Oh Doctor!

My vacation took me far away from the first couple weeks of the latest installment of music director mania. The third week had some underplayed gems on the program - Mendelssohn Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Beethoven Consecration of the House, Schumann Rhenish. (Mozart, Piano Concerto no. 21 with Pollini rounded out the show.)

 

Legitimately a masterpiece, the Schumann is also the least underplayed of the of the three. Nevertheless, I would gladly trade in a few extraneous repetitions of Bruckner 4, Beethoven 3, (and while in the key of E flat, throw in Ein Heldenleben) for a couple more performances of the Rhenish over the years. Consecration of the House might fall under the rubric of 'forgettable' works by great composers, and even butt of the (hilarious) observation that there are no undiscovered masterpieces. (Then again, there is no bit of received wisdom that can't be shoehorned into a tired old saying by some wag in the musicians' lounge either.) And even so, this 'Wellington's Victory for arts administrators' might have some deeper, hidden meaning, maybe a wry comment on banality by the great composer, who knows. It is hard to get to the bottom of a piece if you never hear it. I would trade at least a couple of the hundred or so 7th symphonies to play it once or twice a decade. Finally, while no Midsummer Night's Dream, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage is not without charm of its own, but hasn't been played here since the (Fritz) Reiner era. (Maybe the programmers promised to get around to it in the Carl Reiner era.) Heck, we've played "Bear Down {redacted} Bears" more times than that since then, and if we had a better football team, the programming imbalance would be even more lopsided.

 

Recently, the subject of programming came up in a discussion with a friend of mine, who I'll call Dr X. The Doctor, who has attended scores of concerts over the span of about 20 years, admitted to me the woeful inadequacy of his musical training as a schoolboy, and later, as a college student. He went on to confess further that he relied on the orchestra as his main source of musical education, assuming that attending as many concerts as possible would lead to his developing a well rounded knowledge of the classical genre. He also admitted to being something of a homebody whose exposure to concerts came almost exclusively from the {redacted}SO.

 

This immediately piqued my interest, as I am of the opinion that organizations dedicated to the so-called 'high arts' have a duty to enlighten as well as entertain. The Doctor, who has continued to renew his subscription year after year, has undoubtedly been entertained, but I was keenly interested to know what sort of education he had obtained merely by attending our concerts over the span of many years. After a considerable amount of cajoling, I persuaded the good Doctor to put his knowledge into writing.

The Doctor asked that I beg the readers' indulgence, as he claims to have written nothing more than prescriptions since his student days and is a little shy about his prose. He also asked me to state that he often arrives at concerts dead tired after a long day at the clinic, which might have lead to him nodding off a few times over the years; and of course, he had no idea there would be a test at the end.

 

 

What I learned at the Symphony

by Dr X

 

 

The father of so-called classical music is Bach. Unfortunately, as his music is best handled by specialists, it is rarely heard in the concert hall today.

 

The first of the great symphonists was Haydn. A simple man, he was practically innumerate, writing about 6 or 7 symphonies but giving them numbers like 96, 104, and so on. In spite of its high quality and universal appeal, his music is rarely played.

 

Mozart wrote a great many piano concertos, three Italian operas, and parts of a requiem mass. As a symphonist, his output was slightly greater than that of Haydn. Sharing Haydn's innumeracy he gave his symphonies evocative titles such as Jupiter, Haffner, Prague, and Thirty-nine.

 

The first composer to complete a well-ordered set of nine symphonies was Beethoven. The even numbered were evidently 'practice symphonies' written between the more serious compositions and are rarely performed any longer.

 

Schubert, mainly the composer of about a thousand songs, took enough time off to write either one, or two-and-a-half symphonies. Sensing his own early demise, he numbered them 8 and 9.

 

Berlioz wrote one Fantastic Symphony. Mendelssohn and Schumann were also composers, but their symphonies have been mostly forgotten, or are apparently of interest to academics only.

 

The most important composer of the 19th century, Richard Wagner didn't write any symphonies at all, in fact, he might have loathed instrumentalists. He is best known for the Ring cycle and for inventing a chord progression which he expanded into a 5-hour long opera, Tristan and Isolde. The harmonic ambiguity of Tristan and Isolde permeated all music that came after, and miraculously, even some that came before.

 

Wagner's chief disciple was Anton Bruckner, who wrote the same symphony 11 times, elevating the idea of chord progressions as music to its highest level.

