They certainly enthralled Eric Siblin, a former pop-music journalist. “The Cello Suites”, his first book, vividly chronicles his international search for the original, and unfound, Bach score. The story is interspersed with digressions on the lives of Bach and Casals, which deftly reveal how contemporary politics shaped their music, and buffeted their careers. For Bach, for instance, “there is a straight line connecting Prussian militarism with [his] six suites.”

Mr Siblin’s book is well researched, and filled with enough anecdotes to engage even the classical-music aficionado. One of the suites, for example, exhibits the musical refrain B-flat, A, C, B, which in German usage spells Bach. Bach’s music also displays a fetish for Kabbalistic numbering. But the book is best distinguished by its writing. To vivify music in words is not easy. But Mr Siblin, who memorably describes one Bach passage as a “spine-shivering, jewel-encrusted melody on a swath of organ and strings”, rises to the task.

The dearth of data on Bach makes an accurate character portrayal difficult. Yet the book manages to chip away at the stuffy image of Bach famously fanned by a Saxon court painter, Elias Hausmann. Instead, we see Bach the irascible youth, the ambitious careerist, the grieving husband, and the father (of 20 children, only ten of whom survived infancy) keen to send his sons to university.

A fuller picture of Casals emerges. His musicality was complemented by an unwavering love for his native Catalonia, whose customs and people Spain’s fascist forces began to destroy in the civil war. Casals’s outspoken opposition to General Franco’s government kept him exiled in France. He refused requests to play the cello suites in the many countries that recognised the regime. Spain’s government swore to amputate his arms if he returned.

Casals’s mix of genius and musical martyrdom made him a geriatric superstar. In 1958 he played at the United Nations in New York (assuring himself that it was not American territory) in a concert that reached more listeners than any other to date. In 1961 President Kennedy invited him to the White House. Casals’s lifelong political torment was ultimately tempered by domestic bliss. Aged 80, he married a former student, 20-year-old Marta Montanez, and spent his final years with her in her native Puerto Rico.

Mr Siblin never found the original script. It remains unclear whether Bach even meant the suites for the cello. The sixth suite curiously calls for an instrument with five strings, whereas the cello has only four. One thing is sure. Read “The Cello Suites”—preferably with their melodious hum in the background—and you will never look at a cello in quite the same way again.

January 7, 2010
Weblink: www.economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15211187
Photo credits: jsbach.net

The question — the $64,000 question for all forms of so-called “new technology” — is what you put out there through this new medium. It’s the same problem that has faced countless organizations that got themselves spiffy new websites and then discovered they had to figure out a little thing called “content.” (A great scramble of the 2000s involved lots of performing-arts organizations discovering, after they had launched websites, that what audiences really wanted to do on-line was buy tickets. One of the Metropolitan Opera’s less-heralded but possibly most influential innovations was the development of the software Tessitura, a ticket-selling and fund-raising program that’s now in wide use.)

For the most part, organizations are settling for using Twitter as a glorified bulletin board for PR notices: “Come see our performance on Sunday! Tickets going fast!” Some, though, are developing personalities, from “Here’s what I did this morning” to “Hear a recording of our recent concert.” Were it not for the Fairfax Symphony’s Twitter feed, I wouldn’t know that the group is represented on the newly ubiquitous service Instant Encore, where you can hear recordings of recent concerts and even of ones that are coming up. (In fact, I had a brief moment of panic when I saw on the Fairfax site a recording of Avner Dorman’s second piano concerto, which had its world premiere in Kansas City in November, and thought I had somehow missed the Fairfax performance — it’s coming up on March 13.) The Welsh National Opera is one of my favorites, because it is engagingly personal and, not least, because it Tweets everything in both English and Welsh.

But I think the Leipzig Gewandhaus has set some kind of new benchmark with its latest Tweet. It’s searching for a new director of its concert office and artistic planning. And it’s making this known over Twitter.

