Copenhagen's "Ring": Why "Eurotrash" Isn't the Whole Story

Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Regietheater Bomb.

I’m always up for a Ring with Viking suits, if there are any left today. It works fine – better than fine – because it’s wholly consonant with the original choreographic and semantic nature of the cycle.

I sympathize with people who spend hundreds of bucks on tickets to a live performance and end up with a two-headed Wotan, an Alberich who’s a gaudy pimp or Supreme Court Justice Fricka. But consider this: you can stage these things in your mind, and I don’t just mean closing your eyes in the theater. We have the Ring as a permanent endowment. The theater of imagination in recordings or at the piano (if anyone still plays) can provide the traditional underpinnings that establish the work’s bona fides. At this point, I even see something sentimental and nostalgic in Viking helmets, but I don’t see anything regressive about desiring such a representation. The specific locus of the cycle in Northern European mythology has a deep importance for the work. Let that be said and never gainsaid. To rebut this is to rebut the place of art in history.

I once had a professor who taught Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, who wholly disputed the primacy of the relation between Arthurian legends and Tennyson’s contemporary world. Understanding that work as even primarily metaphorical does not allow us to disregard the garb the work wears. Such is the case with Wagner’s Ring. I surely don’t recommend reading the Icelandic saga Edda, or the risible Nibelungenlied with its Amazonian Krimhild (Brünnhilde) winning feats of strength. I don’t recommend that everyong go out and buy Wolfram von Eschenbach’s wierdly erotic medievalisms.

With apologies to Tolkien fans, that stuff is boring. Viking suits can become boring, too.

That’s why I love (or at least cheerfully tolerate) Eurotrash. My “personal Wagner” is impregnable, like some Pentecostalist’s “personal savior.”

Which brings us to the Copenhagen Ring, the so-called Feminist Ring production by Kasper Bech Holten. (Read about the production at the Royal Danish Theater’s website.)

Firstly, it’s a good sign that the Michael Schønwandt, conducting the Royal Danish Orchestra, is a musician of obvious discernment who cares about subtlety, nuance and real musical value. Schønwandt, known to me through an excellent set of DVDs of the Nielsen symphonies, has proven himself again with a thoughtful, vibrant, fresh and surely learned approach to these well-known if enormously complex scores. He doesn’t try to prove himself through irreverence, or chamber music textures, or grotesque exaggeration, or strangely self-identifying tempo extravagances. His magic fire music glitters and glows. Hagen’s watch glowers. The forest murmurs place you under a tree in your favorite park.

The smokin’ good Brünnhilde, (Iréne Theorin) was a new discovery to me. (Apparently she’s owned the Wagner soprano roles in Copenhagen for years, and her Bayreuth debut as Isolde opposite Robert Dean Smith’s Tristan took place this past summer.) Theorin’s Brünnhilde is not some cruel heridan when a Valkyrie. Neither is she some majestic sage-woman as a mortal; she’s simply a woman, sometimes angry, sometimes affectionate (in ways both sweet and profound), but always human and vital.

More importantly for collectors, Theorin handles Brünnhilde’s taxing role not just with aplomb but with an almost casual technical ease, allowing the listener to focus on what her character is and not whether she can handle this or that technical stretch. An exceptional artist, indeed. I don’t bandy these words lightly. For, although, Wagnerian tenors are as rare as cheap tickets to Bayreuth, good Brünnhildes are still a find. By the way, I wouldn’t normally comment on such a topic, but I will do so now to avoid confusion. In recent photos, such as some of the ones on the Copenhagen site, Theorin is thin. In this Ring DVD (from 2006) she is heavy. She’s lost considerably weight in the past couple of years.

The Rheingold Wotan (Johann Reuter) was appropriately cruel, with the facile callousness of youthful power. It’s amusing that Scene 4 devolved into a weird and grotesque simile of the Hostel movie franchise. (Chaining Alberich in a white subway-tiled room next to a tray or surgical instruments was not a good sign.) I like horror movies, I must admit, and although I’m staring at my toes, nervously shuffling my feet, I like Hostel. It pushes the envelope as horror movies have done since Jason and Freddie shredded their first teenagers. Does this belong in Wagner? Just read the libretto, you!

As Wotan in DieWalküre and Der Wanderer in Siegfried, the American bass-baritone James Johnson was often very moving, and always commanding. This, itself, is not unusual (there are many moving Wotans) but it seemed to stand out in the context of this cruel Ring. When he was onstage, the production never lost me.

