Last night I went to a very bland performance of a piece that couldn't be less bland. My 'hotshot local conductor' led my local in Shostakovich 4: the most difficult, most terrifying, most unique, funniest and potentially best classical masterpiece of the 1930s: it's either this, Lulu, Shosta 5, RVW 4, or Bartok MSPC. It's one of the most ironic, bleakly comic pieces ever written. Last year I heard it in Philadelphia conducted by Tugan Sokhiev: a Ossetian Russian who comes from a war torn region and surely understands what this music is about in his marrow. But when our local did it, it was done with the wistful sincerity of Brahms 1.
Our local guy is not at all a bad conductor, he's just... well... he's a very earnest young man, and he makes music like one. A nice guy though a little full of himself as successful young people tend to be. But I get the sense he's so sincere that if one were to meet him and make a joke, there's a 50% chance he wouldn't get it.
Jonathon Heyward is going to be the biggest thing in American orchestral life since Michael Tilson Thomas, perhaps since Leonard Bernstein. No doubt he will grow into the roll, but I doubt he'll get there until he sheds the brash overconfidence of those two predecessors. It's just not him.
Our generation is full of all this talk about separating the art from the artist. Bullshit. The artist's temperament, character, background and beliefs are intimately bound up with it. If you respond well to an artist whose character is, as we say, problematic, one would do better to consider the problematic aspects of one's own character than simply eliminate their works from your consumption. The whole reason we have art is so we can contemplate it. A great artist's flaws of character are a large part of the process of understanding the works. Evil-natured artists give you a window into the mental processes of evil. If you want to understand evil, you would do well to keep paying attention to them.
I've grew up listening to a long list of live podium musicians. When you hear them, after a while you begin to feel as though you know them. You feel as though you know their personalities and life stories through their music, and they take on the qualities of friends.
David Zinman was a New Yorker of the 1950s who grew up in the era of Sid Caesar and Golden Age Broadway. He is of the same generation as the 'sick comics', educated comics who pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse beyond the Borscht Belt: Woody Allen, Tom Lehrer, Nichols and May. Zinman, who paid his way through college with stand up gigs, is perhaps the funniest man who ever stood in front of an orchestra, and you hear that wit in his musicmaking. He spent his career trying to be Leonard Bernstein, who was half Harvard professor and half rock star, but he should have been the American Charles Mackerras. He wanted to be known for his Mahler and Brahms, but he should have been far better known for many others who don't demand quite so much existential depth: Mozart and Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, Ravel and Stravinsky, Berlioz and Richard Strauss. He could make extraordinary noises in fortissimo and pianissimo, but they were used with extreme intention. His musicmaking was always fastidious, urbane and full of wit: there was always lightness and retraint. The extravagant angst of German romanticism seemed almost completely alien to his nature. Zinman was music's truest high comic, and rather than Zurich, he, not Slatkin, should have followed Andrew Davis at the BBC, where he could have been the most beloved Last Night conductor of all time. Now, I could mention the incredible virtuosic precision of a Zinman performance and their dancably pulsating rhythms, the magnificent ear for balances, or his ability to project harmonies and linear transparency, but it's frankly not the most important thing about him.
Yuri Temirkanov was obviously very different. He was funny in a very different way, but his musicmaking was suffused with heart and tears. Temirkanov was, apparently, an enormously passionate reader, and I remember a profile in Baltimore when he said he would rather never listen to music again than give up reading. His way was not the animal passion of Svetlanov, it was emotionally specific, suffused with many different emotions at once. In many hands, perhaps most, Tchaikovsky sounds like melodrama. In Temirkanov's, T's music sounds like masterpieces as emotionally complicated as anything in Tolstoy or Pushkin. His musicmaking went almost simultaneously between passion, terror, rage, humor, romance, bitter irony, and melancholy. You heard his pessimism, you also heard his love of being alive. He was a giant of a musical poet whose poetry unlocked the works of the Russian masters as I'd never heard anyone unlock them live but Mariss Jansons and, occasionally, Valery Gergiev. But before a Shostakovich 13, one of the greatest performances of anything I'd ever heard, he did a Haydn 104 that probably sent flies dropping to the floor for how much air was sucked out. I could mention Temirkanov's ability to stretch a vocal line for minutes at a time, his ability to create an overtone glow in the string section, the way he tied rubato to harmonic tensions and resolutions, and of course, the bodily power of his fortissimi--niceties of linear clarity be damned, and, of course, the constant imprecisions. But that's not what made him memorable.
Then came Marin Alsop. Alsop, like Zinman, is a New Yorker, but she is a Boomer, a woman, and once upon a time, a musical hustler going gig to gig. I didn't know Alsop particularly well. She knows who I am, but I met her less than half-a-dozen times. Everybody I knew who knew her testified to two things: 1. She is formidably demanding. 2. She is a very nice person. Alsop is, at heart, an ambitious New Yorker. You always heard the brashness of those pieces, the cynicism, but you also heard the sincerity and lyricism. She was a better Mahler conductor than Zinman and probably even than Temirkanov. She was fantastic in Richard Strauss and Stravinsky and Shostakovich and Prokofiev and Hindemith and Britten, and, of course, all that mid-century American music. She's grown over the years, and after her Vienna years she's learned how to do German romanticism in a way she never used to. On the other hand, I didn't like hearing her in Beethoven's Eroica, and I outright walked out of her Tchaikovsky 5 to catch a rock band down the street instead. I don't think she has that earnestness in her character, that simplicity, that unbridled optimism or pessimism. I think a person like Alsop is a realist who takes things as they come. I get the sense she realizes that life is never one thing or the other. I could mention that the orchestra was dominated by a big, LSO like, brass sound, and the rhythms always seemed to swing in a groove like a piece of American pop music. I could mention that over the years she developed a bloom in the string sound that at first she obviously found extremely hard to do, even with her background as a violinist. But that's inside baseball. It's not why anybody comes to the concert but nerds like all of us.
