Letter to Dad #1

OK Dad,

I haven't been able to write much lately, and I can't help thinking it's to do with you. I see your face every minute of the day. It has still just barely hit me that you're gone and my life feels no different than when you were here. If you're going to live rent-free in my head for the rest of my life, I'd better talk to you. I don't know whether I'm more scared of your answering back or not answering at all.

Whatever the source of the craziness, you made me this dinosaur: you filled my head with music and history and books and movies, I was your pet project to make into the one person you could regularly talk to about all the things that went through your head. The worst thing about my life is that you succeeded. You never understood how I couldn't figured out how to navigate my own direction, but how could I when my whole mind was owned by you. I'm now this strange 19th century man of letters adrift in the sea of a world who moved on long before I was born.

Whatever the disagreements, the worst thing you gave me was understanding of the world. By late 2006 I saw how the subprime housing bubble would lead to Great Recession before you did. Shortly after the recession I looked at the combination of Republicans' systemic gaming of the political system and a buttressed class divide and realized America would lurch into authoritarianism ten years before anyone would agree with me. I saw the worst of Trump coming and we fought like cats and dogs for five years until on January 6th, you finally acknowledged I was right. I didn't think it was that big a deal. I dont know how people kept up with the news and didn't see it.

As you never tired of pointing out, I also got many things wrong along the way and forecast doom at plenty of wrong moments. But a combination of your bildung and my own life story led me to the conclusion that something was rotten with this country at the fundamental root long before anybody else noticed. When they did notice, they misdiagnosed it, and now it looks like turtles all the way down. Your skeptical liberalism was the right way, I'm just an updated version of yours, but it's the worst possible attitude toward life in America to have in 2026: what profits a man to be pessimistic in an era that deserves pessimism when our only option is to fight it even as we know we'll lose? We have to believe in a better era, we have to believe in better lives, but you never showed me how to do that. You cynicism infects everything, and as a result, the world evolves with seizmic tremors, and we only know how to pretend it's somewhere between 1907 and 1954. Even Mom and Nochem are more of our time than we are. Right or left, nothing is more au currant than to hate liberals. We're not good exemplars of liberalism. Good liberals know how to fight for everything right even as they know that they'll lose so much of what they value in the process. You never showed me how to do that, but you did show me the world. I'm inestimably grateful, I love you more because of it, but it's the worst possible way to live a life.

Whether people realize it, what every Westerner hates is people exactly like us. Left, right, maybe even center. They hate everything we are, everything we support, every choice we make. The right may call it paternalism, the left may call it patriarchy, but we embody everything they resent: you and I both. We are the tragic, skeptical education that assimilated the world's knowledge and came to the conclusion that there are no moral absolutes: only millions of compromises along the way to solutions that are only livable moment-to-moment. We know there is no such thing as justice and equality just as we know there's no such thing as security and liberty, you can have tiny, unreliable bits of each, but nothing is guaranteed and if you take too much of it, you will eventually provoke those you steal them from into stealing from you. We are the people who tell conservatives they have to sacrifice money to protect their own country, we are the people who tell leftists they have to sacrifice non-violence to protect the world. We are the people who tell the right that they have to stay out of the bedroom and tell the left they can't cut people off just because their views aren't enlightened--or even that their actions aren't enlightened, we are the people who tell moderates that they procure their self-advancement and complacency at everyone else's expense, and eventually, everyone else will take revenge. I don't know if we are the education they were denied or if we are the self-education they didn't know how to give themselves, but we are the people who know that when you spend your life pursuing ideals to an impossible standard, millions die in the acquisition.

There is so much to talk to you about and I don't know where to begin. I blame everybody, but I find myself cowardly for not joining the fights without hesitancy. Even as I know the fighters will screw it up and screw it up even as I write, the pen is not enough, charitable contribution is not enough. I know that if I tell the truth about how people are enablers in what's coming, they will hate me, they will disavow me, they will find my provocative prognostications still more annoying than they already do. We need bodies that will put themselves in harm's way against the worst of society, which teems all around us now. I fear getting beaten up, but I think I can overcome that fear. What I can't overcome is that I don't want to get beaten up or worse for a tactical error. I don't want to be Alex Paretti or Renee Nicole Good, I don't want my friends to be them either, but still worse, I don't want the examples of people I know to be the one who leads America's protestors into a situation like Iran's. It won't happen any time yet, but it's probably coming. Still worse than that may come. Still so much worse. People talk about Trump like he's Hitler. He probably isn't, but if he is, he is SO MUCH WORSE. Hitler killed a mere 18 million, but with every danger in the world today, we could stand to lose 1.8 billion. Horror, horror, horror everywhere. Everyone affected. Everyone complicit.

Will it happen? Well, history tells us that some day in history it will. Not necessarily in my lifetime, not necessarily in Eli's and Joel's, but one day, it will happen. The point is, it always happens when people fight tyranny with their hearts without their brains. To do so is to enable people who fight with their brains without their hearts. The world must think with its heart so good can worm its way into evil, and feel with its brain to guard against how easily evil can worm its way into good. Nobody does that today, and if people don't start soon, the results of heartless thinking will begin to display their rot.

Is it a blessing you taught me to see that while no one else does?

For Jose van Dam (1940-2026)

 

One of the great singers of the 20th century. He was a favorite of mine. The only time I heard him live, I was fortunate enough to hear him sing Hans Sachs. He was not a huge personality, he was, rather, a singer of google intelligence, enormous dignity, and emotional restraint. Every vocal nuanced felt earned and apiece with itself. No grandstanding, and while probably as intelligent as someone like Fischer-Dieskau, none of DFD's pedantic bending over backwards to make musical points.

