Happy Birthday, Martha Knox

My humanist friend Martha Knox, a mother and woodcut artist who recently spent some time in the  the hospital for a gallstone, celebrated her 36th birthday yesterday. The day before, on her Facebook page, she specifically asked her friends not to give her the standard saccharine greetings. She wanted edgy, she wanted cynical, she wanted insulting. I couldn't quite make myself insult her, but I did come up with this.

We celebrate, for what it's worth,
The day of Martha Knox's birth,
And raise a song, in dulcet tones,
Of purple hair and bladder stones,
Of butterflies on blocks of wood
And humanistic motherhood,
With healthy snacks and wholesome games
For daughters with outrageous names,
Knowing as we do full well
Her soul headed straight to hell.

The Little Shrine

Charles Ives's studio, with his piano, seen from outside a small set of windows. The view out the window at the far end is a photograph of the view in West Redding.

On Thursday I took a day trip to New York to see the studio from Charles Ives’s home in West Redding, Conn. The home was sold last year, but the studio – or rather, the furnishings and artifacts from the studio – are on permanent display at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, donated by Ives’s grandson, Charles Ives Tyler. It’s a small exhibit, but a compelling one. Everything is arranged just as it was in the composer’s lifetime, though perhaps a little neater – his piano, his books, his photographs, the double doors he used as a bulletin board, even his bottles of bitters. His infamous felt hat, the one he wore in many late-life photographs, sits on top of the bookcase, near the cornet that belonged to his father, George Ives.

Ives's desk, with the end of his cot at left. The studio was not added to the West Redding house until 1922, as Ives's health was failing. He probably did little actual composing here. 

It’s no surprise, but the little room, particularly the bulletin board, reminded me of Ives’s music. Both are slightly disheveled but welcoming collages built from random scraps of memory, and both are windows into the mind of the man who made them. The surrounding exhibition includes photographs, letters written by Ives to his daughter in his nearly indecipherable scribble, concert programs, early editions of scores, and the inevitable narrative decaled on the walls. Some of the information presented has been rendered obsolete by recent books on the composer, and some of it is simply wrong. Ives did not stop composing entirely in 1920, for example, and his breakdown in 1918 was most likely not a heart attack. A photo of George White Ives, the composer’s grandfather, is misidentified as his father, George Edward, but the portrait of a young Harmony in her nurse’s uniform is a heartbreaker. Adam Budiansky, in his new biography of Ives, Mad Music, refers to Harmony as a plain girl. She was anything but.

Ives's bookcase, with his felt hat, his father's cornet.

One could go through the entire exhibition in about twenty minutes, but I stayed upwards of two hours, until closing time at 4 p.m. I spent much of that time chatting with the docents and couple of the visitors, one of whom turned out to be the clarinetist Mark Simon, an old acquaintance from my days posting at the Classical Music Guide discussion board. I also had the good fortune to be there at the same time as Kyle Werner, a young composer who is also Robert Mann’s archivist.

The American Academy is way uptown on Broadway at 155th Street, a part of Manhattan I had never visited. One hears a lot of Spanish on the streets. The galleries, home to a large collection of contemporary art, occupy two of a set of hulking neoclassical buildings, set back from the street, that collectively used to be the Numismatic Society. (All that ostentation for a bunch of coin collectors?) Now, the Academy shares the central piazza with Boricua College and the New York Hispanic Society.

The bulletin board made from the double doors that led to the rest of the house.

Another memorable afternoon

Sarah Shafer

The Independence Sinfonia group keeps raising the bar for itself. Usually, I attend concerts by small, semi-professional orchestras with modest hopes. I’m content with the passable reading of a familiar piece, and I’m willing to forgive the occasional the whining intonations and the ragged tuttis in return for an enthusiastic performance in an intimate venue. But the Independence Sinfonia, under Jerome Rosen, no longer has the cushion of low expectations. Yesterday’s performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 103 and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 was as good as any concert in recent memory -- or long-term memory, for that matter. The orchestra played wonderfully, which was all the more impressive since the musicians told me afterward that they had not read through the pieces in their entirety during rehearsals. They had spent all of their time polishing up individual sections, they said. Special mention goes to concertmaster William Phillips, who had meaty solos in both works, and first trumpet Rick Yiensgt, whose fanfares in the first movement of the Mahler nearly reduced me to tears.

