dismiss, and even harder not to love. It is Strauss's enduring paean to nature, vulgarity and Mahler. The kitsch and the sublime meld seemlessly in this piece, and for those qualities I love the work passionately . This was not nearly as hard-driving a performance as was given last year by the Staatskapelle Dresden as conducted by Fabio Luisi, and perhaps suffered as a result. It was a performance with the type of Wagnerian style that Bychkov should have loaned to the beginning of the night. His tempos were almost uniformly broad, with beautifully lush string textures and incredibly characterful solo winds. Under Bychkov's hands, the work emerged as a piece of hallucinatory tone-painting. A mountain painted by the more disturbed cousin of Van Gogh and Munch. Bychkov leisurely journey gave us a uniquely vivid picture of Strauss's mountain, unfortunately the vividness was offset by a lack of vitality which more propulsive tempos would have given. Semyon Bychkov may yet prove to be a great conductor (the Sergiu Celibidache of our age?) but he needs much greater than what was on display here.
C+
Prom 6: Beethoven Nite
Paul Lewis Piano: BBC Symphony Orchestra Conducted by Jiri Behlolavek
Beethoven Piano Concertos and Overtures
"It was as though Lewis gave the performance I heard in my head from the time I was six years old. It is probably impossible to put into words how wonderful this was, so I won't even try. This performance had every possible quality this concerto requires and held them all in near-perfect balance. This was worthy of the greatest masters of the keyboard. Keep your ear on Lewis, he may already be a master." This is what I wrote about Paul Lewis's performance of Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto two years ago. I wish I could say that lightning struck twice but this performance was not quite on the same level. Perhaps Lewis, having now recorded the concertos, suffers from a bit of over-familiarity. Or maybe he was exhausted from having already played the First piano concerto earlier in the concert. Complaining about musicality on this level is quibbling, but effects which Lewis integrated seamlessly into the whole stood out from one another as though the pianist were going through a checklist of things to remember in each individual phrase. His performance of Beethoven 4, easily the most difficult of Beethoven's piano concertos from a musical point of view, was nothing less than very good and occasionally inspired. It was paced almost perfectly, holding poetry, form and drama in equal balance. But that highest level of magic that he provided two years ago in spades was missing. All the evidence necessary was to listen to his other performance in the same concert. Lewis's performance of Beethoven's 1st piano concerto had all the brio and poetry his performance of the fourth seemed to lack. The performance of the 4th sounded like a performance by an extremely intelligent, conscientious but calculating musician (Aimard?). But the performance of the 1st sounded as though this were how Ray Charles would have played Beethoven. Paul Lewis still may be a master, but even the very greatest have better and worse trips to the stage. If this was a worse trip, Paul Lewis is still one of the very best around. The rest of the concert was filled by two Beethoven overtures = Egmont and The Creatures of Prometheus which the BBCSO performed under the baton of Jiri Behlolavek of surprising vitality. Behlolavek has been responsible for some Beethoven snoozers over the years, so it was a delightful shock to hear the BBCSO playing Beethoven under him with such life.
A-
Prom 7: Maria Joao Pires plays the Chopin Nocturnes
Alicia De Larrocha is dead, and Martha Argerich doesn't give recitals anymore. So Maria Joao Pires is now the Grand Old Lady of the Piano. Like De Larrocha, she has that easy natural fluency that seems to adapt to the challenges of any composer, something can only happen with the aid of a fearsome musical mind. But like Argerich, she plays with an easy freedom, not so much adapting completely to the composer but adapting the composer to her own personality. But whereas Argerich's persona can seem volatile and neurotic, Pires is elegant and unperturbed. She's one of the keyboard's natural poets, able to conjure a gorgeous singing tone from the piano that few in history have ever matched. With Alfred Brendel now retired, she's almost indisputably the world's most accomplished Mozart pianist, and she does many other composers almost as well. Pires has been known for her Chopin for many years. She brings an incredibly sensitive lyricism to these pieces, creating a dream-like haze of sound that suggests far more than it states. But all the same, it's not the whole story. This is a perfect representation of the perfumed, 'French' side to Chopin - the delicate dreamer and seductive romantic par excellence. This is the Chopin of Alfred Cortot and Ivan Moravec, and it is great piano playing of a type. But where in this playing could you find Chopin the revolutionary? Chopin the Polish Nationalist? Chopin with the Slavic soul? No doubt Richter and Claudio Arrau would have made something far different sounding out of these pieces. But my favorite Chopin players: Hoffman, Rubinstein, Lipatti, Ashkenazy, Pollini, Zimmerman and maybe Yundi Li, found ways to combine the best of both approaches. Chopin's genius lies in the fact that right beneath his immaculate elegance was a volcano precipitously on the edge of eruption. Those pianists, for all their differences, always found ways to suggest the huge emotions lying just beneath the elegance. Pires seemed to cover up the explosiveness in a surfeit of beautiful sound.
B+
Prom 8: BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Conducted by Thierry Fischer
Britten, Prokofiev, Shostakovich
Two overrated pieces and a flat-out masterpiece I used to think was overrated. Let's put the cards on the table: I don't like Prokofiev. Yes, he certainly has better and worse pieces. But I can't escape the feeling that a lot of his music is noise that expresses nothing except empty gymnastics, worship of technique for its own sake, and mechanical bombast. Listening to his first piano concerto is an experience for me not unlike fingernails on a chalkboard. Even a great pianist (and surely Alexander Toradze is one) can't make me like his music any more. I go out of my way to avoid lots of music by Prokofiev, and this piece is near the top of my blacklist. I'm sure that the fault is mine, many artists I deeply respect champion his music all the time. And certainly the RAH audience, who gave a rapturous ovation, totally disagreed with me. The Prokofiev concerto was preceded by Benjamin Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem. I am, as ever, a huge Britten fan. I think he's one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century, but this piece is far from Britten at his strongest. It was Britten's first purely orchestral piece, and he wrote few more after it, perhaps learning from this experience that it wasn't for him. The piece is in three movements, and the middle movement is a fantastic and terrifying roller-coaster that these musicians rode out at maximum intensity (BBCNOW seems to have a wonderful brass section). But the outer two movements bare the marks of an immature composer who couldn't yet develop music over a large-span. Most of it sounds like long-winded filler with minimal material spread incredibly thinly. Then there's Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony: a 80-minute loose baggy monster of a piece that sounds to many people as though it's 90% filler. It amazes me how dense people can be when Shostakovich comes up. They point to the Leningrad Symphony as a perfect examples of Shostakovich's long-windedness, banality and bombast. But this is a war symphony, how else could he have written it? If it's a little too long, who cares? In any event, this was the kind of performance that does supporters of this symphony no favors. It was a slow, reasonably well-played performance that seemed appallingly short on Shostakovichian qualities like humor, violence and menace. There are many ways to approach this piece, but Thierry Fischer managed to pick one that gives its critics as much ammunition as they need. Ultimately, this was not a prom for me.
D
BBC Philharmonic
Vassily Sinaisky Conductor
Parry, Scriabin, Tchaikovsky
Vassily Sinaisky is one of those Soviet-era conductors who subsist on the international circuit by playing a steady diet of Russian composers. Nobody really cares how they would play anything else, and they generally don't try. But conductors like him, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Yuri Temirkanov and Valery Gergiev have earned their crust by travelling the world and introducing musicians and audiences not only to forgotten Russian music but also to forgotten Russian performing styles. Dynamics are more exaggerated, tempos are more flexible, and the sound of the instruments much more raw. Their musicmaking is provincial in the best sense. So it was doubly surprising that Sinaisky chose to begin not only with British music but unknown British music. Hubert Parry is now probably best known for being the mentor of Ralph Vaughan Williams, but he was a fine composer in his own right and still sometimes worth hearing. In this case, Parry's 5th Symphony was surprisingly engaging - Parry is a thoroughgoing Romantic who composes like a cross between Elgar and Tchaikovsky. Unfortunately the work is hardly a masterpiece, plenty of good ideas but Parry never seemed to know what to do with them. Even so, Sinaisky and the BBC Phil clearly appreciated the work for its good qualities and played it for everything it was worth. Then came the Scriabin Piano Concerto, a work Scriabin completed when he was still very young and not yet the firebrand he became in middle age. The slow movement is a beautiful theme and variations that foreshadows the genius Scriabin would later become, savored wonderfully by pianist Nelson Goerner. But I'd still rather hear these musicians play the Poem of Fire because the other two movements were made in the "Generic Romantic Piano Concerto Assembly Line." The concert ended with a surprisingly disciplined and restrained performance of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony. I was expecting a performance in the Svetlanov/Gergiev mould with lots of tempo shifts and huge brass firepower. Instead we got a beautifully shaded performance in the mould of Rozhdestvensky and Ivanov that hewed closer to the score than most other performances ever dare (though hardly without individual touches). It was all in a far more classical style than we're accustomed to hearing Tchaikovsky, an equally valid and sometimes more effective way to approach Tchaikovsky that shows him for the great composer he is in addition to being a very emotional one. It wasn't the most searing Pathetique I've ever heard, but it was a damn fine performance and many conductors could learn a thing or two from Sinaisky's way with this over-interpreted score.
B
Proms 10 & 11:
Doctor Who Prom
I hear Doctor Who's an incredible show. But something tells my that I won't figure out how to appreciate it by listening to its soundtrack.