This is actually a nice sign of institutional transparency — even, arguably, a sounder understanding of the Twitter audience than many groups seem to harbor. This ad tacitly presupposes that an internationally experienced classical-music business type with extensive connections in the field may be reading the Gewandhaus’s Tweets. At least it doesn’t fall into the trap of assuming that all Twitter users are 20 to 30 years old and card-carrying representatives of a hip generation. (Of course, since the Gewandhaus has all of 317 Twitter followers as of this morning, they are in a position to know exactly who’s following them.) I’d be curious to know what kind of response, if any, they get.

Anne Midgette | January 6, 2010
Weblink: voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat/2010/01/its_been_observed_here_before_1.html
Photo credits: ccapp.osu.edu

Winterreise, Song Cycle for Voice & Piano, D. 911 (Op. 89) – Book I, Gute Nacht (‘Fremd bin ich eingezogen’)

From Schubert: Winterreise (2009)
Released by Harmonia Mundi






Schubert: Winterreise, Gute Nacht

Based on poems by Wilhelm Müller.

Every time I listen to Gute Nacht, sung by Mark Padmore with Paul Lewis at the piano, I get goosebumps.

I have never heard this song sung and played with so much intensity and sensibility; there are no words to describe it, the music simply goes straight to your heart.

Good Night (Gute Nacht)

As a stranger I arrived
As a stranger I shall leave
I remember a perfect day in May
How bright the flowers, how cool the breeze

The maiden had a friendly smile
The mother had kind words
But now the world is dreary
With a winter path before me

I can’t choose the season
To depart from this place
I won’t delay or ponder
I must begin my journey now

The bright moon lights my path
It will guide me on my road
I see the snow-covered meadow
I see where deer have trod

A voice within says – go now
Why linger and delay?
Leave the dogs to bay at the moon
Before her father’s gate

For love is a thing of changes
God has made it so
Ever-changing from old to new
God has made it so

So love delights in changes
Good night, my love, good night
Love is a thing of changes
Good night, my love, good night

I’ll not disturb your sleep
But I’ll write over your door
A simple farewell message
Good night, my love, good night

These are the last words spoken
Soon I’ll be out of sight
A simple farewell message
Goodnight, my love, good night

The score is really a blueprint for our creative talents and, consequently, our interpretive options abound. We interpret not only the music but the verbal directions the composer has given us. No score will tell you how to play allegro (quickly)—there are a lot of different “quicklies” to go around. No score will give you the coordinates for playing rubato (freely), agitato (agitated) orsemplice (simply). Nor will it tell you how to adapt the pedal indications, which applied to 19th-century pianos—a far cry from the very sonorous ones of today.

Composers occasionally specified with metronome markings the exact speed of a tempo they desired. Arturo Toscanini once confided to John Pfeiffer, a recording engineer at RCA Victor, that he preferred a faster tempo in a work of Beethoven than the composer’s metronome markings indicated. But after a long inner struggle, he decided he should stick with the score as written, saying, “I’d rather be wrong with Beethoven.” A passage in a letter written by Brahms could have eased his dilemma. “As far as my experience goes,” Brahms wrote, “every composer who has given metronome marks has sooner or later withdrawn them.”

The great composer Robert Schumann definitely had a malfunctioning metronome judging by some of his tempo markings. At the end of his G-minor Sonata he wrote, “As fast as possible,” and shortly thereafter, “Still faster.” If the “faithful-to-the-score people” ever thought of being unfaithful, that would surely be the time!

Do composers regard their work as sacrosanct as the demands for fidelity to the score would suggest? The answer might surprise you.

In 1960, I opened the cultural exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and brought Aaron Copland’s Piano Sonata to play. Never having performed it before, I wanted to play it for the composer first. On arriving at his home, I found him tinkering with one of its passages and said, “Mr. Copland, I notice you are playing forte and you have marked it piano in the score.” He turned to me grinning mischievously and said, “Ah, but that was 10 years ago!”

