Why Is Mellon's $2 Million Gift to Support a New Masters Music Program So Important?

Inside Philanthropy

By Mike Scutari

August 15, 2015

Readers should know that we here at IP are big fans of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. After giving him a shout-out in a theater post regarding the Roy Cockrum Foundation, we can now say that we're spending our free time tackling his ambitious novel The Savage Detectives.

The book looks at a clan of aspiring (and starving) poets in Mexico City in the early 1970s. It's romantic stuff. The characters are young, idealistic, and obsessed with the art of poetry, whether it's spending all night discussing Ezra Pound or Chinese masters from the mid-first century.

The book evokes a simpler, bohemian time that nowadays seems quaint and anachronistic. None of the poets seemed to have day jobs. They floated around from cafe to cafe. They somehow got by on poetry, charm, and the kindness of others.

We couldn't help but juxtapose the past and the present upon coming across today's news, which finds the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarding a $2 million grant to support Bard College's innovative master of music degree program in "Curatorial, Critical, and Performance Studies," and its resulting ensemble, The Orchestra Now.

Vividly aware of the financial, economic, and professional demands on modern artists, curators, and musicians alike, the Mellon Foundation realizes that it's actually difficult to pay the bills with one's poetry, charm, and the kindness of strangers. So they've been recently funding programs that create hybrid career paths that blend both performance and professional dimensions.

Take, for example, a $2 million grant to fund the Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship Program at a half-dozen museums, which provide specialized training in the curatorial field for students from diverse backgrounds across the United States. The program attracts not only curatorial students, but also visual artists who, for whatever reason, may be burned-out or disenchanted with the art-making world.

Viewed through this lens, the gift to Bard makes perfect sense. Just take the title itself, which blends three distinct elements of the arts and music world—curatorial, critical, and performance. Rather than settle for just one of these three fields, students can dip their feet in all three.

According to the press release on Bard's website, the program is designed to prepare select conservatory graduates for the challenges facing the modern symphony orchestra and to produce scholars and advocates of classical and contemporary music as well as practiced members of a top-grade orchestra. Musicians receive three years of advanced orchestral training and take graduate-level courses in orchestral and curatorial studies, leading to a master of music degree.

And so the gift to Bard, like those that preceded it, aims to a create a logical and economically viable career roadmap for artists and performers of all stripes.

Original full story here.

Review: Bard Festival Salutes Carlos Chávez

The New York Times

By Vivien Schweitzer

August 10, 2015

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — In an article in 1940 in The New York Times the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez wrote that “the folk-music of a country influences in one way or another, but always substantially, the individual creations of great ‘learned’ composers.” The degree to which Mr. Chávez (1899-1978) integrated native and local traditions into his own works was a major theme of the Bard Music Festival, which opened last weekend at Bard College here.

It’s the first time the festival is highlighting the accomplishments of a Latin American composer. Mr. Chávez had a vital role in Mexico as educator, composer and conductor. He directed the Conservatorio Nacional de Música and founded the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, which established state support of the arts.

In the introduction to the festival book, the scholar Leonora Saavedra writes that the question of how music could represent Mexico and how modern it should be was an important debate in his lifetime. For Mr. Chávez, there was little question that music should be modern.

In 1928 he founded the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, which gave hundreds of premieres and offered free performances on Sundays for blue-collar workers and students. “There is no Mexican equivalent of Milton Babbitt,” said Leon Botstein, director of the festival, at a panel on Sunday, one of several speakers placing the programs in the political and social context of the time. (Mr. Botstein was referring to an article by Mr. Babbitt, “Who Cares if You Listen?,” in which he argued that contemporary music should be the domain of specialist listeners and not the general public.) For Mr. Chávez, added Mr. Botstein, “Music was a social art and had to be heard.”

But while Mr. Chávez’s outreach was populist, his music wasn’t, and it often elicited mixed reactions. He shunned European romanticism for an astringent, modernist aesthetic, writing colorful, densely scored works with complex rhythms, lyrical interludes, striking dissonances and vivid percussive elements.

Some of those elements are evident in his Piano Concerto (1938), a vast and sometimes unwieldy piece whose slow movement features an unusual duet between harp and piano and whose virtuosic whirlwinds, acerbic chords and gentle pentatonic, folklorish melodies were deftly and energetically rendered by the pianist Jorge Federico Osorio on Saturday evening, with Mr. Botstein conducting the American Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Chávez’s catalog includes six symphonies. The second, the Sinfonía India, uses native Yaqui instruments and North Mexican melodies and is one of Mr. Chávez’s best-known pieces; it led Copland and other prominent American supporters to identify Mr. Chávez as a quintessentially “Mexican composer.”

The opening-night program, on Friday, featured two other pieces by Mr. Chávez that contain direct references to pre-Columbian and indigenous culture. In “Xochipilli: An Imagined Aztec Music,” written to coincide with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940 called “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art,” wind and percussion instruments replicate the sound of Aztec instruments like the conch shell. Mr. Chávez’s “H.P. Danse des Hommes et des Machines,” a chaotic reimagining of folk tunes, was later adapted for a ballet featuring sets and costumes by Diego Rivera. But there was nothing particularly “nationalist” about many other of Mr. Chávez’s works featured during the five weekend concerts, including a performance of the String Quartet No. 3, whose driving, acerbic outer movements and mournful slow movement were vividly rendered on Friday by the Daedalus Quartet.

The festival seeks to spotlight a composer in the context of contemporaries and predecessors. On Friday the lineup included pieces by Silvestre Revueltas, Mr. Chávez’s colleague and fellow modernist, as well as a French-influenced work by Ricardo Castro (1864-1907), Manuel Ponce’s Concierto del Sur for guitar, and a one-movement piece by Julián Carrillo (1875-1965), who developed theories about microtonal music. (Mr. Botstein warned the audience about the alternate tunings, to avoid listeners thinking that the musicians simply couldn’t play in tune.) The program on Saturday sandwiched Mr. Chávez’s Piano Concerto between his “Sinfonía de Antígona,” Revueltas’s concert suite of music for the film “Redes” (about repression and injustice in a Mexican village), and Honegger’s Symphony No. 3 “Liturgique.”

There are invariably delightful surprises among the densely packed programs at Bard; I particularly enjoyed some of Mr. Chávez’s short works for solo piano, brilliantly rendered by Orion Weiss. Two excerpts from Mr. Chávez’s Ten Preludes (1937) provided a jolt of color, an enigmatic Andantino espressivo and a virtuosic, harmonically edgy Allegro. There were alluring moments in his Suite for Double Quartet, with the oboe melodies beautifully rendered by Alexandra Knoll.

One program was devoted to the Parisian influence on Mr. Chávez’s music. The French composer Paul Dukas encouraged him to use Manuel de Falla’s “Siete Canciones Populares Españolas” as a model for how to incorporate Mexican traditional and popular music into his works. The program, with works by Ravel, Dukas, Stravinsky, Poulenc, Ponce, Milhaud and a vibrant, harmonically astringent quartet by the little known José Rolón (played with panache by the Amphion String Quartet), also included arrangements Mr. Chávez made of short pieces by de Falla and Debussy.

A program on Sunday, “Mexico and the 10-Year Mexican Revolution,” explored the impact of popular song on art music. According to Ponce, Mexican composers had a duty to “ennoble the music of their own country, clothing it in polyphony while lovingly preserving popular melody, which is the expression of the national soul.”

Mr. Chávez wove the tunes of folk songs like “La Cucaracha” through a modernist idiom in a work for solo piano, and altered a traditional song chromatically in his Sonatina for Violin and Piano. His “Cuatro Melodías Tradicionales Indias del Ecuador” was beautifully sung by the soprano Cecilia Violetta López, whose bright, expressive voice made a strong impression in several works, including de Falla’s “El Retablo de Maese Pedro.” The resetting of part of Don Quixote de la Mancha’s story concluded the final program in a charming production featuring puppets and witty visuals designed by Doug Fitch.

Renegades

The New Yorker

By Alex Ross

August 10, 2015

The next weekend, Bard College presented something even rarer—Ethel Smyth’s 1906 opera, “The Wreckers.” Here was another renegade, not least in matters of sexual desire; Partch explored the gay-hobo subculture, and Smyth was open about her lesbian affections. There, however, the resemblance ends. Smyth, a Londoner, was a majestic Victorian eccentric who, despite her vehement feminist views, cultivated the highest social classes, including Victoria herself. Smyth’s music is conservative in profile, grounded in Romantic rhetoric. Nonetheless, it has an unsettled potency, and deserves to be heard more often than it is. The Bard production was the American stage première of “The Wreckers”; the only other known staging of any of her operas in this country was in 1903, when the Met performed her one-act “Der Wald.”

To get a picture of Smyth, you need only pick up the later novels and diaries of Virginia Woolf, who befriended her in the nineteen-thirties. Smyth provided inspiration for Rose Pargiter, the militant suffragette in “The Years,” and for Miss La Trobe, the avant-garde spinster in “Between the Acts,” who perplexes her fellow-villagers with a surreal pageant of English history. Woolf found Smyth overbearing, as did many people, but envied the older woman’s political outspokenness. (“Her speech rollicking & direct: mine too compressed & allusive.”) Woolf found “The Wreckers” to be “vigorous & even beautiful; & active & absurd & extreme; & youthful”—a fair summary of the work.

The opera’s story concerns the vicious practice, not unknown on the Cornish coast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of luring ships onto rocks and plundering their contents. Often, the wreckers found ways to justify this activity on religious grounds; from that twisted logic, Smyth and her librettist, Henry Brewster, spun a tale of criminal fanaticism in which villagers persecute a young fisherman who attempts to warn passing vessels. The fisherman, Mark, is in love with the pastor’s wife, Thirza. In the finale, the two are condemned to death, and drown in a coastal cave as the tide rises.

The score is an uneven creation, at times conventional and at times craggily inspired. It lacks the kind of uninhibited lyricism that makes an aria soar, and the love duet between Mark and Thirza in Act II grinds on. Furthermore, Brewster originally wrote the libretto in French, with an eye toward a Monte Carlo production, which never came about; Smyth later translated it into creaky English. (“Twixt ye and me, o murd’rers, / God be judge!”) But her choral writing packs a mighty punch, as the villagers declaim violent unison lines over propulsive ostinatos that look back to “Boris Godunov” and ahead to “Peter Grimes,” another tale of an outcast fisherman. (“The Wreckers” had a revival at Sadler’s Wells, in London, in 1939, just before Britten left for America.) In the end, the gale force of Smyth’s musical personality banishes doubts.

Leon Botstein, who has long served both as Bard’s president and as its resident conductor, has repeatedly won the gratitude of adventurous New York-area operagoers by reviving such neglected treasures as Blitzstein’s “Regina,” Schreker’s “Der Ferne Klang,” and Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots.” Botstein’s account of “The Wreckers,” with the American Symphony in the pit, went over with rough-edged passion. Neal Cooper nearly conquered the taxing tenor role of Mark, and Katharine Goeldner fully mastered the high-lying mezzo role of Thirza, giving heat to that undercooked duet. The production, directed by Thaddeus Strassberger and designed by Erhard Rom, skirted the subversive undertones of the scenario—one senses an allegory of capitalism run amok—but offered thrilling images, including a fire suitable for “Götterdämmerung.” The inventive young Strassberger deserves a shot at the Met, which has all but exhausted its supply of Tony-winning directors who know little about opera.

As for Smyth, perhaps she will one day get another chance on the Met stage. In the 2016-17 season, when the Met presents Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin,” she will at least lose a dubious distinction that would have enraged her—that of being the only female composer ever to be performed by the world’s biggest opera company.

Original full story here.

Revealing A Great Work

ConcertoNet

By Michael Johnson

August 2015

Leon Botstein’s latest resurrected opera for Bard Summerscape is Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, first performed in Dresden (in German) in 1906, and then in English in London in 1909. The libretto, written by a cosmopolitan, Europe-based American, Henry Brewster (he died in 1908) had originally been in French. The double translation the work went through might account for some of the weakness in its libretto. Aside from a certain awkwardness in the language, the work is striking for its confident musical and dramatic intensity. Also startling is the libretto’s depiction of religion (Christian in this case) twisted to serve brutal ends.

The story is set in 18th-century Cornwall. The residents of a remote village live as land-based pirates. They extinguish coastal beacons so that ships will be wrecked; they then murder the crews and pillage the cargoes. (This is rather luridly portrayed during the work’s overture.) The local pastor, Pascoe, preaches an aggressive religious sanction for these criminal activities; the result, to say the least, is an extremely solid (if not mafioso) sense of community. A young man named Adam secretly rebels and keeps beacons lit. He finds a soulmate in Pascoe’s young wife, Thirza. But: there is a rejected girlfriend, Avis, who creates much confusion when the community seeks the culprits foiling their criminal actions. An impromptu trial results in the two lovers embracing death together - one almost expects them to burst into “Viva la morte insieme”, the concluding utterance in Andrea Chenier.

It truly is a pity that this opera has been so neglected. It is interesting to compare it to two works of the period with relentlessly tragic libretti that have managed to obtain a place in the repertoire: Giordano’s Andrea Chenier of 1896, and Richard Strauss’ Elektra of 1909. Each of those is part of an established national repertory that serves to support the introduction of new operas and even new directions in the genre. (Maestro Botstein delights in pointing out the imperfections in operas firmly fixed in the canon.) The few British works tended to be orphaned solitaries (like this one, or Sullivan’s Ivanhoe of 1891) until, as we know, Benjamin Britten’s breakthrough, Peter Grimes, in 1945. The fact that aspects of The Wreckers - especially in its treatment of a tight community hostile to non-comformists - seem to have influenced Grimes is far from the only reason Smyth’s work deserves attention.

