The Swan of Tuonela

In my never-ending struggle with iTunes, I have yet again had to recover all of my music after a hard drive crash.  I've gotten smarter over the years and keep a back up on an external hard drive.  But this time I decided I was really tired of the whole process (which seems to happen to me at least once a year) so I subscribed to iTunes Match which allows me for a yearly fee to upload all the music I have from my own CD's up into the Cloud - there to be retrieved whenever I need it.   It takes forever to upload it, but that is not the point of this post.

Since I was going through the whole time-consuming process I decided to load all of my remaining CDs into iTunes.  These were the CDs that for various reasons I had never thought it worth the time to load previously, mostly classical music CDs.  I never feel like listening to them except at home where there is a CD player right there.  But now they are available in the cloud to me through all of my various devices.

Before you read the rest of this you might want to click play and listen as you are reading:

As is probably predictable, this process caused me to listen to some pieces that I hadn't heard in a few years.  One of them was Sibelius' The Swan of Tuonela.  I've always liked Sibelius and Swan is a lovely, calm, soothing work that features an English Horn.  Although I've always liked the piece I don't think I've ever heard it live and I've never bothered to find out why it is called The Swan of Tuonela.  I think I knew that the English Horn is meant to be the Swan, but that was about it.

So, I looked it up.

The Swan of Tuonela is "tone poem" - a piece of orchestral music meant evoke the content of a poem, story, or painting.  Swan is part of a four part suite of tone poems (Op. 22 Lemminkäinen) based on stories from Finnish mythology.  Just as in Greek mythology the underworld (Hades) is separated from the world of the living by a river (Styx) with a ferry man (Charon), so in Finnish mythology the underworld (Tuonela) must be reached by crossing a river (Tuoni) via a ferry (this time the ferry man is a woman - Death's Maid).  Tuonela is actually an island (I assume it is in the middle of the river). 

In the myth, the hero Lemminkäinen wants to win the hand of a daughter of Louhi, a powerful witch and the queen of a land called Pohjola. Louhi has many daughters and she sets the suitors impossible tasks in order to win them.  Lemminkäinen must cross to Tuonela and kill (or capture, depending on the version) the swan that swims around it.  He fails.  He is shot with a poisoned arrow and dies, falling into the river.  But his mother searches heaven and earth for his body and eventually is able to bring him back to life.

The Swan of Tuonela is the second part of Sibelius' suite.   The music is meant to evoke the image of a swan swimming around the island of the dead, with the English Horn playing the part of the Swan.

Thus endeth the lesson.

It’s Hard to Wait … But

I’m starting to get excited about hearing Stephen Hough play the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in April.

And the following weekend I’ll hear him play the First and then the Third piano concerti.  It’s the Rachmaninoff fest!

Rare and Special

Saturday night at the Symphony was one of those far too rare nights when the audience was so excited by a performance that total strangers felt compelled to talk to each other about it.   The occasion was the performance of Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto by the Saint Louis Symphony with guest artist Stephen Hough.

I am not that familiar with the Second Piano Concerto, although I’m sure I must have heard a recording of it at some point in my life.  After all, I love Tchaikovsky and I love piano.  So I must have heard it at some point.  But I don’t remember it and I know I’ve never heard it live.

Unlike the First Piano Concerto which I heard a couple of weeks ago at the symphony, the Second Piano Concerto seems more thematically coherent.  It also features virtuoso moments for the pianist, especially in the first movement, in which he can play solo in a cadenza-like section that is very long. 

Hough is a brilliant pianist and by that I don’t just mean that he is technically brilliant, although he is. I again sacrificed acoustics for sight lines and sat orchestra level on the side where I could see the pianist’s hands. There were moments in which his hands were moving so fast that they were actually a blur.  I’m not exaggerating.  His notes are crisp and clean and his pedal work is inspired.  But that isn’t what makes an awe inspiring performance.  There are many technically proficient pianists out there who give fine, but not particularly special performances.

What made this performance breathtaking was the almost symbiotic relationship Hough had with the orchestra.  They were as one.   Compare this with the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto which featured Yefim Bronfman in which Bronfman played beautifully from a technical point of view.  But he and the orchestra were not as one in parts of the piece.

Some of the credit for Saturday night certainly goes to Ward Stare, SLSO’s Resident Conductor who did a fine job.  He’s very young (or at least very young-looking) and I predict will be evolve into a popular conductor with audiences because he conducts in the dramatic style that audiences love to watch.  But the orchestra sounded perfect under him and if there wasn’t complete musical sympathy between he and Hough, it was not apparent. 

But even technical fireworks and a symbiotic relationship with the orchestra aren’t enough to raise the hair on my arms and send tingles up them as happened to me on Saturday.  There is … something.  Some undefineable musicianship where an artist seems to be not only at one with the other performers but at one with the piece being performed.  Hough clearly loves performing this work and finding the moments in a particular  performance of the work with a particular  orchestra and a particular  conductor.  Sometimes it all comes together as it did on Saturday. 

