The Well-Tempered Music Guy

Viva Verdi

2007-11-12T08:19:00.000-08:00

This month has been jam-packed with concert-goings, so now is a good time to clear the backlog of thoughts. I'll start with probably the most substantial helpings of great music, both emanating from Verdi's awesome brain -- Aida and La Traviata.

The genius of Verdi leaves the most significant impression on me when I hear these operas, although both featured notable performances in the female leads. Too often the audience's attitude towards operatic performances, particularly of Verdi, is that they're some kind of acrobatic feats of strength. So the biggest stories in the two performances were the female leads, Angela Brown and Renee Fleming, rising star and established star, respectively. I don't have much to say, other than both performed as billed -- Brown has a powerful, ringing voice, and Fleming sang with unparalleled tenderness and intelligence. My unprofessional opinion is that Brown has a future as a Wagnerian soprano, if she so chooses to go that route. Slap a horned helmet on that woman!

The performance of Aida suffered from some of the same unevenness and tinkering that I've complained about here before. It left me yearning for a James Levine performance. I also realized why I've never been thrilled with Olga Borodina -- she has a powerful voice, but has problematic timing. She lacks rhythm in her singing and does not attack the notes sharply, which is a fatal flaw in Aida, as Verdi characterizes Amneris with punchy, aggressive music. But as always, the opera as a whole was still immensely enjoyable.

La Traviata actually got me thinking about the under-appreciated Dwayne Croft, whom the Met took out of their backstage storage to sing Germont. Croft has sung over 350 performances at the Met, and the Met should be thankful. He has a warm voice and is an intelligent singer, and I think he is especially good at this role. One of my favorite parts of Traviata is the duet in Act II between him and Violetta, and Croft really nailed it.

Take just the word "Piangi," which Germont repeats several times to powerful effect in the duet. Croft sings the first syllable with no vibrato, building up to an emphasis on the second syllable, topping it off with some vibrato at the end. Contrast this approach with that of the legendary Sherrill Milnes on the Carlos Kleiber recording, which I listened to at home a couple days after the performance. Milnes sings the first syllable loudly, almost barking it out, then tapers the second syllable. It's perhaps blasphemous to say so, but I find Croft's approach both more convincing and kinder on the ear musically. It just sounds like a pleading cry. I also appreciate singers who use vibrato as an ornament (even an oft-used one), rather than as a constant part of their tone.

Marco Armiliato conducted the Traviata, and the Times gave him raves as one of the Met's "great finds." I thought his pacing was rather sluggish in many parts of the opera, though. But it's a tough opera to screw up, and the experience overall was a treat. Polenzani was even better than I expected as Alfredo.

Looking forward to seeing Fleming in Verdi again in February, as Desdemona in Otello -- perhaps our most perfect example of music drama.

"Happy Birthday dear Colin..."

2007-10-22T18:48:00.000-07:00

After having to cancel on a couple concerts, I finally kicked off the season with a British invasion. I got tickets to all three terrific programs that the London Symphony did at Avery Fischer this past week. Colin Davis paired with the LSO is a special thing -- a unique combination of energy -- the players are practically jumping out of their seats -- and polish. Their concerts are always thrilling without being overly "interesting" (take notes, Mr. Maazel).

The first program was on Wednesday, all Mozart -- the Piano Concerto no. 27 and a certain Requiem. As the concert was set to begin, I was surprised to see the Chorus seated at the back of the stage. I've never heard of any arrangement of any Mozart piano concertos featuring a chorus, so I thought this was weird.

They sat there quietly and listened to the concerto, which I'm sure they enjoyed as much as I did. I didn't used to think that this concerto was one of the greatest, but it really has grown on me, especially the sublime slow movement. Imogen Cooper played lightly and sensitively, and the orchestra was at it's typical best.

At the end of the Concerto, as Cooper and Davis were taking a curtain call, they quickly wheeled out a giant cake, and the chorus and orchestra sang and played "Happy Birthday" ("... dear Colin!"). A program insert informed us that Davis turns 80 next month. May he live -- and conduct! -- for decades more. I can say he looks terrific -- if I just saw him, knowing nothing else, I would guess he's in his mid 60s. And he's one of the great musicians we have, a real treasure.

I don't think any performance of the Requiem could top the one I heard John Eliot Gardiner lead a couple years ago. A flawless, thrilling, and perfectly idiomatic performance. The Davis/LSO performance was also enjoyable, with characteristic verve and richness, but far less idiomatic. The big band approach to Mozart (and in particular the Requiem) has its appeal, but it's hard to go back to that once you're accustomed to the detail and sparkling loveliness of the more "period instrument" (style) performances, such as the Gardiner or, in the "style" category, the terrific Mostly Mozart performance this summer led by Louis Langree (going from Gerry Schwartz to Langree was like going from Jeff George to Payton Manning, for you sports fans -- Mostly Mozart is no longer something you grudgingly endure to tide you over). In the LSO performance, the woodwinds, so crucial and nice here and elsewhere in Mozartland, were completely swalled up by the enthusiastic, slightly mushy strings and the unnecessarily huge -- but excellent!!! -- chorus. Plus, slower tempi bugged me in a couple of the movements, particularly the Domine Jesu. Other movements, however, were especially powerful -- the Rex Tremendae and the Confutatis and Lacrymosa, for instance.

Next, on Friday, came an all-Beethoven program, featuring the Piano Concerto no. 4 and the "Eroica" Symphony no. 3. The Fourth Concerto is one of those pieces that keeps popping up in programs I go to -- no complaints! -- but this performance blew all the rest away, and that includes the starry Levine/Barenboim pairing from last year. Although in a way, it was just different. In fact, I've never heard it played like this, on recording or in concert. The Fourth concerto is usually treated as a graceful, austere work, and this approach certainly works. Davis on Friday led the most zestful, aggressive (but never harsh) reading I've ever heard, and I was swept away. The pianist, Paul Lewis, whom I had never heard of (not that that really means anything), was terrific. Consistent with Davis, he played energetically and with much detail, and was never overly dramatic or fussy. The incredible, unparalleled slow movement was the only part fell short of the Barenboim/Levine performance, which had me in tears in that section. Nobody can milk a great Romantic passage like Barenboim.

The Eroica was also great. Not much remarkable to say about it, just that every positive adjective I've applied above to Davis/LSO performances applied in spades to this performance. The ovation was thunderous.

On Sunday came Haydn's magnificent oratorio, the Creation. I'm generally not a big fan of Haydn -- I admire his music a lot, but I just don't really enjoy most of it. A lot of his music is brilliant and witty without enough warmth and beauty -- but NOT the Creation. In fact, the Creation is one of the warmest, most joyful pieces of music ever written. The program had a great note about the genesis of the work, speficically the way strong influences from Mozart and Handel came together in Haydn to produce this work, and it really does seem a cross between the Messiah and the Magic Flute.

Anyway, the performance was big, rich, gorgeous, bracing, and just a joy to hear. The London Symphony Chorus is your prototypical showcase of the Grand British Choral Tradition -- which, after all, is the Tradition that inspired this composition in the first place. After the first big fugal chorus -- one of the sections that has Handel smiling and nodding from his special corner of heaven -- there were audible gasps scattered around the audience, uttered by music lovers catching their breath.

I really hope Davis keeps accompanying the LSO to New York for years to come, even if new hire Valery Gergiev mainly takes the reins (as good as Gergiev can occasionally be). This year's tour lived up to this great team's great tradition, but I couldn't help thinking back to one of the greatest, if not the greatest, live performance I have ever heard -- their Verdi Requiem in Fall of 2005. I still think of this concert often, yearning to hear it again and wishing I could have somehow bottled up the experience and taken it with me. I even tried emailing the LSO archivist to track down some archival or broadcast recording done of the work that season, but no dice. It will have to live on only in my memory. Sigh.

(By the way, the summer was really no excuse, but especially now that the concert season is in full swing, I'll try to fill this space more often. Even if no one is actually reading this anymore, it's sort of personally cathartic to get these thoughts down -- it helps me preserve those performances, and other thoughts, that otherwise go un-recorded).

Unspeakably Gorgeous

2007-04-12T19:14:00.000-07:00

I had been looking forward all year to hearing Phillipe Herreweghe and the Collegium Vocale Ghent perform Bach's St. John Passion, and the day finally arrived on Sunday. It was everything I had hoped, a flawless performance of an incredible masterpiece.

First, I don't really understand why the St. John gets so much less attention and performance than the Matthew. The Matthew is great, of course, with some typically wonderful Bach. But I've always thought it's overlong, with some arias that are overlong by themselves and somewhat boring, by Bach standards. And these long, frequently occurring arias break up the drama of the recitatives and crowd choruses. I leave a performance of a Matthew feeling impressed but somewhat exhausted. I left the performance on Sunday trembling with awe (at Bach's genius and the talent of the performers -- no religious affinity here, although appreciating the religious meaning is important to appreciating the full impact of the music, just like the drama in an opera).

As I've grown to expect from this conductor and ensemble, the sound was just so beautiful. The chorus has a creamy, perfectly blended sound, even in relatively small numbers. The orchestra sounded terrific. The sound was smooth but the dramatic and rhythmic pulse was always there (in this respect, I think Herreweghe is sort of the Herbert von Karajan of early music). The soloists were all terrific, even though two of them -- the soprano and the bass who sings the arias -- were last-minute replacements. Most outstanding was Christoph Prégardien in the key role of the Evangelist. He had a wonderful sound but also sang with great expressiveness. And the recitatives were not done perfunctorily, but with great dramatic sensitivity. For instance, when the evangelist's line finished with, "and Jesus said" or the like, Konrad Jarnot as Jesus jumped in with his line while Prégardien was still beautifully tapering the phrase. And the crowd choruses were of course both thrilling and sung with pinpoint accuracy.

Anthony Tommasini, my favorite critic at the Times, had a couple comments about the performance I found a bit odd. First, he compares Herreweghe to Furtwangler in both style and tempi. Herreweghe's tempi might on average be slightly slower than most period groups, the difference between him and, say, John Eliot Gardiner in this regard is far smaller than between him and Furtwangler. In Sunday's performance, the speeds were actually quite typical for period performance, very similar to Gardiner's recording, which I'm familiar with from many listenings. The tempi were occasionally slightly slower than on the Gardiner, but they were also slightly faster in a few other numbers. Mostly, I hardly noticed a difference. Furtwangler, on the other hand...

Second, Tommasini says that the voices in the chorus "lacked uniformity." He doesn't really mean this as a criticism, but to my ears, the chorus sounded just as perfectly blended and unified as it does in recordings. I was actually surprised about the extent to which this was the case, considering the clear acoustics of Alice Tully and small size of the chorus' forces.

Third, he cites a "very troubled moment" when the soprano (Johannette Zomer) and the orchestra drifted apart, and some "inexplicable lapses with shaky intonation." I did notice when the soprano and the orchestra got disconnected, but I thought it was very slight and didn't last very long. I didn't notice any shaky intonation; might Tommasini just not be accustomed to the tuning of the original instruments? That might also help explain his odd contrasts of Herreweghe versus other original-instruments conductors. Or maybe I just didn't catch it. I was too entranced by Bach's genius.

Hewitt and Gould

2007-04-12T18:55:00.000-07:00

A reader named Will Farnaby recently left the following comment on the Angela Hewitt interview from Bachfest 2005:

As talented and dedicated as she is, one cannot help but remark that Angela Hewitt really should come to terms with her inferiority complex vis-a-vis Glenn Gould.

Instead of denigrating Gould - as she does in various of her interviews - she would be much wiser to strive to decrease the vast gulf that exists between her and the transcendent pianism and musicality of Glenn Gould.

Obviously, I completely disagree that there is any such "vast gulf." I'm not a fan of Gould at all, and even those who are must ackowledge that he was extremely unique and idiosyncratic. Any such comparison is silly.

More importantly, this comment implies that she has a "complex," and by merely saying that she draws no influence from Gould she is somehow "denigrating" him. Gould was simply his own animal, and anyone who has heard Ms. Hewitt's playing style -- clean, light, unfussy, almost no pedal -- would realize that it is about as different from Gould's as can be. Imagine being in her position: her playing is completely unlike Gould's, a musician she has nothing to do with; and yet simply because they share a nationality and an affinity for Bach (such as Gould claimed to be playing), she always has to answer the same stupid question about him. It's really my fault, I should have realized how silly a question that was.

And how exactly would she "decrease" that gulf? By waving her head about wildly? Ignoring the scores she plays? Painfully drawing pieces out to show her great, wild angst and Epic Seriousness? Just generally acting like a total weirdo, such that people will shake their heads in wonderment and say, "Wow, those geniuses..."? I like her the way she is: displaying and paying homage to the composer's genius.

Oh, That Fickle Phil

2007-03-15T19:36:00.000-07:00

The New York Philharmonic is a fantastic orchestra with a great big sound. But every once in a while, for reasons an outsider such as I cannot know, the orchestra just phones one in. The rumor is they're picky about the conductors they play for. It's possible that some of these times the orchestra is trying their best, but the conductor is just idiosyncratic and difficult to follow. At any rate, tonight was one of those times. The performance was mushy, limp, and lacked rhythmic drive.

The conductor was Alan Gilbert, who is the son of a violinist in the orchestra. It thus seems awkward and sad that the performance didn't go so well (at least to my ears).

Problems were immediately apparent with Stokowski's famous "Fantasia" orchestration of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor for organ (I read in the program this piece is now apocryphal -- who knew?). I always thought Stokowski's scoring was kind of lame, but tonight's performance lacked the sharpness that even Leopold's reconception of Bach requires. The music stopped and started, and the starts were hesitant and ragged. The fugue was rhythemless and mushy.

Next was the Ligeti Violin Concerto. I can't really comment on modernist pieces such as this. I defer to academics and musicians. All I, as a mere listener, can say is that it was unlistenable.

The first half opened with Webern's orchestration of a movement from Bach's Musical Offering. Not much to say about this either, just that the playing seemed in character with the evening.

Then came the reason I was there, Schumann's Rhenish Symphony. The opening of this piece should grab you immediately; it should hop along like a boy skipping down the banks of the Rhine (nice, right? okay, sorry). On this night, it was languid and sluggish. Gilbert hopped at times on the podium like he wanted some bounce, but he didn't get any. It seemed like he was over-conducting, trying to express every little feeling evoked by the score, rather than determine what must be done by the orchestra so that the score can speak for itself. He was dancing to the performance rather than firmly guiding it. I've never played under any conductor, so it is hard for me to imagine what playing for him would be like. But watching him, I thought his manner helped explain why the performance lacked any rhythmic consistency or drive. He was so busy expressing the music with his body that he could not maintain a steady beat at the same time.

From those loving expressions, it was also clear that he sought to shape and emphasize every little quirk and effect in the score. Yes, like Director Maazel. But distracting as Maazel's micro-management can be, the orchestra responds sensititively and with pinpoint accuracy to it. They were not nearly as responsive to Gilbert. They seemed just confused and disinterested.

The height of the disappointment was the opening to the weird and wonderful 4th movement. Half the orchestra, I think, expected a longer break. The jarring opening note was chaotically split into several. It was cringe-inducing.

This was actually my second shockingly-lackluster performance in a row. Glenn Dicterow (the common deminator, I suppose) and his Lyric Piano Quartet performed a pair of masterpieces on Sunday at the Barge: Schumann's E-flat and Brahms' G minor (the latter being one of the great pieces of music ever, period). The group was severely under-rehearsed, like I've never seen in a professional performance. There were screw-ups galore, and the playing was at once rough and feeble. Although those works are very difficult, especially the Brahms, these are extremely talented professionals; they clearly didn't take this event (or the venue?) very seriously. Which irked me, I have to say.

But you know what? They all still played a helluva lot better than I could.

Rite of Spring, and some other piece

2007-01-12T12:09:00.000-08:00

It's Zubin Mehta week at the Philharmonic, apparently, and I got tickets to both of his programs. Not really because of Mehta, they happen to be good programs.

So Tuesday was the Rite of Spring, one of the most stupendous works to hear live. Although relatively popular for such a daring, still modern-sounding work, the place would not have been so full had the orchestra not also been playing Beethoven's Violin Concerto, one of the most inexplicable works in the core repertoire. I think this piece is a true turkey. Perhaps not on the level of Wellington's Victory, the Choral Fantasy, or Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, but when you consider the ratio of quality to frequency of performance, this piece tops them all. And when I say "them all," I mean all pieces ever written. Beethoven's Violin Concerto is astoundingly banal.

And yet, it packs the house! One reasons seems to be the strange, disproportionate popularity of violin concertos and violinists in general. I don't really understand why this is, for several reasons: first, the idea of a solo violinist on stage is not terribly novel -- in any orchestral work the stage is already mobbed with violinists; second, in a related story, the format just doesn't work very well, instrumentally and sonically speaking. The violin gets drowned out by all the other stringed instruments. Recorded sound was the best thing to ever happen to the violin concerto, as now the instrument can be closely and artificially enhanced. Third, the violin can't play with near the complexity of the piano, for the simple reason that it can only play at most two notes at once. That's a full eight fewer than the piano!

Beethoven's concerto wasn't particularly helped in this performance by the ponderous pace Mehta took, especially in the first movement. It just plodded along. The highlight was the cadenza, which was not Beethoven's but Kreisler's, played by Pinchas Zuckerman. It contained an almost Bachian simulation of counterpoint, very cool.

The finale had some energetic moments, and that one glimmer of beauty, the unexpected melody played by the bassoon. The bassoonist was busy that night, between that melody and the famous, opening to the Rite of Spring.

In fact, I thought the bassoonist milked that opening too much, reeeeeeeeeally drawing out those first few notes. It was a bit much. In general, I thought the performance was a little too romanticized and gushing. The real genius of Stravinsky is in the rhythms, and to really bring out his incredible rhythmic effects, the piece should be played sharply, with jagged, pointed phrases. Mehta seemed to be treating the work like a Strauss tone poem.

So of the three performances I've witnessed (that I can recall offhand), this was probably the least (the other 2 were Eschenbach conducting the Philharmonic, and David Robertson conducting his Lyon Orchestra). But it was still an absolute joy to hear, and when this orchestra plays big, it's a magnificent thing. What band would I rather hear beat out those incredible brass choruses? A feast for the eyes and ears.

Discovering new pieces

2007-01-05T08:29:00.000-08:00

One of the great joys of classical music is its practically limitless nature. Although I frequently go to concerts and buy up CD's, I still regularly have the pleasure of discovering truly great pieces of music. The best is that period of time where you're just getting to know a piece well enough to hum along.

I'm in that honeymoon period with a couple of works right now. One is Handel's oratorio Semele. I of course love Handel in general, so bored a few weeks ago, I was browsing Amazon looking for potentially good recordings of oratorios I don't know. I generally ignore the operas -- it's not Handel's fault, I'll just come out and say it: opera seria is dull by nature, despite the sudden, recent movement to establish otherwise; it's like an emperor-with-no-clothes situation.

The piece I found actually proves this: Semele is very dramatic, basically an opera, but since he wasn't constrained by the opera seria straightjacket, Handel was able to let loose. Unlike some of his oratorios, which often have their boring sections, the music here is almost uniformly excellent. It contains some typically great Handelian choruses, but also some really inventive, moving arias and duets. The duet "You've undone me" in Act I merits the "back" button on my ipod for a repeat listen pretty much every time.

The name on the box that enticed me to grab the set was, of course, John Eliot Gardiner. The performance is typically excellent. It dates from the very early days of the Monteverdi Choir (1981), when Gardiner had not quite yet polished the group into the model of precision, clarity, and expressiveness it became a few years later. But they're still very good. And the cast of soloists is top notch: deserving special mention is the ever-reliable tenor Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, who is just so darn good in this kind of thing. Even better, though, is the mezzo Della Jones, who brings down the virtual house in the thrilling aria, "Hence, Iris, hence away!"

I'm generally not a huge fan of Papa Haydn. I admire his tremendous skills, but his music (especially the symphonies and quartets) usually fails to give me the deep pleasures that are ultimately what I'm looking for in great music. There's something cold and overly ironic and clever about much of his music. Just when you think something is building to a gorgeous melody or climax, it suddenly shifts to something else. Every tender moment is so fleeting it is barely there. It so often seems like a giant tease, as if Papa is saying: "You can see I could blow your mind with great music; but I'm just gonna mess with it instead."

One exception to this, I've always felt, is the Creation, where Haydn finally really seems to be letting lose and reveling in the pure beauty and ecstasy of nature. Well, casually browsing my uncle's CD collection on a Thanksgiving visit, I found another Haydn work to embrace: the Nelson Mass. It helps that the performance, on this Trevor Pinnock recording, is absolutely sublime. The pacing, the chorus, the sound, the soloists are all absolutely perfect. Felicity Lott is especially brilliant. The piece still doesn't take place among my very favorite masses, but it is full of wonderful and exciting moments. As if to prove it's not just the exceptional performance that's carrying the day, I was completely unimpressed with the Te Deum, which is at intervals either dumb and cheesy or just weird.

Bachfest

2006-12-20T12:50:00.000-08:00

I noticed the Bachfest "schedule" is finally up on WKCR's website. It's rather vague. Are they doing to have a whole day of "discussion"? I should hope not, and I doubt it.

Gotta wonder about the new management, the first classical director(s) since I joined up in college that I haven't personally been acquainted with. They totally cut me out of the loop, even though I've been a regular, devoted, and I daresay positive contributor the past 6 years. The Bachfest is its shortest length ever, only a week. They didn't put the schedule up until the last minute, and that "schedule" is only a rough sketch of themes and "discussions."

Well, I hope it goes well. I mean, it can't exactly be bad as long as Bach's music is prominently involved.

Don Carlo

2006-12-20T07:07:00.000-08:00

Finally, December 18 arrived -- Don Carlo! The Met's performance lived up to my expectations in every way, it was absolutely terrific.

At the outset, I was treated to something new. I had gotten to know the opera from the classic Giulini recording, and the Met's performance kicked off with an introductory scene involving Elisabeth and the chorus that is from a version not used in the recording. I gather from the program notes that this scene was cut just before the first performance and never published, but discovered some time later. I'm not sure when it was translated to Italian, as the original performance was in French. At any rate, the scene made a lot of sense, it helped set up Elisabeth's dilemma at the end of the Act. It's not essential to understanding that dilemma, but it beefed it up by providing more context. As for the music, it was typically nice Verdi, but nothing earth-shattering.

I don't think I had heard Patricia Racette before (although I've seen so many performances it's hard to remember every performance), so I didn't know what to expect. She was excellent as Elisabeth, with an impressive combination of prettiness and power in her voice. She also had the powerful low notes that are so necessary for this role. There was only the occasional moment when her voice lost some focus or had an edge for a few notes. Consistent difficulties with harder passages can detract from a performance, even when the performer is otherwise singing beautifully, because you start to anticipate the problems and brace for them, which is distracting. This was NOT the case with Racette, who handled many of even the hardest passages beautifully, so her occasional minor imperfections at odd times were easily ignored.

Johan Botha in the title role had a great night. I have heard him before as Walter in Meistersinger and Radames in Aida, and I've thought him a solid tenor with a nice, powerful voice. On Monday, he sounded even better than I remembered from those other performances, especially in how agile his voice was. Every note, even in fast passages (made especially fast by Levine's tempo choices), rang brightly and clearly, with perfect timing. He doesn't have the syrupy tone and smooth, flowing lines of Domingo or other great Italian-repertoire specialists, but the punchier, Vickers-like style can work just fine. Since I was used to listening to Domingo on record, it took me a few passages to adjust, but once I did, I was completely sold.

Rene Pape was as awesome as ever. One of the great things about the Met is that they have some truly excellent singers who they are able to get very frequently for even relatively small roles. They are house singers in a way. Pape is a great example of this, and the audiences really appreciate it. His great aria at the beginning of Act IV received the biggest ovation of the night.

The only hole in the cast, but one I anticipated, was Dmitri Hvorostovsky as Rodrigo (aka Posa). I have heard him before and not been impressed. He had a loud voice but a completely boring singing style. He sings with zero expressiveness or variation, every note sounds precisely the same. This style can sometimes be excused when the voice is beautiful enough, but I also find his tone rather cold. On Monday, he did not even sound as powerful as he had in the past, and was frequently drowned out by the other singers in this strong cast. This struck me especially in his big scene with King Phillip in the 2nd Act. The singing imbalance in favor of Phillip in both character and tone completely changed the tenor of this scene from what I was used to. On the Giulini recording, it is the Rodrigo (in the form of Sherrill Milnes) who dominates, and the Phillip (Ruggero Raimondi) who is rather weak and dull. When listening to the recording, the central character in the scene, the person whose feelings and motives seemed to be the focus, was Rodrigo, with Phillip being a mere foil. In Monday's performance, it was Phillip who I was concerned with; Rodrigo seemed merely to be a plot tool used to set up Phillip's development. This showed how the singers in an opera can affect fundamentally the shape of the drama.

Samuel Ramey still has a big voice, and unlike Hvorostovsky was not dominated by Pape in the great, great scene between the Inquisitor and Phillip in Act IV. Like Hvorostovsky, Ramey's performances (even in his prime) can be a bit monotonous, but his tone is more menacing, and that combination of menace and solemn monotony works perfectly for the Inquisitor. The performance of the key scene was thus ideal and one of the highlights of this great performance.

Olga Borodina is another reliable Met regular. She has a powerful but smoky and typically Russian mezzo voice. In a perfect world, I prefer the firmness of Horne, Verrett, Bumbry, or Cossotto in Verdi mezzo roles, but I very much enjoyed Borodina as Eboli all the same. She sang her big Act IV aria with great gusto.

Another great thing about the Met is that they fill the small roles with great, young talents looking to break out, such that the singers in the small roles can sound almost as impressive as the stars. Andrew Gangestad, who I happen to know is also an incredibly nice guy, excelled in the small but juicy role of the monk who the neurotic main characters mistake for the ghost of King Charles. The other small roles -- the page, the bass who announces the Grand Inquisitor, etc. -- were also filled out with some very good singers.

And the orchestra! They played with more beauty and precision than Giulini's orchestra, and the latter is a studio recording. Particularly impressive passages included the fast opening to the 2nd scene of Act III and the gorgeous orchestral opening of Act IV and Phillip's aria, especially the incredible cello solo. The playing had great expressive power and the phrases, especially in the Act IV passage, were shaped so effectively and convincingly by Levine.

As I've discussed before, Levine is a true master at Verdi. However, he did not seem quite as attentive to the rhythmic pulse of Verdi as I've found him to be in the past. He rushed and slowed passages more frequently than usual. But the performance was still very convincing overall, and the performers, singers and players alike, responded with great precision even in the "rushed" passages.

The only significant problem with the performance probably had nothing to do with the performers. In the big crowd scene, the Met, as they like to do, actually put on stage the trumpets being played in the action. But I'm not sure whether it was the direction the trumpets were facing, if they were placed too far back stage, or some other reason, but they were barely audible, and the orchestra was frequently drowning them out. Levine actually had to quiet the orchestra at odd times so that the trumpets could be heard. I have no idea how this problem has not been worked out over the course of the several performances this production has had already this season. Very strange.

But a mere quibble. It was overall a wonderful night involving one of the great masterpieces of opera.

...Oh, and Purcell

2006-12-18T10:22:00.000-08:00

Purcell is a bit earlier than Bach and Handel, but he was every bit as great (or as great as Handel at least). But Bach, Handel, and Purcell Orchestra would probably be a bit too wordy.

Period Performance in New York

2006-12-18T09:35:00.000-08:00

My reference to the "strange paucity of period performance in New York" provoked this response, which I published as a "comment" but wanted to bring attention to it in the body of the blog:

I see you read Oesterreich's review in the Times and have taken his prejudice at face value. The notion he perpetuates, that New York does not offer top-notch period performance, is a habitual thorn in the side to those of us who routinely perform period music at a top-notch level.

As a vocalist active in church music, I urge you to take into account the work of early musicians that goes overlooked by the reviewers. Just two examples:

The Magnificat offered yesterday at Holy Trinity Lutheran's Bach Vespers by professional period performers (with the able contribution of parish singers!) was expert technically and powerful musically. Judging from your description, it sounds like we did a better job than Koopman's people did!

Also yesterday afternoon, downtown at Trinity Church, Wall Street, another professional church choir with a period sound, together with Ensemble Rebel's instrumentalists who travel from all over the world to gig in New York, offered Messiah in a performance that has gained a worldwide audience (thanks to annual radio play and webcasts) AND acclaim by the press.

New York may not perceivably be the crucible of period performance that we wish it to be. But to assume that top-notch period performance is rare here is false. It's definitely out there. We, the musicians, are here and working.

I'm so glad to hear from an early music musician and I salute you for your efforts! First, I'll offer what weak defense I have for my remark: I wasn't quite merely "assuming" it to be the case. I certainly wasn't taking anything Oestreich said at face value, because I don't think he's a terribly good reviewer. I look through the music listings in the Times for performances, and I don't generally see very much in the way of baroque music on period instruments. (And by "baroque music" I basically mean Bach and Handel, because I confess I'm not much interested in anything else.) There may simply be a publicity problem -- do you have a place where interested concertgoers like me can find out about these performances? But I admit that I have allowed the blanket comments in Times reviews to confirm my (mis)impressions gained from perusing listings. I missed the performances you mentioned, and I would have loved to have heard them.

One group I'm aware of and whose mailing list I'm on is the New York Collegium. I went to the New York Collegium's performance of the St. Matthew Passion. The playing seemed excellent, but it was hard to even hear it clearly because the performance was given in such a hopelessly cavernous venue (a large church on the east side, I'm blanking on the name). The fast, contrapuntal parts were completely lost.

As a group that has had its struggles, the NY Collegium is not offering many concerts in its season, a problem they are obviously trying hard to remedy. Their current season offers only four programs. But another problem for which they are perhaps more to blame is what they choose to play in those few programs. The next concert, advertised on their home page, features 17th Century works by Biber, Weichlein, Rittler, Vejvanovsky and Schmelzer. Who? You lost me after Biber.

If I were to start a period group, I would simply call it the "Bach and Handel Orchestra," and play almost exclusively music by those composers. There is simply a huge dropoff in quality of Baroque music after those two titans. A smattering of music, perhaps for historical context, is certainly welcome, but it seems to me that any series of baroque performances would have to center on Bach and Handel. This is really not all that limiting -- both these fellows wrote REAMS of gorgeous music, much of which is not heard all that often.

I also had in mind the lack of visiting period groups at New York's big venues, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. The Amsterdam Baroque's performances (and ones by the Acadamy of Ancient Music later in the season) seem to be marking a significant change. I have been in New York and attending concerts for 8 years, and I don't ever recall seeing major period groups in Carnegie's schedule before last season. Lincoln Center has had occasional visits, but still at a rate disproportionately small relative to the greatness and importance of, say, Bach and Handel and the top-notch period groups that do them justice.

But really, getting back to the original point: the problem, if there is one, is perception, publicity, and venue, and clearly not any lack of talent or effort on the part of musicians. Please post more comments and let us know about more performances.

Gettin' Psyched for Don Carlo

2006-12-12T06:59:00.000-08:00

I'm seeing it on Monday. James Levine is conducting this year's edition, and that's always a cause for celebration. He's a total master at Verdi. He brings out so much detail you might never notice, as he does with many composers, but he also masterfully controls the rhythms in Verdi, an element a lot of conductors seem to ignore. And Don Carlo is a masterpiece, a fact I've only discovered recently.

To get to know the opera, I obtained what seems to be the consensus pick, the Giulini Covent Garden recording. Consensus pick for good reason. What a cast! Domingo at the absolute top of his game, singing those glorious, melting, soaring lines. My appreciation for Sherrill Milnes has really grown since I first heard him, and he also sounds in top form. And Caballe, whom I actually wasn't familiar with before, is the complete package. Nice, creamy tone, solid power, good low notes, and most incredibly, GORGEOUS pianissimos. When she tapers a phrase, it holds me breathless.

The downsides of the recording are the two basses: Raimondi as Phillip is boring as usual, but especially Giovanni Foiani, whoever that is, as the Inquisitor. It's a small role, but an important one, and Foiani is just awful. Considering how starry the rest of the cast is, they didn't seem to be limited at all in terms of whom they could get, so it's strange that there would be such a weak link. His vibrato sounds bizzarre, almost as if he's flapping his hand over his mouth.

But hey, no recording is perfect, and overall I am just loving this one. I've listened to it probably twenty times already, and I'm still enjoying it more every time. We'll see how the live version goes, I just have to prepare myself for singers that surely will not be Domingo and Caballe.

I'm back

2006-12-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

I neglected this little blog for a while, but WKCR's Bachfest is (or should be) approaching, and I recalled this page. I won't be participating in Bachfest this year, unfortunately. I'd provide info on it, but oddly enough, I haven't received any. I hope the new folks in charge have their act together.

Speaking of Bach, I heard the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra last week at Carnegie Hall. It was one of the most disappointing concert experiences of my concert-going career. (Oh if only that were a career).

On the program were two great Bach choral works, the first cantata of the Christmas "Oratorio" and, the piece I was especially looking forward to, the Magnificat (D Major version). Based on past experience, Ton Koopman is not the most exciting or brilliant Bach interpreter, but his performances tend to be at the very least pleasant and competent. This experience included a live concert at Alice Tully a few years back of orchestral works and a solo cantata (I think Jauchzet Gott in Allen Landen), which I thoroughly enjoyed. So considering the strange paucity of top-notch period performance in NYC, I was anxiously looking forward to hearing one of my favorite Bach pieces performed by such an accomplished period group.

Well, as I said, my expectations were not met. The performance overall was very flat, overly staccato, too light and too limp. These are criticisms commonly leveled against period performance groups in general, but they are often not justified, cf. John Eliot Gardiner and Phillipe Herreweghe. Even the previous Ton Koopman performance I attended had far more energy.

Worse, the performance was just sloppy. I understand baroque trumpets are very difficult to play, especially at the speeds Koopman chose, but the Amsterdam trumpeters really struggled, especially in the Magnificat. Also, in the opening movement of the Magnificat, the oboist accidentally paused where there was no pause in the score, and quickly had to cover it up. The soprano, who only had one number in the concert, had serious intonation problems. And most egregiously, the mezzo, who actually had a terrific voice and whose performance up until that point was the highlight of the evening, entered her second aria of the Magnificat a measure too early. Granted, Bach at that point adds an unexpected little extra musical phrase at the end of the orchestral introduction; but obviously you'd think a performer would be well aware of this before taking the stage at Carnegie. There were other moments that just seemed ragged. On the plus side, the bass and the chorus were excellent.

King of Kings

2006-05-01T10:59:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted anything in a while, mostly because I haven't made it to any concerts lately. But I never intended this to be just a repository for amateur concert reviews, so I'm not sure why that's an excuse.

In any case, I recently bought the Bohm recording of Fidelio on DG (now available on a super cheap reissue), after having been severely disappointed with the Karajan, as I wrote about before. Well, I'm happy now. I love this recording, especially the performance of James King, one of my absolute favorite singers, ever since I got the Bohm recording of Die Walkure, the very first opera recording I ever bought (and in my opinion, one of the great classics of the catalog, another subject on which I could ramble for much time). His voice is totally unique, utterly unmistakable. He has a richness and depth of tone that tenors so rarely have, and sings with endless strength and piercing character. He almost sounds like a baritone. I love the way he punctuates some notes at the end with an extra little breath, or alternatively tapers them gorgeously -- listen, for example, to his impossibly glorious singing at the end of the notoriously speedy Boulez Parsifal. In fact, that Parsifal's cast overlaps substantially with the Fidelio recording. The Fidelio is from a couple years earlier, so Gwyneth Jones is stronger, farther removed from her degeneration into a hopelessly huge wobble (she still sounds ok, barely, on the Parsifal, and is actually convincing as a crazed Kundry on the edge). Franz Crass gives warm performances on both recordings. And then, as I was saying, there's King. I can't get enough of his voice, I only wish he had made more recordings. There are some broadcast recordings of various operas floating around, but those are always very expensive and you have no idea what kind of sound quality you're getting. If anyone has an info on any of his other recordings, I'd love to hear it. Shoot me an email (link on the "profile" page).

A Professional Verdi Requiem

2006-04-10T07:13:00.000-07:00

In the Fall, I heard the London Symphony Orchestra under Colin Davis perform the Verdi Requiem at Avery Fischer Hall as part of the Great Performers series. It was an absolutely thrilling, electric performance -- the highlights were Sir Colin's consistently convincing pacing and the sharp, incisive, pitch perfect singing of the London Symphony Chorus, one of my very favorites in the world. I like the sound of a chorus singing as one powerful voice, with little or no vibrato. I think this works best, not just in baroque and classical pieces, but in Romantic ones like the Verdi. The tenor and especially the soprano were also terrific (the names fail me now, I'll look it up later). In short, it was a heart-stopping performance of one of the great masterpieces of Western music, on the short list of the most incredible concert experiences in my memory.

Fast forward to last Tuesday (yes, this post is a little overdue). I had high hopes, because although Maazel is an obsessive tinkerer, as I've talked about here, the Verdi Requiem is a vast, dramatic, Romantic canvas that is amenable to such a flexible approach (see Riccardo Muti's excellent recordings, especially the one featuring Pavarotti, Zajick and Studer). But I was rather disappointed with the result. First, the performance as a whole was just TOO SLOW. It was as if Maazel was taking a reverential, spiritual approach, but for some reason it never even worked on that level. It just felt matter-of-fact, even (and in a way, especially) in the big, loud Dies Irae episode, which one would think MUST be exciting. Everything was played on the legato side in the entire piece, there was no punctuation or rhythmic vitality. When you thought he finally had a solid, steady rhythm going, he would suddenly slow down the performance at the oddest times. Second, the New York Choral Artists is a fine professional chorus, but I longed for the London Symphony. They sang with a lot of vibrato and a lot of those gorgeous chords, especially in loud parts, lost focus as a result. A bunch of excellent solo singers singing together don't make an excellent chorus.

The soloists were all very good. The mezzo, Luciana D'Intino was especially good, the only advantage this performance had over the London Symphony's (where the mezzo was a bit lacking). Franco Farina is a solid, serviceable Verdi tenor, and can certainly be very very loud, but soft and tender as well, even if his tone isn't always the prettiest in either mode (it has an gritty edge to it). We were told at the outset that the soprano, Fiorenza Cedolins, had a cold, and the Philharmonic's director requested out "indulgence." These announcements seem to be getting more and more common, I think it's a bit silly. I was prepared to provide "understanding," but "indulgence"? Hmmm... At any rate, she didn't need any indulgence, she sounded quite good. The bass, Orlin Anastassov, had a nice, rich voice.

And you know what? I'd go hear it again. This piece is incredible, and it was a professional performance, and I enjoyed myself. I hate being a nit-picky, smug reviewer when all these people with immense talent that I don't have present such a titanic work on a high level. But what can I do? Recordings and especially that incredible London Symphony performance set such a high standard.

As for recordings. I think there is no perfect all-around recording of the Verdi Requiem, oddly enough. At least I haven't found one, and I've done quite a bit of looking. As I mentioned, I like Muti's recording, but the sound is a bit recessed and the chorus is on the wobbly side. Muti's other recording has more immediate sound but less spectacular soloists. Solti has the best quartet of soloists (Pavarotti in his prime, Marilyn Horne (WOW!), Talvela, and Sutherland), but as is often the case with Solti recordings, the conducting is a bit uneven and the orchestral sound rather brutal. Toscanini's recording is awesome in its way, with a terrific quartet and some exciting, even terrifying, passages, especially the Tuba Mirum, where you can hear Toscanini shouting while the trumpets blare. It makes your hair stand on end. But again, although the Robert Shaw Chorale was fine for what it was, it just doesn't have the focus that I like. Also, some passages in the Toscanini recording are surpisingly slow, such as the Dies Irae (although he sneakingly speeds it up as it goes) and, more damagingly, the Sanctus. Gardiner, of course, has excellent choral singing, but his soloists are all rather underpowered and uninspiring and, as is the case with many of his recordings on Phillips, the sound is way way too distant. This is a topic for a whole other discussion, but I think this is such a travesty, because the foremost advantage of period performances are transparency and immediacy, and Phillips really undermined this with their muffled recordings of Gardiner's terrific performances.

In the end, I think my favorite performance (although I couldn't do without the Solti -- just for Pavarotti's Ingemisco -- or Toscanini), although it too is not perfect, is Giulini's BBC broadcast recording featuring the relatively obscure quartet of Richard Lewis, David Ward, Amy Shuard, and Anna Reynolds (the soloists listed on Tower are for the accompanying Schubert Mass). Shuard, the soprano, slides around a bit but has a very nice tone. Ward, the bass, is truly excellent. The mezzo Reynolds is also very good, but Lewis is the weak spot. He sounds kind of strained (but that's why we need to keep Pavarotti handy). But the choral singing is truly GORGEOUS, the best I've heard on any recording, and the recorded sound, amazingly enough, is also terrific -- immediate, clear, and warm, FAR better than Giulini's studio recording, strangely. Unlike Maazel's attempt, Giulini's performance actually attains spiritual heights, it's great, live occasion. Go get it if you haven't heard it.

Fidelio

2006-03-30T11:44:00.000-08:00

Fresh off the Bach concert, I went to see Fidelio for the first time at the Met.

I loved it. I think the opera has some problems, and Beethoven is not as his best in opera, but there's a lot of great music in there, and when it's performed as wonderfully as it was on Tuesday, it is immensely enjoyable. Mattilla is simply amazing. Her voice has the piercing power and clarity of a Nilsson or Eaglen without the cold-steel quality. Heppner is still not in his 1999 Tristan form, but he still sounded excellent. The rest of the cast was all terrific. The orchestra sounded great, and was well-conducted by Levine-sub Paul Nadler. He took the score fast and tight.

I actually had only gotten to know the piece recently through the von Karajan recording with Vickers and Dernesch. I was having trouble getting really into the opera, but now I think that's due more to the recording's faults and not the opera's. Vickers is famous for this role, but he sounds strained on the recording. Part of this may be Beethoven's strained writing (he couldn't really write for the voice -- or maybe, really, for any earthly instrument), or maybe I'm just crazy. But I just don't like him on the recording. And Dernesch is, well, Dernesch. She has such an odd voice, this artificial-sounding rapid vibrato. I wonder if she really ever existed, if maybe von Karajan created her voice in studios during post-production, like the model in that awful Pacino movie. As is the case with many of Karajan's opera recordings, the performance also sounds generally manufactured and unnatural. The microphones sound shoved down the throats of the singers, while the orchestra sounds distant and echoey, with the 2 elements brought into parity by adjustment of the levels. No actual live performance could sound like this, and you wouldn't want it to. Hearing this wonderful performance at the Met motivated me to find a better recording -- perhaps Maazel/Nilsson or Bohm/Jones, King (Gwyneth Jones is not optimal, but James King is one of my absolute favorite singers).

Bach in Zankel

2006-03-30T11:15:00.000-08:00

I took in a concert at Carnegie's Zankel Hall for the first time on Monday. Of course, I didn't go for the hall; I went for the strangely rare opportunity of hearing Bach well-played on period instruments (here, by the Bach Collegium Japan).

But first, a note about the hall. It's clearly not designed primarily for the pure sound of real instruments. The ceiling is entirely covered by lights and other equipment. It's like a dense, black forest of technology hanging over your head. I think this hurt the acoustics. I thought the concert sounded distant and muted for such a small hall. I was sitting in the first row of the balcony, which is not that far back.

On the other hand, perhaps the playing style contributed to that muted quality. On recordings (I've heard several of the BCJ's Bach cantata records), I've always found the sound similarly muffled and dead. They lack the immediacy, clarity, and liveliness of Gardiner's recordings, even if the playing and singing are polished. I had assumed that the problem lied in the engineering inadequacies of an obscure label (BIS), but after hearing this concert I wonder if it wasn't at least partly due to the group's style. As Teri Towe pointed out (in characteristically strong terms), the group played in the all-too-typical overly-staccato style of many period instrument groups. They don't use any portimenti, they fail to "connect the notes." I understand the criticism, but I have to say it didn't bother me too much. And although the notes were brief and isolated, they didn't sound abrasive as can also be the case with these groups. Suzuki and the BCJ seem to temper the effect of the staccato style by playing lightly. The problem is the cumulative effect is one that lacks energy.

But eh, who cares. It still sounded lovely and (relatively) clear, and like I said, I crave any opportunity to hear the music of the greatest composer in history performed on original instruments by a properly sized ensemble. And they played some of his best orchestral music: the Orchestral Suite no. 2 (the flute one), the Harpsichord Concerto in D minor, the Concerto for 2 Violins, and the Brandeburg Concerto no. 5. The Suite was the one piece on the program where the interpretation was actually interesting as well. The second movement was played in a lilting "Lombard rhythm," and some other notes were held and phrases tapered to pleasing effect. Everything was well-paced. I just wish I could hear the flute clearer, but again, I blame the hall.

I really liked Suzuki's harpsichord playing in the D minor concerto and the Brandeburg. He didn't vary the registers very much (I believe just engaging the second register for the various finales) and never used a buff stop, but it was still lively and exciting, interesting but still rhythmically vital. When I saw Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque do some Bach orchestral pieces at Alice Tully a few years ago, Koopman in his excited state banged the harpsichord so hard that it made a knocking sound. One would think that someone so familiar with the instrument would know that hitting the keys harder doesn't make it play any louder. Suzuki didn't do this, so you just heard the plucking without any knocking.

So why, in this greatest of classical music cities, do we so rarely hear period instrument groups doing Bach and Handel (frankly, I don't need to hear any other Baroque composers)? I can't wait until the next opportunity comes along.

The Anti-Maazel?

2006-03-10T15:28:00.000-08:00

The BSO paid one of its regular visits to Carnegie Hall on Monday to perform Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony no. 1 and, of course, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. My hunch tells me it was the latter piece that brought droves of people in line for partial view rush tickets earlier in the day.

As an aside here, how strange is the unique level of popularity this piece holds? Obviously, it's a wonderful work. But there are so many works that are just as great, and arguably many that are even greater, even by Beethoven himself. Given the choice, I'd rather hear the Missa Solemnis (if the choir was up to the task), but no such line would have formed for that work. It would at least make sense, even if it would be unfortunate, if NO piece of classical music attracted that kind of crowd to Carnegie. But once this mob appreciates the greatness of the Ninth, aren't they just a bit curious about what joys other similarly transcendant works might hold for them? As a kid, I got to know a few pieces of music from my parents playing them in the car. I loved a few of them. And sooner or later, I got curious: if that's great, what else is? Why aren't more people asking this question? I really have no idea. I suppose one answer is that people are simply lazy; it took no effort to become familiar with the Ninth -- or at least with the finale -- because it's so ubiquitous, and to become familiar enough with anything else as great would require the repeated listenings that a song by U2 does not. But I'm just not satisfied with that answer. Anyone who can crack this puzzle can save classical music.

Anyway, as for the performance, Allan Kozinn's review in the Times did a good job summing it up. It occurred to me during the performance that it sounded a lot like a von Karajan recording -- relatively fleet, unfussy, but lush and thick at the same time. Kozinn notes that the phrases seemed "clipped." I think this is an interesting way to put it. In fact, Janowski merely pressed on, keeping strictly to the beat even in the first movement, where we are so used to certain phrases "breathing," to certain moments being suspended before the next dramatic episode, that when this does not happen the music seems "clipped." If these conventions of phrasing had never developed, we would never have given Janowski's reading a second thought. He would just be following the score and its steady rhythm. After this performance (the first time I've ever heard Janowski), I'm inclined to think of him as the anti-Maazel.

As for the singers, it's hard to even hear the women in Beethoven's notoriously clumsy vocal scoring ("he can't write for the voice," my singer-father grumbles). The tenor had an odd voice; he sounded almost like a baritone with an unusually wide vibrato. The bass was very bass-y indeed; his name (Albert Dohmen) was familiar to me but I couldn't place it. As soon as he started singing, however, I knew what role I heard him sing: Gurnemanz, that role always sung by that very particular kind of deep voice that's difficult to describe. If you're familiar with Parsifal, you know what I'm talking about. The Tanglewood Chorus -- and I have to be careful here, I have a relative therein -- was just too big. It was kind of overwhelming and lacked transperancy. Beethoven's vocal music can easily sound shrieky, and having an oversized amateur (I mean this in the technical sense) chorus usually doesn't help.

Of course, I'm nitpicking; the performance was overall a joy, terrifically exciting. As it always does, my heart started racing, triple-speed, at the buildup to the coda, and didn't calm down until after a couple of curtain calls.

Samson et Dalila

2006-03-05T15:10:00.000-08:00

I finally saw Samson et Dalila at the Met on Thursday. I got the tickets on a whim on Tuesday, and spent the next couple says listening to a recording repeatedly to get to know the work. It turned out to be a good whim.

I saw a great quote about Saint-Saens in a Gramophone Magazine review: "his genius was literally superficial, in the sense that it was for the surface of things—for the fine cut of a melody, the thin but firm texture of good orchestration." Samson exemplifies Saint-Saens' talent for melody and texture. He might not have been a genius of Brahms' stature, but he was an exceedingly skilled composer.

Seeing this performance made me rue my failure to see this opera when Domingo did it while I was in college. I had intended to go, but never did. Jon Frederic West sang it on Thursday, and he was frankly rather disappointing, especially after hearing Domingo soar on the recording I had listened to over the past couple days. West barked and wobbled his way through the role. The barking style might work all right when he does Siegfried, but in French music this style is death. Olga Borodina, however, was terrific, infinitely better than the horrendous Obraztsova on the Barenboim recording. The latter performance must be the worst performance in a title role on a major studio recording that I have ever heard, outside recordings conducted by Herbert von Karajan, who had very idiosyncratic tastes (Hofmann's Parsifal, for instance, is even worse. He single-handedly wrecks an otherwise transcendant recording.). It is simply baffling that this was allowed to happen, as Barenboim does not generally seem to share Karajan's idiosyncracies or imperiousness.

Anyway, back to the opera. Many have noted the parallels between the thrilling Bacchanale in Samson and the Dance of the Seven Veils in Salome. I thought the parallels don't end there; the entire atmosphere of that last scene is darkly ironic in a way similar to all of Salome. About twenty years before Salome, Saint-Saens composed a climactic scene novel in that it's exuberance is one that celebrates evil, and this effect is well-reflected in the orchestral coloring and aggressive, even brutal melodies. Salome, of course, is more deeply ironic, as even the hero, John the Baptist, is being mocked by Wilde and Strauss. The entire scene is absurd. But an element of that is seen first in Samson, as the Philistine's decadence is not meant to be taken at face value, but thinly covers a darker menace.

Speaking of Salome, if you missed Mattila's performance two years ago at the Met, I can't think of a better reason to invent a time machine. It was flat out the most stupendous operatic performance I have ever seen. It left me breathless. The precision, the power, the control, the tone! Hopefully, she'll be back to do it again. I look forward to seeing her as Leonore at the end of the month.

Aida II

2006-03-05T14:48:00.000-08:00

I said before that I had two thoughts on Aida after seeing the Met's performance, and here, somewhat belatedly, is the other one.

The conductor, James Conlon, adopted speeds that, although relatively conventional, irritated me. His style involves accelerating and halting at various points, making the music swell and recede as the drama dictated to him. Although this approach seems to be considered nowadays as authentically Verdian, I think it's unfortunate. As I mentioned in my last post, Verdi has such a great rhythmic vitality and flow, and this quality is hindered by the approach exemplified by Conlon. The Rome recording conducted by Mehta, with Nilsson in the title role, has similar problems.

I think the approach is particularly problematic in the 2nd act. In the wonderfully tense scene between Aida and Amneris, as the latter toys with the former's emotions, Conlon had the music surging and halting as the two go back and forth and Aida's mood shifts. These emphases are entirely unnecessary, and hurt the overarching buildup to the incredible climactic moment when Amneris exclaims "Radames... vive!" Then in the triumphal second scene of the act, the ending after ending that Verdi throws on top of each other was separated by sharply varying speeds and lurching stops. When critics put a positive gloss on this approach, they call it "letting the music breathe" and "shaping the phrases."

Take, as contrast, the severely underrated recording conducted by Erich Leindorf on RCA (with Price, Domingo, Bumbry, and Milnes). The tension in the first scene is unrelenting, and when the unparalleled Grace Bumbry comes to that incredible climactic line, the music just explodes. (Bumbry, by the way, delivers one of those once-in-a-lifetime, stars-are-perfectly-aligned dynamo performance on that recording. It MUST be heard. It's the greatest possible performance of the greatest of mezzo roles.) And the second scene builds evenly to the grand finale. The recording, and Leinsdorf's approach, have been unjustly maligned. The speeds seem unconventional, but only because they are not extreme, while people have grown used to the extremes. I've heard several recordings, and Leinsdorf's is far and away my favorite, and not just because of the unbeatable cast.

Another similar contrast consisted in the last two runs of Otello given at the Met. First, Gergiev conducted a blazing fast performance, but one that had lots of acceleration and seemed frenzied without being exciting. Levine, on the other hand, had more moderate speeds, but his control is impeccable; as always, the inner voices of the score come through so clearly, but the rhythmic delights of the opera do as well. Despite being slower, Levine's performance was more exciting and rhythmically vital due to the tight control he exercised over the pacing. That control was even more crucial in the terrific performances of Falstaff this past fall. Levine is at his best in Verdi.

Aida and the Opera Audience

2006-02-21T17:17:00.000-08:00

I've been incredibly busy lately and have not posted anything to this site. But at some point in that span, I attended a performance of Aida at the Met. A detailed review of the performance seems moot, and my memory is already a bit fuzzy, but I have two separate thoughts based on the performances I have seen there. This one is about audiences at the Met.

First off, allow me to stipulate: I am not a snob. I don't go to the opera or to concerts to participate in "culture" or to hobnob with the upper class. (Did I say upper class? This is America, of course they are all upper middle class.) I just really love music, and great music is best enjoyed live.

With all that said, I think there are two types of people who go to an opera: the opera goers and the music lovers. Opera goers might like the experience of "going to the opera" for the more snobbish reasons I mention above, or they might appreciate the general effect of the harmonious blend of music and drama. Music lovers go, of course, because of the wonderful scores; after all, it's ultimately not "Da Ponte's Figaro," but Mozart's Figaro. Drama serves as a wonderful setting for music. Music has its own inherent drama, but when matched to an actual story, the drama in the music becomes more vivid.

Anyway, for obvious reasons, some operas mainly attract the opera goers (Carmen, Cav and Pag, anything by Puccini), others mainly the music lovers (Pelleas, Boris Godunov, anything by Wagner). Others have the unfortunate tendency to contain both glorious music and great drama and spectacle: Mozart and Verdi come to mind. But it is at Verdi performances, or at least some of them, that this becomes a problem, that the purposes of the two audiences clash.

Aida has a marvelous flow. Each aria and ensemble, each exquisite line and glorious melody, transitions brilliantly to the next, even when it seems to end. But this does not come across well in a live performance, because of the unfortunate tradition of applauding at the end of many arias, dances, ensembles, etc. There is no real break at these points. In Mozart, each number has a clear ending and, although the entire opera holds together wonderfully, no harm is done by the applause. But in Aida, applause really breaks the flow of the work and sometimes even swallows a gorgeous soft ending. This is particularly a problem in the first 2 acts, with their rapid-fire choruses, dances, and marches. Each certainly deserves applause, but the cumulative effect of the pieces are partially lost when the applause is inserted in the middle of the action. If I were conducting this work, I would make an announcement requesting that the audience hold their applause until the end of the act.

A lot of fuss is, rightly, being made about keeping classical music alive, reaching a younger audience, etc. Another fuss over classical music is made from the other direction, in a way: critics complain about the dearth of contemporary, "adventurous" music in orchestra programs and opera calendars. The response to the first problem is often to dumb down the music, install gimmicks, or engage in "crossovers" -- i.e., "engage" the audience in cheap ways that have nothing to do with the true value of the music. Addressing the second results in turning the auditorium into a huge lecture hall, and a boring lecture at that, with the puzzled audience sitting patiently as Professor Boulez drones on with his baton. I think both approaches miss the point, because they don't appeal to or utilize the greatness of music. People will never love great music because it's fun, cool, or mathematically interesting. They will love it because it is great music. And they will only know it's great once they know the music. Of course, that's the tough part: how is this accomplished? But it is always important to keep that goal in mind: classical music is wonderful because its genius is immensely enjoyable.

That's why my suggestion does not slow the advance of classical music or alienate new audiences. To the contrary: my point is that the point should always be the enjoyment of music, or we're missing the point. I don't think people should sit quietly during an entire act of Aida because it's high class, respectful, moral, traditional, or any such thing, but because it's the best way to appreciate the greatness of Aida, in all its magnificent moments and massive flow.

Of course, there are probably ways to engage the audience more that do highlight and enhance the greatness of the music. But that's for another day.

Cosi fan Turkey?

2006-01-30T19:15:00.000-08:00

A Mozart week in a Mozart year brought me to the Met for the "other" da Ponte opera, Cosi fan Tutte.

The performance was serviceable at best (at least by Met standards). Obviously everything was steady, polished, and meticulously played. But Levine seemed on autopilot, and took an excessively mellow view of the score. This was most sharply evident in Despina's Act I aria, "In uomini," where the performance lacked the jumpy, dance-like element that makes it one of my favorite parts of the opera.

My father (a singer) has justifiably observed that Joan Sutherland was terribly overrated. She was adored at the Met opera despite her inability (or unwillingness) to pronounce any consonants and many vowels. "Mealy-mouth," he calls her. And yet she was exceedingly popular, especially at the Met. Well, I have similar objections to Paul Groves, who sang Ferrando here. He frequently appears in Met performances and gets big ovations (although of course he's not as popular as Sutherland was), but I find him irritating in a similar, "mealy-mouthed" way. All the words and notes wash into each other into one big mess; there is no sharp articulation at all. His voice is as light as a feather without being very nimble -- his coloratura is awful. Seemingly in a constant struggle to project his voice -- and, perhaps, to act -- he has that unfortunate tendency to always puff out his chest and make sweeping gestures with his hands.

The young baritone, Mariusz Kwiecien, on the other hand, was terrific as Guglielmo, despite a supposed "severe chest cold" that required our "understanding." This announcement, by the way, is unique to the opera world. As a friend who came with me pointed out, can you imagine the coach of the Lakers stepping onto the court before the game and announcing, "Kobe Bryant has a severe chest cold; he will play anyway, but requests your understanding"? Anyway, Kwiecien will be singing the role of the Count in Figaro this coming month, I look forward to it. I hope he recovers.

Thomas Allen, as Don Alfonso, was steady as ever. He might have lost a bit since he did a terrific Beckmesser a few years ago, but he still sounds very good.

But it's the women who are most important in this opera. The female members of this particular cast (Alexandra Deshorties, Magdalena Kozena, and Nuccia Focile as Fiordiligi, Dorabella, and Despina respectively) are all fine singers. But they all sang with too much vibrato for this piece -- vibrato so wide, you could drive a truck through it, as my dad would say. The female characters do a lot of fretful and acrobatic singing in this opera, and with all the vibrato it started to sound shrill and ring in my ears after a while. They were "hitting red on the wobble-ometer," as a friend would say (ok ok, I'm done). I would have rather heard the sopranos from the Monteverdi Choir whom Gardiner featured in his C Minor Mass for these roles.

Ultimately, I think I must agree with Teri Towe and admit that this piece, by Mozart's standards, is simply a failure ("Cosi fan Turkey," he calls it). The first act has some wonderful music, particularly the gorgeous farewell scene, but around the start of the that act's finale, the opera just falls flat. It's here where you first realize that this piece pales severely in comparison with the other da Ponte operas, Don Giovanni and Figaro. The Act I finale of DG and (especially) the Act II finale of Figaro are grand scenes of escalating tension and towering music.

Think of that incredible moment in Figaro when Susanna, the Countess, and Figaro are worrying about the problem with the note in that soaring melody, while the Count accompanies them with a scurrying line, wondering when Marcellina will arrive. There is so much tension there, expressed through Mozart's unparalleled genius. He has nothing to work with, though, in Cosi's Act I finale. There's no tension at all: Four of the characters know exactly what's going on and are confident in success, and the other two are pathetic dupes. The music is thin and dull, only suddenly, almost ritualistically gaining momentum for the final section. The scene, like much of the opera, is silly without being funny, pathetic without being sad.

The experience really brought me back, especially, to Don Giovanni. There, as Joseph Kerman argues in Opera as Drama, Mozart is not really in his perfect dramatic element, as he is in Figaro and Zauberflote. But unlike Cosi, it still inspired some absolutely glorious music. Who would guess, before hearing the opera, that a classical-era composer, and the warm, gentle, humanistic Mozart no less, could compose such utterly terrifying music as that accompanying the Don's damnation? The music holds our interest the whole way through, always taking fascinating, unexpected turns. It might not be the perfect union of music and drama that Figaro is, but it's a veritable orgy of brilliant dramatic music (kind of like Gotterdammerung is for Wagner -- that's another discussion).

Angry Sparrows in Avery Fischer

2006-01-27T10:51:00.000-08:00

Reading Bernard Holland's review in the New York Times, I was reminded of a rather unpleasant episode during the concert of Mozart's great masses. I forgot to mention this in my original post.

As Holland writes:

"The Mass was briefly accompanied by a twitter in Fisher Hall's rafters, sounding roughly like a flock of angry sparrows. Lincoln Center attributed it to a hearing aid, although how feedback from so small a source could have swooped back and forth and at such a volume strains my limited understanding of electronics."

There is no way that was a hearing aid. Unfortunately, I've heard hearing aid feedback during a concert, and it sounds nothing like that. On the other hand, it sounded exactly like many emergency alarms that sound when an emergency door is opened. I assumed at the time that someone had ducked out of the performance and used an emergency exit close to one of the entrances to the hall. It also, as Holland notes, seemed way too loud to come from a hearing aid. If it hadn't occurred during the grand Qui Tollis section of the C minor mass and instead during, say, Et incarnatus, it would have stopped the performance, I'm sure of it.

At any rate, it's time to toss that hall out back into some mothballs, or better yet shoot it and take it out of its misery.

As an aside, when a hearing aid does go off, I'm most upset not at the pour old soul with the faded aural senses, but at the people sitting next to him who don't immediately do something about it. If next time you're at a concert, something like that is happening next to you, for heaven's sake, give the person a solid poke.

Claremont Trio

2006-01-24T09:42:00.000-08:00

This Friday, a fantastic, immensely talented young trio will be playing a recital at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall. I'm talking about the Claremont Trio, featuring the twins Julia and Emily Bruskin and Donna Kwong. For information on the concert and program, click here.

Also, the Trio will be interviewed on WKCR by Eugene Sit on this coming Thursday afternoon show, airing 3-6 PM.

If you haven't heard their debut record, featuring the Mendelssohn trios, get it. Their first CD already deserves a place among the best recordings of these great works. It has that sparkle that Mendelssohn needs.

Gardiner and Mozart Part II

2006-01-24T09:04:00.000-08:00

I managed to make it back up to Lincoln Center last night to see the second concert in Gardiner's Mozart tour, featuring the last three symphonies. Besides some practical scheduling problems, I was also a bit hesitant because I was so unsatisfied by Gardiner's recording of these works. That recording was surprisingly slow and soupy, more so than many modern instrument performance I knew (and liked -- it was far more dull than, for example, Karl Bohm's version), and the recessed recording sound added to this problem. My favorite recording of these works remained Christopher Hogwood's, by a wide margin.

I am happy to report Gardiner's interpretation of these works has changed dramatically for the better since he made those recordings (I think in the early '80s). The performance sizzled, it was absolutely thrilling. The phrases were gorgeously and always convincingly molded. Some fun, tasteful ornamentation, particularly noticeable in the trio of No. 39, added to the sense of joyful music-making. And of course, the incredible Jupiter finale was a gas.

In fact, the entire Jupiter symphony was played with all the players standing up (except of course for those whose instruments rest on the floor: cellists, bassists, percussionist). For an encore, they played the section of Mozart's very first symphony that features the four-note motif that begins that amazing finale (a case of a "snake biting its tail?" suggested Gardiner to the audience, quoting Brahms).

Admittedly to show off, I asked Gardiner afterwards in the Green Room, "Why didn't you bring along the Choir and play the Missa Brevis, too?" (This is the other work where this motif appears.)

Gardiner replied, "Would you rather have heard that than the last three symphonies?"

I said, "Well, no."

"Well, there you go."

I also asked him if he had any plans to re-record the late Mozart symphonies, since (I dared say) his interpretation had changed so much since the first recording. To my relief, he acknowledged that yes indeed, it had changed very much. As for recording plans, he said, "ask my wife." (His wife, Isabella, is also his manager.)

I didn't feel too badly about introducing myself to Mrs. Gardiner, who was standing right there, as we (at WKCR) had been in touch with her about a potential interview with J.E. for BachFest, an interview that unfortunately did not materialize (although Jacob plans on interviewing him in England in the Fall). She is also exceedingly nice. She informed me that Symphonies 39 and 41 will be recorded live at an upcoming concert in London on February 9th, and a limited edition of 3,000 copies will be sold immediately on Gardiner's production company's website. She said she has not gotten a chance to set up the order form on the site yet, but will do so soon. So there's a real scoop for the few lucky ones that are already reading this blog. Just leave a copy for me!

Gardiner and Mozart

2006-01-22T20:12:00.000-08:00

Ah, another Mozart year is here. And it brings to New York, finally, John Eliot Gardiner and his terrific chorus. Sir Gardiner's work, particularly his recordings, have been among the most thrilling, illuminating, varied, and consistently excellent of any conductor since they started recording music. He took what could once be stalely called the "historically informed performance" movement, and made brilliant, exciting, gorgeous music out of it. His CD's have been a big part of my music-listening life since high school, when I first heard his recording of Figaro. But since I came to New York in 1998, this is the first time he has come to the City with his ensemble, as far as I know (he stepped in to conduct the Philharmonic in Beethoven's Ninth on New Year's Eve one year, but I was out of town). As soon as I could after Great Performers tickets went on sale, I snapped up two seats -- close to the front, of course. The concert was at Avery Fischer, after all.

The program consisted of the C Minor Mass and the Requiem. For soloists, Gardiner drew from his Monteverdi Choir, which was just fine. They were all excellent. I couldn't hear the men (Matthew Brooke and Jeremy Budd) very well in the C Minor, but I think that was just due to where they were situated versus where I was sitting (J.E. was in the way). The women were great, the second soprano (Miriam Allen) in the C Minor was especially good. Her light girlish coloratura voice danced effortlessly through the Laudamus te. And I do mean danced; maybe a bit more so here than in Gardiner's recording, the performance had a dance-like bounce to it, especially in the way the soloists phrased the ornate passages of the work. And of course the orchestra and chorus sounded terrific; we really need more bands and choruses in the U.S. that sound like this. That is, more than zero.

The only part where the performance came loose a little bit was in the first Osanna. Gardiner took it very fast, of course, and the singers -- some of them anyway -- sped up a little too much. Gardiner's interpretation has changed little since he made the recording -- the Cum Sancto Spiritu fugue was a bit more dynamic and the Benedictus was somewhat quicker. But I still feel that his approach in the grand, "high style" numbers -- the Gratias and the Qui Tollis -- is a bit too heavy. Even in big choruses like these, Mozart can't be all that somber. I actually slightly prefer Hogwood's recording for that very reason (that and the drums added to the Credo, which make that movement much more convincing... and fun). But these are quibbles, both the recording and today's performance were excellent.

No quibbles at all with the Requiem. It was one of those rare occasions when a performance had me so enthralled that I could not move and could barely breathe by the end of it. The Lux Aeterna almost brought me to tears. My heart was still racing for several minutes after the (standing) ovations ended. The occurrence of that heart-racing thing is one way I know it's been one of those truly unforgettable concert experiences. (Other such occasions have included hearing Robert Shaw conduct the Cleveland Orchestra in Beethoven's Ninth at Blossom; Murray Perahia play the Chopin Ballades at Carnegie; Renee Fleming forgive the Count in Figaro at the Met in '98 [that time, I actually did cry]; Krystian Zimmerman play the Brahms D Minor concerto at Carnegie; the London Symphony and Colin Davis do Verdi's Requiem just a few months ago... come to think of it, I've been pretty blessed). The Requiem brought new soloists to the front, still drawn from the choir (the bass Brooke was the only repeat). All four were great, and their voices blended wonderfully together in the ensemble sections. The performance was dramatic and flawless, and again the interpretation was very similar to his recording. Gardiner makes the best case possible for the Sussmayr version.

For the first time in my concert-attending career (ah, if only it were my career), I dropped by the not-green Green Room for the chance to shake Sir Gardiner's hand. And that I did, thanking him for all the joy he's given me over the years. Teri Towe was kind enough to introduce me to him. I tried to think of something to ask him, and the only thing I came up with was to ask why he had changed the layout of the chorus for certain sections of the C Minor Mass. He didn't even let me finish the sentence. "Look at the score," he calmly said (he's a very calm but firm guy, it seems). "Some of the choruses have 2 parts, others have 4..." He spoke quickly, I didn't quite get it all, but I shut my mouth. He also said he thought the Avery Fischer acoustics were not nearly as bad as people say. I can just say I feel a little bit less embarrassed, since at least we pleased this great man from across the pond. I'll keep sitting up front, though, thank you.

Maazel-ified Dvorak

2006-01-12T09:35:00.000-08:00

This is a little late, but last Thursday I made my way to Avery Fischer Hall to hear the New York Philharmonic for the first time in a while. As usual, I made sure to get a seat right in the front (this case, second row), to avoid Avery Fischer's notorious acoustical problems. I didn't realize how long it had been until I sat down while the orchestra was warming up, saw all the familiar faces on stage, and thought, "Hey, I missed these guys." I have been to so many Philharmonic concerts in the past six years or so that I've grown accustomed to seeing those faces up there and, at least in the case of the wind players and lead string players, have even grown familiar with how they play. I think this kinship adds another dimension to the concert experience. It's really nice.

Lorin Maazel conducted. More on that a bit later.

The program opened with a predictably rousing performance of the Flying Dutchman overture. The orchestra's terrific brass section played those horn calls with great gusto. It's always a joy to hear Wagner's glorious music from up close and from a stage. In the opera house pit, obviously the music is put in its proper dramatic context, but you're not exposed as vividly to all the detail in Wagner's sound world. Great fun.

Following the classic programming plan of "short orchestral piece-concerto-big symphony," the next work on the program was the Walton Violin Concerto, featuring the Canadian James Ehnes as the soloist. It was the first time I had ever heard the piece, so I can't really comment on the performance, but I really enjoyed the work. It was surprisingly pretty, perhaps sometimes verging on the precious, but quite enjoyable. I'd like to see how it holds up under repeated listenings. As usual with Violin Concertos, the violin tended to get lost in the tutti. This should be alleviated in a recording. The advent of records was the best thing that ever happened to the violin concerto; it's as if composers who wrote in this formal somehow knew this technology was coming. Otherwise, it's hard to explain why they wrote them, the format just doesn't work that well in live performance. I can't think of a single violin concerto that could count as one of that composer's great works (I don't think Paganini wrote any great works). One possible exception could be the Saint-Saens no. 3.

After intermission came Dvorak's great Symphony no. 7, a brilliantly taut work inspired by Brahms' Third, but laced with Dvorak's Slavic sense of rip-roarin' fun. Here's where Maazel characteristically stepped into the fore. As is well-known, Maazel has a tendency to manipulate scores to an irritatingly great degree, inserting pauses, tempo changes, and other means of emphasizing Great Moments. Lorin, we know when the Great Moments are, we don't need you to point them out to us; and in fact, your manipulations make them less great. Maazel made his presence known almost immediately. After the low strings introduce the intense main theme, Maazel had the winds play their answer at a much slower clip. It was jarring and unconvincing, yet obvious what he wanted to say. "Note," screams the maestro, "how lyrical this same theme sounds slightly altered and played by the winds!!"

The worst part of the performance was the slow movement, which lurched and halted at every turn. It was fragmented and episodic, lacked a sense of flow. The playing was hesitant, as if the players needed to wait for Maazel's thumbs-up before starting any phrase... which they probably did. The first three notes of the scherzo were drawn out, a more witty and less annoying gimmick: the dancer holds his leg up and winks before diving into his number. The last movement was the best part, Maazel seemed more willing there to just let the music go.

In general, Maazel's interventionist style works much better in late Romantic and 20th Century works. For example, his performance of Bruckner's Seventh last year was absolutely thrilling, he held my interest at every note and drew a stupendous, rich sound from the orchestra. His Wagner (see above) and Strauss performances are also reliably enjoyable. These composers provide a broader canvas, leaving room for Maazel to play. And he is an excellent musician, so once allowed room, what he does with that space is usually convincing and exciting. On the other end, even he refrains from manipulating non-Beethoven Classical scores in the same way. Performances of Mozart's Prague Symphony and Haydn's Creation were an absolute pleasure. Buyer beware, however, for anything in between, from Beethoven to Brahms to Dvorak. Interesting, how in this respect he is the opposite of Masur, who was at his best in this repertoire, whereas his Bruckner, for instance, (in my opinion) tended to be ponderous and dull and his Mozart, well, non-existent (as far as I can remember, he left Mozart completely to guest conductors, especially Colin Davis).

As for Dvorak's Seventh, I cherish a recording that has been the subject of some scorn from reviewers and was out of the catalogue for many years before re-appearing recently: James Levine's performance with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival. The recording is very close and, at times, even a bit harsh, but I think this works perfectly for Dvorak. It enhances the folksy character and the dance element that is so important in Dvorak, but at the same time gives great weight and power to the Brahmsian tragedy in this particular work. The performance simply sizzles. The magnificent climax of the first movement explodes in your ears; I can't listen to it without jumping out of my seat, goosebumps and all. The same goes for the Ninth Symphony, which comes coupled with the Seventh. Check it out.

Angela Hewitt Interview Transcript

2006-01-07T17:59:00.000-08:00

This interview was conducted on December 1, 2005 over the phone. Ms. Hewitt was at her home in Italy, and I was at the WKCR studios. The interview was taped and aired on December 31 during Bach Fest (of course) on WKCR.

JT: [Intro] Why Bach? What led you to focus so much on Bach from very early in your career?

AH: Well it was there at home. My father, as you just said, was organist at the cathedral, so of course he played all those wonderful organ works by Bach and did play them marvelously I must say. My mother, who was my first piano teacher, had been his student, so I went to church every Sunday and heard him play, and I just remember those early years very well and what an impression Bach’s music made on me. And when I did start playing the piano at age three, I think by four I was already playing the easiest pieces of Bach, and being taught it very well I must say, too, with the right phrasing and how to articulate and all those little details that make such a difference. So I just loved right away from the beginning what was in his music and the rhythm of it all, and the themes, so much. So I certainly grew up in the right household to love Bach.

JT: That’s a very authentic baroque story, growing up with father who was the town organist.

AH: [laughing] Right.

JT: Bach himself studied first with a relative, although I think it was his uncle.

AH: That’s right. He certainly came from a musical family.

JT: And created a musical family.

AH: That’s right. So all those things, and also all the other things I did as a child, you need two or three of them: violin, recorder, classical ballet. They all sort of helped with my interpretation of baroque music. Violin, of course – the keyboard concertos that I just recorded, two of them I first played on the violin, and then later learned them on the piano. Recorder gave me great insights into baroque ornamentation. I had a wonderful teacher for that. And singing also, I sang in my father’s choir, so that was great for getting to know about part playing, singing the inner voices. And then ballet of course gave me the sense of the dance, which is so necessary in Bach, because his music is really all dance, such as how to express rhythm, which I think I really got from my ballet training.

JT: So what made you choose to play the piano, as opposed to, say, the harpsichord?

AH: Well. I never considered anything else, really. It seemed natural to me to play Bach on the piano. Of course, I knew that it was written for the harpsichord. And I remember I had one for a year in my bedroom because somebody went away on sabbatical and left us one, and I fooled around with it. But I was never really taken by the sound of the harpsichord, I much prefer the sound of the piano. And I could see that if you played it properly from the beginning, it sounded great. There’s nothing better for singing those wonderful melodies, melodic lines that Bach writes, for distinguishing the different voices. I never had any complexes about playing it on the piano at all. So it wasn’t a conscious decision, it just seemed natural. Of course, I knew there were people who thought it was a no-no to do that [laughing], but that never really influenced me, because I always felt good about what I was doing.

JT: Well even if there’s not a moral issue there, there are some things that the harpsichord can do that the piano can’t. For instance, the higher notes have a different quality than the lower which helps vary voices; you can vary the stops between the hands; it has a sharper plucking sound. Were you ever attracted to that?

AH: Well, I wouldn’t say that there’s a lot a harpsichord can do that a piano can’t. I mean, it can be noisier, sure. Having done a lot of Couperin… this is important, actually. Couperin’s music is actually more idiomatic for the harpsichord than Bach. Take the Well-Tempered Clavier, for instance. There’s no music that’s more abstract than that. It can be played by anything; a three-voice fugue could be played by three string instruments, by three wind instruments, could be sung by three voices. It’s such pure music, it’s not really idiomatic for the keyboard at all. So that’s why I don’t see a problem. The harpsichord, yes, you can sometimes double the octaves, but you can also sometimes do that on a piano, as I do for instance in the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue [in C Minor the last time the subject comes in in the bass], I double it in octaves. I mean you can do that, which you could do on the organ pedals as well. I just find that the advantages of playing it on the piano outweigh the disadvantages.

JT: That’s a great point. Maybe that’s why his early works, like the Toccatas, are the ones that sound best on the harpsichord, while his later and more abstract works tend to sound better on the piano.

AH: Perhaps, sure. They are more idiomatic, all the arpeggios and stuff. So yes, they do sound quite different on the harpsichord, sure.

JT: Many have observed that your great genius in your Bach work is that you use all the dynamics and everything available in the piano and yet your Bach playing never sounds anything but Bachian.

AH: Right.

JT: Contrast that with, for instance, when I heard Daniel Barenboim play the Well-Tempered at Carnegie Hall, and it was a thrilling performance, but it was very much a Romantic performance,

AH: Exactly

JT: It didn’t really sound like Bach. So how is it that you do that?

AH: Just by using musical intelligence to imagine how it was… I mean, forget the harpsichord, and you look at Bach, so many of the keyboard works are very orchestral or vocal. So that’s really what’s more in my mind than the harpsichord. First of all, I play with very little sustaining pedal. One of the things I really concentrate on, something a lot of pianists do somewhat, but in my opinion not enough, is that all of the legato is done with the fingers. My fingering is very complicated, but it allows me to play cleanly and smoothly without using the pedal. I never rely on my foot to play something legato, if I can help it. I will turn my fingers and my hands inside out to do this [laughing]. So that takes an awful lot of work at the beginning, but that I have done. And also in the articulation, very important. And this perhaps comes a lot from my violin playing. Because I don’t think pianists think enough about what the bowings would be on a stringed instrument. I mean, when we were doing the concertos – and you can hear this, I think – all my parts are marked, I marked them so that the bowings imitate what I’m doing on the keyboard and vice versa. That’s a very important study and a very important part of Bach interpretation.

JT: And you mentioned before ornamentation. Using that also, rather than dynamics and pedals, lots of trills…

AH: Yeah, to get it as close as possible to what it would have been on a harpsichord. You don’t have to do trills on the piano for a long time to get the note to sustain like you had to on the harpsichord. So you don’t have to do that on much. Several harpsichordists who have heard me play say that if I sat down and played the same way on a harpsichord, I would really sound like a harpsichordist a lot of the time [laughing]. I thin it just has to do with the clarity of the articulation mainly.

JT: Yeah, focusing on the space between the notes rather than the amplification of the notes themselves.

AH: Right, sure. Even in something, like the E-Flat Minor prelude from Book I, which is that wonderful, slow sarabande, where most pianists would pedal on every beat, I just don’t use it all. All the legato, even the repeated chords in the left hands, I do just with the fingers, hardly lifting the notes from the keys to repeat them.

JT: So while we’re on the topic of instruments, you recently did a performance in Seattle. I read that you had a piano taken all the way from Salt Lake City to Seattle for the performance.

AH: [laughing] That’s right, a Fazioli, yes.

JT: So what is it about that piano?

AH: Well, the Fazioli piano in general I think is a fabulous instrument. They’re made here in Italy just outside of Venice. Mr. Fazioli only makes a hundred a year, so there aren’t a lot of them around, so that’s why we had to bring one from Salt Lake City to Seattle, because that was the closest dealer who had one and could service one for me. I own two of them. I have one here in my house in Italy, which I record on now, I take it out to do my recordings, it’s a fabulous piano. They have great clarity, they have a great range of sound. They have a different sound. Some people who are so used to hearing the traditional Steinway sound might not like it, or it might take them a while to get used to it. But it’s such a colored sound, that I feel there’s so much more of a variety that I can get. And just the responsiveness of the action is quite amazing, every little ounce that I do comes out, and also I can do it with great ease. It’s not a clumsy piano at all. They don’t say it’s the Ferrari of the piano world for nothing. I mean, I’ve never driven a Ferrari, I wouldn’t know [laughing].

JT: That’s probably pretty key in something as tricky as the Goldberg Variations.

AH: Sure, sure. So I do play them often. I have an Italian tour in December of seven concerts, I’m playing it in two different places. I just also like a bit of variety. If you play the same type of piano all the time, it can get a little boring, so it’s nice to have a little spice in life. But I do find that the Fazioli is wonderful, especially for Bach.

JT: Do you think the audiences notice the difference in general?

AH: They do. Well certainly a lot of them told me they do, they like it very much.

JT: Do you have particular Bach works that have been your favorite to perform in concert or to record?

AH: I know that my favorite Bach piece to perform in public is the Goldberg Variations. I just played it at the famous Lucerne Festival this week. I played it for my debut in Berlin also. It’s just a wonderful experience I think for everybody involved; for me, although I’ve played it for over 30 years now, I never get tired of it and always am finding new things. For the audience, for those who know it, they’re interested to hear another interpretation, or those who don’t know it are just completely bowled over by it. And it does have this, I think, wonderful spiritual power that can really, in a good performance, lift us very high up. And there are not many pieces that have that to such a degree. So I love playing the Goldbergs. But I must say, playing as I did in Miller Theater at Columbia the other night, complete Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier— which is a marathon and you have to be pretty masochistic to do it—is also a wonderful experience. In a way, it’s more demanding on the audience, not just because of length, but in the concentration it takes. But also very very satisfying, because there’s no greater music really.

JT: One thing I’ve found in listening to the Well-Tempered Clavier in performance is that it’s more demanding to the ear. It’s not just very long, but it’s not as integrated a work as the Goldberg Variations. Do you think that’s true?

AH: Well, you have 24 preludes and fugues, 48 pieces there, all of which are very different, so it’s not integrated at all, except that it’s a prelude and fugue in every key. Although I do present them in groups of four, I think each group of four makes a very satisfying whole. But no, it’s not like the Goldberg, where you have the same bass-, the same harmonies that repeat in each variation over and over again, and that gives it a tremendous unity. The only unity in playing the 24 preludes and fugues is that you’ve played them all, so you’ve gone through all the keys. But still, it’s wondrous what he does, and the variety that there is. But yes, it is quite demanding, certainly more demanding on me, playing it from memory. The Goldberg seems like a walk in the park afterwards, to tell you the truth, after playing the Well-Tempered Clavier [laughing].

JT: Do you ever play Book II in concert?

AH: Oh yes, I’ve done Book II in concert. Actually, in the 2007-2008 season, we’re planning a world tour where I will present the 48 preludes and fugues, both books, in two concerts, all over the world. And I will hopefully be doing it in New York, I think at Zankel. And in many different places I haven’t been, South Africa, South America, in London of course. Anyway, really a world tour, presenting Book I on a Friday, Book II on a Sunday matinee perhaps, because it’s much longer, or perhaps more spaced apart with a master class in each city. Something like that, but really, we’re going to make a thing of it. It’s going to be very demanding on myself, but- I did it in 2000, in the Bach anniversary year, and it was the biggest challenge of my life. But I feel it’s worth it, it’s something I want to do.

JT: Book 2 was written much later, and is more complicated

AH: It is.

JT: And a lot of people would say a little less warm. So do you have a different approach to it in general than you do for Book I?

AH: No, I don’t have a different approach, but the music is a bit different. Especially the last twelve can be very complicated, but I’ve worked quite hard on those. And also worked hard to get the biggest contrasts, to get the most interest out of each of them. Some people play those last twelve so slowly, all of them, that you just die. So I’ve really tried to put as much life as possible in them, and when you do actually, they’re fabulous fabulous pieces. But it took me a long time to find that, so I think some people just don’t get that far [laughing]. And also they’re terribly difficult to play technically. Book I perhaps is easier to play in concert, because it’s “only” two hours of music, whereas Book II is two and a half hours of music. So it’s a big thing. So as I told my Italian agent, I don’t start a concert of Book II at nine o’clock at night, they have to start a little earlier [big laugh].

JT: Going back to the Goldberg Variations, in performing this and even more so in recording it, you have a daunting task of distinguishing yourself from just about every other major keyboard artist since Glenn Gould, because just about everybody records this piece. So how did you confront this challenge?

AH: Again, I didn’t actually listen to a lot of performances. I mean, everybody records this piece… well, not everybody plays Bach, but certainly yes, all the major Bach players have. But I didn’t obsessively listen to all the recordings out there. No, I had my own way of playing it, and that was what I was most interested in, just going to the score and finding my own way. When I did record it, I had already played the piece for twenty-five years, and it had changed immensely since when I learned it at age sixteen until then. What happened was, we went into the studio, and we had five days to record it. This is true. On the first day, I played it through, and I discussed it with my producer, what we wanted to change. On the second day we did the first ten [variations], on the third day we did the middle ten, and on the fourth day we did the last ten. So by dinnertime on the fourth day, we had it all covered. I went for a bit of a massage on my shoulders, and we had a nice Japanese meal. And then we went back to the hall—Henry Wood Hall in London where we record. And my producer—who always knows when I’m playing my best or can do better—said, play the opening aria again, because I think we can have it better. So I did, and then he said, you know, now you’re playing really well, why don’t you keep going. And it was a quarter past eleven at night, I said, you’re crazy! And he said, they’re not going to kick us out of here. And it’s true, they don’t. So between a quarter past eleven and a quarter to one in the morning, I get the best performance of my life of the Goldberg Variations until then. And I would say 80% of that one performance is what you hear on the record. And it was also very different from what I had done previously in many cases. We had worked so hard taping and listening, and then changing things, improving things; we had worked so hard over those four days, that then I felt free to just play it. Plus my tuner had changed something in the piano mechanism to make the trills a little easier, which always helped. So it really just flowed out. And then we had to do a little bit of patching on the fifth day for a few stumbles here and there, but we couldn’t actually use anything we had done on the first four days, because it had been so different. So that’s a nice story, and absolutely true, about what is on my Goldbergs CD. A late-night performance.

JT: Reminiscent of the original performance, played to help the count fall asleep…

AH: In a way! That’s right, I had an audience of three, my producer, my piano tuner and his wife. So I was playing for people, too, which is when I often play my best.

JT: Yeah, and often studio recordings can have an overly contrived feel, like there was too much effort, but it sounds like you really simulated a live performance.

AH: Yeah, that’s what it is, for sure.

JT: And you haven’t just recorded the Goldberg Variations and the Well-Tempered, you’ve recorded all of Bach’s works for solo keyboard, just an incredible accomplishment. So what did you learn from the journey? How did your view of Bach’s output evolve over the course of this entire incredible endeavor?

AH: I learned a huge, huge, huge amount, an incredible amount. I purposely started with the easier pieces, the two- and three-part inventions, and the French Suites, and the middle preludes. In each recording, I gained in knowledge, gained in experience. And of course playing it all in concert, too, as I did, while I went on. I didn’t just record them, I played them all in concert, and from memory. So throughout the years—and I think you can hear that, if you listen to the later recordings and the earlier ones—there is quite a difference, more dynamic contrasts, more distinct voicing between the parts, the ornamentation also is better. At the time I did every record, at that time I felt it was the best I could give. But I did learn a huge amount. Also, how Bach himself developed! That was the most fascinating thing, too. And now having done Couperin, to see what he got from French harpsichord composers. When you play something like the 8^th [] from Couperin, the one in B Minor, and then you learn Bach’s French Overture, there are so many similarities, they must have known each other’s piece. So it’s very fascinating there. I really have come out of it so enriched, not just emotionally and intellectually, but technically as well. It has hugely developed my technique. That’s one of the reasons Bach wrote it, to get those fourth fingers as strong as the thumb! And the second and third finger! And I know that has happened, because in some pieces that I played when I was younger and then got to at the end of the cycle, I didn’t have to use fingerings that avoided using the fourth and fifth fingers as much. Those fingers are now very strong and very even. Plus, I hate to think what it’s done— well, not hate to think, I always say to myself it would have been interesting to measure my brain at the beginning of the cycle and then at the end. After having memorized all these thousands and thousands of notes, to see how my brain has changed would be fun to know.

JT: Has your approach or interpretation changed since you’ve recorded them? Musicians sometimes express displeasure with their recordings later.

AH: I still like what’s out there, but I know there are things I could do better. And even in the Well-Tempered Clavier—I recorded it in ‘97 or ‘98 I think, so that’s already quite a while away—and I would like to some day do it again, also in the new surround sound technology. We have all of the CD’s, I think from the Goldberg on, we have in surround sound, but not the ones before. But I would like to do the Well-Tempered again. I feel that it’s such a huge work, and my style has grown since I recorded it. So I will some day. What I am going to do, in 2007, or at least have available by 2007, is a DVD on my approach to Bach on the piano, explaining to people all the things one has to think about it, how to learn a fugue, because there are people wanting to know all those things. So I do want to put that down on DVD.

JT: So let’s talk a little more about influences. Obviously there’s your father. But what other performers have influenced you? Glenn Gould is also Canadian, is there a connection there?

AH: We used to see him on television. I remember the first time I saw him, I ran into the room and I saw this person playing with his fingers up by his nose, and I said, “Who’s that kook?” to my parents. I must have been four or five years old. We listened to him, but we never really imitated him, because he was so unique, and his style really only suited his personality, and certainly not mine. So I can really say that he was not a great influence on me. I think the fact that we’re both Canadian and play Bach is more a coincidence than anything else. Although one of my teachers in Toronto, Myrtle Guerrero, was of course the widow of Gould’s only teacher, Alberto Guerrero. But that was as close as the connection came. My teacher whom you mentioned before, Jean-Paul Sevilla, the French pianist who came to teach in Canada, he was the one I first heard perform the Goldberg Variations live in recital. And that really impressed me. So he adored Bach and always made sure I had some in my repertoire. So that was an influence for sure. And then I suppose the next big influence was when I went to live in London in 1985, and all the early music people were very—well, they all still are active, but especially active then. You know, Norrington and Pinnock and Gardiner. And I used to go to a lot of their concerts, I worked with some of them, and I did get a lot from them. Nothing terribly new; they talked a lot about articulation and phrasing, but that as I said any good musician should know anyway, and I was taught when I was young. But it was more their sense of joy, the way they brought out the dance in Bach, the enthusiasm they had for it. I thought it certainly didn’t have to be boring! So that just sort of underlined what I had already felt, and I dared to also be a bit more extrovert in that, in expressing that joy. So that was also a big influence on me. And then what I learned the most from really were the recording session days, listening to myself in the studio in the most ideal conditions, in a wonderful hall with a wonderful piano, with wonderful recording equipment. And with my record producer, Ludger Bockenhoff, who has tremendous ears, and really helped me extraordinarily in getting the best interpretations that we could. So those have been, I must say, the most major influences on my Bach playing.

JT: I was going to ask you about the period performance explosion, what influence it has had on you and how you feel about it. It sounds like that has had a significant influence on you.

AH: Well it did, as I said, especially in those years, the middle eighties I would say. And I really took from them what I felt applied to me the most. Also in Beethoven, I went to all the concerts of Norrington’s first Beethoven series before he recorded all those records in ’87, ’88. So I took all that and applied it to what I was doing, and yes, it did change the way I play, for sure. I think there is room for both though; there is room for that, and for the traditional interpretations. But I don’t think one can play Mozart and Beethoven now without a regard for what they’ve done, or if you do I don’t think it’s right.

JT: One thing I think you do have in common with that, with those conductors and that movement, is that you bring out that dance and that freshness in Bach.

AH: Exactly.

JT: Like what you talked about, in performances of the second half of Book II, where the performances had gotten so slow and so over-romanticized, that it got sluggish and boring, and your recordings are always the opposite of that.

AH: That’s right, that’s right. That’s important… the energy.

JT: Especially, say, the keyboard toccatas of Bach, which are so under-recorded and so under-appreciated, and part of the problem is that they are really dance-like, fun pieces but had gotten so lugubrious. And your record did a lot to alleviate that.

AH: Oh, good. Good, good [laughing].

JT: You mentioned Beethoven. At the risk of straying from our BachFest theme, you have your first Beethoven CD coming out soon, is that right?

AH: I do. I’ve recorded it, we’re just doing the editing now, and it will be out I think next fall, in September. But yes, I’m quite thrilled with that. Three sonatas, the Appassionata, the Op. 10, no. 3 in D Major, and the Op. 7 in E-Flat. And I’ll be doing another one of these about this time next year. Again, I feel that I have a little bit different approach from most pianists in playing that repertoire, than a lot of pianists, so I want to apply the same type of things that I put in my Bach playing to Beethoven, and we’ll see what comes out.

JT: Is your unique approach to Beethoven related to, or a result of, your experience with Bach directly?

AH: Of course, of course. I mean, Beethoven was influenced by Bach, they say he played all the 48 preludes and fugues as a kid. So yes, I do think so. So many people play, not just Beethoven but the piano, always playing the hands at the same dynamic. If they play mezzoforte with the right hand, they’re playing mezzoforte with the left hand. Whereas no, there are so many different voices, so many different parts, so many different things going on.

JT: Rubinstein did that really well.

AH: Sure, sure. So that I’d like to bring out. And also just the energy, the energy. The craziness of it, too. I remember when I lived in France, from 1978 to 1985, there was a tradition of playing Beethoven that, to me, it sounded as though the more boring it was, the more “Olympian” they described it as. But I couldn’t understand. I thought, is Beethoven this boring? And then I discovered it didn’t have to be that way. So I think the amount of energy you put in it is very important.

JT: Yeah, I think we really have something to look forward to then.

AH: [laughing] Good, good.

JT: One thing you like to do is write your own liner notes. Your notes to your Well-Tempered Clavier recording are especially impressive, extensive and detailed. Do you do a lot of writing on music? Is that something you feel really adds to the performance itself?

AH: Well I do like to do it. Outside of my liner notes, I don’t have much time at the moment to write anything else. I do book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, which I enjoy doing, too. I’ll soon have to write the notes for my Beethoven record, so that will be a challenge. But I do enjoy it. I mean, I learn a lot from it too, and I want to give my own take on the pieces to my public. I think they appreciate that, not to have just the same old historical sort of bla bla bla. So I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy the actual process of writing. My mother was an English teacher, so I was taught how to write decently. But it does take an awful lot of time, and it’s hard to practice and write on the same day. So I usually have to put some days aside where I just write.

JT: So when’s your next trip to New York?

AH: My next time is in February, on the 24^th and 26^th I play in the Chamber Music at Lincoln Center series, a French program, the Debussy Cello Sonata, with Daniel Muller-Schott, the Ravel Trio, and the Franck Quintet, with members of the Society, so that will be great.

JT: It seems like your focus so far in your career has so far been Bach and French music.

AH: Well, I play everything else as well, I play all the Mozart concertos, all the Beethoven, but yeah, I suppose I am known for those two things for sure. And I have a Chabrier disc coming out next month, in January, the Chabrier for solo piano, which are wonderful. I love French music, I lived in Paris for seven years, and as you said, my teacher was French. So I was very much steeped in the French idiom, and I love it. So that’s a nice program.

JT: Great, we look forward to that. Thank you so much, Angela, for taking the time to talk to us.

AH: Thank you, Jonathan. It’s been my pleasure.

Hilary Hahn Interview Transcript

2006-01-05T21:25:00.000-08:00

The following interview was conducted live by phone during WKCR's BachFest, on December 27, 2005.
(Sorry it's taking me a while to post these, this transcription is tedious work. I'm a pretty fast typist, but not fast enough. The Hewitt interview is coming soon.)

JT = some jerk; HH = Hilary Hahn.

JT: So why did you choose Bach to record your first record?

HH: Well it’s interesting, the first recording that I did for Sony was Bach and the first one that I did for Deutsche Grammophon was Bach, with no Bach in between as far as recording goes. But I’ve always played a lot of Bach. I actually did the Brandenburg Concertos at Lincoln Center one winter. I think I was 15 or 16 or something like that, and that was right around the time I was going to start recording the first album, the Bach stuff. I felt like I’ve played so much Bach from the beginning, that I might as well make Bach recordings (laughs).

JT: What’s special about Bach to you?

HH: Maybe this isn’t accurate, but to me it seems that Bach is actually one of the most romantic composers. A lot of his music has a lot of depth to it. You can interpret it any way you want, and you can really pour yourself into it, or you can hold yourself back. There’s a kind of a balance there that you have to strike. You can’t just go all out and have it sound like Bach still. But at the same time you can really find a lot in it every time you come back to it. So there’s a definite emotional connection for people who play it, and the audience as well gets a lot of variety as far as the interpretations that they’re presented with.

JT: Yeah, you certainly take a very expressive style in your Bach playing. I know you value very much the history of violin playing, the old masters. Who are some of your big influences in your playing, especially for Bach?

HH: For solo Bach I was influenced by Henryk Szeryng and Arthur Grumiaux. I listened to their recordings a lot very early on. Milstein as well, for Bach, he’s a great person to listen to. And I also listened in general a lot to Kreisler and Heifetz and Elman and a lot of other people from that generation. My teacher, Jascha Brodsky, was familiar with all of them.

JT: Talking to other performers, Angela Hewitt said she barely listened to any recordings of the Goldberg Variations before she played them. Other performers have told me they don’t like to listen to recordings first, because it can distort their interpretation. But my impression is that you do listen to recordings and that it actually helps you with your interpretations.

HH: Right. Coming into a recording session myself, I don’t tend to listen to other recordings, because I need to make sure I have it straight in my head, what I want to do. But when I’m learning a piece, it helps to listen to different recordings to hear how the different – well, with Bach, it’s solo – but still, it helps to hear how the different instruments interact, and to get a feel for the pacing of the piece, and how it sounds when one person plays it versus when another person plays it, then you get an idea of what the options are. There are some pieces that have a tradition of interpretation, and if you do a certain thing because you don’t know any better, it’s not acceptable. You can do anything you want, but there are certain pieces that have certain ways of being played that you have to start from in order to sound like you know what you’re doing. But in other pieces, you can just start from scratch, and whatever you come up with is fine. So it really depends on how much variety there is in the interpretations, and how much is considered standard.

JT: How did you find that situation in terms of the Bach Violin Concerti? Was there a lot of tradition bearing down on you?

HH: Well, with anything that now has performance practice traditions, I think that kind of frees you up in a way. Because there already, when you start your own interpretation, are so many different possibilities. You can really choose anything you want. With Bach, there are certain things that don’t work structurally, but they have nothing to do with tradition, they have to do with the structure of the piece, the phrasing you can come up with in that structure. For example, sometimes certain accents wouldn’t make any sense in the music, or certain tempi just don’t feel right, so you really can’t force yourself to do something that doesn’t feel right. With Bach it’s more that it has to work as an interpretation, but as far as which one you choose or how you go about your interpretation, there are a lot of options.

JT: In terms of tradition, obviously each violinist puts his own stamp on the work. But at this point, there are also two broad camps, the Heifetzes and the Milsteins on the one hand, and the period performance explosion on the other. How has the period performance movement influenced you, if at all?

HH: Well, I think there’s a third category, which is sort of a combination. Because there are people who are on the extremes of both, people who make a career out of knowing the traditional way that things should be played, and they’re extremely good at it. And then there are other people that like that kind of style, but don’t really want to go all the way into that, with the baroque instruments and everything like that. So they play in a more historically informed way but on modern instruments. And there are people who just throw all that out and do whatever they feel like [laughing]. And I think I’m kind of between the last 2 categories I mentioned, not really striving to sound like a historically informed interpretation, but at the same time I don’t want to disregard what is evident from the music. And there are certain things in the research of original performance that are very helpful for someone like me. I’m not trying to do only them, but I am trying to respect what the composer intended and how the composer might have expected it to be performed, in things like ornamentation and other stuff. I don’t want to do something from another era, in other words.

JT: Yeah, for instance you didn’t record the [Bach Violin Concertos] with the full forces of, say, the Berlin Philharmonic, you recorded them with a chamber orchestra [the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra], if not on original instruments, more scaled to the forces of Bach’s time. And with a harpsichord continuo.

HH: Yeah, exactly, I wanted to record it with a chamber orchestra, with as small an orchestra as possible.

JT: How did you get hooked up with this particular ensemble, the LA Chamber Orchestra?

HH: Jeffrey Kahane, used to conduct in Santa Rosa, California. He may still do that, I don’t remember. But I worked with him a lot there. He’s also a really good pianist, and I know him from various musical experiences. So he seemed like a good person to record the Bach with. And the LA Chamber Orchestra was… actually, Sony arranged that recording, and then the contract, when we were renegotiating for the second contract, just didn’t work out. So Deutsche Grammophon took over what Sony had arranged. They didn’t have to, that was really nice of them to do. And the way Sony had set it up was, they were comfortable recording with the LA Chamber Orchestra, and I had wanted to record with a chamber orchestra. And there was Jeffrey, directing the L.A. group, so it all just all worked out really well. I think one reason Sony had an agreement with them was there was some kind of financial thing. American orchestras are really expensive to record with, but they had some sort of financial arrangement that worked for Sony. So that was nice. I didn’t want to record without a conductor, I wanted a conductor to take responsibility for certain things, in the interpretation and in recording sessions and things like that. So that ruled out some of the other chamber orchestras that Sony would have considered. So it all just kind of came together nicely. The musicians were really quick on the uptake, because that particular group has a lot of people who also play soul music. And they’re incredibly good musicians, because you have to be really quick to play soul music well, because you just don’t get any rehearsal. And so I knew they would be flexible as to whatever we decided to do interpretively, and it just made a lot of sense.

JT: Have you ever played a baroque violin?

HH: No, I haven’t, not because I don’t want to, but just because the situation hasn’t arisen. You can’t just pick it up, you need someone to talk you through it, explain things. And you need to spend time trying to figure out how the sound would have been produced. So I don’t want to go in and say, oh, I played one for five minutes. Yeah, if the situation arose, I would be curious, but I just haven’t been in the right context yet.

JT: With a lot of the recordings you’ve made since your original Bach record, you’ve paired a classical or romantic concerto, like the Beethoven and Brahms, with a 20^th Century work. You didn’t do that this time [in the Bach Concerto record]. Was that simply because the Bach concertos conveniently filled up an entire CD?

HH: Yeah, that pretty much is it. I wanted to do the oboe and violin double concerto which isn’t done very often. Once you start dividing something up that could have been recorded in one album, you have to make several projects out of it. And the projects are not self-contained. For example, if I were to record 2 of the Bach concertos along with some other major work, I would have to record something else to fill out the remaining 2-piece disc. So it’s tricky. I thought, I want to record them all anyway, so I might as well put them on the same album.

JT: You mentioned the Concerto for Oboe and Violin, and there’s also the Concerto for Two Violins that we just heard. How was it different for you performing concertos for multiple soloists?

HH: I think it’s fun. I’m actually working with Jaime Laredo right now, because we’re playing the Bach Double and I’m playing something else with him conducting tomorrow night [December 28, 2005] at Carnegie with the New York String Seminar. And he’s playing the first violin part in the Bach Double and I’m playing the second. So it’s fun, because I used to take lessons with him. We did that about ten years ago, and now we get to do it again. It’s neat, because it’s a good chance to work with other people in a very decisive situation. As soloists, you have to know what you want to do. You can’t say, “Oh, well let’s see if this works or that works.” You have to go into rehearsal with a tempo, a basic structure in mind, and all of that. In chamber music, you have more rehearsal time and more flexibility in the rehearsal time that you’re given. With orchestra, it’s like chamber music meets the efficiency of an orchestra. So it is different from just playing a duet.

JT: Do you feel you have to change your playing when playing with other soloists?

HH: Oh yeah. I mean of course, it’s only fair. Everyone alters their playing for the other people. It also happens in regular concertos. I have a basic idea of what I want to do, but then I change the details according to what the conductor or the orchestra is inclined to do. And sometimes those details make for a large change overall, and that’s fine, too. But you do have to have an idea of what it is you’re trying to do, but within that you do have a lot of flexibility, so it’s only fair that everyone be flexible.

JT: One interesting choice in this recording is that the tempi are very fast. I mean that in praise, I love fast. Was that a decision made by you or by the conductor, or some combination?

HH: Well, it was more my thing. It’s different for recordings, when people are going to see that as your definitive interpretation. From one concert to the next, it doesn’t really matter a whole lot whether it’s this way or that way, as long as you feel comfortable. But for recording, that’s how people are going to think you hear the piece. So you really have to decide what it is you want to do at that point in time. And I wouldn’t of course force anything that someone didn’t want to do. But it was important to me to try to maintain those tempi. I was basically trying to come up with tempo relations within each piece. I couldn’t define what they are now, because it’s been a while. But I came up with things that would separate each piece from the one that preceded it and the one that followed it. That’s one trick of recording an album of all the same composer, you have to make each piece sound different. And if you take each movement individually and just think about what works for that particular moment, then you can run into a situation where you have just a whole bunch of movements recorded, and yet they don’t sound like they’re related to each other or differentiated from each other. So I was trying to come up with certain tempo relationships between the movements that would make sense as a whole but also work individually. And I wound up having some of the movements be rather brisk and other movements were slower than people play. And I tend to feel comfortable taking quick movements quickly and slower movements more spread out. I don’t like to average it so that they sound kind of the same.

JT: Yeah, I think that contrast really works well.

HH: I think it’s important, because the music is so clean and lively, so I don’t think it suffers from a quick tempo.

JT: So just to clarify, do you think that relationship is important just between the movement within a piece, or also between the pieces? Did you choose the order of the works as they appeared on the CD?

HH: Yeah, I chose the order. The order was just what sounded best back to back. Because some pieces sound better back to back than others, and some pieces sound similar back to back and then you can’t have something sounding really similar and then really different. So we were going for some kind of consistency in how the pieces ran into each other. Yeah, it was too complicated to do tempo relationships for the entire album [laughing], so I just stuck to each piece. I’ve played the double in the past week in another concert and now I’m working on it with Jaime, and the tempi are really different even between those two concerts. It’s just because sometimes you settle into one tempo and sometimes you settle into another, and it depends on the other person playing as well.

JT: What are the differences for you between performing on stage and recording?

HH: Well, performing on stage you have an audience there. And that makes a big difference because you can just feel that they’re there and they’re definitely there to receive the music that you’re putting out, so that makes a big difference psychologically. With recording, you do things over and over again, so that is another big difference. Performing, you play it once through. Recording, you have a certain amount of time to get it and that’s that. Once you finish that day, that’s all you have to work with. So there’s a certain amount of time pressure but a need to keep things fresh, so that the takes don’t start to sound the same and tired and all of that. So it’s just a different approach. I have to approach recording from the end perspective. I have to always keep in mind what I want it to sound like in the end and what will work well on the recording. So I can’t be playing like I do in a big hall, when a microphone is right in front of me, because a violin sounds different up close than it does in the distance. And I can’t just play and forget what I’ve played, because I’m going to have to do it again and improve it for the next take, so there’s a certain amount of keeping track of things that’s involved in recording sessions. But in both circumstances you have to be flexible on the spot, and if someone else tries something different musically or tempo-wise at any particular point, you have to be able to adjust to that, if it sounds right and it sounds interesting. So yeah, spontaneity and flexibility are very important. Playing for an audience is an important thing to keep in mind in the recording sessions, where you don’t have anyone listening out in the hall, because a tiny extra noise, someone moving their foot on the floor or whatever, would show up in the recording and ruin a take. So when I’m in a recording session I think of all the people listening at home or in their cars or wherever it is that they’ll be hearing it, so that’s my audience. I don’t record without an audience, it’s just that they’re not right there with me.

JT: Have you done most of your recordings in studios? Many recordings are made in a hall, even if there’s no audience.

HH: Yeah, a lot of mine have been in halls. I actually haven’t recorded anything in a studio, except for non-classical recordings, that’s different. Or radio broadcasts, where you play something through and then you do the interview, and that’s of course in a studio. The Bach solo album was in a concert hall above a savings bank in Troy, NY. It’s a very famous hall; a lot of people use it for recordings. And the others that I’ve done with orchestra have been in the orchestra halls. Abby Road Studios, that’s a studio, but the orchestra studio we used was quite a large space, so it felt like a hall. You could have put people in there. It’s not exactly a hall, but it’s not a rinky-dink acoustically dead studio either. When I’ve recorded in London I’ve recorded in studios, but it’s very much like halls. Otherwise it’s just in the orchestra’s home hall.

JT: Going back to your first CD, the sonatas and partitas. That was an interesting choice, to start out with a completely solo recording, as a violinist, that’s-

HH: Actually it’s easier, because you have all the time in the world. You don’t have to stick to an orchestra schedule.

JT: Is that one of the reasons you chose to do that?

HH: No, it’s just the stuff that I played the most actually. I just played more solo Bach than anything else, and why record something you’re not as familiar with. So it just made the most practical sense.

JT: Well you certainly didn’t make any compromises in terms of quality there.

HH: Oh. Well, I did the best that I could.

JT: No, I mean in terms of choosing which works to record, the Bach pieces being some

of the greatest in the violin repertoire.

HH: Oh, right. Yeah, I was just lucky, because they’re great pieces, and I played them a lot so I was familiar with them to a certain extent. Also, being solo, if I wanted to listen to all of the takes I’d done, I could do that. I actually did listen to every single take in that recording. So we would work really late into the night sometimes. Everyone needed to sleep, but no one needed to get onto another job or teaching or whatever else they had scheduled, because it was just us, the crew and me.

JT: Did you have a lot of time for the Concerto recording?

HH: Well of course that was with orchestra, so it was very limited. You have to finish by a certain time. So no, that was pretty straightforward, as far as orchestra recordings go.

JT: Do you have any more Bach recordings in the works?

HH: I’m thinking of making a habit of this, every contract period. So every five or six recordings, I do a Bach. The next contract period is 2 recordings away, and I’ll probably do some cantatas with voice. Various singers and a small ensemble. I think those are really beautiful works and it would be nice. There are some really nice violin lines, and I love working with singers. But that’s a little while out. The next recording is in the works, I’ve recorded Paganini Concerto no. 1. And the other piece I’m playing tomorrow, besides the Bach Double, is the [Ludwig] Spohr Concerto no. 8, which I’ll be recording in February to finish that album. And after that is the Sibelius Concerto and Schoenberg Concerto. And after that is the album in question.

JT: That’s great, sounds like you really have things planned out.

HH: You have to, because you have to book two years in advance. And for recordings these days, it’s not enough to book the preparatory concerts, you also have to book the next season – some concerts of the piece you recorded, so that the record company can get more publicity, to get the word out on the album. And anyway, it’s fun to play something after you’ve recorded it, because you have a different perspective on it, having spent all that time with it.

JT: I understand that music education is very important to you, educating kids about music.

HH: And also college students, and anyone who hasn’t been to a concert or is curious about it. You don’t have to be little to learn new things.

JT: Everyone worries a lot about this, it’s one of the hot topics: the future of classical music. You’re a shining example of a brilliant, young, American musician who has really excelled in classical music. How do you feel about the future of classical music in this country?

HH: I really can’t say, because I haven’t been around for long enough to see certain trends come and go. But what I am noticing is a lot of younger people coming to concerts and just being curious about the music, not necessarily going because they’re being “educated” in it, or because they’re expecting one thing or another, but just because they’re curious. Like, “Oh, what’s this music, I wonder what this is like.” Classical music is one of the few genres – I guess jazz is similar, I guess – where you can just explore it for yourself, and find what you like. And anything you like is fine. It’s not like pop or rock music where a lot of the stations just play the top 50 to 100 hits, and you are pretty much inundated with what’s popular because other people like it. And if you don’t like something that’s cool, then you have bad taste; and if you do like something that everyone hates, you have bad taste, and that reflects on you, and it’s just not like that in classical music. And also, I think because the same thing is played by numerous people, you can really discover more about each piece that you might be curious about, just by listening to different people play it. A lot of people aren’t really aware, unless they’re involved in the classical music world, that the way two people play the same piece, even if we don’t change the notes at all, is quite different from each other. There are little things that make it different. It’s kind of like sitting someone down in front of a certain scene, with the same paints and the same canvas and the same brushes as the person next to them, also sitting in front of the same scene at the same time. And you get two entirely different paintings.

JT: Or different actors performing the same Shakespeare play.

HH: Precisely. You get two people to say the same line and they don’t say it the same way at all. That’s a lot of the interest in classical music. And people can just come and see what they like and go from there. And everything is related, too. Nothing just comes out of the blue. But at the same time, everyone has made these innovations in classical music, all the composers, as time has gone along.

JT: How did you come to classical music, and the violin in particular? Were you in a musical family?

HH: No, not really. There was a lot of music for fun in the family, but not really anyone professional in music. So I just heard it a lot around me. My parents played classical radio all the time, and I grew up listening to classical radio. We didn’t have a TV or anything, so that was always on. And my dad sang in a church choir and he would practice at home. So basically no, not a musical family, just I was exposed to it early on.

JT: Did he sing a lot of Bach?

HH: Yeah, actually. He loves the B Minor Mass, so I’ve heard it a lot.

JT: Of course, don’t we all!

HH: Yeah, and then of course, as far as Bach was concerned, I’ve done a lot of Bach, because in Solfege class, we had to do Bach… what do you call them? I want to say cantatas, now that I have that word in my head…

JT: You probably mean the chorales.

HH: Yeah, the chorales. We had to read these chorales in different clefs and play them on the piano, so I would practice them and get really familiar with them. I was one of those dorks who practiced their Solfege assignments, so I actually got familiar with a lot of them. A lot of what Bach wrote is really great music, and it’s different from itself, one piece is different from the next. And they really have interesting content, each particular piece, no matter how short it is.

JT: That’s why we’re able to play Bach for a week and half non-stop.

HH: Right!

JT: There’s really no other composer you can do that with, who wrote that much music, that consistently great, and that varied.

HH: Right, and you can just find so much in it. And he wrote for a lot of different instruments as well, so there’s variety just in the nature of what he wrote.

JT: Well, thank you so much for talking to us. We look forward to more recordings, and more Bach. [short re-iteration of December 28 concert info]

Thoughts on Harnoncourt

2005-12-31T16:16:00.000-08:00

I was so happy with how this went, and it was a great privilege to speak one-on-one with such a luminary of the music world. A few thoughts on the exchange:

First, I marvel, reviewing the transcript, at Harnoncourt's eloquence. He has a way with words that shines through his relative unfamiliarity with English. The "beautiful, fat marmalade" comment was very apt and probably the funniest moment in the interview, but what stood out for me was his characterization of spending time in libraries researching performance practice as a "good waste of time." He cleverly uses an oxymoron to express two ideas that are in tension with each other. On the one hand, his research helped freshen the music and make it transparent, but on the other, the most important aspect of performance is musical insight. Spending your vacation in a library is interesting and illuminating, but if you do not have your own vision of Bach's genius, communicable to today's audience, you are ultimately wasting your time.

On a different note, there were a couple points at which I could have questioned him further. For instance, he says that you can't just put together a bunch of great players and say you have a great orchestra, in response to my question about performing Mozart and Beethoven on modern instruments. But from what I understand, this is precisely what was done to create the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, a band he regularly conducts and the one with which he traversed Beethoven's orchestral works on record. I thought it would be a bit flippant, however, to raise this point, and I was not entirely sure about the COE's origins.

It also would have been interesting to explore more specifically what experience had taught him about the Bach passions. To explain why I didn't question about such specifics, I must note that his wife, Alice, had asked that I not grill him on Bach, since he was currently working on Mozart (or, apparently, Haydn). I thought asking him about specific interpretive decisions in his recent passion recordings would veer close to violating this request. Nevertheless, if I had been able to continue the interview, my next questions would have been about some of his more general decisions, such as the shift away from boy choirs.

Finally, I'd like to comment about a point we discussed, the trope of period performance being overly academic and unfeeling. Harnoncourt himself repeated the criticism, saying that "sometimes" the technical problems are addressed and nothing else.

Again, I felt an urge to ask: when has this happened? Who are you talking about? I think that if I had the privilege to discuss the issue with Trevor Pinnock, John Eliot Gardiner, Ton Koopman, Phillipe Herreweghe, Paul McCreesh, etc., etc., they would all respond in the same way as Harnoncourt. They are primarily concerned with making great music, of doing the best they can with Bach's music, not creating some kind of academic, historical document. Many adopt practices in some aspects of a performance that they know conflict with the original performance in Bach's day. But (for instance) Gardiner feels that a chorus of women just sounds better than a chorus of boys. And of the original-instrument conductors mentioned above, the newest ones on the scene, Herreweghe and McCreesh, are even better examples. Herreweghe tends to adopt slower speeds, a mellower tone and more legato phrasing than other such conductors (see, for example, his and Gardiner's versions of "et in terra pax" in the B Minor Mass). And McCreesh goes for sheer energy and excitement, in a more modern way (he refers to his recording of Handel's Messiah as a "Messiah for the 21st Century).

I think the issue of period performance being scholarly rather than musical has been rendered moot by the passage of time and the acceptance of the medium, and Harnoncourt and his critics are simply stuck in a debate that raged when the novel technical aspects of period performance still overwhelmed the musical insight. Towe's complaints, aired in his entertaining and illuminating interview, are completely valid. Bach playing that is harsh and overly staccato, and fails to connect the notes, is not only musically unconvincing, but also probably inauthentic (how could it be otherwise?). And some recordings are made, even today, that exhibit these faults; but many do not. My point here is not that Towe and company are wrong, but that they have largely been vindicated by the passage of time, as sensitive and intelligent musicians have come along and used original instruments only as a medium in which to play Bach in all his warmth and humanity, "authenticity" be damned.

Comments, Emails Welcome

2005-12-31T16:07:00.000-08:00

See below for the Harnoncourt transcript. Feel free to comment! I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts. To email me corrections, etc., go to my "profile" page.

Harnoncourt Interview Transcript

2005-12-31T15:26:00.000-08:00

The following interview was conducted live by phone and aired on December 29, 2005 at 11:00 AM EST on WKCR-FM in New York during our annual BachFest. Harnoncourt, of course, is Austrian, and English is not his first language. In making this transcript, I sometimes altered his syntax slightly to conform to normal English, without changing his meaning.

JT= Jonathan Toren, NH = Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

JT: [Intro omitted] Thanks so much for joining us.

NH: I’m happy to be there, and I’m ready to answer your questions.

JT: Ok, terrific. First of all, let’s start from the beginning. What prompted you and your wife to start performing works on original instruments, when this really hadn’t been done before? Where did this come from?

NH: The reason was when we were very young music students, we found that the way baroque music and also the works of Bach were played then was very boring. It was not interesting, without any passion, and very boring. And so we looked at the other arts – we looked at the sculptures of the time, and at the pictures of the same time – and we found the pictures and the sculptures [to be] very passionate. And we looked at the old tools in Vienna, at the great museum, where the earliest instruments are from the 1500s, and they were then in very good condition. When we played on them, we found that it is totally different. We thought that we would have now the tools to come closer to the music than on modern instruments, and this proved to be true.

JT: Absolutely. So in this museum, even the strings and the bows had been preserved over all that time?

NH: Not the bows, and not the strings. We made copies of old bows, but the real old bows are very seldom in playable condition, and the strings never. For the strings, you need to use modern sheep to use the [guts? perhaps he used the wrong word?] to make the right strings from them.

JT: Well, it’s the strings and the bows that really make a big difference in terms of the original baroque violins versus the modern ones, isn’t that correct?

NH: Absolutely. But it’s not the string and the bow itself; it must be played with the skills of the Baroque era. Because you can, with the idea of a modern sound, get the modern sound out of any instrument. But with the idea of a baroque sound, if you know the old instrument, you can come very close to the baroque sound on modern instruments if you know how to do it.

JT: So when you formed the Concentus Musicus, you and your wife had played these instruments and learned about all this, so how did you put together the group, a whole ensemble ready to play on these old instruments that required special training? How did that come about?

NH: It was very difficult, because there was nobody in Vienna who knew how to play the instruments, and it was almost equally difficult to find the players as to find the instruments. We went to all the monasteries in Austria and to old churches, and sometimes we found instruments. But when we found, for instance, the oboe, a flute, or old violins, we had to look for the right player. He must be a brilliant violin player and at the same time a very intelligent person, to learn all the old [tutors?] and find out a lot, because there was nobody there who knew about that. It was like going in a land which was uninhabited, and you found things which were never heard before. So for instance, then when we played the St. John Passion and the St. Matthew Passion for the first time, we were very moved, because we heard sounds which were not heard for two hundred years.

JT: That must have been an incredible experience, after a lot of hard work.

NH: It was incredible, it was really an incredible experience.

JT: I’m sure it was an incredible experience for a lot of people hearing the performance, for audience members and people who got the recording, hearing it for the first time.

NH: But it’s still a great experience, it has not ended. The shock is still there.

JT: Absolutely. So who’s in this orchestra, the Concentus Musicus, now? Has it survived as an independent body through all these years, or have you re-assembled it at various times?

NH: No. I never wanted to have the group as a full-time job. I don’t want specialists. All the musicians of the Concentus are at the same time playing either in orchestras or playing as soloists and they play also music of the 19^th Century on other instruments, and if possible also modern music on contemporary instruments. And a small part of the time is just for the Concentus. [And as for the founding members,] a lot of them are already dead, some are still alive, and two of them are still playing. We [i.e. the original members] are all between 70 and 80 years old. And in the time between 1953 and now, when a musician came to retiring age, we replaced him with a young musician, so that the ages of the members of the Concentus range from 22 to 70. There are lots of musicians who are eager to play with us, and we have always the same players, we don’t change. So a player who is 60 years old has been playing for 30 years in the group.

JT: In making those pioneering Bach recordings, or in the first performances before that, what were the most significant predominant practices of the time that you had to change? What were the biggest things that created the “shock” that you described?

NH: I think that the biggest thing was in the articulation. Because in that time, almost all of us were in the orchestra [presumably the Vienna Symphony Orchestra]. It could be that in the morning, we had a recording session for the St. John Passion for the Concentus, and in the evening of the same day we had to play the St. John Passion in the Musikverein in concert. And it was like day and night, it was black and white. It was totally different.

JT: Recording versus performing?

NH: No, playing with the Concentus and playing with the great orchestra and with the great chorus [by “great” he simply means large]. Because the tempo was different, but the greatest difference was the transparency. When the string instruments play with a little bit less vibrato and articulating like speaking with the bow, and with the winds playing the same way, even in the greatest [i.e. largest] works, you have absolute transparency. You can hear everything. And when you play it with the great orchestra, with lots of vibrato and not listening to all the parts, you get a beautiful, fat marmalade.

JT: [laughing] That’s a good word for it. It sounds cloudy and lugubrious.

NH: Right, absolutely.

JT: Yesterday, we had an interview with a fellow named Teri Towe, who has done a lot of work listening to very old recordings, the very first recordings of Bach from the 20s and 30s.

NH: Oh, yes.

JT: In your notes to your original B Minor Mass recording, you wrote a wonderful long introduction that I was just looking at. And you lay out the basic argument that resulted in these recordings and these performances, and in this whole movement. The idea basically is that there was a long period of time when Bach wasn’t played at all. And when they started playing it again in Mendelssohn’s time, they started playing it through a romantic lens.

NH: Yes, absolutely.

JT: And our tradition of playing, at least up until your movement came along, had evolved from that practice and was still played through that lens. Towe’s argument yesterday was that this romantic style of playing, with lots of vibrato in a large orchestra like you described, really only started in the 30s and 40s, that there was a shift then in the way things were played. A lot of vibrato was instituted, and before that people actually played Bach with a lot less vibrato. He said he’s actually talked with you about this, and that you also have listened to these old recordings. Have you heard these, and what do you make of this argument?

NH: My memory goes far back into the 1930s, my actual memory. And I think, this way started really with Mendelssohn. And when they played Bach for instance in Vienna, in the time of Brahms and Dvorak, it was very, very Romantic and with a very great orchestra, and believe it or not with a lot of vibrato then already. And I think with a composer like Paul Hindemith and [Ernst] Krenek, they started to play Bach without Romanticism and very dry. It was already a kind of step away from Romanticism. But for me it was without life, it was boring, it was too objective. The personality of the musician was not there. And I think what we did later was to bring again a little bit of romanticism into the interpretation, but not in the sound, just in the way of playing. And I think the change in the ways of performance, of sound, are much more frequent than we think now. It is almost like the changes in fashion, almost every 30 years.

JT: You also mention in your introduction that the same problem does not exist for composers that have been performed constantly for all that time, like Beethoven.

NH: Yes.

JT: But since then a lot of work has been done by academics and maybe by you, I don’t really know, and Beethoven is often played with his original metronome markings, and in original style, based on research, and it is completely different from what had been played by Klemperer and von Karajan.

NH: Absolutely.

JT: So how do you explain that difference, without the gap? And also why have you decided, despite all that, to record and play Beethoven usually on modern instruments?

NH: I think that the instrument is just a tool, it is not the thing itself. It’s like a teacher. You can learn a lot about the instrument, but it is not the ultimate important thing. It is more important to be really familiar with the instrument. If you live with an old instrument, it’s better that you play with the old instrument. But if you, as a musician, take the old instrument just for special occasions, you will never play it in the best possible way. So they are very different things. And it is a great question if it is really the goal to play exactly in the same way as Bach or Beethoven or Mozart wanted it in his time. It makes a great difference if, for instance, a symphony of Beethoven is played in Beethoven’s time with the ideas and tempos of Beethoven, on the basis of Mozart symphonies and Haydn symphonies. But we have now heard Stravinsky and all the works of the 20^th Century, and the message of Beethoven’s time or of Mozart’s time has to be brought into the 21^st Century. And there are slightly different parameters to be fulfilled now. It is not just a museum thing.
I think it is necessary to know everything. There is nothing you must not know. You must know whatever it is possible to know. But then you must find out what is the best for our time.

JT: So why do you think, for out time, that Mozart and Beethoven might sound better on modern instruments, while Bach or Handel might sound better on period instruments?

NH: This is difficult to answer in five minutes. I do a great deal of Mozart with old instruments. But it can occur that I do a passion of Bach now with a modern orchestra also. Beethoven, I have done just very few works of his with old instruments. But in general, I would not do 19^th Century works on old instruments because: I think that the orchestra is also a grown thing. An orchestra has a special sound. You cannot put together an orchestra, saying, now I have the best possible violin players and the best possible wind players, and now it is an orchestra. Because an orchestra, as a great instrument formed of 80 or 100 musicians, is a living thing, where the older members teach the younger. An orchestra like the Vienna Philharmonic has a very special sound which you cannot reach in ten years or so. It is a grown thing. It is a very valuable thing. Now, I could say the Concentus has already existed more than 50 years, so it is in some ways also like an old orchestra. So with the Concentus, I think when we play Bach or Handel or Mozart, we are very close to this grown thing. But still the idea is: to find a way of performance that is important for our time, not just a repetition of a performance of 200 years ago. Because this would be too museum-like for me. And I don’t think that the question of instruments is of the same importance for 19^th century [music] as it is for 18^th Century. We know much more about the sound of the Brandenburg concerts [I think he means concertos] of Bach than we know about the sound of a Brahms symphony. We know the players, but we don’t really know the instruments. So when you take just instruments from the late 19^th Century, maybe the players who played the first performances of Brahms used much older instruments then. So it is not easy to reconstruct sounds of the 19^th Century. On the other hand, I would say I know exactly what instruments Bach had when he played the Brandenburg Concertos or when he played the cantatas or passions.

JT: Interesting.

NH: That’s interesting, yes?

JT: Yeah. So what you’re saying also is that, when you conduct, when you perform, say, Beethoven, with the Vienna Philharmonic, you’re not just presenting the music on modern instruments, it’s not just modern instruments playing it, it’s the Vienna Philharmonic playing it.

NH: Yes.

JT: And it’s their own unique cumulative experience, and tone and character, that has it’s own value.

NH: Absolutely, yes. And I use my experience with the old instruments. So I can tell the flute player or the oboe player what he should do with his instrument so that the whole sound becomes more transparent. The musicians accept my advice because they know that I am a practical musician, too.

JT: This relates a lot to what you’ve been talking about already, but Mr. Towe said yesterday that you said once, “There is no such thing as authenticity.” Do you mean that authenticity is impossible, that we simply can’t know everything, or that it might be theoretically possible but it’s just not worth it?

NH: Both. I think it is impossible. I think that the only thing that is really authentic is a living composer playing his own works. When I listened to Bela Bartok playing piano, in 1937 in Graz, this was authentic. I heard him playing his own works. Nobody can say, “This is authentic Mozart playing.” Because we don’t really know how his way of notation was read by his contemporaries. We don’t really know what he expected from the musicians. There are lots of hypotheses, but we cannot really know because we have no telephone to him. We have no possibility of asking him or having him play for us. An instrument can be authentic – just the instrument. When you have an instrument by a great instrument maker, then it is an authentic instrument by Stradivarius or by a woodwind maker of 18^th or 17^th Century. But in the moment when a modern musician blows into this instrument, there is no authenticity, because the modern musician blows modern air into the instrument. He cannot even use the air of the 18^th Century, because it is only in some old mines that you can find 18^th Century air. Everything is different. And you can never get authentic ears, because the ear that has heard other things which were composed later, or even noise of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, is no longer virginal. It is impossible.

And it makes no sense. Because I would like to be a mouse or a fly in Bach’s room and listen to him play. This would be very interesting. But I would not like to turn an audience, a hall full of 2000 people, into an audience of 1720 or so. They are people of our time. What is really important is: I have to find out what the message of the music is. And it is not a message which is only important for people of 1720, but the message is so important that it must be heard and must be projected to people of our time. And then the question is, How can I do that? And my result is that I can do it best with the instruments and with the tutors of the time, but with the brains of our time.

JT: Right. And I can say as a listener, to audience members, authenticity just doesn’t matter. I don’t care when I’m listening to Bach whether it is exactly the way he played it. I care what sounds best, what’s going to give that inner meaning and convey it the best.

NH: What is most convincing, yes.

JT: And period instruments tend to just sound better, they’re more convincing.

NH: Absolutely, yes.

JT: You also wrote in your introduction, “The attempt must thus again be made today with Bach’s masterpieces in particular to hear and perform them as if they had never been interpreted before, as though they had never been formed nor distorted.” But it seems to me that you’re selling yourself short a little bit. You didn’t just present the works in period form, and that’s it. You also added a lot of your own personal flair and you did a lot of very interesting things that are just musically unique, that have nothing to do with modern practice versus period practice.

NH: It is impossible to do otherwise. If a human musician is working, he always carries his own personality into the work. You cannot avoid that. And I think this is very important. Because to be convincing, you must be convinced yourself. And you cannot just make the musical sound. You always give your own personality in it.

JT: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. [Station ID, etc. omitted] You also launched an amazing project to record all of Bach’s cantatas, together with Gustav Leonhardt. So how did you get together with Leonhardt, who is sort of the great father of modern harpsichord playing, and how did that project come about?

NH: I am a very, very long-time, good friend of Gustav Leonhardt. He came to Vienna in 1949. And I think on the first day he was in Vienna I met him in the Vienna Academy. And from this moment on, we made music together almost every day. I cannot say how many concerts we played together, I playing gamba and he playing harpsichord. And his approach to music… we had hundreds of hours of discussions on how to play best. His approach to the harpsichord was, for me, the threshold [i.e. benchmark] for how harpsichord is to be played. So ten or fifteen years later, when we decided to play all the cantatas of Bach, for me it was absolutely clear that it was impossible for me to do it alone, because there were so many works for research. There were a lot of cantatas never played before. I saw I could not do that alone with my group. And I spoke with Gustav Leonhardt, and he was enthusiastic about this collaboration, and it was obvious that it could only be he to do that with me. And we had a fantastic collaboration, I think it was almost 20 years. And we distributed the cantatas, he said what he prefers to play, and I said what I prefer, and the few cantatas which we both wanted we decided who shall do it. And the few cantatas that neither of us especially wanted, we said, you have a good recorder player, or you have good trumpet players... So it was easy to do it together.

JT: So how did you approach a work that was absolutely never played before? And how difficult was this for the players, for the members of your orchestra and chorus? How much time did you have to rehearse for these recordings?

NH: Years. We had years to rehearse. For instance, all these cantatas where Bach writes for some instruments only “corno.” You don’t know: is that a cornet, or is it a horn, or is it a slide trumpet? Or even a woodwind instrument? There were lots of questions. Or “oboe da caccia,” what is that? The orchestra played that with English horn. And sometimes Bach wrote, “Taille.” Is that an instrument? Is it just a part? There were lots of questions, and all the editors of the new Bach edition joined us in answering questions, or in bringing new questions, and we had to visit all the museums to find new instruments, maybe to find instruments which Bach used himself. It was highly interesting. It was like finding a new continent.

JT: Yeah, and even more Bach works have been discovered since that time.

NH: Yes, right. But now it’s not that difficult anymore, since the tools, all these basic questions, are solved now.

JT: So how do you feel about the directions in which the style of early music performance has evolved since that time? It’s gone in a few different directions, different practices. There are still debates today about, say, one voice per part versus a larger chorus, et cetera.

NH: Yeah, this “one voice per part” is a bit ridiculous for me. I know also the reason for that. Because when you have just one sheet of music, you can always have three musicians play from it or just three singers sing from it. I have visited all the original parts from Leipzig, and for some works I have copies of the original parts of Bach’s. For me that [i.e. one voice per part] is ridiculous, but I think all types of hypotheses are valuable, and when the result is interesting, it should be done. But at the same time it must be allowed to laugh about the one thing and to take seriously the other thing. This is life. But I think in general there are now many very good groups that can play this music very, very convincingly. The only problem I feel sometimes is when the technical problems are too much in the foreground, to solve all the problems and then it is over. I think that the important thing is always the message and the content of the music, and whatever is necessary to bring that out should be done. This is more important than anything else.

JT: Right. But for a while that groundwork had to be laid. There was so much work and there required so much specialized expertise just to put forth more historically stylistic performances that the people who had that expertise didn’t necessarily have on top of that all the general musical insight that people such as you have. Now that you and the pioneers have laid that groundwork, a lot more people who are just interested in playing Bach and just have musical ideas can more easily put it together.

NH: You are right, yes. The groundwork is done. But I must say I think it was very interesting work. And I think when you use all your vacations to be in libraries and to test instruments and all that, it is a good waste of time.

JT: Recently, you came back to the studio and recorded the Bach passions again in 2000. So what changed? What prompted you to re-record those works? Did you just want to put out a recording that was a little more polished with better sound, or did your interpretation actually change?

NH: No, no, no. I never wanted to make something more polished. If you live with special music, it would be a shame if you don’t gain experience. If I would play a passion of Bach or the B Minor Mass or great, great cantatas today in the same way I played it forty years ago, it would be a shame. There must be a little bit of growth. And we never played these pieces so often that it became routine. It was always- When we played it after ten years or after five years again, it was like playing it for the first time in life. So we always wanted to make just first performances. And this is the reason that in some of the great works, one gains some insights which I think are worthwhile to be performed again, to be recorded again.

JT: So going back, what might you have done differently in the Bach recordings that you made in the 60s?

NH: Oh, I cannot answer that question. I don’t look back. I’m still, I’m very old, but I look forward. And I don’t know what I did 50 years ago or 30 years ago. I can look in my photo album and say, “Oh, I was very young then.” But my questions are, what am I doing tomorrow? Not, what was I doing yesterday?

JT: So do you have more Bach performances or recordings in the works?

NH: Performances, yes. Recordings, I don’t think so.

JT: What are you working on right now?

NH: An opera of Haydn.

JT: Live performance or recording?

NH: Performance.

JT: Do you have any plans to come to New York in the near future?

NH: No, to San Diego. I’m coming to San Diego in April, because I have won the Kyoto Prize, and part of the ceremony is in San Diego. So I have to go there in April and give some lectures, I think on Bach and such.

JT: So no performances?

NH: No, I don’t think so. Maybe with a local orchestra in San Diego just for demonstration.

JT: Why is Bach still important today? You talked about how we should be performing composers for our own time. What about Bach is especially important today?

NH: I think that Bach is, if not the greatest composer, one of the two greatest composers who ever lived.

JT: Who’s the other one?

NH: Mozart. We have a very few great artists, some Greek artists, some sculpters, a few composers, a great poet like Shakespeare, who are not historical. Their works are so important that as long as humans are on the earth, those works must be performed because we cannot miss them, they remain important for us. For this reason, if we lose contact with the great works of Bach, we lose our contact with humanity in general.

JT: When you play late 19^th Century works, let’s say Bruckner, do you build more off your experience with the great 20^th Century Bruckner conducters such as von Karajan, or Furtwangler, or Klemperer, et cetera, or more from your own insight into the score and a focus on transparency carried over from your experience with period performance?

NH: I think when I play Bruckner… I have played all the symphonies of Bruckner with Karajan, some with Klemperer, with those conductors you mentioned. So I have that experience myself. But what is interesting for me is to study the score in an absolutely new way. I don’t look to all these later editions, just to the autograph score. I try to find out what was important for him, and find out is it still important for out time or for me as a performer, and I’m not interested in what others in between Bruckner’s time and our time did with this work. I have this experience. I cannot erase it, it is there. But what’s important is the [inaudible].

JT: This might be an impossible question to answer, but what do you think it is about Bach that makes him so great, if there is any way to summarize it?

NH: I think this is the real great question which cannot be answered. Because the greatest composers, like Bach or Mozart, used everything which their contemporaries also used. The vocabulary of Bach is the same as the vocabulary of Telemann, and the vocabulary of Mozart is the same as the vocabulary of Dittersdorf. When you hear five notes by Bach, you can say, “This is Bach.” It towers above everything else. And the same with Mozart. And you cannot say why this is so. And I think this is because Bach has the keys of the muses, and Mozart also, and the others [laughing] are not in that dimension.

JT: Do you think in recent decades there have been any composers, if not quite at Bach’s stature, at that level of composing even though the tools have changed, or if there’s still potential for it?

NH: 20^th Century, I would say Alban Berg or Bela Bartok, but then I have problems later. But maybe I have not the measure to find out.

JT: To what extent have you been involved with contemporary music?

NH: I have done one first performance by Berio, and of really contemporary music this was the only thing. But of music from up to the 1930s I have done a lot of works.

JT: So how do you feel about the future of classical music and classical composing?

NH: The composers will always mirror the spiritual situation of the time. The future depends on the spiritual situation, because the composer cannot compose anything else but what is the spiritual situation. And I’m pessimistic, because the general direction is toward materialism, and materialism and art are not compatible. And it is a great loss. Maybe the wave will go in another direction, but I am a little bit pessimistic.

JT: But didn’t Mozart spend a lot of his time composing for and worrying about income?

NH: No. No, he had no problem with income. He had enough money. He was never suffering.

JT: What about the world of conducting? How do you think that has changed since you’ve been involved in that and how do you see the future?

NH: They are too important. They are printed in too-large letters on the advertisement. The composer should be printed in large letters and the conductor in small.

JT: [I stupidly tell a story about Maazel holding up a score during ovation after a performance]. How do you think that can change? Maybe the big problem is that people aren’t very familiar with the music. How do you get people more literate again? How do you think we can get people more familiar with the music and get people to love the music?

NH: The education system is wrong. We only learn things that we think we need in life. So reading, writing, arithmetic, mathematics. And for a thousand years in Western culture, it was equally important to train the fantasy. The arts. Children aged 3, 4, or 5 were already familiar with music, with drawing, with any kind of art. And this is not important for a profession, but it is important for the personality. And the goal of today’s education system is just, how can I earn money? And as long as the school systems don’t change, until the little children are already singing and dancing and made really familiar with the language, the vocabulary of music… they need the music for their whole life. And at the same time, it makes them better in all other fields. Even a good musician is a better mathematician than a bad musician.

JT: It’s also a problem of exposure, though, right? Even education side, as recreation, back then, they were exposed to great music from a very early time, but now people are mostly exposed to popular music. How do you think we can get people exposed to it, and familiar with it, and love it?

NH: I think when they learn the vocabulary as little children, they get a good estimation of what is good and what is bad. And all this junk music which is pouring out of television and of radio and of the walkmans, in most cases it is of really miserable quality. And [if they had the vocabulary], they would not estimate that, they would not use it, because they knew too much about it [to like it]. And then the quality would become better, and there would not be a great threshold [i.e. gap or division] between classical music and other kinds of music, because the question is of good and bad, not of classical or popular.

JT: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today, Mr. Harnoncourt. It was really an honor and privilege. I hope we can keep hearing your work, not just in Bach, but in Mozart and other great composers, for years to come. Thank you very much.

NH: Thank you, it was a pleasure.

Coming soon!

2005-12-29T05:47:00.000-08:00

I have created this "blog" for the immediate purpose of posting the transcripts of a few interviews I was able to conduct as a programmer for WKCR's incredible annual BachFest, but I also intend to use this space to write about great music, performances and recordings, the same kind of observations I have featured on my -- alas! -- soon-to-be-dufunct radio show (I am a law student, and must soon become a lawyer).
At any rate, check back here soon for interviews with Angela Hewitt, Hilary Hahn and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.