Underrated Classical Musicians: Fritz Busch at the Old Met

Another broadcast from the Old Met today.

The Mozart operas are the great artistic wonders of the world, and it deeply saddens me that so many intellectually active people who live their lives guided by Shakespeare never get to Mozart. It's not just that Mozart operas are, for me at least, the greatest operas ever written. It's that they manage to do things which not even Shakespeare can. We'll sadly never know how Mozart would have responded to Romanticism, but Mozart picked up where Shakespeare left off. It took Shakespeare his entire career to arrive at The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, and practice what the literary critic James Wood calls the 'comedy of forgiveness.' Every contemptuous thing Mozart's characters do is suffused with compassion and examination for the reasons why they did it. Mozart is the lessons of Tolstoy compressed to their essence, and the lessons of Chekhov examined in greater depth.

There are, for me, so many ways to fuck Mozart up. But there are two ways to perform the Mozart operas that truly work. There's the historically-informed way, or the old romantic way. It's easy to say things so basic, but such is the purity of Mozart that hybrid approaches don't really work, because within those strictures, there are so many pratfalls. The period informed needn't be done with period instruments, but it does have to take the research into account and perform with the agility Mozart demands. It has to be done with classical formal balance and perfect balance between the instruements and the singers, it requires pure lightness of texture and voices, it requires absolute vocal agility and security. Older listeners heard this all the time from Levine's Met and Davis's and Haitink's Covent Garden, from Sawallisch's Bavarian Opera and Suitner's Berlin Opera, from John Eliot Gardiner's period forces and wherever Charles Mackerras conducted. One does not hear it, however, from more newfangled Mozartian period approaches. The much adored newer recordings of Rene Jacobs and Teodor Currentzis and even my beloved Nikolaus Harnoncourt are un-Mozartian, all three artists are admirable in other music, and in the case of Harnoncourt could not possibly be more admirable in some (including Abduction from the Seraglio...), but in their Mozart operas, there is no Mozart in the Mozart. Furthermore, one doesn't hear it in older recordings that take a more classical approach: those of Karl Böhm or Erich Kleiber or Erich Leinsdorf or Georg Solti or (oy) Herbert von Karajan. Their attempts at classical lightness, often admirable attempts, are so often weighed down by the heavy vocal tread of their singers, who were trained in the era of Wagner and Richard Strauss, and don't understand the necessity of a completely different approach.

The other approach, the old, romantic approach, extremities of tempo, freedom for the singer, more slovenly execution, can work, but it requires everyone in the ensemble to be on the same page. Modern romantics like Barenboim and Muti can't get it together, because their singers are much too light for their approaches. The singers can't impress the same force of personality as their conductors, and as a result, the focus is entirely on the bobbing head in the pit, which no doubt is how Barenboim and Muti like it.... But then there are the older romantic Mozartians. Not a grim teutonic Wagnerian romanticism like Furtwangler's, but a lively, happy romanticism from the era of Weber and Schubert that lets the light in, one finds it from Bruno Walter, Thomas Beecham, Ferenc Fricsay, Carlo Maria Giulini, and most famously today, Fritz Busch.

Busch's Glyndebourne recordings of the Mozart operas, mostly from 1930s London, are legendary. But today, when death is all around us, listen to this liveliness to take your mind off of it. This Marriage of Figaro is sloppy as hell, it practically plows through the whole piece, but it's pure life and joy. The critic Joseph Horowitz, who is a frequent email correspondent, writes of the old Met that at the old Met, conductors like Bodanzky and Panizza don't support the singers so much as they inspired and inflamed them. The old Met was a dialogue between stage and pit of mutual synergy. The singers are sometimes off the beat, the orchestral execution is far from perfect, and the singers occasionally veer off pitch.

Who cares. This is Mozart as the best of the 19th century performed him, not the Apollonian Mozart whose balance and equanimity between happiness and sadness makes us realize the terms on which we must live life; but rather the Dionysian, vibrant Mozart, full of life and joy, who reminds us that life is worth living.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

So here's the thing: I suppose a couple of us get 'bragging rights' to say 'I told you so' (like me...) that a disaster of this level was coming. It doesn't give any comfort to say that we were right, we'd much rather be wrong.... And others will reply that this is a 'black swan' event, completely unpredictable in the normal course of events, so no, you could never have predicted this. 

This particular event, of course, was not in any sense predictable. But some unpredictable event was always likely to happen, literally half or much more of the Presidency is about keeping the country and the world afloat in a sea of unpredictable events. So when you have a head of state who can't manage unpredictable events like Trump or Kaiser Wilhelm or Czar Nicholas or Louis XVI or Emperor Commodus or Sultan Ibrahim or Sha Reza in Iran or James Buchanan, it becomes far more likely that one of these events will balloon into something so lethal and chaotic that it alters the course of history forever and the country in question only recovers after a cataclysmic loss of life. 

