Here is my review for Washington Classical Review of Cho-Liang Lin’s concert with the Apollo Orchestra yesterday (Sunday, June 19). And below are some additional notes.
Attendees at the concert were required to wear a mask and show proof of vaccination for COVID-19. I enthusiastically support that. The orchestra members who were using their mouths to play their instruments did not wear masks. I support that as well. However, the first and second violins seemed to be divided based on who had chosen to wear masks – first violins were masked, second were not, and they were placed on opposite sides of the podium. The viola and cello sections were mixed with masked and maskless players sitting side-by-side. I do not understand what was happening there.
This program was played without an intermission, which meant that we had to sit for over 90 minutes on church pews, which are normally used in a sit down-stand-up situation. I like programs without intermissions, but they have to actually be short enough that a listener can navigate them without getting mentally or posteriorally exhausted.
Beethoven’s First is definitely the worst of the Beethoven symphonies, and it also manages to be better than almost anyone else’s best symphony. Funny how that works.
I have decided to go back to linking to my reviews elsewhere and putting extraneous personal material related to the concert on this blog. When I say “go back,” I am referring to my practice when I was last doing freelance concert reviews and had a blog named the Spam-O-Matic, which I have since removed from Ye Olde Internet. So “going back” is kind of meaningless. Anyway, Wednesday night I went and saw the “Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín,” and here are my thoughts on that for Washington Classical Review. Additional thoughts:
I had trouble getting into the Verdi Requiem earlier in my life, but in prepping for this concert it started to land with me, which was nice – always great to be able to enjoy more music. I am still waiting for this to happen with Brahms’ second string quartet, for example.
The program for the concert showed the Latin in darker-colored font and the English in a light-grey font. That’s fine except that the lights were kept pretty low for most of the concert, so even when wearing my glasses it was impossible to read the English text. Fortunately as a classical music fan I know enough liturgical Latin to get through it. But there was an obvious solution hanging right above the orchestra’s heads: Project the text and translation on the giant screen! Is that too obvious?
There is something weird about how the performance of the Verdi Requiem felt more powerful because of the sheer human suffering and oppression involved in the Terezín performances that “Defiant Requiem” testifies to. The weight of the evil in the Holocaust is a weight art can’t bear. But of course the whole concert/program is a testament to how art does help people caught up in such suffering to bear it. A paradox that I have not fully worked through.
I have neglected to inform the Internet that I am now writing approximately one classical concert review a month for Washington Classical Review. Although house style there does not allow me to make quite the number of irrelevant jokes to which I had formerly been accustomed, it has been fun to write with actual word counts and deadlines, and my son is old enough that it is less of a pain to find someone to take care of him whilst I gallivant about. Plus I get to rub virtual elbows with critical luminaries like Charles T. Downey. It’s a win-win!
There is no one I trust more to perform a program called “Chopin: A Young Genius” than Brian Ganz. His Chopin always blends the wisdom of age with the enthusiasm of youth, and he tells you from the stage what parts of the music strike sparks in him so you can appreciate them too. Thankfully, Ganz was the man performing that program at Strathmore on Saturday, in the seventh episode of his continuing mission to perform all the piano works of Chopin, under the auspices of the National Philharmonic.
Brian Ganz, enjoying having performed. Photo by Jay Mallin.
On Saturday, Ganz played two of his “Musical Gardening” sequences, in which he plays works of the very young, slightly less young, and still young but fully mature Chopin, so you can see the seeds of Chopin’s genius taking root and then blooming. On Saturday, we got sequences of polonaises and mazurkas, each culminating in his first published essay in the genre. The early polonaise and mazurka were both charming but unmemorable; Ganz emphasized, however, that even in his early years Chopin composed music that was physically pleasurable to play, and Ganz made vivid his joy at playing it.