Prom 12: Sir Charles Mackerras Memorial
Schumann, Johann Strauss, Dvorak
BBC Philharmonic
Vassily Sinaisky Conducting
I nearly didn't listen. This was supposed to be conducted by Sir Charles, who until earlier this month was arguably the greatest living conductor and an inspiration to musicians everywhere. Unfortunately Sir Charles died less than a week before the Proms began. So this concert that promised to be a highlight of the season couldn't help but be a low point because of his absence, or so I thought. Not that it could ever be bad: Sir Charles chose the music - there's not a musician in the entire world with better taste - and Vassily Sinaisky is certainly not a bad conductor. But so many wonderful memories are bound up with listening to Sir Charles that you can't help but listen to passages and think of how the orchestra would have played them under his baton. In Schumann's Overture, Scherzo and Finale, I found myself missing things as simple as the extra spring Sir Charles always brought to the dance rhythms, particularly in the Scherzo, which was, to say the least, lead-footed. Even so, the other two movements were much better and Sinaisky didn't fall for the trick of blunting Schumann's rough edges which only succeeds in making the music boring. Then came an account of Schumann's Piano Concerto with the great musician-pianist Christian Zacharias. This was always going to be a highlight, and even if Mackerras is not there Zacharias is. This is Schumann as he should be played: always fresh, no lingering, always flexible but never so much that breaks up the line. I've heard slightly more dramatic accounts of the Schumann Piano Concerto, but never have I heard a rendition that made the piece sound so coherently a whole - the first movement particularly is often played as thought Schumann were delivering a manic-depressive rant with contrasts played up for maximum effect. The second half began with one change to the program: Sir Charles had devoted an entire half of the program to the music of Johann Strauss (try to imagine Claudio Abbado or Bernard Haitink doing that...) but one work was replaced by a Dvorak's E-minor Slavonic Dance as a tribute to Sir Charles - a wonderful and tasteful tribute since it has one of the saddest and most beautiful melodies ever written. I don't think anybody would have ever guessed that Vassily Sinaisky would turn out to be a great conductor of light music, but as it turns out, he is. Indulging in a much freer hand than Sir Charles would have, Sinaisky gave Romantic life to these old Viennese gems. A wonderful, and absolutely surprising, concert.
A-
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Thierry Fischer Conductor
Cherubini, Schumann, Holt, Richard Strauss
I was beginning to wonder if Thierry Fischer would ever come back to life. Early on in the BBCNOW partnership I remember hearing some wonderful Beethoven and Berlioz, but in these past few years they've seemed to check out, phoning in more dull performances than are worth anybody's time. But all you need to do to hear what this partnership is capable of is to listen to their performance of Cherubini's Medea overture. Cherubini hasn't gotten much good press these past...oh...150 years, and the reason for it is as clear as it ever was. The fault lies almost entirely with Berlioz, the prodigal student of the Paris Conservatoire, who also wrote the most entertaining composer biography in the history of music. The autobiography casts Cherubini, the Conservatoire director, in the role of the sputteringly pathetic conservative villain. It would be nice to believe that the portrait is more memorable than Cherubini's music, but fortunately that's just not true. Cherubini's music seems to combine the best elements of Mendelssohn with Beethoven, and BBCNOW seemed to relish the novelty, tearing into the dramatic piece like a pack of ravenous wolves. Next came a very crisp and nimble performance of Schumann's Spring Symphony. Fischer hued extraordinarily close to the score markings, and the romantic poet who relished getting his hands dirty suddenly sounded like an elegant ultraclassicist. It's not the only way to perform Schumann (many people think the tempo markings come from his wife Clara), but it made for a limpid, virile performance in a piece that makes many supposedly better conductors come unstuck. Then came a performance of a percussion concerto by Simon Holt, called "A Table of Noises". I've heard a couple pieces by Holt before, and this one unfortunately this one was no diffferent than any other piece by him in that I can discern no coherent sense of form or structure. It's nothing more than a chaos of noise to which he tags a title, and people are supposed to froth at the mouth at how deep it is. And judging by the reviews, some people do. It got some glowing reviews and I don't doubt this was in no small part due to Colin Currie's percussion performance. But one should pity any performer who has to memorize pieces full of so much complication that it would sound no different than a random improvisation. More's the pity, since the concert ended with a performance of Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel that captured its light heart as few in the world have. Fischer set a daringly fast tempo to which BBCNOW seemed to have no trouble keeping up. This performance had that one special quality that can't be faked: fun. It was relieving to hear these forces play at such a high level after their first concert was at such a low one. Let's hope for more nights like this in the future.
Holt F, Everything Else A
German Chamber Philharmonic of Bremen
Paavo Jarvi Conducting
All Beethoven
Beethoven looks to be having a pretty good year at the Proms. Paul Lewis gave an excellent Beethoven concert last week, and now Paavo Jarvi brings one of the 233453 orchestras of which he's music director for a very good performance of nothing but Beethoven. The Beethoven cycle released by these forces makes clear that Jarvi is one of the world's great Beethoven conductors. Jarvi 'gets' what makes Beethoven tick. There's no tacked-on late-Romantic pathos, this is Beethoven as he should sound: explosive with all the jagged edges in tact. The concert began with a performance of Beethoven's 1st symphony that was simply one of the finest anyone will ever hear. Most conductors slow down the tempo markings in an effort to make it sound like his later music, but Jarvi seemed to know that this is Beethoven when he was still in Haydn's sway. Beethoven 1 is Haydn on steroids, and that's precisely what this wonderful performance sounded like. This was followed by a performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto by my mortal enemy. Now, I should probably specify that Hilary Hahn has in all likelihood never been notified of our mutual enmity (to say nothing of existence). But for any ambitious violin student of a certain age from Baltimore, Hilary Hahn is a name that still strikes terror. The 'little miss perfect' of violin studies continues to be more 'with the program' than the rest of us can ever dream. In possession of a golden tone, awesome accuracy of intonation, and a musical intelligence that leaves mere mortals in the shade. Everything about her seems so perfect, it doesn't seem quite human. And that's precisely what was missing from this performance - the sense that this musician is unaware that the incredible piece of music she's performing can express any feeling higher than the perfection which she seems to achieve so easily. Everything was so perfectly in its right place that there was no reason to care. Some people love Hilary Hahn because she plays like a goddess, but that's precisely what gets in the way of my appreciating her. I'm always awed by her, but I've never been moved. The concert ended with a rare performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that was too hasty. There have been many great performances of Beethvoen 5 over the years, and many more awful ones. Jarvi's performance was very nearly a great, but not quite. No doubt after years of suffering through turgid, murky performances it's nice to occasionally hear a Beethoven 5 that zips through it with too much blunt force. It can't be denied that Jarvi's tumultuously fast tempos and volcanic dynamics (especially for a chamber orchestra of 40) were awesome. But in order to get the full power of the work's enormous contrasts, there has to be more moments of repose than Jarvi allows for. But this performance got much closer to the reality Beethoven than many performers ever do.
B+ (Beethoven 1 gets an A+)
Prom 15: BBC Symphony
Oliver Knussen Conducting
Stockhausen, Birtwistle, Luke Bedford, Colin Matthews, Zimmerman, Schumann
Oliver Knussen is a fine musician. He writes extremely dissonant music that can still manage to be charming (he wrote an opera of Where The Wild Things Are), and his conducting never fails to have interesting insights into oft-misunderstood pieces. But it often occurs to me that in its way Knussen's insistence on all things avant-garde is a bit like political theorists who still think Communism is the most desireable system even after the Gulags. Knussen can make atonality sound more reasonable, but he can't make us forget what we already know. His concert began with Karlheinz Stockhausen's Jubilee Overture. It should be said, Stockhausen was hardly a terrible composer, he was merely a raving lunatic who endured terrible childhood traumas and wrote some decent music in his day. But even at his best Stockhausen is monumentally overrated - charmingly eccentric music is touted as prophecies for a new musical epoch. Sadly, this piece is Stockhausen at his most boring: nonsensical patterns scrawled around the score, piles of musical white noise which any listener can place upon whatever meanings they like. That's not music, that's a Rorschach Test. Then came a piece by Harrison Birtwistle called "Sonnance Severance" which was dissonant, loud, and mercifully brief. I enjoy a Birtwistle in small doses, he knows how to orchestrate and how to build to climaxes, but his refusal to allow for anything but the most stringent atonality leads to some crippling monotony. But this piece was all of three minutes long, and enjoyable for its duration. Then came the London premiere of Colin Matthews's Violin Concerto by Canadian violinist Leila Josefowicz. Josefowicz is the polar opposite of her contemporary Hilary Hahn: her playing is full of eruptive fire, it takes enormous risks, and it effortlessly draws in the listener. I have doubts as to whether Colin Matthews's Violin Concerto is a masterpiece, but it is a fine composition and a wonderful vehicle for Josefowicz's overwhelming talents. The piece is not unlike Thomas Ades's violin concerto, lots of dominant suspensions piled one atop the other, but it seems to be done without Ades's genius for organizing them into great paragraphs. After that came Luke Bedford's six-minute "Outblaze the Sky." Far be it for me to say that some composers use 'too many notes,' but the human ear must always have a point of reference in order to make sense the musical content. Without pandering, this piece is far more intelligible than the other two new pieces on the program because it's organized around the principle of the 'glissando' (slide), and the orchestral strings slide from note to note as the other instruments intone a series notes in a single large chord that builds to a climax of real beauty. It is a wonderful piece that I hope we hear many more times, so I'm keeping my ear on Luke Bedford. Then came Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Rhenish Fair Dances. Though fundamentally a German atonalist, Zimmermann was too individual a voice to subscribe to dogma. Like Ligeti, he bristled at the strictures of the Darmstadt School, and was a finer composer than either Stockhausen or Boulez. This piece, like Ligeti's Concert Romanesc, shows the composer as a young man in a far lighter mood than we're accustomed to hearing him. If Concert Romanesc sounds like Bartok in his Balkan folk mode, then the Rhenish Fair Dances equally channel the more Teutonic volk moments in Hindemith. They're small, impish little pieces that take Bavarian folk melodies and put them through all sorts of weird polytonal paces. Finally came Schumann's Rhenish Symphony, and while not without moments of sloppy execution, it was a completely galvanizing performance and in all seriousness perhaps the most understanding performance I've ever heard, with all the German warmth of a Daniel Barenboim performance without Barenboim's droopy tempos. Knussen wisely performed the first movement at top-speed so that we could enjoy the hemiola (three against two) rhythm on which the whole work is based. Knussen followed the metronome markings in each movement as any period performance conductor would have, but with much more vibrant playing than the period crowd ever allows for. The Rhenish symphony suddenly achieved a fruitful, glorious life which this problematic work seldom does under less perceptive musicians. This concert is vintage Knussen, an always interesting musician who takes enormous risks, introduces us to unfamiliar repertoire and shows us unfamiliar facets of repertoire we knew backwards. Would that he'd apply himself to better music.