 

Brahms completed 3 symphonies that end loudly, and one which is no longer played.

 

Tchaikovsky finished 3 symphonies before effecting his own demise. His Pathétique symphony, oddly given the designation as 'number 6' is chiefly known for ending softly yet still remaining part of the repertoire.

 

No one knows how many symphonies Dvorak wrote. One or two of them (numbered 8 and 9, of course) remain in the repertoire to this day.

 

Mahler raced against his own mortality to finish a complete set of 9 symphonies. Depending on who you ask, Mahler had enough ideas in his head to write about 25 symphonies, or maybe 4 really good ones.

 

Richard Strauss came from a musical family. He showed great promise in his early 'tone poems' but gave it all up to write operas.

 

Stravinsky was another composer of the early 20th century who showed great promise before retreating into neoclassicism.

 

The great French composers were Debussy and Ravel. The former wrote La Mer, the latter, a bunch of 'Spanish' music.

 

Schoenberg was the most important composer of the 20th century although he wrote almost no music. Taking Wagner's ambiguous chord progression from Tristan, he essentially posed the question "What if everybody behaved like that?" and in answer came up with the 12-tone system. The result was the end of tonality and the beginning of the 2nd Viennese school. The greatest accomplishments of the 2nd Viennese school were intimidating composers like Stravinsky, Strauss and a few others.

 

Shostakovitch and Stalin spent a lifetime thumbing their noses at each other; the resulting gift to us is a fine set of about twelve symphonies.

 

The two greatest composers alive at the end of the 20th century were Elliot Carter and Pierre Boulez. At the turn of the 21st century, one of them was still composing music, but no one knows who.

Potemkin Village

 

The orchestral musician needs to know which things are bad and which are good. This usually applies to conductors and repertoire, but it easily spreads to soloists, critics, administrators, and a myriad of other things as well. A quick and easy aid to forming an opinion is to have a default setting, let's say any new thing is bad until it passes a litmus test to qualify for goodness. The reverse is of course true, albeit rare, as nobody wants to play the fool. Much lively debate goes on backstage as players take sides or work towards formulating opinions about the good and the bad. Some folks enjoy the verbal sparring. Others get less pleasure from it or become positively annoyed. If you take the debate too personally, it can be painful to see a sacred cow slaughtered on the altar of prevailing opinion; or else, hearing a perennial scapegoat suddenly elevated might bring on a sort of persecution mania, the feeling everyone around you has mysteriously taken leave of their senses and are all in league with each-other, plotting the downfall of music. As in the movies or literature, where the villainous are often more fascinating than the virtuous, discussing shortcomings proves more entertaining than singing praises, so sometimes it feels as if anyone who approves of anything is fighting a sort of rearguard action.

 

Events beyond the scope of this blog kept me from devoting a significant amount of forethought to my job, so the following concert kind of crept up on me, forcing me to make a snap judgment.

 

Borodin In the Steppes of Central Asia

Khachaturian Flute Concerto

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4

 

This has to be bad concert, right? - the great Russian chemist's Ode to the Caravan, Aram 'Catchy' Khachaturian's immortal (read: un-killable) concerto, the oft-repeated, tragicomic 4th symphony - surely this had to be the most craven catering to mass appeal. And, as nothing can be truly lofty without trampling on at least a few bourgeois toes, this concert tiptoeing around in stocking feet had to be contemptible in some way, didn't it? Of course, the predictably raucous audience reaction spoke otherwise. There were standing ovations for everything that ended loudly. I also talked to a few people who were at the concert and loved it. So, maybe it was a great concert, the customer always being right and all. So much for the default setting.

 

Going back in time another week, we see this concert on the books:

 

Wagner Siegfried Idyll

Schoenberg Violin Concerto

Mahler Adagio from Symphony No. 10

Wagner Prelude to Parsifal

 

Not quite your classic shit sandwich - maybe more like gefilte fish and koogle on a Kaiser Roll - this odd concoction was originally to have been conducted by Pierre Boulez. (Incidentally, seeing the names Barenboim and Boulez together on a program brought back so many feelings of nostalgia - I kept thinking of the song "That Old Black Magic".) Strangely enough, just like the Khachaturian, the Schoenberg also received a rousing standing ovation, although, to be fair, it was the only piece on the program that ended loudly. This might have been a trap set by the wily Boulez, who I imagined dreamed up this program as a way to slip 12-tone music to an audience and make them clap for it the way some people slip a pill to a dog and make him swallow it. And who can say why an audience erupts for a particular piece and not another? Sometimes the 'Standing O' might be simply honoring a weary soloist for having strutted an sweated his hour upon the stage. Or else folks are merely standing to don their winter coats, getting a jump on the traffic or the line for the restroom. Nevertheless, there you had it, people standing and clapping lustily after a piece by Schoenberg.