The fact that the opera was composed by a woman further served to marginalize it.

Right from the start the music packs a visceral punch - in fact the composer might stand accused of going too far to avoid any accusations of effeminacy in her style. The choral parts are very grand - Elgarian, in fact - and the orchestration reveals her German training. The influence of Wagner is evident, but there is nothing pallid or feeble in her attempts to maintain a consistent, highly declamatory style with big effects.

I was rather surprised that director Thaddeus Strassberger came up with an approach that embraces the work just as written - no framing, no updating - with period costumes. The only staging innovations I could spot were two: once when Pascoe forces on kiss on the young Avis, and later, in the argument with his wife, he slashes her hand. These two actions help motivate the hatred each of the women feels toward him.

When the beleaguered lovers meet and the idea is raised that Thirza might have to sacrifice herself (an idea she welcomes), a shaft of golden light descends upon her to the accompaniment of harp music. (When did you last see that? Probably never. Maybe it’s time for old devices to become new again.)

Erhard Rom’s set consists of piles of wooden cargo cases, representing both the villagers’ booty and the craggy locale. Hanna Wasileski’s projections vividly portray flames or flood when appropriate.

This is Leon Botstein’s second go at The Wreckers, having conducted a concert performance in 2007. The hefty orchestra never overwhelmed the singers, and James Bagwell’s chorus was in terrific form.

In many ways the character Pascoe dominates the action, and Louis Otey inhabits the role to a commanding degree. There is a bit of a surprise in the casting in that the idealistic young woman is a mezzo and the more troubled (and troublesome) woman is a soprano - and quite a young one, Sky Ingram (Avis), who handles the role’s demands extremely well. Katherine Goeldener as Thirza displays a warm, attractive tone.

Neal Cooper displays a essential degree of helden in the part of Adam. Some of his music can only be described as arioso narrative with orchestral punctuation and one isn’t sure if he is managing to keep in tune, but his stalwart delivery never flags. Michael Mayes is thunderous as Avis’s father, Lawrence.

In short,this was a revelation.

Next year’s operatic rarity at Bard: Pietro Mascagni’s Iris, dating from 1898.

Original story here.

Carlos Chávez, Mexican Modernist

The New York Times

By William Robin

July 30, 2015

“European musicians are of the worst kind,” the composer Carlos Chávez declared in a 1931 letter. “Conductors, pianists, violinists, singers and so on are ‘prima donna’ minded people — they are very important to themselves. We must change the situation, Aaron.” In a reply to his close friend, the young Aaron Copland concurred: “All you wrote about music in America awoke a responsive echo in my heart. I am through with Europe, Carlos, and I believe as you do, that our salvation must come from ourselves and that we must fight the foreign element in American music.”

The battle for American music was won on two fronts. Just as Mr. Copland’s populist style transformed music in the United States, so too did Mr. Chávez exert enormous influence in his home of Mexico as composer, conductor and bureaucrat. Beginning on Aug. 7 at Bard College, “Chávez and His World” will commemorate that legacy with concerts and panels spread across two weekends.

This summer represents the Bard Music Festival’s first examination of a Latin American composer, focusing on one who, though little known today, may have shaped American music more than any other. Along with building an impressive oeuvre couched in an acerbic modernist idiom, Mr. Chávez almost single-handedly remolded Mexican culture through his official roles in national arts institutions after the Mexican Revolution.

“It seemed to be the best framework in which to introduce an audience to the musical riches of the 20th century, primarily, in Mexico and Latin America,” Leon Botstein, the festival’s co-director and the president of Bard College, said in a recent interview. “For the concert audience in the United States, this is a thrilling opportunity, because most of the music they’re going to hear over these 12, 13 concerts is unknown to them.” Performances of chamber and orchestral music will situate the pluralist Mr. Chávez in his myriad contexts, from Mexico City to Greenwich Village.

Perhaps no other composer of the past century exerted such a strong pull on his national culture as Mr. Chávez (1899-1978), whose activities included leading the Orquesta Sinfónica de México (which maintained an astonishing dedication to the new, giving hundreds of premieres), directing the Conservatorio Nacional de Música (where he created an eclectic composition program and advanced research into Mexican music) and founding the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (which officially established state support of art). “Chávez is also organizationally the key linchpin of the infrastructure of 20th-century Mexican musical education and institutions,” Mr. Botstein said.

Mr. Chávez came of age just as a self-consciously nationalist art music first emerged in Mexico, epitomized by the leading composer Manuel Ponce. Mr. Chávez studied piano with Mr. Ponce, who later fretted that his former pupil was too quickly embracing the new sounds of the European avant-garde. “Will he renounce Romanticism to steadfastly follow the banner of the modernists?” Mr. Ponce wrote after Mr. Chávez made his debut in 1921.

A cleareyed Mr. Chávez followed that banner to the West Village, where he arrived broke in 1923 and met Edgard Varèse, dean of the New York ultra-modernists. In a later visit, Mr. Chávez befriended Mr. Copland, who recognized him as an ally in the war against the excesses of German Romanticism, describing Mr. Chávez as “one of the few American musicians about whom we can say that he is more than a reflection of Europe.”

In creating an image of Mr. Chávez as an essentially non-European composer, Mr. Copland also misconstrued him as an essentially Mexican one. According to Mr. Copland, Mr. Chávez “caught the spirit of Mexico — its sun-filled, naïve, Latin soul.” Critics similarly interpreted the arid intensity of Mr. Chávez’s music through Indian stereotypes. “If he did not scalp he tomahawked the keyboard,” Olin Downes wrote of Mr. Chávez’s performance of his own piano sonata in a 1928 review in The New York Times.

“The idea that he was a quintessential ‘Mexican composer’ and that in his case it was not a picturesque, postcard folklore, but some sort of really internal, almost racial essence, marked him forever,” the musicologist Leonora Saavedra said recently. An associate professor at the University of California, Riverside, Ms. Saavedra serves as the Bard festival’s scholar in residence and has edited an insightful volume of accompanying essayspublished by Princeton University Press.

In the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Ms. Saavedra traces how Mr. Chávez, far from naïve, deployed national elements in his compositions. Once Mr. Copland and his cohort brought him to international attention by proclaiming him the archetypal Latin composer, the cosmopolitan Mr. Chávez played to that identity, writing a primitivist“Sinfonía India” that incorporates indigenous drums and echoes “The Rite of Spring.” For “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art”— a huge 1940 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that juxtaposed Diego Rivera’s murals with pre-Columbian artifacts — Mr. Chávez composed “Xochipilli,” a shrill and steely reimagining of Aztec music featuring replicas of antique instruments. These inventions of the “Mexican” allowed Mr. Chávez to capitalize on the vogue for Mexican culture in the United States and secured him a lasting relationship with New York, where he maintained an apartment across from Lincoln Center.

But Mr. Chávez was as invested in the technological as the national. “There are so many pieces that are not about being Mexican; they’re machine music,” Ms. Saavedra said. “Chávez was a young man in the 1920s: He loved modernity, he loved cars, going to the movies, Charlie Chaplin.” His 1925 “Energia,” a nonet for winds and strings, bustles with mechanical rhythms and quizzical instrumental lines.

A fascination with the contemporary culminated in Mr. Chávez’s absurdist ballet “Horsepower,” with sets and costumes designed by Mr. Rivera, in which the industrial North confronts the exotic South — complete with dancing fruit and a protagonist dressed as a giant machine. Despite glowing advance press and a strong champion in the conductor Leopold Stokowski, the ballet’s sold-out 1932 Philadelphia premiere was poorly received. Frida Kahlo wrote that “there was a crowd of insipid blonds pretending to be Indians from Tehuantepec and when they had to dance the zandunga they looked as if they had lead instead of blood.” But the score for “Horsepower” is a fascinating document of a composer panoramically surveying the Americas, with discordant harmonies, jagged melodies and a searing tango.

When Mr. Chávez first returned to Mexico in 1924, he began a local campaign for modern music that went unheeded. “I am alone and have to overcome a sea of resistance,” he wrote to Mr. Varèse. “Here people hardly know of the existence of Debussy; they do not know Moussorgsky and even less what followed after Debussy.” Alienated from a post-Revolutionary artistic renaissance steered by the education minister, José Vasconcelos — who subsidized Mr. Rivera’s murals but ignored the high-art compositions of Mr. Chávez’s colleagues — Mr. Chávez penned distortions of folk music that mocked the government’s populist revival of Mexican song. But by the end of that decade, Mr. Chávez had positioned himself at the helm of several state-backed institutions, ones that he fervently directed toward the new.

“He knew that there could be no important composition in Mexico if there wasn’t a very solid infrastructure,” Ms. Saavedra said. “Otherwise the composers compose and put it in a drawer.”

Mr. Chávez conducted an orchestra dedicated to introducing new music and revamped the national conservatory. He appointed as his assistant conductor Silvestre Revueltas, who would develop a glittering and heatedcompositional voice. Though he fell in and out of favor as governments changed, Mr. Chávez remained at the center of Mexican musical life, a position that benefited colleagues including Mr. Copland, whose “El Salon Mexico” represents the best-known document of this cultural exchange.

Despite his impressive legacy, Mr. Chávez remains a controversial figure in Mexico today. A long-lasting affiliation with the country’s dominant political party and his authoritarian personality — which eventually put him at odds with Mr. Revueltas — left many musicians and scholars resentful. But the wealth of his music and the cross-border connections on display at the Bard festival are reminders of how government support for the arts helped create not only an American sound but also a framework to sustain it. And from jarabes and foxtrots to Neo-Classical preludes andheaving symphonies, Mr. Chávez’s oeuvre represents a musician as vigilantly committed to the global as to the national.

“So much the better if our tradition is richer and multiple, deriving from native as well as Western culture,” he once said in a lecture. “We are just as much the owners of our ancestral Tlacuilos as we are of our Florentine Renaissance grandfathers. To circumscribe ourselves, to fix on one thing or the other, is to impoverish ourselves.”

Original story here.

Ethel Smyth's 'The Wreckers' Thrillingly Staged In New York

Bachtrack

By Robert Levine

July 27, 2015

Bard SummerScape made musical history by presenting the first full staging of British composer Ethel Smyth’s opera The Wreckers. Born in 1858 and dying in 1944, Smyth was celebrated in her day (John Singer Sargent painted her portrait in 1901) not only for her compositions, but for being an openly bisexual member of the suffrage movement. After breaking the window of a politician opposed to giving women the vote, she spent two months in prison. She was fiercely independent and headstrong – at 71 she fell in love with Virginia Woolf, who found her somewhat overbearing. Her long life bridged the music and lives of Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, R. Strauss, Berg and Schoenberg, and she met Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Clara Schumann and Brahms when she was studying, against her Major-General father’s wishes, in Leipzig, to which she travelled alone when she was only 19 years old – unheard of at the time.

Her music sounds like Tchaikovsky with hints of a conservative Richard Strauss, but her greatest musical influence seems to have been Wagner, if not in his complex harmonies or long-windedness (The Wreckers comes in at just over two hours), then for her dense, brassy, rich orchestration and use of repeating motifs, not as sophisticated as Wagner's, but much in the vein of his Leitmotifs. Her use of the chorus is masterly in the English tradition, and the overall effect of the work is, simply, lush late Romanticism. With its attempted evocations of the sea and portrayal of narrow-minded villagers, it presages Britten’s Peter Grimes, first performed the year after Smyth’s death, but it is nowhere near as great a work. The Wreckers’ first performance was in German, in Leipzig, and was a success; weirdly, the headstrong Smyth, disapproving of the cuts the conductor had made in the opera, snuck into the opera house and stole the score, so there was only that single performance. Don’t mess with Ethel! In 1903, her one act opera, Der Wald (The Forest), received a single performance at the Met, and she remains the only woman to have had an opera produced there.

The plot, with a stilted and somewhat antiquated libretto by her friend and on-and-off lover, Henry Brewster, is cruel and fascinating: Pascoe, a fanatical preacher in a coastal Cornish village, has the villagers keep the coastline in darkness to lure ships onto the rocks, where they murder the crews and steal supplies. Pascoe’s much younger wife, Thirza, has a lover named Mark; the latter had previously been romantically involved with Avis, the daughter of the lighthouse keeper. Mark and Thirza, horrified by the town’s murderous practice, light fires as beacons to save the ships and are almost caught by Pascoe, who (in the libretto’s instructions) faints before he can identify the pair. The jealous Avis (who, at Strassberger’s direction, hits Pascoe with a two-by-four, knocking him out – an unnecessary alteration, really) tries to trick the people by claiming it is Pascoe who has been setting the warning fires, but Mark confesses and he and Thirza are condemned to die in a cave that becomes submerged at high tide. Yes, it’s all a bit squeaky, but the theme of religious fanaticism and ask-no-questions followers couldn’t be fresher, could it? Not to mention secret love affairs and revenge. There’s more than a bit of bombast, but it is an interesting period piece.

Edward Rom’s sets for Bard’s production, abetted by Hannah Wasileski’s projections and JAX Messenger’s lighting, evoke the coastline well; crates, planks of wood and sheets standing for sails litter the stage, a broken mast is seen in Act I and the projections give us the feel of the dreadful weather and harsh coast. We see the villagers plundering and murdering their latest victims during the overture – a good directorial touch by Thaddeus Strassberger – who also manages to convey the town’s desperation well. With its piles of crates, the set is an obstacle course, but it helps Strassberger keep the choral formations interesting. The acting of the soloists is natural and rarely reverts to “stand and deliver.”