B (Stockhausen gets an F, Bedford, Zimmerman and Schumann all get A+'s)
Prom 16: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons Conducting
Wagner, Beethoven, Dvorak
Has the CBSO done it again? Thirty years ago they hired a little-known Liverpudlian in his mid-twenties to direct them, this unknown turned out to be Sir Simon Rattle. After eighteen fabulous years under Rattle, they hired Sakari Oramo, who only a few years before was an orchestral violinist in Finland and is now the director of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and one of the most underrated conductors in the world. Now they hired a thirty-year-old Latvian who until then had only conducted the orchestra at an acoustical tune-up. The world is already ready to proclaim a third miracle in Birmingham, but perhaps I'm a bit more guarded in my optimism. Nelsons is a pupil of the great Latvian maestro Mariss Jansons, Nelsons looks, sounds, and moves almost exactly like his mentor does right down to the same Latvian accented basso on the radio. Nelsons has his mentor's talent for eliciting great orchestral playing, but interpretively Nelsons is far more willful. Jansons is very severe (too severe?) in his refusal to indulge in adjustments that diverge from the score, a practice about which Nelsons seems to have few scruples. Jansons didn't become a star until his mid-40's, and had decades to develop his craft away from the spotlight. As a result, there is nothing Jansons does on the podium without considerable forethought. Andris Nelsons is doing everything at once - Bayreuth, Vienna, Dresden, the Met - as though he already has a fully-formed musical personality. It began with Wagner's overture to his opera Rienzi, and where was the Wagnerian grandeur? Maybe too much Wagner can make anyone silly, but I missed those massive Wagnerian chords that hit the listener right in the solar plexus, on my laptop (a Toshiba A665 with fabulous speakers by any standard) this orchestra rang as hollowly as a toy orchestra. Critics around the world have already gone wild about Nelson's Wagner, but I'm not yet impressed that we've seen the birth of a natural Wagnerian. Then came a characteristically superb performance from - who else? - Paul Lewis, of Beethoven's second piano concerto. Numbering aside, it's really Beethoven's first concerto, and the most Mozartean work Beethoven ever wrote. Lewis plays Beethoven with an astonishing elegance that could easily be transferred to Mozart, and to my delight Nelsons was with him every step of the way. It was every bit as wonderful as Lewis's performance of the first concerto last week. Finally we came to a performance of Dvorak's New World Symphony that was exciting and alarming in almost equal measure. The slow movement in particular was absolutely magical and showed that Nelsons is a natural musical talent potentially of the Furtwangler/Bernstein level. He obviously has a wonderful feel for inspiring players, setting moods, and creating just the exact right sound for the right moment. But at the same time as that was an unmistakable sense that mannerisms were creeping in that would be easily solved. There's nothing wrong with pushing tempos around so long as it doesn't distort the musical material (often its necessary just to clarify it), but Nelsons tempo manipulations sometimes felt arbitrary, as did the way in which players phrased the same musical material differently. Many phrases were beautifully formed, but others seemed to go by without a second thought, a practice that would send Mariss Jansons into a rage. Nelsons is obviously a fabulous natural talent capable of giving enormously theatrical performances. He could be a Willem Mengelberg for our time, but like Gustavo Dudamel he's not yet fully formed as a musician, and it would be a terrible mistake to expect too much of him too soon.
Prom 17: Scottish Chamber Orchestra Winds
Douglas Boyd Conducting
Dvorak and Mozart
This was to be Sir Charles Mackerras's second and final Prom of the season, and had he been able to go on a little while longer he couldn't have picked better music with which to exit. Anybody who's never heard Mozart's 'Gran Partita' is missing out, but most people have heard it without knowing it as it's his famous Serenade for Winds which Salieri describes so memorably in Amadeus. Even by the standards of Mozart, it's a miracle. But before that came Dvorak's Serenade for Winds, which he wrote as a complementary piece to Mozart's when he was still very young. Dvorak's essay isn't on Mozart's level, but it gives just as much pleasure as anything else written by this most natural and human of composers. Some composers - Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Bizet, Dvorak, Faure, Vaughan Williams, Poulenc, Ned Rorem...to say nothing of Kander & Ebb, Duke Ellington, Van Morrison, Sam Cooke, The Beach Boys, Otis Redding, The Beatles, and Louis Armstrong - express themselves so directly that the simple act of listening to their music without contemplating any meaning gives overwhelming pleasure. Maybe Sir Charles would have given the rhythms a bit more spring, but it was perfectly enjoyable under Doug Boyd - who was also the principal oboe of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe before becoming a conductor. But Sir Charles's absence was keenly felt in the Mozart, a masterful piece that needs the hand of a master. A few years ago the conductorless London Mozart Players gave a reading of this piece which I will never forget, every note well-placed, every phrase thought through to build upon what preceded it. This performance was not conductorless, but far it was far more characterless. The piece can work equally well in a variety of interpretations, but the players have to bring commitment and fervor to however they choose to play it. In this performance, phrases were lobbed off with all the care of a dorm room slob. It was a routine performance, and no composer exposes the rote more mercilessly than Mozart does. If only we could have heard Sir Charles in this music, that would have been pleasure as only Mozart can give.
C+
Prom 18: Australian Youth Orchestra
Sir Mark Elder Conducting
Brett Dean, Mahler, Shostakovich
It really is amazing that so many countries are able to round up their best young musicians for orchestral training. The Australian Youth Orchestra is yet another country where the young players can be put through an intensive program so that they can emerge with the ability to compete on the world market with the very best from everywhere else. Where do they get the money for these things? In any event, for this concert they were conducted by Sir Mark Elder who is quickly becoming one of British music's most venerable institutions. Having put the Halle Orchestra of Manchester on the map with its greatest period since the legendary 27-year tenure of Sir John Barbirolli, and having done similar things before at the English National Opera, he is poised to take his place with Sir Simon Rattle and Tony Pappano at the forefront of British conductors. But even the best don't hit it out of the park every time (as we Americans say), and this concert with the Australian Youth Orchestra was nearly as dull as concerts get. The prom began with the London premiere of Australian composer Brett Dean's Amphitheatre. In recent years, Brett Dean has become the undisputed composer laureate of contemporary Australia. But in a previous life he was a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic, and before that he was principal violist of the Australian Youth Orchestra, a tenure during which he played under Mark Elder in his previous performance with the orchestra. The piece has many fine ideas, but it jumps from one to the next without fully exploring how to develop them. It did, however, seem to be excellently played by the AYO. Following that was a performance of six songs from Mahler's cycle: Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Young Russian mezzo Ekatrina Gubanova had a voice much too shrill for Mahler's music and sounded indifferent to interpretive nuance. Elder's Mahler conducting could only be described as 'too goyish.' It is wooden conducting, unsympathetic to the inflections Mahler needs. Judging by this effort Sir Mark, who can be so perceptive in Wagner and Elgar, doesn't seem to 'get' Mahler. And yet, there was still a Shostakovich 10 with memorable attributes. The 10th, one of Shostakovich's greatest works in a career of masterpieces, is not a work that easily yields its secrets. With it's brutal violence sandwiched between endless stretches of deliberate longueurs, it requires the hands of only the very best to be brought to life. For those reasons, I generally prefer my Shostakovich fast and fierce and I think Shostakovich did too, but Mark Elder never ceases to amaze me at his ability to sustain tension at the slowest possible tempo. In Elder's hands, the usually twenty-minute first movement was a full five minutes longer, yet Elder had these young musicians playing with the most fragile control in quiet dynamics. In its own way it was an incredibly impressive feat of musicmaking, but this movement is far too long to be able to withstand such treatment without getting bored of it even from the very best conductors. And unfortunately, the playing was not matched by equal commitment in the loud sections, which generally sounded far too refined to be healthy for any youth orchestra. Perhaps we could get the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra to fill in for them in the loud passages. The rest of the symphony continued in much the same way. Certain passages sounded wonderful, but they were intermittent throughout whole parts of the symphony that sounded listless and tired.
