Vacation Time

Since I’ll be on vacation much of the next two weeks – a planned 8-day weekend, woo-hoo! – I won’t be blogging here for a while, probably not till after I’m back on the 29th. This is a planned “composing holiday,” with a goal to get the foundation down for a new violin and piano piece as well as work on the full score for the songs for mezzo and orchestra, Evidence of Things Not Seen. You can read those and maybe some other posts, as/if they occur, at my personal blog, Thoughts on a Train.

Tonight, I’m planning on attending the performance at the Rose Lehrman Arts Center of Concertante, complete with the world premiere of a brand new work by Gabriela Lena Frank written for the ensemble’s 1+5 Project – tonight’s work was composed for violist Rachel Shapiro. Also on the program is Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quintet and the less-often-heard Piano Quartet by Joaquin Turina with pianist Adam Neiman. The concert’s at 8:00, John Clare’s giving the pre-concert talk at 7:00.

I’ll be giving a pre-concert talk at Odin Rathnam’s solo recital at the Forum on Sunday, June 1st. The performance begins at 3:00, but I’ll do the warm-up routine at 2:00. You can find out more about the foundation he’s recently formed in honor of his mother, the Else Borges Foundation on Artistic Initiatives - here.

Catch ya later,
Dr. Dick

Essential Rachmaninoff & Ravel and the Heart of Paderewski

This weekend, the Lancaster Symphony concludes its subscription concert series with "The Essential Rachmaninoff & Ravel" in a program that also features the Piano Concerto by Ignace Paderewski with guest soloist Ian Hobson, along with Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances and Ravel's La Valse. There are five performances in all -- Friday night at 8, Saturday at 3 & 8:00 and Sunday at 3 & 7:30, all at the Fulton Opera House.

Conductor Stephen Gunzenhauser was telling me the other week how he'd subbed in the Boston Symphony when he was a clarinetist studying at the New England Conservatory. On the program was Ravel's La Valse, conducted by the orchestra's legendary music director Charles Munch, well known as a specialist in the French repertoire. But Gunzenhauser was surprised that there was no rubato in their interpretation, none of that pulling-and-pushing of the tempo, shifting the beat or elongating a phrase for a musical effect to enhance the phrasing. It was very straightforward, not what you'd expect with a Viennese waltz -- which is basically what this piece was, however French the composer may have been.

So he asked some of the other players why - and they responded with the story that, when Ravel conducted the piece the first time it was played in Boston, he was, how should we say... inebriated? Maybe not to the point of being incapacitated (as has happened with other conductors before or since) but whether that was why he conducted his own piece in a very straight-forward way or not, who knows? Regardless, this non-rubato interpretation set up the Boston tradition, whether or not its been followed by conductors like Ozawa or Levine since then.

And that is why Gunzenhauser likes to take a fairly strict approach to the piece's tempo, so that the listener can focus, as he says, on the music itself and not be side-tracked by turns of phrase which may not be indicated in the original music.

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Whether needing to be drunk to conduct La Valse should be a part of that tradition may be something to argue about, but it certainly seemed to be the Glazunov Method. Composer, teacher and, to a much lesser extent, conductor Alexander Glazunov was drunk (as well as under-rehearsed) the night he conducted the 1st Symphony of the recent conservatory graduate Sergei Rachmaninoff. This was one of those great disasters, every composer's nightmare, though all the criticism was leveled not at the conductor but at the young composer, something that sent him into a depression deep enough he was unable to compose for some two years. Therapy and hypnosis can be credited with bringing him out of it: the next work he composed was his 2nd Piano Concerto, a huge and enduring success. Strangely, though, Rachmaninoff never tried to have the 1st Symphony performed again: it wasn’t heard again until after his death.

After Rachmaninoff left Russia during the 1917 Revolution, he had to concentrate more on being a concert pianist than being a composer. Aside from the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, written in 1934, the few pieces he did write were not successful. It was often said that when he left Russia, he left behind his inspiration: even restricting his home-life to recreating an Old Russian atmosphere didn’t help rekindle his inspiration. Stravinsky described him as a "six-and-a-half-foot scowl," this great stone face that looked like it would crack before it could smile.

(Not that he didn't have a sense of humor: the story goes that, in the midst of a Carnegie Hall recital with Fritz Kreisler, the great violinist lost his place in a Beethoven sonata and wandered over to the piano bench, whispering to Rachmaninoff "Where are we?" To which the pianist replied, "Carnegie Hall.")

Over the years, he had developed a strong relationship with the Philadelphia Orchestra and its conductor Eugene Ormandy who said in 1961,

"Rachmaninoff was really two people. He hated his own music and was usually unhappy about it when he performed or conducted it in public so that the public saw only this side of him. But, among his close friends, he had a very good sense of humor and was in good spirits. He liked his Symphonic Dances and his Third Symphony, both of which he dedicated to the Philadelphia Orchestra and to me, but he didn't like--well, I guess he was sick of--his two most famous works: the Second Piano Concerto and the Prelude in C-Sharp Minor." (Quoted from an interview with Fred Flaxman.)

