Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Inside Schoenberg's wallet (updated)

The awe-inspiring website of the Schoenberg Center in Vienna continues to digitize its holdings and place images online; every time I visit, I find new treasures. Various of the master's identity cards and school reports can be viewed, and one can also page through his address books; one page lists Heinrich Schenker, Richard Strauss, Franz Schmidt, and Franz Schreker, among others. There are also cards for Orson Welles and Harpo Marx. The photograph file has been considerably expanded: I don't recall having seen this lovely picture of Schoenberg with Poulenc, for example, or a bathing shot of Schoenberg with a husky Winfried Zillig. Two photo-booth snaps are strangely reminiscent of Robert De Niro; another has him wearing a delightfully rascally smile. (The Photomaton, the world's first fully automatic photo booth, arrived in Berlin in 1929, the Schoenberg Center newsletter advises.) A couple of the pictures suggest a man attempting to figure out his new camera.

Update: Lawrence Schoenberg, the composer's youngest son, sends along news that Schoenberg Center is offering educational workshops for those interested in incorporating Schoenberg into teaching curricula. Details are here.

Update 2: Robert Holzer notes that the Poulenc-Schoenberg photo had previously appeared in Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt's Schoenberg biography, accompanied by some delightful anecdotes of Poulenc and Milhaud's visit to Schoenberg in Mödling in 1922. Evidently, Schoenberg's son Georg was playing football outside while Mathilde Schoenberg, the composer's first wife, was serving soup to the guests, and the ball somehow landed in the tureen, becoming, in Poulenc's recollection, an "edible melon." On this same trip Poulenc met Anton Webern, describing him, improbably and memorably, as "un garçon exquis."

Update 3: The composer Ken Ueno has used integer notation to convert Schoenberg's Social Security number to an interestingly whole-tone-ish nine-note motif:

The one and only...

A quartet of Koussevitzky concerts from 1923. Yes, Stravinsky's Octet and Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto had their premieres on the same program; after intermission came the Eroica.

MTT's smoothie

In a Rest Is Noise exclusive, I can reveal to an anxiously waiting world the contents of the smoothie that Michael Tilson Thomas prepared onstage at Carnegie Hall the other night, during a rendition of Song Books and other works by John Cage. To wit: cucumber, celery, carrots, apple, and banana. Leaving nothing to chance, Maestro Tilson Thomas brought his own Cuisinart from San Francisco for the occasion. The above photo — a still life or nature morte taken by Oliver Theil, the director of public relations at the San Francisco Symphony — hauntingly captures the ingredients before their glorious disintegration.

The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met

SF Mavericks, night 2

The San Francisco Symphony's program of Ruggles, Feldman, and Ives-Brant was, as expected, a knockout. MTT gave a little talk before the Feldman, positioning the music in the context of the Abstract Expressionists and not so subtly begging the audience to remain quiet for the duration of the piece. This they did; Morty was saved the incessant coughing and shuffling that, in the past, has greeted his appearances in large New York halls. (On one unhappy night at the Philharmonic in 1996, Feldman's Structures preceded the final scene from Salome, and dynamic levels onstage and off seemed about the same.) What a joy it was to hear Ruggles's Sun-Treader! This masterly score has been played all too seldom in New York since its local premiere, in 1967, with the American Symphony under Leopold Stokowski. (The program erroneously listed a 1970 MTT/Boston Symphony performance as the first New York outing.) When the Phillharmonic thundered through Sun-Treader at the American Eccentrics festival in 1994, I felt certain that it would become a repertory item, but it did not. Incidentally, Other Minds will, at long last, reissue the classic two-LP set of the complete Ruggles that MTT put together for CBS in 1980. The release is scheduled for next month. Tonight's program has Harry Partch, Mason Bates, David Del Tredici, and Lou Harrison.

James Brown questions tonality

Previously: James Brown sings Kurt Weill.

