https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lurl-klLJWo
I promise I'll get back to Martinu, but as I got home from band practice last night, the radio was playing the Pittsburgh Symphony broadcast of Haydn's Creation I drove to Pittsburgh to hear a few years ago. Haydn's Creation is one of my top 5 pieces of music in the world. It's pure joy, and I never expected I'd hear as great a performance of it in my lifetime as I heard Manfred Honeck conduct.
Honeck is controversial. He divides opinion as nearly no other conductor does in our time because his interventions are so obvious and radically different from anyone else's. I dislike a lot of musicians like that, I find them exploitative and cynical, trying to make a splash rather than make real music. I won't mention any names for the moment, but so many of them do it from a place of self-aggrandizement rather than knowledge and love.
Not Honeck, not Adam Fischer. These are musicians who know and love what they're doing, and when they change the scores, they do it not because they want to impose a concept, but because they want to illuminate things within the score that were already there. These are musicians who do the homework and whose individuality comes out of thousands of hours of study. I don't agree with how Adam Fischer interprets Mozart, but when you hear what he does, it's clear he's clearly studied every bar, noticed a hundred details of color and harmony we haven't, and wants to bring them out. Ditto Honeck's Beethoven, ditto a hundred things from Harnoncourt before them. This is real musicianship that has everything to do with engaging the score. You don't have to agree with the interpretation to find it enthralling. Music shouldn't just tell you everything you already know. If you want to keep discovering things within music, you have to open yourselves up to new possibilities, even as you retain your bullshit detector to protect against charlatanism.
It's a shame there isn't more Honeck/Pittsburgh on youtube, but there's plenty of Honeck guesting around Germany, especially lately. You simultaneously hear how radically different Honeck is, and how the difference is so needed if you're going to hear the 123452356456756785697th performance of the classics.
Honeck is often written off as a Carlos Kleiber wannabe. That is a terrible mistake. Even if his stick technique is based on Kleiber, his musicianship is altogether different. I think of him as a kind of Austrian John Barbirolli. The interpretation is outsize and self-conscious, the playing can be spotty, but the spirit is so outrageously huge and generous. This is upper-case Romantic, Dionysian musicmaking at its very best, in which interventionism is invariably done with an infinity of heart, sincerity, study, and knowledge.
There are only a very few absolute masters of trad repertoire the older generation over 60 (not counting the OLD old, like Dohnanyi and Zinman, or Blomstedt, who's only 34). Ivan Fischer is perhaps today's greatest, a man of pure music. Perhaps Franz Welser-Most too, but most of our documentation of him are from the early 90s when he wasn't much.... Fischer's older brother Adam, like Honeck, represents the best of the romantic, Dionysian tradition. While Semyon Bychkov represents the very best of the classical, Apollonian tradition. Otherwise, we have a lot of masters of 20th century rep, or masters of the Bach-era, but very few who continue the world of classical music at the height of its influence and gave the world what's sadly still its biggest reason to go to the concert hall.
Do not dismiss Honeck lightly. Having him around makes music better. There aren't many like him left, and if his ilk disappears, what in classical music will be left?
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