Quatuor Diotima Celebrates Boulez Centenary

Pierre Boulez working with the members of Quatuor Diotima in 2010 (photograph by Gravrand Marion, courtesy of PENTATONE)

This coming Friday PENTATONE will release its latest album of music performed by Quatuor Diotima. The members of this ensemble are violinists Yun-Peng Zhao and Léo Marillier, Franck Chevalier on viola, and cellist Alexis Descharmes. In the past they have recorded quartet music by György Ligeti and Anton Bruckner, and the new album is devoted entirely to the “Livre pour quatuor” composed by Pierre Boulez.

This new release was clearly timed to celebrate the centenary of that composer’s birth on March 26, 1925. He composed the quartet between 1948 and 1949 at a time when he was forging his own path into serial techniques inspired by the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. It was structured in six movements; but, when it was first performed by the Arditti Quartet at the end of March of 1985, the fourth movement was not included in the performance. That movement would only be completed after the Boulez’ death when, in 2018, composer Philippe Manoury worked with Jean-Louis Leleu to prepare an entire performing version. The new Diotima album provides the world premiere of “Livre pour quatuor” in its entirety.

As an undergraduate majoring in mathematics, I took an enthusiastic interest in the serial techniques of the Second Viennese School, which were grounded in the field of combinatorics. Accounting for why the pitch class of every note was where it was came to be an engaging pastime. Listening to the disposition of those pitch classes on score pages was another matter. Ultimately, I reconciled myself to the hard truth that an elegant mathematical construct did not necessarily make for an engaging listening experience.

This may have been due, in some part, to my hanging out with music majors at Boston University. I remember a bull session in which we were discussing different approaches to atonality. I would often interject with the ways in which those approaches were grounded in combinatory analysis. On one occasion one of the music students burst out, “You want to know what will be the future of music? TRIADS!” It was only a few weeks later that I first encountered the music of Philip Glass!

Now I am back to thinking about Boulez again, after recently listening to his piano music on Tamara Stefanovich’s Organized Delirium album. It may not be like “noodle soup going down the drain” (the way a New York Times reviewer once described a piece by Morton Feldman); but each of the individual movements comes across as (in the words of Wozzeck in Alban Berg’s opera) “one thing after the other.” Mind you, the Diotima players clearly do their best to bring expressiveness to the “marks on paper;” but there is only so much an attentive listener can take before bursting out “Enough already!”

New Pentatone Album from Tamara Stefanovich

Tamara Stefanovich on the cover of her latest album (from its Amazon.com Web page)

According to my records, my last encounter with Tamara Stefanovich took place in June of 2017 when I wrote about her contribution to the Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir album of music by György Kurtág. Her latest recording is a solo piano album entitled Organized Delirium. It will be released this coming Friday, but the preceding hyperlink can be used to place pre-orders through Amazon.com. It is a collection of five solo piano sonatas, each by a different composer. Only the last of those composers, Domenico Scarlatti, is not from the twentieth century. The “order of appearance” of the other four composers is:

• Pierre Boulez
• Hanns Eisler
• Béla Bartók
• Dmitri Shostakovich

Boulez is represented by his second piano sonata in four movements. A photograph in the booklet suggests that Stefanovich consulted him in preparing to make her recording. Boulez was, of course, a master of abstraction unto an extreme; but he was also a stickler for expressive performance. My guess is that he coached her in bringing expressiveness to her performance. Nevertheless, expression tends to be in the ear of the listener; and I suspect that many well-intentioned listeners may find themselves overwhelmed by the abstractions, rather than the expressiveness.

In that context, the other three twentieth-century selections will almost definitely come across as highly accessible. The one I know the best is the Bartók sonata, which I have often enjoyed in the past. My guess is that the final Scarlatti track was included as an “exclamation point” for the entire album, but the eleven tracks of “serious content” that precede it tend to undermine any suggestion of wit!

Stefanovich reminds me of Peter Schickele’s epithet about “holding a black belt in piano.” She approaches every track on the album with fearless dedication. Nevertheless, I would prefer listening to the compositions on this album individually, rather than undergoing a beginning-to-end journey!

SFCMP: Progressive Rock Meets High Modernism

Following up in RE:voicing, the first program in the 53rd concert season of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) in Grace Cathedral last month, the ensemble will present its second program, RE:visitations at the more conventional venue of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). The “visitations” involve an encounter between the worlds of Progressive Rock and High Modernism. Each of those worlds is oriented by a “distinguished representative.”

Where rock is involved, that representative is Frank Zappa, while advanced modernism is represented by Pierre Boulez. Many might view the two as an “odd couple;” but, back when I was a researcher at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, I was fortunate enough to attend a dialog between the two of them, which took place at the University of California at Los Angeles. This was probably the most agreeable encounter of “opposites” that I ever had an opportunity to witness.

In that context I can appreciate that the final two works on the RE:visitations program will be compositions by Boulez and Zappa, both of which were completed in 1984. Boulez’ “Dérive 1” was scored for the five instruments selected by Arnold Schoenberg for his Pierrot Lunaire with a vibraphone added for good measure. The duration of most performances runs between seven and eight minutes. (For those curious about the Boulez catalog, there is a “Dérive 2,” whose history is more elaborate. It was scored for eleven instruments, and it was originally completed in 1988. Boulez then revised it in 2002, followed by an expanded and final version, completed in 2006.)

Cover of The Perfect Stranger album (fair use to illustrate the audio recording in question)

“Dérive 1” will be followed by Zappa’s “The Perfect Stranger,” the opening track on his album of the same title. It was scored for 28 musicians; and Zappa described the content as “post-Varese with frequent gestures of acknowledge towards Messiaen.” These two pieces will be preceded by a work from the following decade, Steve Mackey’s 1997 “San Francisco,” which finds a “middle ground” between Boulez and Zappa with instrumentation for electric guitar and cello.

The first half of the program will feature world premiere performances of works by two of the SFCM students in the Technology and Applied Composition Program. Specifics have not yet been finalized. These new pieces will be preceded by Missy Mazzoli’s “Tooth and Nail,” scored for solo viola and electronics. The first half will then conclude with Louis Andriessen’s “Life,” which he composed for the soundtrack of a film by Marijke van Warmerdam. That film will be screened as part of the performance.

This program will take place on Saturday, January 27, at 8 p.m. in the SFCM Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, which is located at 50 Oak Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station. As usual, the program will be preceded at 7 p.m. by a How Music is Made discussion with Artistic Director Eric Dudley in conversation with participating SFCMP musicians. General admission will be $35 with a $40 VIP rate, and $15 for students. Tickets may be purchased online through a City Box Office event page.

Aucoin Writes About “Lessons” from Boulez

Before we had to deal with the constraints of pandemic conditions, my wife and I would make regular visits to the City Lights Bookstore when we were in the North Beach area. Inevitably there would be something that attracted my attention strongly enough that I ended up purchasing it. On our most recent visit (hopefully not the last), my acquisition was Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures, transcriptions of lectures given by Pierre Boulez between 1976 and 1995 translated into English by Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman, and Arnold Whittal.

Like other purchases this book found its way to a pile where it has had to compete with other offerings vying for my attention. Because I have not touched the book since then, I was particularly interested in reading Matthew Aucoin’s review of it, which has just appeared in the latest (November 5) issue of The New York Review of Books. While I recognized Aucoin’s name as a composer, to the best of my knowledge, I have never had an opportunity to listen to his music; and I have been unable to find evidence of anything I have written about him. Given the clarity of his writing about the Boulez book and the acuity of his challenges to the contents of the book, I feel that I ought to learn more about his music.

I suppose my interest in Aucoin’s review derives from one of his strongest criticisms of the Boulez lectures. This has to do with the apparent conviction by Boulez that listening does not figure in the act of composition. To be fair, the index of the book has an entry for “listener/listening;” but it is just a reference to the entry for “perception,” which is broken down into a myriad of subcategories among which “listening” never appears. By now readers are probably aware that my own interests have involved arriving at a better understanding of the nature of listening as it is practiced by not only those making the music (both composers and performers) but also those on “audience side.”