That is the beauty of live performance.  The work may be a classic, performed time and again, but the performance is unique.  There will never be another performance exactly like Saturday night’s performance.  It is rare to witness a performance where all of the pieces come together, it is usually enough when most of them come together.  But when they all come together in a unique moment, the audience is part of the specialness and when the lights come up total strangers turn to each other and say “wow.  Just wow.”

Hough will be back with SLSO to perform the first three Rachmaninoff piano concerti next year.  I want to be there for all three.  And I’m not going to sacrifice sound for sight – I want the best sound I can get to enjoy those performances to the max.

A Stephen Hough Preview

Stephen Hough is coming to St. Louis to play the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.  Here is a three part interview done with him a couple of years ago in which he discusses playing Tchaikovsky. 

He points out that Tchaikovsky is physically tiring for the pianist – all of those big chords.  But he also sees an innocence in Tchaikovsky and thinks it is important to balance the two sides of Tchaikovsky.

In part 3 he discusses working with conductors, including prior performances with David Robertson.   He won’t be playing with Robertson in St. Louis.  Ward Stare, the SLSO’s Resident Conductor, will be on the podium.

Tchaikovsky–Part One

A Saturday night at the St. Louis Symphony is a fine way to spend an evening.  I don’t know why I don’t do it more often.  I always intend to go more but then time gets away from me.  If I don’t have tickets in advance I don’t think to go.

Last fall I saw that the SLSO was performing the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 AND Piano Concerto No. 2 this season.  I love Tchaikovsky and I love piano concerti so I bought tickets for both.  This past weekend was the First Piano Concerto.  The orchestra was under the direction of David Robertson and the guest soloist was Yefim Bronfman.  It was a fine performance although I thought the performance got better as the work progressed. 

The opening of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano concerto is very famous with the piano and the orchestra playing together.  When piano and orchestra play simultaneously there is a chance that the piano might tend to get a bit drowned out by the orchestra. That almost but didn’t quite happen last night.  But that also might have been my choice of seats.  I’d much rather sit in the balcony at Powell Hall because I love the enveloping sound up there.  But I wanted to see the pianists hands so I chose orchestra level seats over to the side.  That might have accounted for the not-so-perfect acoustics.   I also felt that the there were moments (only moments, and rare ) where the orchestra and the pianist were not performing “as one” , but as they moved into the second portion of the first movement they began to work off of each other as they should and that feeling went away.

I’ve heard this concerto so many times that I didn’t think it was possible to have a new thought about it.  I’m always struck anew each time I hear it how the first part is so different from the rest of the concerto and how the rest of the concerto sounds like bits and pieces of one of his ballets (I always think of it as pieces of music rejected from Sleeping Beauty – which is not to say it is anything but exquisite).  But this time, as I listened to the second movement, I suddenly thought that it was as if the piano was intended to be the ballerina.  Perhaps it was the way Bronfman approached the work, but I thought it was quite charming, more charming than I normally do.

The second half of the program was Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 in E Minor.  Shostakovich is not my favorite composer but I didn’t mind this one.  There were parts that were a little boring but the second movement galloped along and was quite thrilling.  The symphony sounded superb under Robertson and made me want to go back and hear them again.

Which will happen in two weeks when I return to hear the Tchaikovsky Second Piano Concerto.  This time the guest pianist will be Stephen Hough who is also one of my favorite bloggers.  

For your listening pleasure here is Mr. Bronfman performing the third movement at the Herkulessaal, Munich Residenz conducted by Mariss Jansons.  They took it slightly faster than SLSO did. You can see the physicality required to perform this.

The Floating Palace: A Duet Performed by The Saint Louis Symphony and Circus Flora

 

The Floating Palace was a circus showboat that played up and down the Mississippi River just before the Civil War.  It was an extremely elegant barge, pulled by two paddle wheelers with a full circus ring inside. 

So it said in the program that I received when I walked into Powell Hall last night.  You can’t really go wrong attending The Saint Louis Symphony on a Saturday night and it was a program full of my favorites:  parts of Copland’s Rodeo; Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King; a series of pieces from Bizet’s Carmen; and Falla’s Fire Dance among others.  

But as we headed down the aisle to find “Orchestra Center, Row F”, we knew it wasn’t going to be the usual “what a great night at the Symphony” kind of night.  It was going to be something we had never experienced before.

For one thing, Row F is, as you might imagine, the 6th row at Powell Hall.  But not last night.  Last night they had removed rows A, B, and C and didn’t sell any seats in rows D and E. So we were, in effect, in the front row.  And we were almost directly under the high wire where the Flying Wallendas were going to perform later in the show.  That’s right, the Flying Wallendas were going to perform with the Symphony right over our heads.  I looked at the woman next to me and she said, “Oh yeah, I’m VERY nervous.”  I looked at my sister and she said, “If they drop those pole things, they’ll probably kill us.”  I said, “At last we’ll break their fall.” 