Is that what's coming for us? Well, not necessarily, but we now experience a nearly 9/11 rate of casualty literally every day, and the economy has never contracted like this in world history, not even in 1929 when the Great Depression began. So whatever new era this is, this is the beginning, not the end, and while there's a lot of reason for hope as a group that we'll emerge on the other side stronger, perhaps much stronger, than we were before, but as individuals, these transitional periods are usually very very difficult, and nobody's survival is 100% guaranteed.

Underrated Classical Musicians: Today's Four Best Young Conductor's

So very quickly, let's talk about the four best young conductors in the world. 

With conducting, the word 'young' has to be graded on a curve, and all four of them are very nearly 50 now. Conductors are not musicians in the operative sense. They don't even get to play their instrument much until their mid-20s, so like with any musician, it takes 20 years of practice before you really see which students are really extraordinary and which are merely pretty good. But the thing is that there are a different four who are supposed to be the best that have been promoted well past their achievements. All four of these now superstars were given too much attention too early, and are struggling to meet their achievements which their publicity departments set for them: Gustavo Dudamel of course of Venezuela, Yannick Nezet-Seguin of Quebec, Andris Nelsons of Latvia, and Mirga Grazynite-Tyla. We'll see about Mirga, she's not even 35 yet, but the pressure on all four is overwhelming, and none of them yet deserves it. All four can provide extraordinary feats of music making, but in between those extraordinary nights comes disappointment after disappointment. 

Meanwhile, there are a further four who have presented themselves to the public and seem to have, almost overnight, superseded the superstars in accomplishment, distinction, and perhaps even their hold on the public. These four are Kirill Petrenko of Siberia/Austria, Francois-Xavier Roth of France, Vladimir Jurowski of Russia/Germany, and Teodor Currentzis of Greece/Russia. Except for Roth, who seems Parisian to the bone marrow, the rest are completely multicultural. But what distinguishes all four is not their globalism, what distinguishes them is that until five years ago, hardly anybody but specialists had ever heard of them. They gradually rose through the ranks without any heraldry from publicity departments about their stupendous gifts, no one expected extraordinary things of them until they provide extraordinary results (except Currentzis, who seems to have expected extraordinary things of himself when no one else did...), and word of mouth spread through the music world that these four were worth paying attention to. Once all four provided results, music publicists provided attendant pageantry, especially for Currentzis, who's publicity is quickly proving even more unbearable than Dudamel's. And gradually musicians awakened to the fact that these were no ordinary stick wavers but musicians of extraordinary insight and power. 

But part of what is extraordinary about them is that all four represent completely different ways of making music, and are as representative of four different archetypes of music making as there can be. 

Let's call Jurowski an 'architect.' Jurowski is a conductor after the manner of Toscanini, Szell, Mravinsky, Haitink, Levine.... A pure classicist. So extraordinary a technician is this type of conductor that every piece is put as definitively in place as a stone. The dynamic contrasts are overwhelming, the balances are perfect. The power of his orchestral muscle is overwhelming, and alongside that power is awesomely graceful refinement. In every Jurowski performance, a knowledgeable listener can hear details which one would never have perceived under any other conductor, and they are never details imposed but details he brings out in the score. Jurowski's repertoire is jaw-droopingly huge, and he conducts it all with awe-inspiring consistency and idiomaticity. In order for such an ascetic approach to work, one has to operate with enormous reserves of passion, and like Toscanini, Jurowski's performances can be as passionate as they are disciplined. And yet, there is always something reserved about them, never quite giving into the emotional needs of the moment, and consequently perhaps even also a little bit cold and arid. Eventually, one detects a certain level of humanity in Jurowski's performances that is missing. 

Let's call Currentzis a 'performer.' Currentzis is Jurowski's exact opposite, and a listener who particularly warms to one approach would excoriate the other. For a 'performer', the score is not a schematic whose details must be realized perfectly lest the entire building fall down, but a living entity, whose interpretation always evolves from the performer's own creative notions. He is a 'romantic' conductor after the manner of Mengelberg or Stokowski or Svetlanov or Muti or Gergiev. One could make arguments that Furtwangler or Bernstein are this type but they would be controversial arguments. Musicians such as Currentzis can change everything you ever thought you knew about music you've known your whole life. Passages that make no emotional sense to your ears suddenly snap into focus. And when music calls for the height of passion, there is no sort of musician more electrifying than a Currentzis. And yet this overheat can be exhausting and just plain bizarre. Currentzis is as inconsistent as Jurowski reliable. At his best, he provides a level of emotional nourishment a Jurowski or Szell never could. But if the score calls for reserve or understatement, Currentzis cannot hold himself back, and the result, however illuminative at times, can sound like a kind of artistic mutiliation. Following the highs and lows of such artists is much like the highs and lows of substance abuse. 