We’ll not hear a finer performance of this work again soon. Major kudos go to Leon Botstein, who has championed the work for years and leads the American Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (under the masterful James Bagwell) in a performance that thrills. Despite the awkwardness of the English-language text (there are surtitles in English as well), there is drama aplenty and the work proves absolutely stageworthy. The brass rings out with abandon, and in the more tender moments – the lovely prelude to the second act, for instance – the interplay between winds and strings is lovely.

The sincere, professional cast is led by British tenor Neal Cooper as Mark and mezzo Katharine Goeldner as Thirza. Almost the entire second act is a love-and-moral-conflict duet for the two which builds to several climaxes, and their voices rang clear and true throughout the 20-minute moody, passionate ordeal. The manipulative Avis is sung by light soprano Sky Ingram with fine arrogance and a glistening tone in the role’s upper reaches. Her father, Lawrence the lighthouse keeper, is played by baritone Michael Mayes, booming out effectively. As Pascoe, baritone Louis Otey creates a truly wild, obsessed, and eventually, broken man. The role is oddly under-written, but Otey takes over the stage whenever he appears. The remainder of the cast is brilliant.

I cannot foresee The Wreckers becoming a repertoire staple, nor is it a masterpiece. But Botstein et al proved it creditable and more. The ovations were long and hearty.

Original story here.

'The Wreckers' a Monumental Revelation

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

By Liane Curtis

July 25, 2015

The US-staged premiere of Ethel Smyth’s 1906 opera The Wreckers at the Fisher Center as part of Bard Summerscape made a strong case that this work deserves to be in the standard repertory. The story comes across with visceral impact when given a staged production. Addressing critical moral issues, the music gives depth and urgency to the grim story: a community steeped in violence and depravity as a way of life, and the courage of the two people who stand up to it. Music Director Leon Botstein is nothing less than a visionary in bringing Smyth’s opera to light.

The staging essential as it makes the plot more credible than it appears on paper—the intertwined blood-lust and piety that supports the community’s beliefs and behaviors become visceral elements. From the vigorous first notes of the overture, we witness the act of wrecking as the villagers work over the crushed hull of a shipwreck, viciously slaughtering survivors and plundering their possessions. This staged overture encapsulates the villagers’ motivation, making what follows more believable.

And the chorus’s opening words explain the rationale behind the practice: the wreckers’ grisly murders become (instead of a crime) biblical sacrifices to a stern and demanding God. The goods they collect from the victims are God’s rewards to a people who do his will. Pascoe, the minister, leads his community in these beliefs and also demands stern propriety—he condemns drinking and working on the Sabbath.

But someone in the community is betraying them by lighting beacons on the cliff to warn ships away. Thus for many weeks there has been no wrecking, leading to hardship and hunger. Who is the betrayer? Thirza, Pascoe’s young wife, is disaffected from the community. She and Mark (a local fisherman) clearly share an attraction. But Avis, with whom Mark was involved with in the past, is determined to try and hold on to him. Also Pascoe has alienated Avis by some salacious groping and with insisting she give up her necklace for the good of the community. She determines to implicate him as the betrayer, both to punish him for his hypocrisy and to bring down Thirza, her rival for Mark’s attentions.

Act II reveals Mark gathering wood to burn as a beacon—he is the betrayer of the community’s values. Thirza joins him as an accomplice, but she warns him that the townspeople know about the beacon and are out to find who is setting it. In an impassioned and hopeful (if overlong) love duet, Mark and Thirza agree to run away together and escape the community. Just as they light the beacon and leave, Pascoe sees them and calls out Thirza’s name in shock. In the libretto, he collapses in distress, but in this staging, Avis clubs him so he falls by the beacon, and is lying there when the villagers arrive to catch him “red-handed.” Thus Avis is given real agency in this production.

In the final Act, Pascoe is tried by the villagers in a great cave. He refuses to answer their questions: “I am not one to whom his fellows give orders.” Avis insists he has acted under the influence of Thirza, and the people condemn him to death. At this point, Mark steps forward to interrupt the trial “Stay! I, Mark, am the betrayer! This man has done no wrong!” Pascoe is visibly shocked at this. At this point, Thirza also joins Mark in admitting guilt. Avis, in desperation, insists Mark did not light beacon, claiming he spent the entire night with her. The townspeople see through Avis’ lie, and her father orders her to leave.

The court is declared closed, and Mark and Thirza are left in the cave as the tide rises. Pascoe pleads for his wife to be spared, and even moves to drag her from the cave, but she insists on her desire to die with Mark. Solemnly, the villagers depart. Mark and Thirza conclude with a rapturous duet, as the great waves, the unsurmountable power of the sea, crash over them.

Botstein views this story as profoundly current and significant: “It is hard to imagine an opera whose argument is more pertinent to our times than Ethel Smyth’s ‘The Wreckers.’” Seeing the drama, with its powerful music, enacted on stage, clearly supports that view. The cost of unexamined tradition and inherited ritual is present in many aspects of today’s society — for instance, the narrowness of religious fanaticism (in a range of faiths) or the belief in American Exceptionalism that fosters brutal treatment of undocumented immigrants.

And the music itself is powerful and varied, revealing Smyth’s command of the orchestra’s full range of emotions and expressions. While occasionally there were passages that seemed overly long, or orchestrated rather heavily (for instance there seemed to be a lot of snare drum), Botstein kept a sense of momentum and drive, and the tempos were frequently energized with a remarkable fluidity (which the ensemble carried out with expert control). The singers were all impressive and poised. As the flirtatious/manipulative Avis, Sky Ingram was remarkable. Her lilting aria in Act I evoked something from Carmen, or perhaps Grieg’s “Anitra’s Dance.” Louis Otey was impressive as the pastor, Pascoe. While vocal fatigue weakened his high notes in Act I, by Act III he was recovered, and was compelling dramatically and musically. Katharine Goeldner (as Thirza) and Neal Cooper (as Mark) were strong, and demonstrated real chemistry towards each other. Goeldner might have employed more vocal nuance, however. The role of the chorus as the twisted community is crucial, so the success of Chorus Master James Bagwell should be noted (despite the limitations of the set).

The use of screens, projections, and evocative lighting were effective in transforming the scene –creating a wrecked ship, for instance, or townspeople climbing over the rugged cliffs. The set itself consists of assorted stacks of wooden crates that suggest (alternately) the rugged cliffs of the coast, or the workplace of the fishermen who fix their nets, clean their catch, or (as wreckers) kill and rob their victims. While striking, the set design was flawed, in that movement around the stage was always impeded and constrained. While the crates are often useful stage items, there is no open stage area; the singers cannot walk across the stage, but must always climb or clamber, taking care where to place their feet. When Mark sings “Thirza! Come to me!” and Thirza replies “Love, I come, my arms open wide,” they cannot rush into each other’s arms, but instead must carefully maneuver to each other. As an onlooker it made me nervous; the precipitous set seemed to make a fall imminent at any moment, even during the final curtain calls!

Smyth employs a range of stylistic approaches in conveying this powerful story through music. Mark’s moving song in the beginning of Act II employs a mournful and evocative folk-inspired melody that builds with an expanding orchestral palette of accompaniments. Some of choral writing, with its lush chordal motion, is distinctly English. While Smyth draws on different styles to illustrate and illuminate the range of moods and emotions, the many returning musical ideas serve to weld the work into an overarching and impelling whole. For instance, the evocative swirl of the ocean conveyed in the Prelude to Act II and recalled again at the conclusion as villagers note the rising tide. Or the “wreckers” motive itself – driving and invigorating as it opens the opera, but then recurring in different moods: playful and light to subdued and hushed. The variety of approaches reflect the range of emotions of the work, but thematic transformation and integration is used to underscore the characters’ emotional development, and to draw connections between events.

About the ending, I am inclined to ask, as Pascoe does, “You, Mark! But why?” When it looks as if the hypocritical Pascoe is to be executed, why does Mark step forward to accept the blame? While we might think that this is the chance for Mark and Thirza to escape and have the happiness they dreamed of at the end of Act II, Mark’s moral fiber will not let himself see Pascoe be the fall guy for Mark’s deeds. Mark and Thirza might have been able to escape from the oppressive village, but the town would have only continued in its hideous path of murder and thievery. With Pascoe reeling from his wife’s execution for the crime of counteracting the town’s immoral practices, we can imagine that Pascoe himself might have a watershed moment and turn to leading the villagers away from their traditional depraved practices. Thus the redemption experienced by Mark and Thirza, just may, in turn, through Pascoe, influence and reform the townspeople. Though the opera ends tragically, the possibility remains of eventual transformation and redemption by the townspeople themselves.

The Wreckers continues with performances July 26, 29, 31 and Aug. 2. For ticketing information click here.

Liane Curtis (Ph.D., Musicology) is President of Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy and The Rebecca Clarke Society, Inc.  Her website is here.

Original story here.

One Feisty Victorian Woman's Opera Revived

NPR

By Tom Huizenga

July 23, 2015

Ethel Smyth was not your typical Victorian lady. She defied her father, a stern army general, to pursue a career in music. She loved women, played sports and played an important role in the women's suffrage movement in Britain in the early 20th century. Along the way she composed chamber and orchestral music, an acclaimed Mass and six operas.

Smyth's music was as dramatic as her life, but today both are largely forgotten. Leon Botstein is doing his best to correct that. He's head of Bard College in upstate New York, where he conducts the first full U.S. staging of Smyth's 1904 opera The WreckersFriday night.

"We are really in the reclamation business of neglected masterpieces and this is certainly one of them," Botstein says. "It's only helped by the fact that Ethel Smyth was a truly larger-than-life character, and a woman."

A woman — especially at the turn of the 20th century — who was not supposed to do the things that Smyth did. Like hunting, mountain climbing, falling in love with Virginia Woolf and of course composing. Sure, Botstein says, there were women composers back then, but the male music establishment had certain expectations.

"A woman composer might have been tolerated to write dance music or ethereal types of music that befit some kind of stereotype of the feminine," Botstein says. "So in a sense, people were offended not only that she was a composer but the kind of music she wrote in no way could have been, on a blindfold test so to speak, identified as have being written by a woman."

Smyth's music was considered manly and muscular. The Wreckers features boldWagnerian brass writing, pulsing crescendos and full-throated choruses.

"The score is fearless," Botstein says. "Maybe that's what they thought was masculine about it." And maybe that's why Smyth, with all of her in-your-face attitude, ran afoul of the group she called the "Male Machine."

"These were the men who ran the press, ran the Royal College, the professors, the heads of institutions who really were misogynist, homophobic and enjoyed turning her into a figure of fun and ridicule," says Elizabeth Wood, a musicologist who's written extensively on Smyth.

Partly, these men despised her politics. In 1910, Smyth took a detour from composing to activism, falling in love with Emmeline Pankhurst, the charismatic leader of the women's suffrage movement.

"And of course in her typical fashion she bullied her way into being very close to Mrs. Pankhurst, possibly lovers," Wood says. When Pankhurst called on suffragettes to smash the windows of politicians opposed to voting rights for women, Smyth was there.

"At exactly 5:30 one memorable evening in 1912," Smyth recalled on a 1937 BBC broadcast, "relays of women produced hammers from their muffs and handbags and proceeded to methodically smash up windows in all the big London thoroughfares. Nearly 200 women were arrested that evening."

Among the women were Smyth and Pankhurst. "The two were imprisoned together," Wood says. "And their famous story of course comes from that of Ethel conducting the prisoners in the yard below her, with her toothbrush, as they sang and marched to her famous song "The March of the Women."

The song, written by Smyth in 1911, became an anthem for the suffrage movement. Her passion for activism and politics also found its way into the plot of The Wreckers.

"She draws a sword on behalf of a variety of very hot political issues," Botstein says. "So the other thing about this opera which appealed to me especially today is the whole question of justice, the state and religion."

The story is no tender La bohème tear-jerker. It concerns an isolated coastal community in Cornwall which lures passing ships to crash on the rocks so villagers can plunder the goods and murder the crew. All in the name of God. At the end, a pair of illicit lovers tries to stop the gruesome practice and is condemned to death by the townsfolk.

"One of the things this opera does, which is so powerfully present, is that it shows that majority consensus — groupthink — is very dangerous," Botstein says. "The intolerance of individual dissent, that's what appeals to me. We in this country, for all our rhetoric, don't like dissent. We see it in many communities. It's not only on the right, it's also on the left. People who challenge orthodoxies are ostracized." Smyth must have, at some level, identified with the outsiders in her opera.

"She was fairly outrageous," Wood says. "When you think of it, Radclyffe Hall's sensational [lesbian] novel, The Well of Loneliness, didn't come out until 1928. Ethel was writing about why she found it very interesting that she was attracted to members of her own sex, rather than to the male sex, back in the 1890s."

Later in her life Smyth even made a play for writer Virginia Woolf.

"It is clear from her correspondence with Woolf, and from her memoirs and diaries, that she was deeply in love with Woolf, but found Woolf a little untouchable," Wood says. "Woolf was fascinated by her and I think was also deeply moved by the resilience of this old woman who she met when Ethel was in her 70s and very deaf. But gallant as ever."

Smyth began losing her hearing before she turned 50. She noticed problems in World War I when she worked as an X-ray nurse in a French military hospital in Vichy. Later, in 1934, when the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham led a 75th birthday concert of her music, Smyth, ensconced in the royal box at Royal Albert Hall, couldn't hear a note.

The hearing loss, Wood says, triggered a long depression. But Woolf and others encouraged her to return to music, and to writing, which she continued until she died in 1944 at age 86.