St. Louis has it’s own local circus company, Circus Flora, that performs each year in a one ring circus tent set up on the parking lot of Powell Hall in June after the Symphony season is over.  It’s a lot of fun to go see, a traditional one ring circus where you can almost reach out and touch the performers.  The clowns circulate among the audience and you probably could hear the breaths of the performers if the Circus band weren’t playing so loud.

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Circus Flora got itself a bigger band.  It teamed up with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra to do a circus right there on the stage of Powell Hall.  We weren’t sure what to expect.  Where was the orchestra (which usually takes up the entire stage) going to sit and where would the Circus performers perform if there was no ring?   Well, the Symphony was on raised platforms on the back three quarters of the stage and the Circus used the front quarter of the stage and the space above it and above the first few rows of the audience. 

It was a great night, one of the best things I’ve ever seen.  First, the Symphony was, as usual, wonderful.  I have no idea how guest conductor Alistair Willis got this gig.  I searched his bio for any sign that he’d been in a Circus Band in a previous life but, if he had, it was scrubbed from his official history.  He seemed to have a good rapport with the Orchestra and they sounded sharp.  

The choice of music for each act was usually spot on.  Of course, the Symphony is committed to playing the entire piece and, unlike the Circus Band, can’t suddenly end a piece to make the music and the performer end together.  But the Circus had made provision for that and had “other” things to go on after the performer ended their spot.

Circus Flora usually puts together a loose narrative that ties together all the acts and last night was no different.  The circus performers were on The Floating Palace, performing up and down the Mississippi.  One of the performers was pining for a girl he had met in St. Louis.  There were three stowaways that made appearances now and then.  And of course everyone lived happily ever after.  But mostly it was all about the performances.

Where to begin.  There was, of course, juggling – performed to Stravinsky’s Circus Polka.  There was a duet of two female performers hanging from a big ring usually only by their toes (it seemed) – performed to Copland’s Corral Nocturne from Rodeo. Aerialist Una Mimnagh did a ballet like performance holding onto a rope high above the stage – performed to selections from Falla’s Three Cornered Hat. 

There were no horses at this circus, unlike the summer version, but the dog act was back and they are one of my favorites.  Johnny Peers & the Muttville Comix performed to selections from Kabelevsky’s The Comedians.   Each dog in the large menagerie has been rescued from a pet shelter and none of them match any of the others.  But if you’d love to see a Bassett Hound riding a skateboard, this is the act for you. 

Another favorite of mine are the St. Louis Arches, who are a young troop of local acrobats.  I feel that I’ve seen these kids grow up and every year they get better and better.  Last night was the best I’ve ever seen them. 

Aleysa Gulevich wowed the audience with hula hoops – performing to music from Bizet’s Carmen.  She started with one hula hoop and by the end of her sultry performance she was covered in hula hoops. 

Duo Voltart was new to St. Louis, performing here for the first time and they were a wow.  Their act, performed to Falla’s Fire Dance, was a combination of dance moves and breathtaking acrobatic lifts.  Sitting so close, we could see every muscle in Damien Boudreau’s arms quiver as he held Genevieve Cliché in unbelievably difficult poses and lifts.

That wow was matched by arielists Andrew Adams and Erika Gilffether who performed equally difficult poses and holds high above the stage using ariel straps.  Their music was the beautiful ballade form Sibelius’ Karelia Suite. 

And there were, of course, a clown and also a rope spinning artist.  But the hilight of the evening was, as always, the Flying Wallendas/Great Wallendas who did their high wire act right above our heads using bicycles no less.   They did not attempt a large pyramid, but they did have two members on bikes with a chair on a pole between them holding another member of the act.    Without the “use of nets or safety devices of any kind”.   I held my breath the entire time. 

All in all it was one of the best nights I’ve ever had at any venue and I hope they repeat this every year. 

A Couple of Things

Remember that little meteorite remnant I pictured the other day?   Check out this story about one that destroyed a house

And here is yet another reason I need to get an iPad – no problem tuning it as a musical instrument:

In Tune

My sister and I took piano lessons when we were children.  She continued to play after the lessons ended; I didn’t.  But although she likes to play the piano she really always wanted to play the violin.  So for her New Year’s resolution, she decided she would take some lessons.  She rented a violin and found a teacher and has been enjoying herself.   A few weeks ago she was playing some of the tunes she had learned for me and she remarked that the violin sounded out of tune.  So she started trying to tune it and ended up very frustrated.  I was no help.  I know nothing about violins and although I could hear that she was in tune on the first note I didn’t think she was out of tune later while she was sure that she was.  

The violin, unlike a guitar, has no frets.  So a violinist must tune only by ear without any help from the instrument itself.  Recently Sam, at Inside the Classics, wrote an interesting post that may explain why it was so hard.  He wrote it as an adjunct to a post by Jan Swafford at Slate on the History of Tuning.   Sam tells us that there is no such thing as Perfectly in Tune, it is all a matter of taste.

