Essays After a Sonata

For the past few weeks I've been living with Kyle Gann's new book, Charles Ives's Concord: Essays After a Sonata, an exhaustive study that combines literary history, musical analysis, and aesthetic philosophy. It's an endlessly fascinating resource and a book I'll be returning to often.

Analyzing a favorite piece of music is, for me, rather like describing a mental state in terms of neural activity. It's necessary, I suppose, but does little to capture the quality of the experience. As detailed and daunting as Gann's vivisections can be, however, they do us the service of exposing the planning and intelligence -- the artistry, if  you will -- that Ives lavished on his Second Piano Sonata. The underlying unity of a composition is "not a selling point that would have impressed Ives," Gann says. Still, it impresses me. And although Ives downplayed the value of form -- what he would call "manner" -- in evaluating a work of art, it is also true that after self-publishing the Concord in 1920, he devoted the better part of three decades to revising, editing, and tweaking the score until he arrived at a form that satisfied him. And even then it didn't, quite.

Gann's chapters on the Essays Before a Sonata, the short volume Ives published as a companion to the Concord, are more fun, though less essential to understanding the music, and they go a long way toward rehabilitating Ives as a thinker and prose stylist. Ives was not the first to judge art from a moral standpoint, or in terms of a fundamental duality. In both respects, Gann argues, he owes a large, mostly unacknowledged debt to John Ruskin. Gann admits, however, that "in the end, Ives's treatise on substance and manner may have to remain for us, no practical typology or description." In other words, it doesn't offer much of a guide on the best places to spend our entertainment dollar. To my mind, dualisms like substance and manner can create a useless diversion, entangling the listener in endless parlor games about which pieces conform to the standard and which don't. They also deny us our right to determine our own response to a work of art. A song or a symphony may be enjoyed for any number of reasons, no one of which is deeper or more authentic than any other. To paraphrase Ives's father: Don't pay too much attention to substance. If you do, you may miss the music.

I've listened to the Concord Sonata countess times over the years, and I've seen it performed live more often than any other piece. Now I'm hearing it again with fresh ears, picking out details that had grown almost inaudible through repetition. I am grateful to Gann for reintroducing me to a piece I thought I knew well, and for loving Ives as much as I do.

(I should also mention the book includes a concise, helpful chapter on Ives's First Piano Sonata, a remarkable work that is often overlooked beside the Concord. This week,  I listened to it again, in Donna Coleman's fiery recording, and with Gann's notes in mind, I was able to navigate its conflicting cross-currents without once losing my bearings.)

Ives Uncaged

The microtonalist composer and theorist Johnny Reinhard invited me to his New York apartment Sunday to hear a new recording, which he is producing, of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. There must be dozens of recordings of the piece. What makes this one unique is that it involves two pianists ― the young powerhouses Gabriel Zucker and Erika Dohi ― playing separate instruments tuned according to what Johnny calls an “extended Pythagorean” system, or “the spiral of fifths.”

The tuning creates 24 tones per octave and, Johnny says, comes closer to what the composer must have had in mind when he wrote the sonata. In this score, as in others, Ives distinguishes between tones that in equal temperament are enharmonic ― placing, for example, an F sharp beside a G flat in the same measure. To his copyists, this was just bad notation, and it drove them batty. In the Pythagorean system, however, the tones are distinct, and Johnny insists that with his version, he is merely taking Ives at his word.

He also finds justification for his approach in this paragraph from the Epilogue of Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata:

In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones ― when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now ― perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe the music is not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may be a transcendental language in the most extravagant sense. Possibly the power of literally distinguishing these “shades of abstraction” ― these attributes paralleled by “artistic intuitions” (call them what you will) ― is ever to be denied man for the same reason that the beginning and end of a circle are to be denied.

The century Ives predicted, Johnny said, is now. The circle has been broken, swept up into a spiral of fifths.