As her hearing worsened, Smyth ramped up her writing, eventually producing 10 books about her extraordinary life and times. She had stories galore. Like the time she pitched a rock through a cabinet minister's window, her golfing escapades in the deserts of Egypt and her various love affairs. She wrote a piano piece called Variations on an Original Theme (of an Exceedingly Dismal Nature). Plus there were meetings and friendships with Brahms, Tchaikovsky and a host of European potentates.

In 1922, Smyth was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the arts. Even with a few accolades along the way, it seems Smyth was always fighting for her music — a fight that, Wood says, extends to today. "Right up until the New York premiere of The Wreckers in concert performance that Leon Botstein did in 2007," Wood says. "We were appalled to read a very offensive review in the New York Times. So it's not over yet."

And it's certainly not over for Botstein, who says that The Wreckers is "ever so much more impressive than many of the second tier Bellini and Donizetti operas we tolerate." He knew there was something special about the opera the first time he saw the score. "I could see immediately this is a hit, this has real legs, as they say. This is an opera that should be on the stage of Covent Garden, on the stage of the Vienna State Opera, at the Mariinsky Theater, at the Met."

It was another opera by Ethel Smyth, Der Wald, that to date has been the only opera composed by a woman to have been produced at the Metropolitan Opera.

Ethel Smyth's The Wreckers runs through August 2 at The Bard Music Festival.

Original story here.

Staging ‘The Wreckers’ Opera at Bard College

The New York Times

By Phillip Lutz

July 23, 2015

Leon Botstein, the Zurich-born polymath and president of Bard College, has the bald pate and imperious bearing of an Old World movie director. And he has the rhetorical style to match.

Little wonder, then, that he had an immediate impact this month when, addressing 52 singers midway through an early rehearsal of the Ethel Smyth opera “The Wreckers,” he let the rhetoric fly, warning of an impending “musical disaster.”

“This thing doesn’t play itself,” Mr. Botstein, the production’s musical director, declared. “The tempo, sound and pace need to be radically altered.”

As if to prove the point, he swept the singers into a detailed deconstruction of the libretto, coaxing them to extract meaning from every syllable. Ultimately, the strategy worked: Singers lent both shape and substance to their developing characterizations, and praise supplanted scolding in Mr. Botstein’s oratory.

“The Wreckers,” which is having its first fully staged performances in the United States in Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts through Aug. 2, is, Mr. Botstein said, one of the least known in a line of lesser-known operas the college has produced.

Its score has been heard only once in the United States, in a 2007 concert version Mr. Botstein presented at Avery Fisher Hall. That kind of obscurity, he said, put an added premium on the dynamism of the cast, a handpicked group with experience in leading opera houses around the world.

“When someone goes to see the ‘The Wreckers,’ ”he said during a break in the rehearsal, “there’s no filter of memory, of comfort, of familiarity. So the burden on us is for people not to walk out and say, ‘Now I know why we’ve never heard of this piece.’ “

Mr. Botstein said the qualities that originally attracted him to the work — its potential for drama and its timely subject matter among them — argued for the full staging. The dramatic potential, in particular, also seems well suited to the broadly theatrical personal aesthetic he brings to the project, which draws on the legend of 18th-century Cornwall peasants who salvaged valuables from ships they lured onto the rocks, along the way using religious faith to justify murder.

“It’s a tremendously germane story,” he said.

Telling the story presents challenges, not least the language. The opera was written in French and translated to German for its 1906 premiere in Leipzig. Its English retranslation yielded what are now archaic words and phrases, among them “barque” (a deep-water cargo ship), which sent Mr. Botstein to the dictionary, and “beetling crags” (hanging-rock formations), which did the same to the baritone Louis Otey, who plays the fiery preacher, Pascoe.

Mr. Botstein said he and Thaddeus Strassberger, the director, had turned to replacement words sparingly, in each instance weighing their clarity of meaning against their rhythmic fit.

“We’ve done some very slight fiddling, but you have limited options,” he said, adding that the libretto would appear in supertitles projected over the stage.

Mr. Otey, one of six principals in the cast and a veteran of the 2007 concert, said the libretto had occasionally come across as stilted during that concert, detracting from the dramatic impact. But he said that placing the narrative in the context of a full stage production allowed him to speak the words “in a certain way, color them to give them meaning in whatever the scene is about.”

Compared with performing the work at the concert hall, he said, “taking it to the stage is much easier. I’m used to living a character, with sets and costumes and movement.”

As this month’s rehearsal unfolded, Mr. Otey, whose dark image dominates the stock poster for the opera, began to refine his character by varying his delivery and at the behest of Mr. Botstein, making greater use of sprechstimme, the singing technique combining elements of speech and pitch. Beyond the language, the terrain onstage held some hazard for the players as they moved on, over and around props that served as plundered crates. The movements were mapped by Mr. Strassberger, who, in a single day with the chorus and several more with the principals, had laid the groundwork for Mr. Botstein’s appearance.

Mr. Strassberger and Mr. Botstein, who have worked together previously on four operas — “Le Roi Malgré Lui,” “Les Huguenots,” “Der Ferne Klang” and Sergei Taneyev’s “Oresteia” — appeared to have developed a communication shorthand, helping release Mr. Botstein from having to micromanage the process.

“Leon is a charismatic character,” Mr. Strassberger said during a break. “Once he knows what he wants, he can sort of lightning-rod around. There’s a sort of freedom.”

At the rehearsal, Mr. Botstein, who at age 68 is nearly 40 years older than Mr. Strassberger, assumed the dominant role, though his younger counterpart in one instance sought the superior vantage point by standing on a wide ledge and surveying the cast spread across the rehearsal room.

Mr. Strassberger said he sometimes found it helpful simply to observe. “Some of the conductors, especially in Germany, let you run the rehearsal the entire time,” he said. “But then you’re always in output mode and it’s difficult to sit back and listen to what somebody else is saying.”

For Mr. Strassberger, hearing what Mr. Botstein is saying is especially critical on “The Wreckers” because Mr. Botstein is that rarity in America — a conductor who has performance experience with the piece, albeit in the concert hall.

Whatever the dynamics of Mr. Botstein’s working relationships, the results have shown some success in raising the profiles of the projects at hand. Notably, Shostakovich’s neglected early opera “The Nose” gained currency with a Bard production in 2004, and in 2010 it was staged by the Metropolitan Opera.

Mr. Botstein was making no such prediction for “The Wreckers.” But he is hoping that Smyth, a London native who remains the only woman to have composed an opera produced at the Met and whose views on sexuality, art and politics were unusually open for her day — she died in 1944 — will attract fresh interest.

“That’s the point of the production,” he said. “In a way, Ethel Smyth’s time has come.”

“The Wreckers” is being performed on July 26, 29 and 31 and Aug. 2, at Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, 60 Manor Avenue, Annandale-on-Hudson. Tickets: $25 to $95 (discounts available). Information: 845-758-7900 or fishercenter.bard.edu.

Original story here.

Recording: The Long Christmas Dinner--Available This Summer

The Long Christmas Dinner

Paul Hindemith/Libretto by Thornton Wilder

Recorded live at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center

Marking Time Musically

By Joel Haney

While preparing for an interview in 1948, Paul Hindemith noted, “the opera industry should be made to serve ethical purposes; it should serve the education of the audience—its intellectual and spiritual formation.” This conviction had already shaped Mathis der Maler (1935), whose painter-hero struggles to justify art amid Reformation-era upheavals. It would also motivate Hindemith’s future projects: the second version of Cardillac (1926; rev. 1952), Die Harmonie der Welt (1957), and finally The Long Christmas Dinner, which ponders the experience of time as a condition of human possibility and limitation—“the bright and the dark”—through the rise and decline of an American bourgeois family.

Hindemith wrote the music for The Long Christmas Dinner between May and August 1960 in Blonay, Switzerland, following a triumphant U. S. conducting tour that had included appearances with the New York Philharmonic, renewing his confidence in American opportunities. After finishing scoring the opera in mid-1961 but also losing hope in a companion project with Thornton Wilder, he led the premiere of his own German version in Mannheim on December 17^th. Performances in English had to wait until 1963, when Hindemith conducted the opera at the Juilliard School on March 13^th and 14^th (Jorge Mester led additional performances) and then at the Library of Congress.

The premiere was heavily attended by critics and favorably reviewed. Early commentators identified traits of a distinctive “late style” and spoke of a newfound clarity, lyricism, and rhythmic and harmonic subtlety. They reserved special mention for the delicacy of Hindemith’s scoring, which employs what he called a “Mozartian orchestra” that ingeniously complements the vocal parts without intruding on them.

In its musical dramaturgy, The Long Christmas Dinner recalls the innovations of Cardillac by presenting a sequence of discrete musical sections that broadly analogize the action instead of a seamless flux of emotion and psychology. Baroque anapests, trills, and a jangling harpsichord project the industrious optimism of the new firm; a rollicking jig ushers in the young Charles at the crest of entrepreneurial self-confidence; he and Leonora are symbolically wedded in a subtle waltz; the unruly Roderick II and aging Genevieve finally renounce the family in a reckless, centrifugal tarantella.

Hindemith also infused his score with themes and motifs whose transformed recurrences indicate super-generational continuities: the lilting arioso in which Mother Bayard recounts her childhood also bears along her descendants’ memories; the gasps and joyous outcries of the birthing room hurry the Nurse onstage with each new arrival. More complex associations also accumulate: the churning music with which Roderick II rejects the firm echoes in distorted form the youthful jig of his father (also a tenor); Ermengarde’s elegiac final scene recalls in tone and imagery the memory song of Mother Bayard (likewise an alto) even as it opens toward the future.

Throughout, Hindemith’s music models the flexibility of human temporal experience. We hear this in the orchestral introduction, which elaborates the English carol “God rest you merry, gentlemen” as a chorale prelude sounding in a time warp. Roderick’s premature death triggers a brooding version of the vigorous music that had precipitated it, and this shift recurs when Charles departs decades later. Generally, as characters pause to reflect on time’s passage, musical “business as usual” dissolves into dreamy, suspended moments.

Most arresting is the sextet featuring Sam, the proud soldier, who “looks at the table as though he were taking a photograph” and asks his family to “do what you do on Christmas Day.” They patter through the circular conversation of seventy-odd years while he lovingly pledges to “hold this tight” in a lyrical cantus firmus and then steps into the darkness. Producing “one of the most extraordinary and moving effects in contemporary opera,” (Hugo Weisgall) this simultaneity of perspectives signals a duality that Wilder noted to Hindemith: “From one point of view the great Mill-Wheel of birth and death seems mechanical and frustrating; from another point of view, filled with new promise, and the rewards of human life ‘quand même.’”

The house empties, and yet Ermengarde’s final words, which Hindemith reportedly found “moving and extremely beautiful,” reveal that the family lives on. Interleaved with her short-breathed phrases are those of the opening carol, now spare and melancholy but also tonally elevated, suggesting continuation. Along with the introduction, this musical return evokes the framing chorales of the Lutheran cantata, a genre eminently concerned with its hearers’ “intellectual and spiritual formation.” Hindemith’s penchant, moreover, for wordless instrumental quotation hints eloquently at a balance between human fragility and tidings of comfort and joy.

Joel Haney is Associate Professor of Music at California State University, Bakersfield.

Thornton Wilder and Music—A Note

by Tappan Wilder

Thornton Wilder’s collaboration with Paul Hindemith on the opera The Long Christmas Dinner reveals an intriguing aspect of the author’s creative life: his close, complex relationship with music.

During his lifetime, with some exception, Thornton Wilder rejected requests from composers eager to turn his two majordramas, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, into operas or musicals. He did permit Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman to fashion The Matchmaker into Hello, Dolly! and he collaborated as librettist with composer Louise Talma on the full-length opera The Alcestiad. Wilder did grant rights to Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green in 1965 for a musical, stage adaptation of The Skin of Our Teeth. That venture collapsed. When Bernstein returned later, now seeking opera rights for The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder shut the door with a definitive no! Bernstein was not alone on the outside. Wilder also said “no” to musical and/or opera rights for his two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays to many others over the years, including Aaron Copland, Howard Deitz, Ned Rorem, and Italy’s Luciano Chailly. Television adaptations were a different matter; as a general rule he viewed these rights as one-time, financially favorable opportunities. He thus permitted an NBC Producers Showcase musical of Our Town in 1955 that opened the heavenly door for Frank Sinatra to sing Sammy Cahn’s and Jimmy Van Heusen’s Emmy-award winning song, “Love and Marriage.” Fortunately, he was also open to seeing his shorter plays put to music.

Wilder did not make these decisions based on inexperience or lack of knowledge. On the contrary, from the time he was a boy, music played a vital role in Wilder’s creative life and provided a source of inspiration for his pen. Though very few details of this chapter in Wilder’s life are known, the early building blocks are clear: a supportive mother, violin and piano lessons, participation in an Episcopal boy's choir—that well-known training ground for the life-long love of all things choral—and ready access to major music concerts. On April 29, 1909, twelve-year-old Thornton wrote to his grandmother from his home in Berkeley, California, “We had a Bach Festival Thursday in which the Mass in B miner [sic] was given with great success. The Chicago Symphony orchestra is coming…”

Through his teens and early college years, music and writing represented all but equal passions. As a high school sophomore at Thacher School in California, he wrote, produced, and starred in his own first play. He also played violin in the school orchestra and performed solo concerts on piano and violin. At Oberlin College, where Wilder attended his first two years of university, he published drama, prose, and poetry, sang in choirs, and, as a sophomore, studied organ at the Oberlin Conservatory. When Wilder later transferred to Yale, John Farrar, one of his new undergraduate friends, would recall in 1928 that Wilder was, “from the start, interested in the literary and dramatic undergraduate activities, and perhaps even more in music."