D+
Proms Chamber Music #2
Navarra Quartet and pianist Francesco Piemontesi
Debussy, Haydn, Schumann
Originally this prom was supposed to showcase the interestingly named Finnish quartet, Meta4. Unfortunately the cellist took ill, and Meta4 cancelled their proms debut. In their place came the debut of a young British quartet named the Navarra Quartet. Not that the replacement gig was tough, it consisted of filling in on two repertoire chestnuts. Before the quartet was due to come onstage, young Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi gave us some bravura renderings of four Debussy preludes. Piemontesi played with enormous expressive freedom and charisma, perhaps it was the type of playing that seems better suited to Liszt at first-glance, but it was tremendously exciting pianism all the same in some of the greatest works ever written for the instrument. Then came a performance of Haydn's String Quartet op. 20 no. 3 - one of Haydn's darkest works from his Sturm und Drang period, it is one of Haydn's most difficult quartets to bring off in performance because of its many odd quirks in construction. The Navarra Quartet's approach sounded too careful by half, with tempos and dynamics that were the last word in moderation in a piece that demands Beethovenian contrast. Even with this extremely cautious approach, they caught the oddities in this quartet only inconsistently, with noticeable lapses in ensemble. Things finally woke up in the final movement, but by then it was too late to rescue the performance. Then came a performance of Schumann's equally difficult Piano Quintet that brought to mind an image of the pianist dragging the string quartet along kicking and screaming into taking some risks. The whole ensemble had a fantastic sense of the same ebb and flow that Piemontesi brought to the Debussy, but which the Navarra Quartet lacked almost entirely in the Haydn. It was a performance that was romantic in the best sense of the word, with lots of flexibility but always within the parameters of the piece's structure. The result was still perhaps a bit small-scale, but far better than the Haydn.
B (Piemontesi gets an A+, this kid's going places)
Prom 19: Sondheim at 80
Lots of Stars and the BBC Concert Orchestra
Stephen Sondheim
The older I get, the more I think that if there is such a thing as 'The Great American....' whatever, it's Stephen Sondheim, at least in my parents' lifetime. There's nobody in any other artistic line of work that has either his long-term consistency or his all-reaching poetic gift. How many creators of any genre are so gifted that they can show you the whole world? A creator who can make you laugh and cry, be terrified and become wiser, show us awe and create characters in which we see ourselves, and make it all seem as though it's second nature. Dylan and Springsteen can't do all that, neither can Steve Reich and John Adams, or Roth and Pynchon, or Woody Allen and Scorsese. But not only can Stephen Sondheim make listeners feel all that, but he can make us feel all those emotions at the same time. The only other American I know who can do all that is Steven Spielberg, but for whatever reason Spielberg has far more difficulty relating to adult problems. How many artists in history can do what Sondheim does? Shakespeare?...Mozart?...Goya?...It's probably time people started talking about Sondheim in that class (a fact that Judi Dench seemed to agree with when she spoke about Sondheim during the broadcast). But this is precisely why this approach seemed so pathetically inadequate to Sondheim's requirements. Some opera composers whom the bleeding chunk approach flatters (desperately avoiding a sardonic Wagner reference here, I gotta stop railing on him every day on this blog, it's almost like I like him too much to change the subject), nothing is more harmful than stripping these impeccable songs of their context and cumulative impact. Without knowing what these songs describe, there's nothing that separates a venture like this from a dinner-theater revue. You can class it up with the presence of the composer and Bryn Terfel, with Judi Dench and Simon Russel Beale, but it's still just a presentation out of music theatre 101. Those who gravitated to the classical world and unfairly malign composers like Stephen Sondheim do so more than anything because of presentations like this - that are completely meaningless except as a parade for the egos of stars. Classical music is no less susceptible to ego than any other musical genre, but with that comes a long and incredible history of integrity and searching for truth. And one day soon, Sondheim will be considered as important to the fabric of that culture as anything by Schubert or Brahms.
D- (would have been an F if it weren't for the informative interview with Sondheim at the break)
Prom 20: Wayne Marshall plays Wagner on the Organ
It's impossible not to like Wayne Marshall - a great organist, pianist and conductor, still one of the only black stars in a genre that desperately needs more diversity, and a fearless champion of both new music and new interpretations of old music. Marshall is a rare artist in the classical music world not content to play it safe. He takes enormous risks, and when those risks succeed they succeed brilliantly. But sometimes his risks fail to reap rewards for what he invested, and that's a shame as it was in this concert. There are few good reasons to play Wagner on the organ. It might seem like a good fit with the massive Wagnerian sound, but Wagner requires far too much of a particular kind of delicacy for the organ to provide. Whatever one's opinion of Wagner, it can't be denied that he was one of the greatest orchestrators of all time, and his particular techniques for part-writing would not work in virtually any other instrumental combination than the one he provided. Royal Albert Hall is a massive behemoth whose echo can swallow any number of orchestral details, but the RAH organ is a behemoth within a behemoth, and the organ itself is perhaps too massive to be delicate. To Marshall's credit, he didn't try to compensate for the loss. This was Wagner made into pure organ music, and if the all-important contrapuntal lines of Die Meistersinger were made into a wash of sound, at least there was some gusto to compensate. After playing the overtures to Meistersinger and Tannhauser in organ transcriptions, Marshall played improvisations on themes by Wagner - both from Tristan and from The Ring. But I'm sad to report these improvisations were barely any more interesting than what preceded them. Musically, it was impressive, but I'm still not sure as to why Marshall felt the need to do this. There's amazing music for the organ that the Prom audiences rarely ever get to hear: why not a recital of Bach, or Buxtehude, or Louis Vierne, or Charles-Marie Widor. Or for that matter, why not improvise something a bit jazzier. If you're going to improvise on Tristan, why not juxtapose it against Duke Ellington or Thelonius Monk? It wasn't terrible, but it could have been so much better. We need more musicians with adventurous spirit like Wayne Marshall's, but this recital would never explain why that is.
C-
Prom 21: Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Sir Simon Rattle Conducting
Berlioz and Wagner
Is it just me, or is it no longer easy being Simon Rattle? Even ten years ago Rattle had established himself as the pre-eminent, and perhaps the best, conductor of his generation. He his pick of any orchestra, any repertoire, any soloists, anything he wanted. But Rattle wasted no time using his leverage to tie himself down with the world's most pretigious position, Chief Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. It probably was a decision he made with noble aims, but nobody should envy Rattle the time he's had in Berlin. For the past eight years now, Rattle has now been locked in a desperate struggle to preserve his maverick identity in a city that wants him to be more like Daniel Barenboim. But more on that when the Berliners come to London. In the meantime, let's focus on Rattle's one remaining permanent connection with his home, as a principal artist with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The OAE is a much easier fit for Rattle - a period instrument ensemble that exists to reinvent tradition rather than preserve it - and the quality of their performance bespeaks their mutual aims. The concert began with a performance of the Love Scene from Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet which would have made Charles Munch proud. It was a manic performance with enormous contrasts in dynamics, pulse, and color. Not for Rattle is the severe structuring of Colin Davis. After the love scene, it was time for intermission (couldn't they have given us a little more?), and after they returned came Act II of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. For reasons probably having to do with expense, the period instrument crowd has virtually ignored 19th century opera and especially Wagner. The benefits of period instruments were immediately felt when we heard natural horns that actually sounded like hunting horns - this is exactly what Wagner wrote for! What followed did not disappoint save in one area. Living up to his reputation as my favorite living conductor, Sir Simon gave a reading of Tristan that was neither the violent thrill-ride of Bohm and Kleiber or the slow German philosophizing of Furtwangler and Knappertsbusch. Rattle said that he viewed Tristan as Schubert on steroids, and for once we got to hear Wagner with a human face. There was drama aplenty, but this was not a vision of Wagner that tried to overwhelm us, it was moving in a way I had never thought Tristan und Isolde could ever be. Rattle had mostly able singers, with a visceral Isolde that lacked a little introspection from Violetta Urmana, and a solid King Marke from Franz-Josef Selig that did what it could to make the most of his boring twenty-minute monologue. But it was truly sad to hear the once-impeccable instrument of Ben Heppner's Tristan reduced as it is to such a state. Heppner has finally found a conductor with a conception to match his own, if only they had found each other ten years earlier the results would have been truly something at which to marvel. Heppner's voice is now in such disrepair that it seemed to crack midway through every phrase. It was a very sad thing to hear from this once incredible singer. Will there ever be a well-sung Wagner opera again?
B (Rattle gets an A+, Urmana gets a B+-, Heppner, sadly, gets an F)
Prom 22: BBC Symphony
Jonathan Nott Conducting
Mozart, Ligeti, George Benjamin, Ravel
Jonathan Nott is probably too intelligent, too curious and too self-effacing to be a great conductor. His music-making seems far too aware of the risks involved in great performances to take them. His concerts almost invariably look better on paper than they are in practice. The performances are invariably polished and well-organized, the programs are intelligent in the extreme, and yet you're left wondering how a person can be so intelligent and yet miss the essential element of what makes music worth experiencing. The concert began with a performance by Pierre-Laurent Aimard as a pianist, the perfect counterpart to Nott - who can make sense of the thorniest avant-garde pieces yet sound totally adrift in Bach and Schumann. They performed Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 27 - his last - in a matter that suggested nothing so much as Mozart played with kid gloves. There was no sense of fun or play, just the sense that two musicians wanted to contribute as little personality to the proceedings as possible. The result was curiously quaint, like those old-fashioned romantic performances by Karl Bohm and Walter Gieseking that created a perception of Mozart as a composer of sweet ditties. This was followed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing a solo Ligeti piece: the Musica Ricercata no. 2 - made famous by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut leading straight without applause into the London Premiere of George Benjamin's Duet for Piano and Orchestra. The change in character was immediate. Aimard's playing, which sounded confused and board by Mozart's simple cadences, sounded engaged and wholly convinced by this more complex fare. Even so, there are passages in the Benjamin piece of very sparse simplicity, and yet Aimard sounds wholly sympathetic to Benjamin's simplicity in a way he doesn't to Mozart's. I wouldn't call Banjamin's piece a masterwork, but it's still a pretty remarkable piece of writing in its way. What I find amazing about Benjamin is that he is able to extract music that is as interesting as it is without surrendering even momentarily to the lure of tonal contrasts. The concert resumed after the interval with an ingeniously-constructed snippet of Ravel looking toward Viennese culture in two separate pieces. Nott's fastidiousness dovetails well with Ravel's, and he was in his element, but I can't escape the feeling that these are not the Ravel pieces for which he's best equipped. It began with an elegant performance of the Valses nobles et sentimentales that was quite pleasant if hardly the last word in excitement, and it ended with a lucid performance of La Valse that was forthright, brought out lots of inner voicing and made all the right noises. But it was all a bit austere, this is Ravel without the blue suggestiveness, Munch and Monteux wouldn't have seen the point. But between the two works was sandwiched a pointilistic movement from Miroirs which Nott approached like a master builder and created ravishing excitement out of pure musical craft. What was missing from all this was the Ravelian charisma, the whiff of sensuality without which Ravel attains the arid precision of a swiss clock. And as enjoyable as clocks can be, Ravel without the sex is just not as fun.