The second polonaise, Ganz said, packs “a hefty dose of teenage bravado—the testosterone has kicked in, and he’s talking smack. And I think that’s wonderful. He’s a normal teenage boy.” Indeed, it is almost all dazzle, as was the second mazurka Ganz played Saturday, but Ganz’s performances made both sound like the wonderful pieces he thinks they are. Meanwhile, the published polonaise and mazurka sounded a world apart in terms of their subtle treatment of the dance rhythms, their rich, variegated tone color, and their integration of ornament into the musical line—but Ganz also showed how Chopin had pushed himself to greatness, rather than springing forth a fully formed genius.
Bookending the program were two sets of pieces Chopin wrote after attaining that young genius: the three Nocturnes, Op. 9, and the 12 Études, Op. 10. Ganz’s performance of the first nocturne featured some of the best Chopin rubato I’ve ever heard, the left hand playing the rhythm steadily while the right hand dropped behind the beat, so the sighing figures that dominate the melody sounded like leaves clinging to trees before finally fluttering to earth. In the famous No. 2 in E-flat major, Ganz brought out the dance rhythm more prominently than in many performances I’ve heard, an engaging counterweight to the lambent harmonies. No. 3 was similarly distinguished.
Before performing the Op. 12 études, Ganz said that, as a child, he sent away for an LP of the études for $1.78, after which he wore out the groove on the record and dreamed of the day he could play them. His performances showed that he has been able to marry that young love for this music to a sophisticated understanding of its structure and, usefully, lots of virtuoso firepower. Ganz tried to play the études through, without stopping for applause, but his brilliance in the more note-heavy studies kept triggering spontaneous clapping, like after the eruptions of notes in No. 4. It wasn’t all display, of course; Ganz made the big operatic melody of No. 3 in E major sing winsomely, and in his remarks from the stage he called special attention to the weirdness of No. 6 in E-flat minor, an inward, morose piece that seemed to blossom under his fingertips. But the standing O after the “Revolutionary” étude that closed the set was one of the rare ovations I’ve encountered that felt like a release of tension rather than a perfunctory show of appreciation—you had to do something with all the energy and tension Ganz built up in his volcanic performance.
Ganz’s Chopin concerts have been so excellent that it’s going to be a shame when he finishes the monumental task of playing all these works. He hasn’t just been playing them; he’s been contexualizing them, appreciating them, inviting us to love them as much as he does. It’s harder for me to get out to concerts nowadays, but I never want to miss a concert experience like that. Looking forward to the 2018 edition already.
(See DMV Classical reviews of the 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 editions. I missed last year for some dumb reason.)
The National Orchestral Institute and Festival provides conductors with the opportunity to lead and teach talented young musicians, and talented maestros have always come to the University of Maryland’s College Park campus to do just that. But never have I seen a bigger name in the conducting biz come to the Dekelboum Concert Hall as part of the NOI+F than the guy who showed up Saturday night: Osmo Vänskä, who came from Finland to music-direct the Minnesota Orchestra into the first rank among American bands, and who has won accolades up to and including Grammys for conducting the music of his countryman Jean Sibelius.
Vanska leading his NOI+F troops. Photo by Geoff Shell.
If you’ve been to a few concerts by the yearly iterations of the somewhat eponymous National Festival Orchestra, you know that sometimes they sound like an ensemble of extremely talented students learning their trade, and sometimes that talent and the musicians’ youthful enthusiasm create something beyond what a professional orchestra can do. Happily for my decision to pay a babysitter so I could go hear it, this was one of the latter concerts.
Carl Nielsen’s overture to Maskarade started things off by unspooling smoothly, but Vänskä and the orchestra didn’t quite make it fizz with fun. The orchestra seemed to enjoy itself more in Witold Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra, which, like Bela Bartok’s genre-originating essay in this form, combines folk tunes, classical structures, and unusual but exciting textures and sounds. (My favorite unexpected combo on Saturday was the back-and-forth between the double basses and a solo timpani.)
Here Vänskä kept a firm rein on tempos and made sure the overall shape of the score emerged, while the orchestra sounded really, really good on all desks — brass swaggered and murmured, woodwinds delivered both succulent and piquant tones, strings sounded smooth playing super-fast or sustaining slow melodies with their bows up on the bridge, and a vast array of percussion colored it all. This was a true showcase of the colors and affects an orchestra can deliver, and it would have been the most memorable performance on any number of concert programs.