At Yale, Wilder’s interests shifted decisively away from music to literature and drama. Yet, throughout much of his life, Thornton Wilder, celebrated playwright and novelist, remained an excellent sight-reader, devoted four hand pianist, and concertgoer. He had a special interest in attending rehearsals, where he enjoyed watching a work being constructed. He referenced music often in letters, wrote about music in his private journals, and annotated sheet music as a serious hobby, claiming to be able to hear the individual parts of a score in his head. The appraisal of Wilder’s personal library at his death included the category “Music Annotated by T.W.” with this summary of its content: “33 volumes of scores, including works by Palestrina, English madrigal composers, Mozart, and Beethoven.” His taste ran from classical to opera to choral music. He also enjoyed jazz, and near the end of his life developed a passion for twelve-tone music. His many friends included such stars as Otto Klemperer and Robert Shaw, and the musicians he met at The MacDowell Colony, where he first met Louise Talma, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Yale, where he met Paul Hindemith.

In the late 1930s the composer Mabel Dodge (1877–1971) drove Wilder from Walpole, New Hampshire to the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough. She recalled, in a memoir, playing a game in which one of them would hum classical or operatic melodiesand the other identify the exact movement or act from which they derived. While Dodge did well on the orchestral end, she recalled that Wilder, “succeeded in immensely broadening [her] operatic repertoire.” What amazed her most was “Thornton’s ability to sing snatches from an opera in the language in which it was written…it doesn’t make any difference to him in what language an opera is sung, he is at home in all of them.”* For a 1935 University of Chicago production honoring the 250th anniversary of Handel’s birth, Wilder not only rewrote the translation of Handel’s Xerxes, but also served as its stage director, “seeking the authentic baroque method of staging with enough of the modern tendency introduced to interest completely a 1935 audience,” and cast himself as a soldier in the chorus. Newspapers across the country printed a wire story out of Chicago with this lead: “FAMOUS AUTHOR NEAR OPERA BOW.”

All this is to say that Paul Hindemith had in Wilder a collaborator who knew his way around music. Wilder-the-librettist’s knowledge of languages, particularly German, his fascination with music, and his prior successful experience with translations and adaptations predicted a happy outcome for Paul Hindemith and The Long Christmas Dinner.

*Mabel Dodge’s Thornton Wilder—A Musical Memoir, appeared in the Radcliffe Quarterly in May 1964.

Tappan Wilder is Thornton Wilder's nephew and literary executor, and the manager of his literary and dramatic properties.

Lucia/Lucia II…………………….....................................................................................Camille Zamora, soprano

Mother Bayard/Ermengarde…........................................................................Sara Murphy, mezzo-soprano

Roderick/Sam……………………...........................................................................................Jarrett Ott, baritone

Brandon………………………….....................................................................................Josh Quinn, bass-baritone

Charles………………………….........................................................................................Glenn Seven Allen, tenor

Genevieve…………….………….......................................................................Catherine Martin, mezzo-soprano

Leonora………………………….......................................................................................Kathryn Guthrie, soprano

Roderick II………………………..........................................................................................Scott Murphree, tenor

American Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein

Bridge Records

Thurmond Smithgall, Executive Producer

2015 Commencement Address

To the Class of 2015:

The pomp and circumstance of commencement, and the diplomas you have earned and are about to receive celebrate the significance and power of education and learning. But one overarching but unanswered question haunts us every year just at this very moment. If education and the traditions of learning we celebrate today are so crucial to us as individuals and as citizens why have we failed, quite persistently to find the means to inspire ourselves and others to treat our fellow human beings—no matter who they are---whether they be neighbors, or strangers we find next to us on a subway, a line in a store or at an airport or whether they are anonymous populations at a great distance---with genuine respect and empathy. The paradoxical challenge this ceremony presents all of us here today is whether we can learn to choose, freely, to act with the proper regard for the sanctity and dignity of each and every human life.

Put another way, the question is whether there is any hope for human progress, not just in technology and science, but in the way we live and conduct ourselves as private individuals and citizens in society. Or are we condemned forever to remain disturbed and distracted by perceived differences between ourselves and others and by the apparent absence of resemblance to ourselves among so many around us? When we look for ourselves in the faces of others and see only differences we render the exhortation to “love thy neighbor as thyself” entirely moot. In its place we allow suspicion, mistrust and fear to guide us. Can that which your Bard diploma signifies---an encounter with science, history, art, literature and philosophy, the grand traditions of learning---prepare any of us to resist resentment and envy and more importantly, replace violence with reason, particularly when the pervasive violence in our world seeks justification as greed and desire?

Can a psychologically adequate sense of regard for human equality, with a tolerance for differences and therefore a genuine pluralism, be cultivated by education and made to take root in society? Despite their consistent embrace of the language of love tolerance and forgiveness, the world’s religions have, if anything, helped justify intolerance and violence rather than deter it. Is there any realistic prospect that we will ever learn to live with each other in peace and tranquility?

This daunting web of questions has its painful modern history. The senseless carnage of World War I led Sigmund Freud to the conclusion that there was something in human nature beyond eros: a universal death instinct, thanatos. By 1930, his pessimism led him to predict more war and violence and lament the impotence of culture and civilization as deterrents to human self-destruction.

For a brief moment, after World War II, it seemed that confronting the horrors of the death camps and the brutality of fascism would inspire us to change. A similar glimmer of optimism occurred right after the fall of communism. Yet despite all the museums and memorials to the victims of war, tyranny and genocide, it seems little progress has occurred. And the tragedy and memory of 9/11 have ushered in a new continuing wave of violence and hate. Even if we were to follow the call by Bryan Stevenson (a commencement speaker here a decade ago) to erect long overdue markers and memorials to our African Americans brutally lynched in our own nation’s past, would that recognition inspire us to become less racist and more civilized?

The wonders of technology to which we all have become increasingly addicted have not made the prospect of moral and ethical progress more plausible. As we retreat from direct human communication—speaking and meeting in real time and space---and text one another, communicate through screens that project images of ourselves and celebrate online relationships and even online education as immediate, cheaper and more efficient, we find ourselves moving about in public spaces never looking at one another in the eye but caught up in complex but isolating network of social communication that generates the illusion of contact while depriving us of all genuine privacy and intimacy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked, “No language is conceivable which does not represent this world”. In that simple observation rests the realism of all hope—the possibility that things might change. If we can talk about a humane and just world, then perhaps we might learn to act to make it so. The fight for ethical progress in our private lives and our politics is not lost. Your education here equipped you to connect speech with thought. Despite Freud’s pessimism and the depressing landscape of intolerance and violence in which we live today, we must continue to cultivate the unique human quality represented by language--the capacity to speak and to learn and to create meaning, using our imaginations, and to pursue knowledge and beauty. It is precisely institutions like Bard that are dedicated to the pursuit of inquiry, to teaching and learning through personal relationships and not machines, and to the making of art, and to connecting theory with practice on behalf of justice and civility that hope rests. Forget the pundits who are eager to predict that our best colleges and universities are doomed by technology to become obsolete; the traditions of learning you have encountered here have created, absorbed and survived every technological innovation for the past thousand years. But the hope that education inspires depends in turn on each of us finding ways through language to connect learning to action with the sort of courage that a true education inspires.

As each of you crosses this stage to receive your diploma remember that every one of you has something to contribute to the cause of humanism. Therefore I charge you to cherish your experience here. Remember it and keep it close to your heart. Never abandon the process of learning, the ambition to use language to imagine, improve and improvise. By sustaining the conversation about a better world and acting on it you will honor the values, traditions, and commitments of your alma mater. As you take your place in the larger world share your talent and join us in protecting education and the traditions of learning dedicated to learning, beauty, justice and the public good embodied in this college. Help sustain the hope that in the education you experienced here—an education dedicated to the intersection of language, thought and action, rests the only prospect for improving the human condition. The diploma you will receive today is a token of a realistic idealism of all the good we humans are capable of. Cherish it.

Congratulations to you all.

For a healthy arts scene, participation is key

An article about a speech given at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY By Colin Dabkowski| News Arts Critic | for The Buffalo News

Saturday, May 9, 2015

When the conductor and public intellectual Leon Botstein takes up his baton this weekend in Kleinhans Music Hall to lead the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in a program of accessible masterpieces, the tool in his hand will do more than coax beautiful music out of the musicians.

It will, in all likelihood, switch on the imaginations of audience members in a thousand unpredictable ways. It will inspire some form of fascination or wonder in the children and young adults in attendance. They’ll then trickle out into the city, subconsciously stepping in time to the complex rhythms of Prokofiev or replaying the familiar trumpet blares of Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” in their heads.

One or two of them might decide, based on that experience, to pick up an instrument and play. And only then will that baton and the collective talents of the conductor and orchestra have served their true purpose.

For Botstein, the longtime president of Bard college, Open Society Foundations board member and sometime “Colbert Report” guest who has dedicated his life to the dreams and lately the defense of humanism, the community’s active participation in the arts is the only way to ensure their survival.

In a stirring talk Friday night in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery auditorium titled “Arts, Justice and Innovation,” the bow-tied conductor with the basso profundo gave a passionate defense of culture’s crucial role in a democratic society. Albright-Knox director Janne Sirén introduced Botstein accurately as “the icon of everything a humanist should be.”

Perhaps the most surprising part of his talk was what little faith Botstein placed in the future of public funding for arts and culture. While he said that he’s not opposed to increased public subsidies for arts activities in American cities, the future for the arts lies in participation on a huge scale and across demographic and socioeconomic lines.

“I think the arts require not the patronage of the state, but our own patronage, from the people, from below. The only way we’ll fill the seats or concert halls, fill this museum, is by people who love to do it,” he said. “Soccer is watched by millions of people. A very high percentage of those people kick the ball around.”

Botstein recommended employing all the city’s cultural institutions, including the public schools, churches and colleges, in the service of fostering active participation in the arts from all city residents young and old.

“Every possibility exists here, from the schools, from the museums, from the university, from the orchestra, so that actually it’s a place where a young person would come who wants to live. Why should Brooklyn be popular? The infrastructure here is much prettier,” he said. “I think the arts can be a factor in coming to terms with the other real problems we all face, which are those of employment, those of difference, political racial ethnic, and to be a place where new people find a common ground and feel welcome.”

All this might sound like pie-in-the-sky talk if not for Botstein’s role, along with the other members of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations board, in selecting Buffalo for a major program designed to address systemic inequality, poverty, justice and education issues.

Open Buffalo, the organization that grew out of that investment, is dedicated to using the arts as a tool to spread awareness about those issues and to help foster solutions. Its recent report, “Social Justice and the Arts,” provides an excellent blueprint for doing so.

Botstein is right that Buffalo has the ideal infrastructure – even the ideal challenges – for his theory of mass participation to work on a grander scale. It also has dozens upon dozens of projects and people that already do this work, each of them seeds from which a larger endeavor can grow. These range from Gary Wolfe’s paintings of homeless Buffalonians now on view in Starlight Studio and Gallery to Felice Koenig’s participatory “Drawing Together” exhibition in Big Orbit Gallery to the Albright-Knox’s own community-minded public art projects.

Though his wide-ranging talk struck a largely optimistic tone, Botstein also made sure to acknowledge the precarious position the arts now occupy in a culture increasingly obsessed with market-based metrics.

“If we have a single nasty problem that has gotten worse since 1980, it is the belief that the market is actually a fair judge. The market is not a fair judge,” he said. “Commerce and volume and profit are not the only ways to judge art. We don’t judge science that way. If you ask for a populist definition of science, most of what we understand about science wouldn’t exist.”

The solution, he reiterated, is in fostering the entire population’s active participation in the arts.

“Being a consumer is not a reminder of your humanity. … It is not the same as being part of a community of people who do things and make things,” he said.

“Fame and money are not the only yardsticks of value.”

Concert Review: Music U.

The New Criterion

Jay Nordlinger / June 2015

In Carnegie Hall, the American Symphony Orchestra presented a program called “Music U.” It offered American composers who held jobs in the Ivy League. (One of them—the only living composer represented—still does.) Critics and administrators love a programmatic theme. Everyone else is indifferent, or should be. The aso served up an interesting and satisfying afternoon of music, theme aside.

What we had was a variety of pieces, written by American composers from 1891 until today. The last piece on the program was a premiere. Yes, the composer teaches at an Ivy League university: Cornell. But so what? What if he taught at Bowdoin or Mills? It was still good to hear the music.

The concert began without the orchestra but with choral forces from Cornell—who sang Randall Thompson’s Alleluia. Composed in 1940, it is one of the most famous choral pieces in the repertoire, or at least the American repertoire. It is sometimes thought of as Christmas music (found on a Robert Shaw Christmas album, for example). I might note that Randall Thompson is not to be confused with Virgil Thomson, a contemporary. Randall may be a one-hit wonder—but, oh, what a hit.

His Alleluia opens every season at Tanglewood, the music camp in Massachusetts. (I use the word “camp” loosely.) Another camp, Interlochen, in Michigan, has its own theme music: an excerpt from Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2, the “Romantic.”

The ASO’s piece from 1891 was written by Horatio Parker, who lived from 1863 to 1919.

This piece is Dream-King and His Love, a cantata. Parker entered it into a competition whose principal judge was Dvořák. It won. The cantata takes its text from a German poem by Emanuel von Geibel, in English translation. The music is “lushly Romantic,” to use the cliché. There is also something otherworldly about it.