Fasolt. Here he have the greatest Fasolt in DVD history. A man (giant) so consumed by the fires of love and jealousy and possessiveness and sentimentality. A crude, cruel man who doesn’t understand his own impulses of tenderness and violence, erotic malaise and grotesque pseudo masculinity. And ultimately, he generates genuine pathos. This was the greatest portrayal of Fasolt that I’ve ever heard; and, in fact, Stephan Milling has reinvented Fasolt as a major figure to be reckoned with for all future Rings. This revelatory performance sets the standard; incredibly moving and equally disturbing, Rheingold profoundly benefits from this unprecedented incursion of human pathos. Bravo!

This is billed as the Feminist Ring, for reasons that weren’t always obvious to me as I watched. I was full of questions: What kind of division (or possibly politics) separates a feminist Ring from another kind of Ring? How can one gender score at the expense of the other? Well, of course it cannot. Wagner knew this and it is impossible to disentangle the author’s gender bias from his work. It’s all fruitless surmise. But Brünnhilde with apologies to Siegmund, is the single positive figure in the Ring. And wanting justice isn’t the same as claiming unwarranted privilege.

As a partial answer, this Ring is depicted as a flashback from Brünnhilde’s point of view. Kasper Bech Holten (blog) believes that each of us “writes” a personal mythology, and it’s Brünnhilde’s personal mythology that he dramatizes in this Ring. Her mythology centers on freeing herself from what Bech (in the liner notes) describes as an Electra complex via her break from Wotan.

In this sense, the Copenhagen Ring is a tremendous success. The greatest and most human operas, by which I mean The Marriage of Figaro, Fidelio, and Die Walkure, abandon utterly the traditional male hegemony implicit in Teutonic culture, although all these works are, in fact, Teutonic. Wagner’s awareness of the plight of women and his gentleness in expressing essentially feminine problems extant in his society is an under-studied topic.

This Ring doesn’t pursue these issues in particularly coherent ways. On the contrary, it is full of knee-jerk, hysterical political talking points that sometimes detract from the potential of a feminist Ring. But it’s a step, if not in the right direction, or even one endorsed by Wagner, that points to an underrated part of what the Wagnerian ethos is. I’m fully aware that there are so-called scholarly works that attempt to portray Wagner as a feminine figure. But the reality in most Ring productions is that Siegfried and Wotan dominate except for the immolation. This flawed, peculiar, and often immature production takes a firm step in a promising direction.

Are Viking suits better than feminist deconstruction and the grisliness of Hostel? Of course. But I can always reconstruct the literal Ring in my mind as I listen to innumerable recordings or probe my past fixations. This Ring, often silly and rarely profound, offers the potential of newly exeriencing not just a well-worn favorite but probably the essential work of my musical life. And for that, I say “Bravo!”

The Copenhagen Ring: The Complete DVD Set starring Stig Andersen, Irenie Theorin, Gitta-Maria Sjoberg, Johan Reuter, Stephen Milling

Update

on 2013-06-19 20:19 by John Gibbons

Originally posted Mar 24, 2009. Reposted for the Ring Cycle class.

Is Rachmaninov a Waste of Time?

I recently read, generally with pleasure, Alfred Brendel’s book Me of All People. In passing, I’d like to remark that Brendel’s book Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts and Music Sounded Out are among the admittedly large number of musical commentaries I return to with considerable frequency. This book, Me of All People (Cornell University Press 2001) pleased me less than Brendel’s other books, but probably because it’s a series of conversations in contrast to the exceptionally erudite books of his I had earlier read. (Alfred Brendel on Music is a compilation of essays from his earlier two books.)

As I am in the process of preparing a Rachmaninov/Prokofiev class, a comment from Me of All People caught my eye:

“…I am not a Rachmaninov fan. The piano repertoire is vast, and Rachmaninov to me seems a waste of time.”

This comment isn’t interesting in itself. Not my view, but Brendel is not here to be a Rachmaninov fan. His specialty is German masters from Haydn to Liszt. Paradoxically, what is interesting about his comment is that it’s boring. And it’s boring because it’s the old tune of the German pedant or would-be pedant.

It might be the necessary opinion for an artist like Brendel to hold — and if I comment that the president of the Rachmaninov Society, Vladimr Ashkenazy, is at once a more versatile and technically gifted pianist, doesn’t invalidate the point. And I’ve never heard Ashkenazy play Schubert the way Brendel is able to play Schubert.

But Brendel’s cool. Just don’t go to him to learn about Rachmaninov. There is no problem with Brendel’s comment, but it is unlikely to teach us anything about Rachmaninov. In fact, I don’t even question the legitimacy of  Brendel’s statement, I just find it boring, because it’s just what you would expect from a Germanic specialist. And generally, the classical music world is extricating itself from the doctrines of 18th and 19th-century Teutonic specialists.