The soprano Sarah Shafer, in a royal -blue gown, was touching, wide-eyed presence in “The Heavenly Life,” although, based on what I heard, I can’t judge if she’s destined for the brilliant future Jerry predicted for her. For the performance, she stood back among the woodwinds, which was a mistake, I think, even in the small room at Or Hadesh. But it’s a minor complaint. I could hear every word.

One player summed up the experience afterward by saying, in reference to Jerry Rosen, "It helps to have a retired genius in charge." Then again, I don't think genius every really retires.

On the strength of my preview in the paper, I was invited to the post-concert party. Thanks, Faith, for all the orange juice. Compliments, too, to third trumpet Mark Handler, who provided the chocolate cookies.

Sarah Shafer sings Mahler

The 25-year-old soprano Sarah Shafer, who has a few weeks left as a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, will perform Sunday with the Independence Sinfonia in Fort Washington. Shafer will appear as soloist in the last movement of Mahler's Fourth Symphony, and Jerry Rosen, the Sinfonia's music director, tells me she is destined for great things. You can read my preview here.

The Independence Sinfonia is, in my opinion, the best of Philadelphia's several suburban orchestras, largely because of the work Rosen has done with the string section in the past few years.

Totes Florio

I spent an enjoyable hour yesterday afternoon at Ursinus College, where I attended a performance of Carmina Burana, surely the most famous cantata ever written about drinking and horniness. It’s by no means a great work, but it went down well on a sunny spring afternoon when the trees were blooming and the young women on campus were parading about in their gym shorts. The version I heard yesterday was for reduced forces – chorus, soloists, two pianos and percussion -- which emphasized Orff’s debt to Stravinsky’s Les Noces, but which I preferred to my overblown orchestral recording.

John French conducted, wearing an academic robe and a tasseled beret. He said afterward he wore it as a joke a joke on the singers. He called it his medieval costume, and indeed, he did somewhat resemble the statue of Zacharias Ursinus that stands on the lawn between the concert hall and the art museum.

The instrumentalists were from the University of Delaware Percussion Ensemble, directed by Harvey Price, whom I came to know in 2012 when a group of Delawareans performed Pierrot Lunaire at the German Society of Pennsylvania. Standouts for me were the lovely, light tone of the women’s chorus in “Chume, chum, geselle min” and tenor Robert O’Neill’s cracked falsetto in “Olim lacus colueram,” the song of the swan as it is roasted slowly on a spit. O’Neill was very funny, fanning himself with his score, though it didn’t seem most of the audience picked up on the joke. (Strangely, that was all he had to do.)

Oh, and I didn’t mention the concert was free. Ursinus has a great music program with many free concerts during the year. Next Sunday, the Independence Sinfonia will play Haydn’s 103rd and Mahler’s 4th in Fort Washington.

It was fifty years ago today

The Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show fifty years ago last night. I was six years old in February 1964, and their performance is my second earliest memory of an event of public importance. (The first was the assassination of John Kennedy.) As with all early memories, this one is sketchy, consisting of only a few vivid impressions that can be summarized briefly: I remember the sense of anticipation before the broadcast, which emanated from my older sisters, the ghostly image of four long-haired boys on our black-and-white Zenith TV, and my mother’s reaction, which was, simply, that their faces were dirty and needed to be washed. (Mom had a knack for seizing on insignificant details, usually on the basis of bad information. It didn’t occur to her that the dirt thought she saw was actually shadows. )

In the days that followed, however, the Beatles became a large part of our lives. Their music, names and images were everywhere, especially at the Jersey shore, were we spent a week every summer. (My brother had a John Lennon beach towel.) Beatlemania was a real phenomenon, one that is difficult to convey to younger people. You couldn’t escape it. Not that you wanted to, since everyone agreed that the Beatles were, in fact, fab.

Which they were. I was reminded of just how fab yesterday when I played cuts from the two Past Masters CDs, a collection of singles and covers the boys put out in addition to their albums. One cover, Larry Williams’ headlong rocker “Slow Down,” sung by John, was a favorite when I was small. Back then, it appeared on a quickie LP, rushed into stores in a vain attempt to satisfy the insatiable American market, called “Something New.” I remember listening to it over and over again in our dining room, kneeling backwards on a chair, facing the speakers that stood on what we called the buffet, and shaking my seven-year-old behind.