In 1940, Rachmaninoff composed a set of three dances, originally called “Fantastic Dances” and later, simply, “Symphonic Dances.” Perhaps he was aware these might be his last works, whether he was aware he might die soon or not – he died a few years later just days before his 70th birthday. But there is a kind of valedictory summing-up in these pieces, most notably with the struggle between death (represented by his ever-present use of the Dies irae, the Day of Wrath from the Latin Mass for the Dead) and resurrection (quoting from his own setting of the Vespers liturgy in his All-Night Vigil). But most poignantly – and extremely privately – would be the benedictory quote from his 1st Symphony, something that no one in an audience would have ever heard before to recognize it, but something which Rachmaninoff had kept in his heart and felt it still beautiful enough to let it sing one more time.

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Most of the works that Ignace Paderewski composed have been forgotten except perhaps for a little old-fashioned Minuet. He was regarded as one of the great – certainly one of the most popular – pianists of his day and he too may have considered it more important to perform than compose. Another distraction was his patriotism which found him getting involved in the politics of his native Poland, championing an independent nation after its centuries of occupation by the Germans and Russians and then becoming its Prime Minister in 1919. (Arriving in Paris to sign the peace treaty that concluded the war, the former concert pianist was greeted by the French President with “so now you are a prime minister? What a comedown!”) Even during World War II when Poland was again occupied by its neighbors, Paderewski served as the leader of a government in exile, fighting to keep the nation alive until the end of the war. He died, however, before the war was over, but more on that, later.

(Paderewski has been credited with the quote, which I remember from my student days: “If I miss a day of practicing, I can tell the difference; if I miss two days of practicing, my wife can tell the difference; if I miss a week of practicing, the audience begins to suspect something.” Or something to that effect.)

So considering his own virtuosity and his role in the history of concert pianists, it’s surprising you don’t hear his Piano Concerto more often. You’ll get a chance to hear it live in Lancaster with pianist Ian Hobson joining Gunzenhauser and the orchestra this weekend.

Incidentally, with all the talk a couple of years ago about Mozart's skull and who's buried in the Mozart Family Grave in Salzburg (not Wolfgang, at any rate) , now there is apparently more of the same controversy regarding the remains of the creator of the Ode to Joy, Friedrich Schiller, one of Germany’s greatest poets and dramatists. When he died in 1805, he was, like Mozart, buried in a common grave. Twenty-one years later, the mayor of Weimar wanted to exhume the remains and bury them properly, but faced with 23 skulls in the grave, he decided (on what grounds, I’ve no idea) that the largest one must belong to the great poet. And so in 1827 he was buried in Weimar’s grand ducal vault, where Goethe, who died in 1832, was also buried, two great artists, two great friends, neighbors in eternity.

The only problem is, there are two skulls in Schiller’s grave and neither of them are Schiller’s, according to DNA testing done earlier this month by the same experts who came to similar conclusions about Mozart’s skull two years ago.

Talking about the Lancaster Symphony concerts this weekend, Gunzenhauser mentioned to me that Ignace Paderewski’s heart was buried in Pennsylvania. The rest of him, it turned out, had been buried in a temporary vault in Arlington Cemetery when he died in 1941 with orders from no less than FDR that the body, according to the pianist's wishes, should not be returned to Poland, then occupied by the Nazis and the Soviet Union, until it is again free. This was interpreted by the American government as also being communist-free: it wasn’t until after 1991 that President George H.W. Bush signed the necessary paperwork to return Paderewski’s ashes to Poland for final burial in 1992.

However, Paderewski himself had requested his heart be buried in the United States, and it was first placed in a crypt in Brooklyn. In 1986, it was moved to a bronze memorial in Doylestown, PA, at the Shrine of our Lady of Czestochowa, also known as “The Black Madonna” (an icon that, according to tradition, was painted by the Evangelist, St. Luke - the original is now located in Poland).

You can read more about it in archived articles from the New York Times here, here and here.

- Dr. Dick

The Rite of Spring: Up Close & In Your Face

This time of year, spring rituals could mean chasing down the elusive dust-bunnies under the couch or trying to outwit the real ones in the back yard so you still have some flowers or vegetables left for your own summer’s enjoyment. In the Old Days, it might have meant... oh, I dunno, maybe sacrificing a virgin to propitiate the gods of Spring to ensure a good harvest, a practice that went out of fashion long before the scarcity of virgins.

It’s the latter ritual Stravinsky had in mind when he created his ballet, The Rite of Spring (translated from the French Le sacre du printemps (initially Les sacres du printemps) which is not a very accurate translation of the composer’s original title, in Russian, Vyesna svyashchennaya or Sacred Spring), a work that caused the most famous riot in the history of music.

There was no riot at the Forum this past weekend when the Harrisburg Symphony concluded their season with a concert performance of Stravinsky’s now classic score.

There is considerable argument about that opening night performance which, in becoming legendary, has attained a certain amount of legend itself: was Saint-Saens in attendance and did he actually stride out of the performance after the very opening, protesting the mistreatment of the bassoon in its famous opening solo? How much of it was staged? One school of thought thinks Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets russe who commissioned the score, planted students to “throw a riot” as a marketing gimmick and that once underway, it took on a life of its own. People who wanted to stop the music were being yelled at by people who wanted to hear the music: Nijinsky, the choreographer, was standing in the wings shouting out numbers to the dancers who could no longer hear the orchestra over the audience’s protests. Stravinsky left the auditorium “in fear of his life” and went backstage fairly early in the piece.

