Carolin Widmann’s Solo Album on ECM

courtesy of Crossover Media

If I am not mistaken, I have not been aware of the work of violinist Carolin Widmann since my tenure with Examiner.com when, in July of 2013, I wrote about her ECM New Series recording of Morton Feldman’s “Violin and Orchestra,” a 50-minute work that Feldman had composed in 1979. At that time I had become familiar with Widmann through two earlier ECM releases, one of a concerto by Erkki-Sven Tüür (2011) and the other devoted to the chamber music of Franz Schubert (2012). Last month ECM released her first solo album, which is, to say the least, impressively eclectic.

As might be expected, the album includes two of the “usual suspects” in the solo violin repertoire. The more familiar of these is Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 partita in D minor, whose concluding chaconne has a duration roughly equal to that of the four preceding movements. The other “usual suspect” is better known among violinists than among most general audiences. He is the Belgian virtuoso violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, who, in July of 1923, composed his Opus 27, a collection of six solo violin sonatas each dedicated to one of his contemporary violinists. Widmann selected the fifth of the sonatas, dedicated to one of Ysaÿe’s disciples, another Belgian violinist named Mathieu Crickboom.

By way of context, I should make it clear that I have absolutely no skills when it comes to trying to play the violin. Nevertheless, I was drawn to the Ysaÿe collection because it is one of the first CDs I encountered in beginning a library for my first player. That CD was a Nimbus Records release of Oscar Shumsky playing all six of the Ysaÿe sonatas, and I was hooked the very first time I played the album.

Sadly, the education that resulted from Shumsky’s album has not been put to very much use. Unless I am mistaken, my only contacts with Ysaÿe in performance have involved coupling the second Opus 27 sonata with Bach’s BWV 1006 solo violin partita in E major, since Ysaÿe began his sonata by quoting the opening measures of BWV 1006. I thus felt a great relief in discovering that Widmann chose not to play this game, selecting the fifth of the Opus 27 sonatas instead. From a personal point of view, the second of the two movements, entitled “Danse rustique,” has become a favorite; and I was delighted to find another violinist who acknowledged its proper place in the violin repertoire.

The other composers represented on Widmann’s new album are George Enescu (the dedicatee of the third of Ysaÿe’s sonatas) and George Benjamin. Enescu is represented by a solo violin composition entitled “Fantaisie concertante,” will the Benjamin contribution consists of three miniatures, each less than three minutes in duration. Finally, over the course of the album, Widmann plays to solo vocal line of “Spiritus sanctus vivificans vita” (the Holy Spirit gives life), one of the antiphons in the Canticles of Ecstasy collection of Hildegard von Bingen. This selection begins the album and returns as the “spacer” between Ysaÿe and Bach.

This suggests that Widmann planned this album as a “recital experience,” to be listened to in its entirety, rather than on a track-by-track basis. I find this an imaginative approach to providing a CD with an overall “program.” To be fair, however, I have to say that I would have preferred to experience this program in a recital hall, rather than through my sound system. I do not know if Widmann has ever performed in the United States; but, given her rich background, I would leap at the opportunity to listen to her present a recital here in San Francisco.

Making Our Own Listening History

I just finished reading Chloe Veltman's latest post to her lies like truth blog under the title "Should Composers Conduct Their Own Works?" The claim she was trying to warrant was that, over the course of the two Project San Francisco performances by the San Francisco Symphony featuring the composer George Benjamin, David Robertson, who conducted the first concert, had been more effective than Benjamin himself, who conducted the second. She concluded her case by proposing the hypothesis that this was "a case of the creator 'not being able to see the wood for the trees.'" I found myself in sufficient disagreement with this position that I prepared a rather lengthy comment; and, because that comment reflects some of the more general principles of listening that I have been trying to explore on in this forum, I would like to rehash my position.

Since I believe that every good hypothesis deserves a counterhypothesis, I propose that Veltman's position amounted to a case of the listener being biased by the order of his/her listening experiences. When I wrote my preview piece for Examiner.com, I was eating my own dog food in recommending the Nimbus recording that includes "Ringed by the Flat Horizon" performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder. Where Veltman heard little (if any) differentiation in Benjamin's performance of this work, I found the same subtle differentiation that I had heard in the Elder recording; and I think that taking that subtlety to such an extreme heightened my sensitivity to "what the thunder said" in the percussion parts. I have no problem acknowledging that Roberston's performance of Dance Figures involved far more emphatic contrasts; but I suspect most of the emphasis resided the strength of my memory of the "Hammers" section, which, as I observed in my Examiner.com review was the one sharp break in an otherwise seamless integration of the remaining movements.

For better or worse we have no control over the order in which we encounter our musical experiences. As Marx said, we make our own history. However, he also said that we do not make it under the circumstances we choose but under those "given and transmitted from the past." In the same way we can never make the circumstances under which we listen to music.

"find the beauty … and don't bother with the rest of it"

In light of yesterday's post about the kinship between weirdness and unfamiliarity, it seemed appropriate that last night, when I went over to Davies Symphony Hall for my first exposure to concert performances (as opposed to recordings) of the music of George Benjamin, I should bring along my copy of Robin D. G. Kelley's book about Thelonious Monk. However, I really did not anticipate that reading this book during the intermission might have an impact on my listening behavior. Nevertheless, that seems to be the way in which things turned out; and, rather like Paul Saffo's aphorism about the future, they turned out in a rather unexpected way.