But this particular concert was billed as “Vänskä Conducts Sibelius” for a reason, and after intermission conductor and orchestra delivered a shatteringly intense performance of the composer’s Symphony no. 2. It hooked you from the beginning — the opening repeated chords murmured soft and lush from the strings, looking for a resolution, and Vänskä allowed them to fade into the distance just a little before bringing in the first melodic building block. Vänskä took his time throughout, separating the score into paragraphs with pregnant pauses and gradually building to irresistible climaxes that then took unexpected detours. The second, slow movement of the symphony, in particular, sounded like Vänskä and the orchestra were constructing it before our eyes using granite blocks of melody: it felt both personal and monumental, stark and desperately affecting.
I’ve been listening to Sibelius’s second since the summer after I graduated from high school. Vänskä and the National Festival Orchestra made me feel like I was hearing it for the first time again — those chords that give you some of the emotional resolution you want but not quite all, the unique twists and turns of Sibelius’ musical rhetoric, the shock of the downshift to the pastoral trio section in the third movement, the thrilling transition between the third and fourth movements followed by the biggest tune of the work, here shining like a sun from the strings. It was all vivid and new, just as it must have been for most of the National Festival Orchestra’s musicians, just as Vänskä must try to make it every time he conducts this music he knows so well. This was a performance everyone in the hall will remember for a long time.
J. Reilly Lewis passed away on June 9, from a massive heart attack. The news shocked me because he exuded vitality every time I saw him perform. A little over two years ago, I took a job that happens to be across the street from the Church of the Epiphany on G Street, where Lewis and the Washington Bach Consort occasionally performed a Bach cantata as part of the church’s Tuesday noontime concert series. When my work schedule would permit (stupid 1 pm meetings), I always snuck out to hear Lewis do his thing.
You can’t be interested in Baroque and early music in the DMV and not have heard Lewis perform, conducting the WBC or the Cathedral Choral Society, playing keyboards in chamber settings, getting an organ to sing and thunder. I reviewed him accompanying Jennifer Ellis Kampani in Bach (a really transporting concert), with the WBC completing their Bach cycle and celebrating Christmas, and with the Cathedral Choral Society. You’ll notice that those are pretty warm reviews. The man was a giant ’round here, what can I say?
But I had never gotten to attend the Tuesday cantata concerts before, and they were a new revelation, where Lewis had all the time he wanted to talk about things he found interesting in the cantatas, introduce an organist of whom he was fond to play a prelude, get WBC members to discuss their instruments, or welcome the numerous school groups that also attended these performances. He had such a genuine joy both in the music and in performing it, and he had the further gift of being able to communicate that clearly to whoever happened to come into the church on a Tuesday afternoon (yes, including the homeless dudes).
I never reviewed any of those performances in part because they felt more like gifts than concerts; reviewing them would have been like reviewing a dinner a friend served you. Maybe I would have preferred certain things to be slightly different, but I walked out of all of those performances feeling grateful that the music of Bach existed and that we had such a warm, eloquent, and talented advocate of it to bring it to us, in the form of J. Reilly Lewis. And he brought that warmth, eloquentce, and talent to all the music he performed. I’ll always be grateful to have sat in the audience, especially for those noontime concerts, and heard and felt music through and with him. R.I.P.
The National Orchestral Institute‘s National Festival Orchestra, housed every summer at the University of Maryland, often presents concerts that exceed reasonable expectations for an orchestra composed of outstanding students: technically accomplished, yet also full of a wonder and joy that elude many professional ensembles. (For more background, you can check out this story, which if nothing else proves that linking to myself is fun for me.)
The record label Naxos got wind of this, and their sound engineers festooned the Dekelbaum Concert Hall with microphones for the NFO’s concert on Saturday night, the first recording in what will be an annual series of recording dates, with each successive iteration of the NFO playing an all-American program for digital immortality.