Of course, the proof of any theory is in the listening, and I have to say, there are many stunning, ear-stretching moments in this recording. The word that kept recurring to me throughout the 40-minute running time was “liberated.” The dense, complex “Emerson” movement, in particular, gains a new power and resonance. The music seems propelled by a long-pent-up energy, like a tiger suddenly let loose  from a cage. The fresh charge comes at a cost, however, as the last two movements, in which Ives progressively thins out the textures, lose some of their accustomed flavor. “The Alcotts” sounds less naive, “Thoreau” less transparent, with the flute solo at the end (performed sensitively enough by Erin Keppner) struggling to break through the haze. But these are initial impressions, derived perhaps from a lifetime of familiarity with standard performances ― if any performance of the Concord may be called “standard.”  With repeated listening, I expect I might find new values to replace the old.

The two-piano version did not require any form of re-arrangement, Johnny said. All he did was take two copies of the score, black out some of the notes in each, and highlight others. The problems of coordination for the two musicians must have been staggering, but Zucker and Dohi rise to the challenge with astonishing precision. The performance is seamless.

---------

Tuning for the two-piano, microtonal Concord Sonata:

Piano I (Zucker)

  C#   D#         F#    G#   A#

C    D     E     F     G      A     B

Piano II (Dohi)

   Db   Eb            Gb    Ab    Bb

B#   Cx    Fb    E#    Fx    Gx   Cb

Shall we gather at the river?

Congratulations and thank you to the Fine Art Music Company for its exhilarating program of American music this weekend in Philadelphia. The performances, held Saturday evening at Ivy Hall and Sunday afternoon at the Ethical Society, were timed -- intentionally, I am told -- to correspond with Tuesday's general election. I joked, ruefully, that it might be the last time I feel good about being an American for a long time to come.

But feel good I did. The program was well-chosen and lovingly presented. I was familiar with most of the music, but two pieces -- Paul Bowles's Six Preludes for Piano and William Grant Still's Suite for Violin and Piano -- were new to me.

Bowles's Preludes are short, finely etched studies that the pianist, Kasia Marzec-Salwinski, compared to the character pieces of Schumann. Still's Suite shoehorns elements of jazz and spirituals into rather a conventional framework.

By contrast, Charles Ives's Fourth Violin Sonata, which opened the second half of the program, does away with frameworks altogether. Subtitled "Children's Day at the Camp Meeting," it is not one of Ives's more avant-garde works, but it bristles with mischief, and Jonathan Moser, the afternoon's violinist, navigated the mood swings with remarkable clarity of tone, while Kasia, on piano, more than held her own in a piece that mocks the very notion of holding your own.

The Ives was one of two high points of the afternoon for me. The other was the finale, Gershwin's ubiquitous "Rhapsody in Blue," in Henry Levine's arrangement for piano four hands. This is not a piece I need to listen to a lot, though I certainly don't avoid it. Gershwin's concert music is often better remembered than heard -- that is, the melodies are so good they stick in the mind long after you've forgotten just how clunky the structures are. But any doubts as to the music's ultimate value were banished here. Kasia and Rollin Wilber breezed through it with an enthusiasm that proved infectious. It was obvious they were having a high old time.

I don't want to leave out flutist Elivi Varga, who performed Copland's Duo for Flute and Piano and Samuel Barber's Canzone (with  Rollin on piano in the former, Kasia in the latter). These are relatively minor works, but they are pretty, and Varga gave a radiant luster to both of them. She was especially effective in the Barber.  

I also want to thank the musicians for inviting me to join them onstage for the Q&A session after the concert, when I was asked to say a few words about Charles Ives. In gratitude, I kept my comments short.

Florence Foster Jenkins and Charles Ives

In an earlier post, I referred to Florence Foster Jenkins, portrayed by Meryl Streep in the eponymous film, as a horror. Now,  however, the blog Voice Science Works has defended her, or at least her right to sing, because of her enthusiasm and her love of music. "Do we want a world where only a few will sing due to social  pressures," the blogger asks, "or one where we all understand that our voices have enormous potential should we seek to find it?"

Personally, I'd go with the social pressures. Ara longa, perhaps, but vita is too damned brevis to put up with incompetence, let alone encourage it. I wouldn't want to waste my time on an execrable singer any more than I would on a juggler who keeps dropping his clubs. Performance might benefit from passion, but it also demands skill.

