Big Papa Haydn’s keen understanding of the timbres and capabilities of the instruments allowed him to constantly play with the light textures of the combo while still packing the trios full of the kind of witty, elevated invention we have come to call Haydnesque. Schultz, Stewart and Ellis, playing Hadyn-period instruments in the historically informed style (this was a Bach Sinfonia concert, after all), gave a performance where the music sprang to life from the first notes with the kind of carefree joy that comes to audiences only from the previous hard work of performers.

It was all the more surprising, then, that later in the program Stewart announced that Schultz would skip his scheduled performance of a solo flute fantasia by Georg Philip Telemann because he had a bad head cold. I am not a professional flutist, but it seems to me that breathing is an important part of playing the flute; it’s tough to imagine how good he must sound when his various respiration-related passages are not obstructed. Thankfully, he was able to play everything else as scheduled on Saturday, and I hope he recovers soon.

Kathie Stewart, renowned Baroque flutist, is from Silver Spring, Maryland. What up S-Double? Photo by http://www.jessewphoto.com/

Stewart covered for him by playing the first movement of a flute sonata by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Like a lot of C.P.E.’s music, it can be heard as a young man’s rebellion against his famous papa, with phrases twisting up from their obvious conclusions into harmonically outré questions, moods changing seemingly bar-by-bar, and long pauses to make everyone think hard about the goings-on. Stewart committed fully to the ride, playing up the contrasts and wringing lots of drama out of her fermatas. Hearing the last two movements of the sonata after intermission allowed the first to hang in the air for a while like an unanswered question — an effect not inimical, I would guess, to C.P.E.’s intentions, and certainly a fun effect on Saturday.

Those of you not steeped in 18th-century musical lore may be wondering how the Bach Project could gin up an entire program of music for flutes. If you guessed “Some guy with a lot of money and/or power played the flute,” you are of course right: That person was Frederick the Great, German potentate and skilled amateur tootler. Besides C.P.E.’s opus (his only work for solo flute), F.d.G. likely played two other works on Saturday’s program, duets by C.P.E.’s bro Wilhelm Friedemann and the king of the Baroque flute, Johann Joachim Quantz, who conveniently had the king who played the Baroque flute as his patron.

On Saturday, W.F. Bach’s “Duetto” in E minor mostly sounded dour; Schultz and Stewart made fetching noises, but W.F. did not vary those noises enough to avoid monotony. Quantz came off much better in his D major Duetto, which showed a command of the various means of combining two flutes to imply harmonies that can only come from high-level familiarity. S&S made cool, poised work of the minor-key Mesto (“sadly”) slow movement, finding a kernel of real emotion, then swept all that away with a glittering fast finale. Jacques Hotteterre attained prominence as a flutist and composer similar to that of Quantz, and his suite for two flutes had similar fluency in the instruments and vivacity in the music.

Like most people, I was not super-familiar with the literature for two or fewer flutes and no other instruments before this concert, so the only music on the program with which I was intimately familiar was the second suite for solo cello by the Bach from which the Sinfonia got its name. In his Haydn performances with Schultz and Stewart, Ellis provided a firm rhythmic underpinning, hitting his notes at just the right time to keep the melody aloft; playing by himself, he took a much more mercurial approach, sometimes burying the dance rhythms on which the suite draws in expressive gestures, sometimes accelerating or decelerating at unexpected times.

The constant gear-shifting made the opening movements feel a bit aimless, but in the “Sarabande” Ellis shaped the phrases so they sounded organic, like breathing, a striking effect. He also dug into the rhythms a little more in the final two dances, which made their effect stronger (for me, anyway). And throughout, his cello sounded lovely, rich and warm but with the occasional rasp and whisper that make the period cello such a captivating instrument. It was good to have all three performers on stage for the Haydn that closed the concert: we got to hear Schultz and Stewart back on classical flutes, along with Ellis — hearing, one last time, these instruments so well-played and playing so well together was a final treat in a concert full of them.

THE AUTHOR OF THIS BLOG IS FROM SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND

For this concert, Stewart not only wrote the program notes (which were engaging and lucid – professional program note writers should take heed) but also provided some intro remarks before most of the pieces (except Ellis’ solo). In one of these interludes, she mentioned that she is from Silver Spring (a graduate of Northwood HS) and that Schultz also has family in Silver Spring and in Rockville. It just goes to show – people from Silver Spring do great things. Or start blogs about other people who do great things.

Benjamin Olinsky in greener seasons, from the 18th Street Singers website

Francis Poulenc’s “Quatre Motets pour le Temps de Noel” (“Four Motets for Christmastime”) and “Un Soir de Neige” (“A Night of Snow”) led off the first and second halves of the program and received some of the evening’s most satisfying performances. In the sacred work, the 18th Streeters crisply rendered the text — even though a few lines of Latin were missing from the program, I was able to keep up — while making a lovely sound that easily filled the warm acoustic of First Trinity Lutheran Church. The basses, in particular, sounded like a force of nature here and throughout the concert, a palpable presence deep in the harmonies yet capable of nimbly navigating melodies when called for.

The Gregorian chant inspiration in the first of the four motets came across with appropriate gravity, and when the severity and wonder of the first three motets gave way to joy in the finale, “Hodie Christus natus est” (“Christ is born today”), the chorus’ sound lifted up too. “Un Soir de Neige,” conducted by assistant music director Nick Bath, also showed the singers at the top of their game, vividly limning complex harmonies and giving life to the wandering sufferer depicted in the texts and Poulenc’s settings thereof.