So, for the purposes of this article, I want to consider if there are valid reasons to find Rachmaninov worthwhile.

One of the ignorant claptraps about Rachmaninov is that he’s a sentimental Slavic melodist. Some of us would only prefer that he really was! Not me, however. In fact, in the corpus of Rachmaninov’s piano works, there are reasonably few memorable melodies. And most of those are in the concertos or, in fact, borrowed from other composers or that inestimable reservoir of pseudo-folk Russianness that, likewise, inhabits the music of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev if not Scriabin or Shostakovich.

Preparing for my class, I have had occasion to play most of Rachmaninov’s piano music, and naturally I’ve heard the great interpreters of this oeuvre from Richter to Horrowitz to Ashkenazy — and, especially, Rachmaninov himself: The best pianist I’ve heard in person or on record.

Brendel shows an ignorance (which he acknowledges) when he writes that he doesn’t know the late works of Rachmaninov. He doesn’t specify which works he’s missed, but if they include the Etudes Tableaux, shame on him for commenting in a public forum on Rachmaninov en general.

I’d like to enumerate the especial strength of the two sets of Preludes, Op. 23 and 32 and the Etudes Tableaux Op. 33 and 39, with occasional reservations:

1. These works rely more on texture and counterpoint than on melody — an essentially sound strategy for piano music (as opposed to vocal or string music).

2. Oddly, there’s tons of Bach in Rachmaninov. Consider the figurations in the minuet pastiche of Op. 23 No. 3, and the Corelli Variations, for example. And the C Minor Prelude Op. 23 No. 7 sounds like a fantastical updating of C.P.E. Bach’s famous (or infamous) Solfegietto. I could go on — Rachmaninov was a devotee of the Baroque.

3. And I will go on: inner voice canonic imitation is de rigeur in Rachmaninov’s piano style. Don’t believe me? I ain’t got the time, pal. It’s everywhere.

   Does this make Rachmaninov an honorary German that Brendel ought to admire? No. Like more than a few romantics and post-romantics (Schumann and Brahms, for example — not to mention Schoenberg) Bach was probably his most significant master. There’s more Bach than Tchaikovsky in these works.

4. There are those who consider Rachmaninov a reactionary because he didn’t use fancy (au courant) harmonies. Why should he? Contemporaries like Scriabin and Szymanowski et al, were doing plenty of that without him. And the piano isn’t a fundamentally harmonic idiom — if only because its homogeneity of tone renders spicy dissonances less important than textural and dynamic contrasts (which Rachmaninov excelled at).

5. Like Chopin, Rachmaninov combined the principles of the etude and the characteristics of the prelude seamlessly. Naturally, not all are equally successful. The A flat prelude Op. 23 No. 8, is a stinker. The E flat minor prelude, Op. 23 No. 9 is an etude-esque masterpiece.

6. Brendel loves Liszt: why doesn’t he love the C Major prelude Op. 32 No. 1, which invokes the opening essay in Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes?

7. In all fairness, rhythmic ostinati are all too prevelent in Rachmaninov’s oeuvre. The dotted rhythm of Op. 32 No. 2 is maddening in its insistency.

8. Purely subjectively: Rachmaninov’s greatest gift is in combining voluptuousness with morbidity. (Not that kind of voluptuousness, you!)

9. The Etudes Tableaux are a brand new form. Naturally, they are related to Nikolai Medtner’s Skazki (Tales). While they fully retain the Skazki’s storytelling connotation, they do not rely on a specific narrative.

10. There’s precious little virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake in Liszt. That element in Liszt’s style is too often exaggerated (by players as well as critics) in his major works. And Rachmaninov has very little as well. The works are hard because they’re hard: delineation of inner voices, careful climax-building, etc. provide the difficulty. I personally have often struggled more with awesomely great composers like Gottschalk and Thallberg than I have with Rachmaninov — which is convenient for us “spiritual players” who value soul over fingers( ‘cause our fingers can’t move fast enough). But I admit that unlike Chopin, the difficult pieces in Rachmaninov don’t generally correspond with the best pieces.

11. There is a manufactured quality to the preludes and etudes. This is a tribute to great craftsmanship; Rachmaninov wasn’t Chopin,whose music almost never betrays the laborious process of creation in the finished product. But doesn’t craftsmanship count? Even Rachmaninov’s more reasonable detractors don’t argue with the craftsmanship of works like the second and third concerti — only with their popularity!

12. To call Rachmaninov a reactionary is a historical prejudice. Hindemith, Respighi, Ravel could earn the same sobriquet. Even, occasionally, Haydn, Mozart and Brahms could be tagged thusly. Rachmaninov was the living continuation and culmination of the Tchaikovsky - Rubenstein - Taneyev strain of Russian lyricism. Rachmaninov didn’t have his finger to the wind, like certain notorious contemporaries (Stravinsky, I’m looking in your direction…) but it is unassailibly true that music history would have taken its evident course if Rachmaninov had never lived. He’s not Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Chopin, Wagner or Schoenberg. But certain contemporaries equally can be described by poindexter-types as cul-de-sacs (Scriabin, Medtner and Miaskovsky, for example).

Waste of time? If it’s a “waste of time” to have Rachmaninov instead of more Schubert and Beethoven, then it’s a waste of time to read any Turgenev or Chekhov, as opposed to Gogol and Tolstoy. Theoretically, you can fill your time only with the greatest of the great. But you can never do them sufficient justice, anyway, and you compromise a lively adaptability to individual voices.

Update on 2013-06-19 20:16 by John Gibbons

Originally posted Aug 24, 2008. Reposted for the Great Pianists class’s enjoyment.

Joyce Hatto Piano Fraud, Wrapped Up Nicely by The New Yorker

It’s been out for the better part of the month, so this post is hardly news. But only yesterday did I get around to reading and hearing Mark Singer’s excellent article and podcast on the Joyce Hatto piano fraud.

This coverage is one-stop shopping on one of the summer’s best stories. Let’s sum it up:

1. Joyce Hatto enjoys minor piano career but stops performing in the 70s.
2. Her husband, a record producer, begins releasing “her” catalog of recordings, representing an astounding breadth of repertoire and a fevered pace of productivity despite Hatto being unable to perform in public due to cancer.
3. Classical internet community falls in love with recordings and spunky narrative. Joyce Hatto is the best pianist you’ve never heard of! Why, it almost sounds as if she becomes a different pianist when she plays different pieces!
4. Not too many people inquire too deeply into the recordings, or the names of the gifted-but-unknown conductors, or the impressive orchestras they lead in the Hatto piano concerto recordings. Mainstream music critics write gushing reviews.
5. One day a listener slides a “Hatto” CD into iTunes and is puzzled when another musician’s name appears. A reluctant analysis ensues on sites like Musicweb.
6. Music theorist Nicholas Cook and colleagues prove, through data visualization techniques, that Hatto’s recordings are technically identical other performers’ releases.
7. Collectors, working collaboratively across the internet, begin to identify true performers.

The discovery of the fraud has, in turn, led to an even more lively discussion on technical and artistic points:

• Why did the discovery have to be made through technical serendipity? Why hadn’t more people recognized the original recordings?
• How much do context and backstory add to the enjoyment of art? Singer indirectly alludes to the idea of “Joyce Hatto’s Career” as a work of art in itself when he asks “did it make her happy?” Ms. Hatto died over a year ago, before the truth came out, and her health status prior to her death is not public information. We are left to speculate on just what she knew or condoned.
• Can this be considered performance art, as has been suggested in the case of J.T. Leroy, the hot novelist with the courageous backstory. Though there’s a compelling difference between the Hatto fraud and the Leroy fraud. Laura Albert wrote her own stuff — she just lied about who “she” was.

Update on 2013-06-19 20:18 by John Gibbons

Originally posted  Oct 5, 2007. Republished for the entertainment of “The Great Pianists” class.

Stephen Sondheim Trashes Diane Paulus "Upgrade" of 'Porgy and Bess'

Chad Batka for The New York Times
From left, the director Diane Paulus with the actors Phillip Boykin and Audra McDonald at a rehearsal for “Porgy and Bess” at the American Repertory Theater.

via artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

Via a tweet from Alex Ross of a NYT Artsbeat post about an Arts & Leisure article by Patrick Healy after which Stephen Soundheim unleashed one of the most convincing dissings of Regietheater I’ve ever seen. Well, he isn’t actually taking on the concept of Regietheater directly. But the director of this production, Diane Paulus, is definitely in that category. She’s directed several recent productions of opera seria for the Chicago Opera theater. Nor am I opposed to directorial creativity — I just ask that significant changes add something of comparable value to what’s being destroyed. Paulus is a director whose work I haven’t really enjoyed so far. 

Since everyone else is pasting Soundheim’s whole letter, so will I:

The article by Mr. Healy about the coming revival of “Porgy and Bess” is dismaying on many levels. To begin with, the title of the show is now “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.” I assume that’s in case anyone was worried it was the Rodgers and Hart “Porgy and Bess” that was coming to town. But what happened to DuBose Heyward? Most of the lyrics (and all of the good ones) are his alone (“Summertime,” “My Man’s Gone Now”) or co-written with Ira Gershwin (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”). If this billing is at the insistence of the Gershwin estate, they should be ashamed of themselves. If it’s the producers’ idea, it’s just dumb. More dismaying is the disdain that Diane Paulus, Audra McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks feel toward the opera itself.

Ms. Paulus says that in the opera you don’t get to know the characters as people. Putting it kindly, that’s willful ignorance. These characters are as vivid as any ever created for the musical theater, as has been proved over and over in productions that may have cut some dialogue and musical passages but didn’t rewrite and distort them.

What Ms. Paulus wants, and has ordered, are back stories for the characters. For example she (or, rather, Ms. Parks) is supplying Porgy with dialogue that will explain how he became crippled. She fails to recognize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are archetypes and intended to be larger than life and that filling in “realistic” details is likely to reduce them to line drawings. It makes you speculate about what would happen if she ever got her hands on “Tosca” and ‘Don Giovanni.” How would we get to know them? Ms. Paulus would probably want to add an aria or two to explain how Tosca got to be a star, and she would certainly want some additional material about Don Giovanni’s unhappy childhood to explain what made him such an unconscionable lecher.

Which brings me back to my opening point. In the interest of truth in advertising, let it not be called “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” nor even “The Gershwin-Heyward Porgy and Bess.” Advertise it honestly as “Diane Paulus’s Porgy and Bess.” And the hell with the real one.

Then there is Ms. Paulus’s condescension toward the audience. She says, “I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.” I don’t know what she’s sorry about, but I’m glad she can speak for all of us restless theatergoers. If she doesn’t understand Bess and feels she has to “excavate” the show, she clearly thinks it’s a ruin, so why is she doing it? I’m sorry, but could the problem be her lack of understanding, not Heyward’s?

She is joined heartily in this sentiment by Ms. McDonald, who says that Bess is “often more of a plot device than a full-blooded character.” Often? Meaning sometimes she’s full-blooded and other times not? She’s always full-blooded when she’s acted full-bloodedly, as she was by, among others, Clamma Dale and Leontyne Price. Ms. McDonald goes on to say, “The opera has the makings of a great love story … that I think we’re bringing to life.” Wow, who’d have thought there was a love story hiding in “Porgy and Bess” that just needed a group of visionaries to bring it out?

Among the ways in which Ms. Parks defends the excavation work is this: “I wanted to flesh out the two main characters so that they are not cardboard cutout characters” and goes on to say, “I think that’s what George Gershwin wanted, and if he had lived longer he would have gone back to the story of ‘Porgy and Bess’ and made changes, including the ending.

I can hear the outraged cries now about stifling creativity and discouraging directors who want to reinterpret plays and musicals in order to bring “fresh perspectives,” as they are wont to say, but there is a difference between reinterpretation and wholesale rewriting. Nor am I judging this production in advance, only the attitude of its creators toward the piece and the audience. Perhaps it will be wonderful. Certainly I can think of no better Porgy than Norm Lewis nor a better Bess than Audra McDonald, whose voice is one of the glories of the American theater. Perhaps Ms. Paulus and company will have earned their arrogance.

It’s reassuring that Ms. Parks has a direct pipeline to Gershwin and is just carrying out his work for him, and that she thinks he would have taken one of the most moving moments in musical theater history — Porgy’s demand, “Bring my goat!” — and thrown it out. Ms. Parks (or Ms. Paulus) has taken away Porgy’s goat cart in favor of a cane. So now he can demand, “Bring my cane!” Perhaps someone will bring him a straw hat too, so he can buck-and-wing his way to New York.

Or perhaps in order to have her happy ending, she’ll have Bess turn around when she gets as far as Philadelphia and return to Catfish Row in time for the finale, thus saving Porgy the trouble of his heroic journey to New York. It will kill “I’m on My Way,” but who cares?

Ms. McDonald immediately dismisses any possible criticism by labeling anyone who might have objections to what Ms. Paulus and her colleagues are doing as “Gershwin purists” — clearly a group, all of whom think alike, and we all know what a “purist” is, don’t we? An inflexible, academic reactionary fuddy-duddy who lacks the imagination to see beyond the author’s intentions, who doesn’t recognize all “the holes and issues” that Ms. Paulus and Ms. McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks do. Never fear, though. They confidently claim that they know how to fix this dreadfully flawed work.

It so happens that Paulus did direct Don Giovanni at Chicago Opera Theater and I saw it. Here’s a photo gallery. Unfortunately you cannot see the IKEA KLIPPAN sofas, in fuchsia, in the lobby of this night club. Or the sweet catsuit worn by Krisztina Szabó’s Donna Elvira. It was the sort of “contemporary trashy” approach on which Paulus has leaned heavily when dealing with early music at COT.  Now that I have made fun of the setting, I should admit that Paulus didn’t “upgrade” Mozart’s work to the same extent she reportedly has upgraded Gershwin. Oh, there was that clever little twist where all the other characters were arrested for the Don’s death and sang their little moral epilogue in handcuffs.

Google Honors Granados

Enrique Granados was the subject of a “Google Doodle” (their name for those special logos) on July 27, his 114th birthday. I only noticed it today while perusing the Google Doodle Archives, because it was only displayed on Google’s Spain site. 

Why Isn't Inventing Instruments Considered Normal Anymore?

In a Slate concert review, J. Bryan Lowder (yes, a musican ) examines one answer to the age-old question “how do we keep classical music new?” For composer Sean Friar, the new answer is “used auto parts.”

Wielding a cello bow, one musician caused a dented fender to produce sounds so piercingly lovely that an oboe might have been jealous. Hubcaps, when drawn over with the same implement, released a startling cry. Wheel wells struck with padded mallets created tones deep and resonant enough to challenge the horns for majesty, and gently scraped brake drums transmitted—better than trembling violins—the nervous energy of your fourth cup of coffee.

Unfortunately, the tongue-in-cheek title of the “Clunker Concerto” is itself a signal that nobody really expects to diversify the orchestra. The question is, why is the modern configuration (essentially from the mid-19th century) sacrosanct? Lowder goes on to remind us of something any orchestral musician (student or pro) already knows: that they used to invent and upgrade instruments all the time. Just look at the evolution from the harpsichord to the grand piano. The clarinet wasn’t standard until Mozart’s maturity so those guys never showed up for the earlier music.

While the 19th century saw a great deal of technical improvement of the orchestral family (valves were added to most of the brass) and sporadic expansions (e.g. the bass clarinet and booming Wagner tuba), not much else changed until the turn of the 20th century. With the crack in artistic continuity caused by industrialization and WWI, composers of the early 1900s like Schoenberg and Varèse sought new sounds and new forms from music. Unfortunately, the orchestra wasn’t having it. Musicologist J. Peter Burkholder has written that by this point, “the orchestra had been transformed … into a museum for the display of great works of art from the past,” and museums, as most artists know, are rather difficult to get into.

The piece isn’t online yet. In this video we learn that Friar composes  regular chamber music but wishes to expand the percussion palette. He  has no dreams of supplanting the violin with found junk (they obviously  lack agility) but sees no sense in the arbitrary boundary between  official and unofficial percussion instruments.

But for me, this example falls short of the “answer” that Lowder seems to be setting up. Intrusions into the standard orchestral palette seem permissible in three forms. “Crossover” sounds like ethnic instruments and arguably the saxophone; special effects; and (brake drum roll…) the percussion section! Overwhelmingly, the exploration of new acoustic sounds for orchestra happens in an ad hoc context, or it’s “only” a percussion instrument. And many are used by multiple composers?

See also: American Composers Orchestra

Classical Beach Reading: Robert Levine's "Weep, Shudder, Die"

If there is one quote from Weep, Shudder, Die: A Guide to Loving Opera that sums up Robert Levine’s case for opera as popular entertainment it’s this:

Opera is all around us — hundreds of hours’ worth on YouTube alone — and there is no excuse not to take part in it. Much like the dozen or so theaters in eighteenth-centure Venice (and then all over Europe), opera has again become familiar, popular entertainment, and it has unleashed its weird power. It still requires some commitment to knowledge and it rarely has a beat, but there’s just so much of Lady Gaga a human being can enjoy/tolerate without needing to be touched in a slightly deeper place.

The aim of this book is to get people to try opera by pointing out how available it is today (with the Met’s HD broadcasts, Opera in Cinema, DVD/Blu-Rays in the hundreds) and by demonstrating opera’s similarities as well as differences to more widely accessible genres. This comes with a little mythbusting in the bit where he anticipates and shoots down some common “Philistine” objections like the unnatural sound produced by operatic technique. Nobody objects to Gospel singers taking their voices as high as they’ll go because we recognize religious ecstasy as a justification for all that intensity. Stipulate that opera functions on a similar level of heightened discourse and its “inauthenticity” stops being a distraction. It becomes the entire point. Levine wants people to fall in love with the trained, unamplified human voice.

Another goal is to make it easier to get into opera. In chapters devoted to the top national traditions in opera, Levine covers the greatest hits with brief composer bios and historical/stylistic background, then homes in on selected facts the newbie might find most helpful and entertaining. The tone is quite chatty and there’s a liberal helping backstage gossip. Excellent beach reading.

Levine introduces his book at the Wall Street Journal: Why Opera Isn’t Just For Divas.

Friday Links

An 8-year-old piano student takes on Anthony Tommasini's Top 10 Composers. His wonderful letter (with hand-drawn portaits intended to be Schumann and Tchaikovsky) lists the kid's "greatest" list, plus the ten he likes best. He's sorry if his departures from Tommasini's pick's hurt the critic's feelings.

Reviews of Covent Garden's Anna Nicole production are out. (Composer: Mark-Anthony Turnage, Librettist: Richard Thomas) The Independent, The Telegraph, NY Times.

Last week, the Boston Lyric Opera Annex presented Viktor Ullmann's opera The Emperor of Atlantis (Der Kaiser von Atlantis). Like its better-known counterpart Brundibar, this opera was composed and rehearsed in Theriesienstadt (the Nazi's "model camp" near Prague) and everyone involved in the opera was soon on a train to Auschwitz. Kaiser is a barely-disguised study on Hitler, war and totalitarianism (libretto by Pietr Kien) that may have hastened Ullmann's gassing. Consequently, a professional production inevitably lots of press coverage and reviews.

Decca is launching a new classical label designed to be "more relevant." Meanwhile, the topic of discussion on social media has been Alex Ross's "Why do we hate modern classical music?" from back in November and Michael Fedo's recent follow-up "Why does contemporary classical music spurn melody?" By no means is the classical twitterverse conceding that modern classical music even does spurn melody, while others are defending the place in the world for "ugly" music and debating ways to help people acquire the taste. We hope to find the time to join in the debate. Normally I'd say we missed the window, but if Fedo can respond to a November post in February...

12 Operas NOT to Attend on Valentine’s Day

The Queen of Spades for VALENTINE’S DAY? The Met thought it was a nice program in 2004, as I discovered during a recent rebroadcast on their Sirius channel. But what kind of romantic evening is that? This question inspired the list of bad valentine’s day operas below.

In a way, this category is too easy. Almost by definition, operas feature love stories gone tragically wrong. I’m looking for a higher level of Valentine’s Day incompatibility. Ordinary excess like Manon (Lescaut) and garden variety tragic death (sorry, Rodolfo and Mimi) won’t cut it. Also not welcome on this list is any couple who dies together for love. Individual partners who do so will be treated with great skepticism.  That goes for thwarted would-be lovers, too (Ahem, baritones). And because there are so many angry spouses (rightly or wrongly) who kill each other, they don’t make the cut unless there’s something especially creepy, intense or ironic about it.

Cheating

Così fan tutte

Mozart. This is just awkward. These two guys put on disguises and work an elaborate sting to see if they can seduce each other’s girlfriends. It works, and then… everyone’s kinda OK with it or seething with resentment at the altar, depending on the director.

Eine florentinische Tragödie

Zemlinsky. Wife of working class husband cheats with fancy aristocrat, husband kills aristocrat with his bare hands, and wife is REALLY turned on. We hear this as much as we see it. Violence rekindling romance.

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

Shostakovich. It’s not just that Katerina conspires with Sergei kill her husband so they can be together, only to get dumped on her way to the gulag and drown herself in a river. As with Florentine Tragedy, it’s how frankly erotic the music is. The desperation and claustrophobia is a brilliant achievement by Shostakovich, but (to steal from a Twitter game/Pravda editorial) this is a muddle instead of a marriage.

Infanticide

Médée

Cherubini. Jason dumps Medea, Medea kills the kids.

Jenůfa

Janacek. Jenůfagets pregnant with Števa’s baby, then a jealous Laca slashes her face.  Now Števa won’t marry her because she’s disfigured, and Laca won’t marry her because of Števa’s baby.  Jenůfa’s stepmother drowns the baby in the river, and Jenůfa gets blamed. Once it’s all sorted out, the stepmother is forgiven on her way to jail and Jenůfa and Laca… get married? It’s really much more upsetting than I’m making it sound.

Codependency

Rigoletto

Verdi. After being deflowered under false pretenses, Gilda “takes a bullet” for her guilty lover, dying for him as he jauntily sings how fickle women are.

The Queen of Spades.

Tchaikovsky. Hermann loves Liza and his obsession with winning at cards is totally only about getting the money to marry her. Liza is sufficiently obsessed with Hermann, even after he kills her Grandma and won’t give up the cards, to eventually drown herself in the river.