And yet ... the blogger's defense reminds me of a passage from the Memos of Charles Ives, whose music I have loved since I was a kid and whose ideas have been an ever-present challenge:

Once a nice young man (his musical sense having been limited by three years' intensive study at the Boston Conservatory) said to Father, "How can you stand to hear old John Bell (the best stone-mason in town) sing?" (as he used to at Camp Meetings). Father said, "He is a supreme musician." The young man (nice and educated) was horrified -- "Why, he sings off key, the wrong notes and everything -- and that horrible, raucous voice -- and he bellows out at hits notes no one else does -- it's awful!" Father said, "Watch him closely and reverently, look into his  face and hear the music of the ages. Don't pay too much attention to the sounds -- for if you do, you may miss the music."

Uh oh.

Ives spent much of his creative energy trying to capture the spirit behind the sounds, and, looking at the joy in Streep's face as she butchered "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen," I had to ask myself, have I been missing the music? Is Florence Forster Jenkins the embodiment of the Ivesian ideal of substance over manner?

On this occasion, I'm going to comfort myself by saying no. In the first place, Florence would have hated Charlie's music, as well as his idea that dissonance can lead to higher truth. At the end of the film, we hear her as she heard herself, and in her own mind, she sang like an angel. Earlier, when pianists are auditioning to be her accompanist, we find she can't bear loud, aggressive playing, though her sensitivity was likely a symptom of her lifelong syphilitic condition. Volume and aggressiveness were, of course, staples of Ives's repertoire -- as was humor, and while Jenkins's listeners might feel free to laugh, she took herself seriously.

Ives also would have despised Jenkins's choice of material, which for him typified the easy, spiritually bankrupt world he was rebelling against. For Ives, a man singing a hymn off key is channeling God. A woman singing Mozart, no matter how well, is just singing Mozart.

(Zappa, I think, would have loved her, just as he loved the Shaggs, who he insisted were better than the Beatles. But for Frank, wrong notes weren't about the music of the ages. They were about the subversion of information.)

Over the years, hostile or condescending critics have leveled the same charges against Ives that some reviewers leveled against Jenkins -- amateurism, sloppy technique, and the use of wealth as a buffer against reality -- but right or wrong, Ives was an artist, and a skilled one. His dissonances have purpose, often to wonderful effect, and whatever spiritual vision his scores possess comes though more clearly and forcefully through -- dare I say it? -- a good performance.

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.

Ives Updates

Yesterday was Charles Ives's bithday, which is always a special occasion for me, even if I do nothing to observe it. I didn't get to listen to post or listen to any music yesterday, but I wa pleased to receive the following e-newletter from James Sinclair and the Charles Ives Society: 

Happy 139th Birthday to Charles Ives!!

Ives’s West Redding house sold
Ives’s 101-year old house in West Redding, Connecticut sold to a family from New York City. The new owners are doing restorations and carefully considered renovations which are scheduled to be completed by May 2014. They express a strong interest in having Ives’s music performed inside the house and on the grounds.

Findings in the West Redding barn
Several Ives scholars did a carefully combing of the dusty old red barn (wherein Rocket the horse once lived) and found interesting and important items which have been transferred to the Yale Music Library. A decade of personal checks now documents the Ives’s daily expenses in 1933–43 and two marked up copies of 114 Songs (one labeled “Master Copy”) hold otherwise unknown editing by Ives. A doctoral dissertation is in the works at Indiana University about these editorial revelations.

Ives’s West Redding music room
One of the important necessities of closing down the Ives house in West Redding was to save Ives’s music room for posterity. The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City accepted the donation of the full contents of the room and is building an exact replica of Ives’s study, complete with the views out the windows. The room will become available in later November 2013 for viewing and scholarly pursuits. The AAAL is located at W. 155th St. and Broadway in New York.

Complete Organ Works edition
Published this last fall by Theodore Presser Co.: The Complete Organ Works (62 pp. of music plus 16 pp. of historical and critical notes); William Osborne wrote the preface.

