“None is musical; no, not one"

Heard a great recording of the Emperor Concerto on the car radio this afternoon during my commute to work up Route 76. Soloist was Claudio Arrau. Colin Davis conducted the Dresden Staatskapelle. My commute is long enough (unfortunately) that I was able (fortunately) to hear the whole thing.

I was pretty energized when I walked into the office, but when I said,  "I'm in a good mood because I just heard a great performance of the Emperor Concerto," no one in the office — not one — had any idea what I was talking about.

"You know — Beethoven?"

Nope.

I let the anecdote stand without comment.

I live for pedantry

Ivan Hewett over at The Telegraph has posted an introduction to the music of Charles Ives. The listening points will be helpful to the novice, and the selections are well-chosen, but I find at least three errors in the first paragraph:

“Stand up and use your ears like a man!” That was Charles Ives’s furious response to some hecklers at a performance of music by another great American radical, Henry Cowell. Ives was very hot on manliness — there’s a well-known photo of him in the garb of an American footballer, taken in his Harvard days. One detects an undercurrent of anxiety that his chosen profession was a touch “sissy”, which was reasonable enough given that classical music in the US was almost entirely run by blue-rinsed ladies of a certain age.

In the first place, Ives went to Yale, not Harvard. In the second, he did not play sports in college. The photograph of him as captain of his football team was taken when he was still in high school, a time in life when a lot of guys without psychosexual hangups try out for athletics.  Third, the music being performed during his famous outburst was by Carl Ruggles, not Henry Cowell. (It was Men and Mountains.) And, for a possible fourth, the outburst probably never happened. According to Jan Swafford's biography, Ives wrote later it was something he wished he had said. We all have moments like that.

I know. I need to get a life, but Hewett is a well-known  critic who works for a big-time paper. I expect more from a pro, even if he is English. I'd tell him about it, but you have to sign up to post comments, and I've already left my email address at too many sites around the Web.

Zappa Plays Zappa

Dweezil Zappa has just announced a national tour that will recreate his father's Roxy and Elsewhere album. This seems to be a trend. The Grandmothers of Invention brought the same program to Sellersville Theater last year, Dweezil's tour, unlike that of the Grandmothers, will not include any of the original performers. Herewith a portion of the press release:

Zappa Plays Zappa, the Grammy-winning group that has made and recreated history performing the music of Frank Zappa, is set to embark on an epic musical trek across the US, Canada and Europe celebrating the classic Frank Zappa album, Roxy & Elsewhere. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of that pivotal Zappa fan favorite, the entirety of its repertoire -- including the provocative rhythms of "Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?" "Echidna's Arf (Of You)" and Be-Bop Tango (of the Old Jazzmen's Church)" will be performed Live! "The Roxy & Elsewhere album has always been one of my favorites and I'm excited to play it top to bottom. It has a great balance of musical styles and showcases some of the funkiest grooves and most devilishly frenetic instrumental passages my father ever composed." As a bonus to the tour, a 90 minute personalized guitar instruction session from Dweezil's annual musical bootcamp, Dweezilla, will be offered as a separate ticket in the afternoon before sound check in every city. Players of all skill levels are welcome to attend. Certain to be among the tour's highlights are performances at iconic venues that resonate with Zappa history. Honoring the long-standing tradition in New York City Dweezil will stand in the same place Frank Zappa often stood on Halloween at the Beacon. Auspiciously paying homage to Roxy & Elsewhere, Dweezil and his bandmates will perform at the Roxy Theatre in Hollywood, exactly 40 years to the day of Frank Zappa's Performances at the Roxy in December, 1973.
9/3/13	Providence, RI	Lupo's
9/4/13	Pittsburgh, PA	Carnegie Music Hall
9/5/13	Columbus, OH	LC Pavilion
9/6/13	Iowa City, IA	Englert Theater
9/7/13	Urbana, IL	Krannert PAC/ Ellnora Guitar Festival
9/8/13	Milwaukee, WI	Pabst Theater
10/8/13	Lincoln, NE	Rococo Theatre
10/9/13	Eau Claire, WI	State Theatre
10/10/13	Chicago, IL	Copernicus Center
10/11/13	Indianapolis, IN	The Vogue
10/12/13	Grand Rapids, MI	The Intersection
10/13/13	Kent, OH	Kent Stage
10/16/13	Philadelphia, PA	Keswick Theatre
10/17/13	Buffalo, NY	Kleinhans Music Hall
10/18/13	Royal Oak, MI	Royal Oak Music Theatre
10/19/13	Toronto, ON	Queen Elizabeth Theatre
10/20/13	Ottawa, ON	Algonquin Commons Theatre
10/22/13	Laval, QC	Salle Andre' Matie
10/23/13	Sherbrooke, QC	Theatre Granda
10/24/13	Saint Hyacinthe, QC	Centre de Arts Juliette-Lassonde
10/25/13	Saint Jean sur Richelieu, QC	Theatre des Deux Rives
10/26/13	L'Assomption, QC	Theatre Hector Charland
10/27/13	Quebec City, QC	Imperial Theatre
10/28/13	Rimouski, QC	Salle Desjardins-Telus
10/31/13	New York, NY	Beacon Theater
11/1/13	Portland, ME	State Theater
11/2/13	Boston, MA	House Of Blues
11/3/13	Ridgefield, CT	Ridgefield Playhouse
12/8/13	Los Angeles, CA	The Roxy
12/9/13	Los Angeles, CA	The Roxy
12/10/13	Los Angeles, CA	The Roxy