… what sort of tuning sounds best to your ear depends in large part on what kind of music you like to listen to. If you’re a big fan of renaissance music, for instance, you absolutely need all the fourths and fifths to be perfectly in tune, which means that some of the thirds won’t be, but that won’t bother you so much, since there aren’t very many of them in renaissance music. On the other hand, if you love big Romantic symphonies, those thirds are just crucial, since triads are the basic building blocks of that era, and your brain won’t even notice the occasional slightly out of tune fifth.

What is he talking about – thirds and fifths?  Swafford explains, and explains the problem:

In dealing with tuning, there are two main terms to know. One is interval. It means the distance between notes. The basic science of intervals was laid out in ancient Greece, perhaps first by the mathematician Pythagoras. The first notes of the C major scale are C, D, E, F, and G. The note E is the third note up from C, so the interval C-E is a third. The note G is five notes up, so C-G is a fifth. So musical intervals run second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. (Some intervals can be major, like F to A, or minor, like F to A flat.)

OK? Now, as Pythagoras discovered, intervals are also mathematical ratios. If you take an open guitar string sounding E, stop it with your finger in the middle and pluck, you get E an octave above. The octave ratio, then, is 2:1. If you stop the string in the ratio 3:2, you get a fifth higher than the open string, the note B. The other intervals have progressive ratios; 4:3 is a fourth, and so on.

So far, all very tidy. But this is where things get hilarious. As Pythagoras also realized in mathematical terms, if you start with a C at the bottom of a piano keyboard and tune a series of 12 perfect 3:2 fifths up to the top, you discover that where you expect to have returned to a perfect high C, that C is overshot, intolerably out of tune. In other words, nature's math doesn't add up. A series of perfect intervals doesn't end at a perfect interval from where you started. If you tune three perfect 5:4 major thirds, it should logically add up to an octave, but it doesn't; the result is egregiously flat. It is this innate irreconcilability of pitch that, through the centuries, has driven men mad.  …

What all this means in practice is that in tuning keyboards and fretted instruments, you have to screw around with the intervals in order to fit the necessary notes into an octave. In other words, as we say, you have to temper pure intervals, nudge them up or down a hair in some systematic way. Otherwise, you get chaos. So there's the second word you need to remember: The business of adapting tuning to nature's messy math is called temperament.

How crazy is that?   Maybe this is why I liked playing the piano – I never had to tune it, there were professionals who did that.  I never had to make the choice that tuners have to make:

There is no perfection, only varying tastes in corruption. If you want your fifths nicely in tune, the thirds can't be; if you want pure thirds, you have to put up with impure fifths. And no scale on a keyboard, not even good old C major, can be perfectly in tune. Medieval tunings voted for pure fifths. By the late Renaissance the tuning systems favored better thirds. The latter were various kinds of meantone temperament. In meantone, most of the accumulated fudges were dumped onto two notes, usually G# (aka A flat) and E flat. The shivery effect of those two notes played together in meantone temperaments earned it the name "wolf," which, like its namesake, was regarded with a certain holy fear.

All of this is difficult for tuning fixed tuned instruments like the piano or harpsichords.  But violins aren’t fixed tuned instruments.  They can be tuned by the musician “on the fly”.  The voice is also not a fixed tune instrument and can be tuned on the fly.

Meanwhile, an orchestra is made of a bunch of instruments, some of which tune naturally by ear—strings, woodwinds, brass—but also instruments in fixed, equal temperament: harp, marimbas and xylophones, harpsichord and piano, etc. What do orchestras do to harmonize all those conflicting demands? They do the best they can and try not to think about it too much. It can make you crazy.

Swafford’s piece in Slate is well worth reading.  In the meantime, Sam plays the viola for the Minnesota Orchestra, so he understands string instruments.  And maybe understands why Sr. Emily really didn’t want to teach my sister the violin when she was a small child:

My viola has only four fixed pitches – my open strings – and I can even change those within a few seconds if I need to. I have no frets, either, to control where my fingers land for any particular pitch, so my intonation is entirely within my control (or lack thereof.) This is the major reason why a pianist who’s only been taking lessons for a few years will almost always sound miles ahead of a violinist with the same amount of training. There’s very little that bothers the ear more than out-of-tune music, and in a particularly cruel twist for parents of young musicians, correct intonation is one of the very hardest things to master on string, wind, and brass instruments.

eh, what’s up doc?

It’s always nice to go to the symphony and see kids there.  And last Saturday night Powell Symphony Hall was full of kids.  And adults enjoying themselves like kids.  

The event was Bugs Bunny on Broadway.  The Saint Louis Symphony, conducted by Bugs Bunny (via film) and George Daugherty on the podium, played along with classic films starring Bugs and friends.   We learned a little local history too.

Olympic Blogging: Classical Music

Sarah over at Inside the Classics (which, by the way, is my favorite classical music blog) addresses the eternal “is classical music still relevant” question by pointing to the Olympics and all the classical music we are hearing as we watch the telecasts.

I learned something from her post.  I had no idea that all the national anthems played during medal ceremonies were recorded specially for the Olympics by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.  That’s cool.  I thought the Olympic committee just pulled standard recordings and used them.

