Fuse Classical Music Interview: Pianist Jeremy Denk -- Riding the Roller Coaster of Rhythm

Jan 202011

Pianist Jeremy Denk: “Being a musician can be very solitary and a bit navel-gazing (like blogging). I’m not sure that blogging made me saner, but it surely released a valve somewhere.”

Pianist Jeremy Denk

By Susan Miron.
Pianist Jeremy Denk will be tackling one of the year’s most challenging programs this Sunday at 1:30 at MassArt (where the Gardner Museum concerts are this season)—Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Book One and Two of Ligeti’s Etudes.
Known for his amazing technique and musical intelligence, Mr. Denk has recently released critically acclaimed CDs of the sonatas of Charles Ives with violist Roberto Diaz, and the Viola Sonatas of Brahms with violist Roberto Diaz. A longtime musical partner of violinist Joshua Bell, Mr. Denk writes a popular, thought-provoking blog on music and being a musician, ThinkDenk: the glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.
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Arts Fuse: When did you feel almost as/as compelled to write/blog as you felt about needing to practice to have a sane/balanced life?
Jeremy Denk: Since I was very little, I’ve been a book nut … it’s easy enough to draw a line from reading Wind in the Willows obsessively as a child to a spring and summer in 1999 where I just lost my mind over Proust. Obviously, if you’re crazy about words, then at some point you get this (evil) desire to put them down yourself.
Actually the blog would never have started if it hadn’t been for a friend from NPR writing me one day, saying “you have to blog.” And in those days I was obedient … I started one up, that very day (2004 sometime) I wrote my first blurb … very different at that time! Eventually it kind of evolved (or devolved) into something like essays about whatever I was playing, intertwined with the comedy of being a musician. It became a perfect, if occasionally deranged, outlet for all the solitary thoughts that occur to you when you’re stuck at the piano, trying to improve yourself — all the thoughts that never would fit in a program note, for instance, or a bio, or an academic essay, etc. etc. Being a musician can be very solitary and a bit navel-gazing (like blogging). I’m not sure that blogging made me saner, but it surely released a valve somewhere.
AF: Was there a point, say, somewhere in music school or earlier, that you realized, hey, this is really going to work out for me- this life as a concert pianist? Were there prizes? And did they help, career-wise?
Denk: When I was at Oberlin (1986-2000) I gradually began to realize or be more confident that I was going to be a musician in some capacity. I think in my mid twenties when I went to Juilliard and won Young Concert Artists: that’s when I began to think more of career development. In my early twenties I was just studying with an amazing guru in Bloomington Indiana, a Hungarian pianist named György Sebök, and this was a whole line of thinking about music and pianism that I had never (American boy that I was) experienced. I drank from that very happily for five years, had many lazy Bloomington barbecues, but then realized I had to wake up and make my way somehow.
AF: How did you hook up with Joshua Bell? With Diaz? With Steven Isserlis? What was/is most satisfying about these collaborations?
Denk: Joshua and I met at Spoleto Festival in 2004, for the 75th birthday gala of Charles Wadsworth (founder of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, among other things) … we played the Grieg C minor Sonata together. A funny story is that Joshua’s mother (who was living in Bloomington) had been pushing for us to play together for many many years. Finally it seemed to spark something, the Grieg was a great deal of fun, extremely fast (as I recall!) and very well received, and now six or seven years later it has been an important part of my life.
I came to know Roberto Diaz through his cello-playing brother, Andres, also a wonderful musician who I had met at various festivals. These festivals are like extended families where you keep running across different branches …

Violinist Joshua Bell accompanied by Jeremy Denk on piano perform at the Oberlin College Finney Chapel. Photo by Roger Mastroianni

Steven and I met through Joshua, of course, and I really first met him at his home in London (on Abbey Road) for a rehearsal of Schubert E-flat Trio. I just sat back and listened to the two of them argue, it was fantastic. Now the gift has been passed on: Steven and I get to argue all the time, which is fun, if exhausting occasionally. We just played one of the hardest pieces ever, Thomas Ades’ new cello piece, Lieux Retrouves; luckily both of us are just too darned busy the whole time to really argue.
Obviously each collaboration brings different things, like any friendship with any person … each person you know tends to bring out a different facet of yourself, and these kinds of collaborations have been a tremendous source of learning for me. Each person you work with like an incredibly rich book of ideas, thoughts, musical possibilities you had not imagined.
AF: What brought you to Ligeti? Has it (learning it and performing it) been an unusually satisfying experience? (Why?)
Denk: I’ve been interested in these Etudes for a long time, since I first heard the second one (Cordes a Vide) in a master class in 1991, I think … And I thought to myself, there’s piano music that is modern, that speaks to the moment, and yet uses the piano truly as a piano (not as a percussion instrument), that uses its possibilities in previously unused ways. Something new to say on the piano, that 19th-century relic!
Also, I thought, it’s [expletive] beautiful. I think a lot of pianists have felt the same, with or without expletive, and these pieces have become part of the extended standard repertory in a startlingly unanimous way. I dipped my toes in this music (it takes an astounding amount of time to learn) very gradually, a couple etudes at first, and then more and more, and now here I am. They are very rich, very pianistic, very contrapuntal: they stretch the brain in ways that it doesn’t always enjoy. And precisely in that stretching you find something new to say, musically, some new thrill of survival, in a way … Often you have the sense it’s a wild roller coaster ride of rhythm or thought, without having to go to any amusement park.
AF: Do you think pianists/other instrumentalists of the past generation felt such an urgency to perform (what was for them) contemporary music as so many instrumentalists do today? What do you think brought on this (what I see as a ) new commitment to 20th and 21st century music?
Denk: I’m not sure this is a new commitment … it might be? I’m not good at analyzing “trends.” I guess I’d just say that I’m committed to music that I think is excellent, that rewards me and the listener, etc. etc.
AF: Do you think this is the result of competitions insisting on one or two “new” pieces or just a better educated generation of musicians?
Denk: I know that the Munich competition required a Ligeti etude and that is part of how I got started with them… the extra push, or incentive. A market-driven notion of pianistic repertory! I think there’s a position at the AEI for whoever can write that essay.

György Ligeti (1989) © Schott Promotion / Kropp

AF: Why do you think there is such a wide interest recently (it seems to me) in the Goldbergs? Do you know (I laughed at your harp entry in your blog) there is a Welsh harpist Caitrin Finch who recorded them on the harp (!!!!!) a year ago? What brought you to them? Was it after a lot of Bach playing or just because they were so fun?
Denk: There’s a tremendous weight of attention on the Goldbergs and perhaps that’s simply because of the celebrity that Glenn (do I need to write his last name?) brought to them. Let me throw out a wild theory. There is something about the simplicity/repetitiveness of the harmonic scheme that seems to me to evoke something of the pop world … or the jazz riff … not that I’m saying by any means that jazz or pop is necessarily simplistic! But there is something about this harmonic foundation that perhaps resonates well with modern listeners: the purity, the catchiness, the sense of roundedness, the motoric typewriter-ness, etc. etc.
I was brought to them because a friend twisted my arm and said I had to play them, if I loved Bach so much. True, I love Bach, he’s my hero. And if I may say–this will get me in trouble–maybe I think the Glenn iconic notion of them (something emitted with groans by a borderline narcissistic nut job) does them a disservice. After all, they are tremendously genial — some of the variations are quite far off the reservation, but many of them are just right there in front of you, their contrapuntal workings simply smiling at you. This kind of embrace, gathering the many out of the one, the basics of the intervals, the possibilities of two hands leaping over each other…
AF: How do you prepare the repertoire for a year like this, where you’re playing so many different programs in a short amount of time?
Maniacally. Desperately. Coffee.

Gorgeous Playing from Levinson, Transporting Reconstruction, at Chopin Symposium

June 21, 2010

Gorgeous Playing from Levinson, Transporting Reconstruction, at Chopin Symposium

by Susan Miron

Several remarkable lectures and three concerts took place the past weekend (June 19, 20) as part of the Chopin Symposium at Rivers School in Weston. The symposium, honoring Chopin in his bicentennial year, was the brainchild of pianist Roberto Poli, who ran a similar event last year. A self-described “passionate advocate of the music of Chopin,” the indefatigable Mr. Poli is clearly an ideal advocate. The symposium gathered together some of brightest of Chopin aficionados for talks, master classes, and concerts.
Friday night’s opening concert featured the Boston-based pianist Max Levinson, whose program alone this reviewer would have walked 10 miles to hear. The first half, Chopin’s Four Ballades, was played with tremendous power, when needed, and poignant delicacy and sweetness at other times The Second Ballade was dedicated to Robert Schumann. Mr. Levinson is well-known for his formidable technique; hardly a concert or a review goes by when it’s not mentioned. What is worth noting is that this renowned technique (and what big name pianist doesn’t have one?) is really at the service of a sophisticated musical mind that gets exactly what it wants from Levinson’s fingers. There was little to watch; Mr. Levinson sits rather still most of the time, seeming somewhat delighted to be having so little trouble executing these very difficult pieces. Were the ballades gorgeously played? Yes. Were they as good as my many recordings by Chopin superstars? Yes. The audience, full of pianists, went wild, which was the only sensible reaction to such glorious playing of such wonderful music.
For the second half, Mr. Levinson effortlessly tackled the virtuosic Kreisleriana : Eight Fantasies for Piano after E.T.A. Hoffmann, Op. 16 which Robert Schumann (1810-1856) dedicated to Chopin. Mr. Poli’s beautiful program notes — so readable and so consistently interesting — refer to this lengthy piece as a cyclical character piece, written by Schumann at the height of his powers. The triptych of characters who “appear” in this piece, the impulsive, passionate Florestan, the dreamy Eusebius, and Master Raro, who acts as mediator between the other two, are understood to be projections of the troubled (bipolar it is thought today) Schumann’s mind, full of contradictions, a psyche so often on the verge of madness.

Schumann knew he had created something great when he wrote the semi-autobiographical Kreisleriana, which he wrote for his beloved Clara during their separation before they were finally married in 1840, after a long legal battle with her father. Of this piece, Schumann wrote to Clara, “My music… seems so simply and wonderfully intricate… so eloquent and from the heart; that’s the way if affects everyone for whom I play it, which I enjoy doing quite frequently.” Mr. Levinson captured all the mood and color changes in a powerful performance. But for this listener, the most beautiful moments of the evening came in his encore, Schumann’s Träumerei, played with calm simplicity, no fuss, just a few moments of quiet loveliness after an evening of spectacular fireworks.
Sunday night’s concert was an entirely different sort of event, an attempt to recreate and reconstruct the last concert Chopin played at Pleyel Salon on February 16, 1848. Mr. Poli’s research into which of his compositions Chopin  played on that famous evening was frustrating since most of the pieces were never written down in a program or documented in letters or in the press.  Performers at that time often decided what they would play at the last minute. The program book for this (and Mr. Levinson’s) concert was extraordinary, as it tried to replicate the original program, stating only Chopin Etudes, Preludes, Mazurkas, Waltzes or Aria for mezzo-soprano. A copy of the original program is in the program book, as well as biographies of its musicians. The lights were dimmed and three votive candles sat on each of the five windowsills.
The evening began with a lovely reading of the Mozart Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano in E Major, K. 542, a piece Chopin adored. (Piotr Buczek was the violinist, Ronald Lowry the cellist). It was Poli’s night, and he covered himself in glory. His Mozart was simply beautiful. The co-star of the evening was a 1845 Pleyel piano borrowed from the Frederick Collection, a piano very similar in sound to the one Chopin played at his last concert. It took this listener a while to get used to its sound, which was described as having a veiled silvery quality. Chopin preferred the sound of Pleyels to Erards, while the more extroverted Liszt insisted on using Erards with their more open and commanding sound.
The program was a diverse one. There were two arias for mezzo-soprano (Colleen Palmer) by Bellini and Mozart, “Air nouveau” from Robert le Diable for tenor and piano by Giacomo Meyerbeer (Gregory Zavracky) and Chopin’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in g minor, Op. 65 in an excellent performance by cellist Ronald Lowry and Poli. But the star of this concert and the brains, energy, and dedication was Poli, whose two Etudes, Berceuse, Nocturne, Preludes, two wonderful Mazurkas, and Waltzes were played, in each set, one seamlessly following the other. Poli has been pursuing a recording project of all the works of Chopin and he has his own unique way of playing Chopin, not at all generically. What stuck me as this concert was ending was how in his last set, I was no longer thinking about how odd the piano sounded, or about who was playing it. I was simply listening to Chopin. And it was simply wonderful. I was transported, if not back to 1848, then to a place where it’s just a privilege to be in the audience.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

1. It was a pleasure to read Susan Miron’s appreciative, informative write-up of performances given in the context of Roberto Poli’s excellent Chopin Symposium. The playing was clearly intended to convey sensitivity and musicianly protein, despite the concommittant feux d’artifice such repertoire brings with it.
   Ms. Miron elected not to describe the power of expression, musically communicative or otherwise, of the fine, subtle 1845 Pleyel salon grand lent to the Symposium by Patricia and Michael Frederick, other than to label its unfamiliar sound as “odd”. It is certainly not unusual for modern performers and reviewers not to have encountered or to have become curious about the pianos (or winds, strings, organs, brass, tympani, etc.) whose technical and sonic characters paved the way for the polished and, I must say, rather bland timbral palette required of most instruments today. However, I am sorry that, in her otherwise exemplary review, she did not feel that the special opportunity of hearing an authentic and visceral voice from Chopin’s own era and artistic milieu merited a small evaluative remark or two. A puzzlingly missed opportunity!
   This particular salon grand, which I have delighted in recording a number of times in excellent concert conditions, immediately brings to mind those famous hallmarks of “the Pleyel sound” Chopin took care to jot down for the enlightenment of friends, and therefore for the eyes of discerning posterity. The original construction and Michael Frederick’s curatorially responsible voicing (in the course of a notably non-invasive restoration) of this modest-sized instrument result in detailed, gently veiled, and quite sweet tonal production. Not every pianist can make full musical sense of the particular keyboard scale and different key dip, pedaling sensitivity, and una corda use that this sort of just-pre-modern piano requires. Roberto Poli evidently brings flexibility and insatiable curiosity to bear when approaching any instrument, even a 160-year-old transitional Parisian piano by one of the celebrated makers of Chopin’s day.
   Perhaps the New York Steinway, the de rigeur standard of our day, is the measuring staff by which, by default, all we hear is to be judged. How sad, though, not to seize and relish these precious, seldom-occuring opportunities for broadening, even deepening, our listening palette.
   (Chamber music sessions this winter, in which Andrew Willis’s lovely 1845 Pleyel figured, thoroughly convined me that the 1840 Pleyel in the Frederick Collection indeed produces exactly the right sound for music of the period, be the scores French, German, or elsewhat. Either instrument’s extraordinarily easily moulded dynamics and deft evocation of voicing make for astonishing, irresistible results in collaborative music making.)
   
   Comment by Christopher Greenleaf — June 22, 2010 at 11:30 am

Ravel Harp Gem Highlights Marlboro’s Concert Dedicated to Cellist Soyer

July 19, 2010

Ravel Harp Gem Highlights Marlboro’s Concert Dedicated to Cellist Soyer

by Susan Miron

A sold-out house enjoyed the third concert of the 60th season of Marlboro Music Festival’s opening weekend on Sunday, July 18, and judging by overheard conversations, many people in the 636-seat hall had happily made the long, winding, and hilly pilgrimage to this famous chamber music festival many times before.
My visit began auspiciously. A friendly young man and woman were smiling next to a cart of brownies and cookies, free for the taking. Any chocolate lover’s heart would have melted. If I took nothing else away from this revered festival, I rethought the meaning of brownie points: what critic can be impartial after such unexpectedly sweet pleasure? I posed a question to the young man: who is lucky enough to participate in Marlboro, written about so fawningly by Alex Ross in The New Yorker in June, 2009? He replied, “The people here are the top 1% of musicians.”
It takes a lot of confidence to state 1% with such assurance. Not 2 or 3%? Most people who love chamber music have known about Marlboro since its early days in the 1950s under Rudolf Serkin through the decade and a half under the dual rule of pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode. As Alex Ross pointed out, a successful career at Marlboro practically assures one of a significant career, and it always has. To those involved in the music-making, there is an awareness of existing in the midst of so much power and connections. It is exhilarating, playing with one’s renowned elders, and, one might guess, a tad scary. If you are young and at the bottom of the Marlboro food chain, there is a lot of pressure, which might account for the childish games and pranks Mr. Ross described, which presumably let off some steam. At intermissions and in the green room after the concert, Marlboro certainly appears to be the festival with the most effusive hugging and kissing, like a weekly summer camp reunion.
There are many wonderful Marlboro tales. Few have involved how young people get chosen. Richard Goode put it quite simply: “A certain technical excellence is a prerequisite. But you also listen for urgency, emotional reality.” It would seem it’s not that easy even to apply to be heard. Several decades ago, a violinist friend applied, who was quite well known in her city. She got a dose of “emotional reality” when, instead of an audition application, she received a ticket order form. Another applied four years before she, by then nine months pregnant, got her unsolicited reply: “You application has been looked at. You are too old now for Marlboro.”

Sunday’s concert, dedicated to the late, longtime Marlboro and Guarneri Quartet cellist David Soyer, was a typical Marlboro program, sort of a Talent Night for the Really Talented. Oddly, nothing on the program featured cello. It opened with the Haydn Piano Trio in C Minor, Hob. XV:27 (c. 1797) in a lovely performance, with a particularly delightful Presto Finale. Like the composer’s other piano trios, the cello part merely doubled the piano.
Regrettably, there were no program notes, nor was there a single word about the performers. The next pieces were Three Duets, Op. 20 (1858-60) by Brahms, sung gorgeously by soprano Susanna Phillips and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson, with pianist Lucia Brown.
For this listener, the next piece, featuring the great young Israeli harpist Sivan Magen, was the concert’s highlight. This septet, considered by many to be a harp concerto, was called “Introduction and Allegro” on the program, but its real name is Introduction and Allegro for Harp, Flute, Clarinet, and String Quartet. Magen, the first Israeli winner (2006) of the prestigious Israel Harp Competition and now a Pro Musicis artist, is in his third summer at Marlboro, which had the good sense to grab him before he was a big competition winner. Magen had a formidable technique, a lovely sense of color, and masterful musicianship. Like any great musician, he makes each work he plays his, and always convincingly so (I have heard him recently at a harp conference, at several of Berkshires chamber music concerts, and several years ago at Marlboro). Here his initially understated dynamics, quieter than one usually hears at the piece’s first solo, drew the audience in, building up gradually to a heart-stopping crescendo in Ravel’s brilliant cadenza. Harmonics were stunning, the accompaniment excellent, and the tempo quite exhilarating. The clarinetist, Moran Katz, was outstanding. Bravo to all seven players.
Dvorak’s beautiful Piano Quartet in E-flat Major (1889) featured pianist Richard Goode, violinist Joseph Lin, violist Dimitri Murrath, and cellist Saeunn Thorsteinsdottir. The violin and viola were often overpowered by the piano, leaving countermelodies and subsidiary melodies hard to discern. Often, the piece seems to want to break free of its piano quartet restraints and become a cello concerto; Thorsteinsdottir was certainly up to the task. The Dvorak got the standard standing ovation. Is there a summer concert that doesn’t end with one?

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Ravel Harp Gem Highlights Marlboro’s Concert Dedicated to Cellist Soyer

July 19, 2010

Ravel Harp Gem Highlights Marlboro’s Concert Dedicated to Cellist Soyer

by Susan Miron

A sold-out house enjoyed the third concert of the 60th season of Marlboro Music Festival’s opening weekend on Sunday, July 18, and judging by overheard conversations, many people in the 636-seat hall had happily made the long, winding, and hilly pilgrimage to this famous chamber music festival many times before.
My visit began auspiciously. A friendly young man and woman were smiling next to a cart of brownies and cookies, free for the taking. Any chocolate lover’s heart would have melted. If I took nothing else away from this revered festival, I rethought the meaning of brownie points: what critic can be impartial after such unexpectedly sweet pleasure? I posed a question to the young man: who is lucky enough to participate in Marlboro, written about so fawningly by Alex Ross in The New Yorker in June, 2009? He replied, “The people here are the top 1% of musicians.”
It takes a lot of confidence to state 1% with such assurance. Not 2 or 3%? Most people who love chamber music have known about Marlboro since its early days in the 1950s under Rudolf Serkin through the decade and a half under the dual rule of pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode. As Alex Ross pointed out, a successful career at Marlboro practically assures one of a significant career, and it always has. To those involved in the music-making, there is an awareness of existing in the midst of so much power and connections. It is exhilarating, playing with one’s renowned elders, and, one might guess, a tad scary. If you are young and at the bottom of the Marlboro food chain, there is a lot of pressure, which might account for the childish games and pranks Mr. Ross described, which presumably let off some steam. At intermissions and in the green room after the concert, Marlboro certainly appears to be the festival with the most effusive hugging and kissing, like a weekly summer camp reunion.
There are many wonderful Marlboro tales. Few have involved how young people get chosen. Richard Goode put it quite simply: “A certain technical excellence is a prerequisite. But you also listen for urgency, emotional reality.” It would seem it’s not that easy even to apply to be heard. Several decades ago, a violinist friend applied, who was quite well known in her city. She got a dose of “emotional reality” when, instead of an audition application, she received a ticket order form. Another applied four years before she, by then nine months pregnant, got her unsolicited reply: “You application has been looked at. You are too old now for Marlboro.”
Sunday’s concert, dedicated to the late, longtime Marlboro and Guarneri Quartet cellist David Soyer, was a typical Marlboro program, sort of a Talent Night for the Really Talented. Oddly, nothing on the program featured cello. It opened with the Haydn Piano Trio in C Minor, Hob. XV:27 (c. 1797) in a lovely performance, with a particularly delightful Presto Finale. Like the composer’s other piano trios, the cello part merely doubled the piano.
Regrettably, there were no program notes, nor was there a single word about the performers. The next pieces were Three Duets, Op. 20 (1858-60) by Brahms, sung gorgeously by soprano Susanna Phillips and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson, with pianist Lucia Brown.
For this listener, the next piece, featuring the great young Israeli harpist Sivan Magen, was the concert’s highlight. This septet, considered by many to be a harp concerto, was called “Introduction and Allegro” on the program, but its real name is Introduction and Allegro for Harp, Flute, Clarinet, and String Quartet. Magen, the first Israeli winner (2006) of the prestigious Israel Harp Competition and now a Pro Musicis artist, is in his third summer at Marlboro, which had the good sense to grab him before he was a big competition winner. Magen had a formidable technique, a lovely sense of color, and masterful musicianship. Like any great musician, he makes each work he plays his, and always convincingly so (I have heard him recently at a harp conference, at several of Berkshires chamber music concerts, and several years ago at Marlboro). Here his initially understated dynamics, quieter than one usually hears at the piece’s first solo, drew the audience in, building up gradually to a heart-stopping crescendo in Ravel’s brilliant cadenza. Harmonics were stunning, the accompaniment excellent, and the tempo quite exhilarating. The clarinetist, Moran Katz, was outstanding. Bravo to all seven players.
Dvorak’s beautiful Piano Quartet in E-flat Major (1889) featured pianist Richard Goode, violinist Joseph Lin, violist Dimitri Murrath, and cellist Saeunn Thorsteinsdottir. The violin and viola were often overpowered by the piano, leaving countermelodies and subsidiary melodies hard to discern. Often, the piece seems to want to break free of its piano quartet restraints and become a cello concerto; Thorsteinsdottir was certainly up to the task. The Dvorak got the standard standing ovation. Is there a summer concert that doesn’t end with one?

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Hamelin, Putnam, Ansell, and Reynolds Astound Concord Chamber Music Audience

September 19, 2010

Hamelin, Putnam, Ansell, and Reynolds Astound Concord Chamber Music Audience

by Susan Miron

Michael Reynolds, Wendy Putnam, Marc-Andre Hamelin and Steven Ansell (Michael King photo)

Concord Academy hosted The Concord Chamber Music Society and the great pianist Marc-André Hamelin for the first concert of its new season on Sunday, September 19. And what an opener it was!
The sold-out concert began with the middle of Beethoven’s magisterial last three piano sonatas, Op. 110 in A-flat, composed in 1821, at the same time as the Ninth Symphony and Missa Solemnis.  Mr. Hamelin, whose move here is one of the best things to have happened recently to Boston, played it with his usual beauty of tone, thoughtfulness, and musicality. Mr. Hamelin has the reputation of being a virtuoso’s virtuoso, but he is so much more than that, as any one lucky enough to hear him live will notice.  For decades he spent most of his time playing and recording arcane, under-noticed composers — Medtner, Busoni, Goldowsky, Alkan — but recently he has begun playing Chopin, Brahms, Haydn (his two-CD set of Haydn sonatas is terrific), Liszt and Schumann.  In an interview, Mr. Hamelin declared, “I’m not really interested in the piano as an instrument itself… What I care about is what it can do and how it can realize my thoughts, my intentions, the composer’s intentions. I’m always interested in how far I can go to make the audience forget I’m playing a piano or an instrument. I’m just making music.” And his Beethoven was a clear illustration of someone who chose, quite simply, to make music. Mr. Hamelin sits quite still and attracts little attention to himself. His musical conception, dynamics, pacing, and phrasing were ideal. Mr. Hamelin is a musician’s musician.
Next came the rarely performed Violin Sonata in F minor, Opus 80 by Sergei Prokofiev.  The last time I heard it played in the Boston area was over 20 years ago.  Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata in D Major is played far more often; it began life as Sonata for Flute, Opus 94, and was rewritten at the urging of the great violinist David Oistrakh, Prokofiev’s friend and chess opponent. Prokofiev described this F minor sonata as “much more serious than the second.” Indeed.  Oistrakh, who championed this work his whole life, played the first and third movements at Prokofiev’s funeral.
The excellent violinist, Wendy Putman, founder and director of The Concord Chamber Players and a member of the BSO, joined Mr. Hamelin in this  dark, brooding, often spooky sonata. They made a case for it being as compelling a work as the more popular, sunny D major. In fact, when you hear a performance like this, you wonder why this piece isn’t played more often. This often eerie sonata consumed Prokofiev for eight years, beginning in 1938. Part of its grimness is undoubtedly attributed to the horrific war years in Russia during which it was written.
After intermission, Brahms’ enormously popular Piano Quartet No. 1 in G-minor, op. 25, was given a rousing yet sensitive performance by Mr.  Hamelin, Ms. Putnam, BSO Principal Viola Steven Ansell, and cellist Michael Reynolds, a member of the BU-based Muir Quartet. The strings sounded beautiful together and perfectly balanced with the piano.  The most popular of the three Brahms piano quartets, the G minor features in its last movement a “gypsy rondo” which inevitably leaves the audience drunk with delight. In his program notes, Steven Ledbetter explains that Haydn had written a gypsy rondo in one of his piano trios, which Brahms undoubtedly knew, as he knew what passed for authentic Hungarian music, “gypsy” musical style. Arnold Schoenberg loved this piece so much he scored it for full orchestra. During the well-deserved standing ovation, I wondered if there was anyone anywhere who didn’t love this piece.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Long-Anticipated Return of Levine

October 4, 2010

Long-Anticipated Return of Levine with Hero-Status Terfel, Gorgeous Playing from BSO

by Susan Miron

Bryn Terfel and a lively James Levine (Josh Reynolds, AP Photo}

Concern about the health of Boston Symphony’s Music Director James Levine preceded both the BSO Gala Opening Night on Saturday, October 2, and his return five days earlier to the Metropolitan Opera for a much-anticipated production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. At both performances, Mr. Levine was greeted by the audience with a hero’s welcome. His fellow hero on stage at both the Met and the BSO was the great and much-loved Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, who shared and earned standing ovations for all four pieces he sang.
At both performances Mr. Levine was greeted by the audiences with a hero’s welcome.  At Symphony Hall,  a  rather slimmer Mr. Levine walked carefully, unaided, onstage onto his podium, where he planted himself on his custom-made swivel chair for the duration of the concert.  Sitting, he conducted energetically, with much larger hand and arm gestures than before his last grueling back surgery; he  gratefully accepted the audience’s enthusiastic applause and repeated standing ovations. Rather than go offstage between pieces, Mr. Levine continued to sit, but no matter: the orchestra played wonderfully for him, and the audience, including many important BSO givers,  was simply thrilled to have him back in the hall.
The BSO audience was a polite one; they seem to take galas in their stride, wearing nice clothes, but nothing too flashy, not much jewelry. Last night at Symphony Hall was a glitz-free zone; one would never confuse this audience with an Opening Night crowd at the Met or the Philharmonic.
As part of the new Met production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, Mr. Terfel will be singing Wotan, the head god, husband of Fricka, father of innumerable children (though none by Fricka) including Brünhilde and her eight Valkyrie sisters, known best for their battle cry “Ho-jo-to-jo” and helmets with two hornlike protrusions. (At the Chicago Lyric Operas’s production of the Ring five years ago, plastic Valkyrie helmets were all the rage. By the third opera much of the audience arrived wearing them).
This BSO program opened with a exciting, beautifully paced and played Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, written, along with Tristan and Isolde, when Wagner took a long break from writing the “Ring.” Wagner’s overtures accomplish musically —in less than fifteen minutes — the essential content of a six-hour opera.
After the Meistersinger Overture, Bryn Terfel strode on the stage in a long back jacket and sang Hans Sachs’s Act II Monologue, which he had sung at Tanglewood in 2004. Mr. Terfel showed a much softer self in “Wotan’s Farewell,” mixing heartbreak and regret. This aria was preceded by the inimitable “Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre, the second of the four “Ring” operas. The BSO played it brilliantly, but for those accustomed to hearing it with the actual Valkyries singing at crucial moments, it felt like music minus one, or eight to be precise.
The Magic Fire Music which followed Wotan’s Farewell was played gorgeously. The four harpists who had tried valiantly to be heard through the orchestra in the Meistersinger Overture enchanted here. Throughout the evening the winds — especially the English horn in The Flying Dutchman Overture — and the low brass deserve special praise. The printed program closed with the Dutchman’s Monologue (“Die Frist ist um”) from The Flying Dutchman, which let the audience see the Dutchman’s bitterly frustrated side. Terfel’s perfect enunciation and pitch, sense of drama, and heartbreaking high notes dramatically limned the Dutchman’s agony of having to roam the seas, never to find redemption.
Mr. Terfel’s Wotan’s Farewell” is one of the Ring’s most emotionally wrenching moments.  Wotan he is saying goodbye to his most beloved daughter Brünhilde before leaving her asleep on a rock surrounded by a magic fire. Mr. Terfel captured each of Wotan’s shifting emotions, his voice initially full of pathos and tenderness,  then soaring with ease over the orchestra with breathtaking power and beauty.
The audience, which gave Mr. Terfel another standing ovation, was rewarded with an unforgettable performance of Wagner’s “Evening Star,” accompanied mostly by BSO’s own new star, harpist Jessica Zhou. At this point in his career, Mr. Terfel can sing whatever, whenever, and with whomever he wants. The warm rapport he has with Mr. Levine was palpable. Mr. Terfel has recently attracted roles to suit his dark, brooding qualities. (He was the most poisonously pernicious Scarpia I can recall.)  Last year a Bryn Terfel CD was released with the great title “Bad Boys” featuring him as Mack the Knife, Mefistofele, Sportin’ Life from Porgy and Bess, Don Giovanni, and Sweeney Todd. Most music lovers would be happy to hear this incomparable singer do Good Guys or Bad Boys, classical or Broadway.  He’s got the voice and personality for all of them.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Not a Dull Moment From Camerata

November 1, 2010

Not a Dull Moment From Camerata

by Susan Miron

Anne Azema Conducts HUC and Camerata (Trobador photo)

“Vieni, Imeneo! Marriage & Music in the Italian Renaissance” on Sunday, October 31, was The Boston Camerata’s engaging season opener.  Conceived by its Music Director Emeritus Joel Cohen in 2008 and originally commissioned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the program was divided into five sections and performed without intermission. This was my first time hearing Boston Camerata, and I was enchanted. It seemed that most of the large audience in Harvard’s Memorial Church were among the legions of devoted Camerata fans. I soon found out why they loved this group.
Three sackbuts announced the concert’s beginning from the balcony behind the audience, and from then on, there was not a dull moment. The concert’s first section was “Invocation to Hymen,” which I later found out was the god of marriage and of weddings in Greek mythology. (I wish I had known that!) Included here was Claudio Monteverdi’s (1567-1643) Viene Imeneo that implores Hymen to bring tranquil days to the lovers, “driving away the shadows of torment an despair.”
Before each section the charismatic Anne Azéma, artistic director, mezzo-soprano, and when needed, conductor, was a charming guide to music and its history.
Part II: “1423: A Wedding Invitation from Rimini” was mostly devoted to Guillaume Dufay’s (1400-1474) florid Réveillez-vous. Part III: “The Virgin Bride” began with a moving and beautifully sung Gregorian chant and included several texts from “Song of Songs.”
Camerata’s “Marriage and Music” was compelling for its inspired choice of music and texts, its constantly shifting personnel and sites from which the music was emanating. Rarely would two pieces use the same singers or players, although each time the three sackbuts — kinder, gentler trombones —played, I would have been happy to spend the whole afternoon hearing them. Steven Lundahl (who also played shawm and recorder), Mack Ramsey, and Brian Kay were that good.

Carol Lewis, Salomé Sandoval, Anne Azéma sing a wedding song by Dufay (Trobador photo)

The sixteen Choral Fellows of the Harvard University Choir directed by Edward Jones were first heard from a space off stage to the right singing Antoine Brumel’s (c. 1460-c. 1512)  Sicut lilium inter spinas (“As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters”). Anne Azema sang several songs with great charm, accompanied by gamba and lute, played by Salome Sandoval, who doubled as excellent soprano. Regrettably, the lute was overpowered by the gamba; it was audible only when coupled by the smaller vielle, both played expertly by Carol Lewis, or alone with a singer.
Azema explained how marriage “worked” in upper-class Renaissance Italy: the bride and groom simply are peons to a goal. The songs gathered here, she explained, were like snapshots of their worries and joys. “What we think of as romance wasn’t there.” The bride was kept away from the world, not to be seen. “She is to remain untouched,” whereas the groom “can go out and enjoy himself.”  The young bride’s prayer by Adrian Willaert (c.1490-1562) with three singers and three sackbuts beseeches that “you may protect us from calamity.”
For each piece, the Camerata singers and instrumentalists, and eventually the Harvard singers, appeared in different permutations, each with different sounds and even personalities.

ODJB Wows the Crowd (Camerata Photo)

Often they would surprise the audience with sounds coming from different places off stage. The songs, composed some five hundred years ago mainly in North Italy, felt fresh and beguiling. The longest section Epthalamium (VI) involved the wedding feast, which once again began with a Gregorian chant featuring the excellent tenor Daniel Hershey followed by a yet another wonderful Canzona for sackbuts and cornetto, who appear a few minutes later in a lovely piece by Thomas Campion (1567-1620).  A highlight of this closing section was the impassioned plea by the great Claudio Monteverdi Si, ch’io vorrei morire (“Yes, Love, I wish to die, now that I kiss the beautiful mouth of my heart’s desire”), hypnotically delivered by five singers.
The official program (pre-encore) was all about joy and having a good time; everyone in the Camerata and Harvard group gave an exuberant performance. We had already experienced and gotten to know the singers and players in small ensembles, so to experience them en masse felt festive indeed. A good time was had by all, on and off-stage.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Terrific Two-Piano Team at Longy

November 4, 2010

Terrific Two-Piano Team at Longy

by Susan Miron

Four gems from the four-hand two piano repertoire were given a stellar workout at Longy School of Music on November 2. The two excellent pianists, Philip Liston-Kraft and Daniel Weiser, appeared under the aegis of Classicopia, of which Weiser is Artistic Director. “Two Piano Power,” as they titled it, was their second concert in the Boston area in five days. The other, at the Goethe Institute last Friday, featured music for two pianists at one piano.
The biographies of the evening’s pianists are more interesting than most. Weiser, most recently on the piano faculty of Dartmouth College, had finished the first year at Harvard Law School (where he was a classmate of President Obama) when he headed off to Peabody Conservatory and got a Doctorate in Piano. Polymath would be an understatement for describing Kraft, who holds an M.D. degree from Tufts University Medical School, is a graduate of Harvard Law School, and teaches German at Dartmouth in the Accelerated Language Program. His day job is Senior Associate in the Research Ventures and Licensing Office at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also an accomplished ballroom dancer.
The two pianists met years ago after Weiser saw Liston-Kraft’s note (on the Longy bulletin board) looking for a pianist for a two-piano concert at Harvard Musical Association. Twenty years later they met up again at Dartmouth, where they played together and realized they had found the ideal piano partner.
Tuesday’s concert began with Suite No. 1, Op. 15 by Anton Arensky, known, if at all, for his piano trio. The ebullient Weiser enthusiastically imparted background details of the composers and pieces, in lieu of program notes. An important Russian composition teacher whose his pupils included Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, Arensky nearly met the fate predicted by his own teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov: “He will soon be forgotten.” Not so here. The Suite is a charmer, with a jazzy first movement, a second movement full of glitter and more jazziness, followed by a lovely Polonaise.
Variations on a theme by Beethoven, Op. 35 by Camille Saint-Saëns, is constructed quite differently than Arensky’s Suite, in which the two piano parts can stand alone, (and thus prove satisfying to practice alone). Saint-Saëns, the more accomplished composer, has each pianist answer the other, like matching puzzle pieces. The music’s lines bounce back and forth between the two pianos, entertaining to watch as well as hear. There is a ghoulish funeral march, suitable for the season, and the all-but-obligatory Saint-Saëns fugue.
Franz Liszt’s wildly popular Hungarian Rhapsody received a excellent performance following intermission. Weiser noted, “I’m not sure Liszt ever imagined its comic possibilities,” then recounted some of the more than dozen cartoons which used this piece, ranging from Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, and Woody Woodpecker to the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races. What fun! How could Lizst NOT have seen the comic possibilities?
The program ended with Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2, Op. 17, a four-movement work recognizable throughout as this composer’s. Written in 1901, after the Second Piano Concerto and Cello Sonata, it also has many moments which sound like Arensky, his teacher. The second (of four) lyrical and romantic movement would melt the heart of any audience, and this one was beguiled. Weiser and Liston-Kraft, a terrific two-piano team, were clearly meant to play together.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Magical, Believable Petrushka

November 13, 2010

Magical, Believable Petrushka

by Susan Miron

Puppeteer Basil Twist (Leroy Door photo)

Basil Twist, nine puppeteers, and twin Russian-born pianists, Irina and Julia Elkina, presented an enthralling Petrushka at the Paramount Theater on Nov. 11. (The show continues through Nov. 21.) Co-sponsored by ArtsEmerson and the Celebrity Series of Boston, this ingenious production, commissioned in 2001, was the brainchild of Twist, a third-generation award-winning puppeteer. He was inspired by the famed 1911 Ballet Russe production created by Michel Folkine and danced by Vaslav Nijinsky.
The pianists, who have played together since the age of five (we never do find out their ages), based their two-piano arrangement of  Petrushka on Stravinsky’s four-hand version from 1947 and Grigoriy Korchmar’s handwritten arrangement for three movements. (The program lists the pianist/composer’s last name incorrectly as “Krochmar.” For those unfamiliar with Korchmar, he was born in Baltiysk in 1947. Although little-known outside his native Russia, he is a prominent figure in the musical life of St. Petersburg. A piece of his was played at a faculty recital at Longy last spring.
The two grand pianos were on opposite sides of a ten-foot-square frame which acted as both an unexpected screen and the location for this magical Petrushka. As the performance is a mere thirty-five minutes long, the evening began with an apt opener, Stravinsky’s lovely three-movement Sonata for Two Pianos, with an abstract “fantasia of puppetry.” I have heard this piece played far more dramatically by Roberto Poli and Sergey Schepkin at Jordan Hall in 2002; However, it was hard  to get a good sense of the balance as critics were assigned seats at the sides and near-back of the hall. The surprising element was the appearance inside the darkened frame of seemingly free-floating geometrical images that danced around, reshaping themselves one color at a time — yellow, turquoise, red, purple, blue. It was quite mystifying until the performance segued into  ”Petrushka,” and we realized the puppeteers in black velvet moving the puppets had been behind the moving of the shapes. It served as a enchanting prelude.

Duet between the Ballerina and the Moor (Leroy Door photo)

The two Elkinas switched pianos for Petrushka: Suite for Two Pianos. It worked well and was well played. However, I actually prefer the virtuosic one-piano version to the sister’s new arrangement and still love the orchestral version with its myriad colors best of all. From the moment the scene opened at the Shrove-Tide Fair, the audience was spell-bound. The three puppets — the Moor, the Ballerina and Petrushka — are magical. They (especially Petrushka) actually convince us that they are living creatures with all the emotions and passions of humans. Each of the three puppets/marionettes is controlled by three people, and their range of motion is astonishing. Petrushka, who falls in love with the Ballerina, flies and flits about, doubles over, is pursued by a huge bear claw and fangs, is killed by the Moor, then comes back to life in, of all places, the audience’s left side. Petrushka’s spirit, however tragic, is unstoppable; we know to love him from the moment he appears.
The four-foot-high Ballerina, however, often steals the show. As bone-thin and leggy as many ballerinas wish they could be, the Ballerina seems, physically, very close to human. There would seem nothing — except to love Petrushka — that she can’t do. The puppetry here is absolutely astonishing; I have never seen anything approaching it, even in puppet-loving Prague.
Both Czech and Japanese puppetry influence this production. Bunraku, probably less well known to Western audiences, has a thousand-year-old Japanese heritage that has evolved over the years; the puppets, around three-and-a-half feet tall, now seem more real. Originally operated by one person, they now are cleverly designed to be operated by three puppeteers, visible although shrouded in black.
Twist worked closely with the two pianists and was guided, he writes, by Stravinsky’s music. “It inspired… every fantastic image in my head, and now on stage. In many cases my understanding of the music has led to different characterizations and narrative action than the original production.” I loved this production, but hearing “Petrushka” in its many piano versions always feels to me like hearing it in black and white, so to speak. The color here came from the three puppets, the light show, and the Twist trademark wavy curtains. As said, the performance was fifty-five minutes long; I could have watched Basil Twist’s puppets all night.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Sir Simon Rattle and Musicians Give Their All

December 6, 2010

Sir Simon Rattle and Musicians Give Their All

by Susan Miron

Jordan Hall was only partially full for one of the season’s most exciting concerts, “Concert for the Cure” on Sunday night, Dec. 5. Although the concert featured two superstars, conductor Sir Simon Rattle and pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin, and had plenty of pre-concert press coverage, people might have stayed away because of the ticket prices ($100 and $150). The brainchild of flutist Julie Scolnik, who had breast cancer five years ago, this concert, presented by the Susan G. Komen organization, was meant “to raise funds and awareness in the fight against breast cancer.” Skolnick spoke eloquently about her time in the chemo chair, accompanied by music on her Ipod, which gave her hope through this ordeal.
If less than lucky in health, she was extremely lucky with her choice of friends, many of whom played in the orchestra. (Everyone involved, from Marc-André Hamelin to Sir Simon, volunteered their services). While subbing at BSO, she had befriended Sir Simon in the coffee room at Symphony Hall and renewed their friendship a few years later. When she mentioned her dream of this concert, he jumped at the opportunity to help out, but had only one day free, which was yesterday. For no fee, he drove up from NYC, conducted a three-hour rehearsal and a two-hour concert, then drove back for a 9:30 A.M. rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera Monday. Sir Simon is an unusually easy and expressive conductor to follow. Both before and after the concert, the players seemed ecstatic about the chance to work with him. It’s not often one sees so many seasoned players this elated. Sir Simon was the evening’s hero before he conducted a note.
The evening opened with one of Boston’s beloved new musicians, Marc-Andre Hamelin, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G major, K. 543, a favorite of Leonard Bernstein. There is, as those who know Mr. Hamelin’s playing and repertoire, nothing he cannot play brilliantly. For those who know him “merely” as a player of monstrously difficult repertoire, the surprise here was that he was a stellar player of Mozart — a model of clarity, intelligence, and beautiful scale work and voicing. It is always a privilege to hear this thoughtful pianist. Sir Simon, especially in the third movement with its catchy tunes and horn calls, seemed to be having a terrific time. It was a great collaboration.
Mahler’s gorgeous Adagietto from Symphony No. 5 for harp and strings has different meanings for many people. To harpists, it’s an audition piece; it is the heartbeat of the movement, and rhythmically tricky. Last night’s harpist, Boston Symphony’s Jessica Zhou, is another wonderful new musical citizen. She was placed towards the rear of the stage, but every note she played came through with poignancy and elegance. This was music for anyone’s Ipod, and aptly chosen for this program.
The Brahms Symphony No. 2 received a spectacular performance. The four horns, the BSO’s James Sommerville, Richard Sebring, Jason Snider and Eric Ruske, gave stunning performances. Sommerville’s solos were, as always, simply perfection. The trombones,  Stephen Lange (of the BSO), Ross Holcombe and Gabriel Langfur, were also excellent. (One wanted to know where the others usually played). The strings, especially the first violins,played beautifully, and BSO oboist John Ferillo was his customary superb self. Throughout the winds had impeccable intonation and the strings played with real beauty. For those who love Brahms 2, this was a performance not to be missed. I do not expect to hear a better one, ever.
Each of these pieces were played by pros or people about to be pros. I think the very rare opportunity to play for Sir Simon was surely an incentive to play unusually well. It seems unlikely he will soon be returning to the BSO, and this seemed extra sad given the response he elicited from these players. Conducting is far more than hand gestures and facial expressions and a good baton technique. The charismatic Sir Simon, whose conducting doesn’t draw attention to itself, had the orchestra produce breathtaking crescendos and playing of memorable musicianship. He produced amazing results, and his players certainly loved him last night. It was one of those concerts that both the too-small audience and the players will not soon, if ever, forget.
Besides the exorbitantly-priced tickets, there were a few things that could have been easily remedied. The “Concert for the Cure Orchestra” was filled with people from orchestras and chamber ensembles besides the BSO, and without adding a page to the program book, it would have been very helpful to know where many of these musicians play. Also, knowing (yesterday, for example) that attendance at this concert would be low, it would have been great to have made tickets available — to students, to anyone! — so that more than the center section would be filled. That so few people experienced this great concert is a real shame.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

 

Larget-Caplan Doing Everything Right

January 8, 2011

Larget-Caplan Doing Everything Right

by Susan Miron

Some thirty markedly enthused people gathered on Friday, January 7, at the small recital room at New School of Music in Cambridge to hear guitarist Aaron Larget-Caplan in a program that mixed well known and unknown pieces and composers. Larget-Caplan is in the beginning stages of what promise to be a good career. He’s doing everything right — making interesting CDs, commissioning and performing both classical and Spanish and Latin American music, often with a dancer, and playing very well.
Dressed all in black with a red tie, Larget-Caplan opened his program with J.S. Bach’s Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-Flat Major, BWV 998, originally titled Compositionen für die Laute, in E flat. Written at the time of Bach’s lute suites, it was probably performed on a lute-harpsichord. The fugue is longer than the other two movements combined, and like most Bach fugues, presents traps that can be most disheartening. As many performers know, opening with Bach may be great for the audience, but is always better if one had already rid oneself of nerves. Larget-Caplan, who played it in D Major, got through it with grace.
From the Quatre Pièces Brèves by Frank Martin (1890-1974) on, Larget-Caplan seemed more at ease (who wouldn’t be after performing a Bach fugue?) and his playing immediately became far more interesting and colorful. The program notes explained that these four lovely pieces were written in 1933 for guitarist Andrés Segovia who refused to play it (another idol goes up in flames). Martin then re-scored it for piano, calling it Guitarre. Kevin Siegfried’s (b. 1969) “Tracing a Wheel on Water” was commissioned by Larget-Caplan in 2003 and has had spectacular and deserved success since then. According to the program notes, it has been performed in over 50 concerts and is the title of one of Larget-Caplan’s CDs. It’s a hypnotic work, what the composer says “is a meditation on my experiences of the water’s surface… a manner in which flowing circles on the water’s surface envelop one another in a rhythm that is always new, yet never changing.” This hypnotic and beautifully written work was, for me, the highlight of a really interesting concert.
Elegie für die guitarre by J.K. Mertz (1806-1856) was, in guitar terms, a long piece, about ten minutes. A piece of great charm, it was just the right thing for a nasty January evening. At least two heads in the audience were contentedly bobbing along the whole piece; people seemed to be entering a state of total relaxation.
If so, they were awakened in the most seductive manner with the ever-famous Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999), here performed with piano accompaniment. Do most people know him for any other piece? This is yet another piece Segovia refused to play, as he did not approve of the rasqueados (flamenco strumming) of the first movement.  I admit, I did not look forward to hearing this colorful orchestral accompaniment in a keyboard reduction, as piano and plucked strings (harp and guitar) need a pianistic wizard to get the balance right. Luckily, Larget-Caplan had a terrific pianist, Kai-Ching Chang, about whom I cannot rave enough. The two musicians played superbly together, so the two (first and second) movements they played were like the most exciting of chamber music pieces. Chang might not be well known in Boston, but as a collaborative pianist she cannot be beat. The Rodrigo was full of excitement and passion; I felt as if I were transported to Seville. I’d hear it again in a heartbeat.
I have a new way of scoring concerts. 1), Would I see the performer or group again? Absolutely. 2), Did I like the evening enough to shell out hard cash for a CD? Reader, I bought two.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Fuse Classical Music Review: The BEMF's Impressive "Dido and Aeneas"

Classical Music, Featured, Music, Opera Add comments

Nov 282010

BEMF’s Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs have, once again, produced a work of impeccable and imaginative scholarship for a production that’s not only historically informed, but musically, dramatically, and visually entertaining.

Laura Pudwell performs the role of Dido in the BEMF's production of DIDO AND AENEAS. Photo: André Costantini

Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate. Presented by the Boston Early Music Festival. At New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA, through November 28.

By Susan Miron.
Henry Purcell’s (1659–1695) opera Dido and Aeneas has been so popular over the past 75 years that there have been nearly 50 commercial recordings. I grew up on the record featuring Dame Janet Baker—for me she is the perfect Dido. The record was about 50 minutes long.
Saturday night’s performance by the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) clocked in at about an hour longer with not a dull moment. The two co-directors of BEMF had added several pieces of Purcell’s music that fit in perfectly. This is the third chamber opera that the BEMF has produced since 2008; each has featured full costumes and elements of Baroque dance. Their 2009 production of Handel’s Acis and Galatea was a great success. And if the tumultuous applause at the end of last evening is any indication, the BEMF’s Dido and Aeneas falls in the same category.
The libretto by Nahum Tate is based on the story of Dido and Aeneas in the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. No one is really sure about early history of the work—much has disappeared. Only a libretto from an early performance survives. BEMF points out that “the earliest copies of the score come from at least 60 years after the work was composed, and lack the music for the original prologue as well as incidental music and dances indicated in the score.”
The first performance might—or might not have been—at a girls’ school in Chelsea, outside of London in the late 1680s.
BEMF’s Dido and Aeneas is the result of scrupulous scholarship and informed imaginative leaps. In a Boston Globe interview, BEMF’s co-director Stephen Stubbs admits that he sees this project “not only as a reconstruction but also as an attempt to jolt listeners out of their familiarity with a cherished favorite . . . If you think of it like a restorer of a painting, where there’s a corner missing, you can pretty much imagine what I did—try to make the corner feel as if it fits.”
One of the missing corners involves choosing music for the opening, which Stubbs found in one of Purcell’s many songs. Dance and movement are as integral to this performance as it was in the girls’ school in the 1680s that may have first produced this opera. Caroline Copeland and Carlos Fittante, the featured Baroque dancers, were particularly excellent. The many costumes—all recycled from other productions—were apt and often hilarious. The chamber ensemble, a string quartet and harpsichord, were led by the BEMF’s two co-directors, O’Dette and Stubbs, who were fabulous. O’Dette and Stubbs alternately strummed small, Baroque guitars and a very lengthy archlute and theorbo. Both renowned lutenists, they were the heart of the ensemble.

(l-r) Brenna Wells, Jason McStoots, José Lemos, and Carrie Henneman Shaw in BEMF's production of DIDO AND AENEAS. Photo: André Costantini

To create a more intimate atmosphere, a tapestry covers the back wall of Jordan Hall. As the program notes point out, Dido is less an opera than a “court masque, an exemplar of that unique blend of aural, visual, and intellectual spectacle that embodied the extravagantly self-reflexive ethos of the English court throughout the seventeenth century.”
Several singers were downright wonderful, but if there there were a prize for most entertaining, it would go to Jason McStoots, who, in his most memorable guise, wore a costume that featured a waist big enough to look like a table for two, out of which crept another person. McStoots, a tenor, sang exquisitely, as did Dido’s sister Belinda, played by an up and coming Baroque singer, Yulia Van Doren. The vocal ensemble, twenty people in all, sang with gusto.
For many people, Dido is all about Dido’s Lament, a.k.a. “When I am laid in earth,” one of the most wrenching arias in all of music. Here Dido, Queen of Carthage, realizes she has been abandoned her beloved, the Trojan hero Aeneas. As Dido sings this, one by one the other singers lower themselves to sitting positions, as if the whole world were collapsing around them—a brilliant idea.
This production’s Dido, Laura Pudwell, was, to my ears, disappointing, but to be fair she had some tough competition on CD. I have both Jesse Norman and particularly the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in my ears, and Pudwell’s singing, for me, lacks their evocation of raw despair, particularly when Dido sings out in her top register, “Remember me, but ah! forget my Fate!” then melts down to the floor. All the male singers, as well as Douglas Williams as Aeneas, are excellent.
BEMF’s O’Dette and Stubbs have, once again, produced a work of impeccable and imaginative scholarship for a production that’s not only historically informed, but musically, dramatically, and visually entertaining.

Fuse Classical Music Review: A Far Cry — 17 Strings Strong

Classical Music, Featured, Music Add comments

Dec 212010

There is no shortage in this town of chamber music groups trying to carve out a charismatic niche of their own. This seems to have come naturally to this high energy, highly likable ensemble.

A Far Cry. Can this group do no wrong?

By Susan Miron.
Seventeen strings strong, A Far Cry is that rare kind of musical group that appears to do everything right. As Chamber Orchestra in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, A Far Cry presented the last concert in the museum’s Tapestry Room on December 20. (For the next few months, concerts will be held at the Pozen Center at MassArt). The place was packed, partly because of the rare appearance of a bandoneón and guitar in Los Cuatros Estaciones Porteñas, a tango lover’s dream.
In their third plus year together, this youthful group has received plenty of praise. Although they appear all over the map, the leaderless and conductor-less group has made itself part of the Jamaica Plain and larger Boston community, donating proceeds from their concerts to homeless shelters and partnering with other non-profits such as the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The famed Orpheus Ensemble in New York began in much the same leaderless way 30 years ago but without the help of the Internet or YouTube.
There is no shortage in this town of chamber music groups trying to carve out a niche of their own to get media attention and audiences. This seems to have come naturally to this high energy, highly likable ensemble. I certainly don’t recall a group with this many players smiling at the sheer joy of music-making or one with such fervent audience and community support.
The program notes themselves were noteworthy, although I had to resort to the internet to find out they are the work of their “mysterious, elusive musicologist-at-large” Kathryn Bacasmot. They began: “This is your shovel. The music is your earth. Dig in.” It went on, gratefully for only one paragraph, in a heady, New Age monologue about obsession, orbiting, gravitational pull, life pulsing in time to the music of the spheres, and circular orbits. Remarkably, she went on to write excellent program notes for each piece. She should let herself be acknowledged. Her notes contributed to the enjoyment of the afternoon.

The star of the concert: a bandoneón, a smallish black accordion.

Cantus in Memorium Benjamin Britten by the well-known, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) opened the program. Pärt yearned to meet Britten personally after he began to appreciate the purity of Britten’s music, but Britten died before this came to pass. To acknowledge the composer’s grief, Cantus opens and closes with silence, executed exquisitely with the 17 players taking visible breaths in unison. A ringing bell hit by a mallet chimes in at intervals. The piece becomes more intense and darker, with the focus shifting to the three cellists and two bass players. Then, after more luscious string playing and more chimes, silence.
Edward Elgar’s (1857–1934) lovely Serenade for Strings, first heard in 1892 , let the strings show off their impressive control over dynamics. These seventeen Criers (as they refer to themselves) knew exactly how to build a crescendo as if they were a quartet. What strikes a listener is how this group, whose members play standing (except for the cellos) and reseat themselves after each piece so no one person gets to hog the limelight as concertmaster, plays as if they’ve been together far more than three or four years. They play with youthful exuberance and professional panache.
The Criers took J. S. Bach’s (1865–1750) much loved Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, BWV 1048, at a brisk tempo. Joined by harpsichordist Matthew Hall, they gave an energetic performance, which I, at least, enjoyed far more than performances on historically “correct” instruments.
The highlight of the afternoon was Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla’s (1921–1992) Los Cuatros Estaciones Porteñas, which involved Jason Vieaux, guitar, and Julien Labro playing bandoneón , a smallish, black accordion, which he seemed to be holding on his knee. This was the world premiere of an arrangement for guitar, bandoneón, and strings by the bandoneónist Juilien Labro. Piazzola has had a resurgence of popularity as The Go-To Composer for Tangos (In his tango CD, Yo Yo Ma helped to spread his posthumous fame).
Divided into seasons, starting with summer, Verano Portena: Allegro, these Four Seasons are a workout for all the players, especially Mr. Labro, who was busy hitting his bandoneón , getting all sorts of vibrato out of it, and playing it for all it was worth. The guitar was—and needed to be—miked, and when he finally got some licks, he was very good. Before these sometimes jazzy, sometimes lushly romantic four seasons were done, nearly everyone had had a solo or had done some fun riffs with either the guitar or bandoneón. The Criers handled tempo changes and every other challenge that these pieces presented with flair and a lot of smiling faces. These players clearly love what they do.

Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla on the bandoneón

The guitar and bandoneón were given an encore piece, “Antonia” from Secret Story by Pat Metheny, which gave Mr. Labro the opportunity to, unexpectedly, blow into his instrument, which sounded like a giant harmonica mixed with a soprano saxophone. It had the atmosphere of a private jam session.
Finally, the slightly exhausted audience was treated to Musica Celestis by Aaron Jay Kernis (b. 1960), a perfect companion piece to the opening Cantus by Pärt. The program notes here get a little spooky—they talk about “the endless interlocking relationships of every key signature by the interval of a 5th, throwing a lasso out into space, catching a little of the infinite within bar lines dotted with notes.” There was great stillness and a hypnotic—yes, scary—atmosphere: the Criers playing very loudly on up-bows and quietly on down-bows, seeming to put their bows down very slowly, then playing a note, another note, until it became a quiet tune.
A Far Cry can play anything and play it really well. They seem to really like each other, and their love of music is palpable. Each of the concertmasters was terrific, moreover they got me to like music I imagined I would heartily dislike.

Classical Music Sampler: January 2011

Classical Music, Coming Attractions, Featured, Music Add comments

Dec 272010

Boston Symphony Orchestra violinist Arabella Steinbacher

I had always thought of January as a musically quiet month, but looking over the concerts I wanted to see, I realized how it is at least as great a month for concertgoing as any other in Boston. I am betting each of the concerts I listed here will be superb.
By Susan Miron.
January 6–8: The Boston Symphony Orchestra under Maestro James Levine presents a compelling program of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. At Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, MA, at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.
January 8: The extraordinary Russian-American pianist Sergey Schepkin performs a fascinating program of music by Bach (Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903), Brahms (6 pieces of Op. 118), Schubert/Liszt, and Liszt. At the Kalliroscope Gallery, Groton, MA, at 8 p.m. on Saturday.
January 14: The Cantata Singers continue their year long exploration of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams and composers who influenced him. The program includes the rarely heard Riders to the Sea, a one-act “music drama” by Vaughan Williams based on the eponymous play by the Irish author John Millington Synge. The concert also includes songs of Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar, Gerald Finzi, and the season’s star, Ralph Vaughan Williams. At New England Conservatory’s (NEC’s) Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street, Boston, MA, at 8 p.m. on Friday.
January 20: Harpsichordist Charles Sherman plays seven sonatas (K. 268, 109, 496, 201, 89, 119, 120) by the ever-inventive Domenico Scarlatti. At the First Church in Boston, 66 Marlborough St., Boston, MA, at 12:15 p.m. on Thursday. Donations accepted.
January 22: The Boston Chamber Music Society presents its Winter Festival 2011, an afternoon of music for four hands/ two pianos (Randall Hodginson and Mihae Lee) along with the superb baritone David Kravitz. There will be music by Satie, Ravel, Poulenc, and Stravinky, including the wonderfully savage Le Sacre de Printemps. At MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, Cambridge, MA, at 4 p.m. on Saturday. There will be a forum at 1:30 p.m. featuring Jonathan McPhee, Music Director of the Boston Ballet, and Ann Allen, a lecturer at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Pianist Jeremy Denk is performing one of the most challenging programs of the season.

January 23: Pianist Jeremy Denk (known to many for his intellectually probing website, think denk) performs as part of the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum Sunday Concert Series. Denk is playing a fascinating and immensely difficult program, J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 and George Ligeti’s Etudes, Book One and Two. This will no doubt be among the most intellectually challenging concerts of the season. His performance, as well as others in the Gardner’s spring series, will be at the Pozen Center at MassArt, Tetlow Street, Boston, MA, at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday.
January 23: Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform with guest pianist Jonathan Bass. A great program that includes music by Peter Liebermann (Sonata for flute and piano, Op. 23) and Mozart (Quintet in E-flat for piano and winds, K.452), as well as Stravinsky’s L’Historie du Soldat (complete with narration). At NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA, at 3 p.m. on Sunday.
January 27–29: The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), under conductor Christoph von Dohnányi presents more Ligeti—the Double Concerto for Flute and Oboe, played by BSO flutist Elizabeth Rowe and hugely admired oboist John Ferrillo. The program features another beautiful concerto as well, Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4, K. 218 with violin soloist Arabella Steinbacher, and finally, Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony #7. At Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, MA, at 8 p.m. on Thursday and Saturday and at 1:30 p.m. on Friday.
January 28: The Boston debut of the Philhamonia Quartett Berlin, which will perform quartets by Shostakovich, Beethoven, and Schubert (the gorgeous “Death and The Maiden”). Presented by the Celebrity Series of Boston at NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA, at 8 p.m. on Friday.

The Borromeo String Quartet are working their way through Beethoven. Photo: Liz Linder

January 30: The Gardner Sunday Concert Series presents the Borromeo String Quartet in Part III of their traversal of the Complete Beethoven String Quartets. For this concert they are playing the three glorious Op. 59 Quartets, often referred to as the Razumovsky Quartets. If you’ve never heard Beethoven quartets before, try to hear these; there’s no better introduction to Beethoven or his quartets. This performance, as well as others in the Gardner’s spring series, will be at the Pozen Center at MassArt, Tetlow Street, Boston, MA, at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday.

For Those Who Love British Choral Music

Fuse Classical Music Review: For Those Who Love British Choral Music

Classical Music, Featured, Music Add comments

Jan 162011

The only thing more unforgettable than this sung story of woe was the eloquent singing of Lynn Torgove. Vaughan Williams could have hoped for no better singer or instrumental ensemble.

Singer Lynn Torgove

The Cantata Singers. At Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street, Boston, MA, January 14.
By Susan Miron.
The history of British classical music is a strange one. If its recent past becomes more familiar to Boston’s classical music lovers this year, it is certainly the doing of conductor David Hoose and his troupe, The Cantata Singers and Ensemble.
Their focus this year has been on the compositions and on the composers influenced by Ralph (pronounced Rafe) Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). Their third Vaughan Williams focused program took place in Jordan Hall on Friday night. The evening’s first part, David Hoose’s 40-minute talk, was as interesting as the musical portion of the evening.
Hoose is a busy conductor (Collage New Music, Director of Orchestral Activities at Boston University, etc.), and if he speaks to his musicians with half the enthusiasm he spoke to those at the pre-concert lecture, he must be immensely inspiring. His enthusiasm is extraordinary; it is as if he were sharing an important secret he could no longer keep to himself.
The secret is the odd story of British music compared to that of the continent, most importantly Germany. Frankly, most of the composers Hoose discussed are just names, if that, even to professional musicians. He pointed out that there has been a long history of disdain in both Germany and the United States for British music, with admiration reserved for only a few pieces, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams’s luscious “The Lark Ascending” for Violin and Orchestra and his “The Wasps,” while generally neglecting the choral music.
Hoose believes that, after a chain of great English choral composers (Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, and Purcell), English music “went to sleep.” Then, centuries later, a renaissance of English music began with performances of “a few stunning orchestral works” by Edward Elgar—Enigma Variations (1899) and The Dream of Gerontius (1900)—followed by Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony (1909), Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), and A London Symphony (1913). There were other massive orchestral works contributing to the English awakening that would, in turn, “shake the resistance of the most dedicated Germanophile.”
But the evening’s music and certainly much of the music of the English revival sprung from local church choirs, madrigal groups, and community choruses. Vaughan Williams and his close friend composer Gustav Holst were deeply interested in the music, particularly the folk songs, that grew from British soil. Singing was indispensable to this renaissance of English music then, as it continued to be through the twentieth century.

Oboist Peggy Pearson — she produces an extraordinary sound.

Hoose posits that what makes a sound “English” is “a velvet kind of fog.” He feels that English a cappella singing has “a freedom, a natural declamation of the text going back to William Byrd and Henry Purcell.” Well, that’s a lot to live up to, and the program’s first half, made up of seven songs for unaccompanied chorus by Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar, Gerald Finzi, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, were very enjoyable indeed.
Vaughan Williams’s “Three Shakespeare Songs” (two from The Tempest and “Over Hill, Over Dale” from A Midsummer’s Night Dream“) were great fun, as was his “Loch Lomond,” a Scottish folksong with the familiar refrain “O you’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.” “I love my love” was a Cornish folksong, wonderfully arranged by Holst, with its touching text sung by women: “I love my love because I know my love loves me!”
The Cantata Singers are fortunate to perform alongside of some of Boston’s best instrumentalists. Oboist Peggy Pearson already appeared this season as the soloist in RVW’s 1944 Oboe Concerto, but when Pearson plays as beautifully as she did in Riders to the Sea (1936), Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 35-minute—and only—opera, you can lose sense of everything outside of her sound—she’s that extraordinary.

Irish playwright J. M. Synge

Riders is set to a tragic drama by the Irish playwright J. M. Synge’s play (1909). Because of the short length of this music-drama, which Vaughan Williams called Riders, it has received relatively few performances, and that is unfortunate.
Synge’s (best known for his play Playboy of the Western World) sorrowful tale centers on Maurya, sung by Lynn Torgove, a mother who has lost four of her sons to the sea, along with six other characters, including two sailors. Not at all dissonant, Riders is built on triads from different tonal spheres, which can, as Hoose puts it, “give you sea sickness.” The story chronicles the inexorable pull of the sea for the men of the family until none are left alive.
The singers stand in the back of the small orchestra, not always a strong choice acoustically speaking. A wind machine acts as the drafty pull of the sea, which gobbles up Maurya’s family piece by piece. The only thing more unforgettable than this sung story of woe was the eloquent singing of Torgove. Vaughan Williams could have hoped for no better singer or instrumental ensemble.