Some 200 years earlier, Chopin would have made a similar remark. Only he would have said, “but that was 10 seconds ago!” Julius Seligmann, president of the Glasgow Society of Musicians, attended a recital where the composer played his new “Mazurka in B flat, Opus 7 no. 1″ as an encore. According to Seligmann, it met with such great success that Chopin decided to play it again, this time with such a radically different interpretation—tempos, colors and phrasing had all been changed—that it sounded like an entirely different piece. The audience was amazed when it finally realized he was playing the very same mazurka, and it rewarded him with a prolonged, vociferous ovation. It seems he had facetiously decided to show why he had no need to republish a score—the magic of interpretation would do it for him. He would often say, “I never play the same way twice.”

How thrilled I was in 1967, at the Château de Thoiry in France, when I accidentally discovered previously unknown versions of two Chopin waltzes, written in his own hand and dated 1833. Unbelievably, six years later I again accidentally found unknown versions of the very same two waltzes, this time at Yale University and dated 1832. Besides experiencing the drama of the discovery, I was excited to be privy to Chopin’s interpretive and creative process, ever-changing right up until the moment of publication.

Thinking is creativity’s worst enemy. When I first sight-read a score, everything seems so right, so natural. The notes seem to be playing themselves and the music flows. Why? Because I am not thinking. Inspiration has been my guide—the adventure of a first time. Then comes familiarization, the learning process where, until the piece is well in hand, thinking is allowed. After that, interpretation—choices must be made, but you are finally free to feel and use your creative instincts. And, at last, creation—how do I make the music sound as it did when I didn’t know it? The great poet Yeats spoke of this dilemma so beautifully in his poem “Adam’s Curse”:

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Before the heart can remember, the mind must forget. And, when I least expect to, I will suddenly start playing that piece, again without thinking, as I did in the beginning when I first sight-read it. That is when it happens—I have finally discovered my “moment’s thought.”

Beauty is in the ear of the beholder, as well as the eye. I’m reminded of a story of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who after playing a recital in Chicago confided to a friend that he had had an off night. “Well, tomorrow comes the bad news from Miss Cassidy,” he said. Claudia Cassidy, the Chicago Tribune’s music critic, was notorious for her sharp-tongued reviews. The next day he was stunned to read in her column that “Rubinstein never played better.” And with a somewhat bemused smile the pianist quipped, “Who am I to disagree with her?”

And who could disagree with Mozart saying, “Finally it comes down to a matter of taste”?

Byron Janis | January 6, 2010
Weblink: online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580904574638380890512334.html

“I swallowed it,” Mr. Gerstein said of the mischievous ruse in an interview in New York on Tuesday. “I was so amazed. I went kind of blank for a minute.”

Mr. Gerstein, 30, is the sixth member of an elite and eclectic group of pianists that includes Ingrid Fliter, Piotr Anderszewski and Leif Ove Andsnes. He will receive $50,000 outright to spend as he wishes and can apply the rest to anything that furthers his career or artistry, subject to the Gilmore festival’s approval. He will give a recital at the festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., on May 3.

The award, which will officially be announced on Thursday morning, is music’s answer to the MacArthur Foundation“genius” grants. And it is something of an anti-Van CliburnCompetition, a tacit rejection of the hoopla, bloodlust and horse-race quality of the international competition circuit.

It is administered by the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo. Nominations are solicited; an anonymous committee sifts through commercial and noncommercial recordings, some of them surreptitiously obtained; committee members secretly slip into dozens of concerts — sometimes keeping to the balcony or hiding their faces with programs — to assess the performers, who are not supposed to know they are under consideration.

Mr. Gerstein, a naturalized American citizen of Russian origin, said he had no immediate plans to spend the money. “I’m looking forward to fantasizing with Dan the things that can be done,” he said, referring to Daniel R. Gustin, the festival’s director and the supposed music critic from Houston.

Mr. Gerstein ran through a few ideas: commissioning a work; carrying out a project that marries piano playing to a visual display or dance element; or combining his roots in jazz with his classical career. Mr. Gerstein also has long-term ambitions to record the music of Busoni, whom he calls the James Joyce of composition for his modernist, magpie tendencies.