On the other hand, it strikes me that that earnestness is exactly who Jonathon Heyward is: a sincere young African-American from that very earnest region, the South, who sees the world in primary emotions. His sincerity therefore makes him magnificent in Verdi, Tchaikovsky, even Brahms. He is clearly a devoted champion of new music, but he also wants to be known for the early 20th century classics: Mahler, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Bartok and Shostakovich which require a 20th century pessimism he does not understand. I get the sense he wants to be an updated version of Simon Rattle, but he clearly lacks Rattle's weirdness, Rattle's probing for the minutest details, Rattle's willingness to be polarizingly bizarre. Rattle is, at heart, a Carnaby Street hippie, and responds to the psychedelic in music. I could be very wrong, but at heart, I get the sense he's much closer to an earnest romantic like Giulini than a hippie postmodernist. He can get a deeply impressive noise, both visceral and bass heavy, but when it comes to conveying complicated emotional states: pessimism, wit, sarcasm, he has no idea what he's doing. When he does Beethoven, he does it at fast tempos he does not yet have the technique to sustain, and it sounds as though he doesn't truly feel a thing about it.
One day, this guy may be a great conductor, but not yet. In a few decades, after a lifetime's stresses and frustrations and sadnesses, he may understand these things much better, but the essential temperament of a person rarely changes.
The problem with being a musician is that the conscious self can only get you so far. Being an artist of quality is not a matter of brain or even heart, it's a matter of stomach. You can do all the work in the world, bring out all the countermelodies and cross rhythms and balance all the harmonic dissonances, but you have to find a way of making art that coincides with the person you are. Perhaps you can fake it for a little while, but if you try to be someone else than the person you really are, it will burn you out. Look at Carlos Kleiber: he seemed to be so joyous up there, but everyone testified that he was in absolute agony, so he could only do it once a year.
Had my life worked out very differently and I ended up the conductor I wanted to be when I was three years old, I would have loved to be a musician with the bittersweet glowing naturalness of Pierre Monteux, Rafael Kubelik, Fritz Busch, Zino Francescatti, Fritz Kreisler, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Wilhelm Kempff, ... obviously I'd be much worse than these guys.... But good or bad, I'm not that guy. I'm a Jew who grew up solely among Jews, speaking Yiddish and Hebrew whose grandparents survived the very worst of the 20th century under both Hitler and Stalin. If I wanted to express what was in my soul, it would probably sound like highly mediocre versions of Klemperer, Horenstein, Sanderling, maybe Tennstedt. Extreme dynamics, slow tempos, massive rough sounds interrupted by lyricism. That's what my violin playing was always like (the slow tempi were because I didn't practice enough...). But at heart, whether or not I'm a musician, I'm probably first a Jew who missed his calling as a historian. I'd probably be best in those composers who articulated the crises of the 20th century from various sides: Mahler, Janacek, Bartok, Nielsen, Shostakovich, the 2nd Viennese school, Hindemith, Britten, Messiaen, Ligeti, Ives, Schnittke, even Vaughan Williams and Mussorgsky. I doubt my natural temperament could find a way into the unbridled romanticism of Wagner or Verdi, and my temperament has very specific notions of what Mozart should sound like that are extremely different from any traditional view.
Interpretation is not a question of what the musician thinks it should sound like, it's a question of the interpreter's natural temperament and what their subconscious needs to express. If they're able to translate their conscious thoughts to sound, they firstly need to have the temperament and grace under pressure to do something so purposeful to the intellect. If they don't, they have to find their way in, and the way in is to relate to the music on a human level, not an abstract one.
The technical aspects of music have their own sort of fascination, but so do boardgames. Obviously, the technical aspects matter, they matter very much. But they're only the beginning. Many artists are not even aware of how they've interpreted unless they hear a playback. The 'why' of art is so much more important and interesting than the 'how.' You can't just listen to the notes of music, you have to listen behind them. The 'how' of art obviously matters, but it's usually a question best left for the practice room. 'How' is a question for the left brain: far more important to math, science and technology. The humanities are those murky waters that only exist in metaphor and context. If the emphasis of a climax is placed on the physical impact and not on the harmonic resolution (or dissonance), what's important is the why: what it makes you feel like and what it might make the musician feel like. I think it was Oswald Spengler who said 'metaphor is the algebra of the right brain.' What matters is not whether a countermelody is brought out, but why it was, how it made the audience member feel and what the artist wanted to communicate. In the arts, there is no 'this is that', there is only 'this is like that.' As I've said before, the key to understanding art is not emotion or intellect or message or didactic purpose or beauty or empathy, the key to art is meaning, and meaning takes in all those aforementioned notions and a thousand others besides. Meanings are simultaneously universal and deeply personal.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "Who you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you're saying."