But was it his music that actually caused the riot? It’s nothing like what anybody these days would think people in those days were expecting: but when Pierre Monteaux, who conducted in the pit for that premiere, led an orchestral performance of just the music a few days later – no awkward, primitive choreography – it was actually greeted with cheers. The first performances in London (with the ballet) were very well received and the next year, another performance in Paris ended with the composer being carried out onto the streets on the shoulders of the cheering crowd!

There’s a marvelous chronology included in Robert Craft’s notes for the Naxos recording of The Rite of Spring (click on read more link) – while it details much of the process of those rehearsals and early performances, it also quotes from letters Stravinsky wrote when he was composing the music.

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Briefly told, the ballet takes place in ancient Russia during pagan times (the subtitle is “Pictures of Pagan Russia”) in a village gathered to celebrate the end of winter, the beginning of spring and the hope for a good harvest at the end of summer, a cycle their lives depended on. The introduction, with its eerie bassoon solo, all the stopping and starting, adding layer on layer of bird-calls at sunrise and perhaps people trudging into the village center to begin the fair (a very different fair than the one Stravinsky depicted in Petrushka), the curtain goes up on a series of ritualized games – girls stamping their feet, perhaps in imitation of sowing seeds and pounding them into the ground, boys staging a mock-attack and abducting the girls (perhaps re-enacting some mythical event or simply acting out a more brutalized pre-historic version of “courtship”), a round dance that is about as stately as it gets (one assumes these would be the adults of the community) that erupts into war-games, perhaps pitting one village’s men against another’s. The Old Sage, the wisest of the village elders (a combined political ruler and spiritual leader), makes a grand entrance, and in one almost silent (and eerie) moment, blesses the soil (the scene of only a few measures length called “The Kiss of the Earth”) as the party then really begins with the frenetic “Dance of the Earth” that concludes Part One.

In Russia, spring is not a gradual letting-go of winter’s grip as we know it here: it happens suddenly, violently, with great cracks in the frozen soil, the ice breaking on the lakes and rivers. Stravinsky recalled hearing this in the middle of the night, this sudden arrival of spring. It is this suddenness and sense of eruption he captures in this segment of the ballet, and the rejoicing that accompanies it.

The second part takes place at night. Having partied (and then presumably feasted), it was now time to get down to business: the village virgins gather in a mystical circle and out of them, one will be chosen to be sacrificed. Once chosen, she is then glorified by the assembled villagers, the ancestors are addressed in prayer, and then the sacrificial dance begins. As she becomes more and more frenzied, in the end she dances herself to death to propitiate the gods and ensure a bountiful harvest.

The score has become another one of those Everests for orchestras: for the likes of an orchestra in a town like Harrisburg to be doing it – and doing it this well – is a reason for justifiable pride. First of all, it requires a huge orchestra – quintuple winds instead of the usual two or three of each, including the likes of an alto (or bass) flute and pairs of bass clarinets and contrabassoons; eight (or nine) horns instead of the usual four (or five, with an assistant for the principal) including two playing “Wagner Tubas;” five trumpets (including a piccolo trumpet and a bass trumpet) and two tubas – and it demands the utmost concentration to get through its rhythmical intricacies, especially in the infamous final scene, The Sacrificial Dance. This is no waltz:

With the orchestra’s final concert of the season, I had to hear it twice. Technically, Saturday night’s performance was better than Sunday’s, but viscerally Sunday’s was far more exciting, as if, having done it once, everybody threw themselves into it with a greater sense of abandon. This is not a “nice” piece – Stravinsky complained about Karajan’s 1964 recording, that it was “too polished,” “a pet savage rather than a real one,” “duller than Disney’s dying dinosaurs” – the raucous ending of Part One reminds you this was, after all, a street fair with an ecstatic crowd waving their arms and stamping their feet, cheering the climax of the day’s games and the appearance of their spiritual leader, the community’s biggest and most important celebration of the year.

The complexities of the piece are legendary – in its rhythm and constantly changing meters, the patterns which never seem to recur logically, not to mention the demands on the individual instruments with just a ton of notes and the use of extreme registers – but none probably more so than merely making sense out of all this chaos and frenzy yet keeping it, somehow, controlled. Stuart Malina did an incredible job shaping these lines and balancing these textures, no easy task, since many conductors are lucky just to keep the baton going in the right place at the right time. Nothing can smell fear like an orchestra with an unprepared conductor in front of it, so it is to everyone’s credit that they could all get beyond playing (and placing) the notes and just letting it rip. There were no “pet savages” on the Forum stage.

