Author: 459856pwpadmin

Sunday evening Friends Of Music and the Arts presented a concert featuring Igor Stravinsky's Mass and John Rutter's Requiem.  I had been looking forward to this particular concert for some time, as the Stravinsky Mass is one of my favorite pieces.  Admittedly I was also feeling slightly apprehensive.  It was an ambitious and difficult program, and although I knew many people who had been working hard to master the music, I also had heard some say that the Stravinsky was simply not beautiful.  I know this is not the case, it can be a breathtakingly and profoundly beautiful piece, but I also appreciate that learning new music can be difficult, especially when that music plays with accents, stresses, and the layering of chords that in unusual or unfamiliar ways.   I would say that Stravinsky's sacred music is not nearly as atonally shocking as his secular music, and, in fact, is quite melodic, but it does not follow the familiar mold that we have come to expect for sacred music.  There may be something quite insightful in that.

 

The Mass is scored for chorus and wind instruments.  Stravinsky wrote it as a piece of music intended not as a concert piece, but for liturgical use.  To accomplish his intent, Stravinsky draws on very old techniques used in Medieval and Renaissance liturgical music, but not so commonly employed today in Western liturgy. There is a strong rhythmic focus very reminiscent of the old style of Gregorian Chant, with its complex mixed meter before the emergence of complex polyphony.  I also hear echoes of the Russian Orthodox in this music, but this could be my own imagination. The Mass was specifically written for the Roman Catholic Liturgy as the Russian does not allow for the instrumentation, but at the same time, Stravinsky was familiar with the music of the Russian Orthodox church and it is not odd to think some influence is present.

 

I am going to quote from the program notes here:

"The mass that resulted is indeed spartan but also evocative of chant, especially the syllabic chanting of the Orthodox Church.  The unusual orchestration, consisting of ten wind instruments, provides a cool, sonorous, and usually independent accompaniment to the four-part chorus.  As Robert Craft, Stravinsky's music assistant and friend, once observed, "The orchestra which Stravinsky says "tunes" his choir never plays quite the same music.  It adds tones, sounds different root tones than appear in the vocal parts, stresses, underlines, imitates, counterparts, sets off and augments the chorus".

 

I am very glad I went to this concert.  The choir performed fairly well, and at times with ethereal beauty.  They did not capture the magic of this piece, its deep liturgical flow and meaning, but I am sure with more time and more practice, were they so inclined, they could.  The orchestra itself, generally needed more work.  There were moments that were good, but generally there was too much horn.  It seemed to me they took that phrase "usually independent accompaniment"  to heart, although it simply could have been a lack of familiarity.  Music is something we never master completely, even with pieces we know intimately, and there were moments where the horns reminded me of a recent piano recital, where the children were happy just to hit all the notes, loudly and with no inflection, but at least hitting the notes. In a truly good performance we get something closer to what Craft describes at the end of the paragraph above, and the horns are softer and the effect far more subtle.  True the orchestra does not play quite the same music, but the overall effect is one of harmony, of subtle wave-like shifts in sound that build and add shadings to the meaning of the words, the words being Stravinsky's primary focus.

 

In the Kyrie, the horns and woodwinds set the tone, and aside from volume, there were lovely moments where, in the simple rhythmic recitation of the simple phrases, the choir achieved a kind of ethereal beauty, enhanced by the way Stravinsky manipulates the stresses of the meter, placing the normally unstressed syllables on the stressed beats, a technique that woks well with this music and brings focus to the words themselves and their meanings, and actually acts as a foreshadowing of what will come later in the text.  Unfortunately, but also understandably, there were also parts of the Kyrie where the choir slipped back into the more common, meter-centered inflection, with the unfortunate effect that the listener would be startled out of the beginnings of reverie. 

 

The second movement, Gloria, was a more successful conversation between instrumentation, chorus, and soloist,  with a clearly articulated pulse and a sense very reminiscent of the kind of early polyphony, or parallel organum, found in Medieval sacred music.  In the third movement, the Credo, the choir alternated between great beauty and a bit of a stumbling sense of disconnect, again probably due to changes in meter. The stumbles did not help the rather stark, sonorous coldness of this movement, meant to be a serious statement of faith, but generally that sense was present. 