He exhibited a complete lack of vanity. Part of it is generational: the postwar generation put an enormous value in being understated and technically immaculate, but some of those artists always sounded to me as though they wanted credit for it (Abbado, Anda), but van Dam was born into nobility. Literally, he was a Baron. The understatedness seemed bred into his ethos. I think of him as the vocal equivalent to someone like Dohnanyi or de Larrocha. The understatement and intelligence never precluded warmth or communication, and there was never a lack of musical detail. Every bar had a nuance should you care to notice it. Self-effacement wasn't what he wanted to be, it was simply who he was.

A José van Dam Recital (1994) - YouTube

Enjoy Every Sandwich - Half of it

 The greatest thing to happen in years happened this week. Greater than love, greater than friendship, greater than a sports championship, greater than music, books, movies and sex.  

I started beta-blockers. 

On vacation. 

It was supposed to be an overnight trip to see my favorite conductor and favorite orchestra play my favorite piece of music. A train up, one night in Boston, then a train home. Two glasses of wine in some bar while talking to some guy and our bartendress about... what did we talk about? Then back to my hotel room. 

Then on the way home, the train stopped in New Haven. Apparently power had gone out in Manhattan's Penn Station. No trains were coming in or going out. Nearly everybody else of the thousand passengers left the train, able to travel locally through Grand Central Station which would honor their tickets on another train. But being the passenger with the farthest distance to travel, I had to stay onboard and for two-and-a-half hours I did. Finally, with no end in sight, almost out of food, I went out into the train station. 

I immediately realized there were two options: catch another train, or take my first genuine vacation of a distance past Philadelphia in... I don't want to say... No matter how much my stomach blew up to Veruca Salt-like proportions, I would take the risk.  

And so I did what I'd been loathe to do and start regularly taking those beta blockers I've been supposed to take every day since late November. Not for belly bloat, but for heart issues. 

And yet the 10 I took it before this week, the biggest impact it had was not on my heart but my stomach, or at least once it had that impact on New Year's Eve. But I never really thought it did again. 

Until New Haven! I could eat! I could drink wine! I could go on vacations like a halfway normal person. For three days I went around Yale University, the closest thing America has to a gothic village like Bruges or Avignon where you can picture having a royal wedding then murder your in-laws. 

New Haven, full of Yale professors with nothing to do, is one of the best culinary towns in America. Not only is the food amazing, but the nutritional content is listed everywhere. There was barely a place where I was left unnotified of all the ingredients, even before ordering. All the problems and fears of ordering in Baltimore restaurants were nowhere to be found in this leisure resort for smart people. Simple things my body could not keep down were suddenly digested with no trouble: hard cheeses, chocolate, butter, even things I wasn't able to have for years as simple as cucumber and greek yogurt were able to be kept down. Even the carbonation of kombucha did not affect me, and it began to have the stomach settling effect everyone promised. 

It's the ultimate proof that ten years' trouble is nothing more in fact than EXTREME visceral hypersensitivity. One full pill every day with eleven refills. Suddenly, my stomach doesn't blow up for more than a few minutes at a time, and for the first time in three years I don't have to eat only six things. Technically I'm still on the same diet, but I'm actually on the diet properly and not just checking ingredients for a hundred things I can't eat lest my stomach turn to Falstaff. 

It doubtless may create it's own problems, but if this problem can be dealt with, every other problem is easy in comparison. I can keep losing weight. I can plan meals, I can get to the gym five days a week and turn whatever fat's left over to muscle. Here is the hope we all need that with proper application, problems will eventually be solved.  

I've had the pills for a while, but I haven't quite believed in them because... well... for something that's supposed to calm your heart it seemed to create other heart issues, but I'm assured that's a pain in a nerve, not heart. so if I die next week, just know I died fairly happy and hopeful.  

On the other hand, if I die next week, it probably won't be from heart issues: at least not directly. It would be from an abscess I'm pretty sure I developed while on vacation after scratching a skin tag too hard in a train bathroom. Today when finally home and finished with a prescribed antibiotic, I had it cleaned. I was told to go to the hospital if it grows back, and now I find myself debating whether or not to go. They didn't tell me what it might be, but I made the mistake of looking up the symptoms, and the abscess is in an area where sepsis becomes a genuine possibility. 

Enjoy Every Sandwich - Beginning

 The greatest thing to happen in years happened this week. Greater than love, greater than friendship, greater than a sports championship, greater than music, books, movies and sex.  

I started beta-blockers. 

It's the ultimate proof that ten years' trouble is nothing more in fact than EXTREME visceral hypersensitivity. One full pill every day with eleven refills. Suddenly, my stomach doesn't blow up for more than a few minutes at a time, and for the first time in three years I don't have to eat only six things. Technically I'm still on the same diet, but I'm actually on the diet properly and not just checking ingredients for a hundred things I can't eat lest my stomach turn to Falstaff. 

It doubtless may create it's own problems, but if this problem can be dealt with, every other problem is easy in comparison. I can keep losing weight. I can plan meals, I can get to the gym five days a week and turn whatever fat's left over to muscle. Here is the hope we all need that with proper application, problems will eventually be solved.  

I've had the pills for a while, but I haven't quite believed in them because... well... for something that's supposed to calm your heart it seemed to create other heart issues, but I'm assured that's a pain in a nerve, not heart. so if I die next week, just know I died fairly happy and hopeful.  

More later...

Six months today Dad

You didn't live a short life and survived many health scares, but it was still much too soon. You may not believe me, but I miss you all the time, which is unbelievable even to me because I sense your presence every minute of the day. It still utterly feels like you're here and will send an email or call or enter a room at any moment. Such is the force of your personality that I do not even feel a void where you once were. You make yourself felt even in your absence.

Authenticity

So here's the problem: 

The guy who writes this page is a good writer, a really good writer, maybe ever a great one. If he ever finished a book, people might be really impressed with what he does. He happens to also be a really smart guy who is extremely modest..., and so he hears from most, great company, always ready to make himself vulnerable, loyal to a fault, solicitous to the welfare of those for whom he cares, in spite of his physical ailments a 6'5 adonis, and does his admittedly mediocre best to be reliable in action. 