Wagner-free miscellany

Allan Kozinn reviews the delirious Sō Percussion / Matmos show I mentioned below. I would happily have seen it five more times. The first San Francisco Symphony event in American Mavericks week — Cage's Song Books, John Adams's zesty new Absolute Jest, Cowell's Synchrony, and Varèse's Amériques — was last night; no one who was there will soon forget the sight of Jessye Norman typing while Michael Tilson Thomas made a smoothie. Tonight brings the hotly anticipated Sun-Treader / Feldman / Concord program.... I wish the Mavericks lineup had found space for the music of Johanna Beyer, who truly lives up to the ever-debatable name. A 2011 New World release has some of her percussion pieces.... The lineup for the 2012 Look and Listen Festival has been announced — more Sō on the way.... A fund-raiser is under way for a recording of John Luther Adams's percussion masterpiece Inuksuit.... The London Symphony's Gareth Davies, whose Twitter account modestly describes him as "one of the flautists of his generation," amusingly recounts what went down the night Valery Gergiev conducted the Star Wars theme in Shanghai. Take special note of the poster.... Claire Chase, unquestionably one of the flautists of her generation, has a gorgeous new record on the New Focus label, with works by Saariaho, Donatoni, Carter, Boulez, and Fujikura. I've also been listening heavily to New Focus's Drew Baker record, with Marilyn Nonken — the piano as granite outcrop.... Jeremy Denk, a pianist for all generations, is now a Nonesuch artist, with a Beethoven-Ligeti record arriving in May.... The gifted Iranian-born harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani plays at the Frick on Sunday.... Voting for Spring for Music's Ultimate Xtreme Arts Blogger Death Match — did I get the name right? — has begun.... When, in 1896, the arts connoisseur Harry Kessler visited Bayreuth, he found that — oops, my mistake.

There are also points of dissimilarity

"There are several points of resemblance between the activities of Mrs. MacDowell at Peterboro and those of Wagner's widow at Bayreuth." — New York Times, Aug. 7, 1910

Brooklyn Phil, So Percussion

A photo of the setup for Brooklyn Village, last weekend's virtuosically produced Brooklyn Philharmonic program at Roulette. Steve Smith has a report in the New York Times. I plan to write about the orchestra at the end of the season. Last night, I attended a John Cage tribute by So Percussion and Matmos — one of the more entertaining and fulfilling evenings I've had in recent years, not least because Dan Deacon's conceptual piece Take a Deep Breath required me, along with the rest of the audience, to make a hooting, hollering, singing, stamping, and ringtone-playing Carnegie debut. (The score explicitly called for the participation of "press," so critics were unable to recuse themselves.) For the record, I played a Music for 18 Musicians ringtone and sang "Shallow Brown." Fortunately, my singing was inaudible amid the general din. American Mavericks week at Carnegie is off to a riotous start. Note: there's much auxiliary material on WQXR's Q2 channel, including guest-host appearances by Michael Tilson Thomas, Phil Kline, Mary Rowell, and Fred Sherry.

Czech Noise

Zbývá jen hluk: Naslouchání dvacátému století has been published by Argo Press in Prague. The Rest Is Noise is now available in eleven languages, with five more translations in the works.

Ross-Boulez

When will Diana Ross and Pierre Boulez finally make a record together? She is sixty-eight today, he eighty-seven. Happy birthday to them both, and to my friend Sean.

Kennedy Center column

"Culture Complex"

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, April 2, 2012.

 

Harry Truman, an amateur pianist who often brought miniature scores with him to classical performances in Washington, D.C., once wondered aloud why the capital lacked a decent venue for concerts. “There isn’t any reason in the world why Washington shouldn’t have a place for the greatest symphony in the world to assemble and play for the benefit of the public,” Truman said at a National Symphony luncheon in 1952, courteously overstating the local orchestra’s reputation. Truman helped to set in motion plans for a national cultural center; Eisenhower and Kennedy inched the process forward; and L.B.J. scared up the money that made it happen. In 1971, the complex, bearing the name John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, made its début. In truth, it should have been named for Truman, perhaps the most avid concertgoer in Presidential history.