“Something New” also contained another favorite, Carl Perkins’ “Matchbox,” sung by Ringo. I was the youngest of four children, and Ringo became my favorite Beatle by default. My older sisters grabbed John and George. My brother declared for Paul. Ringo was the only one left, but I embraced him gladly. It was a particular point of pride that his real name was Richard, which is my middle name.

So I was happy last night when he reprised the tune on the overproduced, badly miked “tribute” program commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Sullivan appearance. He was in fine voice. The same cannot be said of Paul McCartney, whom I could barely hear through the cavernous acoustics of the hall and the slick, anonymous instrumentals. To be fair, Paul had a much greater range than Ringo ever did, and if he’s lost more of his voice over the years, it is only because he had more to lose.

As for the rest of the program, the less said the better. It was the kind of smarmy, star-studded extravaganza that the Beatles, with their honesty and their raw energy, rendered obsolete in the Sixties. Back then, for a time at least, it was about the joy of making music. The Beatles belonged to us, to everyone. Last night, it was about the rich and famous basking in reflected glory. The covers were mostly awful. Dave Grohl’s “Hey Bulldog” landed close to the mark, though he lacked John’s growl. Most memorable was John Legend’s honeyed rendition of “Let It Be.” Alicia Keys should have gotten out of his way.

John Lennon once said that if the Beatles ever reunited, they would just be four old men trotting out their greatest hits. After last night I can see what he meant, but I wonder if it would really have been such a bad thing. Yoko gave the enterprise her blessing: She was there in the audience, rocking out. (Was she high?) Paul and Ringo looked great, and they seemed to be having a wonderful time. I like to think John would have put his grudges aside and joined his old friends onstage. George, too. The songs have aged well, and the fact two of the men who created them have died, and other two have grown old, does not diminish them. They’ll survive another hundred years of bad tributes.

Music of mourning

Last night, while surfing the web, I discovered that my ex-wife died last November of ovarian cancer. Neither she nor any member of her family had informed me she was ill. We had not spoken for several years, but needless to say, I was badly shaken, and although it was late, I went to the stereo to find some kind of relief in music.

My first choice was Ralph Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony. The second was Debussy's "Homage a Rameau" for solo piano. Both of these old favorites came into my head almost as soon as I became aware my ex was gone. Both are gentle, contemplative, and dignified, but with an undercurrent of strength. The fourth movement of the Vaughan Williams, especially, has a wonderful climactic moment in which a wave of sound rises swiftly, but with a satisfying motivation, and crashes over the rocks on shore.

This afternoon, before I walked to work in the snowstorm, the music was more about affirmation than sadness - Bach's Partita No. 2 for solo violin, and Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32. Bach's Chaconne is one of those works that instill a sense of awe over the human mind can conceive. The finale of the Beethoven breaks the bonds of earth. The performances were by Arthur Grumiaux and Alfred Brendel.

I don't know what I will need to turn to next.

Back online

To all seven of my readers: Sorry I've been silent the past few weeks, but I moved to Norristown at the end of December, and most of my time was taken up with packing, unpacking, and nursing sore muscles. At some point I'll be posting again. Thanks to my best friend in the whole world, who shall remain anonymous, and who drove in from out of state to help me carry the boxes and boxes of books and CDs. Also a shout out to his son. who said he would help, then changed his mind at the last minute. Twerp.

More live music

Between one thing and another, I have fallen far behind on my blogging, but I didn’t want too much time to go by without mentioning a pair of memorable concerts I attended in the weeks before the Carter tribute at Carnegie Hall. The concerts took place on consecutive Sundays. On November 3, I drove out to Swarthmore (may the builders of I-95 roast in eternal perdition) to hear Orchestra 2001 and the Daedalus Quartet perform music by Walton, Joan Tower, and Schoenberg. The quartet played Joan Tower’s String Quartet No. 5, titled White Water, and, with baritone Randall Scarlata and pianist Charles Abramovic, Arnold Schoenberg’s 1942 “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte.” The afternoon began and ended with orchestra itself, dressed in red and black, playing William Walton’s early, sprawling “Façade,” split into two big sections, with Scarlata and the sublime Suzanne DuPlantis as narrators. Performances were uniformly excellent. The Tower was easy to follow, with broad lines and open textures, but it seemed to me more well-crafted than inspired, somewhat like the music of Walter Piston.