He's also a little crazy. 

He's no fool, he knows what's going on, but he's also not a model of balance. He's not nearly as crazy as he seems from description, but also crazier. He could try to conceal the extent of it for more than a short term, but if he did, it wouldn't be true to himself, and he'd lose a lot of the authenticity people find most appealing about him, not to mention; 50% of his best writing. 

He writes in the hope that the daemon (demon?) on the page is exorcized, so that he is free to live his personal life with the appearance of a (not particularly) normal person. Some people just have to be creative, and unfortunately it takes precedence over just about everything else in life, because if they do not sacrifice themselves to creating things, the creative urge devours them, and the mind creates situations that sail over its own resistance, even of people with great capacity for rationality. Over the years he's learned a few things about keeping this pack of hounds at bay: the usual psychiatric things of course, but also an extremely steady appetite for learning. The more actively the brain is learning other things, the less actively the brain works against itself.  

In terms of craziness, he's probably an 8 out of 10, maybe a 7.7 at this point. Going from 9 to 8 was extremely hard-won, and he'll exert continual effort to lower that number for the rest of his life. In terms of difficulty, at this point in his life, he's probably a 5.25: no pushover but also a person who goes along to get along and lives by a near-religious belief in the importance of compromise, and over the years the trajectory of his number has gone steadily downward. Recent relationships have been a bit stunned by how easy he is to get along with. 

No matter what people aspire to be, they have to be themselves, but they can't simply present themselves exactly as they are on the first interaction. That would be still greater madness than any he already knows, and no matter what is discovered afterward, it would be a terrible imposition to admit to a complex situation as a first interaction. One can allude to it, but one can't simply tell it. 

Some people manage to conceal truths over a lifetime, but the concealment comes at horrific personal cost of suffering and fear, what could possibly make that worthwhile?

He has learned to hope over the years, not because he's put any great store in hope, but because life has no improvement without the practice of hope, and over the years his hopes have borne out some improvements. 

He still doesn't have much audience, though he does have at least a couple dozen devoted readers. He's a little terrified of the concentration and distraction it requires to do serious publicity, but he writes in the hope that he can hold out hope to others in the still darker situations which he, like all of us, fears are imminent for us all. He's accumulated a lot of experience over the years, joy as well as suffering, fun as well as humiliation, courage as well as fear, hope as well as depression. What matters to him, what matters to us all, is the affirming flame, the importance of using the voice one is given as a call to our better angels. 

He tells his own story not for his own masturbatory arrogance (or so he hopes), he hopes that by telling his own, he is in fact telling a story of his time, his place, of people like him, even of people who aren't. He's writing about themes common to us all: loneliness and community, suffering and joy, history and the future. Every writer needs an address, a camera through which they perceive the wider world. This camera just happened to be the one at hand. You work with the material you have. This is, for the moment, his best camera, though he hopes to improve some of the others before too long. 

He would like to get away from provocative political prognostications, which have gotten him far too easy an audience (such as it is), and get to those things people really care about. The soul-feeding place from where people can derive the inspiration to keep going. 

It's a journey. Slowly but surely, he's getting there. As an artist, whatever that means, and far more importantly, as a human. He is not obligated to complete the work, but nor is he free to abandon it, and whenever the darkness deepens and helpers fail (whomever they may be), he will abide. 

For Tamas Vasary (1933-2026)

 Tamas Vasary was one of the greatest performing musicians of all time. Full stop. His playing is instant catharsis, his conducting scarcely less so, and he was conducting and teaching to nearly the end. In his youth, Deutsche Grammophon recorded and marketed him as a virtuoso. What a shame. In those years, DG's pianist of probity was his fellow Hungarian Geza Anda, whom I think never got to the level of Vasary. In Anda you heard technical perfection: utterly even passage work and balanced chords, god knows what practice it took to get him there, but I've never heard music.

There are a number of ways to make the highest level of music. But one of my favorites is art so subtle that it sounds as though they're playing the music as straight through as Anda, but they're not. It's just phrasing so subtle it can't possibly be noticed. You only notice it by the cathartic effect it has on you. One could call it flow or glow, but it's past even there. It's fully in the 'next world.' Who gets there? Well, it's so few, you'd probably have to look past just pianists. Along with Vasary, Sandor Vegh, Menachem Presler, Adolf Busch, Gustav Leonhardt, Helmut Walcha, Marcel Moyse, Josef Suk, Brendel and Schiff and Kempff at their best but only at their best, if I'm feeling charitable then Grumiaux and Lupu. There are a few who get close: De Larrocha, Pires, Rubinstein, Moravec, Lipatti, Curzon, Milstein, Enescu, Oistrakh... I honestly wonder if that's it. You'll notice how many of them were not just instrumentalists: they were all-around musicians--chamber musicians, teachers, and conducting being their very last priority. This is the very top of the mountain of musical performance, where full-time conductors don't belong. Neither crowd nor craft matters as much to them as music, and music is all they are.

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 17 - London Philharmonic Orchestra - Tamás Vásáry (piano) (RFH, 1981) 

Folie a deux

.

I made the mistake tonight of ingesting a slight bit of a spice my stomach couldn't take, so I'm up for the night to ponder tonight's interaction.

I was where I was because a good old friend came down from Philadelphia. Not a friend I've seen much for twenty years, but he's one of the more consequential relationships of my life. When I knew him best he was the coolest kid in school: every girl we knew was in love with him and it wasn't hard to see why. He was charismatic, he radiated positivity, he was the guitarist and lead singer to my sideman violin with all the connotations. To my disappointment, the bastard was thoughtful too, and always had answers at the ready to my practiced cynical poses--which were really a cover for terrible despair and doubts from which I had no idea how to recover.