The NFO’s performance of John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 surely merited repeated hearings. This is a big-canvas work for a huge orchestra that tackles a great enormity, the plague of AIDS during the 1980s, through the most personal means possible: memorials for friends the composer lost to the disease. Ironically, hearing this work live made it make much more sense to me than the recording by which I had previously known it: An offstage piano, playing a tango that was a favorite of one of Corigliano’s friends, now sounded and appeared decisively separated from the main orchestra’s attempts to make sense of the death, and the waves of brass in the epilogue, spread across the stage, felt like real ocean currents with the proper sense of sonic separation.
The musicians made both these special orchestral effects and the more conventional passages sound incredibly vivid. Guest conductor David Alan Miller, music director of the Albany Symphony and a noted champion of American composers, gave his young charges clear direction and urged them to expression while fitting individual moments into the overarching structure of the symphony.
David Alan Miller. Photo from the Albany Symphony website.
Much of this music is supposed to sound brutal — the first movement is subtitled “Of Rage and Rememberance,” and the second depicts an acceleration into madness. But in this performance, each brutal moment had its own unique sonic character that drove the narrative forward, with the whopping six percussionists variegating their playing nicely in particular. The strings played everywhere in the emotional and musical spectrum with aplomb, seething on an A to open the work and serving as a balm elsewhere, with notably eloquent solo cello work from the principal in the third movement, when Corigliano eulogizes a player of that instrument. The winds matched their counterparts in eloquence and virtuosity. Most professional orchestras would be quite proud of an effort like this.
The pre-intermission performances came up short of that standard. In Michael Torke’s “Bright Blue Music” (another work I have been waiting for a long time to hear in a concert hall), the orchestra’s various sections every so slightly out of sync with each other, making a work that should both shine brightly (hence the name!) and bustle with activity instead sound blurry and fall flat.
The same large orchestra that played “Bright Blue Music” more or less stayed on to play the suite from Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” which for pedagogical purposes is entirely understandable — no one came to the NOI not to play in the orchestra. However, textures that sound crystalline in chamber-orchestra renditions sounded big and boxy on Saturday night, creating some emotional distance from the melodies. It was interesting to hear the Copland after the Torke, however, as the Torke seemed to be made up almost entirely of the little interstitial bits Copland uses to get from melody to melody. In the right hands, Torke’s super-tonal harmonies and refusal to engage melodically makes for a oddly uplifting and meditative experience. I’m going to have to wait for a while to hear that performance live, I suspect.
Still, this was the NFO’s first full concert with a guest conductor, and the playing in the Corigliano symphony was well worth the $25 that the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center asked folks to pony up to hear it. The last two programs this year (here and here) seem like potential winners as well. Go see ’em.
To accommodate Naxos’ efforts, the audience was asked to avoid making any unnecessary noise, like applause between movements and loud coughing, and you could have heard a pin drop in the hall throughout. I confess I spent a few seconds during the concert angrily remonstrating my nose for even thinking about letting loose a sneeze. I made it without spoiling anything.
The opening bars of the Corigliano, which aren’t even that hardcore in terms of dissonance compared to what would arrive just a few moments later, chased a couple elderly audience members seated to my left out of the hall. They walked very softly, though, and I am sure the record-buying public will be none the wiser. I don’t really understand buying a ticket to a concert and then not actually listening to the all the music to which your ticket entitles you, but then again I actually like this stuff.
Brian Ganz thought a lot about how to showcase the mazurka in the fifth concert of his effort to perform all the works of Frederic Chopin. As Ganz noted, Chopin’s mazurkas are based on the Polish folk dance but transcend those roots; their constant rhythmic and harmonic shifts give them, in Ganz’s words, a “marvelous strangeness” that makes them less accessible than some of Freddy’s other stuff but emotionally intense and endlessly fascinating. So on Saturday night at the Music Center at Strathmore, he leavened the program with more straightforward pieces; he discussed the rhythms and harmonies to help the audience put words on the sensations the mazurkas create; and, most importantly, he played every note as a thing of beauty in and of itself and as part of a spontaneous yet controlled musical line, as he has in every concert in this series that I’ve attended. (See 2012, 2013, and 2014.)
Onstage discussion is not for everyone, but a performer who is really good at it can add a conceptual framework to guide the audience through the pretty notes coming from the stage. Ganz’s talks are the best I’ve ever heard. He talks fluently without notes, comes prepared, makes both his hymns to Chopin’s greatness and his jokes about performing sound completely sincere, and chooses concise yet apt musical excerpts to illustrate his points. He’s also a pithy quote machine, on Saturday describing the “mystery of time and memory” that the mazurkas evoke, which is better that anything I would have come up with by myself. (You can get a very small idea of what his talks were like here.)
Brian Ganz, going mazurk(a) at Saturday’s concert. Photo by Jay Mallin.
His actual piano playing rewarded the interest that his discussions piqued. Perhaps Ganz doesn’t have that International Virtuoso Firepower that could make the D-flat major “Minute” Waltz into a hyper-smooth cascade of notes that would actually take somewhere close to a minute (“Don’t get out your stopwatches!” he cautioned the audience). Rather, Ganz is the type of player to note that the waltz was inspired by Chopin seeing a dog chase its own tail and then perform the waltz with the same kind of merry, scampering obsessiveness. In the meatier fare of the mazurkas, he seemed to lay down each unexpected modulation or rhythmic hiccup as both a musical and philosophical event, creating a world and inviting us into it. (The B-flat minor mazurka, Op. 24/4, stood out particularly for me in this regard, with many of the key changes seeming both like recriminations and attempts to find a way forward.) I find this kind of playing much more exciting than sewing-machine facility. Plus, Ganz can definitely deliver thrills for their own sake when called for; witness the low-bass rumbles in the F-sharp minor Polonaise, Op. 44, or the tossed-off brilliance of the Rondo a la Mazur, a juvenile work that Ganz showed to be well worth a hearing on Saturday.
The National Philharmonic has promised to keep sponsoring these concerts until Ganz has completed his Chopin cycle, which is projected to take another five years at the current one-concert-a-year pace. On a personal note, this was the first concert I have tried to review since my wife and I had our first child in October. It turns out that as difficult as it is to find childcare to attend a concert, it is also difficult to find time in the day to write a review of said concert when the little one needs to be fed every three hours. So this blog will probably be going silent again for a while. But it was worth it to keep the string of concert attendance unbroken, to learn a few new things about great music, and to get another keen appreciation of Chopin from Brian Ganz.
Not that there have been too many posts on here lately, but I’m definitely not going to be posting for a while. It’s for a good reason! My wife and I welcomed our son into the world on October 22, a little ahead of schedule. He’s doing well and so is Mom, but I am not going to be attending classical concerts for a while. (And if I do, it will be in listening/enjoyment mode and not critical mode.)
For some time I have been wanting to do more classical lifestyle-ish posts on here, but the press of daily life and my inability to sit down for long enough to clarify my thoughts through writing has prevented it. Maybe, after the initial flurry of baby-care duties, this will be the spur to my ambitions! We’ll see.
Yesterday, The Washington Post’s Justin Moyer posted a spectacularly ill-argued and misguided screed against jazz, which I will herewith proceed to expose for the drivel it is. I would not do this here except that (a) this happened in the Post, meaning it is central to the DMV musical experience (maybe); (b) I used to freelance for Jazz Times, and still listen to jazz a good amount; and (c) the article is just that bad. Now let’s proceed.
Although he begins by baldly stating “Jazz is boring. Jazz is overrated. Jazz is washed up,” Moyer does not pose an argument that actually synthesizes various strains of thought to support these statements; instead, he makes five points that build on each other in no way. While the listiclish format will not endear him to ancient scholars of rhetoric, it does make it easy to set ’em up and knock ’em down.
Moyer’s first knock on jazz is as follows: “Jazz takes great songs — and abandons the lyrics that help make them great.”