I sighed a little as I listened. Choral singing used to be an important part of American life, and it has greatly diminished, or so I gather. Can it be revived?

Completing the first half of the program was a symphony from the middle of the twentieth century: the Symphony No. 2 of George Rochberg (1918–2005). He would go on to write four more of them. No. 2 was premiered by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. In other words, it started at the top. The symphony is written according to the twelve-tone method, but it is not academic. It is loaded with feeling. It is rhythmically arresting and shrewdly orchestrated. It is varied, energetic, and brainy. It is also solidly musical.

Is it enjoyable? It is, yes, but one hearing may not be enough. In any case, this Rochberg symphony is a high example of midcentury American modernism.

The second half of the aso concert began with a work composed in 1992 by Leon Kirchner. He wrote it for Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist, a former student of his at Harvard. It is not called a concerto but “Music for Cello and Orchestra.” Is there a difference? If a composer says so, yes, probably. This work is teeming with anxiety, like any number of modern pieces. Yet this piece is special, inspired, compelling. It is both virtuosic—even showy—and pure. It is also “lushly Romantic,” not so distant from Dvořák, really. (He wrote a cello concerto that has enjoyed success.) The Kirchner work ends unusually, in an almost questioning vein, I would say.

And it was played brilliantly by a young cellist, Nicholas Canellakis. I believe he is American—specifically, Greek American— but his bio doesn’t say. Today’s bios tend not to give nationality, even when they go on at length. Puzzling, and sometimes annoying.

The new work that concluded the program comes from the pen of Roberto Sierra. It is called Cantares, indicating songs and chants— which is what we get. The work is in four parts, three of them choral, and one of them an orchestral interlude. Sierra’s general aim is to put his own spin on things ancient.

Cantares begins with the text of a hymn published in seventeenth-century Peru. The language is Quecha. Sierra’s music is ritualistic and exotic. It is also kaleidoscopic, even cinematic. I thought of Indiana Jones and the type of composing done by John Williams, the leading movie composer. From me, that is no putdown. Sierra arranges for something like hissing. I thought of a radiator. Snakes?

The second part of the work “traces its ancestry to Afro-Cuban ritual music of West African origins,” says Sierra in a program note. The orchestra produces a wash of sound. There is much percussion, and chanting, and some more hissing, too. It is all rather dizzying, a paganistic religious experience. The orchestral interlude that follows is a good idea. The listener could use some relief. But the interlude is not altogether restful. There are spooky jungle noises, as in many modern pieces. There is also something that sounds like scattering—like frightened animals running away. Also, there are those twinkling noises that dot so many modern pieces.

Sierra ends with a bang, a dreadful movement that evokes the conquest of the Aztec Empire, from the perspectives of both conquered and conquering. The music is loud,

cacophonous, pounding. It has something in common with Carmina Burana. It is all-out, unremitting, and tiring. Tiring, yes, but true to its theme or intent.

I don’t know whether Cantares will be heard much in the future—these things are hard to judge—but it is a fine way to spend twenty-five minutes now. Asking more from a composer would be greedy. Asking for twenty-five worthwhile minutes is already fairly greedy.

This concert was conducted by the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein, who is also the president of Bard College. He might gag to hear the term, but he is perhaps our musical culture’s foremost conservative. He conserves music, retrieving it, tending to it, perpetuating it, honoring it. If we did not hear that Parker cantata, say, from him, from whom would we hear it? No one. And that would be a shame.

I also want to applaud Botstein for a dog not barking: there was no talking from the stage whatsoever. There were excellent notes in our program, and no talking was necessary, or desirable. There were some unwelcome noises in the audience, however.

Just as the second half was beginning, a lady reached into her purse to withdraw some jelly beans. The beans were in a cellophane bag, tied with a ribbon. The ribbon was in a knot. The lady struggled with that knot for several minutes, making a cacophonous noise with that bag. The Sierra work would have competed with her, but the Kirchner work, at this juncture, could not. Intermission had lasted more than half an hour. But the lady waited until the music began to wrestle with her bag. Eventually, she got it open, offered some beans to her husband, took a few for herself, and returned the bag to her purse.

I have heard almost everything in concert halls and opera houses, on stages and in the seats. I was almost impressed by the lady’s sheer obliviousness to the atmosphere. She wanted them beans, and she got ’em.

George Perle at 100

Written for the concert American Variations: Perle at 100, performed on May 29, 2015 at Carnegie Hall. George Perle was a unique figure within the world of twentieth-century American classical music. He was part of a “second” generation that followed the pioneers of the 1920s, which included Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, Carl Ruggles, Roy Harris, Edgard Varèse, and Henry Cowell. With the exception of Cowell and Ruggles, the others were all linked closely to European influences; they either trained in Europe or studied in America under the tutelage of European masters. But one of the ambitions of this first generation of post-World War I American composers was to create a distinctly American voice. On today’s program the work by William Schuman powerfully represents that goal.

At the same time, these American composers and their successors sought to take their rightful place within a modernist movement whose aesthetics were free of clear markers of the national. Copland’s 1930 Orchestral Variations, originally for piano and presented here in its orchestral version, is a case in point. The Orchestral Variations may be Copland’s most abstract and angular work. It was the piece that young college student Leonard Bernstein played for Copland at a memorable encounter that was the starting point of a lasting close friendship. Not surprisingly, George Perle greatly admired this work.

Although influenced by the work of the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern (Perle studied with Ernst Krenek), Perle charted his own path. He did not attempt to express a musical nationalism. But he also did not imitate or adopt Schoenberg’s technique of “serial” composition. He was not a twelve-tone serial composer. He developed his own version of how to use a 12-note series, primarily as a basis of harmony and counterpoint, and not as a source for musical motives. Using “cycle sets” he crafted a modern musical language that was translucent, expressive, and lyrical. There is an elegance and eloquence in his music that never fails to reach the listener on first hearing. Perle also kept his distance from a more abstract, dense, and often brutal anti-expressive characteristic of mid-twentieth-century avant-garde modern music. As a result, his music has a warmth, intensity, and beauty evocative of Classical and Romantic practice, without any hint of a sentimental nostalgia.

Perle was, in addition, a scholar whose pioneering work on Alban Berg will remain as the foundation of all subsequent writing on Berg. Indeed, Berg’s own adaptation of Schoenberg’s 12-tone strategy was Perle’s inspiration. Like Berg, Perle found the means to write music that communicated emotion and meaning in a manner that was adequate to modernity, yet within a tradition that went back to Bach and the masters of the first Viennese “school” of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. And like Berg (as opposed to Schoenberg), the legacy of late romanticism, particularly of Mahler, left its mark.

Perle’s writings are, like his music, a model of economy, clarity, and insight. It was he who unraveled the “secret” program of the Lyric Suite. His two-volume analysis of Wozzeck and Lulu are without peer in terms of clarity, detail, and deep original insight. Likewise, his 1962 book on the Viennese school Serial Composition and Atonality, his 1977 Twelve Tone Tonality, and his 1990 volume The Listening Composer are classics. They will long remain among the most essential readings for musicians, particularly composers. Perle’s writings reflect the significance of his career as a teacher. For more than twenty years he taught at Queens College of the City University of New York.

Perle represents, therefore, the best of American musical modernism. I had the honor and pleasure of getting to know him towards the end of his career. Walter Trampler, the distinguished violist, repeatedly urged me to program Perle’s Serenade for viola and chamber orchestra from 1962. He and his wife, Shirley, a terrific pianist (and lifelong close friend of Leonard Bernstein’s), introduced themselves after a Bard Music Festival performance of Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri, a work they had known about but never heard live. The Perles and I became friends. They were unfailingly curious and generous. In subsequent years I had the honor of recording Transcendental Modulations with the ASO, and performing the 1990 1st Piano Concerto with the Bard Conservatory Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall (with Melvin Chen as soloist).

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein once quipped about Bernstein (who admired Perle as a musician and a man) that he was the “greatest pianist among conductors, the greatest conductor among composers, [and] the greatest composer among pianists.” The same could be said about Perle using his trio of accomplishments as composer, scholar, and theorist. If that weren’t enough, Perle was himself a fine pianist. Perle was among the first composers to be awarded a MacArthur “genius” Award.

In this concert Perle’s place in music history is framed not only by Copland—the dominant and consistently gracious “dean” of 20th century American music—but also by the contrasting and parallel careers of two contemporaries, both of whom shared with Perle achievements apart from composition. Lukas Foss, the startlingly gifted pianist, was distinguished as well as a composer and conductor. William Schuman was not only a major figure as a composer, but an eminent administrator. Schuman served as president of Julliard and subsequently as the first president of Lincoln Center. The music of Foss and Schuman is quite distinct and different from Perle’s and offers the listener a glimpse of the rich, vital, and varied musical culture of the American twentieth century.

More than in the other arts, in music we have developed the bad habit of neglecting the achievements of the past. Too much of great twentieth-century music, particularly American music, has fallen away from the repertory. Some composers were strikingly prolific (one thinks of Martinu and Milhaud, for example). Perle’s output may have been restrained in quantity, but it is rigorously consistent in refinement and quality. His music—the orchestral music, the music for piano, for the voice, for solo instruments, and the chamber music—deserves to prevail in the twenty-first century alongside his remarkable contributions to music history and music theory.

Bard Music Festival's Artistic Director Leon Botstein Talks About Showcasing Carlos Chavez

By Francisco Salazar (staff@latinpost.com) May 03, 2015

In August, Bard College will hold the annual Bard Music Festival, one that was founded in 1990 to promote new ways of understanding and presenting the history of music to a contemporary audience. This year the festival will turn to Latin America as it will showcase the work of Carlos Chavez, a composer who was a central figure in Mexico in the 20th Century.

Latin Post had a chance to speak with Leon Botstein, the artistic co-director and the president of Bard College. Botstein spoke of his work with the festival and discovering the work of Chavez.

Francisco Salazar: Can you talk a bit about what it was to create the festival? Where did the idea come from?

Leon Botstein: It was created 26 years ago to bring academic scholarship in music together with performance to broaden the audience and repertoire of Classical music. Classical music has experienced a shrinking of the historical repertoire. And, as it has struggled to sustain an audience, it has become conservative and has taken to repeating a small portion of the historical repertoire. So Beethoven Symphonies, Mahler, Mozart, Bach. If you compare it to a museum, a museum has 50,000 great paintings. It's as we are only showing 500 of them [in Classical Music].

So with the festival, we are looking to bring back the remaining 49,500 paintings.

Francisco Salazar: So where did Carlos Chavez's music come into play as the theme of this year's festival?

Leon Botstein: This is the first year where we turn to Latin American's history with Classic Music, leading with Mexico. Carlos Chavez was the leading composer and force in the development of Classical Music culture in Mexico. He made his appearance in the public in the 1920s and then became an official leader of the music through government sponsorship in the 20's, 30's and 40's. He was very interested in his Latin American colleagues and was essential the founder of El Sistema De Abreu, so he has a strong connection to the Venezuelan community, the Argentines and Cubans as well. He was not only a Mexican leader but a broader protagonist of Latin America.

Francisco Salazar: What was your first encounter with his music?

Leon Botstein: I had family in Mexico City so I studied with faculty of the Conservatorio Nacional. I heard Chavez conduct as a child. As a child I became familiar with Mexican Classical Music through [Manuel] Ponce, [Silvestre] Revueltas and Chavez. Ten years ago I did an all-Mexican program at Lincoln Center which had music by Chavez and Revueltas. I had a life-long interest in Mexican Classical music.

Francisco Salazar: What do you hope audiences take away from this festival, especially from the music on display?

Leon Botstein: I hope they discover the riches and beauties of Latin American classic music. And of course Chavez and his contemporaries. We will also represent music from [Jose Pablo] Moncayo, Revueltas, Julian Carrillo, Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera and Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. There will be a sampling of composers that worked between 1900 and 1980.

Francisco Salazar: What is the greatest challenge in putting together a festival like this?

Leon Botstein:This is the first summer festival where the audience will know none of the pieces performed very well. Most of the pieces we are doing are not in the active repertory. They won't find them in most concerts in the US and Europe. There are exceptions but very few.

Most of the time we have done a mix of well-known music with rarer works. Most of the names this time around, even Chavez, and their music are unfamiliar to North American and European audiences.

Francisco Salazar: When you are picking the repertoire, where do you start?

Leon Botstein: First of all we have the help from scholars such as Dr. Leonora Saavedra from the University of California. She is a Chavez expert and an expert on Latin American Classical Music. She is the outside scholarly adviser to us. We who organize the festival are not experts in this repertoire so we rely heavily on her. We also publish a book, which Leonora Saavedra is editing. It is published by Princeton University and is called "Carlos Chavez and his World." So we publish a scholarly book and the scholars involved help us find our way through a large repertoire.

Francisco Salazar: Are the musicians performing specialists in this music?

Leon Botstein: No. There are some that have repertoire that is connected to Latin American music, a guitarist and a couple of pianists. But aside from them, the other musicians, including the American Symphony Orchestra and Soloists are not specialists. Most of the time these musicians are playing this music for the very first time.

It is exciting that the focus of the festival is not European or North American. We have never done this before. It is a tremendously rich body of work and I think it is a travesty that so little of it is known. I have done some of it as a conductor and it has its champions such as Gustavo Dudamel, but it is relatively neglected and underrepresented.

Take the New York Philharmonic for example. The last time they played music was likely during the career of Leonard Bernstein. And he was a patron of Aaron Copland who was a tremendous advocate of Chavez and the Latin American compositional community.

Original story here.

Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra “declassify” Janáček's Sinfonietta

Bachtrack, April 29. 2015 By Jacob Slattery

Maestro Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra examined Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta as part of their "Classics Declassified" series with a performance that enhanced the concert experience through intellectual guidance. In the first half of the concert, Maestro Botstein analyzed the Sinfonietta through three lenses: a narrative lens for the overarching descriptive program, a musical lens for Janáček’s inventive speech-melody, and a political lens for the peaking Czech nationalist sentiment of the time. The second half then proceeded with a complete performance of remarkable high caliber for a part-time symphony orchestra.

As Janáček wrote the Sinfonietta when he was just over 70 years old, the composition unravels quite well into a thoughtful retrospective, biographically and artistically. It opens with a famous brass fanfare, which has roots in the composer’s own exposure to Moravian brass bands. Maestro Botstein's lecture focused in part on the Sinfonietta's expansive brass orchestration. Janáček called for four horns, nine trumpets in C, three in F, two bass trumpets, four trombones, two tenor tubas, and tuba, which is impressive even for today’s standards. The American Symphony Orchestra's expanded brass section was appropriately bright and stately in its performance of the pugnacious fanfare, standing to great effect in a semicircle along the back of orchestra. Janáček did not attempt to recall the bugle or plainchant, but rather created a theme in his unique style of speech-melody and provided a fitting introduction to the second movement, Brno’s Castle.

Maestro Botstein explained that Janáček's compositional philosophy was to represent realness, which he often demonstrated through the use of repetition: life is repetitious, therefore music should be repetitious. This ideal is immediately evident in the second movement when the clarinet introduces an obligato passage, precisely executed by Laura Flax, that recurs throughout the remainder of the movement. Neoclassicism is often associated with modern Russian composers, but the simplification of rhythm and melody combined with a homophonic texture of this movement bring to mind Mozart and Haydn as well as the forthcoming “pop” genre.

Several individual parts, however, are virtuosic, and the flute writing in the third movement is a prime example. Maestro Botstein isolated the part in his lecture, so the ASO flute section could show off their daring skill. But even these virtuosic passages are integrated effectively into the whole, as Janáček's goal to achieve simplicity never extends out of reach. This third movement represents the Queen's Monastery where Janáček spent his early adult years, and Maestro Botstein noted that the head of Janáček’s monastery was none other than Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics. Moving out of the monastery, the fourth movement roughly depicts life in the streets of Brno. The unmistakable juxtapositions of city life protrude from shifting tempi and conflicting harmonies that slide to dopey resolutions. Janáček shows that, in contrast to repetitive life at the castle, change occurs often in the streets.

Ultimately, Janáček’s finale cultivates in a victory for the Czech people, and it is here that nationalism is most perceivable through his use of structural metamorphosis. During his own lifetime, Janáček saw the German-ruled Moravian landscape changing as Czechoslovakian independence defined its national identity. Janáček paid homage in a grand way to the place where his people could birth a new, free nation. The movement itself, subtitled “The Town Hall, Brno”, begins with a minor folk melody in the winds before evolving into triumphant brassy bits, and the American Symphony Orchestra’s brass players powered with confidence straight to the finish.

Original story here.

Music and Politics

The horror, destruction, and cruelty that persist, particularly in this past year in Ukraine and Gaza, have properly forced raw politics into the center of our attention. By coincidence, in two of the countries tied to these conflicts, there are prominent musicians who are public figures, Valery Gergiev and Daniel Barenboim. As conductors, they are highly visible, and both of them have become controversial. Gergiev has been criticized for supporting Vladimir Putin and failing to use his international stature and well-earned reputation as a Russian patriot to combat restrictions within Russia on civil liberties, freedom of expression and assembly, and to combat xenophobia and discrimination against the Lesbian, gay, and transgender community. Barenboim, although lionized by the Israeli public as a performer, has been taken to task for his fierce and longstanding advocacy forthe rights of the Palestinians and his criticism of the Israeli government. By their actions as leading citizens of their respective countries, these two star performers raise the question of the connection between music and politics. Music has occupied an ambiguous place as a public art form. In the tradition of Western music, particularly as it flourished during the 19th century, music was a widespread and popular activity. Music was not only about going to concerts and the opera; listening to professionals perform emerged from amateurs who played and sang at home and in the closed circle of private societies. In the repressive regimes that dominated Europe between 1815 and 1848, musical culture assumed a privileged place. The forms of music, particularly symphonic and chamber music but also choral music, appeared to censors in a police state as innocent and devoid of politically dangerous content when compared to literature and the visual arts. (Even so, the manuscript of Schubert’s 1823 opera of the Medieval Christian-Moslem conflict, Fierrabras, is studded with changes demanded by the censors, although it was never produced in the composer’s lifetime.) Even though political freedom was restricted, music was to a greater degree exempt and thereby assumed a distinct appeal as an arena of human expression at once both abstract and emotional and deeply personal, but devoid of any unambiguous content or meaning that could threaten or challenge political authority.

These circumstances helped lend credibility to the mid-19th-century aesthetic theory that declared music to be a self-referential aesthetic system without any explicit correlation to images and words and, therefore,ordinary meaning: the notion of “absolute music.” Music achieved the status of appearing to be—on its own and without words—entirely apolitical. There was, of course, a potent challenge to this construct of the nature of music that came from Liszt and Wagner, both of whom were decidedly politically engaged—Liszt in the Hungarian national movement, and Wagner on behalf of the aspirations of the new German nation after 1870.

Wagner’s extraordinary success and impact, particularly the unprecedented popularity he achieved through his music, rendered the supposition that music is inherently apolitical an illusion. Music as an activity and as entertainment turned out to be crucial to the development of various late 19th-century nationalisms. In the German-speaking world, the Wagnerian came to define the German. Dvořák and Smetana became central to fashioning a Czech identity, just as the Mighty Five in Russia became successful protagonists of what they regarded to be the essence of the distinctive Russian spirit.

The popularity and centrality of musical culture as a social phenomenon was not lost on the dictators of the 20th century. Stalin and Hitler were notorious lovers of music. For Hitler, music was at the core of the Nazi aspiration to create a new Aryan sensibility. His favorite composers were Wagner and Bruckner. Stalin was, de facto, the Soviet Union’s chief music critic. He castigated Shostakovich’s incipient modernism in the mid-1930s, and backed the notorious Zhdanov decrees of 1948 that excoriated formalism not only in Shostakovich but Miaskovsky and Prokofiev as well.

The intersection of music and politics during the 1930s was not limited to tyrannies. In the United States, Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, and Roy Harris took political considerations into account in their search for distinctive voices as composers; they sought to reconcile aesthetic modernism with political advocacy for social justice and equality. Like their Weimar Republic contemporaries Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, they had second thoughts about the virtues of a musical modernism rooted in progressive aesthetic criteria whose radical character alienated the audience and held, in particular, no attraction for the working classes. It may have been chic to “épater le bourgeois,” but to have no public at large seemed both ironic and elitist.

Throughout the 20th century the connection between politics and music was not limited to the work of composers. Early in the century the balance of musical life and the attention of the general public had shifted from an interest in new music to the performance of canonic music from the past. Much to the ire of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the musicians who made the most money and garnered the greatest public attention were no longer composers but performers. The star performers of the mid-20th century became music’s ambassadors, the key public figures of the day.

Consequently their political engagement came under scrutiny. Toscanini was honored as an Italian patriot who was an ardent anti-Fascist. Ignace Paderewski took on the mantle of Polish national liberation and became the new nation’s first president. Yehudi Menuhin defended himself against criticismcelebrating the dream of the musician as citizen of the world by ostentatiously embracing former Nazis as colleagues immediately after the war. Rafael Kubelik and Rudolf Firkusny were stalwart opponents of the post-war Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia, and they returned after 1989 as heroes. A host of German artists, notably Walter Gieseking, Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, collaborated with the Nazis with embarrassing enthusiasm, as did the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg. Wilhelm Furtwängler’s post-1933 politics became a hotly debated subject in the immediate years following the war, as was Ernő Dohnányi’s wartime behavior in Hungary.

Oddly enough, in the United States, during the heyday of modernism in the 1950s, the image of the musician as inherently apolitical became the norm. The most prominent musicians in the U.S. after World War II came as refugees; they understandably felt that engaging in American politics was inappropriate. Leonard Bernstein was an exception to the image of the musician as above politics within the generation of American-born musicians that attained prominence in the 1950s. Bernstein may also have been the last highly visible American classical musician to speak out on political matters. He did so mostly during the 1950s and 1960s, before his retirement from the New York Philharmonic. In 1970, a few months after his retirement, he was famously excoriated for expressing solidarity with the Black Panthers and was the inspiration for the phrase “radical chic.” To his credit, however, Bernstein believed that music mattered, and that as a public figure he had an obligation to speak his mind on crucial issues in American politics, including McCarthyism and Civil Rights.

It is a sad commentary on the decline of the importance and prestige of classical musicians that, in the United States, so few classical musicians are currently active in the political life of the nation, hiding unchallenged behind the blithe assumption that music is a world apart. They exploit the false distinction between the “musical” and the “extra-musical,” a distinction that is artificial and defies the simple truth so eloquently expressed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that music is “a form of life” much like any other. Although orchestras and opera houses are supported indirectly by the state through tax exemptions for philanthropy, and are constituent institutions of civil society performing a public function, the number of prominent conductors and star soloists who now speak out on political questions can barely be counted on one hand.

At the same time, music critics and the public in this country take aim not at the silence of American musicians in matters of politics, but at Gergiev, Barenboim, and most recently Gustavo Dudamel, the charismatic music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The one exception in this respect in today’s debate regarding the intersection between politics and classical music is the American composer John Adams, whose operas have consistently had political overtones if not political content. The most controversial of these is The Death of Klinghoffer, premiered in 1991, the argument of which deals not with American politics but the Arab-Israeli conflict and an act of terrorism dating from the 1980s.

The Metropolitan Opera scheduled a production for this coming season, but backed away from disseminating it through its HD network for fear of offending the wider public. For a variety of understandable reasons, the Met settled on a compromise and declined to confront the politics surrounding the opera’s purported message. Apart from the Met’s Klinghoffercontroversy, most of the attention in the American press regarding music and politics has focused on Gergiev and Dudamel. In Gergiev’s case, the irony is that he has consistently displayed a fierce patriotism as a Russian in a manner consistent with his advocacy of the Russian repertoire, particularly rare operas. His tireless efforts on behalf of the Mariinsky Theater, which he has led since 1988, and the musical life of St. Petersburg are immense.

Americans as outsiders may not like his politics, but he is to be admired for stepping out of the protected realm of his own career to try to sustain a vital musical culture in post-Communist Russia. He is part of a tradition more than a century old in which Russian musicians have not shied away from being controversial political figures. The politics Gergiev defends may merit criticism, but not his political engagement.

The more complicated case is that of Dudamel, the finest alumnus of Venezuela’s legendary El Sistema program. The program was founded 40 years agoby José Antonio Abreu, a brilliant academic and musician and, above all, a superlative and idealistic politician. He started it under the regime of Carlos Andrés Pérez and saw it flourish after 1999 during the era of Hugo Chávez. It continues to be the object of extensive patronage by the Maduro regime. Abreu’s program now reaches over 400,000 Venezuelans, primarily children and young adults from the poorest areas of the country. Abreu found a way to use music education and participation in musical ensembles, incorporating the Western classical tradition, to do more than teach music. El Sistema is a program that provides social mobility and hope, and an avenue out of poverty and ignorance. Abreu has done so by placing music at the core of a social program rather than an arts program, and by working with regimes considered undemocratic, populist, and unsavory. He has embraced one of the toughest challenges in public life: to live with compromise on behalf of long-term public good, and to take the long view about what needs to be done in order to lay a better foundation for a political future based on social justice and freedom. El Sistema would never have had its impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals had it not been for Abreu’s ability to muster massive public support and shun the role of public critic. El Sistema has taken a place in Venezuelan national identity usually reserved for sports teams. This is no trivial accomplishment.

To speak out against tyranny, war, and injustice certainly takes courage, since speech is a form of action. But to establish a program with deep roots in society that develops the minds and skills of underserved and impoverished people on a massive scale takes an altogether different form of courage. Dudamel is crucial to El Sistema’s survival after Abreu. Dudamel, unlike Gergiev, is not active in politics. His unambiguous commitment is to El Sistema in Venezuela and to its adaptation in the context of the United States, as his work in Los Angeles shows. Criticism of his unwillingness to take the expected and seemingly straightforward step of rebuking the Venezuelan government and to reject the desire of a still quite popular regime to spotlight him as the pride of Venezuela is misplaced. Like Abreu, Dudamel appears to have taken the long view. The short-term publicity that might redoundto his benefit for being critical of the current regime would perhaps endear him to a class of liberal music lovers in North America and Europe, but it could alienate him from his countrymen and imperil the essential government support for El Sistema.

The American criticism of Dudamel (and for that matter Gergiev) poorly camouflages the profound paradox among our fellow citizens who have chosen to speak out against both of them. Where is the outspoken engagement by musicians here at home? Where is the outrage at the deafening silence among our own classical musicians of prominence, concerning the shortcomings of our politics and government or on behalf of causes related to this country’s predicaments? Where are the voices of musicians in positions of leadership on behalf of the rising and corrosive inequality of wealth in the United States? Where are the voices among musicians on behalf of the improvement of public education? Where in the United States are the leaders in the classical-music establishment pioneering and developing programs of arts education that are more than decorative “outreach” efforts, that are insteadsystemic collaborations with schools and other institutions on behalf of the least well-served populations in the United States?