If the nature of listening is not called out explicitly in Boulez’ lectures, he does seem to appreciate the significance of the concept of memory. Here is how Aucoin characterizes Boulez’ approach to writing about memory:

He defines active memory as a faculty not only of recall, but of presence and prediction: a performer must achieve a “global memory,” which consists of “recall-memory,” “monitoring-memory” (engagement with the present moment), and “prediction-memory.” Boulez compares this multidirectional memory to peripheral vision, without which we could not gain an accurate sense of an object’s position in space. The performer is like an Olympic skier, entirely alive to the present instant, yet also reliant on the momentum of past actions, and constantly scanning for obstacles ahead. Once a musician has fully absorbed a score, “a whole emerges in which memory can roam at will.” The score’s unidirectional temporal canvas becomes, in the hands of a master interpreter, a landscape within which the performer is free to rove, to discover.

What may be most interesting is that there is nothing particularly new here. Igor Stravinsky offered similar perspectives, acknowledging Henri Bergson as one of his inspiring sources. However, as Aucoin’s summary identifies, any understanding of memory must entail the nature of our awareness of the passing of time. Edmund Husserl gave a pioneering series of lectures on the subject of “time-consciousness;” and many of his insights were subsequently picked up by Martin Heidegger for his monumental Being and Time. What is more interesting, however, is that the “tripartite” nature of memory cited by Aucoin can be traced all the way back to the Confessions of Augustine. Sadly, the index to Music Lessons lacks entries for Augustine, Husserl, and Heidegger; and my guess is that, for Boulez, Bergson was just one of many names that Stravinsky dropped in his own reflections about music.

Stravinsky appears often in Aucoin’s review. I was particularly taken by his account of a “weak misreading” of Stravinsky by Boulez. Aucoin elaborates this point as follows:

In his eyes, Stravinsky was “highly original” in his earlier pieces, which did not have obvious models—or at least not models that Boulez was familiar with—but his later experiments with extant European idioms, and especially his overtly neoclassical pieces, constitute an unforgivable regression.

The kicker here is the aside about Boulez’ familiarity. By now just about anyone interested in details about Stravinsky’s approach to composition knows that Russian folk music played a significant role in those “earlier pieces.” Here, again, we discover that the index to Music Lessons has no entry beginning with the word “Russian.” Trying to overlook Stravinsky’s Russian origins is a bit like trying to overlook the French influences on Erik Satie.

For the most part Aucoin tries to restrain himself from going on an invective rant. Nevertheless, I have to say that I was taken by one particularly observation:

There is nothing more boring than the spittle-spewing invective of a demagogue railing against ill-defined, possibly illusory enemies, and unfortunately this book seethes with such denunciations.

I suppose the value in this is that it allows for generalization. We all know that those attributes were aimed at Boulez, but I suspect that each of us has other targets in mind! More important is how, for better or worse, Aucoin guided my feelings about having this book. The “bottom line” is that I am not about to discard it; but I shall do my best to be judicious in how I allocate any attention to it!

Pianist Ralph Van Raat’s French Rarities

courtesy of Naxos of America

Yesterday Naxos released its latest album of solo piano music performed by Ralph van Raat. The pianist has had an exclusive contract with Naxos since 2006, having begun with a release of the complete piano works by John Adams. The title of the new album is French Piano Rarities, and the track listing almost reads like a recital program.

That overall program is framed by the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. The two Debussy rarities, “Étude retrouvée” (recovered étude) and “Les Soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon” (evenings lit buy the burning coals), whose title is taken from a line in Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Le balcon” (the balcony), were both written near the end of the composer’s life. At the other end the album concludes with a minuet composed by Maurice Ravel in 1904 but not published until long after his death, when an editor identified only as “Guifré” (apparently based in Barcelona) prepared a PDF upload to IMSLP.

Between these “bookends” van Raat presented what amounted to a teacher-student offering with selections first by Olivier Messiaen and then by Pierre Boulez. To be fair, the only Messiaen composition that predates Boulez’ first encounter with him as a teacher is a brief sight-reading exercise composed in 1934, whose theme would later reappear as the “Thème de l’amour mystique” (theme of mystical love), which serves as one of the leitmotifs of Messiaen’s mammoth suite Vingt Regards sur l'enfant-Jésus (twenty aspects of the child Jesus). The other three selections are the results of Messiaen’s musical interpretations of bird songs, two of which were composed as solo piano movements in another major suite, Des Canyons aux étoiles… (from the canyons to the stars), composed for large orchestra.

The major selection by Boulez is his 1945 collection of twelve haiku-like compositions for solo piano entitled Notations. This is preceded by the world premiere recording of an earlier (1944) student effort, three solo piano movements following the relatively traditional structural forms of prelude, toccata (with fugue), and scherzo. The final Boulez selection was composed late in his life In 2005, “Une page d’ephéméride” (a calendar page). Given the friendship that a much younger Boulez had formed with John Cage, I have to wonder whether van Raat may have deliberately taken four minutes and 33 seconds to perform this piece.

If this was, indeed, the structure of a recital program, I have to say that I am just as glad that I did not have to sit through it. Considered in its entirely, this album serves up music with dauntingly high “information content” (in Claude Shannon’s mathematical sense of that phrase). For example, when Messiaen worked on a large scale, as he did in both the Vingt Regards and Des Canyons aux étoiles…, he knew how to guide the listener through his own relationships between foreground and background. Consequently, those two piano solos that van Raat recorded were intended as cadenzas in the overall plan of Des Canyons. Taken out of context, they are little more than jaw-dropping instances of prodigious technical skill, ideal for a competition but not so much in a concert setting.

Mind you, there is much to recommend any individual track on this new album; but, for the most part, any single track is best appreciated in isolation from all of the other tracks.

First Impressions of Jader Bignamini in Detroit

Conductor Jader Bignamini (courtesy of Opus 3 Artists)

As I wrote yesterday, Jader Bignamini will begin serving as Music Director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) by launching the ensemble’s 2020–2021 season. Having had a highly positive encounter with DSO in cyberspace through their Live from Orchestra Hall archive of online performances, I decided that this would be a good time to experience one of Bignamini’s visits to the podium during the current season. There seemed to be two options at my disposal, and I decided to go with the one recorded earlier this season on October 18.

This was a straightforward overture-concerto-symphony program. The concerto soloist was Yooshin Song playing Max Bruch’s Opus 26 (first) violin concerto in G minor. The overture was the one composed by Mikhail Glinka for his Ruslan and Lyudmila opera. The symphony was Gustav Mahler’s fourth in G major, which can be classified as concertante, since the fourth movement is a setting of the Des Knaben Wunderhorn poem “Das himmlische Leben” (the heavenly life), scored for soprano voice. The soprano for this performance was the American lyric soprano Janai Brugger.

Bruch’s concerto is a familiar warhorse, but it still demands focused attention from the very beginning. Following five measures of introduction (primarily from the winds), the soloist must sustain the lowest note on the instrument, playing an open G string. Bruch’s score gives this note forte dynamics in contrast with the piano passage played by the winds, but it is clear that the expression of that note should not sound like an enormous boot stamping in a mud puddle. Song knew how to allow this note to insinuate itself, taking its time (“ad libitum” in the score) to come up to strength, after which she could let the following mini-cadenza unfold.

Song’s management of both subtlety and strength in this single measure set the tone for both her solo work and her engagement with Bignamini throughout all three movements of the concerto. It is worth bearing in mind that Bruch was not as imaginative in the domain of thematic development when compared with the technical virtuosity that could be evoked by Johannes Brahms. However, both Bruch and Brahms enjoyed the influence of violinist Joseph Joachim, who admired the Brahms concerto for its seriousness but found the Bruch to be “the most seductive” (in Joachim’s own words).

However, those seductive qualities owe more to the expressiveness of the performer than to the marks on the score pages. We can only imagine what those qualities were when Joachim played Opus 26. Song’s performance tended to keep both bodily motion and facial expressions to a minimum. Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that both she and Bignamini jointly knew how to make sure that every repetition of a theme was cast in its own unique dispositional attitude, making the entire performance one of the most expressively rich interpretation that I have encountered. By all rights, that should count as sufficiently seductive!