When I was in high school, I told someone that classical was my favorite type of music, and she replied with scorn that classical was the easiest music to compose because it had no words. I never thought I would encounter an argument quite like this again, but Moyer brought it back!
The obvious error is of intention. If you want to hear songs with words, you can go to a show with a vocalist — even a jazz show, as there are many vocal jazz concerts. If you want to hear talented musicians exploring the basic harmonic possibilities associated with that song while weaving in fragments of melody and occasionally arriving at serendipitous moments of synthesis, you should go to a jazz show. It appears Moyer prefers the former type of show, but this does not invalidate the existence of the latter.
Perhaps Moyer was conscious of this flaw in his argument when he followed Point No. 1 with “Improvisation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” States Moyer, “The knowledge that great music is improvised makes it more remarkable. But the fact that music is improvised doesn’t make it great.” This would be a devastating argument if only everyone who loves jazz didn’t already agree with it.
You see, most people acknowledge that there exists both great jazz and bad jazz. In great jazz, the musicians achieve the full possibilities of the improvisational form, the eye-opening combination of exploration and synthesis mentioned earlier. In bad jazz, they’re just noodling around and they don’t do any of that stuff.
Later, Moyer says he doesn’t like Wes Montgomery’s music. That’s fine! It further appears that many people disagree about what constitutes great jazz and bad jazz. Montgomery is not some people’s cup of tea; others appreciate what they perceive as elegant and deft musicianship that doesn’t call attention to itself but repays the attention you give it. But nobody is saying it’s great because it’s improvised, except the straw man Moyer created.
“Jazz stopped evolving,” complains Moyer in Point No. 3. He then discusses artists who have continued exploring the boundaries of jazz (leaving out about a million other people) and then says they don’t count because he doesn’t like them. So there, modern jazz artists! (Also, don’t front like back in the day you weren’t bumping “Rebirth of Slick,” which of course featured rapper Ladybug Mecca, a native of Silver Spring. See, this post relates to the rest of this blog somehow!)
He also says that “jazz is being kept alive by nostalgic Americans” who have the temerity to continue enjoying the music of their youth. One day, Justin Moyer, you too will be old, floundering in a world of new music that sounds like noises and trash to your different-era ears, and on that day you will take solace in a recording of music in a style traditional to you, and Justin Moyer III will laugh his head off at your grandpa music. But Justin Moyer III might still be listening to jazz, because jazz artists continue to evolve the genre in ways Justin Moyer doesn’t like.
Ready for the next devastating indictment of a musical genre? “Jazz is mushy.” It turns out that there are a bunch of artists playing jazz and they do it differently! Moyer quotes famed jazz traditionalist Wynton Marsalis as saying that “too often, what is represented as jazz isn’t jazz at all,” and then complains that Louis Armstrong, Kenny G, Charlie Parker, and John Zorn don’t sound like each other. This is right after he complained that jazz stopped evolving 50 years ago, folks. I can’t even figure out what wrongheaded piffle I’m supposed to be rebutting here.
Moyer also complains that people use the word “jazz” to refer to things that are definitely not jazz, like President Obama’s speaking style or Ralph Ellison’s prose. While I find this annoying as well, it has zero to do with jazz being boring, overrated, or washed up, which the lede lead me to believe this listicle was going to prove.
Here comes the clincher: “Jazz let itselt be co-opted.” For Moyer, the sign of a dying art form is that some of its practitioners (he doesn’t say how many, or what percentage thereof) have been able to secure academic positions rather than languishing in glamorous artistic poverty like all the respectable musicians. White people have begun to study this music in school like it’s worthy of further analysis or something. And look at people memorialising musicians they enjoy! Why, the horror.
In conclusion, Moyer failed in every conceivable way to prove the statements with which he led off his meandering, content-free musings. However, he did inspire me to read his article twice: Once so I could get mad about it and the second time so I could write this response. And thus, Moyer was likely successful in his overall objective. Sigh.
Here’s some good jazz to wash all that bad feeling away:
DMV Classical 