So it’s not unusual to hear the occasional glitch in a piece like this. The ones I heard on Sunday were more the result of a lapse in concentration (perhaps the irony of thinking “oh, this is going well” and then, boom) rather than not being up to the challenge: the timpanist miscounting measures of rests before an entrance (twice!) or a violinist in the set-up to the Sacrificial Dance, with its wildly irregular boom-chuck, “chucking” on a rest. More noticeable and unfortunate, especially considering how fabulously well it had been played the day before, was the opening bassoon solo, the most truly terrifying moment in the bassoonist’s repertoire, when it comes back a second time just before the stomping Dance of the Adolescents begins. Whether it’s because it’s a half-step lower this time or because the reed didn’t speak right, trying to place notes that high in the register (it’s more than just putting the right fingers on the right keys), the principal bassoonist started the second part of the phrase one note higher than written: rather than squeak or honk trying to get out of it, he blanked out for a couple of beats before coming back in to finish the phrase without further incident. Unfortunately, for a rare moment in this piece, he was the only one playing, so there was nothing to cover it up. But we’re only human and sometimes, even in the midst of an amazing performance, something akin to Murphy’s Law will prove it.

It would be impossible to single out individual players since whole sections played with the kind of precision you’d expect on the stage of Carnegie Hall. And it’s all the more amazing because this is not an orchestra that plays together as often as those who play Carnegie Hall. As Phil Snedecor, the principal trumpet player (and now 2nd Trumpet of the Baltimore Symphony), explained in the talk-back sessions afterwards, playing in Harrisburg is like an event (Malina describes it as “Symphony Camp”) where you get together for a few days each month and put on a concert, unlike a full-time orchestra (say, Baltimore) that works 52 weeks a year and it’s, like, your job. And yet in a concert like this one, there are people in the orchestra who don’t play here on a regular basis, yet fit right in. In one of the most challenging pieces in the repertoire.

For me, it’s exciting because I grew up listening to this orchestra since I was a kid and worked with them in the ‘80s (and realizing violist Barb Downs, receiving her 25th Year award as well as the orchestra’s own “most valued player of the year” award, was someone I remember auditioning...). To hear them play something like this this well is just a thrill.

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Probably the first time most people in this country heard (and saw) Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was in Walt Disney’s animated classic, Fantasia, where it was set to a story of the creation of life on earth, ending with the destruction of the dinosaurs. Being a kid and fascinated by dinosaurs, this was fine by me (especially the famous fight between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Stegosaurus), but when I first heard it without the film, I didn’t care for the music which didn’t make sense to me, otherwise. It took a while to appreciate the music on its own terms but it then became one of my favorite pieces.

When I lived in Connecticut and New York City in the late-70s, I saw the ballet several times: for some reason, it was going around a lot those years. I saw the New York City Ballet’s production of it four or five times – without a set but complete with a Male Chosen One (virgin or otherwise) who is sent aloft into the air, hanging over the stage like a crucifix on the final beat, all happening so fast it took your breath away. There were at least two other companies who came to town with it on their programs, one of them being some famous German dancer/choreographer’s production, a little too cartoonish to be serious (a friend referred to it as his “Alley Oop Period”). Sticking more to Stravinsky’s original scenario, he turned the Sacrificial Dance into a wild and wooly pas-de-deux with the star dancer/choreographer (whose name I’ve forgotten) as a High Priest who dances the virgin to death, ending with her sitting up on his shoulders reaching for the stars before swinging her around till she was hanging upside down from his neck, her eyes open wide in fear staring out into the audience on the final chord, all happening so fast it took your breath away. Another, more traditional (using the term loosely) production, had four village elders with long staves who stood around the Virgin during her final dance who then slowly moved in on her as she writhed on the ground: with that sudden moment’s pause, they raised their staves into the air and, on the final downbeat, impaled her. Whoa!

After all that, hearing the piece in concert was kind of ho-hum tame: the world it described was brutish and violent but the orchestra by itself couldn’t make it as brutish and violent as the dancers could. Even today, the work easily shocks people because there is nothing else quite like The Rite of Spring, no matter how many times the music has been imitated in movie-scores.

If Beethoven goes right to your heart, Stravinsky’s ballet goes right to your gut. And it can only do that because it was, in so many ways, unlike anything else before or since – even though much of it is rooted in Stravinsky’s own past, just carried to newer levels and extremes.

The sound of the piece is something hard to explain. Theorists have tried to analyze it because the composer never discussed how he wrote it the way he did: he said he was merely “the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.” While Schoenberg was leaving 19th Century tonality behind (but was still years away from developing what became his 12-tone or serial system), Stravinsky admitted to no system to replace the logic of tonality. And yet, when you pick it apart, there is an immense amount of logic to it. How much theorists are reading into what Stravinsky composed is anybody's guess, but that is always the case - inspiration or the manipulation of tones, the music comes first, the academic description of it comes afterwards.

Once The Rite of Spring became famous, everybody wanted another piece like it, but Stravinsky never tried to imitate it, knowing he could never succeed. Nor did he really seem to capitalize on what he was doing here, theoretically, though L’Histoire du Soldat and especially Les Noces are clearly its descendants. Yet for everything he wrote afterwards, he never again had the success he did with these first three ballets, ending with Le sacre du printemps, completed when he was 30.

Several people asked me, “Is it atonal?” Well, it’s certainly not tonal the way somebody in 1913 might’ve thought about it.

If you define tonal as having a tonic key-center – it’s in A Major – no, it’s not tonal, because its harmonies do not move in such a way to create a sense of a key center. On the other hand if you define it more narrowly – it ends in the same key it began in, the standard procedure of the 18th and much of the 19th Century, then Mahler and Nielsen, among others, are not tonal (an exception would be for change of mode, from minor-to-major, or going from something like B Minor to D Major (same key signature) which was okay because, in Bach’s day, B Major was just a ridiculous key to be playing in).