Bignamini’s approach to Glinka’s overture made it clear that he knew how to seize listener attention at the very beginning of a concert performance. His tempo was briskly energetic without ever coming across like a sprinter determined to win a hundred-yard dash. As was the case with the DSO recording discussed yesterday, the camera work provided a much better view of Bignamini’s technique than would be afforded by seeing only his back. Unlike Song he was not shy about communicating with the ensemble through both bodily motion and facial expressions. There was also a clear sense of joyousness in his body language, suggesting that he would establish an adventurous disposition that would permeate the entire program.

My guess is that many readers will assume that I chose this particular program because it would give me an opportunity to assess Bignamini’s talents in taking on a Mahler selection. Sadly, this was the one selection in which my reactions were mixed. Bignamini certainly exhibited clear ideas about how he wanted to approach this symphony, and during the first three movements DSO clearly grasped what he had in mind and delivered accordingly. That included the “real peak” climax (as Pierre Boulez would have put it) at the coda of the third movement, not so much a coda as a prolonged introduction to the imagery of the Wunderhorn poem that is sung in the final movement.

Unfortunately, the delivery of the poem itself did not live up to that introduction. My conjecture is that Brugger was not properly prepared for her performance, spending more time with her eyes glued to her part than in giving off any sense of the relationship between what she was singing and what everyone else (conductor and musicians alike) was doing. This was more than a little disappointing, given the richness of context that Mahler’s instrumental writing provided to reinforce the vocalist’s delivery.

In many respects the fourth is Mahler’s finest effort in compositing a “conventional” symphony, even if the fourth movement is a song setting. Bignamini’s conducting made it clear that he appreciated both Mahler’s respect for convention in the symphony and the devices he invoked to “push the envelope” into less conventional territory. From that point of view, the final movement is as much a “farewell” to past conventions as the final movement of Das Lied von der Erde is a “farewell” to life itself. The words of the Wunderhorn text (which deserved to have subtitles) thus play as much of a role in Mahler’s biography as they do in the overall catalog of his compositions. One can only hope that, in the near future, Bignamini can return to this symphony with a vocalist better attuned to the contextual significance of what she is singing.

Tenney’s Rigorous Balance of Chance and Choice

Those who have been following my discussion of the articles by James Tenney collected in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory should, by this time, appreciate how much rigor can be found in Tenney’s efforts, whether they are directed toward musical composition or toward imaginative reconceptions of practices that have come to be called “music theory.” When it comes to composition, there is a good chance that Tenney was inspired by John Cage, who could also be meticulously rigorous when called upon to explain the method behind the creation of one of his compositions. What is interesting about Cage is that, while many of those methods were based on a foundation of using a chance technique (such as the ritual for selecting passages to read from the I Ching), there could be prolific diversity in how that technique would be applied. The Silence anthology has two short articles about such applications, one published in 1952 and the other in 1957; and from these we may appreciate how the creation of method was as important to Cage as the creation of the music itself.

Cage’s approach would have an impact on other composers. The best known of these is probably Pierre Boulez. In 1958 Die Reihe published an article by György Ligeti that provided a deep dive into the creation of one of Boulez’ particularly challenging compositions. The title of the article was “Pierre Boulez: Entscheidung und Automatik in der Structure Ia” (Pierre Boulez, decision and automatism in “Structure Ia”); and evidence of Cage’s impact on Boulez is not hard to find. (The article appeared in the English-language edition of Die Reihe in 1960.)

As Ligeti’s title makes clear, much of the composition process is “automatic,” although it might be better to call it “algorithmic.” The connotations of the latter adjective allow us to appreciate that one cannot have an algorithm before first identifying input data, output data, and the relations that connect them. These are the issues that Ligeti addresses in the “decision” portion of his article.

Tenney’s article “About Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps” is very much cut from the same cloth that served Cage and Boulez. However, where Boulez was concerned with serial techniques that could be applied to the twelve pitches of the equal-tempered chromatic scale, Tenney was more interested in exploring the pitches of the natural overtone series. He decided to do this by dividing the semitone into six equal micro-intervals, providing him with an equal-tempered gamut that would enable better approximations to upper harmonics, which could be represented terms of smaller “chromatic shifts” from the traditional pitch classes. (The reader should now appreciate why Tenney’s piece was scored for six harps; each harp had a different “micro-shift” in the pitch of its strings.)

In terms of method, Tenney was far more rigorous than either Cage or Boulez. His expertise in higher mathematics allowed him to make rigorous specifications of subtle variations. This was most evident in his effort to extrapolate principles of harmony into the domain of his 72-pitch equal-tempered gamut. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that almost every reader of this article will come away with absolutely no sense of what it would be like to listen to the results.

(Back when I was living in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to listen to a tape that Tenney played of an excerpt from a performance of Changes. I had as much trouble making sense of my listening experience than I had encountered during my “first contact” with “Structure Ia!” I gather that there is now a performing version six guitars, taking the same approach to chromatic tuning; but I missed out on an opportunity to listen to that music played at the Center for New Music.)

It would be easy to dismiss Tenney’s project as “much ado about not very much.” The fact is that it is very difficult to establish the relationship between Tenney-the-composer and Tenney-the-listener. That relationship was always much clearer in Cage’s work: There was none! Cage simply created the “sonorous materials” for a listening experience; and the listener was free to make of those materials whatever (s)he wished.

Tenney, on the other hand, seems to have been motivated by a desire to explore how one could work with pitches based on the overtone series through techniques consistent with pre-existing knowledge of counterpoint and harmony. Those who have followed this site for some time know that he is far from the only composer to be so motivated. The two composers that have probably received the most attention in my writing have been Ben Johnston and, more recently, Harry Partch. Of these three, Partch has struck me as the one that gave the most thought to the sorts of listening experiences that would arise from his techniques. In that context Tenney occupies the space at the other extreme of the pendulum swing, a claim that I shall be happy to withdraw if convinced by sufficient experience in listening to Tenney’s music, rather than reading about his approaches to composition!

Vänskä Continues Mahler Project with “Resurrection”

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this month, BIS Records released the third disc in its project to record the music of Gustav Mahler. Like the first two releases, this album presents a performance of a single symphony, the second (“Resurrection”) in C minor. It follows up on the release of a recording of the fifth symphony in C-sharp minor in August of 2017, followed by the recording of the sixth symphony in A minor in April of 2018. BIS launched this series in collaboration with the Minnesota Orchestra and its Music Director Osmo Vänskä. At the end of last year, Vänskä announced that he would not renew his contract when it expires in August of 2022 but would act as guest conductor. For those interested in a broader view of how this project is progressing, recordings have already been completed for the first symphony in D major, the fourth symphony in G major, and the seventh symphony in E minor. The tenth symphony in F-sharp major has been scheduled for recording this coming June, but it has not yet been announced which version will be recorded.

The second is the earliest symphony in the cycle whose resources go beyond the “symphonic.” In the last of the five movements, the Minnesota Orchestra is joined by the Minnesota Chorale, prepared by Chorus-Master Kathy Saltzman Romey, and two vocal soloists, soprano Ruby Hughes and mezzo Sasha Cooke. Mahler conceived of the symphony as consisting of two parts, the first movement followed by the remaining four. The recording honors this segmentation with an extended pause between the first two movements. Similarly, the third, fourth, and fifth movements are linked by attacca transitions. The entire recording takes slightly more than 84 minutes (which, for those counting, is longer than the 75 minutes for the fifth and shorter than almost 87 minutes for the sixth).

So much for the nuts and bolts. Where performance is concerned, there are several factors that matter significantly when any Mahler symphony is presented. The most important is clarity. Mahler loved working with large ensembles, weaving thick textures of polyphony, often emerging from unique instrumental blends.

In his many visits to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony, I have been impressed by the clarity that Vänskä brings to just about anything he performs; but, when recordings are concerned, responsibility lies as much with the production team as with the music-makers themselves. Robert Suff has been the Producer of all three of the releases now available, and the results suggest that he is as skilled at following the composer’s score as he is at monitoring all of his microphone levels. If the Devil resides in all of those details, then Suff has done a convincing job of making clear who really is the boss!