B-
Prom 23: BBC Scottish Symphony
Donald Runnicles Conducting
John Foulds, Vaughan Williams, Elgar
The shock that Donald Runnicles has returned to Edinburgh is still with the music world. It is so rare to see a major maestro exhibit loyalty to his hometown that the people were plainly puzzled at his motivations at what seemed to many like a step down the career ladder. But it's clear that Runnicles's principle motivation was to return home, and perhaps to give Scotland it's first authentically great orchestra. After year one, the results are impressive, while still remaining a work very much in progress. The concert began in a manner impressive in its own way. John Foulds's rediscovered piano concerto, the Dynamic Triptych, is one of the cornerstones of the very recent revival of this English composer who has known only neglect since his death seventy years ago. But the little I've heard of Foulds's music is frankly not very interesting. Like Alexander Scriabin, Foulds uses harmonies very creatively and like Scrabin his new ideas are probably born out of a lifelong fascination with eastern mysticism. But unlike his Russian contemporary Foulds seems to have very little idea how to put these harmonies together into a meaningful musical paragraph. The result sounds a bit like musical traction - a composer who doesn't know how to keep his pieces moving. The performers, including pianist Ashley Wass, sounded as though they did the best they could with limited raw materials. This piece was followed by two works written by a composer who certainly knew how to create meaningful musical paragraphs. Vaughan Williams is very much the great composer Foulds is clearly not, and any occasion to hear his gorgeous Serenade to Music - the piece by the way with which I made my non-college conducting debut...I was a little too ambitious no doubt - is not an occasion to listen idly. During the broadcast Runnicles spoke with great eloquence about how understated this piece is. But there was something a little too understated about the proceedings, the performance lacked a measure of that high-Victorian lushness and pomp which makes the piece so much fun. The soloists, from Scotland's Royal Academy of Music and Drama, sounded far more impressive as a group than as individuals. It was simply a disappointing performance. But a different performance materialized after the interval, beginning with the much-heralded debut of young Scottish violinist/pinup Nicola Benedetti. Concerns that Benedetti is a more photogenic phenomenon than artistic are unfounded, and she gave us a reading of RVW's The Lark Ascending that will not be easily forgotten. It's arguable that such a high-calorie sound as the one she makes on the violin is not appropriate for Vaughan Williams, but her playing was unfailingly passionate. The concert concluded with a dramatic though not quite searing performance of Elgar's First Symphony. Runnicles is an unfailingly visceral musician for whom passion is at least as important as intellect, so he and Elgar would seem like a natural fit. The performance had wonderful parts, but Runnicles seemed uncomfortable with Elgar's rambling discursiveness and the weak sections of the performance stood in marked relief to its strong passages. The scherzo, taken at a seemingly impossible clip, was thrilling and the slow movement had visceral passion in abundance but the outer movements sounded listless and longwinded. A disappointing concert all told, but there's still plenty of hope yet for this partnership and there's always Mahler....
C+
Prom 24: BBC Scottish Symphony
Donald Runnicles Conducting
Mahler
I ought to confess that I wasn't much looking forward to this performance. I remember a performance of Donald Runnicles with the BBC Symphony in a lethally dull Mahler's Das Lied von Der Erde. It was worrisome that a conductor so persuasive in so many other German composers couldn't seem to get a handle around the greatest of all symphonists. But I needn't have been concerned because Runnicles was very much in his element in this huge, Wagnerian symphony. Like Wagner's Ring, Mahler 3 is a world in itself, a gargantuan epic which Mahler fills with as many different states as creation can contain. His invention was never as ripe as it was in this symphony and it comes to us without the fatalism of his later works. For me, much as I love everything by Mahler, the third and the fourth symphonies are for me his very greatest pieces, the closest he ever came to the human universality of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Any performance that captures even a portion of Mahler's enormously vivid world is pleasure worth making enormous sacrifices to hear, and even if Runnicles isn't yet quite among the greatest interpreters of this most challenging score (Bernstein, Haitink, Gielen, Horenstein, Levine, Kubelik...my personal list obviously) he sank his teeth into it with relish. Right from the beginning, it was clear that the players had few scruples about making the most of Mahler's most outrageous sounds. In the hands of unsympathetic conductors this movement can seem positively droopy, but Runnicles took the march sections at a heady Kubelikesque clip and the movement's full 35-minute outrageousness came to us in Technicolor. Another highlight of the performance was the incisive second movement, which was performed faster and far more dynamically than usual. Finally, this movement was much more like a sardonic Mahlerian phantasmagoria than the twee-and-cutesy way in which it's often performed. The third movement scherzo, perhaps my single favorite movement in all of Mahler, was a bit less satisfactory. The BBCSSO didn't play at the same level of character and Runnicles seemed to be pulling the tempos in the wrong direction (gradually slowing down rather than speeding up a la Leonard Bernstein), but the famous post-horn solo was wonderfully evocative - with Runnicles admirably refusing the temptation to linger on it. The vocal movements also had some problems, with playing that was too loud to be evocative in the Nietzsche movement and a tempo that was simply too fast for the Knaben Wunderhorn setting. But the contralto, Karen Carghill was a real contralto (for once) and the chorus sang with admirable clarity, if not enough exuberance. The performance ended with a breathtaking reading of the final slow movement. Runnicles coaxed a huge range of color, dynamics and tempo variation out of the players, and it was easily one of the finest readings of the last movement I've ever heard (notwithstanding a doozy of a trumpet crack in the extremely difficult brass chorale at the end). One day soon, these forces may be capable of giving a reading of this piece for the ages. As it stands now, not bad Scots, not bad at all.
B+
Prom 25:
Prom 26: The World Orchestra for Peace
Valery Gergiev Conducting
Two Mahler Symphonies (!!)
There had to be some schadenfreude in Valery Gergiev's decision to put on a concert with two Mahler Symphonies for the London public. Less than five years ago the choice of this great Russian to be chief conductor of the London Symphony was met with hosannas from the press. But just a year into the appointment Gergiev received the critical savaging of his career for his year-long Mahler cycle, which the press almost unanimously proclaimed a disaster. The results of their performances were captured on record for everyone to hear, and truth be told Gergiev's Mahler isn't quite as bad as all that. But as always Gergiev has some extremely individual ideas about how these much discussed scores should go - some are revelatory, some sound stupid, but Valery Gergiev is never boring. His lack of care for technical matters, his impulsiveness in performance, and his unfashionable provincialism just adds to the qualities that make him a unique figure for our time, as crucial to the way we think of orchestral music as Leonard Bernstein and Wilhelm Furtwangler were to theirs. Unlike Bernstein and Furtwangler, Gergiev is hardly a musician with an intellectual basis for his decisions. But in an era of impeccably trained musicians for whom repressing instinct is the norm, Valery Gergiev stands out as one of the few musicians great enough to always feel comfortable expressing his own ideas. And no concert idea is more individualist than putting two Mahler symphonies on the program. It's a nearly impossible challenge for any orchestra, let alone one that meets together for only a few weeks a year. Fortunately, the World Orchestra for Peace is a "superorchestra." It was an idea that originated with Sir Georg Solti (another much-drubbed Mahlerian) to take the best and brightest from each of the world's great orchestras (the first violin section alone contains the concertmasters of 15 different orchestras), put them together a few weeks every year, and conduct them under the banner of the United Nations. Unfortunately Solti died having conducted the orchestra only once, and in his place Gergiev has been the orchestra's director since 1998. Gergiev's Mahler 4 with the LSO came under particular drubbing, but I frankly never saw what was so wrong with it. It's an old-fashioned romantic performance after the manner of Mengelberg and Bernstein with enormous tempo shifts and exaggeratedly characterful playing. It's far from my first-choice Mahler 4 (that will likely always be Paul Kletzki) but it was a valid interpretation and quite preferable to the anonymous sort of Mahler playing that one often gets. Mahler 4 is Mahler's smallest symphony, meaning that it's an hour long and has an orchestra with a size comparable to Tchaikovsky's. Many musicians think that Mahler's scaling back is a cue to scale back the way the way the symphony's approached in relation to other Mahler pieces - a sort of Mahler approach for people who hate Mahler. But Mahler is still the same manic-depressive postromantic he ever was, only fitted into a slightly smaller box. Gergiev is one of those conductors who stretches the 'manicness' of Mahler to the height of its capability (and admittedly sometimes past it). Slow sections are slower, fast sections are (much) faster, contrasts are larger, the character of each episode is played up, and form is of secondary consideration - this is not Bernard Haitink's Mahler. But what am I missing? Why is this so terrible? The opening movement was fairly average, especially compared to the roller-coaster performance on the LSO recording with lots of Central European schmaltz and rhythmic vitality. The second movement had an unforgettable gypsy-fiddle solo from Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster Reiner Kuchl, who seemed to have no inhibitions of playing out-of-tune and with a truly ugly sound like an untrained country fiddler. The third movement was beautifully shaded with enormous contrasts of dynamics and pacing, the last movement was equally beautiful with gorgeously subdued orchestral playing and a wonderfully rustic contribution from soprano Camilla Tilling. The kinetic energy of their Mahler 4 did not quite ignite on the same level. Between the two symphonies, Mahler had changed substantially as both a composer and a human being. Having arrived at the top of his profession, having married the most beautiful woman in Vienna, Mahler began to realize that the fulfillment of his dreams did not guarantee the satisfaction he had hoped, and from then on a gloomier fatalism revealed itself in his music. The challenge of bringing both works off in performance is damn near impossible because the two pieces are so different. The opening funeral march leads us into a far more animalistic, terrifying world than the 4th symphony. Gergiev and his orchestra sounded far more cautious and tepid in the opening. The wreckless abandon for which Gergiev is so well known gave way to an unnecessary restraint. But the soggy first movement gave way to an exceptionally volatile second. Gergiev obviously saw the proximity to the tragic music that would come in the sixth symphony (which he does exceptionally well). The third movement, the twenty-minute nightmare of a dance, was similarly energetic but Gergiev's penchant for extremes finally did him in. The movement is simply too sprawling to carry the listener through without being very careful about where rubato is liberally applied, but it can't be denied that lots of passages were exciting on in of themselves. The famous adagietto was played with far more passion and contrast than is typical, with an unusually large amount of flexibility in tempo and dynamics. And it was wonderful to hear a such a wonderful string section tear themselves into Mahler's purple-prosed melody with real abandon. The last movement - a fifteen minute rapid fire fugue - was taken at a ferocious clip with lots of raw, nervy playing. The Gergiev of the final two movements is the conductor that stuns people, bending pieces like taffy to his peculiar visions of how they ought to sound, and doing so because under his sheer force of personality makes music sound like a natural phenomenon that erupts unpreventably. It's a once-in-a-generation talent, a gift that only Leonard Bernstein and Wilhelm Furtwangler shared among conductors in the era of recording. The result in Mahler isn't to everybody's taste, but it's a particular type of Mahler playing from a highly talented outsider to the Mahler tradition. It was often fascinating, sometimes insightful, occasionally revelatory, and certainly not dull.
