Outside Perspective

Mozart's Requiem or a Requiem for Mozart? - David DeAngelo

That's how Druckenbrod of the P-G began his preview of this week's concert.  

And depending on whether one is looking for the former or the latter, one may come away with different opinions on Honeck's setting, though I would amend Andy's query into this:

Was it Mozart's Requiem or a requiem for Mozart using Mozart's Requiem?

First off let's set down some context.  The texts of the Roman Catholic Mass can be divided into two classes: those texts that more or less is constant regardless of the liturgical day (the Ordinary) and those texts that change according to the liturgical day (the Proper).  And these can then be divided into those texts that are sung and those that are spoken.

So to musicologists (a shiftless, reprobate band of ne'er-do-wells and scalawags if ever there was one) the mass movements usually studied are those from the Ordinary that are sung:

1. Kyrie
2. Gloria  
3. Credo 
4. Sanctus 
5. Agnus Dei 

On the other hand, the Requiem Mass (Missa pro defunctis), according to my old red HAH-vuhd Dictionary of Music (p725):

...differs from the normal Mass chiefly in that it includes not only the items of the Ordinary (Kyrie, Santus, Agnus Dei) but also, and in fact more prominently, those of the Proper (Introit, Gradual, etc).

The Mass gets its name from the first word of the first line of it's introit ("Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine," "Grant them eternal rest, O Lord") and its history goes all the way back to the 15th century.  The earliest extant example is from the great Franco-Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem (c 1410-1497), though a previous (and now lost) Requiem has been attributed to at least equally as great Guillaume DuFay (1397-1474).

So what of this piece?  This performance?  As Kanny of the Trib wrote:

Poignant circumstances surround Mozart's composition of the Requiem. Because of the mysterious nature of the commission Mozart received in July 1791 -- from a stranger dressed entirely in black who would not identify himself in any way -- the composer believed he was writing it for his own death. In fact, he was working on it while on his deathbed and left it unfinished.

And of Honeck's setting?  Back to Druckenbrod:

Like an architect who turns conventional wisdom on its head, Honeck sought to "complete" the spirit of the Requiem, by surrounding the fragment with music and texts on the subject of death. 

The program of Honeck's "Requiem: Mozart and Death in Music and Words" slightly resembled the outline of a funeral mass with bells, chant and biblical readings, but Honeck was going for an "impression" of death's meaning both to Mozart (in tender letter to his father) and to us (in poems about the Holocaust by Nelly Sachs and local student Matt May).

With this next rhetorical question, Andy hits the nail on the head:

When is the last time you heard a conductor have the conviction and the chutzpah to mess around with the likes of Mozart?

While he was thrilled at the attempt, I found myself wondering during the performance (and let me say right now that it was a great performance - of that there is no question) whether it was necessary to re-frame Mozart's great work in such a way.  Indeed, Andy touches on the issue a few paragraphs later: 

Textually, I had some issues. While Western society downplays our relationship with death like it did in Mozart's time, medieval times or earlier, I hardly think we are out of touch with it. Death is the ultimate personal affair, and everyone faces it differently, then or now.

I take Honeck's point that death has become so unfamiliar to us that we're terrified of it and that it was much more a part of life in Mozart's time: on the screens flanking the stage we read before the music started that five siblings of Mozart died as well as four of his six 6 children.  But while we have developed medicines to cure many diseases, we now have the means to commit genocide.  If the inclusion of the poetry of Nelly Sachs and Matt May are any indication however, we are all very well acquainted with the fact that death awaits us all.  Just not in the way Mozart was.  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But perhaps I missed the point.  To re-frame Tom Lehrer into my own mid-life crisis balding paunchy graying at the temples mode, "It's a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age he'd already been dead 11 years."

So what do I know?

Lunch With Lithgow - David DeAngelo

On Thursday, I got to chat by phone with John Lithgow, the narrator of this week's concert.  From the PSO website:

Music Director, Manfred Honeck, presents his personal version of Mozart’s Requiem where he imagines what the Mass of Mozart’s funeral could have been like. The performance features a dramatic and theatrical treatment, including church bells, Gregorian Chant and readings from Mozart’s letters to his father and passages from the Bible. The setting is Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral at the time of Mozart’s death. The all-star cast includes John Lithgow, narrator.

The date being important as today (December 4) is the anniversary of Mozart's death.

Of Mozart, Lithgow said up front that he died far too young.  Of death, he talked of Honeck's idea for the concert.  Death, he said, was far more familiar in the late 18th century.  For example, Mozart and his wife Constanze had 6 children, 4 of whom died before Mozart's own death in 1791.  Death was far more a part of life than it is now, far less terrifying as well.

Lithgow went on to say that he entire concert is, in effect, all of a piece.  The concert opens with Beethoven Opus 62, the Coriolan Overture.  More of the Braufnel's Te Deum follows.  The big piece, of course, is the Requiem.

It's Honeck's meditation on death and the blessedness of life.