Then there is the question of what may be called “overall landscape.” Mahler loves intense climaxes. He loves them so much that inferior conductors easily fall into the trap of making those climaxes sound like “one damned thing after another.” The conductor that has best articulated this issue has been Pierre Boulez. In an interview that New York Times music critic James Oestreich conducted with Boulez, Oestreich emphasized that Boulez recognized the need “to sort out the climaxes from the lesser peaks, so that the real ones stand out.”

Once again, this gets tricky where recording technology is involved. When listening to Vänskä in performance, I have a clear sense of where those “real” peaks are. By all rights, Suff should have the same experience when listening to a performance; and he should know those peaks well enough to make sure that they are recognized as such on a recording. Where the Mahler second is concerned, the question of how many “real ones” need to be acknowledged (and, of course, where they are in the score) is particularly challenging and can probably allow for a variety of different conducting strategies. On the other hand, I tend to doubt that any recording of a “real one” is likely to make me kvell as much as when I encounter that moment in concert!

On the other hand “climax management” is only one brick in the wall of expressive conducting. Even if I do not find Vänskä’s capacity of expressiveness as compelling on recording as I find it in concert, I would still stay that the expressive strategies he brings of all three of the symphonies released thus far are definitely sufficient to seize and hold listener attention. As the song goes:

… it will have to do

Until the real thing comes along

Pierre Boulez, que me veux-tu?

Pierre Boulez on the cover of his Deutsche Grammophon album of his complete works (from Amazon.com)

In continuing to pursue my interest in the relationship between the listener’s point of view and the performer’s point of view, I finally decided to sit down with one of Pierre Boulez’ more notorious essays, whose title is a quotation, “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” The translation is best phrased as “Sonata, what do you want of me?” For some reason I had believed that it originated with Claude Debussy; but it actually goes back to the transition between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is attributed to Bernard Le Bouvier de Fontenelle. It was a reasonable question for him to ask when there was little sense of “sonata form” other than a collection of movements, not to mention that vast library of single-movement sonatas composed by Domenico Scarlatti.

Boulez chose this title for an article, which was first published in German in 1960 in Darmstädter Beiträge zur neuen Musik. The article was intended as a discussion of his third piano sonata. It was first translated into English by David Noakes and Paul Jacobs for publication in Perspectives of New Music and subsequently translated again by Martin Cooper for Jean-Jacques’ Nattiez’ collection of Boulez’ writings in the volume Orientations. 1960 also happens to be the year in which György Ligeti’s analysis of Boulez’ “Structure Ia” appeared in Die Reihe.

These two essays could not be more different. Most importantly, Ligeti was dealing with a composition that had been completed (in 1951), performed (in 1952), and published by Universal Edition (presumably in time for its first performance). Ligeti’s article is one of meticulous description that addresses the interplay between decision (specific commitments to structure on a variety of different time scales) and automatism (specifications that are  “bound logically” to the decisions). By the end of the article Ligeti even provides the reader with some sense of those “features” emerging from the automatism stage that are likely to be apprehended by attentive listening.

Boulez’ own article could not be more different. It is more like a progress report than an account of a completed composition. The overall structure of the sonata consisted of five “formants,” each of which had its own self-contained logic for both composition and execution. However, after discussing the first three formants, “Antiphonie,” “Trope,” and “Constellation” (which included the “mirror image” “Constellation–Miroir”), Boulez confesses that he will not discuss the remaining two formants, “Strophe” and “Séquence,” because “their forms are not yet definitive, having been put on one side and then interrupted by other works.” Indeed, in the Deutsche Grammophon collection of Boulez’ complete works, the recording of the third sonata, performed by Paavali Jumppanen, accounts for only two of the formants, “Trope” and “Constellation–Miroir.” Any connection between what one reads about these tropes in Boulez’ article and the experience of listening to Jumppanen is left, as they say, as an “exercise for the student!”

However, any shortcomings in Boulez’ talent for the art of verbal description are balanced (so to speak) by the first half of his article, which amounts to no-holds-barred polemic. Reading these outbursts can be entertaining, perhaps even as entertaining as coming up with counterexamples to the more outrageous assertions. However, we must be fair to Boulez and remember that, when he wrote his text, his experience with conducting was probably limited almost entirely to his work in the Domaine musical concert series, almost all of which involved composers who shared his polemic dispositions.

It is probably fair to say that, as a conductor, Boulez’ perspective changed when his attention shifted from his own experiences as a composer to those of past composers, such as Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler. It is hard to imagine that he approached either of these composers from one of the perspectives he voiced in his sonata paper:

Finally, Western classical music is opposed to all active participation, and this sometimes makes it difficult to establish any really significant contact, even if actual boredom does not intervene between the musical object and the listener contemplating it.

The very fact that he recognized that, in such music, a conductor needed “to sort out the climaxes from the lesser peaks, so that the real ones stand out” (as James Oestreich reported when writing about Boulez for The New York Times) makes it clear that by 2009 (when Oestreich wrote his article) Boulez had distanced himself from his 1960 outburst. Such a sorting-out process necessarily entailed “active participation,” first between conductor and ensemble and subsequently between performers and listeners.

Reading that passage reminds me of when Roger Sessions held the Norton Chair at Harvard University and gave his requisite six “poetics” lectures. What I remember most from that experience was Sessions’ remark that a composer should be able to listen to something he wrote ten years earlier without blushing. While the noun “sang-froid” tends to come to mind whenever my thoughts turn to Boulez’ personality, I have to wonder: Did he ever reread his 1960 diatribe against Western classical music later in life; and could he do so without blushing?

Heras-Casado’s Stimulating SFS Program

Pablo Heras-Casado conducting without baton (photograph by Renske Vrolijk, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Pablo Heras-Casado gave the first of the three performances of the program he prepared for his latest visit to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony. Heras-Casado has been making these visits regularly since his debut in 2010, and he has consistently presented programs that stimulate through both the adventurous and new perspectives on the familiar. Last night the intermission served as the boundary between those two categories, followed only by Johannes Brahms’ Opus 68 (first) symphony in C minor.

However, without trying to detract from Brahms, it would be fair to say that the high point of the evening came before the intermission with the performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 129 (second) violin concerto in C-sharp minor with SFS Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik as soloist. Like Heras-Casado, Barantschik commands a broad scope of repertoire, exercising it not only from the Concertmaster’s chair but also from the SFS podium and in chamber music performances with his colleagues. Within that vast scope of repertoire, both Heras-Casado and Barantschik seemed to share the opinion that Shostakovich’s final concerto (the last of six) was something special; and that opinion had no trouble venturing into audience space and establishing itself as a significant meme in the consciousness of the attentive listener.

One way to approach this concerto is to begin by looking at the key selection. As has been previously observed, C-sharp minor was the key of Sergei Prokofiev’s final (seventh) symphony; and it would not be out of the question to hypothesize that death was on the respective minds of both composers. Indeed, there is even a clock ticking during the coda of the final movement of Prokofiev’s symphony, serving not only as a recollection of the arrival of midnight in his Cinderella ballet but also of a much darker “sense of an ending.”

The Shostakovich concerto almost feels as if it begins in that enveloping darkness that closes off Prokofiev’s symphony. That darkness pervades the first two movements with the unfolding of an impressive diversity of contexts. The very first of those contexts comes with the imitative counterpoint in the string section based on little more than a four-note gesture. That passage almost sounds as if it could have been written for string quartet, perhaps in the spirit of another significant composition in C-sharp minor, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 131 string quartet, also written near the end of the composer’s life. That context, however, is punctuated by not only the solo violin part but also the introduction of other instrumental voices in the ensemble.