The text I happened to be reading was actually the words of David Amram, who had become sort of a Monk "disciple" in 1955. It is a passage in which Amram described a time when he had visited Monk's house; and Monk was listening to the radio, which happened to be playing country music. Amram, as might be imagined, expressed surprise that Monk would be listening to such music. As usual, Monk had few words by way of reply; and they came in the form of two sentences separated by a rather substantial gulf of time. (This sounds a bit like a setup for any number of jokes about highly scholarly Jewish rabbis.) The first sentence was:

Listen to the drummer.

Then, after that long pause, Monk came out with the second:

Check out his brush work.

This led to Amram discovering the punch line for himself (making the transition from Jewish wisdom to Zen):

So I listened as hard as I could on that little radio with a little bit of static and somehow I could hear something so I realized, of course, what he was trying to tell me was first of all, don’t be judgmental of anybody else, just listen and pay attention and look for the beauty. And then when you find the beauty, study that and don’t bother with the rest of it.

Shortly after I finished reading this passage, David Robertson returned to the podium to conduct the San Francisco Symphony in a performance of Felix Mendelssohn's Opus 56, his third symphony ("Scottish") in A minor. Now I have never made a secret of my not being particularly big on Mendelssohn; and, while there is no question that I would prefer listening to Mendelssohn to just about any cut of country music (with the possible exception of "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer"), I have often observed that his music tends to be overshadowed by the work of composers (such as Franz Schubert) happening to share the program. On this particular occasion Mendelssohn's symphony was preceded by the first San Francisco Symphony performances of two compositions by Benjamin and Michael Jarrell's orchestrations of three of Claude Debussy's piano etudes. Taken together the first half of the program had made for a rather massive shadow to cast on poor Mendelssohn!

Nevertheless, his music was not consigned to that shadow; and Robertson was probably the key figure responsible for "rescuing" it. To borrow from Amram's punch line, Robertson found the beauty of this symphony in its orchestration and chose not to bother with whether or not the melodies, harmony, and counterpoint tended towards the routine. Furthermore, since both Benjamin and Jarrell had been presented to us as imaginative masters of sonority, Robertson had basically disposed those of us in the audience to be listening for "the sound itself," meaning that our receptiveness to the beauty he had discovered had been primed by the music he had selected to precede the intermission. Thus, while Amram's point runs the risk of sounding like the sort of accentuate-the-positive homily you might find in a fortune cookie, it actually makes a strong case for the subjective and social dimensions of listening behavior. I have no idea whether or not Amram would have put things that way, and maybe it would not hurt to ask him about it!

The Legacy of Honoring "The Sound Itself"

The proposition that, as serious listeners, we should think more in terms of our experiences of "the sound itself," rather than in terms of any abstraction of those sounds through notation, has been an ongoing theme of interest, not only on this platform but also in my writing for Examiner.com. Indeed, last month in that latter forum, I invoked this concept with respect to two composers whose work would be featured this month: George Benjamin, who will be hosted by the San Francisco Symphony as part of their Project San Francisco Series, and Michael Jarrell, who will be featured as a composer at the next concert by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and as an orchestrator of Claude Debussy's piano etudes by the San Francisco Symphony. Thus, I was not surprised (and rather pleased) to discover in my reading of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D. G. Kelley, that Monk was another composer whose work was intimately wrapped up in this nature of "the sound itself."

The source of my discovery was a profile of Monk by Herbie Nichols, demonstrating that some of the most astute writing about making music comes from an author familiar with making music on equally intimate terms. Here is a passage of Nichols' text that Kelley quotes:

His eyes light up when he speaks of instrumentalists getting the right ‘sounds’ out of their instruments. He is forever searching for better ‘sounds,’ as he loves to say. He doesn’t seek these effects elsewhere. He creates them at his Klein piano. This way of thinking throughout the years has resulted in the creation of a system of playing which is the strangest I have heard and may someday revolutionize the art of swing piano playing.

Kelley's interest in this passage is clearly grounded in his own experience, since he invokes this idea of "the sound itself" in the "Prelude" to his book to explain how his interest in Monk was first sparked:

I became completely obsessed with Monk’s sound, his clang-clang sound of surprise, rich with deafening silences, dissonances, and harmonic ambiguities.

In Kelley's case that sound came from a recording of "Evidence," released on Riverside and taken from a performance at The Five Spot in New York City on August 7, 1958, with Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, Roy Haynes on drums, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik, about a dozen years after Nichols' profile had appeared in print.

My own first encounter with Monk recordings probably took place either during or just before my freshman year. That was a time when I was more obsessed with "the emancipation of the dissonance" than I was with the possibility that a search for better sounds might have been the motivation for that emancipation. Thus, I was more interested in the theoretical insights of Arnold Schoenberg and those who followed his path than I was in putting the scores off to the side and just concentrating on the listening experience. Put another way, I was spending so much time on the logic behind Monk's own approach to dissonance to appreciate that its fundamental impact was rhetorical.

These days the question is not whether or not dissonance has been emancipated but whether we, as listeners, have been emancipated from the theoretical thinking of the last century that subordinated the rhetorical to the logical. Thus emancipated, we can listen to Schoenberg and Monk as situated on the same "terrain" of musical discourse, just as (to draw upon another one of my examples) we can listen to Karlheinz Stockhausen and Ahmad Jamal. This reflects one of the lessons that Randy Weston took away from the experience of being Monk's student, which is, as Kelley put it, the need "to be wary of false distinctions between 'modern' and 'traditional.'" It's all music; and the experience always comes down to that same capacity for listening that, hopefully, we have built up since our first encounters with music.