Mahler 4: A-
Mahler 5: B
Prom 27: The Halle
Sir Mark Elder Conducting
John Foulds, Beethoven, Richard Strauss
It's a general rule, though hardly a failsafe, that provincial cities throughout the world boast better orchestras than the capitals. There are fewer other cultural institutions with which to compete and therefore more funds to be diverted. London's six full-time orchestras have to compete with one another for attention, performance space and donations. At any given time four or five may be on the verge of bankruptcy, all of them work the sort of concert schedule that would make American musicians cringe, and a London orchestral musician still makes less money than rank and file players in a provincial American orchestra. The Halle Orchestra of Manchester (now just The Halle) has existed apart from the London bustle as perhaps England's most historic orchestra. It was founded in 1857 and its former directors include Hans Richter, Sir Thomas Beecham, Sir Hamilton Harty, Sir Malcolm Sargeant, and of course Sir John Barbirolli. In 1908 the Halle premiered Elgar's First Symphony and Vaughan Williams was said to have marveled many times at how well these Mancunians played his music. The Halle has seen somewhat more troubled times in more recent eras but during the last decade the orchestra by all accounts began yet another golden age under the baton of Sir Mark Elder. Elder made enormous waves as a young man when he guided the English National Opera to a successful fourteen-year period belying the prevailing thought that the ENO was an impossible organization to run. Elder is a musician with a flair for the dramatic, but he seems to prefer long-breathed music-making. He seems to prefer slow tempos and opulent sounds, and it should come as no surprise that he is so successful in ultra-romantic music like Wagner, Elgar and Sibelius. But Elder also has a lighter side, with an enormous passion for the bel canto works of Donizetti and Bellini. I suppose it was natural that Elder would take to the ultra-luxuriant music of a composer like John Foulds. The Foulds piece that opened the concert, April - England, sounded like a lush piece of music with a tinge more Irish than English. Frankly, it reminded me of nothing so much as Riverdance. A lot of very respectable musicians sing the praises of Foulds's music from beginning to end, so I will persist. It was a pleasing concert opener, but as with everything else I've heard by John Foulds, I just don't get it... After Foulds came the great Beethoven we're now taking for granted this Proms year. Out again came Paul Lewis to give yet another Beethoven reading of a lifetime. This time it was the third piano concerto, and Lewis played it with mastery that I'm beginning to take for granted. How does this guy do it? The pacing is natural, the phrasing is always meaningful, and the tone is always exactly right for the moment. If the music calls for infinitely delicate sensitivity, that's precisely what Lewis provides. If the music calls for explosions, Lewis can do that too. It's matters that seem so simple, and yet they pose problems for every major pianist since the beginning of time. Great Beethovenian as he was, Lewis's teacher Alfred Brendel could never match his pupil's Beethoven playing (Schubert's another matter). Mark Elder and the Halle sounded a bit lackluster in the first movement, but in the second movement they provided wonderful delicacy and by the third they woke up and gave a reading that matched Lewis's energy watt for watt. Finally came Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) by Strauss, the composer's apparently autobiographical portrait. Over the years a lot of ink has been spilled about Strauss's motivations for writing such a shameless piece of self-promotion. Many music writers seem to think that this piece is a sort of Nietzschean portrait of himself as a superman, a sort of Mein Kampf in sound that foreshadows the right-wing Nazi sympathizer he would become in his dotage. But these people never fail to take into account one small problem: Strauss was probably kidding. Few composers ever had a less heroic conception of themselves, and in nearly all his programs Strauss would append literary descriptions that proved him as atrocious a philosopher as he was a great composer. If one swallows the philosophy Strauss claimed for his music without imagining his tongue firmly in his cheek, the music becomes unbearable. My love of Strauss was born after I was able to extricate myself from a conception of his music as being a more bombastic ersatz-Wagner, a conception supported by far too many Karajan recordings. But Strauss was far too earthy and cynical a man to believe in the sort of transcendent Wagnerian mumbo-jumbo he claimed for it. I often wonder if the heavy-duty philosophical pieces: Death and Transfiguration, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Ein Heldenleben, The Alpine Symphony etc. - are not just ways of mocking the people who take his music so seriously. It's as though Strauss is privately laughing at these people for falling into the kinds of pranks that would have made Till Eulenspiegel proud. Since I have such particular feelings about the composer, I suppose it follows that I have particular feelings about performances of his music. For me, the best Strauss is light on its feet, far closer to the world of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Johann Strauss than Wagner. Ein Heldenleben is a particularly deadly work if the conductor takes it too seriously. I was worried that Elder, the celebrated Wagnerian, would approach it earnestly, and the worry was absolutely confirmed by a pre-concert interview in which the broadcaster put the question 'Was Strauss Kidding?' point blank. But as far as bombastic Strauss performances go, this was not as bad as Karajan. The Halle strings were particularly wonderful, and the music at least got suitably nasty during the woodwind-chirps that portray the villainous critics. But Ein Heldenleben is a 45-minute piece with the flimsiest musical structure to hang it together. Anybody who approaches it too heavily will bore the audience by minute 8. A lot of the playing was really wonderful, the war scenes made a suitable noise (at a too slow tempo), but no attempt was made to rein in Strauss's rambling paragraphs in a piece that consists of very little but rambling. After this performance I don't think Elder 'gets' Richard Strauss any more than he 'gets' Mahler. I'd have much rather heard Don Runnicles in this piece and Elder in Elgar 1. In the meantime, back to Fritz Reiner to get the taste out of my mouth.
C (Elder gets a D, Lewis gets an A)
Proms Chamber Music 3
Brahms and Berg Lieder
The alien walks up to the German composer and says 'Take me to your lieder!'...As usual I think I'm hilarious even if nobody else does. Brahms would understand me, he always does. Whatever one thinks of Brahms, it can't be denied that his music a cornerstone in the repertoire of every musical genre save opera. You can make arguments that the 'real Brahms' is to be found in the symphonies, or the concertos, or the chamber music, or the solo piano pieces, or the songs, or the choral works. But the truth is that the 'real Brahms' is found in everything he wrote. There is no composer in history who wrote music that was so consistently of high quality. The four songs offered here were set to texts by Heine, who is now generally considered the 19th century German poet least likely to put readers to sleep (Goethe lovers address hatemail c/o Voices of Washington plz). Like nearly all Brahms's songs that I've ever heard (and I freely admit I probably haven't heard half of the 193 in my life) they are profoundly moving - less songs than mini-dramas in which Brahms tells a story. If Brahms was never write an opera, it wasn't from lack of dramatic ability (and he was, he even considered collaborating on an opera with Turgenev - depending on Turgenev's German, that would have been an all-time great collaboration.). I remember a comment from Pierre Boulez stating that Brahms was a fantastic developer of ideas but the ideas themselves were paltry. Clearly, Boulez doesn't listen to many lieder... The lieder were performed by Dutch baritone Hank Neven, who possesses a gorgeous lyric high baritone that reminds me of Christian Gerhaher with a bit more DFD-ish weight. This was followed by the Berg's seven early songs, sung ravishingly well by Swedish lyric soprano Malin Christensson. I always wonder if people who summarily dismiss Berg realize that his music is in fact...well...tonal. Schoenberg is close enough to Debussy to make the reputation far more intimidating than the music. But Berg's music is the lovechild of Mahler and Debussy, much closer to cabaret than "Modern Music." His music, particualrly the songs, are some of the most beautiful music ever written...that is until you start listening to Hugo Wolf. Hugo Wolf is one of those musicians whom you forget is around until his music starts playing and suddenly you wonder how you could have spent so much of your life without this music. The Italian Songbook contains some of the most beautiful songs ever written, and they were well-performed by the two aforementioned singers (though not on the level of the Brahms and the Berg). But I wonder whether all this Hugo Wolf is too much of a good thing. Lieder recitals are stupendously difficult to program. Most songbooks are not meant to be heard in quick succession, and after a while I was exhausted by hearing so many of these songs in a row. There was precious little musical contrast, and eventually you start wondering if they couldn't put in a bit of Paolo Tosti or Abba.