For all of that variety, the deepest darkness has been reserved for a series of cadenzas executed by the soloist. These pervade the first two movements, culminating in an extended cadenza that provides the transition to the final movement. On the other side of that transition, the mood shifts abruptly and startlingly. The tempo launches headlong into Allegro and the rhetoric turns grotesquely ironic. It would not be out of line to compare it to the I’m-not-dead-yet episode at the beginning of Monty Python and the Holy Grail; nor would it be out of line to imagine Shostakovich showing signs of amusement at that episode.

All this should convince the reader that Shostakovich’s Opus 129 is no ordinary concerto journey. Both Heras-Casado and Barantschik clearly grasped all of the idiosyncrasies within and behind the music, giving each of them the most convincing account imaginable. In light of how much intensity spilled off the stage and into the audience, one could appreciate that this is not the sort of music used for relaxation at the end of a hard day; nor is it likely to assume “regular favorite” status. Nevertheless, it definitely deserves occasional visits simply to make sure that the darkness of Shostakovich’s life does not fade from memory.

Far more abstract was the opening selection, the SFS premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s “Helix.” This may best be described as an attempt to translate, through musical structure, the key properties of the helix as it is based on the geometry of the cone. Through those abstractions, Salonen created a framework for both instrumental colors and the motivic patterns associated with those colors. The piece lasts only about ten minutes and definitely does not overstay its welcome.

Nevertheless, the connection between the theoretical foundation and the surface structure of the music itself is far from self-evident. Still, one can appreciate the diversity of the sonorities and the gradual increase of tempo as the music progresses. The overall effect is somewhat like that of an abstract painting viewed for the first time. It is only after one returns to the painting several times that informed perception begins to take hold of consciousness. “Helix” is definitely music that deserves several opportunities for follow-up listening.

Because the Brahms symphony is so familiar, it has its own challenges in presentation. These involve the issue of managing the points of climax, making sure that there are very few significant moments that rise above the many others that Pierre Boulez has called the “lesser peaks.” Heras-Casado seemed to have opted for what statisticians sometimes call a “bathtub distribution,” where the high points are an the very beginning and very end, separated by a low-level trough. Needless to say, Heras-Casado invoked any number of subtle changes in intensity while negotiating that “trough;” but there was a clear sense that he wanted the impact of the final gesture to be a reflection of the opening one. This turned out to work in practice just as well as it looked in theory, resulting in an account of an old favorite that could not have been fresher.

A Historical Stravinsky Program Led by Boulez

courtesy of Naxos of America

Last month IDIS, the house label of the Istituto Discographico Italiano (Italian discography institute), released a new CD entitled Boulez conducts Stravinsky. Those who know about Pierre Boulez know that there is no shortage of recordings of him conducting the music of Igor Stravinsky. Indeed, Boulez’ interest in Stravinsky predates the cultivation of his reputation as a conductor, dating back to the concerts he organized for the Domaine Musical during the Fifties.

Nevertheless, this recent release has major historical significance. It is a recording of a concert performance that Boulez gave with the Orchestre National de France of the score for the ballet in two parts, The Rite of Spring. Boulez presented this program on June 18, 1963 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the score’s premiere performance, which had resulted in a riot. To emphasize the significance of that anniversary, Boulez present the work in the same venue that had seen the premiere, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. As might be guessed, the audience reaction was again extreme; but this time the extreme was on the positive side, doing much to firm up Boulez’ reputation as a rising conductor of note.

(By way of context, 1963 was also the year in which Boulez conducted his first opera. This was a Paris Opera production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck directed by Jean-Louis Barrault. I, for one, will be curious to see if a recording of that debut ever comes out of the woodwork!)

Furthermore, Boulez decided that his entire program should be devoted to Stravinsky’s music. Thus, in addition to honoring the legacy of The Rite, Boulez scheduled four more orchestral works, all of which were not receiving very much attention in 1963 (not that they are receiving much more attention these days). One of these was a piece he had conducted during his Domain Musical days, the “Symphonies of Wind Instruments” (presumably in the 1947 version he had prepared for Domain Musical). Another connection to those days could be found in his selection of the four orchestral études that Stravinsky had published in 1928. These were arrangements of his three pieces for string quartet (whose Domain Musical performance Boulez had organized) followed by the “Étude pour pianola,” which became the last orchestral étude entitled “Madrid” and was subsequently published in a version for two pianos prepared by Stravinsky’s son Soulima.

The remaining two works on the program may well have been “first contact” experiences for Boulez. “Le roi des étoiles” (the king of the stars) is a very early piece (1912) setting a text by the Russian poet Konstantin Balmont. The vocalists were part of the resident chorus for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Français, prepared by chorus master Rene Alix. San Francisco readers may know that Michael Tilson Thomas has been a champion of this piece since the days of his tenure as Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra during the first half of the Seventies. The final selection on the album is Stravinsky’s three-movement cantata, A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer, the one composition that Boulez included on the program that presented Stravinsky’s use of serial techniques.

Taken as a whole, this is a prime example of wish-I-had-been-there programming. In the absence of a time machine, this new IDIS release is the most viable alternative. Attentive listeners are likely to come away feeling more informed about both Stravinsky and Boulez!

Michael Tan will Bring Contemporary Piano Virtuosity to C4NM

Next month may well see one of the most adventurous programs of solo piano music from the middle of the twentieth century to the beginning of the 21st to be offered this year. The pianist will be Guam-born Michael Tan, currently based in Brooklyn and a recent graduate of New York University, where he completed his piano studies with Marilyn Nonken. He has prepared an innovative program, which will be hosted by the Center for New Music (C4NM).

The first half of his program will focus on two of the most significant French modernists in the period following the end of the Second World War. Pierre Boulez’ first piano sonata was composed in 1946, not long after the signing of the final peace treaty of that war. This will be preceded by “Le Traquet stapazin” (the black-eared wheatear), one of the longer compositions in Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux (catalog of birds) and the only one in the second book of the seven-book collection of thirteen pieces. The entire collection was composed between 1956 and 1958; and “Le Traquet stapazin” was composed in 1956.

The second half of the program will be devoted to two living composers, whose music will be played in chronological order. Tan will begin with two of the movements from Michael Finissy’s 1977 collection English Country-Tunes, “Green Meadows” and “Midsummer Morn.” These will be followed by his 1989 “Stanley Stokes, East Street 1836.” The program will then conclude with two pieces composed by Salvatore Sciarrino in 2001, which he called “cruel nocturnes:”

This concert will begin at 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, August 6. C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, half a block north of where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. Admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. In addition to being sold at the door, tickets will be available in advance online from a Vendini event page.

Morgenstern Trio Makes an Impressive, if Conventional, Debut

Last night in Herbst Theatre, Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) presented the San Francisco debut of the Morgenstern Trio. This German ensemble consists of pianist Catherine Klipfel, violinist Stefan Hempel, and cellist Emanuel Wehse and was formed when they were students at the Folkwang Conservatory in Essen. They named their group after the German poet Christian Morgenstern, best known for his bizarre sense of wit and nonsense that took on German grammar in his poem “Der Werwolf” and whose “The Night Song of the Fish” consists entirely of the two symbols used to notate metrical stress patterns arranged in an elegantly intricate symmetrical design. (For the record Sofia Gubaidulina scored this for mezzo, flute, percussion, bayan (Russian accordion), and bass in her 1996 Galgenlieder à 5.)

The trio’s reputation in the United States was reinforced by their winning the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio Award in 2010. Since then they have toured a prodigious number of American cities, so it is about time that they finally graced San Francisco with a visit. They prepared a meat-and-potatoes program of Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn, and Johannes Brahms (played in chronological order). While there were no surprises in the repertoire, I realized that my personal experiences of listening to performances by the trio of pianist Joseph Kalichstein, violinist Jaime Laredo, and cellist Sharon Robinson covered two-thirds of the program.

To this day I still have fond memories of how the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan celebrated the sesquicentenary of the birth of Johannes Brahms (born in 1833) with a marathon series of concerts covering all of his chamber music for piano and strings. The performances involved a partnership between the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio and the Guarneri Quartet; and that was the occasion when I really began to appreciate the qualities of Brahms’ chamber music. I was thus delighted with the Morgenstern Trio’s decision to conclude their program with Brahms’ Opus 8 (first) trio in B major. Ironically, the only Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson recording I have is their CD of the two Mendelssohn piano trios, meaning that I was familiar with how this group approached the second piece on their program, the Opus 66 (second) trio in C minor; and my “KLR” experience remains with me whenever I encounter a new interpretation.