Regional

Sarah Bryan Miller recently had a post up at the St. Louis Post Dispatch in which she responded to a question asked by the New York Times Art Beat Blog:  How does an orchestra earn its status?

The discussion was occasioned by the gift of $85 million to Cincinnati arts groups by a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is patron named Louise Dieterle Nippert. Wakin, reporting on this, got a storm of reaction over calling the respected Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, one of the major beneficiaries of the gift, a “regional orchestra.”

Why, SBM wonders, are orchestras as good as Cincinnati’s and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra classified as regional when they regularly play better than orchestras in the ‘Big 5’.   She made me chuckle:

The New York Philharmonic is the only symphony orchestra in the United States older than the SLSO; it’s in the center of the American artistic universe, and it can have its pick of players. But I’ve heard the NY Phil play like absolute pigs, reportedly because they collectively detested the conductor. (”It’s hard to play well for a conductor you don’t respect,” said a freelancer friend who sometimes works with them. I dunno; when I was a professional singer, that attitude wouldn’t have washed - and most listeners are going to blame the people producing the wrong notes, not the guy with the stick.) I can’t imagine the members of the SLSO pulling a stunt like that.

I love irreverence toward the New York Philharmonic.    

I don’t get too worked up that the SLSO doesn’t get as much recognition as orchestras from larger cities. It makes it easier to recognize the people who really know what they are talking about from the poseurs.  For instance, I’ve never been a big fan of Alec Baldwin and had no idea he was a classical music fan until I read this New York Times piece about his love of classical music and his relationship with the New York Philharmonic.   And even as  I was reading I wasn’t really sure how serious I was taking it until I read this:

Asked about his favorite performances, he rattled them off: “The Solti Mahler Ninth. Any Copland with Slatkin when he was in St. Louis. I like the Mahler cycle that Tilson Thomas did.”

And I realized he was serious.   Because SLSO recordings of Copland from back in the 80’s are fabulous.   I have a hard time listening to other orchestras’ interpretations of Copland because I think Slatkin’s are the gold standard.

People who really love a type of music always know who can really play it.   Worldwide fame isn’t important; playing famous venues isn’t important.  It’s the talent that counts.  It’s like back in the 20’s when white musicians knew that Louis Armstrong was a huge talent even though he wasn’t allowed to play certain venues because of racial segregation.  They would go to his venues after hours and jam with him.  Because they knew how good he was.   It’s the same in the classical music world.  

SLSO has a CD out right now, a recording of John Adam’s Dr. Atomic Symphony.   It is getting critical acclaim.  It seemed that the SLSO fell off of many people’s radar after Slatkin left but now the radar is picking up a bleep. (Full disclosure:  I hated the Hans Vonk years and even cancelled my subscription, I was so bored during those years by what they were playing.  So I can’t blame anyone too much for ignoring SLSO during those years.)

Maybe I’d just rather be a big fish in a little pond than a little fish in a big pond, but I don’t really see any downside to being one of the best “regional” orchestras in the world.   As long as the word “best” is out there.

Alt-Classical

Music critic Greg Sandow, who writes among other things about the future of classical music,  has just written a thought provoking series of blog posts comparing the history and current state of contemporary classical music with the history and current state of contemporary art. 

Amadeus

The Milos Forman film Amadeus has always been one of my favorite films but I had never seen the stage play by Peter Shaffer on which it was based. I remedied that last week when I caught the production at the The St. Louis Repertory Theatre directed by Paul Mason Barnes and starring Andrew Long as Salieri and Jim Poulos as Mozart.

Standing O's

Recently, Terry Teachout did a blog post at the WSJ about an incident at the Metropolitan Opera. A production of La Sonnambula was roundly booed by the audience. As Teachout points out, not only is it unusual to get booed, it is unusual not to get a standing ovation. He says:

Most of the theatrical performances I see in New York receive standing ovations. Time was when audiences reserved that special gesture for a performance of equally special merit, but in recent years it has become a near-reflexive response to anything short of a crash-and-burn disaster.

He then meditates on the art of booing and why it doesn’t happen much anymore.

This post was picked up at the Freakonomics Blog and then by other bloggers, all of whom are wondering why standing ovations are the rule and not the exception.  Ezra Klein has a theory that it has to do with the herd mentality:

People fear being wrong. The standing ovation isn't necessarily a sign of enjoyment. You might stand and clap for an utterly unpleasant play about the Holocaust. It's a sign of critical appreciation. And people don't want to be wrong about whether a play deserves an ovation. They don't want to be the boor who missed the cutting edge theory behind the endless monologues. Disliking a beautiful performance can be seen as a sign of poor taste or deficient critical faculties. As such it takes time to decide whether or not jeering is a safe response to a poor performance. Time you don't have because the audience has already taken a different path.

Audience behavior, after all, is a herd phenomenon. Standing ovations are occasionally instantaneous. But they're more often infections. Some stand, and then some others stand, and then the laggards decide that remaining seated seems churlish, and they can't see anything anyway. So they stand too. Just about no one boos while everyone else stands and cheers.

I pretty much agree with all of that.  But it got me thinking about the rare instantaneous standing ovations I've experienced.

My most vivid memory of a spontaneous ovation was a long time ago (at least 15 years ago, maybe more) at the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.  The program included a Mozart Piano Concerto and the guest pianist was Awadagin Pratt.  I had never heard of Pratt and I don't recall which Piano Concerto it was.  I like Mozart but much of his work runs together in my mind.

Pratt was a surprise from the first moment he walked out onto the stage. First of all, he was huge. Not fat, but big. Very tall with broad shoulders and what appeared to be huge hands (which led me to wonder why he wasn’t performing one of the works that require huge hands, Rachmaninoff for instance. But I digress.)

It was also a surprise to me that he was African American.   There just aren't many African American concert pianists, or if there are they don't visit the Saint Louis Symphony.   I remember he was dressed somewhat casually (it was a day concert as I recall) although not inappropriately.  The idea that he was casual probably was exacerbated by his dreadlocks.

But the strangest thing about him was that he did not sit on a standard piano bench but sat, instead, on a small wooden four legged stool that put him very low to the ground. When he sat down he reminded me for all the world of Schroeder in the Charlie Brown Comic strip. I remember thinking that this might be one of the extraordinary Mozart experiences I'd ever had.  

And it was.  But not because of his appearance.  Because of his playing.

It was magical. His technique was beautiful, precise and light and the sound rang through the hall, the orchestra melding into the piano solos as if soloist and orchestra were one organism. There was utter silence in the hall between the movements. Not the usual silence punctuated by coughs and shuffling, but an expectant silence. It was like being at the ballpark when a pitcher has a no hitter going and the audience is holding its breath. The moment he finished the entire audience was on its feet applauding and shouting bravo.

It was the kind of performance where total strangers turned to each other during intermission and talked about it.  It brought the crowd together.   It was a once in a lifetime experience. 

Pratt has returned and I've heard him since.  He's a fine musician and I've always enjoyed him.  But he's never had, or deserved, another spontaneous ovation.   That was a special moment and he completely deserved his Standing O.

This and That: Books, Music and Architecture

Some stuff:

• I finally read the PD James novel that I got for Christmas: The Private Patient. This happens every year; I want a book and someone gives it to me for Christmas and then I put off reading it because I don't want to read it too fast. This one was worth the wait. It probably isn't my favorite PD James novel but I did enjoy it. The idea of having a modern plastic surgery center adjoining an old Manor sounds odd to American ears. But the idea reminded me of a hotel in Scotland I stayed in that was an old Manor in the front and a modern conference center in the rear. I did feel that James cheated a little with the ending of this book, introducing a new character at the end who "explains" everything. But the cheating wasn't enough to ruin it for me.
  
• Anthony Tommasini reviews the performance of The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Well, actually, he reviews conductor David Robertson's amazing last minute fill-in performance as a singer:
  
  

  "That David Robertson conducted the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night in the most transparent and riveting account of Sibelius’s elusive Fifth Symphony in memory would have been momentous enough. But for making news in the staid world of classical music, nothing topped Mr. Robertson’s unplanned New York debut as a singer during the symphony’s concert on Friday night at Zankel Hall, the first of two programs during this visit."

  
  Bad weather caused the orchestra to arrive in New York with only a couple of hours to spare before the performance and HK Gruber, who was to perform the vocal portion of his own work "Frankenstein", never made it. So Robertson handed the baton over to the assistant conductor and performed the work himself.

  "Mr. Gruber intended for the texts to be delivered in a kind of speech-song, complete with nasal squawks and patter. You do not need a proper singing voice to perform the part, but you do have to be uninhibited. Mr. Robertson’s performance was a tour de force of uninhibition.


This reminds me that I need to go to the Symphony more often.


• Last Friday I attended a lecture by Anthony Alofin, of the University of Texas, who is one of the preeminent Frank Lloyd Wright scholars in the country. We have one Frank Lloyd Wright designed house which is operated and preserved by a non-profit entity. As part of its mission it sponsors a free lecture every year about Wright. During the lecture Alofin sneered at the recent novels written about Wright including Loving Frank which I discussed here. Alofin said that author Nancy Horan used the research of others "without attribution." I didn't much care for Loving Frank, but I question whether a novelist is required to attribute any of the research she uses in constructing an historical novel.

Wasn't this a Novel?

A story in Monday's The Independent sounds like the plot of a novel. A secret love between Swedish singer Jenny Lind and the married-with-children composer Felix Mendelssohn? Is the evidence buried in the bowels of the Royal Acadamy of Music?

In 1896, Lind's husband, Otto Goldschmidt, allegedly placed in the archive of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation (housed at the RAM) an affidavit in which – according to Professor Curtis Price, former principal of the RAM – he declares that he'd destroyed a letter that would have been deeply injurious to the reputations of his wife and Mendelssohn: an 1847 missive from the composer to the soprano declaring passionate love for her, begging her to elope with him to America, and threatening suicide if she refused. Lind, one infers, did refuse. Several months later, Mendelssohn was dead.