B+ (I'm wondering if I've finally gotten to that point everybody warned me about that chamber music becomes more fun than orchestral music...)
Prom 29: National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
Semyon Bychkov conducting
Dukas, Julian Anderson, Berlioz
I was looking forward to this prom, the best and brightest of Britain's young musicians are always worth hearing, and on youtube you may find a Proms performance done by this orchestra with Simon Rattle on the podium that is the single greatest performance of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand that I've ever heard. There are certain orchestras for which the Symphonie Fantastique is particularly designed, and a youth orchestra with 165 musicians is one of them. Combine this orchestra with Semyon Bychkov on the podium and this could have been a night worth remembering. Sadly, it was far from all one could have hoped. Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice (think Mickey Mouse and a broom) just might be the most perfect tone poem ever written - with all due respect to Richard Strauss. It's a shame that Dukas destroyed so much of his music, because a few more pieces on the same level would have made the Debussy-Ravel axis into a triptych. This performance, unfortunately like most, was simply too slow and heavy to do full justice to the delicacy of this piece. This piece requires a Pierre Boulez at the podium who can give the X-ray precision this piece requires. It needs an orchestra of prodigious control, and it's simply a bad idea to put such a delicate work into the hands of a 165-piece teenage orchestra, no matter how talented. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't Dukas either. Next came a Julian Anderson piece, a composer whom I've liked in the past. But this was simply brassy Dada chords that had very little organization or coherence. I have no doubt that the orchestra worked very hard on the music but I wish all that hard work would have better payoff. Then came the Symphonie Fantastique, a wonderful but undeniably flawed piece of music. When one hears the Symphonie Fantastique in a great performance, with all its manic drug-addled passions brought to the fore, it sounds like a perfect piece. Great conductors of this work like Bernstein, Munch and Muti know that following the score in this work is a deadly mistake, and the gaping mistake is in the dead center of the work: a 16-minute evocation of nature at its calmest, featuring music so still that barely anything happens as you wait breathlessly for the dark drug trip in the last two movements. But great performances will make you forget the work's flaws and let you focus on the orgy of invention by putting all sorts of unwritten accelerandos: sometimes to heighten the excitement, sometimes to fast-forward through the dull parts. Bychkov, unfortunately, took Berlioz's score at its word. The result was a mightily impressive roar in Berlioz's louder sections, lots of expressive playing, and lots of incontrovertibly dull moments. I kept wishing for Bychkov to turn into Valery Gergiev and whip the orchestra into the kind of frenzy for which a youth orchestra was born for this piece. But alas, my alchemical wishes continue to fall upon the deaf ears of rationality.
C-
Proms 30 & 31, PCM 3
This is, inevitably, the time of the festival that I develop 'Proms Fatigue.' Alas, due to work-related...well....work, I had to skip Prom 30 and part of 31. Prom 31 was just getting interesting when I had to turn it off (one does occasionally need sleep...). The BBC Singers did not sound at their best for Poulenc's Figure Humaine. One of the great choral masterworks of the 20th century sounded rough, underrehearsed, unblended, and badly in need of a conductor who will disabuse Soprano I's of the notion that they should take the final high-E even if their voices are not up to it. It was followed by a brass piece by Takemitsu, a composer I admire, that was so far from his best that I wondered why I didn't fast-forward. Finally, there was a world premiere by Stephen Montague of a piece called Willful Chants for chorus and brass. I was beginning to wonder if I'd finally become an old fogey who officially lost his taste for contemporary music, but this piece, an intimidatingly diverse melange of styles from atonality to gospel, was really quite catching. When we have the money I wouldn't mind....ah well. PCM 3 was similarly uncongenial, the focus allegedly being the Bach family. But well, maybe I just don't have much sympathy with early classicism, but the Bach sons are hardly a major focus in my own listening. Der Bachvater was represented by an tedious-sounding trio sonata (in this case violin, flute, harpsichord/cello) , and trio sonata from A Musical Offering that was, obviously, much more interesting. I love an enormous amount of Baroque music, but I have enormous trouble listening to Early Music concerts. Occasionally, they contain fabulous discoveries, but so often pieces are revived simply for the sake of having something to revive. With the exception of A Musical Offering and an encore by Telemann, the music consisted of period pieces that had no particular reason to interest people today (or me anyway). In 300 years, I doubt people will listen to Jakob Dylan or Sean Lennon, but I'm sure there will be some 'early music' buffs interested in reviving their music simply so they can say they did.
Prom 32: European Union Youth Orchestra
Matthias Bamert Conducting
Tchaikovsky, Janacek, Berlioz
Q: What's the World's Longest Viola Joke?
A: Harold in Italy
I wasn't looking forward to it. This was supposed to be Colin Davis's prom. It would have been something to hear the 83-year-old dean of English conductors in a program so directly up his alley. But Davis cancelled before, with rumors of a death-in-the-family. In steps the Swiss Matthias Bamert (whom along with the similarly initialed Martyn Brabbins is invariably the conductor who takes over these concerts), and I stopped expecting anything truly memorable. But after a shaky start came some Tchaikovsky of rare power. Perhaps it takes a youth orchestra to play Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet with the requisite passion (there are lots of dull performances), but for whatever reason, this orchestra was clearly inflamed. Tchaikovsky demands enormous commitment from the players, and I have rarely heard Tchaikovsky played with this level of visceralness. Some of the credit must go to Bamert, who imposed some dramatic tempo shifts which obviously paid off. Next came Janacek's Taras Bulba. Janacek is a composer I love beyond reason, but I never get my ears around Taras Bulba, a twenty-five minute tone poem that doesn't quite gel. There are all of hsi trademark strange effects in the music, but it never reaches the orgy of unrestrained passion we get in so much other Janacek. This performance was, well...better than most. Big-name conductors rarely tackle Janacek because his music is so difficult to ignite, but in a piece that is nearly-impossible, Bamert nearly succeeded in putting together a Taras Bulba of enormous (if intermittent) vitality. After the break came a similarly iffy piece by a particular favorite of mine. Harold in Italy just might be my least favorite Berlioz piece. The Symphonie Fantastique is the work of a young genius inflamed with the discovery of his own powers, but with Harold in Italy Berlioz took his first steps into maturity. The result is pleasant, but it feels like a rough draft containing all sorts of passages which he would later rework into greater music. This was the only piece during which I felt as though Colin Davis was acutely missed. This piece requires a level of precision that the Symphonie Fantastique does not, and what would no doubt have sounded like rhythmic vitality in Davis's hands sounded shaky and awkward under the baton of Matthias Bamert. It was, however, a performance that improved as the piece went on, and the "Orgy of the Brigands" generated a good head of steam. For all its flaws, this was a good concert and I'm quite glad I didn't miss it.
B
Prom 34: German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin
Ingo Metzmacher Conducting
Schrecker, Korngold, Mahler
Ingo Metzmacher is one of the great conductors of our time and it's a shame that the world is likely never to realize this. He has now established a pattern of going into a second-tier organization, pulling stunning work out of them only to stun them with a sudden resignation after only five years on the job. In his latest appointment, he had only reached Year 3 with the inevitable paeans hailing his work as genius before he suddenly announced, gasp!, that he must resign because the city of Berlin was unable to meet his demands for funding. Now that Metzmacher has done exactly the same thing with the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester as he did with Ensemble Moderne, the Netherlands Opera, and the Hamburg State Opera, it may be time for people to wake up to the fact that this uncompromising maestro would rather stand on principle than make great music. And so, for the second time this Proms season, we listened to a fine conductor giving his last concert as the director of a fine orchestra which he is leaving for no good reason. Was this the awe-inspiring concert that such an event would merit? Certainly not, it was even far from the best concert Metzmacher's given at the Proms in recent years. It began with much-underrated the overture to an opera by the much-underrated Franz Schreker. Wouldn't it have been a far bolder gesture to bring a Schrecker opera to the Proms? Now that Janacek is finally a mainstream composer, Schreker is the next great genius of the opera-world ripe for rediscovery. But you could never tell from this rambling, over-orchestrated overture to Die Ferne Klang. One day, a champion will come to the aid of Schreker and give him the platform he deserves (in much the way Metzmacher has done for Karl Amadeus Hartman), but I can't help feeling disappointed that this is the most Schreker we'll get at the Proms for a while longer. After a disappointing opening, the great Leonidas Kavakos came out to perform the Violin Concerto of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a piece with special meaning for me because it's my 90-year-old grandmother's favorite piece of music. All due credit to Kavakos, who bathed the work with as much Hollywood schmaltz as the work would allow. But I wish I could tell Bubbie that I love this piece with as much fervor as she does, but the truth is that I only love the last movement. Whatever genius Korngold is considered in a parallel universe, in this universe his greatest music accompanies movies. Thelast movement is a real 'toe-tapper' of an Irish jig, and elucidates to concert audiences that Korngold was a true purveyor of light music in the Grand Manner. But the other two movements are rather generic, and not even Leonidas Kavakos can make me listen with interest. Then came Mahler's much-maligned and misunderstood Seventh Symphony, a performance that won uniformly ecstatic reviews in the press. No doubt, it was a damn good performance. Metzmacher made fantastic sense out of the enormous outer movements of this sprawling five-movement masterpiece (and yes, the M-word applies here), with a Kubelik-esque manic edge to it. Furthermore, the second and third movements, taken at light speed, were fantastic. Textures were displayed with Boulezian clarity (not withstanding some brass clunkers), and the symphony's many dramatic qualities had enormous momentum. All that we missed was warmth, and comparison with Kubelik in this piece readily shows what was missing. This is Mahler with a touch of Stravinsky, done without the mitteleuropische warmth which you'd expect would come to these performers like second nature. And it is invariably in the fourth movement, the Andante Amoroso, where lack of passion/sincerity/whatever proves most damaging. It was in every sense brilliant performance, but IMHO not a great one.