Indeed, the Mendelssohn trio has become a yardstick for me when it comes to addressing matters of performance that go beyond merely getting all of its many notes right. The cellist Bonnie Hampton liked to talk about Mendelssohn’s tendency to burn his candle at both ends, and that metaphor would often arise when she was coaching performances of Opus 66. So much is packed into this piece’s four movements that a naive approach to playing it often results in exhaustion before reaching the final movement. As Pierre Boulez put it, this is music in which the performers need a clear sense of where they want the significant climaxes to be to make sure that they are not overwhelmed by “lesser peaks.”

By the conclusion of the first movement last night, it was clear that the Morgenstern knew which of the several peaks warranted pride of place; and they knew exactly how to modulate their energy levels to make sure that that particular peak was distinguished by something extra. Furthermore, they knew just as well how to extend that logic over all four movement of the trio. This is no easy matter, considering how many different stops Mendelssohn pulls out in the final movement, where are any number of viable candidates for the “highest peak” in the entire trio. The Morgenstern clearly had a well-defined opinion of where that peak was; and their sense of overall climax in this piece was impressively convincing, even if their precision was not always quite up to their tempo decisions.

Equally satisfying was their approach to Brahms. This was the trio that Brahms composed early in his career that almost literally overflowed with more developmental techniques than he could manage. He completed the score in 1854, and it was his first piece of instrumental ensemble chamber music. However, in 1891 near the end of his life, he realized that the composition had been unduly burdened by excess; and he eliminated that excess in preparing a revised version of the score. That latter version is the one we know today, the original having only academic interest.

Here, again, the Morgenstern performed with a clear sense of a “landscape of climaxes” and an intricate network of relationships between wholes and parts. The piano was, of course, Brahms’ own primary instrument; and it was not difficult to fantasize that Klipfel was channeling Brahms in her keyboard technique. What was most impressive, however, was how she could deftly shift between those overly broad strokes for which Brahms is so well known and the more sensitive phrases that weave their way among the lines for the string parts. Opus 8 has deservedly earned warhorse status in the chamber music repertoire; but, while it may have been familiar for much (if not most) of the audience, the Morgenstern still knew how to endow their performance with the freshness of a “first encounter” experience.

The program began with Haydn’s Hoboken XV/10 trio in E-flat major, the third of the Opus 44 trios published in 1785. This was written relatively late in Haydn’s career of service at Eszterháza, and it was a time when he enjoyed getting away for visits to Vienna. (He had probably met Mozart for the first time in Vienna in 1784.) There is an intimate playfulness to this trio, which consists of only two movements, “first” and “last” movements without any intervening adagio or dance movement. According to H. C. Robbins Landon, this trio comes from a time when Haydn was losing interest in the solo piano sonata and wanted to explore its relations to other instruments. Thus, one encounters some of his sonata style in the piano part; but one can also detect ventures into new ground if one knows where to look.

This made for an excellent “means of introduction” for the Morgenstern. One could appreciate both Klipfel’s piano technique and the meticulous sense of balance consistently maintained by all three players. Similarly, one could enjoy their establishing themselves through a thoroughly well-wrought composition that never seems to get very much attention but clearly deserves it. Given the stormy accounts of Mendelssohn and Brahms that would ensue, the quiet wit of this music provided just the right context in which the attentive listener could settle in to prepare for the more adventurous experiences that would follow.

Those adventures would continue into the encore selection, the second (“Pantoum”) movement from Maurice Ravel’s 1914 piano trio. This movement is distinguished for its eccentric approach to rhythm that makes the almost clockwork technique for the keyboard part dazzle when properly executed. Klipfel’s execution last night could not be faulted, nor could be the broad-stroke gestures evoked by the strings executed by Hempel and Wehse. After an all-Germanic program, the encounter with Ravel was a refreshing one; and one could appreciate that the performers enjoyed the rhetorical shift as much as this listener did.

In introducing the ensemble, CMSF Director Daniel Levenstein explained that he had wanted to bring the Morgenstern to San Francisco for some time. We should all be glad that he succeeded. We should also hope that the wait for their next visit will not be quite as long.

A Stunning Partnership of a San Francisco Pianist with a Russian Orchestra

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra gave the second of its two Great Performers Series concerts, presented by the San Francisco Symphony. They were led by Artistic Director and Chief Conductor Yuri Temirkanov. The program consisted of only two compositions, a concerto, Johannes Brahms’ Opus 15 (first) in D minor, and a symphony, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 47 (fifth), also in D minor. There is a long rhetorical tradition that D minor is one of the bleakest of tonalities. Some even refer to it as the key of death, but last night’s performance could not have been livelier.

The concerto was distinguished by having San Francisco resident Garrick Ohlsson as the soloist. We thus had a Russian ensemble visiting San Francisco and a San Franciscan pianist visiting the ensemble. The “cross-cultural” chemistry could not have been better. Over the course of his many visits with the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic, Temirkanov has established himself for being sensitive to the slightest detail without ever neglecting the overall rhetorical drive behind the music itself. That talent made him and excellent choice to present Brahms’ Opus 15. This is music that boils and surges with intense rhetoric, not only in the raw athleticism required for the keyboard work but also in the no-holds-barred intensity of the ensemble passages. The score begins with a threatening roar and concludes with what can only be called a victory lap, allowing its energy level to ease off only during the middle Adagio movement.

Fortunately, both Temirkanov and Ohlsson understood fully that such energy levels are only effective if properly modulated. This is a matter of having the ability “to sort out the climaxes from the lesser peaks, so that the real ones stand out,” as James Oesterich of The New York Times put it in reporting on an interview with Pierre Boulez about conducting Gustav Mahler’s sixth symphony. Ultimately, there is only one “real” peak at the conclusion of Opus 15; and both Temirkanov and Ohlsson were of a common mind in how to hold back on all of the other peaks. The result was an account of the concerto that was always propelling the listener forward to take on the next climax but always gauged to save the best for the last.

This clear sense of gauging climaxes was clearly also on Temirkanov’s mind in his interpretation of Shostakovich’s Opus 47. This is the symphony, written in 1937, through which Shostakovich redeemed himself in the eyes of Joseph Stalin’s authoritarian rule, having been denounced for the “muddle” of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936. (Considering how Stalin treated others who crossed his path the wrong way, Shostakovich’s period in the “penalty box” was relatively mild, although Shostakovich himself probably did not feel that way.)

On the surface it would appear that Opus 47 was scrupulously calculated to deliver all the goods that would make Stalin happy, with full-throated triumphalism as its primary rhetorical stance. Beneath the surface was another matter. Indeed, the Allegretto scherzo in the second movement is a clear sign of the high value Shostakovich placed on Mahler’s symphonies and his awareness of Mahler’s capacity for sardonic rhetoric in his own scherzos. One can almost see Stalin merrily tapping his foot to the clearly defined beat while any number of less positive thoughts were clunking around in the back of Shostakovich’s head.

Nevertheless, one cannot deny that triumphalism rules in Opus 47’s final movement. Here, again, it is important to establish that the coda of this symphony is its “greatest peak.” Temirkanov knew how to let the opening crescendo of the fourth movement have its say; but that crescendo was a “lesser peak” in the overall plan of a much slower crescendo that built to the one true climax. That climax, in turn, involves its own internal prolongations. The resulting effect is that, once you think you have arrived at full strength, you discover that things will only get stronger; and the coda is designed as a series of such deceptions culminating in an “ultimate fulfillment.” It goes without saying that keeping this movement from devolving into mindless spectacle is no mean feat, but Temirkanov clearly knew how to keep everything under control. This was definitely a reading of Opus 47 to remember for a long time to come.