My own private concert

The Independence Sinfonia presented a program of Mozart and Beethoven Sunday afternoon. I was unable to attend, since I worked weekends, but I was invited to the final rehearsal at a shoebox of a church in Wyndmoor Pa. It was a thrill to hear Beethoven's Fifth in such a small space, even when the orchestra consists of only about 40 musicians. The reading was taut, and the musicians played straight through: the only distraction was the occasional shout of encouragement from the podium.

The conductor, Jerome Rosen, who played violin with the Cleveland Orchestra years ago, told me that the one lesson he learned from George Szell is that musicians do not play better when they're terrified.

"Anything positive you can say, you have to say," he said.

Rosen spent all of his time tweaking details of articulation and phrasing, something he said he can do only when the musicians have mastered the score. As an editor, I know what he means: there is a big difference between a writer who needs help with mechanics, and one who simply isn't getting it.

"It's so satisfying to be able to nitpick," he told the group.

 Besides the Beethoven Fifth, the program included Mozart's overture to The Magic Flute and his Sinfonia Concertante, with Rosen on violin and Xiao-Fu Zhou on viola. Zhou made it look easy. He was impassive through most of the run through, while Rosen, who told me he hasn't played violin in years, would grimace every time he made a mistake.

Several the musicians sat out the Mozart, but they were all up front for the Beethoven, leaving me alone in the pews. It was like attending my own, private concert.

Look at all the pretty colors

The 100-year anniversary of the premiere of Rite of Spring arrives next month, and Stephen Malinowski has just sent me a link to the "animated score" he has created and posted on Youtube. It's rather like a kaleidoscopic "follow the bouncing ball." It gives you something to look at while all that great music is going on, and it beats the hell out of Fantasia:





Here is an excerpt from the press release that arrived in my email:

The ballet The Rite of Spring with music by Stravinsky was first performed in Paris on May 29, 1913.

In celebration of the centenary of its premiere, music synthesist Jay Bacal and music animator Stephen Malinowski have collaborated to create an animated, graphical score for viewers.

The animation, which you can watch and listen to on YouTube, is a musical score that nonmusicians can understand. It's a welcoming way to appreciate the structure of the work, and heightens your listening by enlisting the visual channel, which allows one to easily follow the different lines of the orchestration.

"The animation lets your eyes lead your ears," Malinowski says. Malinowski, based in the Bay Area, has created music animations for more than 200 pieces of music. He has provided animation for Björk and provided live animation synchronized to performances by symphony orchestra, chamber music groups and soloists.

An urban legend is born

In his hatchet job at the Huffington Post, David Asia says that, during rehearsals for the first performance of the Concerto for Orchestra, Elliott Carter did not notice that a clarinetist played the wrong transposition for uch of the piece, and that Bernstein, the conductor, was unimpressed with him (Carter). Asia thinks it’s a big deal, because Carter, as we know, was all about intervals. One of my correspondents, something of a Carter expert, emailed me yesterday, in part:

I wonder where he heard the Bernstein story from since he (Asia) would not have been at the rehearsal.

He cc'd another of my correspondents (also a Carter aficion), who replied thus:

I wondered about that too. I'm beginning to think that “can't hear the wrong clarinet transposition” story is an urban legend. I heard Richard Wilson tell it about Schoenberg yesterday on a panel. (Another good one is the "learn the piece on the train and play it for the first time at the concert" story, which I've now heard about three different pianists.)

In my initial post, I had planned to say that I saw no gross misrepresentations in Asia's essay, but I am revising that estimate.

Carter Lives

Daniel Asia spits on Elliott Carter's grave this week over at the Huffington Post. In a piece titled "Carter is Dead" (evoking Boulez' famous pronouncement on the music of Schoenberg), he says, essentially, that the late Mr. Carter had no real talent and never did anything right in his whole life.

The essay is not interesting, but its timing is. Not only did Asia wait until Carter was safely out of the way. He waited until Charles Rosen was, too. At that point, he must have known the coast was clear, and he could safely to poke his nose out of his burrow. His little presumptions are exactly the sort of thing that Rosen, the Huxley to Carter’s Darwin, was so adept at skewering. He would have chewed it up before breakfast, then tossed off three thousand words on Mozart’s use of tonality.