But in the sense that melodic or harmonic fragments gravitate around a certain pitch, then there are tonal implications in The Rite of Spring that do not exist in a famous atonal work composed only a couple of years earlier: Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Regardless, both works had an impact on the “progress” of music in the early-20th Century that led to atonality as a major... okay, let’s say significant form of musical expression.

Many of the melodic ideas (more cellular than what we might call outright melodies) are built like folk-songs or what might make us think of something primitive – simple two or three note cells that repeat or wrap around the same few pitches (think the typical children’s “nyah-nyah-nyah” chant). The opening bassoon solo is basically in A Minor – the famous “stamping chord,” where harmony becomes color rather than function, is built on an E-flat Dominant 7th Chord on top of an F-flat Major chord (or think E Major). But they don’t function harmonically the way they should – in fact, they don’t function at all: they exist purely as sound and it becomes the rhythm that you focus on or the color of these sonorities.

Then, too, Stravinsky is building his sound out of layers of smaller units of sound: not a density of texture through lush harmony, but through its various polyphonic strands. One recurring motive throughout the first part of the ballet (the games, basically) is always three notes in what could be B-flat Minor (or what looks like part of an E-flat Dominant 7th chord), but over this may be another melodic phrase that appears in G Minor, then B-flat Minor and A Minor in succession while under it might be a bass-line arpeggio splayed off the pitch E-flat sounding like the open strings of a cello (but not the same pitches) which if not sounding like it’s in E-flat Major emphasizes the pitch E-flat as a center. Put them all together, there’s no real SENSE of tonality in the mix – no more than you might get from this group of people singing in one key over here, while a bird over there is singing in another key over there and somebody’s radio in the distance is playing a song in a different key as the car drives by.

One of the more stable moments in the first part (the Spring Round dance), a more slow and stately section, begins with a theme that, like many Russian folk-songs, could be in A-flat Major or F Minor (same key signature). Then he takes a thematic cell heard earlier (still in B-flat Minor) and expands it into a longer-lined theme, but now over these resonant E-flat Minor 9th-chords (E-flat with an F as the upper note of the chord). Against this, as a kind of refrain, in the upper stratosphere of the flutes, he places a bird-like passage in F Minor, and then another refrain-like cell in F Major with an E-flat in it (a folksy modality). As it gets more intense, Stravinsky adds other pitches to create more dissonance, mixing E-flat Major along with E-flat Minor, creating chords with a G-natural and a G-flat simultaneously.

The stability of all this harmony built on chords with fifths in them (standard chords regardless of what other pitches are added to them) disintegrates in the Rituals of Rival Tribes when the interval of the perfect fifth (C-and-G) is replaced by the unstable diminished fifth or tritone (C-and-F-sharp) which now obliterates any sense of function because it is no longer a major or minor chord. This is something Debussy would have used but never this violently: what in Debussy would sound vague and “impressionistic” in Stravinsky becomes violent and unhinged, literally and figuratively.

When the basses won’t let go of a pedal F-sharp, the upper layer flails back and forth between fragments in D Minor and A-flat Major (a tritone apart). After an amazing (and quiet) sonority (when the Ancient Sage blesses the earth) which is a C Major 9th chord in the bass but an A-flat Major/Minor chord in the upper register, like overtones off the low C of the bass, the final ecstatic dance that concludes Part One is rooted in this C (not major or minor, just C) with a steady ostinato of a whole-tone scale with F-sharp, G-sharp and A-sharp (no 5th or leading tone in C Major) – again, something Debussy would have used but never so violently as this – with slashing chords in the upper register that are primarily a C-Major triad with an added F-sharp. And it just stops - no resolution to a chord of any single tonality. (And that’s just Part One!)

So is it tonal? Well, not exactly. But it’s not yet Atonal in the sense we later become familiar with it, where the harmony is based on sonorities that no longer even resemble a major or minor triad much less function like one.

But, no, it’s not tonal in the sense that Mozart and even Beethoven are tonal, and for some listeners, trying to explain the difference is splitting hairs. But that’s why Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring sounds the way it does: because he started doing things differently with these same sonorities and building blocks of traditional classical music – though most amazingly with its rhythm – and from that standpoint, Classical Music was never the same.

It is still not an easy piece to get people to love. There were those who left before it was over but not as many as I expected. Standing against the back wall in the Forum’s promenade on Sunday, I watched one elderly couple huff and shuffle their way past me toward the exit during the “Ritual Action of the Ancestors” (appropriately), perhaps more disappointed than annoyed. One elderly man, bent with the care of years and his walker propped near his chair, was applauding vigorously at the end. There were many younger people at both performances, too, more children than I’m used to seeing (always a good sign). While Saturday night’s more staid crowd was slow to offer the usually populist standing ovation, Sunday’s crowd was cheering in a flash, up on its feet a few seconds later. The power to shock may still be there, but its power to excite was exciting to see.


