Underrated Classical Musicians 3/4/20

So let's talk about Matthias Pintscher today.



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

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

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

The probable favorite to replace her is the British-Canadian Peter Oundjian, an 8.5/10, the old director of the Toronto Symphony, a fine musician and a bigger name than this town could reasonably expect to get considering our recent troubles, but Oundjian would be nearly 70 by the time he would come here. He's a violinist who only became a conductor at 50 because of an injury, his musical ideas were always better than his conducting technique, which is rather elementary and probably hampered by his injury. He sometimes gives extraordinary performances, in both their insight and execution. He also can be quite bland.

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

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

But the most fascinating name I've heard rumors about is one of the world's pre-eminent avant grade composers, whom my contacts told me has expressed serious interest in being the music director for this very good orchestra in this very dangerous American city. Matthias Pintscher, German but based in New York, professor of composition at Juilliard, and current music director of Ensemble InterContemporain, the most famous modern music ensemble in the world. Is Pintscher a great conductor? Well, composers are generally terrible conductors, and for a composer, he's fucking Furtwangler. Pintscher is an 8. But in terms of gifts as an all-around musician, Pintscher is a 12, a musical unicorn who seems to be one of those rare complete packages that composes, conducts, teaches, plays piano.

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

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

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