C (Mahler gets a B+)
Prom 35: The Danish National Symphony Orchestra
Thomas Dausgaard conducting
Ligeti, Tchaikovsky. Rued Langgard, Sibelius
The moment the Tchaikovsky concerto began, I knew we were in for a rare concert. Rare is the time when hearing Tchaikovsky can shock anyone, but after two Ligeti pieces for chorus, the sudden intrusion of Tchaikovsky's ever-familiar violin concerto came as a complete shock to the system. The first two Ligeti pieces, Morning and Night, were slight examples of this choral master operating at his cosmic greatest. Ligeti's choral music is still almost entirely the province of professional organizations, but these pieces are early examples of the Transylvanian master operating at his most tonal, and they were sung with wonderful technique and spirit by the Danish National Chorus (which seems to be blowing the BBC Singers out of the water). Then came a rare fever-pitched performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto that can make you listen afresh. I had never heard of Hagen Kraggerud before tonight, but rest assured I will be searching for recordings. Kraggerud's playing was positively Oistrakhian - an impassioned high-calorie sound, with enormously full tone and sensuously wide vibrato, and a total willingness to bend the rhythms (and occasionally entire notes) spontaneously in the heat of momentary intensity. He seemed totally unafraid of 'getting dirty', straining his fiddle well past the point of elegant sound with the rough Russian timbre this piece requires. The accompaniment from Dausgaard and his Danish orchestra was just as fantastically idiomatic. Then came the concert's centerpiece. First the Ligeti Lux Aeterna - a terrifying setting of a text that is usually used for consolation. It's not my favorite Ligeti piece, I like my Ligeti with more humor, but it is classic middle-period Ligeti in which he attempts to lay the demons he left behind the Iron Curtain to rest. It is a profoundly disturbing work, continuously producing ugly sounds that seem to emanate from the realm of the undead. It is not music on the level of Beethoven and Schubert, or even on the level of Ligeti's own Etudes or Clocks and Clouds or Melodien, but it is a type of great music that should never be ignored just because it disturbs. The Ligeti lead immediately into a piece by an early-twentieth century Danish composer so neglected that Steven Schwartz's guide to neglected composers doesn't even list him. At the beginning of his career, Langgaard was lauded as the heir to Carl Nielsen. But by the time he reached thirty, Langgaard was already forgotten. By the time he died in his mid-sixties, he was a church organist in rural Denmark who'd written sixteen symphonies and lots else, little of it ever performed in his lifetime. I'm not sure if the piece of his we heard tonight - the half-hour Music of the Spheres for two orchestras, chorus, organ and soprano - is a masterpiece, but it was fascinating. It was episodic and discursive with material that was never developed, but it was music that sounded like no one else's. Apparently Ligeti was a committed fan of this piece, and he recognized many of his own techniques in this work. Finally came a reading of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony that was among the finest I will ever hear. Very few conductors (Vanska, Berglund, Karajan) are able to reach so far into Sibelius's depictions of nature that the music itself sounds like natural phenomena. The playing of the Danish National Symphony was truly unbelievable, zeroing in on the fundamentals of the Sibelian sound world in a way that would even make Finnish orchestras green with envy. The tone coloring and dynamics were so precise and so extreme that you can only wonder at how they achieve such results. Dausgaard was equally at home and kept things moving flexibly and quickly (occasionally too much so). With his swift assertive approach, I was reminded of those old recordings from Sibelius's first great champion Robert Kajanus - though Kajanus could only dream of an orchestra this good. All in all this was hardly a perfect concert, but it was a pretty magnificent one which showed amply that Dausgaard and his Danish forces are likely among the most exciting partnerships in the world today.
A
Prom 36: BBC Symphony
Lionel Bringuier Conducting
Berlioz, Chopin, Roussel, Ravel
I'll never forget the day I first saw his name announced as the assistant conductor to Gustavo Dudamel. Bringuier was the first conductor to get international attention who was younger than me. And he wasn't just younger, he was four-and-a-half years younger, closer in age to my brothers than to me. A week later I found out that one friend of mine sent an article about Bringuier to another with the caption "Don't show it to Evan, he might jump out a window." Well....is this kid as talented as all that? Probably, but it's tough to tell in a program like this, because I'm not fond of much of the music on offer here. But even so, the light touch, the elegant sounds, the emphasis on precision and the fleet pacing immediately stamp Bringuier as a certifiably French musician. The overture to Les Corsaire was in every sense, a whirling dervish. Berlioz based it on Lord Byron's autobiographical The Corsair, and if the music does the poem any credit, it shows that Lord Byron was an exceedingly noisy man. Le Corsair is an exciting piece of music, but it's barely music. There was no attempt in this performance to disguise the lack of substance. The orchestra made joyful noises at an extremely rapid tempo. Then came Chopin's Second Piano Concerto with the underrated Brazillian pianist, Nelson Friere. Much as I love Chopin, I don't care for his piano concertos. The final two movements are always fine, because all Chopin has to do is write an extended piano miniature with orchestral accompaniment. But Chopin was emphatically not a long-form composer, and the opening movements are bloated beyond any reason for what their material can sustain. But Chopin could not have asked for finer advocacy from Nelson Friere. Friere is one of the great living pianists - always spontaneous but never mannered. Nobody can make the opening movements interesting, but Friere phrased the slow movement with Cortotian panache and finale with Rubinsteinian elan. After the break came another work of which I'm none-too-fond. Albert Roussel's Third Symphony is a work that sounds like Prokofiev: great craftsmanship, lots of noise, not much fun, I'm not sure why I'm listening. The performance made some impressive noises, but the piece has simply never spoken to me. Finally, a work I love unequivocally, at least in part. For all its occasional longeurs (except when Charles Munch conducts...), it's one of the sexiest pieces of music ever written. Ravel never made more beautiful sounds, and unlike Prokofiev, Ravel invariably puts his incredible craftsmanship to the service of something deeper than itself. This was a blatantly virtuoso performance with fast tempos and extreme dynamics, it was extremely impressive in its way. Perhaps it was too brash, Munch's tempos without his imagination, but it does show that Bringuier has the chops to bring off a piece this challenging. So let's keep an eye on him.
C+ for my tastes, A- if you take the concert seriously.
Proms 37, 38, 39, 40 Proms Matinees 1 and 2
Alas, work made me miss Bach Day. And nothing about that was more tragic than missing John Eliot Gardiner perform the Brandenburg Concertos. Gardiner has grown as a Bach conductor in recent years, leaving behind his image as a tense and unimaginative martinet in the 1980's where that reputation belongs. He was once a good Bach conductor who had an unfortunate tendency to overlook delicacy. But he is now an old master in Bach who performs with imagination and understanding, fully an equal to the Harnoncourts and the Herreweghes. I also missed most of the BBC Philharmonic's concert with their outgoing conductor Gianandrea Noseda. Noseda does wonderful work, and I was very happy to hear an early Dallapiccola piece before he met serialism. But I didn't finish the piece, so no oracular pronouncements for that either. Then came Prom 40 the next night, featuring my favorite young conductor with the orchestra whose fortunes he's revived as they have not been in many decades. Vladimir Jurowski is 38 and already the undisputed superior of some conductors twice his age. Like most great Russian musicians, he comes with all the passion for which one can ask, but it's coupled with a rare analytical mind. Perhaps Valery Gergiev reaches even more volcanic heights in his chosen repertoire, but Gergiev does not have Jurowski's all-processing brain. Unlike Jurowski, he can neither get inside the head of composers to which he does not relate viscerally, nor does he have the analytical mind to clarify formal relationships. So it's with great regret that I missed half this all-Russian concert, even if the first half didn't quite promise the great things I'd hoped. Jurowski began with a rare (at least, rare these days) outing of Rimsky-Korsakov's rearrangement of Mussorgsky's St. John's Night on Bare Mountain (or Night on Bald Mountain as it's usually known), but Jurowski did Mussorgskian things to the arrangement which Rimsky would never recognize. The playing was uncommonly vivid, with tempos pulled about like taffy. It was an uncommonly dramatic performance of an arrangement that fundamentally exists to take some of the drama away, so I wonder why Jurowski just didn't do the Mussorgsky version. Then out came Julia Fischer to perform Shostakovich's 1st Violin Concerto. I think Shostakovich's 1st Violin Concerto is both one of the all-time great works for the violin, and one of the greatest pieces ever written by Shostakovich. Jurowski's idiomatic accompaniment provided ample evidence of why that is, entering Shostakovich's stark world with all-too-natural aplomb. Unfortunately, Julia Fischer is tempermentally unsuited to the work. Fischer is like a German Hilary Hahn. She's a violinist of enviable intelligence and fearsome technical abilities. But her playing invariably errs on the side of cool delivery. Shostakovich requires a David Oistrakh who can imbue the work with more passion than people ever thought could come out of a violin. Give me Leila Josefowicz or Janine Jansen any day over this. Even so, the orchestral contribution is important enough in this piece that it was entirely worth hearing at any point. Unfortunately this weekend was concert preparation so I didn't have a chance to listen to the second half, which I looked forward to even if I don't like Prokoviev's Third Symphony. Sigh...
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