Dr. Dick

A Look Back at Clara Schumann for Mother's Day

With the music I'm playing this evening for Mother's Day on Sunday, I thought it might be worth looking back on the story of this remarkable woman - concert pianist, composer, wife and mother - which I originally posted in March of 2006.

Read about The Extraordinary Life of Clara Schumann here.

Dr. Dick

Is It Busy This Weekend or Is It Just Me?

Wow, I was hoping to have more time today to get some blogging done, since there are so many things going on this week, but it’s been kind of a frantic day, the rain aside (when I’d prefer moving at a slightly slower pace, anyway). And last night’s post, getting caught up with Sunday’s performance by Daniel Gaisford at the State Street Academy, was officially my 350th Post here at Dr. Dick’s Blog!

As usual, lots of things going on this weekend, so for those of you who cannot delegate parts of your psyche to attend each of them (“Sibyl, I’d like you to cover the Harrisburg Symphony concert at the Forum, and you, Sibyl II, should go to the Harrisburg Choral Society/Central PA Symphony concert – and maybe Sibyl III could catch the Susquehanna Chorale in Palmyra?”), here are some things to choose from.

The Susquehanna Chorale sings tonight at Whitaker Center and tomorrow night at the Gravel Hill United Methodist Church in Palmyra, both at 8pm. The program includes a number of works they’ll be taking with them on their European travels this summer – and you can read more about all of that at their web-site.

Since I’m not posting this until too late on a Friday evening, it’s worth the trip to Palmyra Saturday night where the acoustics are superb, if you missed out on the one at Whitaker Center, tonight.

The Harrisburg Symphony will be dealing with Spring Fever this weekend, with Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” along with Richard Strauss’ tale of practical jokes gone bad in “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks” – Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 3 at the Forum, with Stuart Malina conducting the orchestra. Truman Bullard will be giving the pre-concert talk, focusing on that historic first night with “The Rite of Spring,” the riot that may or may not have been as big a deal as it’s become in legend: they begin an hour before each performance. I really wanted to write more about the program, but there just isn’t time, right now. At this rate, I’ll be happy to post about Saturday’s performance by mid-June…

Robert Hart Baker and Gregory Woodbridge share the podium with their respective ensembles combining for a Spring concert of the Harrisburg Choral Society and the Central Pennsylvania Symphony, in a program that includes the Poulenc Gloria and Haydn’s “Lord Nelson” Mass. While the Haydn mass is a great work of the choral repertoire, I love Poulenc's setting of the Gloria (basically a section of the complete mass), with its misplaced accents in the Latin text, making you wonder if he really knew the liturgy. Considering Poulenc's usual sense of humor, he was very serious about not being all that serious: one of his favorite images, he'd said, was watching a group of monks, complete with brown robes and sandals, playing soccer. Just a delightful and joyous piece.

There's another orchestra concert, this one with the Pennsylvania Centre Orchestra in an all-Beethoven concert that sounds interesting -- his 4th Symphony (not played that often), his 3rd Piano Concerto along with the 2nd of the Romances for Violin. The orchestra will be conducted by Douglas Meyer with Penn State faculty members, pianist Timothy Shafer and violinist James Luon the soloists. That's Saturday at 7:30 at Esber Recital Hall of Penn State's School of Music.

The 3rd Piano Concerto is one that's always been a favorite of mine (having nothing to do with having worked on it when I was a high school senior and my teacher then thought it would be a good piece to work on), and I'm always delighted to see it coming around instead of the more familiar (and admitedly 'greater') 4th and 5th concertos.

There are lots of other events, but you can find out a lot simply by going to rsvpa.com and clicking on the calendar dates you want to check out. And to those of you who are presenting performances you'd like to see listed there, you can enter your own information to have it posted on-line.

Gotta get on the air! Have a great weekend!

Dr. Dick

A Sunday Afternoon at the State Street Academy

When you’re at a restaurant and ordering a little of this and a little of that from the menu, you may fall into the trap previous generations have described as having “eyes bigger than your stomach.” That may have been what happened when cellist Daniel Gaisford and his wife, pianist Josefina Melgar, planned the program for last Sunday’s recital at the State Street Academy. Gaisford is the artistic director of the Academy and this program was the concluding concert in a season-long series of Sunday afternoon recitals.

Standing in the back of St. Lawrence’s chapel and scanning the program, I can’t say it seemed like it would be an all-nighter (it started, after all, at 4pm), but with 13 short pieces on the 2nd half, if they averaged about 5 minutes each, that’s over an hour of music, even without the applause.

The first half was a little vague, ending with “selected etudes and caprices,” otherwise undetailed beyond Prokofiev’s brief “March for Children.” Considering the program opened with the last and biggest of Bach’s Solo Cello Suites, what were we in for, other than lots of great music-making? It wasn’t really a marathon concert, unless you considered the uncushioned pews in the chapel or the players’ stamina.

But then, continuing the food analogy, “there’s always room for cello.”

After the Bach (which Gaisford described as being like “a symphony for solo cello” not just because it’s about 25-30 minutes long but because it’s so full of music and demands so much concentration without any chance to take a break), the cellist apologized for the number of pieces on the program: he would play just the Prokofiev but dispense with the Etudes & Caprices.