Let's call Petrenko a 'sculptor.' I generally prefer this type of conductor to the first two. The Kleibers was a sculptors, so were Monteux, Beecham, Klemperer, Abbado, Jansons... Sculptors and architects obviously have much in common, but sculptors allow for more flexibility of design so that they can express something that is emotionally specific as well as formally. They generally operate within the score's parameters, but within a very specific framework, there is always an enormous amount of expressive liberty, and consequently they create a kind of deeply impressive unity between hands, brain, and heart. Petrenko, like all these others, is very much a classicist, but the objectivity and discipline is leavened by a unimpeded flow of natural expression. Like these others, one may wish for more willingness to bend the rules of the score to raise the emotional temperature a bit, but like these others, one never has the sense that Petrenko is speaking the music from anywhere but his heart. 

Finally, let's call Roth an 'illuminator.' This is my favorite kind of musician and the hardest whose qualities one can speak of, because while they approach the score subjectively, they do not impose a revisionist interpretation upon the music but elicit qualities in the music that were clearly already there, only now perhaps they are accented in order to bring out the emotional meanings which the composer clearly meant them to have. They believe that great music may be work of genius, the work remains unfinished and imperfect, and therefore can evolve, gently, to accumulate a greater degree of meaning. Most of my favorites clearly fall into this category: Kubelik, Munch, Mitropoulos, Rattle, Walter, Barbirolli, Fricsay, Jochum, Harnoncourt, Mackerras, Pretre, Honeck.... they're all clearly illuminators, whose neither see the score as a thing-in-itself nor as fundamentally a finished product nor as a canvas upon which one can throw one's own personal interpretation without an army of analytic, thematic, or poetical justifications. 

So Roth is clearly my favorite of the four, and at the moment seems like he may be the greatest French conductor since at very least Georges Pretre. But the truth is, whether one or the other is objectively not often to one's taste, there is little denying the skill, passion, and intelligence it takes to create all four visions of music, and all four conductors create their particular visions so specifically that one would have to willfully turn away to not see that these musicians are great musicians of their type. There are many conductors of very high reputation who simply are blank slates, and have no real vision of music which they apply, these four are anything but that. So whether or not I necessarily like their music making, I deeply admire it, and in some cases stand in awe of it. 

(note from 2025: This post rather aged like milk. Currentzis has basically disappeared into Russia and is not coming back. He was always mannered to the point of perversity, but over time the mannerisms have just worn worse and worse. The other three are exactly as good as they seemed five years ago, but there are so many quasi-stars of their generation not named here that could easily ascend to the greatest of artistry: Juraj Valcuha, Cristian Macelaru, Roberto Gonzalez-Monjas, Antonello Manacorda, Marie Jacquot, Krzystopf Urbanski, Joana Mallwitz, Jakub Hrusa, Stephane Deneve, Mikko Franck, Andres Orozco-Estrada, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Vaclav Luks... any of them and others both known and unknown could become legendary artists of the podium)

Tales from the Old New Land - Shimon, 1902 - Outline

Shimon: 1902, South Africa - about the Second Boer War: Shimon (Simon) is an officer at a concentration camp (shades of later Jewish history). The commandant is an aristocrat named Hastings. The other officers are from all around the British empire, we meet them either in the mess hall or over a game of cards - perhaps both of course. They talk particularly about the daring escapades of a newly famous young officer named Winston Churchill and whether he's brave, foolhardy, an upper-class twit, or a lucky idiot. Simon is a relatively new officer, and speaks extremely correct English with a slight Polish accent (like Conrad). We hear one officer, perhaps an African, being called away to officiate a dispute between prisoners and assaulting a minorly disobedient prisoner. Simon, still a very young officer, who was trained with a thorough belief in British honor and English liberalism, takes the colleague aside and with friendliness tries to convince him that the prisoners will respond better to reason and trust, the African officer cynically laughs. "You don't know the Boers, but you will." The commanding officer assigns Simon an interrogation, Simon assures his compatriot that this interrogation will be a completely non-violent. The African officer laughs again. He goes in there and tries to reason with the Boer, named Johan, whom it should be established right away is crude and loathsome. The reasoned conversation turns very quickly to politics, and Johan argues with him that the British are no better than the Boers and just want South Africa's blood diamonds, but that the Boers will win because they care so much more about this land than the British do, who have the whole world. Simon counters that the Boers want to conquer the Africans, perhaps even enslave them, while the British want to empower and liberate them. Johan counters "An empire who conquers so they can liberate their people is no better than a whore who wins her virginity back through fucking." Simon counters further with a list of all the progress the British have brought to the world. Johan counters with all the commonly held knowledge of British-auspiced famines in India, and Simon counters that the famines under the British are no worse than the famines were under the Mughals and are starting to get better, "So you admit that your precious empire is no more competent than the Wogs!" So Simon goes through still more accomplishments of the British Empire, and seems to show conclusively that British imperialism is a much more benevolent, benign enterprise than Boer imperialism. Johan appears convinced for a moment but then counters that because of its allegedly good intentions, British imperialism is much more insidious and can control resources of the world so much more vast, and that 'we Boers admire you, we wish we knew how to hide the stink of our shit the way you all do.'  It becomes clear after a while that rather than wear Johan down, Johan is wearing Simon down. Eventually, something happens that makes Johan realize that Simon is Jewish, and tauntingly warns him, 'No matter how much you think you're one of them, no matter what rank they call you, no matter how many shiny piles of shit they pin on your chest, you'll always be a bloody kike to them.'  And in the midst of this supposedly non-violent, principled British interrogation, Shimon beats Johan to a bloody pulp. The African comes in right away to separate Simon from Johan but Johan is already dead. The Commandant calls Simon into his office, telling Simon he knows exactly what happened without having to read any report. The Commandant, whose rarely ever spoken to Simon, comments upon the name of Charlap, 'your family be Jews from either Portugal or Poland.' Simon is horrified "What sir? No sir! Absolutely not!" But the Commandant reveals that his mother's maiden name is Montefiore. "Don't worry, out here in the Empire, nobody's a Jew anymore. He fell off a wall, accidental circumstances. This never happened. You're an Englishman now."