The program was also distinguished by having both pianist and conductor take an encore. Ohlsson’s selection could not have been more familiar, the C-sharp minor prelude that is the second piece in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 3 collection of five Morceaux de fantaisie (fantasy pieces). This has been called “The Bells of Moscow” because of the steady tolling of the left-hand line. Ohlsson gave it a reading that captured both the grandeur of the imagery and the intimacy of the keyboard setting at the same time, effectively creating a sense of a first impression, rather than a familiar one. Temirkanov, on the other hand, followed the abject triumphalism of Shostakovich with the quiet intimacy of the “enchantment” music from Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 87, his score for the three-act ballet Cinderella. The contrast could not have been more effective, reminding all in the audience of the full breadth of diversity in the repertoire Temirkanov has prepared for his ensemble.

Jonathan Biss Concludes his “Late Style” Series with Intense Schubert

Last night in Herbst Theatre pianist Jonathan Biss presented the fourth and final concert in his Late Style series of recitals for the 2016–2017 season of San Francisco Performances (SFP). Like the first concert in the series, the program was devoted to a single composer, this time Franz Schubert. In the verbal introductions that he prepares for his Faculty Artist Series recitals at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Paul Hersh frequently cites how prodigiously creative Schubert was during the last twelve months of his life; and he has even conducted entire seminars focused exclusively on that final year.

In that context two pieces might seem like too modest a sampling to be representative of Schubert’s “late style;” but that last year was also one in which he ventured into working with longer and longer durations for a single composition. As a result, Biss could prepare a program with only one composition on either side of the intermission to present his perspective on Schubert in this series of concerts. The first half was devoted to the D. 959 piano sonata in A major, one of three pieces of prodigious duration, all of which were composed in what must have been an almost death-defying frenzy of activity during the single month of September in 1928. (Schubert died that year on November 19.) For the second half Biss was joined by tenor Mark Padmore for a performance of the D. 957 collection of fourteen songs on texts by three different poets, which was not published until about half a year after Schubert’s death, given the title Schwanengesang (swan song) by publisher Tobias Haslinger. This may have been a modest sample of Schubert’s productivity, but it definitely made the case that he was outdoing himself not only during the final year of his life but also in the last few months of that year.

In that context Biss took a highly subjective approach to interpreting D.959 with powerfully chilling results. To explain that approach, I would like to begin by reflecting on a memorable Schubert performance from my more distant past. Back in 1983 I heard Vladimir Ashkenazy play the D. 760 (“Wanderer”) fantasia in C major. I came away thinking that this was a score that took the listener to the brink of madness and found it somewhat reassuring that Ashkenazy never went over that brink. Last night Biss appeared to take the stance that September of 1828 was a far more desperate time for Schubert; and that “frenzy of activity” may have been a product of his hearing the whispers of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Erlking in his own ear. As a result Biss fearlessly chose to cross that brink that Ashkenazy had judiciously avoided.

The price for that bold move was an execution whose technical precision was not always right on the mark. However, Biss’ decision to prioritize rhetorical extremes over disciplined dexterity did much to clarify the transitional nature of D. 959. After all, Schubert’s logical successor in this domain was Robert Schumann, much of whose most powerful musical effects were products of his own bipolar mental condition. (Those who have attended SFP events for some time probably recall that Biss’ last project for SFP was based on Schumann’s music.) D. 959 goes a long way towards preparing the listener for the even more radical shifts between extremes that are encountered in Schumann’s music, particularly for solo piano.

It is worth noting, however, that if abandon was the operative concept in Biss’ interpretation of D. 959, one could still sense the presence of some overseeing control. Biss clearly knew that the full duration of this 40-minute sonata could not be simply a matter of one shock after another. Consistent with the wisdom of Pierre Boulez, he knew how to prioritize his climaxes, making sure that there was only one “highest peak” in each movement. He also knew how to pace the energy level so as not to wear down listener attention. After all, the “punch line” of this sonata is that we end up exactly where we started; and Biss knew exactly how to make sure that the attentive listener got the point.

In introducing D. 957, Padmore made it a point to explain that Schwanengesang was not Schubert’s own title. He then suggested that the German noun “Sehnsucht” might serve as a title because of the unifying theme it establishes. (Whether Schubert collected those fourteen texts with such a theme in mind is anyone’s guess.) Henry-Louis de La Grange made much of this noun in his magisterial biography of Gustav Mahler, dwelling on the difficulty of providing a satisfactory English translation. Richard Wigmore’s English translations of the song texts tended to opt for “longing.” The word actually has its own Wikipedia page, which explains its compound nature. “Sehnen” is the more direct German noun for longing; but the suffix is derived from another German noun, “Siechtum,” which is a lingering illness.

“Sehnsucht” thus captures a sense of longing in which all is not quite right; and, in many ways, that is the prevailing mood of the D. 957 songs. For this performance technical precision was much more in order, particularly since such a complex emotional disposition required a firm communicative bond between vocalist and pianist. That bond was established in the very opening measures of the first song, in which a murmuring brook delivers a message of love; and it was sustained through the coda of the final song, in which “Sehnsucht” provides the final mood, even if it is not the final word.

Nevertheless, there remains the question of whether there is some overall plan to these fourteen songs or whether each offers its own perspective on a shared concept. Padmore tended to opt for the latter, dealing with each song as an event unto itself, rather than as a stage along a longer-range journey. Thus, in contrast to Biss’ solo performance, D. 957 emerged as a series of songs, many of which rose to pretty much the same level of intense climax. Now, to be fair, Padmore can be positively bone-chilling when he delivers such a climax; but after a while the listener was inclined to worry more about whether his strength would sustain, rather than whether all those climaxes had to be so similar in intensity.

In any event both selections on the program definitely made a case for the significance of the concept of “late style” in Schubert’s compositional output; and the presentation of both of those selections definitely sealed the deal while also providing an effective “sense of an ending” to the full scope of Biss’ project.

Simon Rattle Elicits Mind-Shattering Reverberations from the Berlin Philharmonic

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the Berlin Philharmonic (listed in the program book with its “native name,” “Berliner Philharmoniker”), led by Artistic Director Simon Rattle, gave the first of two concerts presented by the San Francisco Symphony. Performed without intermission, the program consisted primarily of Gustav Mahler’s 1905 seventh symphony in E minor. This was preceded by a performance of Pierre Boulez’ “Éclat,” which lasted less than ten minutes.

There is so much originality to each of Mahler’s symphonies that it is worth observing that the seventh is one of the few that revisits an earlier plan, the five-movement architecture of the fifth symphony in C-sharp minor, which Mahler completed in 1902. The structure is best described by beginning in the center and working out to the surroundings. At the core of the fifth symphony is its longest single movement, a Scherzo in D major. It is preceded by two funeral marches, the first, in C-sharp minor, marked explicitly as such, and the second in F minor, the key of a secondary theme in the first movement. On the other side the Scherzo is followed by what amounts to an “introduction and allegro,” a serene Adagietto in F major scored only for strings and harp followed by an aggressive D major Rondo.

By contrast, the core of the seventh symphony is the shortest single movement; but it is also a Scherzo, this time in D minor. It is flanked on either side by two “Nachtmusik” (night music) movements, the first a funeral march alternating between C major and C minor and the second a serenade (Andante amoroso), complete with a guitar and a mandolin, in F major. The funeral march is preceded by another funeral march (as in the opening two movements of the fifth), beginning in B minor before establishing itself in E minor. At the other end is another Rondo, this time in C major.

The reader will have noticed by now that, while there is a stable symmetry to the “building blocks,” there is considerable peregrination of the tonal center in both symphonies, almost as if Mahler’s approach to dominant-tonic cadences was a product of some musical variant of stream-of-consciousness writing. The fact is that the seventh is ultimately a highly dissonant symphony, not so much in the sense of the use of intervals (such as the tritone) that are ambiguous with respect to any tonal center but rather in the extent to which even the most attentive listener is seriously challenged to bring “sensory order” to the sounds unfolding before the ears.