In the pipeline at Peermusic:
Robert Browning Overture, String Quartet No. 1, and a volume of the complete Ives marches for piano.

New biography Stephen Budiansky has written a new biography of Charles Ives. Release is expected in March 2014.

New children’s book on Ives
“The Extraordinary Music of Mr. Ives”, written and illustrated by Joanne Stanbridge [Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, ISBN 978-0-547-23866-1]

All-Ives concert
Orchestra New England will celebrate its 40th birthday with an all-Ives concert, on Saturday, March 8, 2014 in New Haven, Connecticut. James Sinclair will conduct. The orchestra began with an all-Ives concert in March 1974 which immediately lead to a recording for CBS Masterworks.

Carter Memorial

I attended my first all−Elliott Carter program in April 1976, when Speculum Musicae performed at the YMHA on South Broad Street in Philadelphia. I was 18 years old. Fred Sherry played the Cello Sonata. Rolf Schulte played the Duo. Both were accompanied by Ursula Oppens on piano.

Last night, I watched Schulte, Sherry, and Oppens present the world premiere of Epigrams, the last piece Elliott Carter wrote. Little has changed in 37 years (and Rolf’s hair hasn’t changed at all). The biggest difference between last night and 1976 is that last night, Mr. Carter was not present.

The premiere was the centerpiece of a memorial concert at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre in Manhattan. Just about everyone who matters in Carter’s world was there. Friends greeted one another with kisses. The men wore ties. Carter’s son, David, delivered a brief speech from his wheelchair. Several of Carter’s musical friends and associates also spoke. I felt as though I had walked into the kind of wake I used to attend as a Catholic schoolboy. The only things missing were the smell of eucalyptus and the open casket.

My sense sense loss was strongest, however, during a brief film that included old interviews with the composer. It pained me to watch him speak from the grave. I was also reminded of how much I miss Charles Rosen, who appeared in several clips.

(Rosen spoke of the way in which Carter synthesized the legacies of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. The legacy of Ives went unacknowledged.)

Besides Epigrams, the program included Mad Regales, for six voices a cappella, and What Are Years? — the song cycle on poems of Marianne More. Lucy Shelton was the vocalist. David Fulmer conducted. The performances were all excellent, if brief. (In a program lasting close to two hours, there was perhaps 40 minutes worth of music.) Mad Regales was especially memorable, thanks largely to the presence of the bass baritone Evan Hughes. Oppens introduced Epigrams as  “twelve examples of how not to write a trio” and said Carter had fun writing it.

From my perspective, it’s a small-scale tour de force, an exploration of the sonorities possible in the unwieldy combination of violin, cello, and piano. Carter enjoyed a challenge, and the challenge in this case was balance. Despite the brevity of the movements, it’s a substantial piece, and it seemed fitting that the last note of the last composition Carter would ever write was a single violin pizzicato preceded by several seconds of silence. Under the circumstances, it felt like a gesture of farewell.

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.

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.

Anyone want to play Charles Ives on stage?

The following announcement showed up in my email this week:

Charles Ives Take Me Home – Equity Principal Auditions
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

Category: Performer

Description:

Written by: Jessica Dickey
Directed by: Daniella Topol
Artistic Director: David Van Asselt
First Rehearsal: 4/29/13. RUNS: 5/29 – 6/13/13

When a father's love of music clashes with his daughter's passion for basketball, modernist composer Charles Ives is the perfect referee. Charles Ives Take Me Home is a comedic and poignant story of dissonance, defense, and devotion.

CHARLES IVES: The modernist composer. Well into the latest years of his life, but full of enthusiasm and mischief and humor and mental acumen. Deeply subversive and humanist.

COACH LAURA STARR: 30s. Slightly butch, geeky, high school basketball coach. Takes the game very seriously. Great dribbling skills. Tough and vulnerable.

JOHN STARR: 50s. A talented violinist. Strict, patriarchal, devoted to his music, a cold father. Resentful of sports.