There was brief elation when the huge marble box on the Potomac opened its doors. Richard Nixon, in a conversation with Ginger Rogers, pronounced the architecture “terrific” and the concert hall “acoustically very good.” (The Oval Office tape recorder captured the exchange.) But a mist of disappointment soon settled over the building. “The Kennedy Center: What Might Have Been” was the headline for a piece by the Times critic Harold Schonberg, who lamented that the new structure was a cluster of conventional spaces rather than a teeming and versatile showplace. Indeed, the Kennedy Center turned out to be one more arts compound in a familiar mode—a cultural shopping mall connected far more intimately to its parking garage than to the life of the city around it. (The nearest Metro station is half a mile away, and at night it’s a less than festive walk.) Moreover, the acoustics of the concert hall proved problematic, Nixon’s opinion notwithstanding: players could hardly hear one another, and the sound seemed to crumble in the air.

I grew up a couple of miles from the Kennedy Center, and had many memorable experiences there as a kid, hearing Antal Doráti conducting the Mahler Second, Erich Leinsdorf and the New York Philharmonic tearing into Richard Strauss, Henryk Szeryng playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto, and new works under Mstislav Rostropovich. In March, I returned for several performances by the National Symphony and the Washington National Opera, and, as on other visits, I felt saddened by the rapidly aging bombast of the place—the cavernous, flag-bedecked corridors; the elephantine chandeliers; the acres of red carpet, suitable for a diplomatic walk-a-thon. Ada Louise Huxtable was piling on when she called the architecture “gemütlich Speer,” but she had a point.

Schonberg may have been right, though, when he wrote that the Kennedy Center was “as good a compromise as could have been expected.” Only during the Cold War, when politicians feared falling behind the Soviets in cultural as well as military terms, could the scheme have gone ahead. (Nixon, mocked for his kitsch tastes, did his part; during his Presidency, federal arts spending grew nearly tenfold.) No such spur now exists for the support of culture, and vague hopes that Barack Obama might reverse Washington’s default policy of indifference to the arts have yet to be fulfilled. In a way, it’s amazing that the Kennedy Center even exists. At night, seen from the Whitehurst Freeway, it has a phosphorescent beauty, like the ghost of another America.

 

Since 2001, the Kennedy Center has been led by Michael Kaiser, an administrator with a knack for rescuing troubled institutions. The center wasn’t exactly falling apart when he arrived, but it was running a deficit and lacked focus. Kaiser, who has an almost Johnsonian flair for conjuring money, erased the deficit, and even during the recent economic downturn he continued to raise funds for large-scale projects, publicly insisting that arts organizations should remain ambitious in times of crisis. But the goal of making the Kennedy Center an “arts destination,” as Kaiser has put it, is some ways off. Running now is a festival entitled “Budapest, Prague, and Vienna,” with joint presentations by the National Symphony, the Washington National Opera, the Eisenhower Theatre, and the chamber series at the Terrace Theatre. It’s fairly meaty programming, ranging from Mozart and Beethoven to substantial helpings of Bartók and smatterings of Ligeti and Kurtág, but I’m not sure how many out-of-towners are rushing in to see the more familiar repertory. Next season brings a “Nordic Cool” festival, raising the spectre, as Anne Midgette joked in the Washington Post, of projects called “Latin Passion” and “The Inscrutable East.”

Bolder concepts would be welcome, along the lines of the San Francisco Symphony’s brazenly dissonant “American Mavericks” festival, now under way at Carnegie Hall. Then again, Kaiser probably knows the limitations of his audience. Washington has a peculiarly transient population, its makeup shifting with each political turnover, and, historically, it’s been difficult to build a following for less traditional programming. When, back in the mid-eighties, Peter Sellars was hired to direct theatre at the Kennedy Center, all manner of wild experiments unfolded, and attendance plummeted. Still, D.C. neighborhoods like Adams Morgan and the U Street Corridor have developed sizable populations of arts-minded young professionals, and the center might find a new audience there. The problem, as ever, remains the building itself, which is designed for suburbanites in cars.