During the second half, there was occasional laughter as Daniel looked over at the printed program he’d set down on the piano or had one or two hushed conferences with the pianist, as if trying to figure out what was next. First one piece was dropped, then it was announced they would end with the Tchaikovsky Nocturne, dispensing with the last three pieces listed. When they concluded, it was still daylight.

They could have, as far as I was concerned, played an encore: maybe the Brahms F Major Cello Sonata?

He had chosen the works on the second half because they were popular short works for the cellist’s repertoire but not easily programmed in the midst of the more standard sonata fare, aside from a favorite like Saint-Saens’ “The Swan,” and perhaps dismissed as encores. He and Josefina had recorded them so students would have a chance to listen to them: in the meantime. they found several of them were favorite pieces they enjoyed playing together.

Though these didn’t sound like “teaching pieces,” I was wondering where all the students were? There were a few there I recognized (one, a violinist), but most of the audience I could recognize from other concerts I would attend in town, regular denizens of Market Square Church or Whitaker Center or the Forum – and, like myself, considerably past the “student” phase.

Though we all have something to learn. While we’ve had several chances to hear Daniel play, this was one of the few times we’d had a chance to hear his wife, Josefina, and she is a fine a musician in her own right. While my schedule may have precluded me from hearing anything else in the past, I’m looking forward to having a chance to attend a solo recital some day soon, or at least a more substantial sonata recital with her husband.

The Bach – many notes for a single cellist – is one of my favorites. I haven’t heard it live many times but this was easily one of the best, clean and well-paced without being academic or, on the other hand, over-done. It’s a very easy piece to make sound hard. By the time it was over, you realize it didn’t sound hard at all.

It was, in all, that kind of an afternoon.

Nor is it easy to pull off having a music school in town (watch the school's promotional video here). It takes more than just interested students and committed teachers and parents – it takes a good deal of community support and awareness. As musically satisfying as the afternoon was, I was disappointed there were only about 80 people in the audience, by my estimation, and of those, only a few students. But that is the concern of all arts organizations nationwide: it doesn’t mean it’s dying as people often say, but it could be healthier than it is.

Considering Josefina Melgar is from Venezuela, I thought it appropriate to conclude with this link to a very moving story you might (or might not) have seen on 60 Minutes. It’s about the program in Venezuela that started by taking kids from the slums of Caracas and giving them classical music. Sound far-fetched?

If you haven’t heard of Gustavo Dudamel, music-director designate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, I don’t know what rock you’re hiding under. He’s probably the closest thing to a “phenom” in the classical music world today – him and his Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of which, at 25 or so, he is the oldest person on the stage.

They are the result of a program that began long before Hugo Chavez became synonymous with the national politics. By now, there are hundreds of thousands of kids from all over the country who’ve been “saved” by classical music, getting together to form hundreds of performing groups and orchestras. Now, they may not all become professional musicians, but their training and, more importantly, their sense of discipline and self-worth they’ve achieved may make them want to – and to be able to – pursue career paths that were not available to troubled kids from poor neighborhoods before.

It is called, simply, El Sistema – “The System” – and several people have asked me if a program like that could work in the troubled neighborhoods of American cities. Perhaps Dudamel, once he’s settled into his new gig, will try to bring a version of it to Los Angeles. (Some groups are already trying it.)

But it was one of those degree-of-separation chills when Tom Arnoldi, president of the Academy’s board, mentioned to me afterwards that Dudamel studied violin with Josefina Melgar’s uncle.

And that reminded me that, during the performance, I noticed a young father with his son sitting near the back. I’m not sure how old the boy was (maybe 8?) but I saw how intent he was, watching and listening to the music, his father occasionally checking the program (we too had to figure out where we were, sometimes), nodding and pointing when they heard the familiar strains of Saint-Saens’ “The Swan.” Was he a music student, maybe a cellist? Or did he want to be one?

They didn’t stay for the reception and other people came up to talk to me before I had a chance to invite them downstairs to meet Daniel and his wife if he wasn’t already a student there. But it was a warm consolation that of all the people in the audience that afternoon, there was one who may have benefited more from having the chance to hear this program – more than the rest of us may have ever guessed.

But there is so much more that can be done.

Dr. Dick

On Hearing the Premiere of Elliott Carter's Clarinet Quintet

A week ago, John Clare and I went into New York City for a concert. This was no ordinary concert: it was the world premiere of the Clarinet Quintet by Elliott Carter with the legendary Juilliard Quartet and Charles Neidich.

As a fan of Elliott Carter’s music, this may not have been the “Must See” event hearing all five string quartets in one evening was, three months earlier (and then blogging about it), but it certainly was an important opportunity to hear a new work – twice – and to hear the composer talk about it in between performances. Considering Carter is 99 and the piece is barely seven months old – as he said, “and to think I have pieces that are even younger than this one!” – how many times will you get to hear a world premiere by a composer still writing as he pushes 100?

Read the entire post, here.

- Dr. Dick

The Alumni Chorale Starts a New Chapter

Even with another Mahler symphony on Thursday night, I still didn’t have time to blog! There was a lot of work to get caught up on so the blogging had to wait. Even at home, this past week, early meetings aside, my staff and I were busily writing scripts for WITF Presents and the like. So maybe tonight will be a bit mellower. Having done the afternoon air shift and already putting in 8 hours by the time I’m half-way through my evening air-shift, mellow isn’t quite the word I have in mind...