Company:

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

Audition Information

Wednesday, January 9, 2013
9:30 AM — 5:30 PM
Lunch from 1 - 2.

Where:

At the Actors' Equity Audition Center
165 West 46th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY

Notes/What to bring:

Please prepare a contemporary dramatic monologue under 2 minutes.
Bring picture and resume, stapled together.

 

 

I would love to play Ives, although I haven't acted in 20 years, and I would probably be a much better fit for the role of John Starr. I am also not a member of Actors' Equity. I also want to get in touch with Jessica Dickey, the playwright, about this project. I have only one request of her: Please make sure that whoever you cast gets the voice right. Charles Ives was a softspoken New Englander, not a crusty old coot. — Joe

Another Concord

For reasons I won’t go into, the Italian pianist Roberto Ramadori found me online and sent me his recording of Ives's Concord Sonata. It's an exciting, thoughtful performance, and it was especially refreshing coming after my disappointment in Jeremy Denk's clotted, overpraised version. Where Denk bangs away as though Ives were an American Liszt, Roberto approaches the "Concord" almost like Bach -- not in a way that dries it out, but in a way that clarifies the textures and equalizes the independent voices. I was especially impressed with his treatment of the Hawthorne movement, which has in general been my least favorite of the four.

The timings are longer than on most other recordings. Roberto brings in the piece at just 12 seconds shy of any hour -- an almost epic duration -- and the music only accumulates power as it goes on. I have at least a dozen recordings of the Concord, and I can see myself spending more and more time with this one.

It is not available in the US, but it can be found at Amazon Italy. At 13 euros, it’s a steal.

The little yellow stripe in the upper corner of the booklet touts this CD as the "first Italian recording." I don't know why that should make any difference. When the first Latvian recording appears, I'll know we've arrived.

Don't forget to tune in to Marvin's Rosen's Classical Discoveries 21st century marathon at 10:30 a.m. EST on Saturday, Dec. 29, when I'll be introducing Carter's Cello Concerto. WPRB is at 103.3 on the FM dial in the Princeton area. The show may also be heard online at WPRB.com.

Marja Kaisla performs at Woodmere

Marja Kaisla played an engaging if lightweight recital yesterday at the Woodmere Art Museum, Chestnut Hill. It was a cozy way to spend a dark, rainy afternoon. The program was split between Rachmaninov and Gershwin. The former was represented by the famous C# minor Prelude and the Corelli Variations, the latter by a selection of songs arrangements and the solo piano version of "Rhapsody in Blue." In her opening remarks, Marja drew a comparison between the two men, who were friends in the 20s, and played sections of the Rhapsody and Rachmaninov's Concerto No. 2 to illustrate the similarities in harmony and melodic treatment. Based on juxtaposition, one would guess there was no difference between the two except the one used jazz rhythms. Marja is an engaging personality and a sensitive interpreter with a mighty technique. I saw her perform the "Emperor" Concerto a couple of years ago, and last night's recital made me wish I could hear her in more substantive repertoire again very soon.



Just to catch up: I neglected to mention the wonderful American program at Arcadia University on Nov. 17. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Symphony Orchestra played music of Copland (the Clarinet Concerto), Ives (The Third Symphony), and Barber (Adagio for Strings, Knoxville: Summer 1915). The orchestra, under the direction of Allan Scott, seemed rather under-rehearsed in the Ives (and I didn't care for the synthesized church bells at the end), but it shined in "Knoxville" behind soprano Elizabeth Ann Murphy. The Copland was well-played by clarinetist Beth Vilsmeire, but again, the strings seemed a ragged. The concductor, Allan Scott, told me afterward the string writing is quite difficult, requiring a great deal of fast bowing off .



I was also told by the PR that Scott became rather nervous, knowing I would be in the audience. Apparently, he was afraid of what I'd find fault with the Ives Third. The musicians tried to reassure him, saying that most people don't know what to expect when it comes to Ives, but he said something like, "No, this guy knows things normal people don't know."



That pretty much says it all.