We both were in Ha'Aretz (Israel) in our mid-twenties, blessed in a sense with time to figure things out, and in another sense, stuck. We were musicians trying to practice in the desert, but there was little else to do but drink. I think we did our mighty best to ply our trade, and had unforgettable experiences playing both in cities and in the desert forty miles away from any town at all. Clearly, the long and strange experience of Mizrach HaTikhon seeped into his pours and made the same searing impact on him it made on me. Twenty years later, he's clearly as affected by the experience as I, and we both have devoted large parts of our lives to figuring out the lessons we learned there. We were adrift in the larger half of Israel, the barren half, the desert Israel was supposed to make bloom, but most of we saw there was abandonment: abandonment of citizens, abandonment of moral obbligations, abandonment of dreams. Those of us there were left to contemplate: what went wrong?

The Israel of twenty years ago was a veritable united nations of Jews. The town we lived in was not just full of ignorant Americans like us but thousands of Russians who felt humiliated by their station and looked as ever to authoritarian leadership to deliver them from what they couldn't deliver themselves. It was thousands of Mizrachim, Sephardic Jews who felt humiliated by the Ashkenazim: the European higher social class, educated and mostly liberal, whom, to their thinking, sold their homeland and peace of mind out to the very Arabs who so oppressed them in their parents' countries of origin. I met Brits, Scots, Swiss, northern Africans, and people of absolutely indeterminate origin. It was home to Amos Oz, Israel's writer of writers, but we never saw him, and rarely did anyone we spoke to. Israel is a place that collects Jewish eccentrics and misfits, nowhere moreso than in the forgotten towns of the south. I met people there from every conceivable European background: all of whom seemed to carry some kind of disappointment by what life promised them, and no less by what Israel promised them. If we wanted to see where the powder keg was for everything that came next, it was right in front of us.

Other than him and maybe two others, all my closest friends on the program were the Europeans: British, Hungarian, Czech, Dutch, Scottish, French, and yeah... Israeli too. Most of the Americans and I never really figured each other out. They were the cool kids and as ever, I was a strange nerd: too cerebral and acerbic for American Jews, whom in our generation were still taught to be optimistic and full of action.

But somehow this guy saw fit to take me under his wing, his protection, and playing with him, talking to him, traveling with him, made a lot of the time there worthwhile. He's clearly of a far more optimistic bent than I, and it's served him well. He turned outward to activism, I turned inward to books (not that I'm reading anything like enough lately...). He turned to people, I turned to ideas. He's one of those guys whose answer to every question is 'yes.' No matter what the challenge, he takes the plunge, whereas I have always listened to the instinct for caution, perhaps even fear. My answer to every question has always been 'no'. I think I'm right, the world is what it is, the folly of humans persists from age to age, person to person, but what has being right ever gotten anybody in the world? He is writing the music he was ever meant to write, engaging with the people he was meant to engage. I write a steady stream of personal essays when all I want is to write the fiction and music that boils in my head but I have not the courage to make daily practice of setting down. What point is there setting things down when the majority of what you know how to write is doubts? I have some small degree of faith in God, but my God is not particularly benevolent. He, I would guess, has not made up his mind about us. Whether or not there's a god, we were sent here to make the world what we make of it. If we want to make it better, we have to see past the void and imagine better. Maybe it's not my nature or temperament, maybe life experience has taught me so to be, but imagining better has never been a great gift of mine.

He performed tonight, songs of his own composition in Hebrew and Arabic as Mizrachi as the roots Americana I remember us performing, and what I saw from him is something I'd never seen before. A righteous anger: not a personal anger, but the anger of the prophets, an earned anger that is the anger of our generation. I didn't agree quite with everything, I didn't need to. I wasn't even supposed to. The point of his message was that we all needed to hear points of view that jar our own, and hopefully he jars a lot of them, because few things need jarring more right now than Jewish complacency, which is writ small the complacency of both Israel and America.

But as he's gotten more angry, I've gotten more serene, and I don't quite like it. At the beginning of the night, someone said that they did not know a single Jew whose perception was not shifted by October 7th. At that moment, I realized, I was that Jew. Nothing for me changed on October 7th. I felt as though I was the only Jew prepared for the event and most of what would happen next was clear to my mind as a diamond. Nothing about what happened next surprised me. I felt terrible despair for the loss of life, I felt even more despair at saying goodbye to the world as I hoped it would be, but I felt no shock. Only 40 I may have been, but I'm acquainted with history, i'm acquainted with folly, and I'm acquainted with its grief. I felt a bit like I could be a guide through the new era for those who needed it, but it's not as though I much liked the situation I've been guiding through.

But then he did something that made my jaw drop. He had the courage to say aloud the question that is in every Jewish mind right now, even if they repress it--the question I write repeatedly but dare say to barely anyone in person: did Netanyahu put the defenses down on purpose? Has he done it before? Will he do it again? Will it be still worse next time? The sheer boldness, fortitude, self-security it takes to say it aloud right now is something so far beyond most of us, and here he was prepared to say it in front of a group of strangers, not knowing who might call him a traitor, a self-hating Jew, an antisemite, or worse, in a public square. The sheer bravery of it is something I can only aspire one day to emulate. I'm just a writer who puts ideas into people's heads, this guy is a true leader. We may disagree on a few particulars, but this person has a level of bravery and moral backbone so far beyond most of us that we can only aspire to be more like him even as we fail. When true moments for bravery come, most of us will have doubts about how well we'd handle ourselves. This guy will never flinch in pursuit of what's right.

We probably never thought it would happen, but we're now the middle generation, promised things in our youths by America and Israel both that never materialized, and now the first generation to take the reins of a society we know will get worse. Yet we have to drag it through, solving very little, but salvaging everything we can so that the next generation muddles through until such time comes when things can be solved, in the hope that it will be their generation's destiny to solve problems of whose making they are entirely yet innocent. We did not ask for this burden, but so long as there are enough people who can live up to his example, we will solve them.