Previous winners have used the money to take a sabbatical for practicing, to hire a publicist or commission works and, in almost all cases, to buy a piano. Mr. Gerstein ruled out the last option. He owns five pianos. They are lodged at his family home in Newton, Mass., and his residence in Stuttgart, Germany, where he teaches at the conservatory. “I think I should not be buying one for a while,” he said dryly.

His instruments include a Bechstein with two keyboards, one of 16 made by the company; a Steinway B grand; an 1899 Blüthner; and an 1848 Pleyel, its original parts intact, that is identical to Chopin’s favorite piano. Of the piano in general, he said: “At times it’s your friend. At times it’s an all-consuming monster that’s about to devour you.”

Mr. Gerstein has thinning hair and an overbite that gives him a boyish air. He ponders the effect of recordings on listeners’ ears and finds freshness in sticking to the score and stripping away performing tradition (a word he does not like). “It can sound shockingly original if you just follow what’s written there,” he said. He also does not like the word career. “I prefer life in music,” he said.

Mr. Gerstein was born in Voronezh, in southern Russia, to a mathematician father and music-teaching mother. His parents, unusually for the time and place, had a large jazz collection that absorbed Mr. Gerstein. From the time of his earliest memory he studied musicianship and piano fitfully, until he became serious about the instrument at 10, at a specialized music school. At 11 he won a piano competition in Poland, where he encountered live jazz musicians for the first time. He later spent two summers there at a jazz seminar. “This was like a revolution,” he said.

At a jazz festival in St. Petersburg, Russia, Mr. Gerstein encountered Gary Burton, a vibraphonist and teacher at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, who eventually arranged for him to attend. At only 14, and without a high school diploma, Mr. Gerstein moved to Boston with his mother to study jazz at Berklee.

Soon, he said, he began to feel a little “overfed” with jazz and turned to classical music, partly influenced by an acquaintanceship with Ralph Gomberg, the former principal oboist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Looking back, Mr. Gerstein explained his conversion as the “radical position of a 16-year-old.” He said it seemed more interesting “to be busy with the great creations of the great minds” rather than with whatever he could produce as an improviser.

He dropped out of Berklee just shy of a degree and attended theManhattan School of Music. His teacher there was Solomon Mikowsky. He also took lessons with the prominent pedagogues Dmitri Bashkirov (in Madrid) and Ferenc Rados (in Budapest), both of whom excoriated his playing at first hearing but eventually took him on.

Mr. Gerstein came to public attention in 2001 with a first prize at the Arthur Rubinstein Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. The next year he received a Gilmore Young Artist Award worth $25,000, becoming the first Gilmore Artist Award winner to have done so.

Mr. Gerstein has a busy concert schedule and plays with major European orchestras. He also collaborates in chamber groups with highly respected players like the cellists Steven Isserlis and Clemens Hagen, the violinistJoshua Bell, the flutist Emmanuel Pahud and the clarinetist Martin Frost. Reviews have generally glowed.

He has been teaching at the conservatory in Stuttgart since 2006, an unusual pursuit for a young pianist with a blossoming international career. But teaching, studying and performing are all part of the same endeavor, he said. “When I have to explain a piece to another person, I have a greater clarity of vision,” he said.

The official profile of a Gilmore Award winner is “a superb pianist and a profound musician” with charisma and broad musicianship who wants, and can keep up, a major international career. Candidates can be of any age or nationality; recent winners have been around 30. Countries of origin include Argentina, Poland, Norway, Finland and Britain.

The award was created in 1989 by the foundation established from the wealth of Irving S. Gilmore, whose family owned a department store in Kalamazoo and who was an heir to the Upjohn fortune. A modest and shy man who lived in a small apartment later in life, he was a serious amateur pianist and wanted to dedicate some of his money to helping musicians. The Gilmore Foundation, which has an endowment of $188 million, is the major provider of funds for the festival and the award.

The festival’s director chooses the evaluation committee, which this year consisted of Mr. Gustin himself; Matías Tarnopolsky, at the time the artistic administrator of the New York Philharmonic; Sherman Van Solkema, a music professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Mich.; Ann Schein, a concert pianist and teacher; Don Michael Randel, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and Curtis Price, then the president of the Royal Academy of Music in London.

