Category: Music

This past weekend G and I went out to a symphony concert.  We had a lovely time and we are both eager to go again. I am looking into getting a subscription for next year, and we are also buying tickets for a chamber concert this coming weekend.  

The main work was Gustav Holst's The Planets, and quite frankly I was surprised to find G eager to attend.  In the past he looked down at the work as a form of "classical for the masses".  In this case I think that hearing something too often does the original work no favors as one becomes inured to its joys.  G however has lost most of his previous associations of things including his memories of bad performances of popular symphonic works performed by second-rate orchestras.  For this I am happy, as the concert was truly lovely and the piece was well played.

The Knoxville Symphony Orchestra could not compete with the New York Philharmonic on a good day, but I might argue that I've heard some sub-standard Philharmonic performances and Knoxville's Orchestra could at least hold its own.  But it has been a few years since we have heard the New York Philharmonic and our only basis of comparison would be the American Symphony Orchestra and I would say the Knoxville performance was far more enjoyable than any symphonic performance we have heard at Bard, either of the ASO or the Bard Symphony Orchestra.  The music was, in fact, far better than we expected, considerably better than The American Symphony Orchestra which tends to be muddy and to overplay the accoustics in the theater, which does not help.

Also performed was a piece by Aaron Jay Kernis, Musical Celestis for String Orchestra which was quite lovely, and a Concerto in B Minor for Viola and Orchestra purported to be by Handel, but actually composed by a French violist named Henri Casadesus.  Neither of us recalled having heard this piece before and it was quite beautiful and well played by violist Mary Persin, whom we have heard play many times in the Biava Quartet, but never as a soloist.  

On a completely more shallow note, I was happy to see that people actually dressed for the concert, something that did not necessarily happen up at my country abode.  In fact I fell squarely on the underdressed side in a simple gray skirt, gray sweater, tights and black flats.  This had been deliberate after we attended a choral concerts where I had been dismayed to be conspicuously overdressed for the occasion while most of the audience seemed to be wearing  jeans or chinos and fleece jackets.  Really I find it much easier to dress "up" than "down".  Even after years of semi- then full retirement  I still find casual to be be difficult.   I am happy to know that there will be events where I can occasionally pull out a nice dress, perhaps even lace, and dress up occasionally.

Last week I mentioned that I had watched the Metropolitan Opera's production of John Adam's opera, Nixon in China on PBS.  I believe I said it went "on and on".  Mater called me on this, having recalled that I had long wanted to see this opera and asked what I actually thought about the opera.  This post is in response to that question.

It is  true that I have long wanted to see Nixon in China, probably since I first heard of it being premiered in Houston in 1987.  Soon after the Houston Premier, the opera was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and I really wanted to go. G was not interested.  This was in the first year or two of our marriage and he wasn't interested in John Adams, and was especially opposed to going to Brooklyn to hear John Adams. I didn't want to push it, and the train situation was more complicated then.  There were fewer trains this far up in the suburbs, and the last train was not very late, before midnight.  It was highly unlikely that I could make it back to Grand Central in time to catch the last train and I didn't want to drive down to Brooklyn by myself. 

24-odd years later G sought me out after seeing an ad for the opera on PBS, and asked me if I would watch Nixon in China with him.  Of course I said yes.  Wednesday night we settled down on the sofa to watch and listen.  G made Brandy Alexanders, rather large ones (Brandy Grandes as Duchesse remarked), I had my knitting, and I was grateful for the large screen television I bought when G came home from the nursing home and the excellent sound system, both added to the experience and made watching the televised opera truly gripping.  I almost managed to stay awake through the entire performance, dozing off only during the intermission.  Televised intermission interviews aren't nearly as interesting as intermissions in a real opera hall with all the excitement and hubbub and people-watching.

But what did I think of the opera?  

I actually enjoyed it very much, if you can use the word "enjoy" with this opera as it is not an opera one really watches for pleasure and light entertainment.  It is true that in the end I was struggling, and I was tired enough that I wished I could see the last act again.  This may not have been the case had I seen it live.  There is something about being there, in the flesh as it were, even if you don't get the camera close-ups of the singers, and although I have been to longer operas, performances usually start at 8, whereas in Eastern Standard Television Time, it started at 9, which I still feel is a late start.

The opening was truly dramatic and gripping with the plane descending, the Nixons disembarking, and the chorus singing an oddly matched combination of lyrically beautiful phrases, occasionally chopped up into odd bits, and accompanied by staccato and ritualistic music that seems to be harsh and clipped in contrast to the words.  I don't believe I had noticed this previously, when I was just listening to the opera, but I am not sure I really thought about the words, just the music.  Seeing it is different.  Seeing it with subtitles is different again.  I found this opening scene powerfully unsettling because of this profound disharmony. It was however a good opening for an opera that was, overall, also profoundly unsettling.

I felt that all the performances were good:  Madame Mao's vocal pyrotechnics, the rich sonorous voice of Chou En-Lai had philosophic overtones, Chairman Mao's rapaciously self-satisfied  outbursts, and the contrast of his emotionally overblown character with Nixon's sharp, contained, and ultimately repressive voice.

James Maddalena as Nixon seemed to capture that self-consuming angst that seems to be my overall impression of Nixon, and the complexity of the character comes through in the contrast of the public and more private scenes, although Nixon almost seems to be an over-contained character, chained by his own self-importance. 

In fact, I found the staging, with the sharp contrast between public and private, large scale events mixed with private moments, shocking.  An introspective character, alone on the vast stage was particularly unsettling, really driving home the lonliness and disconnect of the individual versus the drama of the political.  

Pat Nixon, sung by Janis Kelly, was particularly effective,  and she brings a real contrast on an emotional level to the politicking and sonorous self importance of the other players on the scene (with the exception of Kissinger.  I suspect there must be something brilliant in casting Kissinger as a buffoon.) The scenes where she is taken to a glass factory, a commune and a school are particularly tender and touching, a times filled with a naivety that was at times uncomfortably striking given the overall tenor of the opera. 

I found the ballet particularly difficult.  I was aware it was there, I knew the music and the story, but seeing it was completely different.  I was aware that there was a contrast between the story of the ballet and the and emotional reactions of the Nixons, particularly Pat, to the story. But seeing it on stage, with the blurring of the lines between dance and reality with Mrs. Nixon taking the performance as real and attempting to come to the aide of a young dancer was horrifying poignant with its commentary on the mental compartmentalization  of art, life, and politics which defines how we often perceive the world.  The blurring of art and life is a kind of microcosm of the opera itself, which also seems to push boundaries and blur the lines of what we we think we see in life, which become even more sharply emphasized with the shrieking of Madame Mao, angered at this perceived misinterpretation.

The Nixon's reaction to the ballet also seems embody one of the central dichotomies of the opera.  It is as if she expresses pure emotion and feeling in contrast to Nixon's calculating exterior, a shell of a person from which feelings have been excluded and synthesized into small vignettes which are only shadows of the actual experiences, to be echoed later in the closing act.

The final act was the most difficult for me, not because it wasn't good but because I was growing tired, and the reminiscences and philosophizing closed the opera with a rather open-ended question.   I would have liked to have the opportunity to go out and talk it over, to gauge other reactions to the piece.  Here is where I specifically missed attending a performance and the discussion afterward.  G was already over tired and bored as well.  The companionship is good and sweet but the ability to converse and dissect, to analyze a response and compare reactions is long gone.  I was left with no option but bed.

After all this, I think I still want to see it again.  I would like to be present at an actual performance, although watching this performance has made me see the opera differently than I had perhaps before.  It is an opera that needs attending with someone, an opera I would want to talk about afterward, that requires its own kind of muddling through, an opera that makes demands and therefore not an opera that makes for an easy evening. This of course also makes it an opera that most of my friends who eschew attending.

I've been thinking about opera a lot lately.  Well, more exactly, I've been salivating over Materfamilias' wonderful blog posts on behalf of the Vancouver Opera.  Or perhaps I've been wasting my energy on idle wishes such as dreaming of going to New York to see Nixon in China at the Met.  It is an impossibility of course.  My carriage reverts to a pumpkin at 11 PM, which allows me no time for an evening performance and my Saturday is already spoken for. The caregiver situation has not been settled enough that I am comfortable negotiating exceptions nor am I ready to go to the opera and leave my spouse sitting at home. Perhaps there will be another opportunity, but then I missed Nixon twenty-some-odd years ago at BAM as well.  I gave up my forays to BAM upon marriage.  I seem to have survived the loss.

Instead I must content myself with recordings and the pleasures of the music alone.  It is not such a dreadful fate but the simple truth is that I much prefer the visual stimulus of seeing an opera as well as hearing it.  The exceptions, the operas I do listen to repeatedly, all seem to be contemporary.  I am not sure if this is because they are sung in English (at least the ones I listen to are in English) and hence easier to follow narrative-wise, or if I personally find modern music easier to follow and understand than more classical forms.  It is a probably a combination of the two. 

Currently I have been spending a fair amount of time listening to an opera by Jonathan Dove called Tobias and the Angel.  I don't know anything about the composer.  I came across the opera upon the recommendation of one of those website algorithms that tries to predict things you might like based on past searches.  In this case, I was looking for a recording of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde,  and when the recommendation appeared on my monitor, I was simply taken by the cover photo and decided to play a few snippets and see what I thought.  

Aside from being one act operas based on religious themes, Tobias and Noye have nothing in common although I suspect that the algorithm is not sophisticated enough to make its recommendation on the actual music, but was rather looking at something along the lines of "modern religious opera".  All this reminds me of a period years ago, back in the dark ages before PCs were in common use, when I worked for a computer time sharing company.  Many of our clients were arts organizations, theaters, and regional symphony orchestras, and one of the things we were able to track was not just whether someone purchased tickets for opera or plays or magic shows, but something more along the lines of "attends Adams, Glass, Schoenberg, will attend most opera but avoids Wagner".  We felt this allowed the organization to specifically target groups that might support particular endeavors and would be very helpful in sussing out what kinds of programming might be most successful.  Unfortunately this was the hardest thing to sell and most of our clients were perfectly happy simply classifying their lists along  broad themes, which they were able to easily do even on early PCs.

But back to the opera.  I find Tobias and the Angel to be a rather enchanting opera.  The characterizations are clear and beautiful performed and the story is beautifully realized by the performance.   Although I tend to recall the actual apocryphal story of Tobias as a rather somber lesson on suffering the importance of patience, the opera is much more fun and joyous with a rather witty libretto and charming score.  In this performance Tobias is a carefree n'er do well mostly concerned with dancing and having a good time and his journey with the angel represents his journey to adulthood and learning to see and listen to the world and to adjust priorities and expectations so that he can eventually find love and be reunited with his family.  Just as in the story, Tobias overcomes the all the normal obstacles to growing up — wrestling with and defeating a giant fish, saving his wife from her demon lover,  collecting and protecting his families inheritance, and eventually healing his fathers blindness after sparrows have pooped in his eyes.  

The music is vibrant and, for the most part, incredibly approachable and evocatively joyous moving from a hint of Bartok in the begging to an infectious mix of bright choral music, Jewish fold melodies, religious themes and a bit of Fiddler on the Roof thrown in for good measure. There are enchanting choruses of singing trees and mountains, the waves of the Tigris river,  and wonderful effects such as the morning wake-up chorus of sparrows, sung by children,  the sonority of the organ-reinforced aria sung by the demon, and Tobias's increasing frustration as he moves from the dismissive "I think I hear nothing" to his increasing frustrations at being unable to grasp the lessons "I hear NOTHING".

I find this opera really charming and I am happy to have discovered it.

Sunday's concert at South Mountain was absolutely fabulous.  My mind still swirls in recollection of bits and pieces, little bits of melody, soaring emotion.  