That being said, Thursday was also the day I, your humble blogger scribe, introduced the Emmy and Tony winning, Oscar-nominated Lithgow to the Primanti's sandwich.  At the tail end of our chat, I asked him if, while he's in town, he partakes in the local cuisine, notably the sandwich with the fries and coleslaw stuffed inside.

The already perky Lithgow perked up some more, "What?  I'd never heard of that!  How can I get one of those right now?"  I'll end this with a quote from the man himself:

"Today's the day Lithgow tried Primanti's"

Glad to be of service.

Zoroaster and the PSO - David DeAngelo

It's good to be back blogging for the PSO.  Last time, I was lucky enough to hear Dana Fuchs at the Point and Mahler 2 at Heinz Hall within a few minutes of each other.

This time it's Richard Danielpour, Mozart and Richard Strauss.  Luckily, there's a thread connecting the music performed tonight - from the evening's program:

Zoroaster, the founder of one of the world's earliest monotheistic religions connects two of the works on this weekend's program: Composer of the Year Richard Danielpour's Concerto for Orchestra (Zoroastrian Riddles) Part I draws its inspiration from Mozart's dual interests in the popular eighteenth-century pastime of riddling and Zoroaster as the emblem of ancient wisdom.  Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra is inspired by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche's colossal treatise of the same name.

The band, conducted by the Latvian Andris Nelsons (who, by the way, turns 31 on Wednesday. Apsveicu dzimšanas dienā, Maestro.), was cookin'.  From the tuning pitch to the end of the applause it was a great evening of some great music.  Indeed the applause at the end of the concert lasted long enough that I suspect it gave Andy Druckenbrod (who usually scoots out the door just as the clapping begins) enough time to make it back to his music-critic desk at the P-G before all the clapping ended at Heinz Hall.  On the downside, I did notice that Nelsons seemed at too many times to be waving at the players more than actually, you know, conducting them.  But I digress, it didn't matter much - the band still sounded great.

The Danielpour was a fine piece (though actually it was just two movements from the work - something that confused both Druckenbrod and his opposite number at the Trib, Mark Kanny).  Clear distinct instrumental tone colors and a driving rhythmic propulsion reflect a composer in deep deep control of the orchestrational forces he so easily musters. 

The Mozart concerto, with it's solo part played throughout with a full round tone by Stephan Jackiw was, like most Mozart, simply lovely.  On a completely unrelated note, could someone please sit Mr Jackiw down and feed him?  The man's thin.  Reed-thin.  Flagpole-thin.  Standing-sideways-he-could-easily-hide-behind-his-violin-case-thin.  That thin.  Just a few donuts a week should do the trick.  Maybe some Ice Cream.  Better yet, both.  Still, he sounded great.  His well-received encore, the prelude from the E-Major Partita (BWV 1006) by Bach, was outstanding.  Remarking on the encore, Mark Kanny gushed:

The cleanliness of his playing is remarkable, with Bach's music showcasing an impeccable bow arm.

See for yourself from this youtube clip from a performance last April in Seoul South Korea.

Then there's the Strauss.  Jeebus, what a piece.  We all know it (or at least its opening gestures) from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey but it's much more than that.  It's Strauss commenting on Nietsche who was recasting Zoroaster, that ancient Iranian mystic.

A word or two on the Übermensch might be in order.  What is it?  The literal translation is "overman" but that sounds a little too clunky in English.  A less literal translation might be "Superman", but that's a little too Kryptonian-refugee in American.  Perhaps we should just leave it as "Übermensch" and find a good definition in usage.  A good place to start might be here: 

Nietzsche, informed in part by a misreading of evolutionary theory, perceived a next step in humanity's journey. He believed that this next step would be the appearance of the Übermensch or overman. The purpose of the Übermensch was to overcome the man, not externally, but internally. He would literally be more than man. This Übermensch would be an artist, scholar, lover, and philosopher. He would do what most people only dream of doing. He would test himself and his vision against the strength of the world.

More than that, though, the Übermensch would overcome the need for God, which Nietzsche saw as a dead concept. Unlike normal men, who need the fear of an external authority, the Übermensch would be a law unto himself. He would decree his morality and enforce it on himself. He would be a self-contained moral authority. This is at the very core of what the Übermensch is all about. Nietzsche was primarily a moral and social philosopher and his Übermensch was a creation almost entirely directed at moral and social questions.

Whether that morality is Nietzsche's will to power or something else has always eluded me - like much of Nietzsche.  He was, as far as I can tell aiming towards a new morality, casting off the old one in the process.

There's another thread between pieces, as well.  Danielpour referenced Mozart's love of riddles and titled his work "Zoroastrian Riddles."  There's a "riddle" connection to the Strauss as well as we read from the quickly-scooted Druckenbrod:

The concert featured a work examining Nietzche's "world-riddle" of life -- Richard Strauss' "Also sprach Zarathustra" -- and also Richard Danielpour's Concerto for Orchestra, "Zoroastrian Riddles." Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5, with its mysterious Turkish intrusion, landed in-between [emphasis added.].

What is this "world riddle"?  As far as I can tell, it's the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything (though its answer probably isn't 42).  Of course, like Ives' Unanswered Question, it remains unanswered (unanswerable?) by the end of the piece.

In the end it's less about Zoroaster himself or even about Nietzche's Zarathustra (the book or the Übermensch) as it is about Strauss' reaction to the book.  Indeed, he's quoted as saying:

I did not intend to write philosophical music or to portray in music Nietzsche's great work....The whole symphonic poem is intended as an homage to Nietzsche's genius....

Again much of Nietzsche eludes me.  Perhaps it's the fact that I am reading him in English rather than German.  Perhaps I am not smart enough.  Perhaps I am forever put off by the mustache.

Mahler - David DeAngelo

What can one say about an absolutely great performance of absolutely great music? 

It was great.  Absolutely great.  It was stunning, in fact.

So stunned that I have no idea where to begin (even one day later) - so let's talk about Dana Fuchs instead.

I noticed sometime last week that Fuchs was singing at the Three Rivers Arts Festival.  As my wife is a fan, we planned on hitting the festival in order to see her performance.  That was before we learned that the only tickets available for the Mahler were for the same evening as Fuchs' show.  What would it be like to quick-step from Dana Fuchs to Gustav Mahler?  Stunning.  It would be absolutely stunning.

After catching a bite to eat (me shoveling down a plate of shrimp fried rice while the wife had a falafel), we made our way over to the Dollar Bank Stage where Fuchs was just beginning what was to be an hour-long set.  Dressed in her "Sadie" clothes (and if you don't get the reference, go see Across The Universe), with swayving hair and ambulant cleavage, she sang and jumped and commanded a stage far too small for her voice or her talent. 

And the band cooked.  The band with the formidable Fuchs was tight and rhythmically multi-layered despite being only a trio.  The guitarist knew his way around the fingerboard and the well-miked drums produced a discernible thump thump thump in the chest throughout the music.  The bass player, while holding down the changes, played them into a melodic role easily equal to the rest of the band.  Each part great.  The whole, greater still.

The most fitting song of her set had to be, for me at least, Bible Baby.  In her introduction to the song, Fuchs told the story of how, as a disappointed teenager leaving her intolerant church to join one more open, she was encouraged to sing by a woman in the choir who told her,

Sometimes you just gotta let momma music take over.

The song, one of deep hope in the face of life's deep struggles, begins with these lines,

Mama's first baby, barely two
Daddy needed the bottle more than you
Praise the Lord - Hallelujah - you're alive!

With each setback, each disappointment, the message is the same: Praise the Lord, Hallelujah - you're alive! 

Ok now we can talk about the Mahler.

Kanny of the Trib said the performance "unfolded with exceptional breath" while Druckenbrod of the P-G (who sat merely 6 rows ahead of us) said:

Mahler's writing and orchestration is so strong that it can prop up many a mediocre performance. However, when a conductor with a vision and performers with grace and ability connect as they did last night, the work gains an ineffable glow.

Mahler scholar Henry-Louis de la Grange describes the "program" of the symphony this way:

For Mahler, writing a symphony was tantamount to expressing 'the inner aspect' of his 'whole life', of 'constructing a world with all the technical means at my disposal'. As a result, it was necessary to facilitate access to this world for unprepared listeners. It was in this spirit that he once again drew up several different, but essentially similar, programmes for the Second Symphony. In the first movement, the 'hero' of the symphony is buried after a long struggle with 'life and destiny'. He casts a backward glance at his life, first at a moment of happiness (depicted in the second movement) and then at the cruel hurly-burly of existence, the 'bustle of appearances' and the 'spirit of disbelief and negation' that had seized hold of him (Scherzo). 'He despairs of himself and of God. [...] Utter disgust for every form of existence and evolution seizes him in an iron grip, tormenting him until he utters a cry of despair.'

In the fourth movement, 'the stirring words of simple faith sound' in the hero's ears and hold out the promise of light. As for the final movement: 'The horror of the day of days has come upon us. The earth trembles, the graves burst open, the dead arise and march forth in endless procession. The great and the small of this earth, the kings and the beggars, the just and the godless, all press forward. The cry for mercy and forgiveness sounds fearful in our ears. The wailing becomes gradually more terrible. Our senses desert us, all consciousness dies as the Eternal Judge approaches. The Last Trump sounds; the trumpets of the Apocalypse ring out. In the eerie silence that follows, we can just barely make out a distant nightingale, a last tremulous echo of earthly life. The gentle sound of a chorus of saints and heavenly hosts is then heard: "Rise again, yes, rise again thou wilt!" Then God in all His glory comes into sight. A wondrous light strikes us to the heart. All is quiet and blissful. Behold: there is no judgement, no sinners, no just men, no great and no small; there is no punishment and no reward. A feeling of overwhelming love fills us with blissful knowledge and illuminates our existence.'

It was a huge orchestra - seventeen winds, twenty-five brass, seven percussionists, two harps, an organ, and by the composer's command "the largest possible contingent of strings."  Then there's the chorus.  Druckenbrod numbers them at 150.  I trust him.  He wears glasses.  And then there are two soloists.  I didn't think they could fit anyone else on the stage.

It's amazing to me how Mahler, given the huge orchestrational forces he had marshalled, could still produce at times some of the quietest music I'd ever heard.  From a brass section playing off stage (in effect using the stage's walls as a mute) to the two harps playing alone, the quiet quiet parts were barely audible.  And the loud sections were, well you get the picture.  In between there are swatches of orchestrational color not usually heard elsewhere.

The piece has been called "80 minutes of anguished, ultimately triumphant speculation on the meaning of life" and I think that that's just about right.  Beyond the details of Mahler's program, (where the agnostics of the world - and I count myself among them - are, of course, free not to accept its theology) the fact we can sit there and hear such deep beauty regardless of our own personal speculations shudders my spine.

One of music's aspects that is forever a mystery to me is how it wields such power over us, the humans in the seats.  Don't mistake me, I am grateful that it does, but with only 12 tones (given the musical language we're discussing right now) and a handful of gestures, it's a mystery how it can focus our attention like nothing else.  And it's possible to spend a life time fully immersed in it with little fear of boredom or fatigue.  Perhaps Schopenhaur was right, as it has nothing to represent, perhaps music represents nothing but the Will of the universe itself.  It is one of the joys of living as it is at the heart of experiencing life.

Sometimes you just gotta let momma music take over.

Praise the lord.  Hallelujah - you're alive!

Beethoven, Mozart and (again) Beethoven - David DeAngelo

Before I start on tonight's concert (which was great, by the way) I gotta say one thing:  I LOVE getting to concerts early.  It doesn't happen often and it's not like the evening is ruined by showing up on time, but there's something special about watching musicians get ready.  It's like when you're early enough to a ballgame to catch some batting practice.  On the one hand, it's just the warm up and nothing important is happening but on the other you can tell something important is going to take place nevertheless.

Owing to our seats in the "Family Circle" section, my wife and I were able to look down upon the band assembling.  A sampling from Saturday Night:

• A cellist (whatzizname - the one who's a dead ringer for The Amazing Randi), sauntering over to his friend the timpanist for a nice chat,
• The First Chair Trumpet banging out some snippets of the ending to the Egmont,
• The Horn and Wind players separately going over some parts last minute - stacked, aleatorically speaking, in a way that only Charles Ives or John Cage could love.

Until the time when the hall lights go down and the oboe pitches the A440, it's a wonderful peek into a different frame of mind.  The men in White Tie, the women in Black Dress waiting for the beginning of the concert to arrive.  The buzz of anticipation is ever-present.

We'd made it downtown with a few hours to spare.  We thought we'd walk around the Arts Festival - where, let's all be honest, there easily has to be half as many tattoos/body piercings as there are overall patrons.  This is NOT to say, of course, that half the crowd was inked and pierced - just that those who were, were inked and pierced alot. 

Not a big deal.  Though in retrospect, I have to admit to feeling a bit, um, under-decorated.  But then again I am old and dottering and thus this is more or less expected from men of my time and place.

Back to the music.  Of this week's concerts, The Trib's Mark Kanny wrote:

Artistic diversity is usually thought of as contrasting works from different times, cultures and styles. Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony take a different tack at this week's subscription concerts, showing that works from the same period and place can provide just as stimulating and rewarding a concert experience. Maybe more so.

All of the music performed Thursday afternoon at Heinz Hall, and which will be repeated tonight and Saturday evening, was composed within the span of a quarter century in Vienna, Austria. It was the high tide of Viennese classicism led by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven.

While I think he's right (of course, he's right - he's Mark frickin' Kanny!), there are some big differences between the classicisms of Mozart and of Beethoven.  The danger here is that it's too easy to generalize such things so much as to render them completely empty of any real validity.  That being said, perhaps a careful generalization is in order.  Between Mozart and Beethoven the musical imagination of Europe markedly shifts from High Enlightenment to Early Romanticism.  In Mozart, we find Voltaire's Enlightenment at its fullest flower, a human mind delighting and reveling in the exuberant exercise of its own intelligence.  In Beethoven there is struggle.  There is always struggle in Beethoven.  As if newly recognizing our own unnoticed dark corners, Beethoven is at a constant struggle with the shadows our intelligence can't so easily comprehend. 

The music of this evening is evidence of that.

I agree with Druckenbrod of the P-G that the Honeck's tempos in the Egmont were hardly what one would call slow.  But, he writes:

They accentuated the drama of the piece that honors a real-life hero, the 16th-century Flemish Count of Egmont, who fought for freedom against the Spanish and was beheaded for it. (Beethoven actually symbolized it with an abrupt stroke by the violins.)

But some nobility was lost in the heightened moments that were almost noisy in Honeck's hands. The horns, however, were wonderfully rustic in the coda, and the strings gained a rich timbre.

I think he's missing something.  As James R. Oestreich pointed out a decade ago: 

The overture...brilliantly evokes the defiant strength of its hero, who is modeled after a 16th-century warrior executed for his role in the fight to free the Netherlands from Spanish dominion. Beethoven's heaven-storming conclusion unmistakably proclaims the ultimate victory of the cause to which Egmont has given his life.

This is serious, stirring, restorative music, as was recognized in Munich in 1972, when the Munich Philharmonic presented it as the keynote of a memorial service on the day after the killings in the Olympic Village.

The first thing I think about the piece is its nearly imperceptible shifts from minor to major - from dark and brooding at the beginning to bright and triumphant at the end.  The tempos, to me at least, fit the struggle and I can't say that any "nobility" was lost.  To the contrary.

Soloist in the Beethoven, Violin Concerto Frank Peter Zimmermann, commanded the room the moment he started playing, building the form like any good carpenter should.  And the Prague.  What can you say about a late Mozart symphony that hasn't already been said about any masterpiece ever?

One perk for this old trumpeter to sitting above the band and looking down is that I could better see the hardware George Vosburgh and co was using.  A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to chat with him about his trumpets and he said that for Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart they played Vortuba rotary valve trumpets.  That was certainly the case last night and it was nice to see what they looked like as well as what they sounded like.

Strauss, Mozart and Beethoven - David DeAngelo

Outside, the Pirates were beating the Reds.  Inside, the PSO was playing the heck out of three masterworks; Tod und Verklärung of Richard Strauss, The D-minor Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman, soloist) by Mozart, and the Beethoven 7^th Symphony.

Stunning.  Stunning performance.  From the first note to the last.  Just stunning.

It started with what must be be assumed was a subtle homage to both the musique concrete of the 20^th century AND the Baroque canonical counterpoint of the Renaissance.  Here's what happened: The audio of WQED's Jim Cunningham announcing to the audience to turn off their cell phones was played twice, with one "voice" over-lapping the other at an interval of a second or so - an electronic two voice canon at the unison!

Impressive.  Eclectic.  And kinda subversive, in an Edgard Varèse sort of way.

Then Violist Penny Brill came out and made a brief speech thanking the audience for its support this season and announcing that since the seating arrangements for the symphony had shifted and the violas were now deeply embedded in the middle of the stage, "This is probably the last you'll see of the violas, tonight," she lamented.  Violas, like Rodney Dangerfield, don't get no respect.  They're the Jan Bradys of the string section.  Perhaps of the whole orchestra.

On to the music.

Strauss described the "program" of Tod und Verklärung in a letter to his friend Frederick von Hausegger:

The idea occurred to me to represent the death of a person who had striven for the highest ideal goals, therefore very possibly an artist, in a tone poem. The sick man lies in bed asleep, breathing heavily and irregularly; agreeable dreams charm a smile onto his features in spite of his suffering; his sleep becomes lighter; he wakens; once again he is racked by terrible pain, his limbs shake with fever—as the attack draws to a close and the pain subsides he reflects on his past life, his childhood passes before him, his youth with its striving, its passions, and then, while pain resumes, the fruit of his path appears to him, the idea, the Ideal which he has tried to realize, to represent in his art, but which he has been unable to perfect, because it was not for any human being to perfect it. The hour of death approaches, the soul leaves the body, in order to find perfected in the most glorious form in the eternal cosmos that which he could not fulfill here on Earth.

With snippets of this description projected, mostly unnoticed, onto the two screens flanking the stage, the orchestra tuned and waited for Conductor Manfred Honeck.

And once upon the podium, baton in hand, hands raised, he began conducting.  It was stunning.  And when it was over, there was a lo-o-o-ng pause between when the orchestra ended and when Honeck's arms were lowered.  A moment of silence for "the artist" departed.  A sign of respect for the dead.

While we might think that such a piece would be depressing, we should remember that while he struggles, the artist only does so when alive.  Once his death comes and his transformation begins, the tone of the piece shifts.  The soul reunites with the Cosmos, with Schopenhauer's Will. The struggle is over, only eternal peace remains.  A most comforting thought when contemplating the passing of loved ones.

And Strauss wrote it down at 25.

The Mozart that followed, with Yefim Bronfman as soloist, was a joy.  Clear, precise.  Nuanced as only Mozart can be.  Bronfman encored (unannounced) with a movement from the second piano sonata of Sergei Prokofiev. 

Don't be impressed that I wrote that.  During intermission I had to track down Jim Cunningham to find out what Bronfman played.  But when he saw me, the first thing out of his mouth was, "So, did you know what that encore was?"  I had to admit that I was going to ask him the same thing.  Jim guessed Prokofiev.  I guessed, um, someone else entirely.  Luckily, calls were placed, queries made and answers given (thanks Nicole!). 

It was Prokofiev.  Opus 14, in D-minor.  Turns out it was the scherzo.  Not kidding.

There is little in the symphonic repertoire more exuberant than the Beethoven 7.  Kanny of the Trib raved:

Honeck's interpretation of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 was as bold, detailed and imaginative as one hopes a music director's will be. The music is rhythmic and energetic, unless badly done, but Honeck's vitality was exceptional.

While Druckenbrod gushed:

...such was the vigor and energy that Honeck called for in every measure, from potent orchestra hits of the introduction to the rousing gallop to the end.

An amazing performance.  Followed by more exuberance in an encore: The last movement of the Haydn Symphony 88.  I found myself humming along.  I thought I was quiet but I learned with a quick but gentle jab to my ribs that my wife thought otherwise.

I stopped humming along.

Great performance, great music.  Not so great humming.

Vosburgh's Set-up - David DeAngelo

Let me get the geeky stuff out first:

For most orchestral work, George Vosburgh plays a large-bore silver-plated New York Bach (serial number: 7352) with a 1C mouthpiece, though he's currently breaking in one of Bach's new "Chicago C" horns.

And no one but the most seriously geeky trumpet-geek could probably know what all those words mean.

Braunfels, (Almost) Haydn, and Orff - David DeAngelo

As far as I can tell it was a sell-out crowd last night at Heinz Hall.  While certainly well-mannered, the lines at the "Will Call" windows were frighteningly long - out the door and a quarter way up 6th street.

Good thing it wasn't rainy or sleety or icy or the line outside would have been, well, difficult to stand through.

Inside the warm dry confines of the hall, the crowd moved about excitedly, waiting for one of the most popular pieces in the repertoire, Orff's Carmina burana.  In a preview piece at the Tribune-Review, Mark Kanny wrote:

The popularity of Carmina burana by Carl Orff isn't hard to figure out.

"It has lots of color and powerful rhythmic energy that erupt in every part," says Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra music director Manfred Honeck. "'Carmina Burana' is something outstanding, also, because it's a piece which illustrates key elements in the history of the 20th century in music, including irony and, especially, rhythm."

Before we look at the Orff, we should remember that there were two other pieces on the program as well. 

The first, a segment of a Te Deum by a lesser known (and unfairly so) 20th Century German composer, named Walter Braunfels (1882-1954), was a lush joy.  The piece had it's its première in Cologne in 1922 and according to German musicologist Frithjof Haas, one contemporary report said that it had "largest success that a première ever had in Cologne."  After hearing the snippet, it's completely understandable.

Braunfels, unfortunately, had the misfortune of living in Germany as the Nazi Regime came to power while having been born with a Jewish father (his mother, by the way, was Louis Sphor's grand-niece).  Braunfels was categorized by the Nazis as a "non-Aryan" and in 1933 was dismissed from all his official duties at the Hochschule für Musik Köln and forced to sell his home.  By 1938 all performances of his music were banned, for "degeneracy", by the Reichsmusikkammer and he was, as they say, in internal exile until the end of the war.

After the war, he was reinstated as head of the Hochschule but by that time musical tastes had moved on and his career was never the same.  Unfair.  Just unfair.

Manfred Honeck has recorded the Te Deum and it's available at Amazon.com.

The next piece on the program, the Oboe Concerto by "Haydn" was wonderful. Wonderfully played by the PSO and by PSO oboeist Cynthia Koledo DeAlmeida.  The cadenza at the end of the first movement was amazing.  I think the word "fluttering" more than adequately describes how easily she moved from lower to upper register and than back again.

The reason I put quotation marks around Papa's name (and I'd be tempted to do that "air quotes" thing if I were reading this to you live) is because the piece has only been attributed to Haydn.  In musicology-speak, "Attributed to - " translates into "almost certainly not by  - " 

So it's pretty much impossible to tell you anything about this currently unknown composer. 

So I'll tell you a story about one of my thesis advisors (who we will name "Egon') instead.  Young Egon, a Canadian, was suffering through his master's oral exams preparation and was compiling a list of poets who'd supplied texts for the composers he was studying.  As he did, he repeatedly came across the name "Dichter Unbekannt."  He'd never heard of Herr Unbekannt and it troubled him greatly.  He was just about to approach his thesis advisors with this problem when he happened to notice in an Italian edition of one of the books he was using the Italian"anonimo" where he'd seen "Dichter Unbekannt" in his German texts.

The proverbial lightbulb went of in his head.

Decades later, he told me that at that when the lightbulb went off he felt two conflicting things;  First he felt like an complete idiot for not seeing that "Dichter Unbekannt" was German for "Poet Unknown" and then he said he felt great relief for not bringing this bit of embarrassing information to his thesis committee.

Now onto the Orff.  Great piece.  Great performance.  I mean what's not to love about a piece that uses a boys' chorus (though it was merely a soprano chorus last night - oo fugeddaboutit) to sing these words: 

Amor volat undique
captus es libidine
luvenes, iuvencule
coniunguntur merito.

Translation from the PSO program notes:

Cupid flies everywhere
siezed by desire.
Young men and women
are rightly coupled.

What's not to love about that?  Though I can tell you that when I was 10 and in a boys' chorus singing Carmina burana, we had no idea what we were singing about.

Andy Druckenbrod's review is here and he said of Friday's performance:

Classical music, that pure and refined art, always spiritually uplifting, right? Not so much, at least not when Carmina burana takes the stage.

Even if the performances are heavenly, as was the case last night at Heinz Hall, Carl Orff's masterful setting of medieval texts by students and itinerant monks remains sensuous, ribald and funny. Combined with the thrill of pounding, primitive rhythms, the energetic music is an excellent break from the more serious (though wonderful) tone of most classical music.

Mark Kanny's review is here and he said of Friday's performance:

Heinz Hall was packed Friday night -- not surprisingly -- when Manfred Honeck led three vocal soloists, the Mendelssohn Choir and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in Carl Orff's spectacularly popular Carmina burana.

Orff went further back in time than the neoclassical styles popular after World War I to work in the mid-1930s in a neo-primitive style that Igor Stravinsky had established in his 1913 ballet "The Rite of Spring."

Although much simpler in rhythm and harmony than the Stravinsky ballet, the energy and flamboyance of Carmina burana is irresistible. So, too, is the hypnotic lyricism.

Now for the bad part.  In contrast to Braunfels' treatment at the hands of the Nazis, Orff's life in 1930s Germany was vastly different.  As Ann Powers wrote in the The New York Times in 1999:

The fantasy that Carmina burana creates is the source of its pleasures. But it, too, is more complicated than it first appears. Orff's attraction to the primitive was linked to a quest for purity, a troubling desire for an artist working in 1930's Germany. The composer, who wrote music for the 1936 Olympics and worked in Germany throughout World War II, shared certain artistic ideals with the Nazis, all evident in Carmina burana. Its monorhythmic passages, rousing major-chord progressions and lyrical explorations of a Bavarian Arcadia all fit the Nazi regime's model of art as a conduit to an earlier epoch unblemished by the effects of modernity, including racial integration.

Powers continues:

Orff never joined the Nazi Party, although he cooperated with it to survive. For example, he accepted a commission to write a replacement score for ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' by Mendelssohn, who work was banned because he had been Jewish. The initial Nazi response to Carmina burana was negative: officials condemned it as pornographic and derivative of African-American styles. Orff denied impure intentions, but as the decades have proved, the work's eroticism and the rhythms that link it to rock lay at the heart of its appeal.

Uncomfortable as that some of reads, that's the way it is.

Beethoven, Lalo, and Ravel. - David DeAngelo

This evening my lovely wife and I braved the newly (though sadly temporary) mild Pittsburgh weather and made our way to Heinz Hall to hear Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos conduct the PSO.

It was a lovely lasagna-fueled evening for the both of us.

First off, let me clear away all the barely necessary preliminaries: It was a very good concert - solidly well played with no bad news to report here at all.  I only say that because Friday night, the PSO wasn't so lucky:

Everyone has a bad day at the office now and then, but for those whose workplace is in front of fans or audience members, it's harder to hide it.

Such was the case [Friday] night at Heinz Hall, when concertmaster Andrés Cárdenes never quite got on track in Lalo's "Symphonie Espagnole" and then in a shocker, lost his place in the final movement. That required the conductor, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, to ask the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to restart it.

P-G Music critic Andy Druckenbrod later on in the review gives Cárdenes the benefit of the doubt.  I'd say Andy's got it exactly right here.  I've heard Cárdenes play enough times to know he's an intelligent and steady musician with an agile technique and a full, powerful sound.  Andy's right that everyone has a bad day.  Friday night, Cárdenes had his.  Tonight, he was completely on his game.  Completely.

In his late 70s, Frühbeck de Burgos can certainly be a good candidate for the title of "old school conductor."  Rather dapper in his White Tie and Tails (no Top Hat, sorry) with his white hair combed back from his forehead, he conducted old school Eurpoean with a baton roughly the length of a Louisville Slugger.  To my ear it was an evening of solid, if not necessarily challenging, readings. 

On the other hand I was surprised to see the order of the compositions.  I would have thought that the weighty Beethoven would have gone last with the dashing Ravel somewhat earlier.  My guess is that the idea behind this evening's program was that the crowdpleaser always goes on last and Bolero is nothing if not a crowd pleaser.  Just ask Bo Derek.

The Beethoven

Beethoven's so-called "Middle Period" symphonies tended to be composed in pairs.  The 5th and 6th were composed somewhere between 1805-8 and premiered on the same day in 1808.  The 7th and 8th were composed somewhere between 1811-12 and premiered within a couple of months of each other in late 1813 and early 1814.  The 8th, by the way, was the last symphony Beethoven was to complete before the "Glorious" Ninth of 1824. 

It's been said that the thing to remember about the composers of the first Vienese School (i.e. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) is that they were all opera composers at heart.  Mozart's opera output is well-known, Haydn's, on the other hand, is less so.  And Beethoven was always a composer hunting for the perfect libretto.  Just look at how he worked and reworked Fidelio.  The point, flawed as it may be, is that the three were very much interested in the drama that can be presented as music.  It is this drama that Frühbeck de Burgos was able to present to us this evening.  His Beethoven was clear and crisp without being fragile on the one hand or too muscle bound on the other.  The recapitulation towards the end of the first movement was a particularly effective (and affective) moment.  Old school rules, I guess.

The Lalo

For all his obvious compositional talents (and they are considerable) Edouard Lalo is no Beethoven.  While certainly a strong composition, Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole comes off, when stood up next to the Beethoven symphony that preceeded it by 60 years, as something less.  Less deep.  Less complicated.  Less interesting.  Before we go any further, however, let me add that when Billy Ripkin (Cal's younger brother) was being heckled from the stands for not being as good a baseball player as his more famous brother, he reportedly responded, "Yea, but who is?"  So Lalo isn't as good as Beethoven.  But who is?

This was the piece that vexed Cárdenes and the PSO the night before.  Tonight he was great.  To his credit he made out of a good piece a great performance and deserved the standing ovation he got.

The Ravel

Ah, the crowdpleaser.  A 17 minute long "experiment" (Ravel's description) where nothing much happens except the orchestration keeps getting thicker and the band keeps getting louder.  The PSO handled this piece with great aplomb.  By the end my ears were ringing and I feared I'd lost, permanently, some hearing.  My wife feard that the snare drummers arms would fall off.  This piece got a standing ovation as well.

I'm looking forward to hearing Carmina Burana next week.

December 6: Leonard Slatkin - David DeAngelo

The weather outside (near) frightful
But the music so delightful...

Lotsa interesting things to say about this concert, folks - so let's get started.

I guessing, first off, that the weather must've had something to do with the size of the crowd.  While it certainly was more (much more) than "sparse," the hall was just as certainly less than full - as far as I could tell.  No biggie, though.  The band played great from top to bottom, from Andres Cardenes to Craig Knox.

And while it's always difficult to nail down the details of any sort of national character in music, tonight's program was filled entirely with "American" music - great American music at that.  The evening began with the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein.  I have to admit I was always more impressed with Bernstein's conducting than his composing.  Don't get me wrong, he was a great composer and West Side Story is a great score (as is Candide, for that matter or Chicester Psalms - I could go on but the list is very long) and a Bernstein sneeze is more musical than anything I could ever do, but when the story of 20th Century music is finally written, my guess is that Bernstein's name is higher up on the list of important conductors than important composers - if only for championing the music of Ives and Mahler, not to mention The Unanswered Question lectures and the series of Beethoven symphonies he conduced for PBS in the 1980s. 

Back to the show - I can't say enough about how well the orchestra played.  Conductor Leonard Slatkin (snappily dressed in a black suit, black shirt, black tie but a dark red hanky - Martin Blank chic, I guess) swaggered and swayed appropriately and conducted some with a baton and some without.  It was all rock solid.  Absolutely rock solid.

I hate to admit it, but I initially saw the next piece, Concerto 4-3 by Jennifer Higdon, as merely "the piece I didn't know sitting between the two I did."  Sorry for that.  I do remember hearing the PSO play Higdon's blue cathedral a few years ago and found it, at the very least, a very interesting work - deep and multi-layered without being inaccessible.  Part way through last night's Concerto, however, I blinked a few times realizing that I was paying very very close attention what was happening on stage.  I knew that something very important was going and I didn't want to miss any part of it.  It all kinda snuck up on me.  The piece, written for and dedicated to the trio Time for Three, mixed, blended, and pureed bluegrass and the sounds of a full symphony orchestra - but it wasn't merely a simple content/frame sort of thing.  The trio (a bass player, seated, and two fiddlers, one taller, one shorter) all played some amazing lines - so amazing I shudder to think how it was all written down (A question to the composer: how WAS all that written down??).  The compositional edges between the soloists and the orchestra - the concertino and the ripieno in musicology-speak - were seamless - and yet the "bluegrass" material didn't seem at all forced into an unwelcome setting.  It was simply amazing.

The last piece, the Third Symphony of Aaron Copland was written at the end of the Second World War.  According to Marc Rohr's program notes, there's not real story or plot to the symphony though Copland admitted it might "reflect the euphoric spirit" of the country right after the defeat of the Axis powers.  It's full of the instantly recognizable Copland-esqe gestures.  Listen carefully and you can hear similar orchestrational settings from Appalachian Spring, Lincoln Portrait, etc.

Stunningly ending with a resetting of the now-famous Fanfare for the Common Man, one grand irony of this most "American" symphony comes from knowing it's placement in recent American history.  Given that as it was written at the end of the Second World War that also means it was written at the beginning of the Cold War - a war on many fronts, foreign and domestic.  One of those domestic fronts being the "red scare" of the 1950s.  And that grand irony?  After much of Aaron Copland's "American" work was composed, he was by mid-1953 called to testify before Senator McCarthy's committee for his alleged "communist affiliations."  His name was found on the "Red Channels" list - as was Bernstein's.

One more thing left unsaid in the program notes - One of the most interesting parts of a most interesting evening came in realizing that none of the three great American composers played in last night's concert was straight.  This is not to suppose any sort of "gay sensibility" in the composition of music - the Copland was different enough from the Bernstein and each of those were different enough from the Hidgon to belie that notion, but in a post-Proposition 8 America, what does it all mean?

It was all great American music.