Abi Gezunt and thank you for being a balm for my doubts, now as well as two decades ago.

Evan

A Digression on Soul in Music

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. 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, joy, rage, humor, romance, melancholy, and all of it suffused with exactly the kind of winking irony you get from the great 19th century novelists. 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. But it can only get you so far. Hearing her in the first movement of Beethoven's Eroica was like a balloon leaking helium as the tempo got slower and slower, and I found her Tchaikovsky 5 so dull that I outright walked out to catch a rock band down the street. I don't think she has the earnestness of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky 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 Tchaikovsky, Brahms, even Verdi. 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, 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, Kletzki and Sanderling, at certain moments maybe Tennstedt, Scherchen, Harnocourt, Kubelik, Fricsay or Mitropoulos. Extreme dynamics, slower-than-average 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 the greatest masters like Mozart or Bach 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 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 very, 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."

Five and a half Months

 Something I started a week ago...

Well Dad,

It's finally hit me. You're gone. Gone forever. You've bought the farm, cashed in your chips. You're doing the long limbo, making a call from the horizontal phonebooth, in the marble mailbox, taking the final curtain, in the pine penalty box, dancing the hokey crokey, flying the marble kite, tipping a dirt maitre'd, pushing up Miss Daisy, shopping at the mahogany mini-mall, riding the soil sidecar, staying at Club Mud, passing the Grave Poupon, doing the worm wave at stiff stadium, driving the wood Buick, eating moss muffins, in that dull playground in heaven. 

Almost all that comes from a Johnny Carson skit for the funeral of the editor of Roget's Thesaurus. It was a few weeks before Johnny went off the air. I must have been ten. You and mom allowed me to stay up late sometimes. Why? Was it to view Johnny Carson? Could I already not sleep at normal hours? Was it another day of my childhood when I could not concentrate well enough to do homework and was up until 11:30 trying to complete what took other kids ten minutes? 

One day we had a fight, then we sat in your house's den for an hour, three feet from each other, and didn't say a word. I was mad enough that I was waiting until the next morning to sufficiently cool down and apologize. By ten o'clock the next morning, you were gone. it took me months to get over the idea I killed you, and it still occasionally comes back. 

I was in a relationship when you died, a good one, and we were very much in love. It's very difficult to think properly about one change when another one was going so well. We've gone no contact for a month to help get over each other (mostly me), and suddenly my life is back to what it was. Everything is as it was before R----, and every minute of the day I see your face and note what's missing. However much we fought, I miss you overwhelmingly. The giant who was part of my life past 99% of parents is gone, and now I find out what life is without you. 

Female Conductors: A Progress Report - Parts 1 and 2

It's been a full five years since I last wrote about this, and much has developed in the intervening time.

A certain youtuber who adores me just had a video about his belief that most of the best conductors today are women. I would not go quite that far, and I would also go further. I would say no one really knows the kind of artist a conductor will be until well after 40, but it is beginning to look very much like the future is female. Almost all of the most promising YOUNG conductors are women. When you look at the generation under forty, there's beginning to be no question. Over forty, we have these bombastic batons who sound a bit like a musical rendering of toxic masculinity. The cautiousness of their early years turned the dial all the way in the other direction. What used to be careful now sounds like rage, and suddenly we have major forces in the field like Karina Canellakis, Dalia Stasevska, Eva Ollikainen, Xian Zhang and Oksana Lyniv who sound like nothing so much as the jet set virtuosos of 50 years ago: Maazel, Muti, Ozawa, Dutoit, Mehta, with their giant walls of sound that sell records by brutalizing the music.

One conductor who has disappointed me terribly in recent years is Nathalie Stutzmann. As she ascended the career ladder, she too has left her gentle ways behind for mannerism: driving Schubert without mercy, playing Brahms with heaviness and rubato that sounds more pretentious than affectionate. Singer or conductor, she is such a talented musician, it's a shame to see the gift curdle just when she made the big time.

Nathalie Stutzmann: Gentle no longer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb2GxweVEyk

Of these Orchestra with Capital O meastras, Canellakis, the American, strikes me as both the most talented and the most brutalizing. Talented, intelligent, nuanced, sure, with an absolutely massive dynamic range which she uses at every level, and as many 'wow' moments as any musician ever has. She absolutely raises the pulse, but she's utterly 'hard' like her mentor Jaap van Zweden. Even in the strings, the textures never stop sounding like cold steel. I've heard Stasevska (Ukrainian-Finnish), Zhang (Chinese) and Ollikainen (Finnish) live, and the intensity of all three was undeniably thrillng, but I struggled to hear much subtlety or care beneath it. What will they do when they're old and the galvanizing energy can't be summoned anymore? I was also there for the Ukrainian Oksana Lyniv's American debut, and she has a warm heart beneath her iron discipline, and it really is iron: not a bowstroke out of place, but there isn't much subtlety: things are often just monodynamic and unphrased. If she develops well, she could be another Jansons. If she doesn't, she'd be another Zubin Mehta. One that strikes me as a slightly deeper artist is the Estonian Kristiina Poska, who is as fiery as any of them, but is also possessed of serious thought and detail work.

Canellakis on her best foot forward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT6U8Y0u0pg

Lyniv: Iron discipline concealing sincerity and vulnerability, not much subtlety. Make allowances for the orchestra, it's a youth orchestra in wartime, but listen to the fragility of expression here. The heart breaks in the largo. Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 From the New World | Oksana Lyniv & Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine 

Poska: Fire and subtlety. Beethoven - Symphony no. 7 - Flanders Symphony Orchestra, Kristiina Poska

But looking just a very little bit younger at those who haven't turned forty yet, and the field is much, much more promising. Look past Mirga, whom we'll talk about later, and just think of a few who seem, at least I think, like the coming best in the business.