The good news is that the National Symphony seems to be on an upswing. For decades, it has been stuck in the second tier of American orchestras; Rostropovich, during his long, affable reign, did little to improve the quality of the ensemble, and Leonard Slatkin, his successor, lost momentum after a strong start. Christoph Eschenbach, exiting a tempestuous tenure at the Philadelphia Orchestra, took over in the fall of 2010, and under his direction the orchestra is playing better than it has since the Doráti days. (Slatkin, meanwhile, has evidently made a happy landing at the Detroit Symphony.) Some fine young players have joined the ranks in recent years—among them, the oboist Nicholas Stovall—and the ensemble has tightened up, despite the inferior acoustics of the concert hall, which a 1997 renovation improved only up to a point.

Eschenbach’s two major offerings in the “Budapest, Prague, and Vienna” festival were concert performances of Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and of Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” The casting was strong: Michelle DeYoung and Matthias Goerne led the former, Melanie Diener and Simon O’Neill the latter. There were imperfections in the playing, but I was struck by the vehemence of the climaxes—the opening of Bluebeard’s fifth door made a splendid roar, with DeYoung holding her own against the tumult—and by the intensity of the sotto-voce episodes, such as the end of Act I of “Fidelio” and Bartók’s black-as-night coda. There and elsewhere, Eschenbach molded sound into gestures, gestures into emotions. The conductor, who has also been deploying his formidable skills as a pianist, has assumed the additional title of music director of the Kennedy Center, and may turn out to be the artistic leader that this institution has long needed.

The Washington National Opera, by contrast, has been struggling. Plácido Domingo, who led the company from 1996 until last year, brought in big-name singers, but during his prolonged absences he let the financial side languish. The veteran director Francesca Zambello has begun serving as artistic adviser, with Philippe Auguin in charge of the orchestra, but the most significant development has been the absorption of the company, previously independent, into the Kennedy Center administration. Given the Jonathan Miller production of “Così Fan Tutte” that I saw in March—a modern-dress show with the frantically ditsy air of a soon-to-be-cancelled sitcom—the incipient change of direction is welcome. To have an opera company and an orchestra working in tandem is a rare and enticing prospect. Imagine if the Kennedy Center responded to an election year with a “Revolution” festival. Even New Yorkers might have to board Amtrak for that.

 

Bonus: Nixon in conversation with Ginger Rogers, Sept. 17, 1971.

For more of Nixon's thoughts on the Kennedy Center and other musical matters, go here.

Simpson in America

B. W. Grant Barnes, a knowledgeable observer and generous supporter of the Los Angeles arts scene, has written an in-depth report, for Norman Lebrecht's blog, of a recent West Coast performance of Havergal Brian's Symphony No. 27. It was not only the American premiere of the work but its first outing since the 1979 world premiere. The responsible party was the Orange County High School of the Arts Symphony Orchestra, a much-lauded group with a remarkable range of repertory: a recording on the MMC label has them playing works of Magnus Lindberg, Brett Dean, Hans-Joachim Hespos, Éric Tanguy, and Steven Stucky. Christopher Russell, OCHSA's longtime conductor, has made a specialty of neglected twentieth-century symphonists — Brian, Rued Langgaard, and Robert Simpson, among others. Oddly, just before coming across Grant's report I'd been researching American performances of Simpson's eleven symphonies, and one of very few mentions I'd found in news archives was an OCHSA rendition of the Seventh in 1999. (Another was a performance of the Third by the Oklahoma City Symphony in 1974.) I have admired Simpson's music since hosting a show called "The Twentieth-Century Symphony" on WHRB-FM in the late eighties; in fact, I made my debut as a music critic reviewing Hyperion's CD of the Sixth and Seventh for the WHRB Program Guide. I will have a bit more to say about Simpson in The New Yorker soon, in advance of the Lost Dog New Music Ensemble's performances of the Horn Quartet at two concerts next month — as far as I know, the first nod to Simpson in New York in more than two decades. Despite various attempts over the years, I have yet to acquire a strong taste for Havergal Brian, but there is still time before night falls.