Underrated Classical Musicians: Alberto Ginastera

Latin American classical music is so fucking good, and so little of it is known. It's generally considered that there are four geniuses of Latin American classical: Heitor Villa-Lobos of Brazil, Silvestre Revueltas of Mexico, Carlos Chavez of Mexico, and the Argentine: Alberto Ginastera. I, and probably others of my generation, would add Osvaldo Golijov, also of Argentina, and while his recent output has slowed to molasses in the wake of a plagiarism scandal that was really neither plagiarism nor a scandal, the greatness of his work from 20 years ago speaks for itself to nearly anyone who's heard it. 

Today, we're going to talk about that previous Argentine, Alberto Ginastera: contemporary of Shostakovich, Britten, Messiaen, Lutoslawski, and Bernstein, a compositional giant of the mid-20th century, and while probably the least known of that generation's giants, fully a giant among them.

In some ways, Ginastera was the truest heir among them to Stravinsky, beginning as a composer brined in the folk roots of his native land, whom during the political turmoil of the Peron and Videla years looked elsewhere for his inspiration. For the last decade of his life, he moved to Switzerland, evolving over the course of a lifetime to fully embrace the life and style of a modernist cosmopolitan. The truth is, Ginastera, like many white Argentinians, was perhaps as European as he was Latin American, hailing from a Catalan father and an Italian mother, and as the decades progressed he drew ever closer to his European roots. 

But his musical output began practically wrapped in the Argentinian flag. The red-hot work of a coruscatingly brilliant young native son. His two early ballets, Panambi and Estancia, could be stand-ins for Petrushka and the Rite of Spring, both are ferociously exciting, and so completely Latin-American sounding that many passages could be played in Latin American dance pageants and people would simply think that the musicians were feeling experimental that week. One can perceive a much similar feeling in his early piano music: in the Danzas Argentinas, in the Malambo, in the Preludios Americanos, this is music by a Latin American Bartok. Ginastera would later call this period of his work around World War II 'Objective Nationalism.' 

But after the war, Ginastera found himself in serious trouble with the Peron government for signing a petition in favor of greater civil liberties, and was soon forced to resign all his official Argentinian positions. 

This coincided, or perhaps caused, a period he called 'Subjective Nationalism.' I don't know what the objective difference is between these two forms of nationalism, but this is ultimately a very different sort of music. The balletic rhythmic spring of the early work is still there, but used far more sparingly, and in its place often something much more peaceful and sparse, with a ravishing array of instrumental color. Certain works like the first String Quartet are heavily pickled with an overwhelming flavor of Bartok, but I think the works of this period are equally influenced by Debussy. And much like Shostakovich's famous DSCH, Ginastera began using a musical calling card in certain pieces, E-A-D-G-B-E, the exact tones of open guitar strings.

And yet there is still something thoroughly of the Latin American land about this music. Ginastera was said to be inspired by the 'Gauchesco' tradition, literary works about the Gauchos in the rural Argentinian pampus, and while I've never been there (and one day I will,... I have a lot of family in Argentina), I've read that in works of this period like the Pampeana no. 3 or Ollantay or the Variaciones Concertates, Ginastera portrays the Argentinian landscape perfectly, or at least I've read in youtube comments....

Like Stravinsky or Picasso, Ginastera's early work accumulated its naive energy by its proximity to folk sources, perhaps in a process that was too close to appropriation. But in all three cases, the work gradually becoming grew more abstract until one began to realize that for such creators, the abstraction, the style with which the expression is conveyed, is more the point of the music than the expression itself. Ginastera was not a composer burning with messages for his audiences in the manner of Villa-Lobos, who struggled to keep apace with all his musical ideas. Ginastera was a musical magpie, constantly revising, constantly accumulating new musical influences from around the world. And if a composer in the 1950s was assimilating world influences, there was only one wind from which international influence blew.

So from the late 50's onward, Ginastera referred to his work as Neo-expressionist. Ginastera was yet another composer no one expected to begin writing serial music, and yet there came twelve-tone score after score, along with atonality. But Ginastera was too good a composer to completely subsume his voice in dogma, and scores like Popol Vuh or the Violin Concerto juxtapose Schoenbergian atonality with the same tango-progressive tonality that Ginastera wrote with a generation earlier. 

Was Ginastera as great as the greatest in his generation like Shostakovich or Messiaen? Well.... probably not quite, but he was incredibly close. Even the atonal scores of his later years are incredibly powerful, and the scores of his earlier years are just wonderful: gorgeous and exciting in equal measure. Ginastera is a master composer whose work, whether easy to listen to or hard, is always worth the time put in.

Underrated Classical Musicians: David Zinman

We're going to come back to David Zinman again and again because... well.... if I'm a musician, and I suppose the jury is still out, he's the reason.

This video is one of the only true mementos of the orchestra whose concerts I grew up going to. I had no real idea how good I had it. People don't realize what a difference it was to grow up somewhere with a truly great orchestra, and what a weird little unicorn you become if nobody else was touched in the way you were. But the Meyerhoff in those years was a magical place in a magical era. Week after week of music making whose quality exceeded nearly anywhere else in America, under a conductor whom in those years was like an American Carlos Kleiber, volcanic passion and character under an iron frame of discipline. Only this conductor always showed up, conducted every corner of the repertoire, and tons of new music besides. And not only all that, but when Zinman turned around, he exceeded even Leonard Bernstein in his ability to communicate to an audience. He was just as articulate as Lenny, and a hundred times funnier. Eight weeks every year on Saturday morning at 11, Dad and I would sit in Row L 1 and 3, as Zinman created a series called 'Casual Concerts' which he modeled on Garrison Keillor and David Letterman.For a casual concert of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, he claimed to have discovered a tape of Tchaikovsky narrating his life into an audio-diary. For a concert of Brahms's First Symphony, he hired an actor to play Brahms on a psychiatrist's couch while Zinman played Sigmund Freud complete with a Viennese accent. For one Beethoven concert, he pretended to be Beethoven, still alive and a hobo in New York - condemned by the Devil to hear bad performances of his own music outside Carnegie Hall. And then there were the times he made the contrabassoon emit farting noises, and the time he literally played piano with his ass. For me, I'd always heard that classical music was stuffy, but growing up in 90s Baltimore, there was very very little sense that it could possibly be true.

And yet those early memories are virtually all I have of it. It's all just ephemera now, hardly any documentation of it all ever released to the public. The Zinman/BSO recordings of those years give you very little sense of just how electric this band was in live settings. They're perfectly good, but you'd never have much sense that what went on in Baltimore was any more extraordinary than a good second-tier American orchestra of those years like Cincinnati or Atlanta. Zinman is one of those musicians so disciplined that his music making does not have obvious distinguishing features, so the most extraordinary qualities of his performances can only be captured live. Mariss Jansons was the same way. People, including me, came out of Jansons performances as though they'd been through a literally awesome experience, but those who'd only heard him on recording have no idea what the big deal was. But at least Jansons got the recognition he deserved, and he spent the last fifteen years of his life as one of the world's three or four most feted conductors. Other once overlooked conductors in a similar age group like Charles Mackerras and Herbert Blomstedt finally saw their due in their final years.

David Zinman is nearly ten years older than Mariss Jansons, now in his mid 80's, and clearly suffering from something like Parkinson's. He is still a part-time guest conductor, an honored returnee at many of the world's best orchestras, but he can't possibly be the conductor he used to be. Look at his technique in this video, he is literally conveying hundreds of pieces of information to his players every minute with his body language as can only be done by an absolute master of the craft. Some conductors do miracles without much physical presence, but however small Zinman's 5'3 frame was, part of his power over orchestras was making them realize that however collegial, they were in the presence of a dynamo.

Rachmaninov's Second Symphony is not my favorite piece of music. Like Saint-Saens before him, and perhaps Mendelssohn and Liszt too, Rachmaninov was a musical genius to whom the craft of music came so easily that little room was left in his mental space to figure out what to say with his craft. Rachmaninov wrote a few original masterpieces, but the Second Symphony is not one of them. It is a perfect imitation of a symphony, perfectly orchestrated, and so perfectly constructed that I'm still discovering new formal relationships after decades of listening to it. But let's face it, it's simultaneously a work of genius and pretty insipid piece, and so long that the musical sugar can wear on the ear as very few pieces in the classical canon ever do. If I have a yen to listen, and I sometimes do, I need a Russian like Pletnev or Svetlanov who goes so far over the top that you never realize how bland this piece can get, playing it with raw Soviet brass and throbbing Russian string vibrato, and getting through the whole thing without cuts in fifty minutes. A slower performance (one that goes by Rachmaninov's tempi) is a very tough prospect. It becomes an hour of Hollywood film music at its most sentimental. So if you do this piece by the book, you need a real master up there to make it bearable: no mere Andre Previn, you need Rozhdestvensky or Ivan Fischer or Neeme Jarvi.