Marie Jacquot: subtlety, glowing overtones, flowing phrases. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aaXzYn86GU

The French Marie Jacquot gets mixed reviews, but nearly every video I've seen shows me that she is magnificent. No matter what the size of the orchestra, she sounds more as though she's leading a chamber orchestra than an Orchestra with a Capital O. She seems like my dear Kubelik or Ivan Fischer, if there's excitement they certainly accept it, but like them, she's going for something far more elusive. The music simply flows and glows. At least on youtube, the textures are absolutely luminescent, the phrases seem unending for minutes at a time even as they rise and fall. She seems to deliberately keep things a little loose, perhaps even a little overly gentle and smooth, but she knows that that the subtle unpredictabilities of performance are where the real music happens. Mark my words, in seventy years she will be remembered by the next generation of weirdos like us as one of the truly great artists of the podium.

Delyana Lazarova: Jacquot is for the connoisseurs, Lazarova's for the public. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtslKjYDORk

The Bulgarian Delyana Lazarova is just stepping up to the big time, but like with Marie Jacquot, we already seem to hear an artist fully formed. This is a podium artist with absolutely everything. An absolutely explosive talent full of energy, intelligence, heat and warmth, a 'complete' one who simultaneously engages nerves, mind and heart. Like K. Petrenko or C. Kleiber, when you hear her, you can feel as though you're hearing the music's absolute truth: the thing in itself. Is she that good? Well, those are once every fifty years miracles, so probably not, but obviously we'll know with time. But even if she isn't, she's going to be an indisputably major name by 2030. Listen to her in the above Beethoven 2. here's one of the few podium musicians who can sustain a risky tempo in the opening without everything slowing down, generating more fireworks than anybody since the 1950s, then give an utterly beautiful, nuanced larghetto. There are very few conductors who 'get' Beethoven 2, a work that's ostensibly sunny but is actually full of panic and rage (and comedy). I used to think there were four conductors who really 'got' it: Mengelberg, Beecham, Mitropoulos, Scherchen. There are now five.

Joana Mallwitz: Pure light and agility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcWIdZz4C44

The German Joana Mallwitz is about the most un-German conductor there's ever been. Everything is champagne-like, effervescent and fun, but also artful, sometimes stunningly so. One would think that a conductor this propulsive would be utterly without substance (I'm looking in the direction of the Met...), but like Charles Munch, there is a breathtaking amount of thought and nuance going into what seems like an unreflective entertainer. Every few seconds there seems to be a subtle rubato or accent that catches your breath.

Han-Na Chang: The rare soloist who's just as great a musician when she picks up a baton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9svn1d1Kao&list=PLRFYPLKjaThtJ_Dn4ZL7M8COaTVo7w_ey&index=22

Then there's the slightly older Han-Na Chang, whose musical bona-fides were proven long before she took up the baton as one of the great cello soloists of her generation. I heard broadcasts and youtubes of her doing Tchaikovsky 5 and 6 and they absolutely stunned me. Any idiot can pick up a baton and get a standing ovation in Tchaikovsky, but hers was actually individuated, with a newly minted detail in every bar. Her Tchaikovsky was both the composer's, and unmistakably her own. After hearing that, I was sure she would be able to do more serious repertoire just as well. I was right. Go on youtube, find her doing Mozart or Beethoven. This is still greatness, mixing old fashions and new, coming up with her own interpretations. Like Leonard Bernstein, she might be a little ostentatious in both interpretation and podium manner, but beneath the flamboyance is very real musicmaking.

Ariane Matiakh: Wit and irony flitting between light and dark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWDIwsfgQnE

Another slightly older one is the French Ariane Matiakh. Like Mallwitz, she is a lighthearted one, but with Lazarova's fire, and a very sophisticated tongue-in-cheek pointedness to her phrasing: not quite mannered, but the phrases are deliberate enough that you sense a darkness underneath her lightheartedness. There seems to always be some instrument playing staccato within the general legato, accents within the quiet passages that are surprisingly strong. Everything seems to surprise with her. I can't wait to hear her in one of the big Mozarts. She reminds me a bit of Beecham.

There are others of course: the interesting but hyperactive Anna Bihlmaier, the extremely Italian in both name and style Speranza Scappucci, the Norwegian Tabita Berglund who has genuine heart but not much in the way of detail. In part 2, we'll talk about the great hopes of the field and the weight of expectations on them: Mirga, sure, but also Elim Chan, more about Mallwitz and Lyniv, we'll talk about Simone Young and Susanna Malkki and what expectations did to them, and, god help us, we'll even talk about Marin Alsop.

We'll talk about Joanne Faletta sometime still: the patron saint of underrated composers of every era and country. Others care about headlines, she cares about music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEYukjiGMxQ&list=OLAK5uy_lsJvWAnnLIJwDCm7MdixhaVyh-RdWdEg8

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 The problem every woman conductor faces is the problem present in every line of work for celebrity entertainers, only in this case, having broken a glass ceiling, you needn't be a true celebrity to undergo the same problems. You have to develop artistically under scrutiny. The scrutiny comes both from terrible sexism, and from the very people most rooting for them to succeed. The expectations on them are not just to score a victory for women, or to prove chauvinists wrong, the expectation is to let your excellence speak not just for yourself but for all those who were denied your opportunities before you? In a sense, even your victories aren't allowed to be your own. 

How many among us can properly flourish in that environment? What steel do you have to be made of to not get dizzy in the highest climbs? Can a musician made of less than steel flourish in it? Will that fortitude show up in their work? Will it make them less sensitive? 