This being an 18th Street Singers concert, classical mingled with other genres, but all the pieces were cannily chosen to reflect the theme of the evening, making for a tight, focused program. Felix Mendelssohn’s “Richte mich, Gott,” doesn’t ever seem fully committed to the laments with which it begins before finding light and hosannas, but the 18th Street Singers made the journey enjoyable all the same. Samuel Barber’s “Agnus Dei” sounded just distant enough from its source, his Adagio for Strings, to transcend the cliche the latter has become and accumulate great power from its implacable buildup, well-managed by Olinsky. These pieces bracketed warm performances of two traditional hymns, “Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal” and “We Gather Together,” and the juxtaposition flattered all of the music.

Some flubs made this concert a little less satisfying than last year’s winter edition. The soloist in “We Gather Together” could not be heard; a few entrances came in staggered fashion rather than in unison; and, most significantly, one or two of the sopranos could not comfortably hit the very highest notes they were called upon to sing, resulting in some unfelicitous screeching during the “Agnus Dei” and in a couple other pieces.

In addition, the transition to the skein of nonclassical pieces that ended the program felt awkward, with the finely grained nervousness and exhaustion of “Un Soir de Neige” followed by a labored “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” “Deep River,” though, leaned on those wonderful basses to make a strong impact, and while at the time I was not wholly convinced by the arrangement of U2′s “MLK,” it’s grown more compelling in my memory. The concert closed with “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” which was as vigorous as you could want and also provided the perfect closer for the program.

Though this concert had the benefit of texts and translations in the program, Olinsky, assistant directors Bath and Sarah Redmond, and other chorus members took turns talking about the pieces before singing. Even though some of these remarks could have been pared by a sentence or two, they went a long way toward making the concert feel warm and personal, which (along with good singing) is what you want when you duck out of the bitter cold January wind to hear a chorus. The concert repeats tonight; tickets are $10, so if you like the idea of wallowing in darkness for a while before emerging into musical light, it’s worth stopping by.

Updated to add Other People’s Perspectives: Michael Lodico.

Artistic director and historical harpist Constance Whiteside told the audience that Friday’s concert featured some of the best of the previous nine years of Twelfth Nighting. There was accordingly a higher proportion of Xmas Classix than at last year’s edition of this concert, which was the first I had attended.

Armonia Nova performing last year's Twelfth Night concert. Photo by Louise Krafft.

They certainly did justice to the more familiar tunes. Whiteside strung together a dulcet prelude on “Es ist ein ros entsprungen,” in which she carefully selected every note for maximum impact, creating a rapt atmosphere even before soprano Allison Mondel and alto Marjorie Bunday beautifully intertwined their voices in tender harmonies. Whiteside also got to shine in a solo fantasy on “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” finely shading her timbres as the music shifted from low to high on the harp to create a feeling of entering into light as the piece ended. “Remember, o thou man,” which included countertenor Corey McKnight and Yayoi Barrack on the viola da gamba, pulsed with devotion in time to the call-and-response of Thomas Ravencroft’s haunting writing. (With respect to this last tune, I admit that my judgment of what is a well-known yuletide song is colored by my parents’ wildly extensive CD library of Christmas music from centuries ago, which is exactly the ground that Armonia Nova is plowing. CVS won’t be piping anything performed Friday over its speakers next December, to my everlasting dismay.)

Yet part of the fun of these concerts is discovering new songs of the season, and thanks to my nonattendance in prior years I was introduced to some beauties. Bunday sang “A solis ortus cardine,” a chant melody for an English Christmas Eve ceremony, with quiet, aching intensity. McKnight gave a similarly affecting reading of Jacques de Cambrai’s thirteenth-century “Chanson pieuse,” well-shaped and in luminous voice. In the canon “Nowel: owt of your slepe aryse,” the three singers came together without instruments, their voices close and shining in the small space. (Among its other pleasures, this concert reminds us that it’s really amazing to hear a lovely voice used well from 20 feet away, not to mention three such voices.) All the players joined for more overtly joyous celebrations in “Verbun Patris unmanatur,” a medieval English song, Guillaume Dufay’s jumpily rhythmic celebration “Vergene bella,” and the Provencal song “Guillo, pran ton tamborini,” the last featuring Whiteside on tambourine to goose the dance rhythms.

Besides Barrack’s pinched tone and intonation problems on the gamba, the only clunker in this performance was its opener, “Ding! Dong! Merrily on high,” in which it proved impossible for the normally rock-solid ensemble of Bunday, Mondel, and McKnight to adopt the exact same tempo when melisma-ing the word “Gloria.” The group’s rousing performance of the closing “Veinticinco de diciembre” (with its delightful “Fum, fum, fum!” interjections) naturally led to an encore, which was a repeat of “Ding! Dong!” in which the audience was invited to sing along. If the professionals couldn’t stay in sync, we surely couldn’t, and pretty much every possible tempo was represented in the subsequent multi-car pileup of a group rendition. However, the group had one more trick up its sleeve: the presence of post-concert cake, a large sheet inscribed with frosting wishing Armonia Nova congratulations on ten years of Twelfth Night. A sweet ending for a treat of a concert.

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROGRAM NOTE BIOS

Regarding Corey McKnight:

Corey has had the fortune of singing on 12 Chanticleer recordings. Two of the songs from those recordings are also part of the movie soundtrack for the Jack Black film “Nacho Libre.”

I always enjoy any little dispatches from the non-classical world that make it into performer bios, but that should read as follows: “Two of the songs from those recordings were the recipient of the highest possible honor in classical music: selection for the movie soundtrack of the Jack Black film ‘Nacho Libre.’” I mean, it’s Jack Black. He was in that remake of “King Kong” that no one but me liked. And some other stuff. And “Nacho Libre!”

The last time I heard “Circus Maximus” was five years ago, when the Marine Band played it under Leonard Slatkin at Strathmore, and I felt steamrolled by something large whose outlines were forbidding and whose insides were murky. I wanted to see whether the murkiness was due to lack of familiarity or lack of clarity in the music. Thankfully, “Circus Maximus” sounds better the better you get to know it.

Corigliano has various band members spread out through whatever coliseum in which the symphony is being played, surrounding the audience in an experience even the finest 7.1-channel sound cannot duplicate at home (another reason to cherish live performances of the work). The band spends much of that time playing very loud, creating a solid wall of sound that seals you in. A recurring motif of horns whooping, with drums banging implacably behind them, sounds like a call to attention and a judgment at once. At one point, musicians march down the aisles, bringing the noise to wherever you are. You get the idea: This is a work that’s coming at you.

A bunch of students playing in the warm acoustic of the Dekelboum Concert Hall is not going to make the same amount of noise the President’s Own can in the super-live acoustic of the Music Center at Strathmore, and indeed I was able to hear myself think during this performance, which five years ago sometimes was a struggle. But the UMWO met the challenges Corigliano poses from a logistical perspective — just coordinating all these musicians scattered about the hall demands a lot of effort both from the players and the conductor. Michael Votta, Jr., the music director of the wind orchestra, had one white glove on his left hand just like another famous Michael, but he used the glove so that his finger-cues would be more readily visible in the rafters, and it seemed to work: almost all the time, the disorder in the hall was purposeful, and not an artifact of disordered playing.

In his introductory remarks, Votta also did a good job explaining the symphony, giving a concise hook for each of its movements that the audience could keep in mind as it listened. For example, Votta spotlit the “Night Music I” movement’s evocations of nature, and in the UMWO’s performance you could indeed hear the distant howls of wolves and the noises of other beasts and fowl over a constant quiet nocturnal murmur. “Night Music I” gradually segues into “Night Music II,” a urban scene with nightlife of a different sort, and it was extremely canny of the UMWO to project the changing movement titles on a large screen above the stage so no one in the audience had to wonder which movement we were in. Votta also correctly pointed out that the penultimate “Prayer” movement is full of hymn-like sounds and melodies full of hope, which the UMWO winds and brass threw themselves into just as they had earlier thrown themselves into battering the audience. The subtleties of the work, in other words, did not escape the UMWO any more than the non-subtleties did. I came away from the performance both impressed with Votta and the UMWO and wanting to hear “Circus Maximus” yet again. Let’s make it happen!

The UMWO deserves credit for choosing, as a concert opener, the maximum possible contrast to the Corigliano: Johannes Brahms’ sunny, sedate Serenade no. 2, for low strings, winds, and brass. Votta made sure the rhythms didn’t drag and the melodies unspooled gracefully, and after some initial infelicities (including two flutes playing a powerfully dissonant unison) the orchestra and its guest strings made pleasing noises. First among the frequent soloists was oboist Emily Tsai, who had a consistently lovely tone and took her melodic twists and turns with stylish assurance, but the whole thing was just the ticket to lull you into a satisfying complacence before the punch of the Corigliano after intermission.

As originally conceived by Stravinsky and an all-star cast of Swiss artists, four people acted out “A Soldier’s Tale” with a minimal set; the septet of violin, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, and percussion played onstage as a fifth actor. For the Falla, PCE artistic director Joseph Horowitz and music director Angel Gil-Ordonez brought in choreographer Igal Perry, to provide a new interpretation of a work Falla originally intended to accompany some acting and dancing.

Both of these scores played to the strengths of Gil-Ordonez and the musicians he assembled last weekend. In “A Soldier’s Tale” (also known by its original French title, “L’histoire du soldat”), the performers brought out the military-band cast of the scoring, with David Taylor‘s trombone snarling and Chris Gekker’s cornet chirping. A beat-up violin symbolized the soldier’s soul in the narrative, and David Salness roughed up his much more refined instrument to match. The score changes time signatures like some composers change keys and throws in constant allusions and subtle changes of tone throughout, but Gil-Ordonez led them in a tight, twisty performance that created a drama of its own.

Sadly, the actual tale in “A Soldier’s Tale” failed to convince me on Sunday. In its favor were the commitment of the Georgetown students who performed (particularly Allie Villareal, throwing herself headlong into everything she did) and resourceful direction from Georgetown prof Anna Harwell Celenza. Still, the story is an old one, about a man who sells his soul for material things proffered by Satan Himself, and it turns out that if a person is greedy, sometimes that person ends up with nothing at all. (I trust Fox Business Channel is going after the PCE once they’re done with the Muppets.) The translation used here featured nursery-rhymish couplets seemingly designed to emphasize the story’s familiarity, but they also trivialized it a bit. I frequently found myself waiting for the music to begin again.

That wasn’t a problem after intermission, since the PCE used the continuous version of “El amor brujo” Falla prepared as an orchestral suite as a base for Perry’s choreography, which in turn reflected the plot of the original version. (It turns out the best way to get the spirit of a dead lover to leave you alone so you can pursue new romantic possibilities is a ritual fire dance. Ladies, take note!)

Smokin! From Fernandez's website

The orchestra expanded to about a score of musicians, hidden behind a sometimes-translucent scrim — still less than a full orchestra, but the volume was not missed, and the stripped-down forces gave the music a raw power more than appropriate to the score. In the latter respect, they almost matched special musical guest Esperanza Fernandez, a flamenco cantatora, who sang the lyrics Falla originally intended for live flamenco performance. Fernandez might not measure up on the traditional classical evaluation scale, since she needed a mic and her high notes could get a little pinched, but on the scale of rocking it she excelled, taking over in the midst of a mad swirl of music and immediately drawing all attention to her impassioned singing. Nothing was out of place, everything flowed from the score, and yet she made Falla’s songs utterly her own.

She also seemed to bend light towards her whenever Perry’s choreography moved about the stage, such was her charisma. Fortunately, Perry realized this and gave her a counterpart among the dancers, with Nikki Holck dancing the character of Candela vividly, if not as fiercely as Fernandez sang it. At this point, I should note that I am definitely not a dance critic, and from my music-critic perspective I wanted to see more of the orchestra doing its thing and Fernandez unencumbered by people dancing around her. In addition, four dancers represented Falla’s original characters, and four others represented nothing, which made me wonder why the latter four were onstage, although all eight were fun to watch. There may be a whole terpsichorean grammar I am failing to understand, though.

Both in the program notes and in a post-concert Q&A, PCE artistic director Joseph Horowitz mentioned the ensemble’s intention to take the show on the road, although he seemed to be referring to other people presenting the staging and choreography rather than the PCE going on tour. Anyone who attends this program, even if the PCE isn’t playing, will be seeing two great pieces of music presented fresh, and that’s the experience of the PCE straight to the core.

Other People’s Perspectives: Paula Durbin. Edited to add: Charles T. Downey, Marie Gullard.

Still, those chords did indeed deliver a proper smack, which speaks to the ORR’s virtues. First, where a modern orchestra sounds plush and rounded, the ORR sounds leaner and sometimes rougher. Even when played with exceptional skill, their instruments often have a bit of a rasp or a tang to them, and they’re never as loud. The period horn, a fiendishly difficult instrument to play, tends to wobble a bit or even crack (though I only heard one crack on Saturday in two solid hours of concert). The kettledrums actually do make a more smack-like sound than modern timpani. The flute sounds tentative, almost brave for standing up among the others and making itself heard, but also seduces with overtones.

Another factor in smack-delivery: Under Gardiner, these ladies and gentlemen sounded as tight as the 70s incarnation of James Brown’s band, even while untangling counterpoint more complex than anything Brown threw at Maceo Parker. (I am not saying Maceo couldn’t have done it.)  Rhythms stayed super-sharp even when shifting or not as prominent; melodies sang out in unison. With that unanimity and the intensity of effort at getting these instruments to make properly orchestral sounds, everything felt alive, bristling with potential.

And so it was that we began “Egmont.” Consistent with period-performance practice, Gardiner pressed forward with his tempos here and throughout the concert, but he didn’t let those tempos straitjacket him — when he took his pauses in “Egmont,” he drew them out and made them count, leaving me a little breathless on one occasion.

It helped that the ORR can actually play at said fleet tempos without sounding hurried. This proved especially useful in the first movement of LvB’s third symphony, the “Eroica,” which acquired a heroic sweep from the contour of its melodies and Beethoven’s relentless development of them rather than a pace slowed by a desire for stateliness. Their “Eroica” also showed how dense with invention this symphony is: Details and countermelodies that often get drowned out in modern-instrument performances by whatever section is playing loudest at the time here emerged in natural proportion and counter-proportion. The development teemed with activity; at times, each section seemed to be separately trying to work out the problems of a knotty dissonance or a sudden change of key, which sharpened the surprise when Beethoven pulled a solution out of thin air.

The rest of “Eroica” was a revelation as well: the perfectly pointed fugato development of the second movement’s funeral march theme, the ridiculously talented horn players (Anneke Scott, Joe Walters, Jorge Renteria Campos, and Chris Larkin) romping through their ridiculously hard trio from the Scherzo, the finale ablaze with color and drama. Never have I felt as satisfied to hear the “Prometheus” theme emerge after Beethoven spends so long teasing us with its harmonic underpinnings; never have the subsequent variations seemed so much like a novel in music, with the theme’s transformations composing the narrative.

I tend to avoid concerts featuring Beethoven’s Fifth because overfamiliarity has dimmed its charms for me. In the iconic first movement, Gardiner and the ORR played splendidly; having been extremely spoiled by this point in the concert, I was disappointed not to feel the excitement of hearing something new. The second movement, though, normally sounds to me like a swamp of brass taking a curious melodic idea and making it sound awkwardly grandiose; with the less opulent, more transparent sounds of the ORR (and Gardiner’s careful management thereof), you could actually hear all the parts that Beethoven had written, and suddenly the movement made sense. Gardiner has a sure sense for shaping a melody, obviously, but even by Saturday’s standards the third movement of the Fifth excelled; the pizzicato tiptoe up to the bridge to the finale, in particular, flowed along deliciously. The finale, also a brass swamp in many conventional performances, here sounded as good as I’ve ever heard it.

This review is at an exhaustive length now, but I could go on enumerating virtues for paragraphs and paragraphs. Let’s just end with my sincere thanks to the Washington Performing Arts Society for bringing Gardiner and the ORR to the DMV. This will likely end up being the best concert I see this year.

Other People’s Perspectives: Charles T. Downey, Joe Banno. Also, you can hear their concert three days earlier at Carnegie Hall (substituting the Seventh for the Third) here. And here’s a fascinating blog from the ORR’s Beethoven tour.

RONDO ALLA ACCIDENTE

I don’t normally cover out-of-town ensembles on DMV Classical, because that’s not really the point of the blog. But I had to go see these dudes because I was a big fan in high school, and you know how much you love things that you loved in high school. In fact, when I had just gotten my driver’s license, the first order of business was to make cassette tapes of all my favorite music so I could cruise around in my parents’ Ford Taurus station wagon bopping to said tunes. (Someday, young people, your methods of music intake will seem just as antiquated.) Gardiner’s set of the Beethoven symphonies with the ORR had just come out, and I was bowled over by the unstoppable dance energy of his rendition of the Seventh’s outer movements, so it was a natural for taping.

One afternoon, I had just loaded a bunch of rocks into the back of the Taurus for a friend’s art project (my mind has erased further details), and we were headed back to school where the project was being assembled. The Seventh was blasting through the speakers, and JEG and the ORR were blazing through the finale. The light ahead of me was red, but it was just half a bar until the closing chord – I thought I had plenty of time to let the symphony conclude and stop when Beethoven did. I had forgotten about the rocks. The result was no damage to the gigantic pickup truck ahead of me, but a bent hood on my parents’ wagon, which in the grand tradition of auto body repairs cost a sum of money to fix that was nearly incomprehensible to both me and my parents. (I was lucky they didn’t make me pay for it.)

Do I blame this accident on the JEG/ORR performance of the Seventh? No, obviously. Was it a contributing factor in my incompetent operation of a motor vehicle? Yes, definitely. And while I love many different recordings, I have only ever loved one enough to operate a motor vehicle unsafely because of it. Plus, the accident happened on Veirs Mill Road in that netherland between Wheaton and Rockville, so covering this concert is totally within the scope of DMV Classical, right?

The personnel of the quartet have changed. Early concerts brought the first, all-Hungarian lineup to UMCP, but now the only original members are second violinist Károly Schranz and cellist András Fejér; Edward Dusinberre, who joined in 1993, mans the first violin spot, while Geraldine Walther, a 2005 addition, womans the viola position. Yet the Takács approach has remained consistent: They’re four musicians having a dialogue and exploring a work, rather than a monolithic organ of unified super-precision sound. Sometimes on Saturday their tones aren’t perfectly matched, and there were a few slipups of ensemble, sloppy phrase endings, and the like. But the musical conversation led to some penetrating readings that reaffirmed the Takács’ status as one of the most interesting quartets of our time.

TQ, chillin. Photo copyright Ellen Appel.

Some quartets that play Leoš Janáček’s Quartet no. 1, the “Kreutzer Sonata,” focus on creating a cinematic, sweeping feel to the proceedings, which depict a wife’s seduction and her husband’s vengeful murder; that strategy sometimes lends a glossy quality to a raw work. In the Takács’ hands, the drama felt uncomfortably intimate, with Janáček’s contrasting gestures in the first movement seeming to undercut each other and create additional unease. The seduction theme of the second movement strutted awkwardly, like the hiccup of a blustery drunk, yet its forward progress felt inexorable as well, making this a bluntly effective suitor.

Dusinberre gave a quick talk before the Janáček, with musical examples and funny jokes, in which he explained why the Takács have decided that the murder is actually depicted in the third movement, rather than the fourth as our program notes had it. They played it with conviction, making it vivid and violent but also teasing out the uncertainty and remorse, then provided further perspective on the goings-on in the finale. Throughout, the music felt slippery and surprising, but also devastatingly powerful.

Benjamin Britten’s first quartet, which followed the Janáček, was the least musically interesting of the three quartets on the program and got the weakest performance. Britten’s first and second movements don’t have much to engage the ear other than rough shifts in texture, and the supposed-to-be-ethereal high harmonics of the first movement, underpinned by plucks of the cello, go on for too long and were rendered somewhat unevenly by the Takács. The third movement, though, carved out an affecting lyrical path from stony monoliths of sound, the Takács showing they can make a big unison noise when desired, and the finale threw off the seriousness of the preceding movement and scampered around cheerfully.

After intermission, the Takács began Maurice Ravel’s string quartet at a little quicker tempo than normal, eschewing French langour for a gentle flow forward; their playing seemed to smile gently and affectionately at the wit of Ravel’s writing, which has rarely seemed so tangible to me in this quartet. They emphasized the tempo shifts in the second movement, teasing out a sense of play here as well. The third movement had a classical poise, flickering between light and shadow without being dominated by either, and the Takács had plenty of well-mannered fun in the finale, yet remained poised and coolly commanding. Though the Takács have visited other venues in the DMV in the interim, Saturday’s concert felt like a homecoming, at least to me. Let’s hope they return soon.

Other People’s Perspectives: Robert Battey. Well, he reviewed this concert, but I cannot find the link to his review on the Washington Post’s horrible redesigned site. When I can find it, I will link to it. (Spoiler alert: He wasn’t as impressed as I was.)

OCCUPY THE PROGRAM NOTE

Taking a title from Jeremy Denk’s blog, I would like to call your attention to this paragraph of the previously mentioned program note describing the Janáček quartet:

In Janáček’s quartet, the first movement may be interpreted as an introduction to the unhappy woman, while the second movement can be seen as a description of the seduction of her by the violinist. A brief quotation from Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata in the third movement points to the performance of the work in Tolstoy’s story, and the torture and murder of the woman may be found in the agitated passages of the fourth movement.

Extreme emotional distance can be created in the audience through the use of the passive voice by the program note writer. Still, you have to forgive when the program notes also reproduce Britten’s correspondence upon getting the commission for his first quartet from DMV classical music hero Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge:

Mrs. Coolidge came over to see us in the afternoon—and has definitely commissioned me to do a quartet for her—to be played next September over here! Short notice and a bit of a sweat to do it so quickly, but I’ll do it as the cash will be useful!

Exclamation points warranted indeed! Get that money, B-Squared.

ORIGIN STORIES

The macro reason I enjoy classical music is because my parents do – for a while, I didn’t realize that not every family had a policy regarding whether Bruckner will ever be played in the house (answer: no). But the micro reason is two concerts by the Takács Quartet that I heard when I was about 12. Back in that day, student tickets to concerts at UMCP were $3, meaning my parents were happy to bring me along when they had a subscription concert, and the Takács were coming to campus twice a year for some reason unknown to me. I would sit in my random seat in the back of the auditorium before intermission, then move up to sit with one of my parents for the finale. They had been subscribing for a while and were thus in the third row, so if a good performance was occurring, I was right there hearing it.

One concert featured Haydn’s Rider quartet, a Bartok opus lost to the recesses of my mind, and Brahms’ first piano quartet. The whole concert was pretty amazing, but I remember specifically feeling like the “Hungarian” finale of the Brahms had the energy of a freight train and was coming straight for me. The rondo episodes felt like oases in which I could relax before the storm started again. It was an intensity I had not heard in music up to that point, and I wanted to feel more of it.

The concert that made me want to understand music more, though, came later. The program-closer this time was Beethoven’s Op. 59, no. 2,  whose finale famously begins in the “wrong” key of C major before modulating with a cruel inexorability into E minor. When the quartet began blasting away at Beethoven’s choppy finale-opening theme in C, I felt deep in the pit of my stomach that something was wrong – it was a physical feeling, not an intellectual one – and when the movement closed with its emphatic E minor it was a surprise I could nevertheless hear coming. Figuring out why that happened was my first step on the road to classical music, and I’ll always be thankful to Schranz, Fejer, and the other two original members of the Takács (Gabor Takács-Nagy and Gabor Ormai) for giving me the emotional jolt necessary to stimulate that intellectual investigation.

Copland composing by candlelight at the Berkshires in 1946. What, no electricity? From the Library of Congress

Though Alsop’s presentation always held my interest, at times I wondered whether it might be overkill for “Appalachian Spring,” which holds its place in popular esteem (and the Music Center was packed to the gills for this one) by being so immediately approachable. There’s certainly value in understanding it a bit more, as with the intervallic discussion, but I think anyone could pick out when (for example) Copland introduces a fiddlin’ tune. I could be wrong.

The performance itself had a common weakness of Alsop-led readings — a sometimes indistinct rhythmic pulse. Copland wants these rhythms to snap and crackle; sometimes the BSO wouldn’t quite hit a beat all at once, or hit a beat as sharply as they should’ve. But Alsop’s strengths also came through. When playing the hushed, almost devotional music that begins and ends the suite, the BSO managed to play as if whispering, with the clarinet at the beginning sounding like daybreak. In louder, faster moments, the BSO sounded bright and piquant, and one could feel the enthusiasm from conductor and orchestra that ultimately carried this performance along. It would have been hard to resist, and no one in the hall on Friday appeared inclined to try.

“Appalachian Spring” is not quite long enough to fill even a short program like this one, so Sharp provided bonus content: six more of the “Old American Songs” that Copland arranged for voice and orchestra. Yes, there was a singalong, in which the audience got to make all the barnyard-animal noises of “I Bought Me a Cat,” and yes, I thought it was the highlight of this portion of the concert, mainly because I got to make a horrible honk of a goose noise many, many times in the context of a supposedly respectable orchestral concert. Sharp seemed to enjoy making such noises even more than I do, and that zest showed up in the rest of these songs as well. Obviously, he can make a beautiful noise, as songs like “At the River” showed, but it’s even more impressive to hear a voice stay beautiful when packing lots of words into lines and inflecting them in a natural manner, as in “The Dodger,” where he explained with jaunty glee how we are all corrupt liars. Sharp made a giant lyrical flub in “Ching-a-Ring Chaw” that necessitated a restart, but the good humor of the evening had been established so thoroughly that it would have seemed churlish not to forgive him immediately.

Plus, how can you be mad at this guy? From Sharp's management's website.

Sharp, of course, was at Strathmore last week for these Post-Classical Ensemble concerts, singing songs of Charles Ives. Since Sharp teaches at Peabody, it was probably a matter of commuting rather than staying in MoCo for a week, but the connection between last week and this week nevertheless invites one to contrast — the small tweaks in Copland’s songs communicating his essential affection for his source material, Ives not loving his sources any less but feeling freer to distort or transform them.

As Alsop noted in her intro, Copland’s America was “the America of his imagination and his dreams,” as he never strayed much from his native Brooklyn except to hit France to learn how to compose. Ives trod his New England path doggedly, finding endless variations and surprises in what was familiar to him. Copland, a socialist, wanted to compose for the masses; Ives, a real-life insurance exec, had the means and inclination to compose for himself. Copland recognized Ives’ genius and advocated for his work, and it’s not like we have to determine which one is more quintissentially American than the other, but they certainly show two different paths to American greatness. Kudos to the P-CE, the BSO, and Strathmore for making the juxtaposition possible — always a nice way to leave a concert, with one’s mind full of unresolved, excited thoughts.

TOPICS THAT HAVE LITTLE TO DO WITH THE BALTIMORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA’S PERFORMANCE

Besides being very large, Friday’s audience was also very old, more than normal even for symphony orchestra concerts. (Indicating that some stereotypes are true, the garage at Strathmore was nearly unnavigable before and after the concert due to tentative driving of large cars.) In the post-concert Q&A, for which Sharp joined Alsop, one person actually asked, “We’re, some of us, getting older…Is this a concern to you?” Alsop speculated that people tend to come to classical music later in life, at least if they’ve had childhood exposure to the stuff. Coming from a family that went to classical concerts pretty much from when my sister and I were old enough to be babysat, I have no idea whether that’s true.