 

Upcoming concerts in and around Philadelphia

The Philadelphia Singers will present a program of Amiercan choral music in Paoli and Philadelphia the weekend of Oct. 27. Highlight for me will be Carter's two Dickinson settings from the 1930s and '40s. Read my interview with choral director David Hayes.

In another (for me) exciting development, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Symphony Orchestra will present an American program Nov. 17, which I will also write about in due course. The concert will include Barber's Adagio for Strings, which is a bit of a snooze at this point, but the other works on tap more than make up for it: Barber's Knoxville, Copland's Clarinet Concerto, and Ives's little Third Symphony.

And I had to speak French

Last Thursday, Oct. 4, I interviewed both Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the incoming music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and soprano superstar Renée Fleming for a preview of the season opener coming up next week. You can read all about it here. I will add only that both Yannick and Fleming were relaxed and chatty, which went a long way toward making me feel the same way.

At the end of my 25 minutes or so with Yannick, I told him I could not let the opportunity pass without making a request. He chuckled and told me to go ahead. I told him my favorite composer is Charles Ives — “Oh!” I heard him say — and the one symphony by Ives the Philadelphia Orchestra has never played is the Fourth. (It has played the first three, plus the two orchestral sets and the Holidays, but never the Fourth. It also has never played the Robert Browning Overture, but one step at time.)

He seemed surprised by the fact, and he said he would take the suggestion seriously. He has already met with management to discuss major works that do not yet belong to the orchestra’s repertoire, he said, and the Ives should be added to the list. So who knows? Maybe in another couple of years. I told him that if he does schedule the piece, I would attend every performance, which also seemed to amuse him.

In my first attempt to phone Yannick — at home in Montreal — I got the wrong number. A woman answered, and since Fleming, whom I spoke to earlier, had screened my call (someone named Paul answered), I assumed the maestro was doing the same thing. The woman sounded elderly, and for a second I thought maybe it was his mom.

I asked to speak with him, and she said, “Comment?”

So, reaching back to my high school French, I said something like, “Je voudrais parler avec Monsieur Nézet-Séguin.” She mumbled something I didn’t understand, and the line went dead.

Ives's Fouth Symphony and Carter's Concerto for Orcehstra

As I said in my previous post, the time I spent of the air with Marvin Rosen July 25 went by very quickly — so quickly, indeed, that I did not have the opportunity to play all of the music I wanted. One of the pieces I cut before I even got to the studio was the second movement, the so-called "comedy," of Charles Ives's Symphony No. 4, which I wanted to contrast with Elliott Carter's Concerto for Orchestra. I have long thought that the latter would not have been feasible without the example of the former, even though Carter never mentions it in his list of inspirations for the piece.

To my ear, both pieces have a similar expressive arc, and they end in much the same way: all hell breaks loose and then things get very quiet, quickly in the case of the Ives, more gradually in the case of Carter. Although Ives completed his Fourth Symphony by the mid-1920s, more or less, and Eugene Goosens conducted the first two movements as early as 1927, a performance of the full work had to wait until 1965, when Stokowski led the premiere at Carnegie Hall. The famous first recording, still considered definitive, followed in a few months.

This was just a couple of years before Carter began to plan his Concerto for Orchestra. He certainly was familiar with the Ives, having attempted to edit the manuscript at one point, and with the Stokowski LP, and I insist that it was lurking somewhere in the back of his mind as he fulfilled his commission from the New York Philharmonic. To me, it is almost as though he set out to re-write Ives's symphony while eliminating what he always thought to be its flaws — first, the use of musical quotations, and, second, the muddied orchestrations in which some instruments are impossible to hear. One thing about Carter's music: as complex and multi-layered as it is, everything is audible. I floated my theory past one Carter expert who responded with what felt like an e-mailed shrug, but I stand by it. Not that it matters. The Concerto for Orchestra stands very much on its own.

A couple more

This from EH in response to my first clerihew:

The wife of Johann Sebastian Bach,
possessed of only a sock
for protection,
created for orchestra a violin section.

It took me a second to get it, but I like it tons. One thing I have sworn never to do is reverse word order for the sake of a rhyme, but EH is a Latin scholar, so we can forgive the "Latinate" construction.