But un-Russian as this performance sounds, this Rachmaninov Second in Tokyo, done by my BSO on tour in 1994, is, like very few performances of this too often-performed warhorse, a performance that completely justifies its necessity, and displays a very rare mastery. Watch it and it shows what I knew in my bones then, that this was greatness. Zinman knew exactly what he was doing at every moment (a exceedingly rare quality among conductors...) and the orchestra responded to his every request (even rarer....). And if you just listen, you realize you're hearing an orchestra as good as it gets. One that doesn't just play the notes with precision and balance, but plays with that extra electricity which turns great skill into magic. This... is.... MUSIC! And this is now my sole memento of the organization that called me to music, and for the first time in twenty years, lets me relive that call.

A Playlist

A playlist of music I wrote up for a friend which I like that I think he'd like. Maybe you will too.

- Heitor Villa-Lobos: Forest of the Amazon (Brazillian)

- Silvestre Revueltas: The Night of the Mayas (Mexican)

- Artur Honegger: Symphonie Liturgique (Swiss)

- Bela Bartok: Bluebeard's Castle (Hungarian)

- Olivier Messiaen: Exotic Birds (French)

- Tan Dun: The Map (Chinese)

- James MacMillan: A Scotch Bestiary (Scottish)

- Manuel de Falla: Master Peter's Puppet Show (Spanish)

- Rued Langgaard: Music of the Spheres (Danish)

- Henry Cowell: Piano Music (American)

- Ottorino Respighi: Boticelli Trilogy (Italian)

- Maurice Ravel: The Child and His Spells (French)

- Benjamin Britten: Rejoice in the Lamb (English)

- Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Trio 2 (Russian)

- Veljo Tormis: Curse Upon Iron (Estonian)

- Karol Szymanowski: Song of the Night (Polish)

- Arvo Part: Credo (Estonian)

- Charles Ives: Symphony no. 4 (American)

- Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphony no. 6 (English)

- Sergei Prokofiev: Scythian Suite (Russian)

- Zoltan Kodaly: Psalmus Hungaricus (Hungarian)

- Leos Janacek: Cunning Little Vixen (Czech)

- Modest Mussorgsky: Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov (Russian)

- Bohuslav Martinu: Double Concerto for Two Pianos, Strings and Timpani (Czech)

- Frank Martin: Mass for Double Choir (Swiss)

- Francis Poulenc: Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings (French)

- Jean Sibelius: Symphony no. 4 (Finnish)

- Thomas Ades: Polaris (English)

- Joseph Suk: A Summer's Tale (Czech)

- Witold Lutoslawski: Funeral Music for Bela Bartok (Polish)

- Ruth Crawford Seeger: Music for Small Orchestra (American)

- Andrzej Panufnik: Sinfonia Sacra (Polish)

- Kalevi Aho: Insect Symphony (Finnish)

- Alfred Schnittke Cello Concerto no. 1 (Russian)

- Georg Friedrich Haas: In Vain (German)

- Alberto Ginastera: Panambi (Argentine)

- Darius Milhaud: Six Little Symphonies

- Erkki Sven Tüür: Lighthouse (Estonian)

- Peteris Vasks: Distant Light (Latvian)

- Krzystopf Penderecki: The Seven Gates of Jerusalem (Polish)

- Gyorgy Ligeti: Melodien (Hungarian)

- Miloslav Kabelac: The Mystery of Time (Czech)

- Carl Nielsen: Symphony no. 5 (Danish)

- Sofia Gubaidulina: Faschwerk (Tartar) 

- H. K. Gruber: Frankenstein!! (Austrian)

- Kaija Saariaho: Graal Theater (Finnish)

- Rodion Shchedrin: Naughty Limericks (Russian)

- Nikolai Kapustin: Eight Concert Etudes (Russian)

- Per Norgard: Symphony no. 3 (Danish)

- Vaino Raitio: Fantasia Poetica (Finnish)

- Giya Kancheli: Styx (Georgian) 

- Henryk Gorecki: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Polish)

- Einojuhani Rautavaara Cantus Arcticus (Finnish)

- John Corigliano: Symphony Of Rage and Remembrance (American) 

- Michael Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony

- Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Kaddish Symphony (Polish)

- Malcolm Arnold: Tam O'Shanter Overtur (English)

- Peter Maxwell Davies: An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise (English/Scottish)

- Gustav Mahler: Symphony no. 7 (Austrian)

- Arnold Schoenberg: A Survivor from Warsaw (Austrian)

- Alban Berg: Violin Concerto (Austrian)

- Karl Amadeus Hartmann: Attempt at a Requiem (German)

- John Foulds: Three Mantras (English)

- Edgard Varese: Ameriques (French)

- William Walton: Belshazzar's Feast (English)

- Colin McPhee: Tabu tabuhan (Canadian)

Underrated Classical Musicians: Ivry Gitlis

Today, we talk about Ivry, my favorite violinist, still kicking around at nearly 98 and performing until just a couple years ago... I'd definitely have rather heard him live thirty or sixty years ago, but Ivry is not just a violinist, he's a personality, an interpreter whose performances involve creative artistry in its own right. 

There are lots of music lovers who believe that the purpose of the performer is to create the illusion that the performer does not exist and there is no interlocutor required between the printed page and the music. Nonsense. Music does not live on a page. As Martin Buber would have put it, music on a page is a mere object, and our relationship to it is of an 'I' to an 'it', while music in the ear is of an 'I' to a 'thou', and it requires the presence of a human being to bring endow the music with life and create a worthwhile experience for the listener. There is value in self-effacement, both personally and musically, but self-effacement is no virtue when music requires the illumination of an intimate heart. 

I'll post a couple videos here, but I want to start this with the Dvorak Humoresque. The only other violinist who could make it sound like this is Fritz Kreisler. That hugely intrusive, tacky slide, right near the beginning (almost exactly as Kreisler did it himself) is the difference between keeping this piece a rather trivial piece of music, and the kind of music that can draw tears even if you've lived with this piece and this recording for decades. Without it, it's utterly forgettable, just like the Dvorak Humoresque you hear again and again at student recitals. 

Or listen to Ivry do the Sibelius Violin Concerto. I believe this is the greatest performance I've ever heard of this extraordinary work: Heifetz, Oistrakh, Ferras, none of them have a patch on Ivry, because Ivry does not just play the notes. He plays tensions between the notes: some people pretentiously call these tensions harmonic rhythm or long-range hearing (fernhören), but like Furtwangler and Mitropoulos and Casals and Cortot and Schnabel and Huberman and Menuhin before him, he bends the note lengths, tempos, and rhythms, even intonation, in such a way that they become tensile and organic, a breathing, dynamic experience that moves and lives. Heifetz would never besmirch a piece of music that way, and the loss was the listener's.

And finally, listen to him do the Nigun from Bloch's Baal Shem. Ivry was just another in the long long line of great Jewish violinists in the 20th century, the first to be born in Israel (Palestine at the time of course), but he is just another of those prodigies who seems to have the fiddle born in his hand. I don't know if you can ascribe qualities to their playing as a group when there are so many distinct personalities, but when you hear the intensity they expend on their bow arm and vibrato next to the golden-toned imperiousness of a violinist like Adolf Busch, you see that there clearly had to have been some unique approach which they brought to the sacred Austro-German tradition. The longer German tradition of violin playing, in some senses itself founded by Jews like Joseph Joachim and Ferdinand David, is a tradition that in some senses adapts itself for orchestral playing. Gorgeous sound, nothing too obtrusive. In today's more internationalized world, you're as likely to hear that kind of playing from a non-German like Hilary Hahn as you are from a German like Julia Fischer. 

But all music, ultimately, is folk music, music by the people and for the people. And if the oral tradition is authentic, there is some sort of alchemy in which even a wrong note feels right. Whether that wrong note is a smudged run in Schnabel's Beethoven, or an out of tune clarinet in Kubelik's Mahler, or a natural horn note in Harnoncourt's Bach, or a raspy bow sound from the Takacs Quartet in Bartok, or an overemphasized characterization in Fischer-Dieskau's Schubert, or a tackily long held high note in Gigli's Verdi, or the extreme compression in the recording of a climax in Furtwangler's Bruckner, such is the inner animation, so completely is the performer's internalization, that it is in fact more exciting than it would be were the music making objectively correct. One day I'll do a list of the best records in that regard....

There is something about Gitlis playing Bloch that has that same authenticity. Isaac Stern, great as he is, doesn't have that authenticity in his more famous recording of this piece. And there's something about his which is correct and literal, and not nearly so inspiring. But when you hear Gitlis play it, it is, for whatever reason, the real thing. Even the wrong notes, and there are a couple dozen here, feel right.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I don't know what it means to wish people a Happy Pesach this year, we're living the closest circumstances to its origins in a lifetime. But I hope everybody, both Jew and everyone with us in spirit today, has new appreciation for all this's meaning. As important as the High Holidays are, tonight is Judaism's root: that a higher power, whomever that power is, heard our suffering, and this divine incarnation set about the task of delivering us from it. The task still seems insurmountable, and once we were delivered, the real work began. As the Tanakh shows, it is an unfinished work, and perhaps meant to be incomplete. Rather, the work always continues to this day and millennia hereafter. The literal meaning of Israel is 'he who wrestles with God'. No matter what many teach, if there is a god, he clearly does not want us to submit to his will, and there is no anointed messiah who speaks for him or her or them or us or it with any more authority than each of us do ourselves. To wrestle and struggle with the meaning of being is Judaism's true meaning, and everything else is an impediment, detracting from the potential meanings of life rather than adding to them. It's up to each of us in this chaotic world to find our own meaning and add our brief chapter to meaning's long story, just as the people before us had to. We are all a collective, and we are all individuals within it, and within that tension, meaning is found. More later no doubt, but in the meantime: 

Chag Sameach, Gut Yontif, A Zissen Pesach, oo'Moadim l'Simcha,

Amen.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

It gives me no pleasure at all to watch so many friends be sad and angry over the end of the Sanders campaign. In their dissatisfaction over Biden, there's not much daylight between them and me. Whatever is true or false about Biden, he and the Clintons both embody a generation of Democrats who put their own prosperity first and let the next generation pick up the tab, thereby making an insurrection like the Sanders movement thoroughly inevitable. Their generation now has so little time left that I honestly think it conceivable that they'll mostly do the right thing from now on, but it took so unconscionably long for them to get there, and for them to see unconscionably much to realize it was necessary. 