 

One can perform an interesting thought experiment if we extract the 'fillings' from these two sandwiches and examine them side by side. The Khachaturian and Schoenberg concertos have little enough in common, so that without a great deal of effort, one can construct all sorts of antipodal relationships, from neutral (tonal/atonal), to opinionated (accessible/indecipherable), and on to the scathing (beloved/trash). Holding these 'antipodes' in the mind for as long as one can endure, it is an interesting experience to suddenly imagine a reality in which they were merged, where the irreconcilable is mysteriously and magically reconciled. Not exactly a religious experience, in fact, some would merely call it being open minded, but interesting all the same.

 

One sign an institution might be circling the drain is the encroachment of the so-called 'Pops' concert. 'Pops', which I believe derives from 'popular' somehow, suggests what is normally on offer might be 'not popular' - kind of an admission of defeat right out of the gate. Scheduling more 'Pops' is a way to sell tickets by supposedly giving people what they really want, which is something different from what is usually on the program, thus reenforcing the notion people don't want what you are trying to sell them. The 'Pops' strategy works, up to a point. When more people buy tickets to hear Schubert than Schoenberg, our sense of righteousness is upheld. But when still more come to hear Sondheim or Star Wars, regret sets in, and the audience, who we previously trusted, has now gone over to the dark side. Once the tail has started wagging the dog, it is hard to get it to stop. The fatal mistake might be in underestimating the taste and tolerance of the audience and playing down to that. The reactions to two quite different sandwich fillings over the past couple weeks has to be a positive sign that audiences are willing and able to demonstrate a little open mindedness.

In Praise of Purgatory

Last week we played, among other things, the Adagio from Mahler's unfinished 10th symphony. For health reasons Pierre Boulez had to withdraw from two weeks of conducting, passing the baton onto Cristain Macelaru and Asher Fisch. Another notable piece on offer was the Bartók Divertimento for String Orchestra, which has had a notable history in our orchestra, particularly for the bass section, but about which I can write absolutely nothing.

Although my fondness for Mahler's music has gone up and down over the years, the 10th symphony has always been a favorite. As a youngster in the early 1970s, I had the good fortune to be part of what I think was at the time a very rare early performance of the performing version by Deryck Cooke. The mystique behind the piece captivated me - Mahler's supposed obsession with death, the poignant funeral procession for the New York fireman which passed below his hotel window. The sensationalism behind that performance also made a lasting impression. All sorts of die-hard Mahlerites flew into town to hear a rare performance. Moments before the concert, a mysterious gentleman pressed one of Mahler's batons into the hand of the conductor, insisting he use it for the concert.

The whole controversy about whether or not any of the existing the performing versions of 10th symphony  should be performed or not never affected me. Strangely, the 10th symphony was the first piece by Mahler I ever heard. When I went back to listen to some of his other music, particularly the early stuff, I was kind of bewildered and disappointed. Without getting into a debate about whether the 10th is really Mahler or not, I can certainly recommend the Adagio 1st movement. And then there is the other movement Mahler finished (mostly) before his death, the odd little movement entitled Purgatorio. At about 4 minutes, I'm pretty sure its the shortest symphonic movement Mahler ever wrote - I always seem to like the shortest pieces by composers otherwise dedicated to gargantuanism. This tiny movement which sits in the center of Mahler's symmetrical structure for the 10th symphony - Adagio, Scherzo, Purgatorio, Scherzo, Adagio - has always been a favorite of mine. Perhaps it has something to do with the prominent role of the double basses. I remember being completely flummoxed by the bass part as a 13 year-old. At the very end of Purgatorio, after a harp glissando that is like Beelzebub himself appearing out of cloud of smoke, it is the basses who usher the listener to the inferno.

For those unfamiliar with the performing version of the 10th symphony, there is a fine performance by the Concertgebouw on YouTube - just search for Mahler 10/Concertgebouw. (Purgatorio begins at about 36:45) There is an interesting article about the piece, here.