(At this point, drowning in the river constitutes a pattern.)

Stranger Danger

Carmen

Bizet. John Gibbons thought this one up. The dangerous stranger he has in mind is not named Carmen.

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

Bartok. Judith marries a guy she knows nothing about, then starts starts snooping around in his storage. The more threatening her discoveries get, the more she just has to keep opening those stupid doors. Judy, don’t just DTMFA. Run!

In A Class By Themselves

Lucia di Lammermoor

Donizetti. Lucia is forced to marry the wrong man, so she kills him in the bridal bed and then loses her mind. Fortunately, her coloratura technique is undamaged. Out she comes to sing her famous mad scene in a blood-soaked gown in front of all her wedding guests. The guy she really loves then has to stab himself, unless his scene gets cut so that the mad scene can be the ending of the opera.

What makes Lucia sound even more crazy is the use of a glass harmonica in the mad scene. This rarely-heard instrument raises the goosebumps because it blends with the soprano and clashes with all the other instruments. For business reasons, Donizetti was forced to replace the glass harmonica with a flute in the original production, but this Met production was able to make the original instrumentation happen.

Salome

Richard Strauss. Salome to severed, blood-dripping head of John the Baptist: “Ah! I have kissed your mouth, Jochanaan. Ah! I have kissed your mouth! It was a bitter taste on your lips, was it blood?” All this and more, over a suggestive orchestral swell. Enough said.

Lulu

Berg. This one owns the Codependency category but it’s so much more than that! Husband #1 drops dead. Husband #2 knifes himself. Husband #3 shot by Lulu. (Son of Husband #3 gets really turned on when Lulu announces “I killed your father on this sofa.”)  Girlfriend willingly acquires typhus to help Lulu escape jail, agrees to have sex with a man (she’s a lesbian so that’s even more of a sacrifice) to help Lulu evade jail AGAIN, and finally gets murdered by Jack the Ripper. So does Lulu, but that hardly makes up for the carnage in her wake.  This is much better than I’m making it sound, but it’s not for a special date – unless you’re looking for a litmus test. (It’s probably like taking a date to see “Antichrist.” The movie version of this story, BTW is “Pandora’s Box” starring Louise Brooks.)

Here is a fairly literal rendition of the final scene. Sorry for the lack of subtitles. Lulu is now a prostitute, so reduced that she ends up paying her last client, who is Jack the Ripper. Her lover Countess Geschwitz begins to talk of making a new life for herself, studying law and working for women’s rights. She then overhears Lulu’s murder and is stabbed on Jack the Ripper’s way out. Her final words are “Lulu, I am always with you.”

And if you have a strong stomach, here is a far more lurid production. Film is an integral part of this opera, and in this version, the musical interlude before the final scene features a film of human dissection. After that, an interpretation of the final scene that makes several departures from the text.

Martha Graham in Appalachian Spring

From Peter Glushanok’s 1958 film version for WQED Pittsburgh. Dancers are Martha Graham as The Bride, Stuart Hodes as The Husbandman, Bertram Ross as The Revivalist, Matt Turney as The Pioneer Woman and Yuriko, Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter and Miriam Cole as The Revivalists’ Flock. The stage design is by Isamu Nogochi.Aaron Copland's original scoring.

Via Orchestra21, the blog of conductor Jason Weinberger

Appalachian Spring, opening from Jason Weinberger on Vimeo.

If You Think You Hate Charles Ives On His Birthday

Not that I’m referring to anyone in particular who might have mourned the anniversary of Ive’s birth today on social media. But if you don’t do quarter-tones and all those other “intellectual” aspects of Ive’s instrumental music, there could be hours of pleasure in store for you in his deceptively simple songs.

I’m sitting in a search marketing conference right now, so I can’t say much. But the songs are catchy, melodic and walk a tightrope between the satirical and the sentimental.

Preview - Charles Ives: Songs by Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish - Rhapsody lets you listen to 20 full tracks per months without joining or paying. This wonderful album is a worthy use of those freebies.

For a totally free Ives song session, here is a wonderful playlist where you can listen to some of the songs and watch a scrolling score. The singing on this playlist is not always ideal (Ives songs are a student recital staple) but it’s a convenient way to get familiar with these songs.

“The Circus Band” is a favorite. I like it better as a song (and PLEEZ, pianists, DO shout “Hear the trombones” at the appointed time - really) but some prefer this totally raucus orchestra/chorus arrangement by Ives, performed here by a school group under the helm of Michael Tippett: