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April 2007
Classical Quiz No. 4
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL CON BLASTO blog
We’re back with the Classical Quiz, which the death of Slava last week and a few other pressing news items pushed back to today.
Last week’s winner was Tony Langford from Roswell, whose three correct answers earned him a CD of Bach’s “St. Matthew” Passion. Another reader suggested I hand out t-shirts and other “fun” fan memoribilia, just like the Ask Alan Smithee column in the AJC’s Movies & More section. Guess what, folks? The Hollywood and TV industries send out loads and loads of disposable stuff — in classical music what you get are CDs and DVDs and the occassional weighty composer biography. That’s a much better deal, seems to me.
OK, so here are this week’s quiz questions:
ONE Mstislav Rostropovich died last week. He commissioned some 120 works for cello or orchestra or chamber ensemble, and he said he was closest to his three “geniuses.” Who are they?
TWO Last week, the Atlanta Symphony played a concert of 20th century British music, including Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Three Screaming Popes.” What inspired Turnage?
THREE Complete this sentence from conductor Donald Runnicles: “Most Brits are born with…”
a) a love of soggy desserts and bad plumbing.
b) an acute inferiority complex.
c) an “outie.”
The first person to email me the three correct answers will receive a DVD of the Cleveland Orchestra and conductor Franz Welser-Moest performing Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5 live at the baroque Stiftsbasilika St. Florian in Austria.
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Van Morrison. Chastain Park. Saturday night.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Phil Kloer pkloer@ajc.com
As the moon rose over the roof of Chastain Park’s amphitheater Saturday night, Van Morrison gave the sold-out crowd a little hometown homage. He’s been singing “Georgia On My Mind” at previous stops on his on-and-off tour in recent months, including Oxford, England, a couple of weeks ago. So it wasn’t like he was trying to curry favor with the audience. As if - he’s Van Morrison.
He took the old sweet song slow and stately at first, then let his exquisite 10-piece back-up band take a few solo breaks, and then escalated to a full-throated roar to bring it home. He sang “Georgia” like he wanted to swallow it whole, so that no one else could ever sing it; for just a couple of transcendent minutes, it was Van’s song only; not the state’s, not Hoagy’s, not even Ray’s.
A couple transcendent minutes here, a few more there, and pretty soon they add up to an amazing evening. Morrison, a singer who’s seemed disconnected from his live audiences lately according to many reports (even as his connection to the music has stayed strong), seemed to relax about a half-hour into his 90 minute set, his first in Atlanta in many moons.
He started slowly, just saying “Thank you,” for the applause. Then he might mention what the next song was going to be. At one point, he seemed to crack a small joke. For most performers, this is just business. For the frequently sullen Morrison, who’s been known to sing for stretches with his back turned to the audience, it was like inviting everyone onstage for hugs.
But even Van Morrison has his limits. No matter how loose he got, he never unbuttoned either button on his two-button suit coat.
At age 61, Morrison exudes vigor and passion onstage; his voice was as strong as anyone could wish, and he seemed to relish that, playing with his vocals, slurring, scatting, belting, caressing. He tossed off a bouncy “Real, Real Gone” and folded in a few bars of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” at the end; re-fashioned “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?” into a jaunty swing number that stripped it of its schmaltz; channeled that Satchmo gravel-voice thing he does on “Bright Side of the Road.”
There were enough hits to please those who only know him from the radio (“Moondance,” “Brown Eyed Girl”) and some bones tossed to those who like to be surprised, like Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Help Me.”
Even the notoriously chatty Chastain audience seemed more attentive than usual. It was a fantabulous night to make music, and to listen to it. Maybe it was the moon.
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Appreciation: Mstislav Rostropovich
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL CON BLASTO blog
AN APPRECIATION
Mstislav Rostropovich, perhaps the greatest cellist of the past half-century, was an icon of moral courage through the darkest years of the Cold War. The Russian musician, a cosmopolitan character in the extreme, lived in Paris and died Friday in a Moscow hospital, after suffering from intestinal cancer. He was 80.
He will be buried at Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, near his friend Boris Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet president, who died earlier this week.
Russian president Vladimir Putin called Rostropovich’s death “a tremendous loss for Russian culture.”
As a conductor, Rostropovich’s close friendships with composers Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten — “my three geniuses,” as he called them — yielded profoundly spiritual performances of their music. Orchestral musicians often remarked that having Rostropovich conduct them in symphonies by Shostakovich was such a visceral, emotional experience that it was almost like having the late composer there himself.
In 2002, he played Dvorak’s Cello Concerto with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, part of an international tour celebrating his 75th birthday. Known to friends and fans as “Slava,” he received a roaring standing ovation as he walked out on stage, as the audience and orchestra sang “Happy Birthday.”
The reception signaled that Rostropovich was much more than a legendary musician. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, he risked his life (and certainly his career) to speak out for human and artistic freedoms.
Rostropovich’s worldview was shaped on the morning of Feb. 10, 1948, when he read that Soviet authorities had officially denounced several composers, including Shostakovich and Prokofiev, for “formalist tendencies” — a blanket charge that meant little in terms of art but everything in terms of political blacklisting. Soviet theater, film and literature had been similarly purged.
The Communist Party attempted to enroll everyone in official declarations of mutual denunciation; Rostropovich refused to sign. For him, 1970 was a turning point. Ignoring the obvious dangers, he sent an open letter to the state-controlled newspaper Pravda, challenging the government’s repressive actions against artists. His inflammatory letter included statements such as, “Each human being must have the right to think for himself and express his opinion without fear.”
His outspoken stand for basic human rights — akin to his contemporaries, novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn and nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov — led to recriminations and, four years later, to his expulsion from the Soviet Union.
He and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, a leading soprano with the Bolshoi Opera and a photogenic darling of Soviet society, later were stripped of their citizenship for “acts harmful to the prestige of the U.S.S.R.” They instantly became “nonpersons.” Galina’s face was erased from official Bolshoi photographs; Slava’s name was blacked out of scores dedicated to him.
They started a new life in the West. In a Cold War-inspired bit of nose-thumbing, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington appointed Slava its music director in 1977. It made good superpower politics, but his undisciplined baton technique drove the musicians crazy, and it was soon obvious that he was comfortable only conducting his core repertoire: Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Schnittke and other contemporary Russians who communicated with the same musical language.
He played the world premiere of about 120 pieces, including the 20th-century classics by his three “geniuses,” as well as Henri Dutilleux, Withold Lutoslawski and many others.
I grew up in Washington, alternately loving and frustrated by concerts that Rostropovich conducted. While they were rarely ideally polished, they were never boring. There was too much explosive energy on the podium, too deep a well of feelings and creativity. Enlightening moments could flower in unexpected places. A routine Verdi overture might suddenly pick up a playful bounce and sound more physical, more theatrical than usual — aha, a listener would think, Slava has discovered something new in this music. But just as quickly, that something would evaporate.
I remember a concert of Shostakovich’s bitter and tense Tenth Symphony, one of Rostropovich’s specialties, where the entire orchestra seemed to weep onstage with their maestro, so iron-tight was his bond with his aggrieved friend. The imprint the performance left on the audience was staggering. A regular concertgoer might wait years between such transcendental moments.
In all, Rostropovich held the Washington podium for 17 years. When the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989, Rostropovich was there. In what must have felt like a personal vindication, he played his cello beside the Berlin Wall as it was being jackhammered apart. In 1991, he returned to Russia during the anti-Gorbachev coup by Soviet hard-liners. Outside, Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank; Rostropovich was inside lending unwavering moral authority to the democratic cause.
Through a turbulent, courageous life, Rostropovich had been grounded by making music. English composer Benjamin Britten called his friend “a searching musician with the mind of a philosopher.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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ASO’s British Invasion concert
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org
Language and history binds Americans and the British in a overarching way, but examine the specifics and what goes on across the pond can make the other side seem like a mighty peculiar place.
Brits often remark on the American appetite for violence and big cars, or notice their shiny white teeth and renewable sense of optimism. As a nation, the U.S. often forgets its past and steps forward with blind confidence.
And in Britain? Soggy desserts and bad plumbing stand out, but so does its wonderfully dynamic arts scene and, oh yes, a tortured, slightly depressed sense of nostalgia for their lost empire.
Several of these facets are bound-up in an event called “The Last Night of the Proms,” the finale to the BBC Proms music festival which runs all summer in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The “Last Night” is basically a rowdy celebration of British imperialism, those good old days of cultural arrogance and political glory, with a discomforting legacy.
All this is background to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s concert Thursday in Symphony Hall — another extremely rewarding program, the sort that’s making Atlanta a hotspot among U.S. orchestras.
Several years ago, conductor Donald Runnicles, the ASO and producers at Telarc Records planned to make a CD of their own “Last Night” concert. Rather than celebrate Imperial Britain, though, the Scottish-born conductor programmed a survey of 20th century British music with a decidedly contrarian slant.
Sir Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” marches Nos. 4 and 1, which bookended the evening, have become the quintessential sounds of Victorian England at the height of its global power (and familiar in the U.S. from high school graduations).
Yet in Runnicles’ hands, Elgar’s upper-crust swagger and cozy nostalgia is softened into a toy-soldier militarism, like it’s all for play, like a kid trying on his grandfather’s old army jacket and helmet. In the March No. 4, in this airy and light-filled interpretation, I got the sense that Elgar had quit England altogether and moved to Provence.
Benjamin Britten’s “Sinfonia da Requiem,” from 1940, is mostly dark music about feeling trapped — by imminent war, by society, by circumstance. Shostakovich is a model, both musically and for a composer who fears for his own life. The conductor gave the work a grieving, beautifully proportioned reading; the uneven balances and stray notes should be cleaned up in subsequent performances.
In remarks to the audience, Runnicles called off the search for a distinctive “British” style — modern day Britian is too cosmopolitan, has too many folk traditions and too many voices. Yet in his programming of three living — and widely acclaimed — British composers, he offered a more or less consistent sound world.
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Three Screaming Popes,” the most aggressive of the moderns, set the tone. Based on Francis Bacon paintings from the 1950s, the music is at turns deafening and moody. Like the other active composers of the evening, he draws his palette from Mahler’s symphonic grandeur and sense of personal confession, from Stravinsky’s anything-is-possible rhythms and from distorted versions of familiar folk tunes. The ASO gave a stiff performance of the jazz-tinged Turnage, square where it needed to swing.
Peter Maxwell Davies’s “An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise” is a delightfully gimmicky piece, a depiction of a boozy Scottish wedding that climaxes with a highland bagpiper (played by Scott Long) marching down the auditorium aisles. It received the most enthused response all night.
James MacMillan’s “Britannia” operates with more subtlety. There’s a section in the middle of “Britannia” that lasts just a few minutes — mostly strings and soft woodwinds playing — and is as gossamer, bittersweet and affecting as anything written in recent times.
Runnicles did right by the music. He allowed the soft and serene parts to fully flower, despite the high-stress invasiveness of the loud bits. I wished they’d played it twice.
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Classical Quiz No. 3
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL CON BLASTO blog
Here’s Week Three of the classical music quiz. First let’s finish up last week’s quiz, which was won by Robert Guenther of Woodstock, Ga. He wins a DVD set of the three Mozart-da Ponte operas.
OK, today’s questions are drawn from the AJC this past week:
This weekend, New Trinity Baroque performs music by a composer who spent the last three decades of his life in a bejeweled city on the lagoon. Name the city.
What is Georgia’s rank in per-capita arts funding, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies?
Tonight, choral conductor David Morrow makes his debut as music director of the Atlanta Singers. He’ll still direct Morehouse College’s celebrated Glee Club. Who was Morrow’s predecessor at the glee club?
This is a piece of cake quiz. The first person to email me the three correct answers will a receive a CD of Bach’s “St. Matthew” Passion, a three-disk set on the Philips label, with the great Peter Schreier singing the role of the Evangelist and also conducting his distinguished colleagues, including Lucia Popp, Theo Adam, Marjana Lipovsek and others. Please include a daytime phone number and your address.
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ASO Goes Lite Classics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org
For several weeks running, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has gone to extremes, programming sublime or riotous music, the kind that requires as much technical brilliance as deep philosophy — a Bach passion, a Stravinsky ballet and the like.
This week, the orchestra scaled it way down, offering what some years ago would have been called light classics or, in the days before Sinatra and Bing Crosby, pop music.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, a boyish looking, hair-sprayed blond conductor made his local debut. Under 40, Arild Remmereit is young by conducting standards. Not quite a rising star, he’s held jobs with smaller ensembles in Europe and guest conducted some fine ensembles on several of the known continents.
He opened the evening with music from his native Norway: Edvard Grieg’s familiar “Peer Gynt.” Remmereit freshened it up a bit by reshuffling the numbers and thus divorcing the drama inherent in the music from the plot of Ibsen’s play, for which it was originally conceived.
As a Norwegian leading us through what’s effectively Norway’s national music, Remmereit gets a free pass from us, although the logic of his 40-minute sequence never materialized. Nor did he stir the ASO to help make a compelling case. Good music stands on its own, whether heavy or light, but only when the performers make it so.
As in Borodin’s super-pops “Polovtsian Dances,” which closed the evening, the playing was clean but blah — loudish, hazy and lacking character.
Conductor and orchestra were more alert and musically sympathetic for the most hummable of Mozart’s great violin concertos, the A Major Concerto No. 5, with ASO concertmaster Cecylia Arzewski was soloist.
Although she paints within a gilded romantic frame — generous long bows, full vibrato, rounded phrasing — Arzewski is not a heart-on-sleeve artist. Just right for Mozart, her temperament is classical, finding truth and beauty in proportion over exuberance, eloquence over hedonism.
She turned lines in the adagio with understated care. But she also dashed off the zesty finale with more gusto than we typically hear from her, taking risks, finding connections, making sense of it all.
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World tunes ear to opera pioneer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL NOTES
Time was, the major classical labels spit out 45 versions of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony every year while relegating antiquated voices like Claudio Monteverdi’s to the fringes. The late Renaissance composer was academically significant, but his music was too brittle or undramatic for modern tastes — or so went the logic of the marketplace.
Turns out, Monteverdi has as much to tell us about beauty, relationships and humanity as any composer in history. He used moods and emotional tension, especially desire, anticipation and loss, as his musical palette. In this language, the sacred and universal become personal and private; the erotic is tinged with melancholy.
We’re still far from having a Beethovenian glut of Monteverdi books, CDs, DVDs and online audio streams, but 364 years after his death, for a variety of reasons, he’s finally coming back into vogue.
This Saturday, Atlanta’s energetic New Trinity Baroque taps the zeitgeist and performs a concert titled “Glory of San Marco: Sacred Music by Monteverdi.” The program’s highlight is “Selva Morale e Spirituale” — “Moral and Spiritual Forest” — a collection of vocal-instrumental works composed for the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, Italy, where Monteverdi spent the final three decades of his long life.
Much of Monteverdi’s music has been lost. He was born in 1567 in Cremona, the city famous for the violin-making perfection of Amati and Stradivari. The composer gained renown across the Italian peninsula for his innovative madrigals, which held some of the same realism as the nascent art form of opera.
Conservatives condemned these madrigals for their modernist excesses, although the style proved influential. Then as now, notorious artists often draw the most attention.
In hindsight, it seems a short hop from dramatic madrigals to actual opera, although in the first decade of the 1600s, quasi-operatic sung plays were an awkward novelty, leaning too heavily on the recitation of texts. Monteverdi’s genius lay in finding that precarious balance between words and music.
His first opera, “Orfeo,” composed for nobility in 1607, along with late-in-life commercial masterpieces “The Return of Ulysses” and “The Coronation of Poppea,” set standards we’ve followed since: Melodic lines trace patterns of speech; harmonies shift to anticipate confrontation or to discharge emotions built up by the action; serious and comic elements mix within the plot; dissonance paints a turbulent state of mind or even violence.
Monteverdi taught us “what we look and sound like on the operatic stage,” writes Mark Ringer in his recent book “Opera’s First Master: the Musical Dramas of Claudio Monteverdi” (Amadeus Press), a detailed introduction to the composer’s music.
The resurgent interest in Monteverdi’s music is helping fill in the gaps. Bold and sympathetic recordings are breathing life into his music.
The best recent CDs show how deeply the Monteverdi revival has penetrated the classical mainstream. Tenor Rolando Villazón — in rounded, heroic voice — has become a celebrity for playing leads in 19th-century standards like “La Traviata.” In “Combattimento” (on the Virgin Classics label), he sings the narrator’s part in the dramatic madrigal on the Tancredi and Clorinda legend — love, cross-dressing and death during the Crusades — with a balance of stylistic tidiness and interpretive freedom.
Conductor Emmanuelle Haïm’s sense of theater blazes with excitement, and the whole production has the feel of an enduring masterpiece. Performances this intuitive and compelling suggest Monteverdi’s moment is right here and now.
IN CONCERT: “Glory of San Marco: Sacred Music by Monteverdi”. New Trinity Baroque. 8 p.m. Saturday. St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, 1790 LaVista Road N.E. $9-$39. 770-638-7574, www.newtrinitybaroque.org.
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Classical Quiz No. 2
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL CON BLASTO blog
The Classical Quiz No. 2
Last week’s winner was Michael Stubbart, a high school senior and percussionist with the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra.
Now here is this week’s quiz. From the AJC this week, name the composer who
1) heard explosive jazz saxophonist John Coltrane perform some 50 times.
2) wrote a new opera called “A Scholar Under Siege” about Georgia Gov. Eugene Talmadge’s race-baiting politics in the 1940s.
3) was commissioned by owners of a fabulous estate in Washington, DC and who named the work after the house.
The first person to email me all three correct answers will receive a Mozart bonanza: DVDs of all three Da Ponte operas. “Marriage of Figaro” and “Cosi fan tutte” are from 1970s productions at the Glyndebourne Festival, with an excellent young cast — Kiri Te Kanawa sings the Countess, for example — and conducted by John Pritchard. “Don Giovanni” is from La Scala, with Thomas Allen singing the bad boy lead and conducted by Riccardo Muti. Please include your name and daytime phone number.
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ASO’s Savage Brilliance in ‘The Rite’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org
Quite by accident, Atlanta’s been treated in recent days to the defining classics from the first and last decades of the 20th century.
Earlier this week, several local groups collaborated on a Steve Reich Festival, highlighted by the New York Minimalist’s “Drumming” (1971) and “Different Trains” (1988) — post-modern music of shimmering beauty, deep logic and cool emotions.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra went to the other end with a mini Igor Stravinsky festival, capped by that howling monster of early modernism, “The Rite of Spring.”
“The Rite,” as a ballet on pagan Russia, famously stirred a riot at its 1913 premiere. Pitched somewhere between harmonious folk tunes and industrial noise, “The Rite” remains the most extreme music in the standard repertoire: violent, clattering, dissonant, both psychologically crushing and viscerally exhilarating. In a great performance, few other works of art can compare.
The ASO’s performance was shy of superb, but delivered fabulously for all the key moments. Music director Robert Spano didn’t reveal too much too soon. He started softly and rather sweetly, giving the players room to breathe and, not incidentally, get in sync with each other. In the introduction, bassoonist Carl Nitchie’s plaintive cries were as anguished and mysterious as any I’ve ever heard in concert.
As the cacophonies piled up and the rhythms came apart and the whole thing got really loud — with percussionist Tom Sherwood whacking the life out of the big bass drum, which was positioned high and in back, like a sacrificial altar — Spano’s concept turned from modesty to savage brilliance. Expect the orchestra to reveal still more facets of the score in subsequent performances.
Spano opened the evening with Stravinsky in retro mode. After the primal screams of “The Rite,” the Russian-born composer reinvented himself as a hipster fit for the 1920s and ’30s.
Named after an estate in Washington D.C., “Dumbarton Oaks” is a baroque-styled concerto grosso, where the 15 instruments on stage take solo turns then return to the sonic fold, not so different from how Duke Ellington’s jazz band performed, or how J.S. Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos are arranged.
Stravinsky’s music is here cosmopolitan and elegant; direct emotional appeals are off limits.
Yet where the “Brandenburgs” are naively joyous to play and hear, “Dumbarton Oaks” is self-conscious to a fault. You get the sense that Stravinsky kept half the story in reserve. With Spano’s taut sense of rhythm, the ASO’s playing danced along.
As often happens when Spano programs a concert, the juxtaposition of the works is as remarkable as the works themselves. Here two virile and masculine Stravinsky works sandwiched Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17, which somehow seemed like one of the composer’s more feminine creations. There’s nothing especially frilly or girlish about the concerto, yet the ASO and pianist Garrick Ohlsson emphasized its perfume, its lightness, its youthful optimism.
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4/12: Steve Reich’s Sonic Balm
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Steve Reich Festival. Sunday at Eyedrum; Tuesday and Wednesday at the Rialto Center for the Arts.
First came the drum. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Then two drums thumping together. Then two drums thumping together but a millisecond apart. Thump-p. Thump-p. Thump-p.
As the space between the two thumps gradually widened over several minutes — thump-ump, thump-ump — we started hearing what composer Steve Reich calls “phasing” or “music of gradual process.” Thump-thump. Thump-ump-ump.
As a basis for “Drumming,” written in 1971, it’s a simple, flexible concept of radiant genius. Palestrina had his vocal polyphony; Bach his fugue; Reich has his phase music, the basis for one the most remarkable bodies of classical music of the past half century.
Now 70, Steve Reich — who pronounces his name with a soft “sh” ending, rather than a hard “rike” — is being celebrated around the country, from club DJs to classical chamber groups to percussionists everywhere. Why not? Reich writes music people love.
Atlanta hosted its own Reich Festival, a three-concert deal that covered many of his most compelling and influential works.
It opened Sunday at Eyedrum art space, highlighted by short films by Robert Nelson, with music by Reich, who had yet to develop his distinct sound world. For reasons never made clear, Reich and his agents tried to block the screenings. So Eyedrum’s Andy Ditzler announced to the crowd that the films were not officially part of the Reich festival … and showed them as planned.
Tuesday’s performance, at the Rialto Center for the Arts, held the 75-minute “Drumming,” performed by So Percussion, an extraordinarily disciplined quartet from Brooklyn, and augmented by a few Georgia State University students.
“Drumming” distills Reich’s style. Like the Pompidou Center in Paris, the modern-art temple with the colorful pipes and elevators on the outside for all to see, Reich’s music is all out there. The listener feels the guts of the piece, hears the obvious changes in harmony.
The performance wasn’t ideal, though. The musicians raced through the music, diminishing the power of glacial change. And while the So players kept a properly ritualistic attitude, several of the students felt inclined to rock out with the music: they sounded sloppy (and looked like they were auditioning for Led Zeppelin).
The festival’s final show, Wednesday at the Rialto, included members of Atlanta’s Bent Frequency and assorted GSU musicians.
The evening opened with a joyous and virtuosic reading of “Nagoya Marimbas,” from 1994. The “phase” concept was by now familiar: two guys stationed at their instruments, tinkling a bouncy rhythm that slips in and out of alignment, creating canons and mysterious, floating inner sounds. (“Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” in contrast, is canon with a fixed alignment.)
Clarinetist Ted Gurch gave a yearningly beautiful performance of “New York Counterpoint” (1985) backed by an array of pre-recorded clarinets. The middle movement, marked “Slow,” is perhaps the loveliest thing Reich has ever written.
Just as “Drumming” reinvents the massive Mahler-sized symphony, while stripping music down to its essentials, “New York Counterpoint” is a sort of technologized and modernized concerto, where the “heroic” action soloist is accompanied by many voices. What’s more, the haunting wail of the clarinet, associated with klezmer, the bittersweet folk music of Eastern European Jews, served as foreshadowing of what lay ahead on the program.
Laura Gordy and Lisa Leong, at two Steinways, played “Piano Phase” (1967), Reich’s lightening strike of genius, where he first applied his discovery of the phase process to live performers.
In the early 1970s, Reich took his new-found concept to a logical extreme, looking for the most elemental aspects of music and performance, down to the level of Paleolithic man around the campfire.
“Clapping Music” (1972) is just that: it starts with eight musicians clapping, soon smearing into out-of-alignment rhythms.
Reich followed our evolutionary progress with “Music for Pieces of Wood” (1973), where mallets strike small cylinders, each at a different pitch. Again, music at once so fundamental and sophisticated plays with your head, stirring euphoria in the listener.
The festival concluded with “Different Trains” (1988), where a live string quartet, pre-recorded string quartets and snatches of speech overlap, complement and blend into each other. (At the Rialto, it was hard to hear the words, which blunted the overall effect.)
It’s more than just Reich’s masterpiece. “Different Trains” is the most thoughtful and subtle (and thus unbearably powerful) Holocaust memorial yet to come out of classical music.
It works on so many levels, and is so tragically beautiful, so emotionally clear yet elusive, that it’s likely the best piece of music by anyone from the last decades of the 20th century — and ensures that Steve Reich’s music, like that of the great masters in history, will be with us permanently.
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Classical Quiz 4/6
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL CON BLASTO blog
The Friday Classical Quiz, Vol. 1, No. 1.
From AJC news this week, name
1) One of the Georgia singers who won the 2007 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions
2) The South American country with the remarkable music-education program known as “The System”
3) The conductor who called opera star Deborah Voigt’s 2004 dismissal over not fitting into a little black dress a “bunch of rubbish.”
It’s an easy quiz. The first person who emails all three correct answers to pruhe@ajc.com will receive a DVD broadcast of Verdi’s “Otello,” with tenor Jose Cura as the murderous Moor, recorded live for Spanish television from Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu. Please include your name and a daytime telephone number.
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Classical Music Fakery (Part 2)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL CON BLASTO blog
A few seasons back, the classical-music community was a-twitter when it was announced that Deborah Voigt had been sacked from a Covent Garden production of Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos” because the very full-figured soprano didn’t fit into the slinky black dress that was “essential” to the production.
A few Voigt fans protested mightily, and music critics at should-have-known-better publications like the NY Times ran lengthy articles on the topic, addressing it from many angles — our obsession with body type, the cultural biases against fat people (and especially over weight women), the sad state of European high-concept opera production and, mostly, about poor, poor Debbie Voigt — dubbed “Planet Debbie” in the savage world of opera chat rooms — whose career was, uh, skyrocketing.
Turned out that the “little black dress scandal” was the best thing that happened to Voigt. It broke just as she released a new CD — which immediately went to the top of the Billboard classical charts — and it served as a preview to her decision to have gastric-bypass surgery to reduce her weight. “60 Minutes” and the rest of the media lapped it up, although some of us in the minority wondered why there were no contracts offered as proof of the dismissal, no lawsuits, no apparent hard feelings between the supposedly humiliated Voigt and London’s Royal Opera House.
Well, you could see this one coming, as reported today on www.musicalamerica.com:
“Little Black Dress Tale a ‘Bunch of Rubbish’
Apr 4, 2007
by Keith Clarke
ROH Music Director Antonio Pappano announces season, says Voigt story was media hype for her new album…
Asked whether he was saying that the singer had lied about the episode, Pappano said: ‘She says it was about the black dress, but that’s not true. When you hire anybody to sing a role, you do take into consideration what they look like, how they move, how they act. It’s not just as simple as saying that somebody is too heavy for a role or not.’ “
So who fell for this in the first place? Are classical-music critics really that gullible? Probably no more than the general public. As a profession, however, we’re vulnerable to deception because we’ve bought into — and helped create — the notion that classical music is pure, driven exclusively by art, and thus unsullied by the vulgar pressures of commerce and scam marketing.
Add Debbie’s Dress to the Joyce Hatto scandal — where several notable critics praised CDs attributed to a sick and elderly English woman pianist, although the disks turned out to be plagarized recordings made, in fact, by established stars — and you can almost hear the balloon of naivete deflating.
Will Deborah Voigt (and her press agents) now be taken to task for the deception? Or is our culture so saturated with high-profile liars and the lies they tell that no one cares? Is there no penalty for spitting into the community well?
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Two Georgians win Met Auditions
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL BLOG
The Met claims two Georgians.
Sunday evening in New York, two young singers advanced their careers immeasurably by winning top prizes in the Metropolitan Opera Auditions, a sort of “American Idol” talent contest that has helped discover opera stars like Jessye Norman, Renee Fleming and Thomas Hampson.
Of the dozen finalists — culled from regional auditions held around the country in recent months — six were named “winners” this year.
Two were from Georgia: tenor Ryan Smith, 30, from Decatur; and mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, 25, from Rome. The other winners included a baritone, a soprano and two other tenors. The age limit is 30.
“It’s the best feeling of my life,” said Smith moments after his win was announced, reached by cell phone while at a reception at the Met’s Grand Tier. “Everyone was singing A+ today, and I had no idea I could win. “This is the result of a lot of years of hard work and suffering,” he added, referring to the time when he dropped opera singing altogether. “Having the Met validate what I do, letting me know I can do this — it’s a blessing for me.”
Barton is currently a graduate student at Indiana University, one of the top music schools in the country. She’ll sing at Opera Theatre St. Louis this summer, and will join the Houston Grand Opera’s prestigious young singers’ studio in the fall. (It often takes years of training for a voice to reach operatic-quality heft, technical prowess and interpretive maturity.)
For Smith, his rags-to-riches story could be the stuff of an opera plot, with scenes in gang-torn Los Angeles, a three-year hiatus from singing and, finally, with encouragement from Atlanta Opera chorusmaster Walter Huff, a return to music as a profession. With the Atlanta Opera, Smith has sung small but noticable roles in Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” The opera also sponsored Smith’s solo recital at the Woodruff Arts Center last fall.
Smith said he doesn’t have any long-range plans after he sings at the Santa Fe Opera this summer. After Sunday evening’s win, he might expect his phone to start ringing.
Atlanta Opera general director Dennis Hanthorn, who was among the cheering fans at the Met audition finals, said, “the talent level here is so high, and there are so many factors that go into a judge’s mind, it was hard to pick the winners, but I’m biased — I thought he was sensational. Certainly the audience applauded him as the favorite.”
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