The challenge is all the greater because this is a score that thrives of superposition. Mahler draws upon the resources of a large orchestra because they allow him to establish multiple centers of activity, often going full throttle at the same time without any clear sense of coordination. (Listening to Mahler does wonders in preparing the mind for encounters with the music of Charles Ives, whose superpositions frequently amounted to free associations gone berserk.) Thus, what was probably most important about last night’s performance was the relationship Rattle had with his ensemble through which the full dissonant qualities of those superpositions could make their respective marks through the clarity with which each of the contributions to any superposition registered. Much of that clarity may have been established through the layout of the players, allowing spatial separation to permit each contributing element to say its piece, so to speak. However, it was clear that Rattle’s meticulous approach to dynamic levels was also a major factor, even if its most salient property was the ability to take any loud passage and enable it to build to something louder.

All this amounts to the fact that the Mahler seventh is yet another example of music whose demands currently reach far beyond the capabilities of even the best of today’s audio capture and mixing technologies. This is not to dismiss the value of recordings. The thematic lexicon of this symphony is so far-reaching that the attentive listener will definitely benefit from a recording, even if it is only to establish familiarity with the full breadth of that lexicon. However, the music itself resides only in the physical-spatial realization of the structures that emerge as those lexemes assemble themselves into rich full-ensemble structures. In that respect the assembly that Rattle presented to last night’s Davies audience was definitely one for the books, even for those who thought they already “knew it all” by virtue of the rich Mahler repertoire of our own San Francisco Symphony.

If the concept of structure based on superposition was critical to how mind makes sense out of Mahler’s seventh, then “Éclat” could not have been a better selection as an “overture” to precede the symphony. It is far more abstract in both concept and execution; but it still served as an excellent (albeit unconventional) “warm-up” for the attentive listener. The piece, composed in 1965 (60 years after the Mahler symphony), is scored for fifteen instruments, each of which has different reverberation properties. One might thus call the piece an abstract study in attack and decay and of the sonorities that emerge when different decay patterns are superposed. In other words superposition is as crucial a structural element in “Éclat” as it is in the Mahler seventh, even if the two pieces are radically different in just about every other structural property.

Here, again, spatial orientation was crucial to sorting out the superpositions that emerged from Boulez’ score. Front and center were a viola (Máté Szücs) and cello (Bruno Delepelaire), the bowed instruments. Behind them were the “blown” instruments, alto flute (Emmanuel Pahud), cor anglais (Dominik Wollenweber), trumpet (Gabor Tarkövi) and trombone (Olaf Ott); and behind them were two plucked strings, mandolin (Detlef Tewes) and guitar (Matthew Hunter). Along the left side were the “two-hand” instruments, harp (Marie-Pierre Langlamet), celesta (Holger Groschopp), piano (Majella Stockhausen), cimbalom (Luigi Gaggero), vibraphone (Simon Rössler), and glockenspiel (Franz Schindlbeck). The only other percussion was provided by Jan Schlichte playing tubular bells.

Through this layout, the attentive listener was readily aware of each attack point and its related decay. Rattle saw his job at the podium as one of scheduling the attack points, so to speak, although there were occasional cadenza-like passages, particularly for the piano, during which Rattle simply allowed time to run its own course. This did not allow very much leverage for expressiveness, but it was probably what Boulez wanted. Ultimately, “Éclat” is an “étude” for both performers and listeners. In the former case it demands meticulous coordination, without which the acoustic effects Boulez wished to achieve would not emerge. For the latter the piece amounts to an exercise in listening to sonorous qualities for their own sake; and, given the brevity of the piece, it is an exercise that can be very rewarding, particularly when Rattle and his colleagues had summoned such focused effort to bring Boulez envisaged auditory qualities to fruition. Furthermore, to the extent to which those sonorous qualities involve the intimate relations between sounds of all dynamic levels and silence, Boulez’ étude definitely does much to prepare even the most informed listener for the experience of Mahler’s seventh symphony.

Pierre Boulez and the Second Viennese School

I wanted to wait until after I had documented my own "obituary thoughts" about Pierre Boulez before reading anyone else's. Fortunately, because of the print cycle of The New Yorker, I had a generous amount of waiting time before having an opportunity to look at what Alex Ross had to say. His article for the January 25 issue is now available for reading online; and, while my personal attitude towards Ross has been variable, I thought that he did an excellent job of giving Boulez his due (which does not mean that I liked reading his piece because it showed that he agreed with me)! One observation that we share has to do with Boulez' acute understanding of the music of the Second Viennese School and his consummate skill at making what they wrote sound like music at a time when most other conductors were lost at sea.

Here is the operative passage from Ross' text:

His lucid approach to classic works of early modernism, particularly the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, changed how that music is played and heard. Simon Rattle, one of many forward-thinking conductors who received Boulez’s encouragement, described the status quo: “What one heard was only a struggle.” Boulez took away the struggle—the muddiness and the messiness. As if seen through polished glass, the music assumed an unearthly beauty.

I am inclined to agree, but I think it is necessary to clarify the nature of the struggle. One element came with Arnold Schoenberg's decision to add Hauptstimme (primary voice) and Nebenstimme (secondary voice) markings to his scores. This seems to have led to a slavish allegiance to Schoenberg's priorities without necessarily grasping the logic behind them. However, the more serious problem came with the move into the use of the twelve-tone row. Amateur mathematicians, such as Milton Babbitt, were quickly drawn to how Schoenberg's technique involved working with a limited number of permutations of the twelve chromatic pitches. This led Babbitt to jump to the conclusion that the foundation for Schoenberg's theory must be the abstract algebraic theory of permutation groups.

It is unclear if Schoenberg knew or cared what Babbitt was trying to do. Fortunately, we do know his famous caustic remark in a letter to René Leibowitz:

I do not compose principles, but music.

Unfortunately, by the time I was an undergraduate, music teachers seemed to prefer drinking Babbitt's Kool-Aid to reading Schoenberg's letter.

Perhaps it was because Boulez had his own intense brush with permutations and the "principles" behind them that he came to realize that there was music behind those principles that was "where the action was." Boulez may thus have been the first high-profile conductor of Schoenberg's music after Schoenberg's death to chuck the mathematics and worry instead about where the music was. Boulez turned out to be very good at doing this, perhaps because he was already beginning to grasp where the music was in other composers, such as Olivier Messiaen. Rattle would then emerge as another such conductor, and it now appears that Rattle is willing to credit Boulez for encouraging him into that frame of mind. Meanwhile, Babbitt's work has been pretty much forgotten. As one of my former colleagues put it:

No one is afraid of Uncle Miltie any more.

Remembering More Than John Henken

Thanks to a post by Alex Ross to his The Rest is Noise blog, I found a link to the review John Henken wrote for the Los Angeles Times about an event at UCLA called An Evening With Pierre Boulez and Frank Zappa. Henken's opening words, deliberately cribbing from Abraham Lincoln, were, "The world will little note nor long remember what was said." For those who had not attended the event, it took a while to figure out why this was the case. It had nothing to do with either Boulez or Zappa or, for that matter, the relationship between them. (Zappa had been a guest at IRCAM; and the Boulez Conducts Zappa CD is still available from Amazon.com.)

Rather, the key factor in the evening being as unproductive as it was can be attributed entirely to the moderator for the event, David Raksin. For the benefit of those who do not recognize this name, Raksin composed the theme song for the movie Laura, a tune of awesome sophistication that has yet to be surpassed on any film soundtrack. He was also a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, who supposedly once said to him something like, "Your music for Laura was excellent. Why do you want to compose twelve-tone music?"

Sadly, Raksin always seemed to feel that he needed more "reputable" credentials; and that conviction probably haunted him throughout his life. Thus, he tried to approach Boulez as an equal and Zappa as some insignificant upstart. He also annoyed the audience by dismissing questions submitted for both Boulez and Zappa as not worth asking, thus provoking annoyed catcalls from said audience. To some extent Henken was right: What was said was not particularly memorable, because Raksin all but prevented anything of significance from being said.

On the other hand, in the spirit of one of Alan Kaprow's happenings, the evening was unforgettable. Fortunately, it was memorable for at least one reason other than Raksin's reprehensible behavior. That was the only occasion on which I ever saw Boulez smile; and, as might be guessed, the smile was in response to one of Zappa's off-the-wall comments.