The greatest piece on the program was the Schoenberg, but for its sheer playfulness, the Walton made the strongest impression. It’s an eclectic piece, a sort of mixture of Pierrot Lunaire and A Soldier’s Tale, with a bit of Three-Penny Opera thrown in. Like The Rite of Spring ten years earlier, it caused a scandal at its premiere. Before the performance, James Freeman, 2001’s conductor, said the poet Edith Sitwell, who provided texts, had to sneak out of the theater, because, it was warned, she might come to some harm. Freeman said he had always envied Walton and Stravinsky for the violence and passion of those first responses, and he encouraged us to boo, if we felt like it. A few of us did, just to be polite, but we were all in much too good a mood to make a serious show of it. The performance was great fun. I told both James and Suzanne I wished the group would record it.

A week later, I had a lovely afternoon in the genial company of Mozart and Beethoven, courtesy of the Independence Sinfonia, which is fast becoming the best of Philadelphia’s small suburban orchestras. The concert was held at Or Hadash synagogue in Whitemarsh, in a boxy, wood-paneled sanctuary that conductor Jerome Rosen said was built as a music hall. The orchestra has about forty musicians, more enough to create a thrilling, knockout sound in such intimate surroundings. There was a tangibility to the music, a sense of envelopment you don’t get in the big halls,. Even with the biggest and best orchestras.

Charles Salinger was the Apollonian soloist in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A. Rosen told me afterward he was especially proud of the job the musicians did in this piece, but after the concert, my head remained full of Beethoven, if only because his music is less subtle. The concert began with the Overture to “the “Creatures of Prometheus” and ended with the Fourth Symphony. The group was tight and fluent in both. Special mention should be made of bassoonist Judy Frank, who nailed the little cadenza in the last movement of the symphony. (The conductor gave her a congratulatory OK sign from the podium.) The passage is as challenging as a fifty-two yard field goal, Rosen said. Even the most experienced player can muff it, but when it works, it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

There. I am now caught up. It is cold tonight. Time to curl up under the covers with tea and Updike’s Couples.

All Carter, all the time

Yesterday I took the Jersey Transit to New York for the 2 p.m. all-Elliott Carter program at Carnegie Hall. Leon Botstein conducted the American Symphony Orchestra with guest artists Anthony McGill, clarinet; Mary MacKenzie, soprano; and Teresa Buchholz, mezzo. The hall was less than half full. Up in the dress circle, where I was sitting, everyone would have fit into one of the five seating sections. As with all Carter concerts, however, the crowd, such as it was, was knowledgeable and enthusiastic. It was rewarded with a good concert that fell several steps short of great.

The bad news first: The program ended with the extraordinary Concerto for Orchestra from 1969, the piece I was most eager to hear, and the afternoon’s big disappointment. The reading was note perfect, but it lacked definition. The climactic moments didn’t stand out, and individual incidents did not emerge from the surrounding texture so much as they sat on top of it. In short, the music didn’t flow. The pieces were all there, but they did not come together. I missed the energy, the grandeur and the spaciousness I find in my several recordings of the work. A friend said afterwards that if he were feeling generous, he would describe the performance as subdued and lyrical. I’ll forego generosity and call it weak. The musicians found it rough going, I suspect, but the failure was ultimately Botstein’s. Back in 2008, Oliver Knussen proved just how exciting the piece can be when he led a pickup orchestra of young musicians in a well-shaped, thrilling performance at the Tanglewood Music Festival. (Anyone curious about why I love this music should watch the performance video on YouTube.)

On the plus side (and it was a big plus), Anthony McGill was dazzling in the 1996 Clarinet Concerto, and Botstein was wise enough not to stand in his way. His tempos were brisk, and if he wasn’t especially nuanced, he was exciting. From the very opening riffs, he swung. It was the most memorable performance of the day.

The concert opened with a solid reading of Pocahontas, Carter's attractive and underplayed ballet from the late 1930s (though the Suite was composed 1960). This is early Carter, written in the rangy, relatively populist style he was devoted to at the time, and while it has been described as derivative of several other composers, it has a feeling of its own, marked by the composer’s way with counterpoint and a love of percussion that became increasingly important in his later work. It was a pleasure to hear.

In the second half, just before the Concerto for Orchestra, MacKenzie and Buchholz joined Botstein and the crew for two early songs. MacKenzie was touching in “A Warble for Lilac Time,” though from where I was sitting, it was hard to judge Buchholz’s handling of “Voyage,” since she was swamped several times by the orchestra.

The program also included an oddly energetic performance of the supposedly contemplative “Sound Fields” for strings.