Until now Mendelssohn was known to have had a happy marriage and five children. It was thought that Jenny Lind had an unrequited love for him but that his attachment to her was friendly and professional.

Friends, including [Hans Christian] Andersen and the pianist Clara Schumann, remarked on their attachment. An acquaintance who met Lind at the Mendelssohns' home in 1846, remarked: "She is such a fine and beautiful character. Yet she is not happy. I am convinced that she would exchange all her triumphs for domestic happiness. That sort of happiness she observes in Mendelssohn's home with his wife and children."

Goldschmidt's 100 year embargo on the mysterious document expired 12 years ago but the document has not been released. It isn't explained why.

Although Medelssohn did die shortly after the alleged letter, it seems unlikely that Mendelssohn killed himself.

Eye-witness accounts and medical reports into the composer's death all assert that he suffered a series of strokes. One could speculate that these could have been induced by self-administered poison, but that seems unlikely since [his sister] Fanny, too, died of a stroke, and it ran in the family. Yet Mendelssohn's crisis could have precipitated his fatal haemorrhage, casting a horrible irony over his alleged suicide threat. Mourning Mendelssohn, Lind wrote: "[He was] the only person who brought fulfilment to my spirit, and almost as soon as I found him I lost him again." In 1869, she and Goldschmidt, a former student of Mendelssohn's whom she married in 1852, erected a plaque to Mendelssohn's memory at his birthplace in Hamburg. (The Nazis tore it down in 1936.)

Isn't this suspiciously like the plot of AS Byatt's novel Possession? The article even includes a line that I swear is out of that novel: It could transform critical views of his music. (Ok change the word music to poetry, but you get the picture.)

For those not familiar with any Mendelssohn, here is the third movement of Mendelssohn's First Violin Concerto. The violinist? Itzhak Perlman at age 13 - yes he was that good at age 13:

This and That

I'm still looking for suggestions in the post below.  While you think ...

• Sometimes you just need a holiday chuckle -- and this one is at someone else's expense.  But I can't help it, I lauged. If you need a laugh then click here to hear the worst ending to Handel's Messiah evah.   For those of us who have sung it many times ... it's one of those funny but thank god it wasn't me moments.  (h/t Inside the Classics)
• If any multi-millionaire was out looking for a Christmas gift for me, I hope he (or she) picked me up an original EH Shepard Winnie the Pooh Drawing.
• Majel Barrett-Roddenberry has died.  The computer is speechless.  And Deanna Troi is mourning.
• I'm thinking of making Cranberry Sorbet this weekend.  Unless I feel too cold.   My sister and I are baking cookies and I figure we'll need a palate cleanser.  Which reminds me that I need to dig out a cookie recipe for Toni's Cookie Exchange.
• As I sit here amidst ice and some snow, feeling very cold, I'm very jealous of my friends Meg and Adam who are spending six months in South America.  They were my inspiration for starting a blog in the first place.  But while they are now blogging in summer clothes, while drinking Argentinian wine and eating Argentinian steak, I'm in my bunny slippers and an oversized sweater shivering.   ::sniff::
• Haven't finished your holiday shopping yet?  Books make great gifts.  At least, that's what America's book publishers think.  And they've done a youtube that says so ( I particularly like Jon Stewart's reasoning):

Chopin Again

Last month, after my post on Chopin, I saw that the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra had scheduled a concert that included the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 1 which, those of you who read the comments might recall, is my sister's favorite work by Chopin.  So I immediately e-mailed her to see if she was free and if she wanted to go with me.  She was and she did.

The concert was tonight at Powell Symphony Hall and the program was called Warm Music for Cold Nights (which was appropriate as it was quite cold out).  The concert opened with Samuel Barber's Essay No. 1 and was followed by the Chopin work.  After intermission we heard Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 3.   I had never heard any of these works performed live before (not even the Chopin, that I could recall) and I was unfamiliar with the  Tchaikovsky .  I had no idea why this program was considered "Warm Music", so I checked the SLSO's web site before going to the concert. 

Barber's Essay lights a bright American candle. Chopin's piano concertos are all of fire, a dramatic combustion between orchestra and soloist, a battle as riveting as a volatile marriage. Tchaikovsky's suites are just as incandescent.  Being Russian he knows the darkest nights require heat and light.  He brings them. 

I have to say, I thought that was a little overwrought.  But I decided to withhold judgment until after the concert.

The soloist for the Chopin was French-Canadian pianist Louis Lortie, of whom I had never heard.  He struck both of us as a man with a sense of humor.  The way he held his body and moved his head during the third movement, we could almost see a twinkle in his eye up in the balcony where we were seated.  

Lortie was in command of this performance, playing with exquisite technical proficiency but with an interpretation that was somewhat mellow.  To say that he made it look effortless probably doesn't convey the depth of his calm at the piano.  And yet he was fully engaged.  Personally I prefer a slightly more emotional interpretation - more longing.  But that didn't detract at all from my experience.