Last Saturday evening, I had a chance to catch the first concert in the next chapter of the Alumni Chorale of Lebanon Valley College. This choir has been around since 1978, formed by Pierce Getz to give graduates of the college a continuation of the choral experience they’d enjoyed as students. When Dr. Getz died suddenly a few weeks before the spring concert last year, there was serious concern about the continuity of the choir – more than just the emotional strain of soldiering on despite their collective grief and shock. Richard Fowler, a member of the bass section who’d been deputized to conduct rehearsals in Pierce’s absence, took on the daunting task of leading the choir first through the memorial service and then the performance that included Palestrina’s Pope Marcellus Mass, a work that Pierce had told me the year before he was so looking forward to conducting in the rich acoustic of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A national search brought in candidates from around the country, including Gregg Mauroni who was a member of the chorale but decided he would throw his… well, choral conductors don’t use batons, so let’s say his pitch pipe into the ring. And among all the things they were considering, he was the one chosen to lead the chorale into the next stage of their development.

Regardless of who’d get the job, it would not be the same, considering the shoes to be filled. Comparisons are pointless though inevitable. The program Mauroni had planned was a tribute to the past but was also looking toward the future. A choral conductor generally needs time working with the singers for both sides of the podium to develop the relationship needed to do larger, more challenging works (and a budget for instrumentalists, depending on the repertoire, comes in handy, too). So this program was a good introduction for all concerned, including the audience. Judging from the positive reaction from the rather small turnout that night, we seem to be off to a good start. Better to see were the smiles and sense of accomplishment in the faces of the singers: clearly, the chorale would continue, and it would be good.

Starting off with Mendelssohn’s “Heilig,” the chorale in the round, we got a great view of the conductor at work, whether or not he realized it when he planned to begin the concert this way – facing the audience! Normally, we’d only ever see the conductor’s back, so if he’d be particularly nervous, it could be unnerving to have ALL eyes on him, to begin. Apparently not: as the evening progressed, everything was well under control. His beat is clear, his style simple but expressive – no pretty hands for prettiness sake – his articulation precise without being academic. His comfort level in addressing the audience (the experience of a high school teacher showing through) is also a plus.

For me, the best performance from the chorale came during the not-very-easy selections from Carl Orff’s less well-known Catulli Carmina, a companion piece to Carmina burana, though it’s in a very different and more clean-lined style (befitting its classical Latin poetry, eroticism aside). This may have been balanced by the collection of folk songs and spirituals that concluded the program, standard fare for most choirs these days, though I get tired of that over-used formula. That’s where I found Pierce’s programming refreshing, but under the circumstances, past or future, it still worked well for the choir.

If there are concerns, I’d mention two things. For some reason, despite the clarity of up-beats (preparations) from the conductor at the start of some pieces, there was often this sense of hesitation – a wobble on the pitch, someone coming in perhaps a fraction too soon, a rhythm not very precise – but only for a second. Not consistently but often enough to notice. Then everything recovered and was fine.

One of the chorale’s projects is to work more closely with the undergraduates at Lebanon Valley College, an obvious “cultivation” of future members, something the chorale will desperately need, soon. As we worry about the graying of the audience, performers are also aging, and though there are some newer faces in the choir than I remember in years past, this is still a concern with some of the sopranos who seem to be losing their luster and focus of pitch in the top register. In the tenor section, it may perhaps be a different story, most evident in the Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes when veteran tenor Tom Hostetter “came out of retirement” to play half the piano duet accompaniment: without his voice, the section sounded a little too flutey on top, no match for the basses, a distraction when the tenors had the tune. It was surprising to hear what difference a single voice could make, but it made the short Brahms selections seem much longer than they were.

You don’t have to be a graduate of Lebanon Valley College to become a member of the chorale, by the way: in the past, it has been one of the better choirs in an area rich with good choral traditions, so if you’re looking for a good musical experience, it’s certainly something to consider. Let’s face it, if you enjoy singing, you should consider joining at least one of the choirs in the region!

Another thing I think should be on the chorale’s agenda: a website! But I digress…

Several people commented afterwards, incidentally, how similar Gregg Mauroni’s conducting style is to Linda Tedford’s, the founder and director of the Susquehanna Chorale. This may explain why it went so well when they combined to form the de facto Harrisburg Symphony Chorus this past month with Vaughan Williams’ Dona nobis pacem and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (and honestly, I will get back to finishing that post, some day…).

As I think of my parents and friends who are no longer with me, I am often reminded of a quote attributed to the Orthodox Saint, John Chrysostomos:

He whom we have loved and lost
Is no longer where he once was:
He is now wherever we are.

It is clear the Alumni Chorale is in good health. The conviction of its members – especially with Dick Fowler leading them through this transition and now with Gregg Mauroni ready to move forward – their love of music and their joy of making music is something I’m sure Pierce would be proud of. I didn’t know him that well, personally, but well enough to know the music always came first. And though someone else may be on the podium, he would still be pleased to see his work continuing into the future.

Here's to the next thirty years, then.

- Dr. Dick