I suspect that Mr. Asia produced his essay in a spirit of malicious glee, fully expecting a firestorm of protest and ready to declare that the anger and defensiveness of Carter’s admirers is proof that he had somehow touched a nerve. But there really isn’t much here to get upset about, and even less to argue with. The criticisms, such as they are, consist of simple assertions. One either agrees with them or one does not. I do not. Here are some counter-assertions, for the record: Carter’s piano music does not “pale” beside Copland’s; the Eight Etudes for wind quartet hold up quite nicely, thank you; and the finale of the Cello Sonata is hardly “cute.”

I have never changed anyone's mind about music through argument, and no one has ever changed mine. Sometimes, through repeated listening, I have learned to like something I initially found daunting or dull, but I've never stopped liking a piece of music simply because somebody told me to. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, of course, even Mr. Asia, but my listening habits remain unchanged. It's not a matter of "I'm right and he's wrong." It's more a matter of "I'm cool, and he's a doofus."

What I find heartening in Asia's piece, however, is that he really isn’t saying anything Donal Henahan and Harold C. Schoenberg weren’t saying forty years ago. To a man, the sages from our paper of record didn’t think Carter’s music had a future, either, and yet, here we are, forty years later, having the same discussion. If the future is anything like the past, the controversy will continue, and so will the music.

Now, to clear the air, I offer the Adagio of the 1948 Cello Sonata, one of my favorite movements in all of music:

Talk with Jerome Rosen

Last week I interviewed violinist and conductor Jerome Rosen and violinist and violist Xiao-Fu Zhou for this article on the Independence Sinfonia's May 5 concert. It was my first talk with Mr. Zhou and my second with Mr. Rosen, and I enjoyed both interviews.

I don't mention this in the article, but it turns out that Mr. Rosen and I go way back, after a fashion. He played with the Cleveland Orchestra back in the 1960s, under George Szell, and his violin enhances the textures in some of my favorite recordings, including the Bruckner Third (my favorite single Bruckner recording), the two Brahms Piano Concertos, and highlights from the Ring. I also used to own Szell's recording of the Beethoven symphonies, but I gave it to my mother-in-law years ago when I switched over to CDs.

Rosen also told me he is the pianist in the Boston Symphony's recording of the Ives Fourth Symphony. The part is fiendishly difficult, he said, and it took him four weeks to learn. I listened to my cassette transfer of the LP today on the way to work. The Ozawa-BSO recording has been overshadowed by others in my estimation, and I hadn't listened to it for years, but I was surprised by just how exciting it is.

Inevitably, the question arose: How does a musician with such a rich career behind him end up conducting an amateur orchestra in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania? The answer, of course, is love. Mr. Rosen's first serious girlfriend plays with the Sinfonia. He lost touch over the years, he told me, and, like many couples who lost touch in the years prior to the 21st century, they reconnected via the Internet. (Hi, Lynn.) They have not reunited in a romantic sense — her "guy," as he put it, is the Sinfonia's first clarinetist — but the orchestra needed a conductor, and when she asked, he couldn't refuse.

"The rest is history," he said.

I have to work May 5, unfortunately, but I’ve been invited to the May 3 dress rehearsal.

Tortured lede department

Look, I get it. I edit a daily newspaper and I churn out a lot of music previews, and I know what a challenge the first paragraph of a story can be. You want to be vivid, you want to be creative, and you want to use the active voice (or, depending on your journalism professor, you have to use the active voice. Even so, I can't quite forgive comparing Charles Ives to Harry Potter, as Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim does in her review of the New York Philharmonic's performance of the Fourth Symphony:

There were moments during Wednesday evening’s New York Philharmonic performance of Charles Ives’s “Symphony No. 4” at Avery Fisher Hall when I felt like a spectator at a Quidditch match. It’s true that neither the Philharmonic players nor their conductor, Alan Gilbert, were riding on broomsticks. But with 14 airborne players, four balls, six goals, and a winged target, Quidditch, the sport central to the Harry Potter novels, is a lot like Ives’s music. Things come hurtling at you from unexpected places. Players are chasing a zigzagging target. The laws of physics don’t seem to apply.

Uh, OK. When critics resort to this kind of extended conceit, it's a signal to me they don't really know what they're talking about, and they bury their ignorance in verbiage. My impression was confirmed by the rest of the review, which offers only sketchy descriptions of one or two outstanding moments and doesn't even attempt to assess either the music or the performance. OK, so Mr. Gilbert seemed relaxed under daunting circumstances. I'm relieved for him.

Vivien Schweitzer does a somewhat better job in her preview of the performance, though at times she sounds as though she's regurgitating program notes.

Elliott Carter tribute

Just received from the indispensable John Link:

 

Who else is going?