So, let's tackle a difficult subject... We may delete it later.
There will soon be two superstar woman conductors who are also great conductors.
Mirga, or MGT, or more properly, the unpronounceably Lithuanian Mirga Gražinyté-Tyla, is already a superstar known to the entire classical music world (all ten of us), but is she truly great? Well.... no. Obviously not because she's untalented, but because conducting is fucking hard, conductors only start practicing in their 20s, and it's damn near impossible to get great at it when you have the entire music world breathing down your neck before you're 30. You can almost hear the weight of the expectations bearing down on her in how careful she is - nary a rubato to be found, and every dynamic shading is absolutely intentional. There's sadly nothing spontaneous in her music making, and the reason is obviously not her fault. Whether classical or anywhere else, PR has killed so many great talents who froze up because their every move was considered too important to get wrong. You sadly hear that same carefulness in so many of the new stars, and it's the fault of a music world that ignored women musicians, especially conductors and composers, for far too long, and now that they have a proper chance to get all the rewards, if they put a foot wrong, they stand to lose their chance. We heard the same carefulness in Marin Alsop and Simone Young and Emanuelle Haim, even the great Joanne Faletta sounds as though she has some of those inhibitions. A post on Faletta is well-overdue, I tried and the internet swallowed it. It's not that she generally inspires orchestras to transcendence, but there's barely been a single conductor with greater musical curiosity in our time, who has taken chance after chance on rare repertoire and moved heaven and earth to get it recorded. She is a musical hero, and it's hard to wonder if her career has not paid a price: Marin Alsop plays new music but not quite as adventurously, and the result is that she gets appointments with a major orchestra like Baltimore and guest conducts major orchestras around the world, while Faletta has to stay in Buffalo and Richmond, and seems to be on the guest roster in for the orchestra of every small city in Europe. The only female conductor I can think of who didn't have that inhibition and seemed to inspire orchestras to that level of transcendence was the once-famous American opera conductor Sarah Caldwell, who was from a generation when conducting was such a novelty for women that the same expectations were never placed, and yet she was always dismissed as a better theater director than conductor (not true). You can hear that same carefulness in Dalia Stasevska or Oksana Lviv or Eun Sun Kim, and Alondra de la Parra is just not very good. There are so many all-flash male conductors that we can forgive an all-flash female conductor rising to the top. But a female Gergiev or Barenboim, so over-confident that she wouldn't care if the performance seems on the verge of flying apart, is still an absurdity in today's music world. Better thus far than all but Caldwell and Faletta is the American Karina Canellakis. She has that same inhibition, but there is also an incredibly intensity and excitement to her performances - like Georg Solti. It's not deep, even in the music's moments of repose her musicmaking is incredibly tense and thick (just like her onetime mentor, Jaap van Zweden), and like Zweden, she doesn't strike me as knocking on transcendence's door any time soon, but she's damn skilled all the same. There is also the Finn, Susanna Malkki, who clearly seems much more comfortable among the cooler, more mechanical environs of contemporary music, where she can be devastatingly, than the repertoire's more expressive and archaic rooms, where she seems distinctly wooden.
If I'm being hard on the current new women conductors on the concert circuit, the reason is obviously not because of any inherent lack of talent, it's because the pool to choose from is so much smaller than the pool of men, and once there are more women in a field, which one can hope will be quite soon, there self-evidently will be more women of extraordinary talent who can rise to the top.
But there are two who do strike me as extraordinary, and neither yet has the regard they should. If classical music wants to survive in the 21st century, it's going to have to radically change how it thinks about representation. In a world that needs great women conductors, the necessary to pay attention to the ones already there is dire.
What it takes to be a great musician is a combination of imagination and discipline. Whatever the artistic endeavor, your ability to achieve in one side of that equation is directly proportional to how well you achieve on the other. One thinks of Beethoven and Michelangelo with overwhelming passion, but without superhuman intellectual acumen and work ethic, they never could have expressed their full emotional volcanoes. The closest we have to a more 'excessive' type is the Chinese Xian Zhang, who is sufficiently expressive and bold in her ideas that she can cover up the music's natural inward expression, but it cannot be denied, the power of her performances is overwhelming. Her excesses are nowhere to the extent of many male peers, but they are quite noticeable, and to have a woman that confident in the music scene can only be a welcome development.
On the other hand, perhaps there is something even closer to mastery in Nathalie Stutzmann, one of the world's great concert singers: a contralto (how many opera roles are there for a contralto?) who has gradually transitioned to the podium. She just landed an enormous 'gig' as Principal Guest Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Is she truly as great as a post like that would seem to announce? Well, probably not quite, her way is relaxed, understated, an unforced, perfectly natural musicality. Everything from the inner voices to the dynamics to the balances sounds perfectly guided, always with enough room to breathe, with soft playing that is often breathtaking. Her's is not the type to give earth-shaking revelations in Beethoven's 9th, but few in this larger-than-life profession of enormous egos can make music so intimate and humane. Philly should consider itself lucky.
But then there are the two of whom I speak. One of them is Mirga's exact contemporary, the German Joanna Mallwitz. All it takes is one Schubert 9 on youtube to convince, you know it when you hear it. Schubert 9 is just about the hardest piece in the repertoire to conduct - technically it can fly apart, emotionally it's nearly the subtlest piece of music ever written, musically its so repetitive that it can get boring in a matter of minutes. Mallwitz conducts it differently than I would, she plays it fast and leans into the Rossini comic/'buffa' elements of the piece, but unlike so many martinets who lay railroad tracks over Schubert's delicate 9th and turn it into a gruff bulldog, Mallwitz is so free within her discipline that she never loses the poetry. The music sings, it dances, and it does so freely - always kept interesting with a dynamic change here, a shading there, an unexpected phrasing, this is an ensemble that, within an incredibly disciplined framework, which this work always must have, is playing incredibly freely.
And then there's the Korean Han-Na Chang, formerly a famous cellist, now making the 'switch' which stymied so many famous soloists. What can I say? This is greatness. Tchaikovsky's Pathetique is the hardest piece to screw up, but it is nearly the most overplayed piece in the entire repertoire. It is almost impossible to newly mint it with something different that simultaneously doesn't feel like the conductor putting a personal stamp that obscures the composer. Every second there's an unexpected phrasing, a new color discovered, a new balance. In the scherzo, she exhibits a bit of that overconfident recklessness that launches into a tempo so fast the orchestra can't keep up, but otherwise, this is Pierre Monteux, this is Ferenc Fricsay, this is Charles Munch, this is Rafael Kubelik. It's almost shelf-knockingly exuberant, but it never conceals Tchaikovsky's inward spirit. This... is... MUSIC! This is freedom! If Han Na-Chang is really this good, it's not long before she heads to the very top of the pantheon.
No comments:
Post a Comment