The one who was supposed to be the next Lenny, Mirga Grazynte-Tyla, is clearly not made of steel. She walked away, probably to raise her kids. She now appears as seldomly as Carlos Kleiber, and generally plays music like Weinberg and Kutavicius nobody else plays. Good for her. This is the life she wants, this is the music she wants to do. She's a much better musician because of it. So many celebrities are not the artists they should be, because when you're a celebrity, you don't have permission to fail, you don't have permission to risk. Celebrities fail all the time, but when they fail in the public eye, they usually learn the lesson to always be cautious: do not be yourself, be who the public or the handlers want you to be. Rarely after the public notices them does an artist get better than they were before they were truly famous, and a lot of them get worse. Even if an artist is merely eminent in their field, it's very different from being a celebrity. A celebrity cannot fail without humiliation, risk becomes harder, and if you don't risk, you don't learn. Furthermore being a touring musician is not a life, whatever genre. You stay in hotels, you go to restaurants, you meet fans, you meet colleagues, but you don't have family or friends close enough that their conversation accompanies your daily life. When her kids are grown, maybe she'll come back, and the experience of a real life will come out in her musicmaking. It already is. 

Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France - Anton Bruckner - Symphony No. 6 in A major, WAB 106

Forget all the Weinberg for a moment, magnificent as it is. Listen to her in this border piece of the trad rep, Bruckner 6, and don't be fooled by the brisk tempo in the first subject. I used to think MGT was as vapid as most of the other musicians who lived their whole adult lives as celebrities. Then she walked away and my jaw dropped to the floor: my god, a real person whose family matters more to them than fame! This is a genuine person with real concerns. While Karina Canellakis's musicmaking sounds compressed into tubes, MGT sounds now like a real voice, singing out. It's steady, not much rubato, but it sounds all the more genuine for its steadiness. Barring one awkward tempo switch at the end of the first movement, it's as inevitable as a cathedral arch: serene, delicate, yearning, at times even ecstatic. If Giulini did Bruckner 6 around 1970, it might sound like this. It's not exactly the way I prefer, I prefer a slightly more flowing tempo in the second movement, but it's great even so. There are as many ways of being a great artist as there are works of art, and if this is the artist MGT becomes, she will both be one of the great podium artists of all time, and be an entirely different kind of one than people want from her. Let people go to YNS for speed and volume, let people go to Dudamel for emotion and passion (assuming he keeps improving...), let people go to Petrenko for immutable truth, but let Mirga be the one to console them. We are still waiting for the woman who will take us to the height of emotional vulnerability the way that (to me) the most necessary artists do: artists of a long proud line like Giulini and Lenny. You know it when you hear it, and you need to know what it means to live a real life with all its setbacks and tragedies. Artists used to live through wars and unmedicated illnesses, you don't learn that from a luxury seat on a plane. 

Elim Chan conducts Brahms - Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op 98

A similar weight of expectation is currently on the Hongkonger, Elim Chan. I wasn't impressed by her. I thought she was quite mid and bland. There's youtube videos of her virtuoso repertoire by rote, with nothing really to say or contribute. Then I heard her do Brahms 4, and in this much more emotionally sophisticated piece than Scheherazade or Tchaikovsky 5, she utterly rose to it. All kinds of titans get tripped up by the latter two Brahms symphonies (don't ask me who, you'll disagree of course), but she achieved what they did not. It was a little too virtuoso and brilliant at times, but mostly in the scherzo which is already a little virtuoso and brilliant. To my ears, Brahms 4 is one of the most emotionally sophisticated works of art in the world, it goes through the motions of dance rhythms while its heart breaks, and Chan seemed to completely understand it. 

Whether you're in classical, jazz or rock, probably even hip-hop, if you want a big celebrity career, you have to do the splashy stuff that gets you noticed and gets the audience to their feet in a second and a half. But if that's the majority of what you're doing, how do you get the necessary experience with the truly deep works of art which can't depend on adrenaline to get their message across? What separates truly great artists from the second tier is what they can do when they can't hide behind adrenaline. 

Having heard that Brahms 4, there is no question in my mind that Chan is capable of artistic perception and achievement at the highest level, but can she repeat it over and over again. Sources tell me the Cleveland Orchestra, arguably the most probing ensemble of musicians in the world, is seriously looking at her for their next director. If she can't repeat that level of artistic understanding over and over again, it's going to be a disaster. Apparently she hasn't even presented a work of new music to them yet. All the good will in the world will not allow her that kind of on the job training without Cleveland spitting her out. 

An incredibly warm and fiery Sibelius 5 that's in danger of flying apart from first bar to last: Sibelius: 5. Sinfonie ∙ hr-Sinfonieorchester ∙ Dalia Stasevska 

Apparently Dalia Stasevska is being looked at too. I find this a little comical because Cleveland is the most precise, fastidious ensemble in the world, and having heard Stasevska, she is a musician who operates entirely on adrenaline and cares about precision about as much as Elon Musk. There can be no more terrible temperamental fit in the field. Stasevska has a lot of good qualities, but she's become an out and out Russian-style romantic like Yevgeny Svetlanov or Yuri Temirkanov for whom every moment is a chance for extravagent passion, and her performances take such enormous risks that the ensemble seems to fall apart just as often. 

https://youtu.be/CoKE3WIEOvs?si=TnKAB_SPJQgD0jNW&t=2088

If they want a woman who's ready for it, look at Oksana Lyniv. Is Lyniv a true great? No, not yet at least. But neither was Welser-Most when he came. There are better women conductors out there, but not with that level of experience, not with that amount of time spent learning away from widespread scrutiny, and not with priorities so similar to Cleveland's. She is precision with heart: simultaneously cold and warm just as they are. Absolute precision, terraced dynamics with not much phrasing, but a truly long line and warm sound all the same. She's not the very best out there, while MGT and Chan may eventually be that, but she's ready and can rise to the occasion. There are better candidates out there, but if they want a woman, she's the one they should pick, and the musical partnership could flourish magnificently. 

Opera Ranting

 Here it is, the most legendary production of Boris. Not the most legendary performers, just a document of the most legendary staging: Andrei Tarkovsky in his only opera production. Can you believe they actually got the director of Andrei Rublev to do it? It's even less likely than getting Werner Herzog to stage the Ring, and fully as well-matched.

