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.

The home of Mozart and Beethoven

The Independence Sinfonia, a good group that is getting better, will present a concert Nov. 10 at Or Hadash in Fort Washington. On the program will be Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus Overture and Fourth Symphony and Mozart's Clarinet Concerto. Soloist in the Mozart will be Charly Salinger. You can read my interview with him here.

Charlie called me on my cell this afternoon and asked when the article and in what paper the piece would  run.  He also said if there was anything he could ever do for me, I had only to ask.

I told him the Mozart would be enough.

Police alarms and ear worms: Make it stop!

Here at the paper, we leave the police scanner on 24 hours a day. Recently the cops instituted a little, two-note electronic alarm — a little "buh-BOOP" — to draw officers' attention to some particular form of announcement. The tones, both in pitch and duration, sound to me exactly like the rising motif contained in the opening clarinet solo of Sibelius's First Symphony. As a result, the first movement of that work has been stuck in my head for weeks.

What is the longest-lasting ear worm anyone here has ever experienced? I think I am going for some kind of record, though I suppose I'm fortunate: I like Sibelius. The two tones could have reminded me of the theme to Bewitched.

Weird Piano Music

My second Spotify playlist has been posted on the homepage of the Times Herald. This one is titled “Weird Piano Music,” for reasons that need no elaboration.

Schoenberg, Walton, Tower

Click here to read my article on the upcoming concert by Orchestra 2001 scheduled for November 3 in Swarthmore. The Daedalus Quartet will be on the program, performing Joan Tower's String Quartet No. 5 and Schoenberg's “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte,” and the orchestra, conducted by James Freeman, will present William Walton's “Façade.”

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.

Spotify Adagios

Here at the Norristown Times Herald, our online editor has set up something called the Spotify Music Corner, and she'd asked our editors and reporters to create playlists that will be available to our viewers for a week at a time. My turn was this week. I'm the only classical person in the office, and for my first effort, I put together some of my favorite pieces of slow and/or achingly lovely music. The list is called, simply, Adagio, and it will be available through Sunday.

So, if you are an online sophisticate, have a listen. It might not be what you would expect from an advocate of the avant-garde, but I didn't want to scare anyone off this first time out.

Vive Napoleon

I emailed Napoleon Murphy Brock the link to my impressions of the Grandmothers (see below) and received the following reply, which I present unaltered, with permission:

Hello Joe,

Thank you so much for your energy inspired comments. I'm sure that all members of the band will enjoy your critique, and well as the fans who did not get to see and experience what we do, "TOTAL MUSIC THEATER". FRANK ZAPPA STYLE. Just remember, what you experienced was a group effort. "All for one, and all for Frank and the fans of this incredibly unique music. Timeless!!!!! And it only gets better!!!!

Peace and God Bless,

Napoleon