Project/Object

Project/Object, the band dedicated to the music of Frank Zappa (I don't like the term "tribute band"), will play the Sellersville Theater this Sunday. It's a little late for a 70th birthday celebration, but in my mind, it will honor the occasion. Lead vocalists this time around are Ray White and Ike Willis, from Frank's '70s and '80's bands, just as they were last time around. I wanted to re-interview Ray (first time I spoke with him was in 2009), but the scheduling didn't work out. I settled for Andre Cholmondeley, Project/Object's founder, who never knew Frank, although "settle" doesn't do justice to our conversation. The link to the article appears at left.

Steven Stull, Milton Babbitt

Baritone Steven Stull will sing Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer Sunday with the Bryn Athyn, Pa., Orchestra. My interview with him is linked at left. I take no responsibility for the headline.

And, before too much time goes by and it is no longer news, I note with sadness the passing of composer Milton Babbitt, who died Saturday, January 29, at 94. I've been honoring his memory the way one should honor any composer's memory — by listening to his music. Over the past week I've played my CD recording the Second String Quartet, Correspondences for orchestra and tape, None but the Lonely Flute, Around the Horn, Occasional Variations, and perhaps one or two other things. The music is, I have decided, attractive and engaging, and through repeated exposure, I am learning to pick out the incidents, if not follow the story. More listening will follow.

Other bloggers have paid more personal tributes to Babbitt, and I recommend you seek them out online. I heard him speak only once, back in the 1990s, when Orchestra 2001 performed his Transfigured Notes for string orchestra at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (This was the score that, a couple of years earlier, the Philadelphia Orchestra had commissioned and then rejected as unplayable. It has been played, and recorded, quite well since by other ensembles that actually seem to care about it.) I remember only one thing from the composer’s pre-concert talk: Babbitt said he did not use folk material in his music and he drew his inspiration instead from the likes of Schoenberg and Webern because, he said, "These are my folks."

Like everyone else in the modern world, composers are living much longer than they used to. I find it a disorienting trend. In Beethoven's day, no one was even guaranteed a "late period," and if he got one, it would last at most ten years. Now it can last up to sixty. Careers are now heavily end-loaded, and the late period is the career.

Jennifer Koh

Last week I interviewed the violinist Jennifer Koh, who will give a recital Feb. 3 in Elkins park, Pa. The link to the article appears at left. I was quite excited to speak with her, since she has recorded the Four Lauds of Elliott Carter. We spoke about twenty minutes. Nothing profound came out of it, but I enjoyed the chat.

I think she's a very beautiful woman, but this same week my managing editor interviewed the singer Rachael Platten. His article also appears in this week's Ticket, and all the buzz from our layout artist and pressmen was about the Platten photos, especially the large one used in the article (as opposed to the cover), which everyone was calling the centerfold. Sorry, Jennifer, I tried to get you noticed.

Ah, and this week, I received my recordings of Andras Schiff playing the Bach English suites, and Andrew Rangel, on Bridge, performing the Ives Sonata No. 1 and the Nielsen Suite Op. 45. An unusual pairing of two of my favorite composers — to my knowledge, the first ever on CD, even though Rnagell, in the booklet, points to some interesting similarities between them. So far I've listened to the Suite. It's a strong, almost stark reading. Very effective. Also very fond of Schiff's rather romantic performance of the Bach. I didn't think I would be (see the romantic reference in teh previous sentence), but at five bucks I couldn't pass it up.

Another day, another list

Critic Anthony Tommasini publishes his list of the ten greatest classical composers of all time in today's edition of the New York Times. My friend and fellow blogger Lisa Hirsch has called this a fool's errand, and I'm afraid I must agree, although, as the long list of comments following the article shows, the process does serve a purpose in generating intelligent discussion.

My own comment is No. 338. I repost it here (slightly edited) in case you overlooked it:

Nice, safe list. Nothing to disagree with, but nothing to get excited over, either. It's the names that didn't make it - but that "get me through my days," as Mr. Tommasini says - that call the whole list-making enterprise into question. If you love something that isn't demonstrably great, or not demonstrably as great as something else, then, it seems to me, the so-called objective criteria for greatness must lack some important element. Subjectivity must be served, and it is precisely such subjective reactions I find more interesting than discussions of range or influence or historical importance.

My favorite dead composers include Charles Ives and Carl Nielsen, who have taken me places no one else ever has, but I can see why a NYT critic would not include them in a list of "the greatest." On the other hand, I dislike Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, and I doubt any list or any amount of argument is going to convert me, however much the may deserve a seat at the table.

Maybe ten slots just isn't enough. A hundred probably wouldn't be, either.

Another commenter — one after my own heart — noted that Elliott Carter wasn't included. He wasn't even included in the list of composers the Times allowed readers to vote for as their favorites, whereas Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein were, and they are much lesser figures, in my humble estimation. But Mr. Tommasini's express criteria include mortality. In his view, one must be dead to be placed among the immortals. So Mr. Carter, at 102, is being penalized for his robust good health.

May he never be included in any list, ever, if it means he goes on living.

How memory works

Today is my Aunt Ella's birthday. Were she still alive, she'd be 107 years old. (She died in 2001 at age 98). I had forgotten the occasion was pending, and I remembered it only because Keith Olberman said on his broadcast last night, in one of those this-day-in-history" comments, that on Jan. 19, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII exchanged history's first transatlantic wireless telegrams.

How did that piece of trivia remind me of Aunt Ella's ? In 1993, when my aunt turned 90, I gave her a newspaper from the day she was born, and the telegrams were the subject of a brief story on Page 1. The other news of the day was unexceptional. The big headline of the day was a fire. It was a New York paper that has long since gone out of business (I forget the title), but I do recall a large fire in one of the outer boroughs.

Now it strikes me that I don't know what happened to the paper when Aunt Ella died.

Ah, now that's more like it

Received my copy of Donna Coleman's performance of the Concord Sonata in the mail today and have been listening to it for the last hour. I won't compare it favorably to other recordings — we are all involved in the common Ives project, and therefore all on the same side — but I will say I like very much the clarity of Coleman's playing, which keeps the themes in the forefront no matter how thick the textures get. I also like the way she distinguishes between passages of differing mood, sometimes simply with a long pause. There's a song-like quality to the playing, particularly in the Alcotts movement, when in a few spots Coleman seems to take on the role of Bronson Alcott's daughter Beth, idly picking out tunes for her own amusement on the "little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children," as Ives describes the scene in his Essays Before a Sonata.

This is an insightful performance that tells a story, as opposed to making a big noise, and it made me remember why I care about this music. If you're in the mood to acquire yet another recording of the Concord, I would recommend it.

The CD also includes fine readings of the Three Page Sonata and the rarely heard Emerson Transcriptions, brief, muscular distillations of material from the Concord Sonatas first movement. As Coleman says in the booklet, Ives couldn't leave this music alone.

No, I don't really like Denk's Ives

Jeremeny Denk's CD of Charles Ives's two piano sonatas has shown up on several end-of-the-year top-classical lists, and, being a big Ives aficionado, I am grateful to Denk for all his work on behalf of this composer, who seems to be rediscovered every few years, only to fall back into obscurity. The following is my review of the CD, which I have also posted at Amazon:

Jeremy Denk has become perhaps our most visible and articulate champion of the music of Charles Ives, which is all to the good. I very much enjoyed his performance, with Soovin Kim, of the composer's four violin sonatas in Philadelphia a few years ago, and so, when I heard he had recorded the two piano sonatas, I was excited. I asked for and received the CD for Christmas, and having listened to it, I have to say it's a disappointment. A big one. I have almost a dozen recordings of the Concord, fewer of the First Sonata, and Denk had not replaced any of them in my affections. He seems to think Ives is an American Liszt (as if we needed one), and he goes in for romantic bombast, banging away in the forte sections while smoothing over the mood shifts and jokes with lots of pedal. The result is aggressive in a way that is often mistaken for Ivesian, but it's also homogenized. The Emerson movement suffers in particular, losing much of its grandeur. The Thoreau movement, by contrast, is overly misty, like a parody of Debussy. (The flute at the end is so distant and washed out that its entrance makes hardly any impression at all.) Ives's famous wit has been suppressed, too, and his homespun elements lack flavor: the hymns aren't very hymnlike, the rags aren't very raggy, and you can't march to the marches. And for the very first time in my life, the First Sonata left me with a headache. This is Ives for people who would rather be listening to something else. (One blogger wrote of this CD, "You don't get many reminders that Ives was a contemporary of Rachmaninoff and Busoni." And this is a good thing?)
Give Denk credit, though. He managed to do something no other performer has ever done: he made me question whether I have been wrong about the value of Ives's music for so many years. Needing reassurance, I went back to Alan Mandel, Nina Deutsch and William Masselos, and gratefully, I found it in them. I don't dislike this recording, exactly -- I could never really dislike any committed performance of Ives -- but I disagree with it, and I disagree also with one of the other reviewers here. Definitive, as Ives himself might say, "it ain't."

To wash the taste out of my mouth, as it were, I've pushed my CD acquisition schedule forward and ordered Donna Coleman's CD of the Concord. I listened to a couple excerpts at Amazon, and it sounds promising.

Donna Coleman

Spent a half hour yesterday interviewing Donna Coleman, a pianist from Ambler, Pa., who now lives in Australia. She is back for the holidays (it's summer vacation down under), and she'll be giving a couple of recitals in the area this month, one of them Jan. 18 in Flourtown. Program will consist of Bach, Chopin, some classic and modern rags, and the Cuban dances of Ignacio Cervantes, and Donna will be speaking on the similarities between them and the development of one to the other.

I was excited for the chance to speak with her because she has recorded the two piano sonatas of Charles Ives, as well as several of the shorter pieces. She sounded impressed on the phone when I told her I had about dozen recordings of the Concord, though not hers. (It's now on my wish list.) Unfortunately, she had so much to say in our time together, we never mentioned Ives at all.

The article will be out in about a week.

A Happy New Year to all seven or eight of you.

Happy birthday, Elliott Carter

Elliott Carter as he would appear on South Park.

Elliott Carter turned 102 today, and I just can't let the occasion pass. He's my favorite living composer, as anyone who has ever met me is aware, and he stands high among my favorite dead ones as well.

I'm guessing Mr. Carter celebrated his birthday the way he celebrates every new day of his life — by getting out of bed and writing music. He is still sharp, still vital, and while it is likely his greatest work is behind him, each new piece is still a welcome adventure. Every so often, one of them, such as the excellent Nine by Five for wind quintet, premiered just last February, will recapture the power of the music from Carter's peak years, the 1960s and '70s. One never knows, does one?

If I live to his age, I'll be happy if I can feed myself.

I celebrated the way I always do — with an in-home concert. Given the richness of Carter's output, selecting the program is always a challenge. I settled on a few favorites: the Oboe Concerto and the Second String Quartet, in performances recorded for me from BBC broadcasts by e-pal and fellow Carterphile Colin Green, and for the finale, the great Concerto for Orchestra (1969) in the rip-snorting reading by Pierre Boulez and the NY Philharmonic. (The recording is available only through the orchestra, in a six-CD box set of American music. The full set cost $90 and was worth every penny for those 21 minutes alone.)

For the past couple of months, I've been listening to Bach almost exclusively, and so I returned to Carter's music "with quite fresh ears for an old man," as Stravinsky wrote in a similar context. It was an invigorating experience. And the night is still young. I might return to the stereo before it's over.

Finally, I'd like to send Carter-Day greetings to the other bloggers and chatroom lurkers around the net who have wished the composer many happy returns of the day (and how many more of those can there be?): Doundou Tchil, Mark Berry, Steve Hicken, Bruce Hodges, Karl Henning, and Paul Yin, to name a few. You are all my friends in spirit.

Addendum: Here is a photo of Mr. Carter with Pierre Boulez (I'll leave it to you to guess which is which) taken Dec. 6 at an 85th-birthday concert for Boulez in NYC. Thanks to Bruce Hodges. When this was taken, Mr. Carter was five days shy of his 102d birthday.

Just hear those sleigh bells ring-a-ling ...

Say what you want about Messiah or the Christmas Oratorio. For me, the season doesn’t start until I hear LeRoy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride.” And it has to be the original orchestral version, with the clip-clopping and the whip snapping and the neighing at the end — none this Johnny-Mathis-coffee-and-pumpkin-pie-by-the-fire bullshit. This year I was fortunate to hear it early — the day after Thanksgiving over a car radio. So now I’m in the holiday mood. It won’t last, so I’ll take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy (insert your holiday here).

Anderson (1908-75) was my favorite composer for a little while when I was a teenager. (Am I square or what?) I don’t listen to him much anymore, but I’ve always been grateful to him for teaching me how to listen to an orchestra at a time when no one I know was listening to orchestras. His music still occupies a little soft spot in my heart. It’s wonderful, light stuff, very catchy and tuneful — the equal, in its bouncy American way, of Johann Strauss the younger, imho.

I once had the pleasure of speaking to Anderson’s widow. I had to double check a title or something for an article, and I went to the LeRoy Anderson website and found a phone number to call for information. I called the number and left a message, and within an hour or so Mrs. Anderson herself called me back. I was stunned. We spoke for a long while, as I recall. She seemed genuinely happy anyone would take an interest in her husband’s music, and I was surprised to learn that the Andersons knew the Elliott Carters. Carter and Anderson were born the same year, both attended Harvard at the same time, and for a while they lived “right down the road” from one another, as Mrs. Anderson put it — the Carters in Waccabuc, New York, the Andersons just over the line in Connecticut.

Besides being classmates and composers, Carter and Anderson shared a talent for languages. Carter speaks French and Italian and reads German and Greek and Latin and heaven knows what else. Anderson, the son of Swedish immigrants, mastered all of the Scandinavian tongues.