Thanks to all who offered condolences, either in person or electronically.

B.B.B.B.B.B.B

Bass Blog Back Better than Before!

Homer: ...the extra 'B' is for BYOBB.

Bart: What's that extra B for?

Homer: It's a typo.

Sorry for the long sabbatical. In truth, I've been waiting for three people to ask in person about the blog before resuming. It only took six months...

There are certain professions where having an eighty-two-year-old fill in for a seventy-one-year-old doesn't raise a bushy eyebrow. The United States Senate comes to mind, along with the chairman's seat at some exclusive private clubs, the College of Cardinals, and if something which happens once every 600 years or so makes for a trend, perhaps one day even the Papacy itself. And then of course, there is Conducting. The {redacted}SO saw itself in just such a position last month, when due to some health issues our music director withdrew from two weeks of concerts here, along with a three week tour to Asia. Edo de Waart stepped in for the local performances. Osmo Vänskä filled in on very short notice for two concerts in Taipei, with the bulk of the tour falling to the ever-sprightly Loren Maazel.

On a thirteen hour flight to Asia there is a lot of time to ponder questions like, 'do orchestras carry any kind of cancellation insurance?' or 'why don't we have an assistant conductor?' neither of which I can answer. When I joined the orchestra twenty-some years ago, there were two assistants, which seemed like one too many. Now we have zero, which seems like one too few. AC can be a thankless job, but possibly a useful person to have on hand from time to time when the MD is unable to go on.

Whether an on-call assistant, or somebody rung up at random out of the phone book, the replacement maestro often suffers a fate similar to that of the substitute teacher, only the spit-wads and paper airplanes are of the symbolic, musicological variety. As such, Vänskä had an unenviable task, stepping onto the podium in Taipei at the last second, with not much rehearsal time. By the end of the second performance, his position had not become significantly more enviable.

Loren Maazel has long impressed me as the Hannibal Lecter of conductors - a veneer of erudition and utmost gentility overlies something I want to know nothing about - the uncanny precision of his gestures brings to mind something clinical, the steel gears and levers of an overdeveloped intellect conjure up something vaguely Mephistophelean. He led us through some highly idiosyncratic performances of the Mozart Jupiter, Beethoven Eroica, Mendelssohn Italian, and Brahms second symphonies. I knew we were in for something 'old school' when I took a look at the part provided for the Brahms. An imprint I had never seen before (a terrible combined cello/bass part with some horrendous page turns, BTW) that bore the stamps "Leopold Stokowski" and "Copyright valid throughout the British Empire." But since it is rude to feed the hand that bites me, I have to admit Maazel was probably the perfect maestro for the job. He was able to step in on a moment's notice and, with almost no rehearsal time, put a very unique personal stamp on those concerts. Even if they weren't everyone's cup of tea, they were certainly interesting performances. The excessively slow tempos gave time to investigate many of the musical nooks and crannies that usually speed by, unnoticed - sort of like getting stuck in a traffic jam on a familiar stretch of roadway; you see the deli, the auto parts store, the little garden you never noticed before. It does get annoying after a while though. The best part of the experience had to be watching the maestro, with no time to stop and deliver an acerbic observation or three, forced to simply keep beating time, making do with scowls alone.

The tour provided an opportunity to see some interesting concert halls - some for the first time, and some old familiar nemeses. Taipei's National Theater, Concert Hall, and Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall form an enormous megalithic monument to the Cultural-industrial complex, where the human-as-ant scale of the structures ensures audiences are sufficiently cowed before receiving state-approved cultural enlightenment. The Forbidden City exterior, which gives way to a Dorothy Chandler Pavillion-esque interior was somewhat jarring, but that might have been a product of the jet-lag.

China is fairly mad with new construction these days - skyscrapers, bullet trains, concert halls. We played at a new hall in Shanghai, although the one we played at last time didn't seem that old. Tianjin also had a gleaming new concert palace, which I walked to from the Hotel, about a mile away. The bus was just pulling out of the hotel, making a tortured left turn across four lanes of gridlocked traffic when I set off on foot. The concert hall sits beside what is either a vast frozen pond, or a snow covered plaza, I couldn't tell which in the dark, and so for safety's sake, took the long way round. Still, when I arrived at the hall after about 30 minutes on foot, a slightly concerned stagehand greeted me. "Where's the [darn] bus?!" I was the first orchestra member to arrive. I'm sort of keeping a mental scorecard about the worst concert halls for a musician arriving alone, on foot. Vast, sterile, windswept plazas, with nowhere fort a footsore musician to sit down for a moment's rest don't do much for me.