But, as a young person who is periodically asked why young people don’t attend classical concerts, I offer the following:

• As Alsop noted, “Young people don’t want to go to places where there aren’t a lot of young people.”
• Tickets are expensive. If I wasn’t getting press tix, I would probably go to the symphony two or three times a year, for specific programs or performers. I’d concentrate my concertgoing at venues with free or cheap tickets (Library of Congress, Freer/Sackler Galleries, etc.) and at chamber music in general, where tix tend to be cheaper. For someone with a casual interest in classical music, $65 for a non-nosebleed seat is a steep hill to climb.
• Sometimes, what is happening is kind of boring. This is true at any type of event, of course, but at classical concerts such a reaction is looked upon as reflecting a lack of education rather than a justifiable judgment.
• Other people’s post-concert questions. One person asked “whether there are American musicians today reaching down to indigenous music from the classical sphere.” Note the telling preposition! Another guy asked whether Alsop and Sharp had heard the new Tony Bennett album, and what they thought of it. Fortunately, Sharp had an actual opinion on this, so the questioner was not left hanging, but it could have been quite awkward in addition to being kind of a bizarre choice of question.

Charles Ives, in all his splendor. Photo by W. Eugene Smith from the Charles Ives Papers at Yale

Specifically, in the P-CE’s “Ives Project,” it took three days of concerts, lectures, and a masterclass, plus guest appearances from pianist Jeremy Denk and baritone William Sharp. Due to work and other demands, I was not able to show as much commitment to the Ives Project as the P-CE did, but I caught both Thursday and Friday’s concerts at the Music Center at Strathmore.

At most P-CE concerts, artistic director Joseph Horowitz strides on stage at some point to explain to the audience what they will hear or have just heard. Thursday’s program, “Charles Ives: A Life in Music,” obviated such discourse by presenting contextual information from Ives’ own writings or other contemporary sources. Actors Carolyn Goelzer and the redoubtable Floyd King helped make the words come alive, so that Ives discussing his childhood enthusiasm for the circus naturally prepared us for his song “The Circus Band.” There were no gaps in the program where people got themselves ready to read or play; everything snapped into place, making a two-hour concert fly by.

Baritone Sharp had the lion’s share of the musical duties on Thursday, and he used his flexible, rich voice with keen intelligence to make his songs into vivid stories in themselves. He sang naturally and directly, without distorting vowels or other classical-vocalist cheats, which Ives surely would have appreciated. He burst with childlike enthusiasm in “The Circus Band,” but sounded just as natural navigating the landscape of Ives’ setting of “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” negotiating tricky intervals to express both aesthetic pleasures and awe, or hectoring his listeners with the broad, brutal satire of “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven.”

For most of the first half, Denk accompanied Sharp on piano. Two settings of Herman Almers’ “Feldeinsamkeit,” first that of Johannes Brahms and then that of the young Ives, came off especially well, with the second providing convincing evidence for the assertion King read us that the 24-year-old Ives’ effort merited consideration alongside that of the German master. Denk’s enthusiasm for both Brahms and Ives came across in his sensitive phrasing and limpid tone, and Sharp’s voice sounded its most honeyed and gorgeous.

Sharp also had some help from the PostClassical Ensemble, conducted by the P-CE’s music director Angel Gil-Ordonez. Five songs whose accompaniment John Adams has transcribed for orchestra got intimate sounds from Sharp and the ensemble, especially when Sharp read the introduction to “Thoreau” as woodwinds and strings described a strange but rapt pastoral. The ensemble got some time alone to play a couple of Ives’ lesser-known short orchestral pieces, “In the Inn” and “Over the Pavements,” digging deep into Ives’ rough invention and, especially atop the pavements, his gleefully contrasting rhythms.

The concert opened and closed with “The Unanswered Question,” with its querent harmonies in the strings, offstage woodwind murmurs and outbursts, and the implacable five-note solo trumpet utterance, here played with serene eloquence by Chris Gekker. Emerging from silence and a low-lit hall, it focused the attention immediately; as a closer, reflecting and reflected in all that had come before, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Another canny trick of programming in an evening full of them.

Friday’s program put Denk in the spotlight, playing Ives’ second piano sonata (subtitled “Concord, Mass., 1840-60″) and the “Hammerklavier,” the bangingest of the piano sonatas by Ives’ beloved Beethoven, back to back. This is a hell of a difficult program, but one Denk evidently finds rewarding, given that he toured with it a couple years ago (including a stop in the DMV) and still wanted to do it again.

Jeremy Denk, always thinking about music even in the presence of ripe tomatoes

The P-CE dressed it up a bit. Sharp came back to read from Ives, Emerson, and Thoreau before each of the sonata’s four depictions of leading lights of Concord. These put one in a properly Transcendental mood before Denk’s performances. His program notes for the sonata (excerpted from his notes for his Ives CD, which is worth a purchase) outlined his thoughts on its major landmarks and threads, and his performance made you understand why he, artistic director Horowitz, and other iconoclastic souls love this sonata so much.

Ives wrote the sonata on a broad canvas, and its forms are all generated from his ideas: the rhetoric of “Emerson,” building itself up from pronouncements and gestures; the wildness of “Hawthorne,” from spooky to out-of-control; the heaven-seeking purity of the main theme of “The Alcotts”; a hazy dawn and subsequent day at Walden Pond in “Thoreau.”  The sonata’s quotations — the first few notes of Beethoven’s Fifth most prominent among them — make it sound like Ives is trying to gather into the sonata everything in the world, particularly in the Alcotts, which reminded me of spending hours messing around on a keyboard seeing what kinds of sounds can be made and occasionally finding something extraordinary. Denk expertly balanced narrative elements against each other; he coaxed myriad colors from his piano (which had to be retuned at intermission from the stress); most of all, he found fascinating moments each movement and showed us how one can connect them.

Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” should be a perfect analogue from the previous century: ambitious, lengthy, fearsomely difficult, and ultimately lowercase-T transcendent. Unfortunately, on Friday, Denk didn’t really have it under his fingers. It would be almost impossible not to drop or mis-hit a note or two during a performance of “Hammerklavier,” but Denk was doing it so much that the beginnings of favorite passages became occasions for anxiety: is he going to get through this? He also took the slow movement, marked “Adagio sostenuto” (“slow and sustained”), at a brisk walk that crossed the line from idiosyncrasy into incorrectness, particularly when Denk himself occasionally slowed down during variations only to return to the faster tempo.

Still, I’ll remember that Concord Sonata for a long time, and it added to Thursday’s picture of Ives, here working in a longer form and accumulating power over that span. (I wish I could have attended Saturday’s concert, in which the JACK Quartet essayed Ives along with contemporary composers, to see the additional light such a juxtaposition would throw on Ives’ music.) The frustrating thing about Ives’ infrequent appearances in American concert halls is that it’s not difficult to understand what he’s up to; you just have to be open to hearing it. Denk, Sharp, and the P-CE made it easy to love Ives this weekend, and I hope some people in the audience felt it too.

IN CASE YOU DON’T KNOW

Jeremy Denk’s blog is always worth a read. Better than this one!

Charles Ives was quite a fine writer too, which is part of why Thursday’s concert worked so well. If you’re getting into the Concord Sonata, Ives’ Essays Before a Sonata are worth reading. And they’re free, here.

Updated to add Other People’s Perspectives: Cecilia Porter on Thursday’s concert, and Charles T. Downey on Saturday’s. I knew the latter was going to be good!

As part of this BSO season’s focus on revolutionary women, Alsop approached James Lee III, a noted composer and a professor at Morgan State, with a request for a composition celebrating the life of Harriet Tubman. Lee was present Saturday to join Alsop onstage in giving a little introduction to his work, the BSO supplying musical excerpts to illustrate his discussion. This is exactly what orchestras should be doing if they have discussions before playing new music: Give the audience some markers they can use to orient themselves in unfamiliar surroundings. Don’t just stand up there talkin’!

James Lee, from his website

In the event, though, “Chuphshah!” didn’t need much explicating. An opening brass outburst followed by a churning, breathless marimba solo conveyed Lee’s vision of a slave breaking his or her bonds and running off, as fast as possible, to an uncertain destination. The slower passages that followed featured the English horn, representing Tubman herself, ruminating on a wistful melody over a bed of absurdly rich string accompaniment. This accompaniment had no tonal center, but sounded purposefully ambiguous rather than murky or dissonant; it seemed to create webs of conflicting feelings around the English horn’s thoughts, an effect magnified by Lee’s quotation and reharmonization of songs like “Go Down Moses” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” This was the point in the composition at which I noted that the BSO should check Strathmore’s HVAC system, because I had something in my eye.

“Chuphshah!” did become sharply dissonant in another episode, depicting one specific liberation in which Tubman participated. After some more heartbreaking lyrical passages, the piece ended with bitterly dissonant trumpet fanfares depicting Tubman’s military funeral but seeming to ask whether any celebration of her life can mitigate the evil of the circumstances that called forth her heroism. I would like to hear this piece again immediately, preferably from the BSO with Alsop conducting; this performance felt totally committed and featured eloquent playing from every desk.

And there were two standard-rep works yet to come! Alsop obviously loves Dvorák, or she wouldn’t program and record so much of his music, so hearing her conduct his cello concerto was a draw in and of itself. Soloist Alisa Weilerstein, meanwhile, won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant last week, meaning she’s smarter than you or I (unless you won one too). Sad to say that these two passionate performers did not start out with their approaches totally in sync. During their introduction, Alsop and the orchetra enjoyed every little detail of Dvorák’s colorful orchestration, like they were on a leisurely stroll along a babbling brook in a Bohemian grove. When Weilerstein entered, however, she attacked her opening like a romantic hero struggling against some oppressive force. Though I am loath to question certified genius, my conception of Dvorák lines up more with Alsop’s than Weilerstein’s. However, both conductor and soloist seemed to sense something needing fixing, and by the middle of the first movement they had found a productive middle ground.

You can't stay mad at a genius grant recipient, right? From her Opus3 Artists website.

From there, Weilerstein’s absurdly good cello playing carried the day. She plays gracefully, yet with a hypnotically clean and focused tone; you get the impression that nothing holds any technical challenges for her, so she can concentrate on higher musical things. As commandingly as she can bark out an aggressive phrase, her quiet playing lingers longest in the memory. She gave a hypnotic rendition of the first movement’s principal theme in the development section, intertwining her tone gorgeously with the solo flute. When she settled into a remarkably warm and even-toned whisper of a trill at the close of the second movement and the orchestra cast a brief minor-chord shadow over the proceedings, I actually felt a chill. The finale was just plain fun, with Weilerstein seeming a little looser, enjoying the jauntiness of the main theme and dialing up another magical trill towards the end.

After those two fired-up performances, Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” symphony may not have been the best possible post-intermission closer. I wondered whether a Classical-era symphony would have fit better there: something with heft that still demands less emotional engagement from the audience, like a late Haydn symphony. Anyway, Alsop and the BSO certainly seemed to be playing well, but I was completely emotionally disengaged — a victim of the BSO’s first-half success. Wish I could give a more informative review, but it’s better to be honest than to make something up…right?

MARIN ALSOP IS THE QUEEN OF THE POST-CONCERT Q&A

Most post-concert Q&As are kind of terrible, with people asking irrelevant questions or attempting to show off their massive erudition for all present, but I always stay for Alsop’s. Why is she so consistently entertaining?

• She’s funny. First and foremost. She never passes up an opportunity for a chuckle, and it makes the audience feel at ease.
• She knows how to take a bad question and turn it into something worth answering: by repeating the question and talking until she lands on a better topic.
• She knows how to draw whatever guests she has onstage (James Lee, in this case) into the discussion without being obvious or ostentatious about it.
• She seems to actually enjoy it.

Four simple ingredients, but they go a long way.