Video of the day: alla turca

A mehter, or Ottoman military band, at the Topkapi Palace.

Sitting behind Wagner

Rudolph Aronson, Theatrical and Musical Memoirs: "It was my good fortune during the first Wagner festival to have a seat directly behind that of the master himself, and this gave me an opportunity to see how intently he followed every movement on the stage and in the orchestra. He was a little, wiry, nervous man, and just before the conclusion of each act he would spring to his feet, rush behind the scenes to consult with the artists, superintend the settings, and then appear before the curtain to acknowledge the plaudits of the audience. As the curtain arose for the next act he would quietly resume his seat."

Meet the critics

Lewis Rosenthal, in "The Critics at the Play" (The Theatre, 1887), gives a rundown of New York's music critics:

What's on the boards at the Metropolitan Opera House this Saturday afternoon? Never mind what: let's go to have a glimpse of the critics. There is Frederick A. Schwab, of the Times, short, compact, alert, curling his tawny mustache. A little to the left sits tall, courteous, military-looking John P. Jackson, of the World, chatting with bluff, genial, broad-shouldered Leopold Lindau, of the Figaro and the Dramatic News. To the right I see athletic Henry E. Krehbiel, of the Tribune, whispering to blondish Henry T. Finck, of the Evening Post....

Schwab ... has written spicy letters and sent lengthy dispatches from Bayreuth. I hear he is preparing some "memoirs." They are sure to be interesting. An accomplished linguist, a violinist in his hours of leisure, a man of wide general reading, Schwab is as caustic, suggestive, boulevardier in his talk as he is in his printed work....

Finck ... a graduate of Harvard and a student at Berlin and Heidelberg, is a perfect monomaniac on the subject of Wagner, and endeavors to put his readers into the same condition of mind. Jackson and Lindau, even Kobbe, of the Mail and Express, are lukewarm compared with him. He seems to date his articles Bayreuth. He dreams nightly of Siegfried and Tristan. He rides daily with the Walküre, and plays cards with the Nibelungen. I hear that he is getting ready a book on types of female beauty. Ten to one, Brünnhilde is his ideal....

Krehbiel writes learnedly, with his eye ever to the land of Wagner and Liszt. Schwab dashes off his column in a breezy, piquant style, with a marked predilection for Verdi and Gounod. Krehbiel comes out with professional elaborateness — quotes, gives dates, cites precedents. Schwab politely suggests, pithily opines, ingeniously infers.

One of the most clever, if one of the youngest, musical and dramatic critics in town is William T. Henderson ... Henderson has written verses, grave and gay; librettos, and translations of librettos; articles for magazines; letters from watering places. His column in the Times of Sunday, captioned "The Orchestra at Work," demonstrates his knowledge of the technique of the stage and of music, and his power of gentle irony and stinging sarcasm.

Little Steinberg, of the Herald, pert, saucy, snappy, always seems to be in a minority. He writes an interesting criticism, but one in which there is always a note of insincerity, a striving after effect. But who can please all the critics? ...

Bassarids in New York

Not long after he began his tenure at the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert mentioned the idea of presenting a staged performance of Hans Werner Henze's 1966 opera The Bassarids, a major work of postwar music theater. Perhaps such an event will still come to pass; a program at the Philharmonic this week, containing an orchestral suite from the opera, certainly whets the appetite. The Bassarids, with its Auden-Kallman libretto and its darkly opulent, post-Bergian score, has long seemed a natural for the Met, but, as Peter G. Davis wrote in the Times on Sunday, for one reason or another it has never happened. Christoph von Dohnányi, who led the premiere of The Bassarids back in 1966 and remains remarkably energetic on the podium nearly fifty years later, is conducting the Philharmonic performances, the first of which took place last night. The concert suite, which Henze assembled in 2004, is drawn largely from the "third movement," the Adagio, of the symphonically structured score; it ends with the dismemberment of Pentheus by the Maenads. Henze has done a marvelous job of recasting vocal lines as instrumental solos; especially wrenching are the cello lines representing Pentheus's dying words. Avery Fisher Hall fell silent as Carter Brey gave a strikingly vocal, expressive account of that solo. Dohnányi led with absolute authority, and returned after intermission with a Schubert Ninth that began somewhat placidly and built momentum as it went along, ending in a display of furiously disciplined dynamism. All told, a superb program, very much worth seeing.

Photo: Franco Pomponi as Pentheus, Châtelet, 2005.

The "complete" Bruckner Ninth

In Stereophile, Richard Lehnert writes about the Berlin Philharmonic's recent performance of the Bruckner Ninth at Carnegie Hall, with Simon Rattle conducting. At the close, Rattle and the Berliners presented a realization of the unfinished finale, by Nicola Samale, John A. Phillips, Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, and Giuseppe Mazzuca. I, too, attended the Carnegie concert, and agree with Lehnert's judgment: although the finale made a substantial impact, it seemed uncertain in places, and one could almost sense skepticism on the part of the players. Yes, the realization is necessarily speculative, especially with regard to the coda, yet Bruckner did a great deal more work on the finale than most people assume. Cohrs, in his notes to the most recent edition, observes that 557 of 647 bars come directly from Bruckner, and only thirteen bars were wholly invented by the editors. (The most common performing edition of Mozart's Requiem, by contrast, is significantly more speculative: nearly a quarter of the score is by Franz Xaver Süssmayr. I have never understood why some conductors happily serve up all that ersatz Mozart while rejecting out of hand the Mahler Tenth or this new Bruckner Ninth.) As I wrote in a Bruckner column last summer, "Some of [the finale's] strangest, most improbable gestures—trumpets leaning on a piercingly dissonant minor-ninth interval, for example—come straight out of the manuscript. Indeed, at one place in the autograph, Bruckner writes “gut” over a weird harmony combining F major with the note B, as if saying to posterity, 'Yes, this is what I want.'"

What I found really riveting about this Ninth was the changed nature of the symphonic journey. With that craggy, visceral finale looming as the new endpoint of the narrative, the symphony lost its usual air of cultish mystery, of ritual passage into silence. I suspect that the slightly quickened tempo in the first movement, the full-throatedness of the climaxes, and the sharpness of the dynamic contrasts were related to the fundamental alteration of the plan. And shouldn't this always be the case, whether or not one chooses to engage with the finale materials? Shouldn't conductors and players always at least imagine this ending? As Richard Lehnert argues, in a further comment on the Ninth, the cliché that the three-movement version is complete in itself, that the Adagio is the composer's true farewell to life, contradicts not only his practical wish to finish the work but his spiritual and philosophical beliefs. Let's not invent a quietistic scheme that Bruckner never had in mind. He has received enough condescension over the years.

Update: Sedgwick Clark discusses this Bruckner performance in his indispensable Why I Left Muncie blog at Musical America.

Classical music returns to NBC

Rock Center with Brian Williams, an NBC news show, had a charming little feature tonight on the issue of cellphones interrupting theater shows and classical performances. There's an interview with Alan Gilbert on the subject of the famous Mahler Ninth marimba incident (weirdly, Barber's School for Scandal Overture replaces Mahler in the accompanying footage), and none other than Marc-André Hamelin makes a brief appearance, performing his "Ringtone Waltz." A longer interview with Hamelin can be found online. It was a relief to find that the reporting did not traffic in stereotypes of Stuffy Classical Snobs. Maybe NBC can now move on from covering interruptions of classical music to covering classical music itself. It has, after all, done so in the past.

Minimalist Republicans

I hesitate to clutter my site with obnoxious political propaganda, but this House Budget Committee ad is of slight musical interest. David Brendel — who had the idea for my Rest Is Noise show with Ethan Iverson — points out that Rep. Ryan's alleged plan to minimize the deficit is laden with a, yes, minimalist soundtrack: Reichian pulsing (or Tangerine Dream) in the first part, Glassy chords in the second. I doubt that either composer would be pleased by the homage, but at least the Republicans are staying away from the Copland-homophobia combination this time. Feel free to employ the "like / dislike" feature.