Of course, the mother of all of these monuments to Big Art has to be Beijing's "Egg." The place has the requisite vast plaza AND a moat. Read here about my experiences trying to break into the "Egg" last time we toured China.

Pressed for time, and to be honest, growing weary of the whole charade, I decided not to try and crack the "Egg" from the outside this time around. However, after the concert, feeling a temporary rush of optimism, a green exit sign beckoned and I made off down a hallway with the intention of finding an exit and walking back to the hotel. There is a story about a conductor getting so hopelessly lost inside the "Egg" during the intermission of an opera, they had to start the next act without him, something the architect should probably receive a commendation for. I hadn't put much credence in that story until after ten minutes of following exit signs down a maze of hallways, I found myself stumbling around in the dark among props backstage at an opera performance in progress. Retracing my steps (by following the exits signs) I arrived backstage at the concert hall in time to board the bus. The "Egg" had beaten me again.

The sightseeing highlight of the tour had to be the brief visit to the Demilitarized Zone, and a look across the Joint Security Area into North Korea. After twenty-odd years in an orchestra, I've developed an unhealthy fascination with hermetically sealed organizations that somehow persist in the face of common sense.

In Memoriam

Joan Hovnanian 1957-2013

While on tour, I received the unfortunate news my older sister had passed away. A talented violinist and pianist, Joan was also responsible for my taking up the double bass. When it came time to choose an instrument, a large white plastic Sousaphone on display at the local band store caught my eye. My parents were aghast and sought to steer me toward something more 'classical'. My big sister took me aside and informed me that if 'bigness' was all that mattered, I could play a much larger version of the violin, making everyone happy.

Joan was something of a musical mentor, and with an infinite amount of patience, my accompanist for many years. She had a difficult, troubled life, and didn't fulfill the potential that seemed so much greater than my own when we were both young. Then again, so-called 'success' and 'failure' each carry their own measure of suffering. I am grateful for the things my sister taught me about music, and for her perceptive, skewering sense of humor, which always helped me endure the unendurable.

Ravinia Week 5

Stop the Planets - I Want to Get Off

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once did a bit where he wondered what aliens landing on earth would make of dogs and their owners. Seeing members of one species following those of another, picking up their poop and carrying it around in a little bag, which would the aliens consider to be the masters?

The thought crossed my mind the other day while playing The Planets with a click track syncing the live orchestra to a film. While both dog and owner are at least living creatures, the subservience of something alive to something not alive is problematic, at least when considering that the 'live-ness' of the music is supposed to be one of ts most compelling features.

Strangely, the most 'real' imagery from the Planets film was shot by the robots sent to Mars a few years back, actual photographs taken by real cameras as opposed to digital animations. Whether in service of our curiosity or merely our vanity, those machines nevertheless operated at the behest of humankind. With technology at our disposal capable of sending a robot to another planet with enough artificial intelligence to roam around for months taking pictures and doing experiments, I am certain it would be possible to arrange somehow that moving images, digitally created and mechanically reproduced could be made to follow a live performance of The Planets. Technology in the service of, if not humanity, at least art. Making a hundred or so highly skilled performers slaves to a click track in order to sync to a film left us holding the bag, so to speak.

The one more or less normal concert of the week took place on Thursday evening – the Holst, which was paired with the Grieg piano concerto took place on Tuesday – when Gianandrea Noseda lead an all Rachmaninov program. Noseda is an upbeat sort of fellow, although not cloyingly so, and almost in spite of myself I have come to enjoy working with him. It didn't take much to make this a high point in an otherwise lowly week.

After two 'classical' concerts in a row, you could pretty much guess what was in store for Sunday at 5 PM. If a pitcher throws two strikes in a row, right down the middle, you can bet good money the third will be way outside, or in the dirt.

Ann Hampton Calloway has a great voice and probably deserves to have her own show. The same could be said for the orchestra, I suppose. It seems as if the critics are finally noticing that a large, late-romantic sized orchestra, a jazz combo, and the great American songbook don't necessarily go together. Sometimes when 'pop' acts get onstage with us, their slick showbiz antics cause a few eyes to roll. The Sunday show was in no danger of eliciting that sort of reaction as it dipped below even a minimal level of professionalism.