Speaking truth to power, as the phrase goes, is hard. Working on behalf of improving the lot of our less fortunate fellow citizens is even harder. Gergiev and Dudamel, in quite different ways, have shown commitment to the potential role of musical culture in advancing the well-being of their respective communities and nations. Would we benefit from less moralizing about the political role played by star performers in other countries, and more attention to what musicians in the United States can do in our own country to make progress in the key areas of education, social mobility, and, finally, privacy and freedom of expression?

The argument against taking this point of view rests primarily on our view of the past, primarily the legacy of political collaboration by musicians with Hitler and Stalin. Musicians and music lovers find themselves caught in a bind when they contemplate the music of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Strauss on the one hand, and on the other are forced to make a candid assessment of the political behavior of these three great composers. We are not consistent in how we balance politics with aesthetic judgment. Hans Pfitzner’s music is performed more than the music by Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Pfitzner was an enthusiastic Nazi, and a fine composer. Hartmann was a far greater composer and one of the few heroic non-Jewish anti-Nazis; during the 1930s and 1940s he sacrificed his career by refusing to collaborate.

When we criticize Gergiev and Dudamel, we think we are trying to show that we have learned the lessons taught by the cases of Furtwängler, Karajan, and Böhm. Yet have we? Each of these three had successful post-war careers. Their legacies are still cherished today. Even Leonard Bernstein, a proud Jew and supporter of Israel saw no difficulty lavishing inordinate praise on Böhm, whose wartime behavior was utterly reprehensible. A similar inconsistency extends to Israel, where a ban on the music of Wagner (who died in 1883, before Hitler was born) remains in effect, and yet Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, a work written during the Third Reich explicitly calculated to celebrate Nazi ideology and aesthetics, is performed in Israel without comment.

This dissonance between moral and political judgments, and aesthetic preferences may not apply to the cases of Gergiev and Dudamel. They are doing more than simply burnishing their résumés and advancing their careers. In an imperfect and troublesome political context, rife with thorny ethical implications, they have chosen to work on behalf of the public good in their countries through music and education, by siding with a politics many may not admire, for good reason. Instead of focusing our attention on them, we ought to turn our attention to the situation here in the United States. We should call on our fellow musicians to speak and work, as musicians, in the public sphere on the tough task of advancing the causes of good government, social justice, and individual liberty—the core values of democracy.

A version of this article appeared in Musical America 2015 Edition.

Concert Review: Music U.

American Symphony Orchestra's MUSIC U

Oberon's Grove

Sunday April 19th, 2015 - This note from the press release describes the inspiration for today's programme, entitled 'MUSIC U', by the American Symphony Orchestra: "In a country without kings and courts, universities have served as the patrons for many of America’s greatest composers." Leon Botstein and the ASO were joined by the Cornell University Glee Club & Chorus in a celebration of five Ivy League composers.

Performing a cappella under the direction of Robert Isaacs, the young singers from Cornell displayed a lovely vocal blend in the heavenly harmonies of this slow, lilting choral miniature. The gentle pace quickens somewhat near the work's end, but falls back into calm with a very sustained final note that hung on the air.

After a rather long pause, the concert continued with the oldest work (late 19th century) on the programme: the cantata Dream-King and his Love by Horatio Parker (above), one-time Dean of Music at Yale. This cantata won first prize in its category in a competition judged by Dvořák himself. A fanciful romantic text tells the tale of a maiden visited in her dream by a kingly lover.

The work is melody-filled and seems to echo some of the exotic works of Jules Massenet. From the lyrical opening (the harp is prominent) thru passages dance-like, rapturous, and triumphant by turns, the music opens out like a perfumed lotus blossom. The naturally youthful sound of tenor soloist Phillip Fargo fell pleasingly in the ear, and the singers from Cornell again gave of their best.

The Symphony No. 2 by George Rochberg (above), who ran the music department at the University of Pennsylvania, was the longest work on the programme. Composed in 1955-1956, this symphony today sounds like a generic work from an era when classical music was not quite sure what direction it was headed in. It's a big-scale piece, one which seems to take itself very seriously. One can sense such influences as Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Schönberg in the writing, and the composer's fine craftsmanship is never in doubt. Yet despite its rhythmic variety and interesting sonic textures - oboe and horns are well-employed - the piece seemed over-extended. Melody is pretty much banished - a promising duet passage for two violas evaporated after a few seconds - and although melody is not essential, it is inevitably gratifying. Maestro Botstein's commitment to the work and the excellent playing of the ASO - many fleeting bits of solo work are strewn throughout the score - made as strong a case for the symphony as one could hope to hear.

Music for Cello and Orchestra by Harvard’s Leon Kirchner

Nicholas-Canellakis

...with soloist Nicholas Canellakis (above) opened the second half of the concert. The cellist is a frequent participant in Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's superb concerts.

Today, Kirchner's music seemed to me to have found what was missing from the Rochberg: a connection to the heart. Throughout the Kirchner, the solo cello gives his piece a sense of unity and purpose that - to my ears - the Rochberg lacks. Kirchner's orchestration is colorful and dense, with excellent use of percussion, and the music sometimes takes on a cinematic quality. I love hearing a piano mixed into an orchestral ensemble work, and at the reference to TRISTAN UND ISOLDE, my friend Adi and I exchanged smiles.

Mr. Canellakis was simply breathtaking right from the cello's passionate opening statement. He was deeply involved in the music, moving seamlessly from a gleaming upper register to the soulful singing of his middle range. Capable of both redolent lyricism and energetic, jagged flourishes, Nicholas's playing seemed so at home in the venerable Hall. The audience gave him lusty and well-deserved round of applause as he was called back to the stage after his exceptional performance.

The chorus then returned to the stage for the concert's grand finale: the world premiere of Cantares by Roberto Sierra (above), which Cornell University commissioned for this concert in celebration of their 150th anniversary. In this panoramic work, the cultures of the African, Spanish, Native Peruvian, and Aztec peoples are entwined in vivid musical settings of texts dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries. The composer has re-imagined these invocations and narratives for the contemporary world; for this piece, the Cornell choristers leapt readily from Quechua to Spanish.

A long sustained tone opens Cantares; then, emerging from dark turbulence, the chorus begins to 'speak'. A trumpet call, a wandering xylophone, a celestial harp, an oddly ominous rattle: these are all heard as kozmic sound-clouds drift by. The music is mystical and - with the under-pacing of rhythmic chant - takes on an other-worldly feeling.

The second movement evokes African ritual and that continent's ancient connection to Cuba. The music seems to echo thru time in its heavenly, ecstatic vibrations. Somehow Chausson's Poeme de l'amour et de la Mer came to mind.

An orchestral interlude has the flutter of birdsong and a dense-jungle yet transparent appeal and leads into the final Suerte lamentosa, an epic of dueling cultures told from both the winners' and the losers' points of view.

The work is perhaps a trifle too long, but the composer has been successful in drawing us to contemplate the oft-forgotten (or ignored) events surrounding the injection of Christianity into the Western Hemisphere. And musically it's truly brilliant.

Original link: http://oberon481.typepad.com/oberons_grove/2015/04/american-symphony-orchestras-music-u.html

Music and the University

Written for the concert Music U., performed on April 19, 2015 at Carnegie Hall. Music has long held a particular pride of place as a subject of formal education in the Western tradition. Part of the “quadrivium” of the seven liberal arts, alongside arithmetic, astronomy, and geometry, already from medieval times music was part of the indispensable training in thinking, and therefore a core constituent of true philosophical education. Knowledge of music was viewed as essential to the examined and just life. It, as an art, demanded that one command knowledge of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, the “trivium” that prepared one to master music, mathematics, and science represented by the remaining four liberal arts.

In comparison to the visual arts—with the possible exception of architecture (which is often compared to music)—music has therefore been held in high esteem in the university, the academy of higher learning. In the United States, it was the first of the arts to become a permanent faculty in the university. But within the arts and sciences university the teaching of music took on a quality quite distinct from the way music was taught in conservatories, music’s institutional equivalent of an arts academy, a place where one trained in a practical manner to become an artist. In the university, music was considered a core constituent of the Humanities.

The way music became defined in the American university was nonetheless not analogous to the way art history now has a place in the curriculum. The first professorship in music within the Ivy League was at Harvard. John Knowles Paine, a fine composer of orchestral music (and an ardent critic of Wagner) was its first occupant. He taught more than music appreciation. Horatio Parker taught at Yale and Edward MacDowell at Columbia. They too were composers and major figures in American musical life. Although learning to play an instrument was looked down upon (Harvard until recently did not give credit for instruction in instruments or performance), composing new music was not. As the late Milton Babbitt (the distinguished and exacting modernist composer who served on the Princeton faculty) is supposed to have replied when asked why no credit was given towards a degree in music at Princeton for studying an instrument: “does the English department give credit for typing?”

The proper subjects of study in music within the university therefore included history, theory, and composition. But from the very start of the career of music departments in our leading universities, particularly the Ivy League, music appreciation for the non major, and the support of voluntary amateur performance organizations, from choral societies and singing clubs, to orchestras and musical theater organizations designed to offer public opportunities to students to perform, were at the heart of the place music assumed at Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Penn, and Brown.

When we lament the decline of audiences, we often neglect to cite as a cause the sustained failure of music departments in these elite universities to maintain, after the 1960s, a once honored tradition of music appreciation. In part as a consequence of a desire to professionalize music history, the kind of sweeping and often “easy” general survey course once associated with Harvard’s G. Wallace Woodworth, Cornell’s Donald J. Grout, and Columbia’s Paul Henry Lang has vanished, and with it the chance to nurture interest among unwitting undergraduates in the joy of music. It is interesting to note that Cornell was the first American university to hire a professional musicologist (Otto Kinkeldey) and the first to grant a doctorate in composition.

The Ivy League has had its generous share of distinguished musicians from its undergraduate alumni, including Charles Ives from Yale, and Leonard Bernstein and Yo Yo Ma, both Harvard alumni (as is ASO’s longtime composer-in-residence, Richard Wilson). But each of these institutions now boasts impressive departments that give Ph.Ds in musicology, music theory, and composition. They have taken on an indispensable role in the preservation and furtherance of musical culture.

Given that an alternative model of institutionalizing the teaching of music also thrives in the United States—the conservatory—as a free standing institution (e.g. Juilliard, Curtis, the Manhattan School, the New England Conservatory), or a unit of a large state university (e.g. at Indiana and Michigan), or a separate school within a private university (e.g. Eastman at the University of Rochester, Peabody at Johns Hopkins, and for that matter, the graduate Yale School of Music), the question might be posed: what has been the impact of the teaching of composition within the university, and outside of what by comparison some might deem a “trade” school, the music conservatory.

It should be remembered that within the history of music, the institutionalized teaching has not always been viewed with approbation. The word “academic” is frequently used as a pejorative when speaking about art, including music. In Europe institutionalized teaching gained an unequal reputation, mostly as a barrier to innovation. In France, Berlioz ran afoul of institutions of formal instruction and the conservatism and moribund character of the Paris Conservatoire at mid century led to the establishment of rival institutions. In the Vienna Conservatory, Bruckner taught counterpoint, not composition; Mahler as a student failed to win the coveted Beethoven Prize for composition. History (and even the ASO) has long forgotten a long list of winners. Perhaps the most successful record in terms of conservatories with respect to nurturing composers can be found in Eastern Europe from Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In America, however, the existence of new concert and so-called “art” music in the twentieth century, particularly after World War II owes a special debt not only to the nation’s conservatories but also to the comprehensive university. Aaron Copland may have gone to Julliard, but Bernstein, Adams, Babbitt, Carter, Glass, Crumb, Husa, Krenek, Schoenberg, Sessions, Luening, Mason, Moore, Wuorinen, Hindemith, Shapey, Blackwood, Wernick, Piston, Milhaud, Richard Wilson (and all the composers on this program) as well as dozens of other major composers of the twentieth century (including Druckman, Tower, and Tsontakis at Bard) have owed either their education or a significant part of their livelihood to the faculties of arts and sciences at colleges and universities, not conservatories.

The inclusion of composition in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum of these non-conservatory institutions of higher education has fostered a closer link between new music and other disciplines, from mathematics to literature. It has helped sustain whatever broader consciousness and appreciation of music still persists in the educated public. In that regard, from the ear of Parker and Ives to today the presence of composers on the faculty has provided the amateur music groups within the university a contemporary repertoire, much in the spirit of Thompson’s Alleluia. Furthermore, the university has protected and nurtured a spirit of experimentation and the avant-garde in contemporary music. In the best sense, it has acted as a bulwark against crass commercialism. This last achievement has been accomplished in a manner complementary to a respect for music’s historical legacy, the great tradition of Western classical music.

So much for the past! Classical music, new and old, has never thrived as a business. It has been dependent on patronage from the 17th century on. It cannot compete as a dimension of the contemporary marketplace of entertainment that earns profits. In the decades ahead, the university, especially the well-endowed private universities—notably the Ivy League—will face the ever-increasing obligation to nurture, protect, and preserve a sophisticated (in the best sense) musical culture that is not commercially viable and not even popular. That protection will involve the research in and teaching of music’s past and theoretical underpinnings. It will involve also the education of future generations of composers. And it will require the support of the public performance of classical music, new and old, by amateurs and professionals alike.

A living and vibrant culture of classical music will increasingly be dependent on the university. The halls of academe will emerge as a refuge, a shield against a society increasingly governed by the rules and mores of “business.” Let us hope that those who govern our universities and those who support it will embrace that task and will prove equal to it. As the ASO joins with Cornell University to celebrate the founding of that great institution, we hope that the next 150 years will prove to be as fruitful and productive at Cornell with respect to music as the century and a half that preceded the year 2015 have been.