At this point, the country has so thoroughly lost its way from the FDR/Truman/Johnson liberalism that brought good fortune that I don't have much hope to offer people because I think most offers of hope would be false hope, and I find offering false hope to be cruel. No doubt, the liberalism of the 20th century needs to be updated for the 21st, but there was no major candidate who sufficiently did it, not even Elizabeth Warren. For me, it was just another indication that the American chapter of the world story is in its final third, and there's clearly no convincing anyone of the necessary two-fold premise: that things really are as fragile as they seem, but that there is also a way through the mess. The end result is that even now, nobody has learned from any of this, and we're all sitting in our houses with the end results.

Underrated Classical Musicians 4/6/20

Gustav Niedlinger today.

Pity poor Alberich, not just the character, but the singer. A great Alberich is worth his weight to opera houses in gold, and he will rarely ever be engaged for anything else. Much more than Wotan, it's the kind of part you're destined to spend your entire career doing. There's no giant repertoire for a bass-baritone voice which is both heroic and comic. And yet this ugly character must be sung by one of the most gorgeous voices in existence.

Like Milton or Goethe before him, Wagner doesn't generally deal in three-dimesnional human beings, but his archetypes are capable of stunning complexity. Alberich, and his son Hagen, are perhaps the fullest musical explorations of evil ever realized by any composer. In Alberich's last appearance in Götterdämmerung, appearing in Hagen's waking dream, Wagner uses every quiet unnatural orchestral effect he can summon - muted strings bowing on the fingerboard, hand stopped horns, all manner creeping glissandos (string slides), all kinds of rhythmic syncopations to disorient us from familiar paths, and the winds play what are still the most evil chords a composer has ever discovered. In this musical moment, we are face to face with nature's chthonian side, the innermost hidden parts of the forest where the most dangerous animals live and destructive forces fester, where light doesn't penetrate, and threats to one's person are as much the invisible organisms likely to drain you of life without your knowledge as wolves and bears are to tear you apart. Without this scene, there's no Sibelius 4th Symphony or Tapiola, no Alpensinfonie or Don Quixote from Strauss, no nachtmusik from Bartok and no scherzo in Mahler 7.

And against all this musical ugliness, Wagner requires a voice of stunning beauty and power to articulate a text which is a terrifying and blatant revision of Hamlet's encounter with his dead father: "Hagen, my son! Hate thou the happy! This joyless and sorrow-laden one lov'st thou so as thou shouldst.... The world will be ours, for in thy truth my faith is firm; thou sharest my wrath and hate.... avenge me, the ring to win me, in Wälsung's and Wotan's despite! Swear to me, Hagen, my son! Be true, Hagen, my son! Trusty hero! Be true! Be true! True!"

From the moment Niedlinger intones, in performance after performance, 'Schläfst du, Hagen Mein sohn?' And puts a little bit of extra emphasis, glissando, and u sound into 'Sohn', we know that we are in the rare presence of a singer who understands his extremely complex role at level of its very atoms. Conductors are so dependent upon their orchestras that they can afford to have a much larger repertoire, and many of them have as many as a couple dozen works that they can convince experts they understand at the deepest level. But the orchestra is a community organism, and no conductor truly 'plays' the orchestra, let alone embodies it. Opera singers, on the other hand, must internalize their roles at the deepest levels of their physical presence, some are lucky to get a single role which they can properly embody as Niedlinger did Alberich for nearly twenty-five years on the international stage.

There are so many live Ring recordings in the 1950/60's vintage. It was, in many ways, Wagner's final hour as Europe's cultural colossus. It was as though Europe, and obviously Germany particularly, required one more immersion in Wagner to come to terms with the full implications of where his destructive ideals led them. After World War II, Bayreuth, the summer festival of Wagner's music dramas that Hitler viewed as his spiritual oasis, was no longer a place where one would go to see costumes made with the breastplates and horns of German mythology. It was, rather, a place of bare sets, stage blocking that had far more in common with religious/political ritual than theater, the action upon the bare stage infused with all manner of avant-garde light. It was as though the productions were designed by Albert Speer and Anselm Kiefer. The memories of the recent German past were so vivid that there was no longer any process of Wagner without conjuring those memories.

It was taken for decades that Alberich was, in some ways, a metaphor for the eternal Jew whose corrupting, loveless influence starts the world down the path of greed and lust for power. But in light of what Germany underwent eighty years ago, did Alberich manifest their eternal enemy, or was Alberich a manifestation of themselves?