Chopin represents early romanticism, Tchaikovsky represents the height of romanticism.  I had never heard Suite No. 3 (in fact this was the first time in its more than 100 year history that SLSO was playing the entire Suite).  I can't say it would count as one of my favorite works by Tchaikovsky.  The Suite has four movements: an elegie, a waltz, a scherzo and then a final movement that is a theme and variations.   The final movement was worth the rest of the piece and more.  The theme itself wasn't particularly memorable, in my opinion, but the variations were interesting and in some cases humorous.  I particularly liked the somewhat schmaltzy violin solo which made me think that Hollywood composers must have had it in mind when they composed "russian" background music.

The Barber piece was also somewhat Hollywood. I often think his works sound like the soundtracks to a Hollywood film of the 1950's but that's not his fault, it is Hollywood's).  This is a somber piece with lighter moments in the middle and then more tension toward the end.  What I liked about it was that it was not only the strings, but the horn section and reed sections, that emoted.  I'm generally a fan of Barber and I enjoyed this.

In fact, I enjoyed the whole program and thought it fit together very well.

Rather than link to any Chopin (a bait and switch, I know) I'm going to link to the Barber.  This version was performed recently by the Conway Symphony Orchestra after the shootings at the University of Central Orchestra.

Barber Essay No. 1

Reviews under Review

This week's Booking Through Thursday question:

I receive a lot of review books, but I have never once told lies about the book just because I got a free copy of it. However, some authors seem to feel that if they send you a copy of their book for free, you should give it a positive review. Do you think reviewers are obligated to put up a good review of a book, even if they don’t like it? Have we come to a point where reviewers *need* to put up disclaimers to (hopefully) save themselves from being harassed by unhappy authors who get negative reviews?

I have never yet in the Long Life of this blog (heh) received a free book to review, but I would like to think that I would give my true opinion in the review. A reviewer who puts up a good review of a book she doesn't like is doing a disservice to her readers.

Of course, since I'm not a professional reviewer and I don't receive books on the condition (or assumption) that I'll review them, I probably wouldn't bother to review a book that I didn't like. I might mention it in passing but I don't know if I'd have the energy to write about something I didn't like. Maybe if I hated it ...

Personally, I think being a professional reviewer would be a pain in the neck. I don't like to finish books on deadline. And I don't like to be in a position where I feel that I must finish a book that I'm not in the mood for. That happens enough by being in two book reading groups.

How do you feel about it?

And while you are pondering, check out this unique performance of Mozart:


h/t Inside the Classics which found it via Andrew Sullivan.

Chopin

Last week, when I wrote about my love for Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto, Family Man, in the comments, asked for some Chopin. It's hard to know where to begin with Chopin, I love so much of his work. Since I couldn't identify the piece that Family Man was thinking of, I thought I'd simply choose one of my favorite bits of Chopin - the second movement from his Piano Concerto #2 in F-sharp minor.

Although the entire concerto is dedicated to a woman, she was not the inspiration for the music. The second movement was inspired by the youthful Chopin’s love for a young opera singer named Konstancja Gładkowska. Later, of course, Chopin entered into a famous long term relationship with Aurore Dudevant (who is better known by her pen name, George Sand).

Unlike my experience of Rachmaninoff, I never have any narrative in mind when I hear this. I just listen and enjoy. I think of it as more than contemplative and less than fantasy. Dreamy, perhaps.

Chopin himself wrote about this movement in an 1830 letter:

It is not meant to be powerful, but rather romantic, quiet, melancholic, should give the impression of a look back at a thousand loveable memories. It is like meditating in beautiful springtime, at moonlight.

Chopin, himself a great pianist, mostly composed for solo piano and not for orchestra. And even in the piano concertos, it seems to me that the orchestra is there less as a partner than as a background to showcase the virtuosity of the pianist. Chopin himself was known for using rubato - a technique where the pianist doesn’t play the notes on the page with their exact tempo, but slows down or speeds up as emotion demands. In the hands of a virtuoso, this gives Chopin’s work an appealing combination of fragility and solidity. (In the wrong hands it just sounds as if the pianist can’t remember what notes come next.)

Sometimes a work that is beloved today was not appreciated during it’s own time. But this piano concerto was praised by Chopin’s contemporaries, including Robert Schumann who commented that it was "...[a concerto] which all of us put together would not be able to reach, and whose hem we can merely kiss". The second movement was especially praised as original and Chopin was called an “exceptional musical genius.” Not bad for a composer fresh out of school.

A Chopin piece will not have the intensity of a work by Rachmaninoff, although they are both considered Romantics. Chopin was among the earliest to compose in the Romantic style (contrast the expression in Chopin's music with the careful formulas of the earlier Mozart or even Beethoven). Chopin was breaking new ground. Rachmaninoff, among the last of the Romantic composers, was taking the genre to it's fullest expression.

This is not a piece that I like to watch played. I just like to listen. So click play and then walk away from your computer and just sit and listen. And think about ... whatever it brings to mind.

Enjoy.