“They saw me in Toledo and Wichita and Birmingham, England,” Mr. Gerstein said. “You never know who is watching you where.”

Daniel J. Wakin | January 6, 2010
Weblink: www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/arts/music/07gilmore.html

Speaking by phone from his home in Paris, Boulez talked enthusiastically about his return to the CSO, which promoted its former principal guest conductor to conductor emeritus in 2006 and which he will take to Ann Arbor and New York’s Carnegie Hall later this month. He spoke less enthusiastically about reaching 85.

“I accept my age when we speak about it, but when I see it in print, that’s not very encouraging!” he said with a wry chuckle. That he is about to turn 85 “feels even more unreal now” to him than when he reached his 70th, 75th and 80th years, he added.

Fortunately, Boulez remains in good health following recent eye surgery, the result of a fall he suffered in Japan in November when he received the $500,000 Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation for his lifelong achievements in music.

Over the years Boulez, through his precise and lucidly organized performances, has done much to break down the resistance of Chicago musicians and audience members alike to much contemporary and unfamiliar music. This also relates to wisdom accrued with age, Boulez observes.

“When I am in front of an orchestra, the players know I have quite a lot of experience behind me. Therefore there is a kind of — respect is too hard a word — agreement that I know my business. I try to persuade them as to the merits of a given score without forcing them to swallow something they don’t want to swallow. I have found that generally when an orchestra is convinced about a work, this conviction carries over to most of the audience.”

As for his listeners, Boulez said he has found that, at least in Europe, audiences no longer seem to fear what they don’t know. “Even if they are sometimes puzzled or don’t quite understand the musical content, they are confident in what I am doing, because they know I believe in a given work and can conduct it without any trouble.”

Boulez’s own intricately crafted music, which adheres to the doctrine of total serialism he first propounded during the 1950s when he declared that any composer who doesn’t feel the necessity of Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone language is “useless,” continues to have its passionate advocates as well as passionate detractors. Among the latter are fellow composers Ned Rorem and John Adams. Adams, whose opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” Boulez decries as “bad film music,” calls him “a mannerist, a niche composer, a master with a very small hammer.”

Chicago listeners will have the opportunity to hear examples of early, middle and late Boulez and judge for themselves whether his music has something significant to say to them. Pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich will perform Book 2 of his pioneering “Structures” (1961) on the same MusicNOW program as his “Messagesquisse” for seven cellos (1971) and “Anthemes 2″ (1997) for solo violin and live electronics. And a CSO subscription program will include his 1968 “Livre pour cordes” (“Book for Strings”), a pivotal piece in Boulez’s catalog.

Conducting his own music as well as that of the composers of the last century with whom he has particular affinity — Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Bartok, Debussy and Ravel — has had two results, Boulez explains.

“The first result is that I am more realistic than before. Experience, if it’s any help, gives you a sense of the possible — what you can achieve in practical terms with an orchestra. I know that maybe I can achieve more now than before. The second result is that by conducting the music of these composers I learn how they exploit their musical ideas. This I find very interesting in terms of my own composing.”

Boulez is the first to admit that his extensive conducting activities have stolen time away from writing music — a situation he hopes to improve next season when he will take another sabbatical from conducting so he can concentrate on finishing the orchestrated set of “Notations” he has owed the CSO since the early 1990s.

Much as observers like to label him as little more than a musical theoretician, the fact remains that the more one listens to his music, the more its sensuous, even seductive qualities are apt to emerge.

Does Boulez regard himself as a spiritualist?

“No, religion is not my cup of tea,” he replies. “But I have the religion of art. You can express your human feelings through music — that is essential to me. If music is only a construction of logical thinking, that’s not terribly interesting. I like composers who have the right balance between feeling and a musical organization that reinforces those feelings. For me, the late Beethoven quartets are a model of how to achieve that. I feel very close to that music.”

John von Rhein | January 5, 2010
Weblink: hchicago.metromix.com/home/review/the-lion-in-winter/1696890/content
Photo credits: wikimedia.org