 

The work concluded with the grandness of the Sanctus, even if the horns were a bit heavy handed, and the ending a bit more dissonant than it should have been.  This final chord of the sanctus uses a system known as Pythagorean tuning, again a technique used in Medieval sacred music, which relies on using perfect fifths and a major third.   In this case, the chord is G.  The point is to sound the fundamental first (G) then the perfect fifths — D, A, and E accordingly, culminating with C#, a major third, which completes the sound. Successfully rendered, each pitch plays on the pitch below it, in the way the ear wants to hear it, forming a kind of complex consonance with great depth.  Misplayed and dissonance runs rampant.  I suspect this color shift is more natural for the choir, as they came far closer to achieving it, than it was to the orchestral accompaniment. I suspect, for the horns, all that was necessary was the subtlest shift in color rather than full shifts in pitch, the end result being that, rather than being lifted to the heavens, the audience was jarred back to earth.

 

I do think the audience was very grateful that the concert ended with the Rutter, which may be one of the most beautiful Requiems in regular performance.  The form of the music was certainly more comfortable for both the musicians and the audience.  Unlike Stravinsky, Rutter is known primarily for his sacred music, and also unlike the Mass, this piece is intended to be performed in a concert setting.  Aside from the composers marked difference in style, this makes for a wide difference in the flow and sound of the music overall.  Whereas the focus of Stravinsky's Mass was on the words themselves, and the music was meant to move one into and through the words to the meaning behind them, with the Rutter, the music itself is the point, and it is the music that is meant to be transformative.  Stravinsky was also a composer who was perfectly capable of exploring darkness in his music, whereas Rutter's compositions, for the most part, are lushly beautiful and markedly avoid the darker sides of the human condition.

 

The piece was very lush and beautiful and mostly well performed.  Rutter writes music that is very easy to listen to and this piece was indeed soothing and uplifting for the audience. My personal favorite was the second movement "Out of the Deep", which is a setting of Psalm 130, with heavy reliance on the music and cadence of Spirituals to begin the movement in darkness and gradually arise to hopes for glory.  The echoes of the second movement, which continued throughout the work, also brings an underlying hint of sadness to the work, although this sadness is far from the dominant theme.  Overall, it was a beautiful work, and a lovely performance.

 

I would conclude by saying that there is a part of me that wishes there was any likelihood that there could be greater exploration of the Stravinsky.  I acknowledge that it is not likely to happen.  Even if the musicians were interested in devoting more time and effort to the piece, I am not convinced the audience would be willing to give the work a second chance, at least in the near future.  I am nonetheless happy to have heard this concert, happy that the group took on such an ambitious program, and I can hope that someone, other than me perhaps, will have discovered something heretofore unknown, and this discovery will lead them to destinations as yet to be revealed.

 

More or less around the time I began my blog break, I attended three concerts in Knoxville.  There had also been hopes of an opera in NYC, but that fizzled, probably due more to my preferences than due to my friend's. 

 

My mini music series was bookended by two concerts on the lighter end of music fare.  First the Knoxville Symphony's pops concert, which was titled "A Celebration of Rogers and Hammerstein" on February 13th, and a week later, also on a Saturday evening, the Knoxville Choral Society performed a concert called "The people's voice" which focused on American songs, mixed between spirituals and folk songs.  I've come to appreciate my pure enjoyment of these concerts, enjoyment in a particularly non-intellectual way, especially the concerts of the Symphony's Pops series.  The guest artists are usually quite good and the music touches on a human aspect of shard experience and renders it into a kind of shared memory, a process of commonality and bonding. I find a joy in these performances, a balance perhaps, between the yearnings for something greater, the aesthetic, and the actuality of life, often touching, often tawdry, filled with sentiment and even the rather ironic touch of kitch.  I don't mean this in a bad way, these things, are what makes us human, and popular music celebrates all of the many aspects of humanity. Music is more than art, it can also be memory, it can be yearnings. it can form bridges in ways words cannot.

 

In the midst of this popular upswelling was the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra's February concert.  This proved to be a much more problematic event from my perspective and my commentary is made far more difficult by the fact that I somehow stopped writing about concerts over the course of the previous months.  This concert featured the fourth of the candidates for the position of the Knoxville Symphony's new music director, Eckart Preu.

 

I will just come right out and say that I did not enjoy this concert.  I thought it was the worst concert I had heard this season, and I spent a considerable amount of time in the days following the concert trying to sort my reactions.  I know I was tired.  I don't know how much my tiredness affected my disappointment.  I may never know.  I can only explore my own reaction, and  I only attended the second half.  Several people who enjoyed the concert told me this was the "best half" which left me struggling with my own frustrations and inclinations, my own biases and joys, and where these various paths may be leading.