Tarkovsky would be dead a year after he did this staging. I doubt he ever could have done another production like this, much as we might wish for a Tarkovsky Parsifal or Don Carlo, Boris was uniquely situated in the Russian canon to elicit a connection to Tarkovsky's extremely Russian Orthodox spirituality. The sets are full of the thick smoke of incense, chiaroscuro lighting and horrifically suffering peasants. The chorus is staged in such detail that every grouping of three or four seems to be its own little world with its own story. The images are full of that specifically Russian gaudiness that betrays a unique mixture of the Christianity and paganism which should be present in every Boris production.

But ultimately this is not about Tarkovsky, this is about Robert Lloyd, the great British bass who somehow finds himself on the stage of the Kirov Opera in the soon to fall Soviet Union singing the most iconic role in all Russian repertoire in the opera Stalin never missed a Bolshoi performance of.

I grew up on Lloyd's performance of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death with Mariss Jansons conducting the Shostakovich orchestration: it was one of the most gripping, horrifying things I'd ever heard. You could have knocked me over with a feather as a teenager when I heard Lloyd being interviewed at the Met while singing Sparafucile, and he sounded like he'd grown up a Dickensian street urchin who matured into the voice of Bill Sykes. And yet as an actor, Lloyd looks like he has the weight of the world upon him. It is not merely a protrayal of histrionics, but of Boris in three dimensions. Look at Lloyd in the Clock Scene. Other Boris's explode. Lloyd implodes as though he cannot say his thoughts aloud.

I was raised listening to the radio to broadcasts of what will probably be remembered as the last great generation of Metropolitan opera singers: not just Domingo and Nucci, but Americans like Fleming, Upshaw, Flicka, Hampson, Norman, Battle, Morris, Ramey, Baltsa, Millo, Zadjick, Stratas, Vaness, Studer, Hadley, Leech, Croft, Plishka. It's an admirable list, but when I was in college and had a summer internship in London, I began listening to Radio 3, and one would begin to compare the Brits of the same period: Te Kanawa, Lloyd, Tomlinson, Allen, van Allen, Jones, Lott, Margaret Price, Veasey, Anne Evans, Plowright, Langridge, Tear, Keenlyside, McIntyre, Howell, Shirley-Quirk.

I basically got my introduction to opera from the Met list, but I think the Covent Garden list of that period is artistically more satisfying. Maybe it's the repertoire: the emphasis on the German classics in London vs. the posh Italian of Levine's Met, but compare the Wotans of Tomlinson and Morris. Morris has the most amazing voice, but which of them would you rather listen to more than once? Compare the Violettas of Studer and Stratas to Angela Georghiu and Marie McLaughlin (we'll call Glyndebourne a CG extension). I know which I prefer.

The Met is, always was, and remains, the terrain of stars. It has provided literal thousands of transcendent nights: or, more to the point, it provided transcendent nights three minutes at a time. Levine could instill more sense of ensemble than you ever got in the Bing or Johnson eras, but you can't completely defeat the house aesthetic, particularly when the sense of ensemble is built around stagings gaudy enough to decorate three Broadway shows.

Covent Garden certainly gets all the stars, but unless they're native Brits, stars don't really make CG their home base. Pavarotti and Domingo always were always at the Met, Domingo multiple times a season, in London? Domingo went... once a year? Once every other year? Pavarotti could be absent for years at a time even if he sang concerts at Hyde Park.

England is the land of theater, and theater makes its mark in opera with an aesthetic that cares more about ensemble and drama than vocal production. A composer like Benjamin Britten would not be possible in the US, Britten makes his impact through drama as much as music, and he needed a 'house ensemble' who worked hard with each other to master this material which works as well as they do. We in America have no equivalent to Britten. I suppose our best equivalent is John Adams, but Adams's operas are basically oratorios with stage accompaniment, and even his banner opera Nixon in China couldn't get a performance at the Met for twenty-five years.

Then came Pappano, and he gave Covent Garden another golden age while the Met underwent its time of troubles. Operas stars burn more dimly in every generation, but the Met now appears to be on surer footing with the disgrace of the Levine's ending mostly behind them, but can Yannick really instill a sense of ensemble? Does he want to? Like Levine, he has real strength in Mozart and Verdi, but Levine could be transcendent in those two. YNS? Not quite. He's good in them, but his real ability is in the Frenchies. I will never forget watching his PBS debut of Carmen with the incredibly sexy Elena Garanca, a hellcat in a brunette wig with a low cut shirt and a skirt she'd exploit every opportunity to lift up. If I were Roberto Alagna in that production I'd have left Georghiu and (let's face it) Netrebko and jumped at the chance for Garanca. YNS's rubato seemed to change the tempo in every bar, and it was so natural it seemed to stop time and breathe with the audience. Impressive as some of his Mozart recordings are, it was nowhere near that Carmen. After that, I'd even listen to him conduct Pelleas!

Nezet-Seguin is a very talented podium musician with very real strengths and musical sense. He is also a very vapid one who would take a look at a score like I look at him, like I listen to him, and he gives every indication of a superficial personality. Ideal for party pieces with lots of fireworks and heat where he can be fast, loud, and colorful (and he's a master colorist). But when it comes to the true stuff of the soul, I'd trust even Dudamel and Nelsons before I'd trust that guy. When I heard him do the Firebird and Petrushka, I had the time of my life. When I heard him do Mahler 3 and 9, or Bluebeard's Castle, he didn't have a clue. Meanwhile, Covent Garden is about to get Jakub Hrusa. Hrusa is 44 I think, but he conducts both himself and music like an old man. Focused entirely on probity rather than fireworks. If it's exciting, he accepts it, but he wants depth. And therefore, in both cases, the house styles continue well into 2050 and beyond.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about Robert Lloyd...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEuWBZCpNno