A Memorable Evening with Salonen at SFS

As we approach the final month of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tenure as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), it becomes more and more evident just what we shall be missing with his departure. The program he prepared for this week’s concert spans a century from the early twentieth century to the early 21st. The selections were presented in reverse chronological order, beginning with the first SFS performance of Magnus Lindberg’s “Chorale” (2002), followed by Alban Berg’s 1935 (only) violin concerto. The intermission was then followed by Igor Stravinsky’s first major undertaking for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the score for Michel Fokine’s “The Firebird,” a ballet in one act with two scenes.

Those familiar with Berg’s concerto quickly recognized how Lindberg’s selection served as an overture. This was his personal setting of the Lutheran chorale “Es its genug” (it is enough), the same chorale that Berg had previously deployed in his violin concerto as a reflection on the death of Manon Gropius. Lindberg did not deploy the fierce percussion expletives in Berg’s concerto. Instead, he relied on a rich choir of winds and brass to capture the poignancy of the full text. The solemnity of his rhetoric became the perfect “overture” for the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) of the narrative behind Berg’s concerto.

The concerto soloist was Isabelle Faust. She is no stranger to San Francisco and has consistently taken fearless approaches to engaging undertakings in both concerto and recital settings. If Berg cast his concerto in the abstractions of atonality, Faust knew how to mine expressiveness out of every one of his phrases and cadences. One might think of the music as a contemplation on confronting death, which is not the sort of context one expects for a concerto. Nevertheless, Faust clearly commanded the rhetorical foundation and the wealth of “technical details” that Berg summoned for his memorial rhetoric. Having become quite familiar with this music through both recordings and performances, I came away from Faust’s partnership with Salonen with more appreciation of Berg’s music than I had previously imagined.

Set design for “The Firebird” by Aleksandr Golovin (public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

There is, of course, a wide gulf between the orchestral rhetoric of Berg’s music and that of Stravinsky’s. Nevertheless, both of them were highly skilled in deploying large ensembles. The instrumentation for “The Firebird” is just as rich in diversity as Berg’s. Indeed, it is so rich, it is hard to imagine how it could be crammed into an orchestra pit for a ballet performance!

Fortunately, it was presented last night without a ballet setting. As a result, one could relish the sonorities of every instrument within eyesight, not to mention the menacing trumpets of the monstrous Koschei deployed on audience side. The program sheet provided the full episode-by-episode account of the narrative, and Salonen knew exactly how to manage the pace through those episodes. The triumphant chord progressions of the final “General Thanksgiving” episode provided just the right mood the conclude the evening that had previously confronted the darkness of death.

Taken as a whole, this was an evening of Salonen at his finest.

SFCMP Continues 54th Season This Month

Swedish composer Mika Pelo (from the event page for the performance being discussed)

One week from this Saturday, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) will continue its 54th concert season with its third program. The title of the program is Northern Lights, and it will present four works by composers from two Scandinavian countries. Sweden will be represented by Jesper Nordin and Mika Pelo, who will begin each half of the program. Each of those works will be followed, respectively, by works by Finnish composers Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg.

Pelo’s offering will be a world premiere made possible through an SFCMP commission. The title of the composition is “Working from a Postcard;” and it will incorporate live electronics. This will be followed by a United States premiere of “Jubilees,” which Lindberg composed in 2002. The first half of the program will be presented in reverse chronological order, beginning with Jesper Nordin’s “Surfaces scintillantes,” completed in 2007, followed by the earliest work on the program, “Lichtbogen,” which Saariaho completed in 1986. She conceived this piece as a musical reflection on the Northern Lights.

This performance will take place in the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater on Saturday, April 12, beginning at 7:30 p.m. It will be preceded by an “Under the Hood” pre-concert conversation with Pelo at 6:30 p.m. The venue is on the fourth (top) floor of the Veterans Building, which is located at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. General admission will be $45 with student admission for $18. Tickets may be purchased online through a City Box Office Web page.

Lindberg’s Latest Album Coming Next Week

The end of next week will see the release of the latest Ondine album of compositions by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg. As in some (but not all) of the past recordings, these will be performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted, for this album, by Nicholas Collon. As of this writing, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders prior to the release on Friday; but the only purchase option is MP3 download. The good news is that the download also includes two PDF files. One of these is the full 24-page booklet. The other is probably a four-page summary, which includes information about previous Lindberg albums.

My interest in Lindberg goes back well over a decade. According to my archives, my earliest account of his music took place in June of 2008, when Sakari Oramo conducted the San Francisco Symphony in a performance of “Seht die Sonne” (see the sun). However, my interest in Lindberg predates my writing activities. I remember when he visited the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in May of 2011 for a trio performance with cellist Anssi Karttunen and violinist Jennifer Koh. After the intermission, Lindberg came out on stage with Karttunen to announce the celebration of the Finnish equivalent to the Fourth of July, after which they launched into a raucous account of the Finnish national anthem. (One of my Silicon Valley colleagues was Finnish. He came up for the concert and dutifully stood during the anthem performance.)

Cover of the album being discussed

The new album is devoted almost entirely to the viola concerto that Lindberg completed earlier this year. It may be worth reproducing the track listing for this music:

1. 1st movement
2. 2nd movement
3. Trio
4. Quasi Una Cadenza
5. Interlude
6. Cadenza
7. 3rd movement

Since there are no breaks in the performance, the conventional semantics of “movement” are pretty much abandoned. There is an overall flow; and, if there are any “punctuation marks,” they have less to do with overall architecture and more to do with the injection of motifs from past sources. The most prominent of those sources is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 81a, his 26th piano sonata, composed in the key of E-flat major and given the title (by the composer) “Les Adieux.” Whether or not the concerto, in its entirety, is based on a “rhetoric of farewell” is left to the individual listener to decide. The album then concludes with two shorter tracks of works composed in 2020: “Absence” and “Serenades.”

Over the years I have come to appreciate that “making sense” of Lindberg’s music is a process that evolves over the course of multiple listenings. The good news is that the process tends to “spill over” from one Lindberg composition to another. This is worth noting because there will be at least two performances of Lindberg works over the course of the coming season.

The bad news is that we shall have to wait for both of them until spring of next year. The first of these will be performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players as part of their penultimate program in April. That will be the orchestrated (2002) version of “Jubilee,” which was composed for the Ensemble InterContemporain chamber ensemble. Then, towards the end of the following month, the San Francisco Symphony will give its first performances of “Chorale” with Esa-Pekka Salonen on the podium. Writing as one that has consistently believed there there is no such thing as too much Lindberg, I have to confess that I am more than a little impatient!

Perhaps another Lindberg album will be released between now and April.

SFS Showcases Brass Players (with Percussion)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the Great Performers Series of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) turned “inward.” The program presented SFS musicians primarily from the brass section. The ensemble consisted of six horn players, six trumpeters, four trombonists (one doubling on euphonium), and two tubaists. There were also three percussionists and one timpanist, but most of the works on the program involved only the brass instruments. The conductor was Brad Hogarth, who provided brief but informative introductions.

This is one of those situations in which it would be wise to begin at the end. Over the course of these brass concerts that I have attended, I have taken an interest in the compositions by Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins. Therefore, it was no surprise that the program concluded with a work that he finished writing in 2022, given the straightforward title “Concert Music for Brass, Percussion and Timpani.” The work consisted of two movements, the first a tribute to Dale Clevenger, the former Principal Horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), who had died on January 5, 2022. The second was a tribute to the entire CSO brass section on the occasion of their return to performing after the COVID pandemic. The first movement was particularly poignant, particularly with its wistful nod to “Beim Schlafengehen” from Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs during the coda.

The high point of the evening came with the performance of Magnus Lindberg’s “Ottoni.” I realized, with a bit of regret, that I had not encountered any of his music since Yuja Wang played his third piano concerto with SFS in October of 2022. Lindberg has appealed to me for quite some time, particularly for his successful efforts to push the pendulum away from minimalism; so I like to call him an “unabashed maximalist.” While listening, I jotted some notes about his textures being thicker than any composer I had encountered since Charles Ives while also exercising the spontaneity of Ives’ turn-on-a-dime rhetoric. “Ottoni” was the wildest ride I had encountered for quite some time, and I loved every minute of it.

The other seriously wild ride on the program came from Roger Harvey’s arrangement of Witold Lutosławski’s “Variations on a Theme by Paganini.” The theme (as many will probably guess), comes from the last of the 24 Caprices that Niccolò Paganini composed for solo violin, which was, itself, a set of variations on a relatively short theme. Among many it is best known for the rhapsody that Sergei Rachmaninoff composed for piano and orchestra. Lutosławski, on the other hand, used Paganini’s own variations as a “blueprint,” to which he added his own twists and turns, scoring the results for two pianos. The result was one of Lutosławski’s most prankish efforts, and the brass arrangement made his wild ride even wilder.

The program also included two composers whose works I had not encountered for quite some time. Gustav Holst was represented by Paul Welcomer’s arrangement of A Moorside Suite, which was originally scored for a full brass band. Welcomer’s introductory remarks about brass band traditions in England were particularly informative, making this offering more than a little sentimental. Alex Bedner, currently a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, prepared arrangements of four short pieces by the French organist Maurice Duruflé, which were described as “Motets on Gregorian themes.” Since my knowledge of plainchant is both distant and limited, none of the themes were familiar to me; but the listening experience was still an engaging one.

The weaker selections were the two “urban” offerings. The program opening with music from a suite that Leonard Bernstein compiled from the soundtrack he had composed for On the Waterfront. Between Elia Kazan’s directing and Marlon Brando’s acting, I have to confess that, after seeing this movie several times, I have no recollection of any of the music; and I fear that last night did little to refresh my memory! I was also left cold by Shulamit Ran’s “Chicago Skyline.” Perhaps I have lost my taste for tone poems inspired by urban life!

As might be expected, the audience refused to leave the house without an encore. The encore was the duel scene from the music that Sergei Prokofiev composed for the full-evening ballet Romeo and Juliet. An all-brass account of that scene worked quite successfully, allowing me to re-create the choreography I had seen so many times in my mind.

Lindberg’s New Concerto for Yuja Wang

Composer Magnus Lindberg (courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony in the world premiere performance of Magnus Lindberg’s third piano concerto. The soloist was Yuja Wang, and the concerto was composed with her prodigious capacity for technique in mind. However, Lindberg also takes great delight in writing music for very large ensembles; and last night was definitely an “all-hands on deck” offering, drawing on the full resources of strings, winds, and brass with more instruments in the percussion section than can be enumerated.

Over the course of Wang’s many performances in Davies, she has cultivated the impression that she can play damn near anything. That was the impression that registered with Lindberg, and he was not shy about dialing the level of “anything” up to eleven. In the program notes James M. Keller found the mot juste in describing Lindberg’s composition as a “hyper-virtuoso concerto.” Not only were all ten fingers going across the entire keyboard with mind-boggling coordination, but also Wang never seemed to let up in her almost explosive expenditure of energy.

As impressive has this experience may have been, the “information level” (in Claude Shannon’s mathematical interpretation of that word) was so high across the full extent of resources that Salonen had to lead, that is it hard to imagine even the most attentive mind coming to grips with the full scope of the performance. Thus, any attempt at description that I can provide will most likely resemble that of a single blind man grasping one part of an elephant. While Keller’s account called attention to the rich chromaticism of Lindberg’s harmonies, I have to say that I was hard-pressed to get my head around any sense of harmonic progression. Indeed, my own focus of attention dismissed such progressions to the background, while I tried to “parse” Lindberg’s polyphony, which seemed to have more to do with rhythms than with pitch classes. Indeed, rhythm seemed to be the composer’s primary priority in an architecture that advanced through three noticeably distinctive movements.

One thing is certain: There is far too much “information” to be grasped during a “first contact” with this concerto. To continue with the Shannon analogy, mind cannot begin to find the patterns among the bits when it is still trying to sort out the “ones and zeros” of the bits themselves. This is music in which familiarity is a strong prerequisite for attentive listening; and familiarity demands more than one encounter with performance, no matter how compelling that performance may be. I look forward to an opportunity for my second encounter with this concerto, but only after all those memories currently rattling around in my head have had a chance to subside!

The program as a whole followed the usual overture-concerto-symphony format. Lindberg’s concerto was framed by two twentieth-century selections, both of which involved a similarly rich scope of sonorities. The overture was Carl Nielsen’s Opus 17 “Helios,” which basically “documents” the movements of the sun across the sky from the first signs of light at dawn to the settling into the darkness of dusk. This was the one composition that did not involve any percussion other than the timpani. However, there was no shortage of rich textures of instrumentation across both the winds and brass families.

Those familiar with Salonen’s recordings know that he accounted for all six of Nielsen’s symphonies with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra during his tenure as a Sony artist. These tracks were interleaved with shorter works, one of which was “Helios,” included on the album with the fourth (“Inextinguishable”) symphony. Nevertheless, there are subtleties in Nielsen’s palette of sonorities that can only really be appreciated through “physical presence,” rather than even the best recording technologies. Salonen had full command of that “physical presence” in last night’s account of “Helios,” whetting the appetite for further samples from the Nielsen canon.

That particular Sony album was first released in 1986. Ten years later, Salonen recorded performances of the “Concerto for Orchestra” and “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta” by Béla Bartók with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Last night he returned to “Concerto for Orchestra” for the “symphony” portion of the program, following the intermission. I came to know this music through the RCA album of Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and there was a time when I would play that album to death. However, here, too, there are far more subtleties in the blends of instrumental sonorities than can be registered through recording technology.

Unless I am mistaken, last night was my first “physical” encounter with the Bartók “Concerto;” and each of the five movements confronted me with experiences that had never registered when listening to recordings. This was not just a matter of sonorities. Salonen had clearly made many strategic decisions in the physical disposition of the instrumentalists. Listening was not just a matter of the overall blend. Rather it involved the many ways in which the different instruments would play off each other.

This is particularly evident in the playful approach taken in the second movement. This explores the sonorities of five different instruments: bassoon, oboe, clarinet, flute, and muted trumpet. Each sonority is established by a pair of instruments separated by a different pitch interval as follows:

1. bassoons: minor sixth
2. oboes: minor third
3. clarinet: minor seventh
4. flute: perfect fifth
5. trumpet: major second

These “couples” are accompanied by the string section, along with a solo side drum (played last night by Jacob Nissly). After each of the pairs has had its say, there is a brass choir interlude, after which each pair returns with a more embellished account with increased instrumentation.

Taken as a whole, Salonen’s accounts of both Nielsen and Bartók made a convincing case that listening in the concert hall will always be a richer experience than listening to a recording!

Lindberg in the Last Decade of the 20th Century

This coming Friday Ondine will release its latest album of works by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu. The last time I wrote about this composer was in September of 2018, when Ondine had released a recording of the same resources playing two Lindberg compositions, his second violin concerto, which he completed in 2015, and “Tempus fugit” (time flies), which was composed between 2016 and 2017. The new album presents three much earlier works, all concluded during the final decade of the twentieth century. As usual, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for this recording.

Each of these pieces has its own unique approach to resources. The earliest of these, “Marea” (the Italian word for “tide”), is scored for a “sinfonietta-sized orchestra” (according to the booklet notes by Kimmo Korhonen, translated into English by Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, which distinguish the ensemble from a “chamber orchestra”). It was composed between 1989 and 1990. The major work on the album is “Aura – in memoriam Witold Lutosławski,” composed between 1993 and 1994. Consisting of four movements played without interruption, the booklet describes the piece as “a grand synthesis of Magnus Lindberg’s output in the 1990s, and … one of the most prominent monumental orchestral works of its time.” The remaining work was composed much later in the decade in 1997. “Related Rocks” is scored for two pianos, two percussionists, and electronics; and, as can be seen from the booklet photograph of the recording session, requires a conductor:

© Yle, courtesy of Naxos of America

I had not been aware of Lindberg until I made my move from multimedia research in Silicon Valley into honing my skills at writing about music from my new home in San Francisco. That was around the time that Lindberg was appointed composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic. Unless I am mistaken, my first encounter with his music took place in June of 2008 at a San Francisco Symphony (SFS) subscription concert led by guest conductor Sakari Oramo. The performance was the West Coast premiere of Lindberg’s “Seht die Sonne,” which had been jointly commissioned by SFS and the Berlin Philharmonic (which gave the first performance conducted by Simon Rattle). I suspect that a tacit connection to Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder had something to do with piquing my attention; and after that concert I became hooked on subsequent opportunities to encounter Lindberg’s music, as well as his skills as a performer.

In that context I should confess that my interest in Lutosławski was never that strong. Nevertheless, I have to confess that, once I set about to hone my listening skills, opportunities to listen to his music in concert tended to be more satisfying than I anticipated. When Lindberg began his work on “Aura,” Lutosławski was still alive; and Lindberg had drawn upon a structural strategy developed by Lutosławski to develop the architecture of this large-scale composition. Ironically, Lutosławski died while Lindberg was still working on “Aura,” prompting him to dedicate the work to the Polish composer’s memory.

I would say that, as a listener, I found myself more drawn to Lindberg than I had ever been to Lutosławski. My guess is that the reasons for this attraction have much to do with Lindberg’s capacity for rhetorical devices that both attract and maintain attention. Indeed, that keen sense of rhetoric cuts cleanly across all three of the compositions on this album, all the way down to the composer’s judicious approach to the use of electronics in the most recent of the three compositions. I suspect that this new album is one that I shall be likely to revisit in the future as a reminder of the persuasive powers of Lindberg’s rhetorical skills.

Ondine to Release Recent Lindberg Compositions

courtesy of Naxos of America

This coming Friday Ondine will release a new album of two recent works by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg. The earlier of these is his second violin concerto, which he completed in 2015. On the album the concerto is preceded by “Tempus fugit” (time flies), which was composed between 2016 and 2017. The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Hannu Lintu, and the concerto soloist in Frank Peter Zimmermann. As usual, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for this recording.

I must confess that I have a personal bias towards “Tempus fugit” that has nothing to do with music. Back in 1983, when Lindberg first began working on “Kraft,” which he was writing for a large orchestra, he was trying to work out how that orchestra could realize harmonies with up to 70 pitches. He ended up using a computer to analyze the harmonic implications of chords that would involve such a large number of intervals. To this end he wrote his own computer programs in the LISP programming language, a language that allowed him to manipulate not only numbers but also structures of numbers (such as the ascending order of pitches in a chord).

LISP was basically a language that manipulated structures of symbols. It treated numbers as a particular kind of symbol that could be subjected to operations (such as those of arithmetic) that were not applicable to other symbols. Because of its flexibility, LISP was the language in which many of the early artificial intelligence programs were written, meaning that, in the wider community of computer programmers, it was regarded as elite, rather than practical.

For my part I was enthusiastic about LISP from the time I first encountered it as an undergraduate. By the time I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, I was teaching a beginning programming class with it whose only prerequisite was total ignorance of any other programming language (such as BASIC, which was popular at that time). On the research side, together with two colleagues, I worked on a system of structured symbols that could represent the pitch relations (both sequential and simultaneous) that Heinrich Schenker had tried (less successfully, in my opinion) to notate in the form of what he called “graphs.” LISP was the ideal language for creating those structures and analyzing their properties.

As an aside, the very first portable computer I purchased was the Apple PowerBook 170 (first released in October of 1991) because I knew it had the compute power to run Maclisp. I make this observation because the booklet notes by Kimmo Korhonen (translated into English by Jaakko Mäntyjärvi) describe how Lindberg resurrected some of his old computers; so he could run LISP programs again while working on “Tempus fugit.” I am impressed that Lindberg took the trouble to revive hardware from the Eighties; but that may have been his only way of recovering any of the code he had written while working on “Kraft!”

Like “Kraft,” “Tempus fugit” is rich with thick harmonic structures. If Lindberg needed software to help him negotiate how, in the midst of all of that thickness, he could convey a sense of progression, then I would say more power to him. Indeed, his analytic foundations are clearly not tied down to some overarching tonic-dominant-tonic progression (as Schenker would have demanded was necessary). “Tempus fugit” makes it clear that a composer can establish a recognizable sense of harmonic progression without committing to orienting around a tonal center.

There is, however, one thought about the title that seems to have escaped Korhonen’s booklet notes. “Tempus fugit” was written on a commission by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. It was first performed at the gala concert for the centenary of Finland’s independence, held on December 6, 2017 in Helsinki. Since Lindberg often has a prankish streak in his work, I would guess that, when told what the centennial occasion was, he might have quipped, “It seems like only yesterday!” Writing about time flying would then be an appropriate follow-up to that response.

The textures of the violin concerto are far more transparent than those of “Tempus fugit.” However, by thinning out his textures, Lindberg allows himself to explore colors emerging from different combinations of instruments. Thus, while the solo violin work is unmistakably central, there is often a sense that the violin line is weaving its way through a landscape of diverse sonorities, interacting with each of them in its own unique way.

This idea of negotiating a landscape seems to be a key element of Lindberg’s interest. If this is the case, however, then there seems to be considerable variety in what he takes to be a landscape. For example, in his second piano concerto, that landscape was basically the score for Maurice Ravel’s piano concerto to be performed by the left hand alone. My own first encounter was with a concert performance, and I was already picking up hints of thematic familiarity about a quarter of the way into the performance. By the three-quarter mark I had identified one Ravel theme I had not yet encountered, only to hear it suddenly coming from the orchestra. The second violin concerto does not work this way; but, as I observed, the technique of setting a landscape and then working in it seems to be part of Lindberg’s toolbox.

Salonen’s European Preferences for “New Music”

I have now advanced to the fourth of the five categories I identified in planning my listening experiences for Sony Classical’s 61-CD box set of recordings made by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. I identified this category as “Post-Schoenberg” as a way to identify how things changed after the mid-point of the twentieth century for those who chose not to return to tonality (or who never departed in the first place). The first thing that struck me about how this category had been instantiated was the absence of any composers born in the United States. Indeed, the only such composer in the entire collection is John Corigliano; and I have already observed that his film score for The Red Violin did not give him “a particularly fair shake.”

On a more positive side, this category serves up a rather interesting geographic distribution. Three of the composers are French (Olivier Messiaen, Henri Tomasi, and André Jolivet), three are Finnish (Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, and Salonen himself), two are Eastern European, (Witold Lutosławski from Poland, and György Ligeti from Hungary), and one is Japanese (Toru Takemitsu). Where specific compositions are concerned, I have to say that I have several pangs of dissatisfaction. Whether these had to do with Salonen, the record producers with whom he worked, or some combination of the two is unknown to me; but I am relatively confident that most, if not all, of my quibbles would not likely mean very much to anyone whose priority had to do with marketing!

The most significant of those missed opportunities involves the ondes Martenot. Messiaen took a great interest in this instrument; and it figures significantly in the performance of his “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” which is given an impressive account by the recording in this collection. One of the first virtuoso performers on this instrument was Jeanne Loriod, Messiaen’s sister-in-law; and, according to her obituary in The New York Times, she estimated that fifteen concertos had been written for the instrument. These are not enumerated on the instrument’s Wikipedia page; but I know that, in my personal history of collecting recordings, I only encountered one of those concertos, which was composed by André Jolivet, who happens to be the only concerto composer named explicitly on that Wikipedia page.

A 1975 model ondes Martenot (photograph by an unidentified Japanese Wikipedia user, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

I suspect that anyone curious about this instrument would have benefitted from the opportunity to “compare and contrast” Messiaen’s approach to this instrument with Jolivet’s. Alas, Jolivet only appears on a recording of trumpet concertos featuring Wynton Marsalis as soloist, where it is coupled with a concerto by Henri Tomasi. The good news is that the concertos on the vinyl album I had collected are now available in CD form on a release by disques Adès. The other good news is that the other Messiaen selections that Salonen recorded are as impressive as “Turangalîla,” particularly when there is solo piano work being performed by Paul Crossley.

Another instrumental soloist who endows this particular category with considerable life is Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen. He appears on each of the three CDs for each of the Finnish composers in the collection. All three of those composers are capable of taking rather thorny approaches to their emancipated dissonances, but there is so much energy and lyricism in Karttunen’s performing technique that one can take in the full scope of each of the compositions without things every feeling too prickly.

The other real delight in this category is the complete recording of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre, which is basically a farce about how the end of the world did not happen. All of the vocalists brought excellent diction to the recording sessions, meaning that the absence of a libretto does not pose any serious difficulties. (The absence of some of the descriptions of what is happening on stage, on the other hand, is likely to disappoint those who know the opera.)

Where Lutosławski is concerned, I appreciate that Salonen took the trouble to record all four of his symphonies; but I must confess that I have yet to get my head around any of them. Personally, my most significant discovery in the Lutosławski repertoire was my first encounter with music that made it clear that he had a sense of humor. Fortunately, that side of him appears on one of the CDs with his song cycle Chantefleurs et Chantefables, which the track listing translates as “songflowers and songfables.” These are given a delightful account by soprano Dawn Upshaw, and these are the tracks that give me the most satisfaction.

On the other hand, just as the role of Jolivet seems to have been to support Marsalis, the Takemitsu album seems to have been conceived to promote guitarist John Williams. Yes, Takemitsu took a great interest in the guitar; and I definitely enjoy the inclusion of “Toward the Sea” on this disc, even if Salonen had no hand in it, since it is a duo for alto flute (Sebastian Bell) and guitar. On the other hand Takemitsu’s arrangements of popular songs for solo guitar tend to exceed my tolerance for sugar overload, even if they make for perfectly nice encore selections at a solo guitar recital.

From a historical point of view, all of the composers represented in this category have much to offer adventurous listeners. Unfortunately, market forces seem to have smoothed over many of the rough spots that make the listening so adventurous. There are definitely better selections that will give the seriously adventurous listener a better sense of what made the second half of the twentieth century such an adventurous time.

Leonard Bernstein: Champion of the Middle-brow?

I have no desire to read all 606 pages of The Leonard Bernstein Letters, no matter how good a job Nigel Simeone did as editor. I figure that reading Robert Gottlieb's account of the book for The New York Review has informed me to a level of satisfaction that does not need to be further advanced. I rather like Gottlieb's dispassionate approach, providing background material when it was necessary and being "frank and open" about many of the warts without getting overly judgmental about any of them.

For better or worse, however, I realize that my own opinions of Bernstein have been shaped, at least in part, by the time I have put into reading Amiria Baraka (writing as LeRoi Jones) writing about jazz. If was from reading Baraka that I confronted that hard truth that not everyone who pays to attend a performance of music is necessarily committed to actually listening (in Igor Stravinsky's sense of that word) to that performance. For Baraka such lackadaisical audiences were simply symptoms of a "culture of middle-brow thinking." Among the middle-brow, Bernstein was the ultimate source of knowledge of the concert repertoire. I have even known music critics capable of writing accounts of concerts that I have felt were worth reading who still, perhaps out of reflex, regard Bernstein as the ultimate authority when it comes to bringing a better understanding of music to the general public.

From my point of view, I recognize that he could labor long and hard to simplify the complex. Unfortunately, there are too many situations when he achieved that goal through distortions that run the gamut from simply confusing to creating dangerously false impressions. The good news is that he tended to focus on topics that he figured would "sell" to the general public. One positive result is thus than Arnold Schoenberg was spared his distortions (as, for that matter, was Thelonious Monk). On the other hand I shall always remember when he decided it was time to explain what was happening to popular music in the wake of The Beatles and eventually came to the conclusion that the epitome of how things had changed could be found in the music of Janis Ian!

I would now like to skate out on some thin ice and suggest that Bernstein could thrive in New York because so many New Yorkers were eager to gobble up the stuff he was dishing out. Baraka was obviously not one of them. Indeed, among those who took teaching very seriously, I get the impression from available biographical material that Lennie Tristano knew the limitations of Bernstein' superficial capacity for perception. One consequence is that, for some time, if you wanted to go to Lincoln Center to inform yourself on how a piece of music ticked, you would learn more from watching the choreography of George Balanchine at the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater) than you would from buying a ticket to get into Avery Fisher Hall. Those were days when it seemed as if Chicago had better taste in conductors.

Fortunately, the New York Philharmonic now has Alan Gilbert, and life seems to have become more interesting. I am left wondering, however, if Bernstein would ever have figured out what to make of a composer like Magnus Lindberg. My guess is that Lindberg would have been too far from Bernstein's comfort zone; but in that distance Lindberg would have enjoyed the company of Frank Zappa, Edgard Varèse, and John Cage!

What Happened to Aulis Sallinen?

One of the things I remember the most about the early days of CD technology was that it introduced me to a variety of fascinating composers who had not received much attention from the vinyl industry, at least in the United States.  Thanks to the enthusiasm with which labels like Finlandia and BIS embraced the new technology, many of those composers were Finnish.  As a result, I remember building up a modest collection of the works of Aulis Sallinen;  and my wife and I had the good fortune to see two different productions of his opera Kuningas lähtee Ranskaan (the King goes forth to France), first in Santa Fe and then at Covent Garden.

Looking at the collection I have accumulated, I realize that I have not heard much of Sallinen lately.  Finnish composers continue to be on my radar, most recently in the conjunction with the visit of Magnus Lindberg to San Francisco (which included an impromptu piano performance of the Finnish national anthem with his colleague, the cellist Anssi Karttunen, to celebrate Finland having just won the International Ice Hockey Federation World Hockey Championship).  However, it appears that the only time I have written about a performance of Sallinen’s music was in October of 2009, when Osmo Vänskä performed his first symphony as part of the program he offered as guest conductor of the San Francisco Symphony.

In the Examiner.com piece I wrote about that performance, I tried to be fair about the lack of attention being given to Sallinen:

Perhaps we should take this less as a sign of negligence on the Symphony's part and more a recognition of just how large the repertoire of twentieth-century actually is.

I continue to stand behind this assessment.  The world the Internet has made is one in which there is just too much competing for not only our own attention but for the attention of many of the more institutionalized “channels” through which we learn about new things.  Where music is concerned, San Francisco has a rich abundance of those channels.  However, no individual can keep up with all of those channels, nor can those channels collectively keep up with the prodigious rate at which the repertoire keeps growing.  The result is that I do what I can to keep up with things, but I shall never be able to get beyond playing the cards dealt to me on any given occasion.

On the Dialectical Synthesis of Bach and Zappa

Regular readers know that SPIEGEL ONLINE is one of my favorite sources for news on a global scale, primarily where topics such as the economy, foreign affairs, and politics are concerned. However, when it comes to music, my major sources seems to be London (the Telegraph and the Financial Times) and New York (mostly Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times and Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review). Nevertheless, I had to turn to Sebastian Knauer for a thorough account of a legal battle between the Zappa Family Trust (run by Frank Zappa's widow Gail) and the Arf-Society, which organizes the Zappanale in the north-eastern German town of Bad Doberan. There is no reason to question the Zappanale's seriousness when it comes to maintaining performances of Zappa's music. As Knauer reported, "18 bands took to the stage in the 19th annual Zappanale last weekend."

However, I am less interested in how the legal dispute will ultimately be resolved and more interested in the innovative approaches that the Arf-Society is taking to musical performance. As Knauer reported, their activities are now extending beyond an annual gig in Bad Doberan:

Last week, Zappanale organizers put on a show at St. Katharinen church in Hamburg called "Zappa Plays for Bach." Some 600 guests showed up for a performance of variations on the famous Goldberg Variations. Indeed, improvisation is one quality Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) shares with his colleague Frank Zappa (1940-1993).

All proceeds from the concert went to the Hamburg foundation Stiftung Johann Sebastian, which is trying to raise money to recondition a Barock organ on which Bach played in 1720. And it was a fantastic show -- with nine musicians from the Florida group Bogus Pomp playing together with the former Zappa saxophone player Napoleon Murphy Brock putting on pieces ranging from "Absolutely Free Medley" to "Chunga's Revenge" to "Idiot Bastard Son."

Personally, I can think of few things more stimulating than an opportunity to listen to Bach in the context of Zappa and Zappa in the context of Bach, all in a single concert. When Zappa receives any attention in a concert setting, it always seems to be in conjunction with his work with the Ensemble InterContemporain with support from Pierre Boulez. Having seen these two men together on a stage at UCLA, I have to say that Zappa is the only person I have ever encountered who managed to get a smile out of Boulez; but, as far as the rest of the world has been concerned, there seemed to be a need to intellectualize Zappa's extremism as a prerequisite to enjoying it. Only Václav Havel seemed happy to enjoy Zappa's work for its own sake, although, as I wrote at the end of last season, there are some signs that the composer Magnus Lindberg is comfortable enough with Zappa's logic, grammar, and rhetoric to pick up where he left off and proceed beyond the "specialist confines" of the Ensemble InterContemporain to more conventional settings, such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony.

Thus, I shall close with a question: If our listening of Lindberg is well informed by past experience of listening to Zappa, when will the San Francisco Symphony program one of Zappa's works on its subscription series?

New Sounds and Old

If there was a unifying theme to this week's San Francisco Symphony program at Davies Symphony Hall, it probably had less to do with any perceptual categories common to the offerings and more to do with the versatility of conductor Sakari Oramo, since he presented himself to us not only as a conductor but also as an orchestrator of Claude Debussy. When considered in the context of Debussy's consummate skill in writing for orchestra (and I happen to feel that Michael Tilson Thomas' interpretation of La Mer is one of his strong suits in the repertoire he has built up with the San Francisco Symphony), it is hard to view an orchestration of music by Debussy as anything other than an act of chutzpah. ("Dammit, if Debussy had wanted the voice to be accompanied by an orchestra, he would have written these songs that way!") Regular readers, of course, know that I have plumbed the depths of the semantics of chutzpah to the extent that I can admit positive, as well as negative, connotations; and I am willing to acknowledge that Oramo's intensions as an orchestrator involved the positive connotation. The performance, on the other hand, was another matter.

The problem is that, since these songs were performed by the conductor/orchestrator's wife, Anu Komsi, it is hard to escape the conjecture that this whole affair was a vanity project. Now vanity projects can turn out for the better as often as they turn out the other way. One of the most compelling performances of Arnold Schoenberg's "Erwartung" I ever heard took place at a Cleveland Symphony Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall when Christoph von Dohnányi was conducting his (then) wife, Anja Silja (whom I had recently seen singing Marie in the Metropolitan Opera production of Wozzeck). In this case, however, I am disappointed to report that Komsi is no Silja. The former may well be able to jump through more virtuosic hoops than the latter ever did, but she made it through those hoops with what must politely be called a neglect of the nuances of dynamic control. (Less politely, most of those jumps stood out like sore thumbs!)

If that were not enough, I could not help but feel that this particular Finnish diva was just not that all comfortable with the French language. This involved more than the usual trend of ignoring the consonants for the sake of getting the vowels right. It had more to do with the extent to which the poets being set by Debussy, such as Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, took the very sound of the text as seriously as Debussy took the sound of the music setting the text. To put it in more extreme terms, a poem delivered without a gut-level sense of the sound is no longer that poem; it is little more than an abstract exercise in performance. Thus, the failure of Komsi to do as much justice to the poets Debussy had selected as to his settings of those poets rendered the question of the effectiveness of Oramo's orchestrations little more than moot.

Fortunately, this "vanity project" was a relatively minor part of the evening, sandwiched between one of the major monuments of the past and a truly awesome West Coast premiere. The latter was "Seht die Sonne" by Magnus Lindberg, jointly commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic (who first performed it under Simon Rattle) and the San Francisco Symphony, leading me to believe that Thomas and Rattle may be able to get along, regardless of whatever "Mahler rivalry" they may have. That Mahler reference is more than incidental, by the way. Rattle's premiere of "Seht die Sonne" was coupled with Gustav Mahler's ninth symphony; so I suspect that it is not coincidence that the very opening motif of "Seht die Sonne" is the same motif that begins the Mahler ninth, even if the title of Lindberg's work is taken from one of the poems by Jens Peter Jacobsen that Schoenberg set in his Gurrelieder. Nor is it a coincidence that the orchestral resources of "Seht die Sonne" bump those of the Gurrelieder up to the next level (without including either solo or choral voices, mind you). Indeed, it would probably not be unfair to say that, in "Seht die Sonne," Lindberg has taken the very palette of sonority, which may well be the greatest virtue of the Gurrelieder, and extrapolate it to even greater orchestral resources.

From this point of view we would do well to consider two additional "sources of inspiration," one acknowledged by Thomas May's program notes and a second, unacknowledged but a corollary to the first. The acknowledged source is Pierre Boulez, particularly in the context of what Boulez learned about sonority from Olivier Messiaen. However, one cannot listen to the closely-knit passages of a large number of distinct wind voices cavorting through eccentric rhythmic patterns without thinking of all that Boulez had done, particularly with his Ensemble InterContemporain, to champion the compositions of Frank Zappa. Lord knows, Zappa's own groups, even the one he assembled for 200 Motels, could not cope with that particular aspect of Zappa's writing as well as the "Boulez band" could! Thus, Lindberg's escalation of orchestral resources applies as much to the Ensemble InterContemporain (particularly in the context of the demands that Zappa placed on them) as it does to the orchestration of the Gurrelieder.

The result, as one might imagine, is a mighty noise, never shy about its dissonances but always exhilarating. This made for a sharp contrast with the recent performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage's recent Three Asteroids, which, from an arithmetical point of view, may have used greater resources than Lindberg did but ended up using them to lesser effect. If we were to seek out another composition for comparison, we would do better to look back to Olivier Messiaen's "L'Ascension," not just for the numbers of the resources but also for the ways those resources were put to textural (as well as melodic and harmonic) use. All this is basically to argue that there would be much to be gained from "Seht die Sonne" making a "return visit" in some season in the not-too-distant future. This work does not deserve to be put on the shelf after it has had its first innings. It may well shape how we hear music in this new century, and for that alone it needs to be heard more often.

Thus, to say that "Seht die Sonne" was capable of holding its own against its "complementary bookend," which was the seventh symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven, is to say quite a lot. Scores whose ink is barely dry rarely deserve to be compared to those of a man who, as I have previously observed, tends to be more monument than master. However, if we try to get "beyond the monument," as I have done by trying to view Beethoven as the "omen" of John Cage and Philip Glass, the pairing of these two compositions is less intimidating, particularly since, for all of his other influences, Lindberg does not appear to owe any debts to either Cage or Glass! Nevertheless, that seventh symphony (which, as I recall, was Beethoven's first composition after losing all of his hearing) shows that same attentiveness to the rhetorical significance of both silence and ostinato, which I have observed, respectively, in Cage and Glass and which I continue to hear in all periods of Beethoven's life as a composer.

It was also apparent that Oramo appreciated that attentiveness. Indeed, his use of attaca transitions between the first two and last two movements were a sign that, one the larger scale, he wanted us to hear this as a two-movement composition in which the silences in those two movements were as important as the sounds. From that point of view, the silences we encounter in the seventh symphony prepare us for the even greater profundity of the silences Beethoven summoned in his ninth symphony. Beethoven's use of ostinato in the seventh symphony, on the other hand, has more to do with the obsessive persistence of specific rhythmic patterns, rather than with either the melodies behind those patterns or how those melodies are orchestrated. To a great extent the fundamental idea of a rhythmic pulse is scaled up to the level of a motif and becomes the primary driving force of each of the four movements (meaning that, if there is a two-movement scheme, then that force goes through a transition in each of the movements). Thus, one of the things that made Oramo's performance so interesting was the extent to which he conducted by this pulse, rather than "by the beat." (There was one passage in the Allegretto where his baton was barely moving, if it was moving at all.)

The result was a performance of Beethoven in the spirit of Thomas Stearns Eliot's Beethoven-inspired poetry. Oramo brought us to where many of us "started," when we were first getting to know the experience of hearing a symphony orchestra. However, when he brought us there, we came to know that "place for the first time;" and any conductor who understands how to do that has an understanding of Beethoven that transcends the mere document of a musical score!