 

I missed the soloist.  In retrospect I do not regret this, although I missed the first half of the concert because my plane was delayed rather than out of any intentional action on my part.  It was, in fact probably good that I missed it.  Based on the reviews, which I have since read, (generally far more positive toward the concert as a whole than my own opinion) and the fact that I have in fact heard Alon Godstein's recording of the Mozart Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 20 in D minor and found it lacking, I would probably have had difficulty being open-minded enough to appreciate that performance.  Much as I love going to our symphony, and much as I have heard performances that have taken my breath away, I have also heard Uchida, Perraia, and Brendel peform this work, and I have several recordings of my favorites, each remarkably different.  There are times that, despite my best intentions, I cannot completely divorce myself from expectation, and it would have been difficult for me to separate my disappointment in the soloist from the rest of the performance.

  

Here's the thing.  I didn't think I remembered Eckart Preu, although I should have.  I didn't remember him from his photo, I didn't remember him from his biography.  Perhaps this should hae told me something in and of itself.  But as a conductor, on the stage, I remember him.  He has a rather distinctive style, and this is not a criticism.  I remember Ekart Preu from the Bard Musical Festival, which I faithfully attended from its inception until I moved out of the area.  I can't say I was thrilled with him then, although I certainly liked him better than Leon Botstein as a conductor (although I admire Botstein in many ways) which of course can explain how I had forgotten.  Although he has grown musically, I still can't say that he would be my first choice, although I can see how his skills, and his focus, may be appealing to an orchestra in a small city which is doubtless trying to find some happy meeting point between the demands of a concert schedule and the costs incurred in producing it.  Perhaps my expectations are not in line with where they should be.  My intellectual side wants adventurous programming while my heart want magic.  What I got on Friday February 19th was not magic.  Oddly, the previous performances had been magical, especially the January concert with the young conductor Aram Demirjian, a concert that was unfortunately not well attended due to threats of bad weather.

 

I am admittedly spoiled. I attended the New York Philharmonic for over 25 years.  I've heard heard other notable symphony orchestras, and many of the world's great soloists.  But I've also heard boring performances in New York.  And I've hard music that moved my soul in smaller venues.  I've heard music that thrilled me, that brought me to tears, music which I can hear in the back of my mind in Knoxville.  But I did not hear it that night.

 

What did I hear?  I heard Jennifer Higdon's Blue Cathedral, a charming and evocative piece, which although fairly lightweight, can be both ethereal and emotionally moving, if not overdone by playing up its new romantic qualities, or underdone, by ascribing to it too much of a foreign, intellectualized zen-like quality.  The latter was the problem with this performance, and Preu seemed to accent the "otherness" of this piece.  To my mind the work seems to seek a balance between art (the zen-like qualities) and emotion (the more romantic impulses), but it is subtle and requires a delicate hand, a gentle teasing of the music. But perhaps this is where having heard a piece performed numerous times is a disadvantage.  The orchestra itself performed well.  I felt the interpretation was lacking, felt the music sounded like it was unfamiliar, and although the flute and clarinet solos were beautifully performed, the middle section of the work, which can sound like filler if not handled with the deftest touch, seemed like exactly that, filler. To my ears, the work felt more like an intellectual set piece, something that appealed more to the head than the heart.

 

The same measured quality, seemed to follow with the Prokofiev.  It was as if the emphasis was more on the intellect, on tackling a challenge, rather than on finding the music.  I felt Preu's rather expressive conducting style was not reflected in the actual music, which was more restrained, something that I found quite unsettling for excerpts from Romeo and Juliet.    The performance was, in fact, of a piece with the performance of the Higdon: accenting the dissonance, in fact playing the contrasts well, something I had once found lacking in prior years.  Normally this was something I would applaud, but I still felt that an idea of music was being painted, but not music itself.  The performance seemed oddly devoid of joy and emotion.  Ultimately, that is what I am looking for when I attend a concert.  My brain wants to be engaged but my heart wants to sing.  

 

I shall reiterate:  perhaps my perceptions were shaped more by the fact that I was tired, and possibly easily disappointed.  Yet I had been so eager to hear this concert.  Every concert this year has surprised me.  This was the first concert that surprise me in a not so good way.  Perhaps, once again I am looking for something that is impossible.  I don't expect the magic to happen every time.  But the one time, the time that is an audition, that is important.  It is important to me at least, but my opinion is but one among many, and I recognize that what is magic to me may not be magic to someone else, and vice versa. I am not trying to change the outcome.  I am not always even comfortable writing about my disappointments, but how can one appreciate joy without accepting disappointment?  Perhaps this was the wall I needed to climb before I could resume writing about my own, highly personal, reflections on music.

 

And now it is March.  There will be more concerts.  There will be another new conductor.  Eventually a decision will be reached.  Where will we go from here?