And one more from me:

Charles Ives
Led two lives,
Which freed him to compose
"From Hanover Square North at the End of a Tragic Day the Voice of the People Again Arose."

Got $123.14?

This just in from the Charles Ives Society Newsletter:

The Ives Society Critical Edition of Ives｡ｯs Symphony No. 4 was published today by Associated Music Publishers (subsidiary of G. Schirmer). This is a landmark publication, among the most important accomplishments of the Ives Society, and made possible by the support of the Maxwell Foundation.

Mvts. 1&2 were premiered in 1927, mvt. 3 in 1933. The whole work was heard for the first time in April 1965. Since then the symphony has been performed hundreds of times, and recorded by at least nine conductors (Stokowski, Farberman, Serebrier, Ozawa, Dohnanyi, Thomas, Karabtchevsky, Adams, Litton, all using problematic performance materials. Under the guidance of Ives Society executive editor James Sinclair, four editors contributed to the new edition. A new performing edition, based on the Critical Edition, is now available for performances. This monumental work will now seem rather easier to rehearse!

You may now pre-order the cloth-bound score (with its attendant CD-ROM) from various locations including Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Symphony-No-Charles-Critical-Clothbound/dp/1458418480 where the publication shows a list price of $195.00 and a selling price of $123.14 (shipping starting January 8th).

The hell with that holiday contribution to the SPCA. This is much, much more important.

Barron centenary

My father, Adam T. Baranowski, was born 100 years ago today, on Dec. 18, 1911. That same year, Stravinsky finished Petrushka and began work on The Rite of Spring, Schoenberg composed Herzgewächse, Nielsen his Third Symphony and Violin Concerto, and Charles Ives had a number of projects in various stages of completion, including the Second String Quartet and the Robert Browning Overture.

Dad would never be aware of any of this. His own musical tastes ran to the Lawrence Welk Show, which to this day I regard as a form of child abuse. Of course, he felt assaulted by my preferences, too, and so the most meaningful way I can remember him today, I think, is to put on a Beatles album, or a Mahler Symphony, and imagine him yelling at me to turn it down.

The Third Symphony of Charles Ives

My experience in Danbury back weekend sent me back to my CDs of Charles Ives’s Third Symphony this week. It turns out I have accumulated more recordings of the work in the past few years than I realized — six in all, to wit:

Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbruecken, Michael Stern, cond. (Col legno 20225)
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, no conductor (DGG 439 869-2)
Northern Sinfonia, James Sinclair (Naxos 8.5559087)
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Neville Marriner (Decca 289 466 745-2)
Concertgebouw Orch., Michael Tilson Thomas (CBS Masterworks MK37823)
New Philharmonia Orch., Harold Farberman (Everyman 08 6154 71)

I’ve listened to them all in the past few days, and the winner is — well, I must confess I prefer the larger ensembles. Tilson Thomas has the greatest sensitivity to line, Marriner gets a beautiful tone out of the Academy musicians, and Farberman draws the most organlike feeling from the New Philharmonia, which to me is a plus, since the symphony is derived from earlier organ pieces. Farberman’s recording is also the only one that does not use the so-called shadow lines or the optional chimes at the close. I don’t miss either. I also like his slower tempos, esp. in the central “Children’s Day” movement. These three were my favorites, this time around.

The others are fine, too, in their ways, but the smaller groups — the Orpheus and the Northern Sinfonia — sound somewhat shrill at the climaxes, and perhaps Stern’s pacing isn’t as smooth as it could be.

Ives scholarship seems to be perpetually in flux, and, the dates of the symphony change, depending on which liner notes you read. The older CDs say the piece was “assembled” in 1904 and revised in 1909. The later recordings say it was written between 1908 and 1911. Take your choice.

Regardless of the forces used, it’s a beautiful piece. It’s not necessary to identify all of the borrowed hymn tunes to appreciate the music, and, indeed, I’ve been listening to the piece for decades without making the effort, but thanks to Nancy Sudik’s tutelage, I can now name them all.

On to Three Places in New England.