We heard a trio consisting of Wu Han on the Piano, David Finckel, also of the Emerson Quartet, on cello, and Philip Setzer playing the violin.   I have, of course heard Finckel and Setzer playing with the Emerson, and I heard Wu Han as a soloist, but I had not heard Han and Finckel play together, nor had I heard this trio.  I was intrigued.

The concert was all Schubert; the Piano trio in B flat Major and the Piano Trio in E flat Major.  Have I already said it was marvelous?  It was indeed.  The music was lush and powerful and filled with emotion.  There was an almost visceral quality to the music, subtle perhaps in the B-flat trio which was filled with lush playful melodies.  That visceral quality was immediately apparent in E-flat trio which  drags you into hell and back; it was in turns brooding, serene, volcanic, angry, and yet touched by solace and perhaps redemption.

Watching and listening to musicians perform is always fascinating.  The opportunity to hear musicians whom I usually associate with one group and sound performing outside those boundaries is enlightening.  Of course playing as a soloist and a member of an ensemble are tremendously different things; in a group the dynamic of the group play a major role in the music.  

This group is totally different than the Emerson; the dynamic is different.  The playing is still brilliant, but the musicians seem to be having far more fun, and there is considerable emotional depth to the music.  Finckel, whose face is always animated during performance, seems more animated.  Han is a dynamo; powerful when power is needed, and yet lilting and precise as well.  There is a definite dynamic between Han and Finckel, not surprising I suppose since they are married.  They create gorgeous music together.  The dialog between Setzer and Finkel seemed magical, the music dancing, a few conspiratorial raised eyebrows, Setzer's feet dancing in their slow smooth slide beneath his chair.  I always love watching Setzer's feet during play.  Since the Emerson stands during performance, I miss watching his feet.  This seemed like a special treat.  He moves them around, as I do when I sit.  But I fidget because I have a bad back.  I don't know that Phillip Setzer has a bad back, but he moves his feet eloquently with the music, and there is an occasional little quiver with the beat or a trill.  Sometimes he raises his eyebrows back at David Finckel.  The music soars.  Heady stuff.

I just found out there is a recording of these concerts.  The photo of the album cover is from Finckel and Wu Han's website, from which I will be ordering the recording post-haste. 

September Issue, which I saw on Friday,  was a disappointment.  It was one of the most boring movies I have ever seen.  I was in NYC with friends, we talked about going to see the Toledo Exhibit, but unsurprisingly, finding a cab in the rain in NYC is an impossible task and we opted to see the movie instead.  Read Carolyn's review, I completely agree and she said it better than I ever could.  

Grace Coddington made the movie.  And Anna Wintour may be brilliant and powerful but my initial impression of her was that she had absolutely no affect.  I was wrong.  There was one scene, with her daughter, were a little glimmer of something came through, and of curse the famous pursed lips.  But really these things just had me feeling very sorry for her, strange as that may sound.

In a nice bit of serendipity, I happened to watch part of "The Devil Wears Prada!" on Saturday, while I was waiting for a match to begin at the US Open tennis tournament.  Meryl Streep nailed the Anna Wintour role except that mean as Meryl was in that movie, she couldn't reproduce the utter blankness of AW's face.  There was always just a little too much humor and irony and intelligence peeking out.  

I grew up
listening to Beethoven.  Actually I
probably grew up listening to Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, but it is the
Beethoven that I remember.   
I remember my father placing his LP’s lovingly on the turntable, the
large speaker he had made from a kit. 
I remember how he set the pressure on the stylus as lightly as possible,
so that the needle would just kiss the surface of the LP:  just enough to extract the sound
without wearing out the LP.  I
don’t actually know if you wear out LPs but I remember that is what I was
told.  I remember learning not to
run through the house, not to allow a door to slam, that such noises would
cause the old wooden boards to shake and the needle to skip.  Scratching Beethoven was a capitol
offense.

 Later, when
I was finally allowed to take the piano lessons I had been craving since I was
4 or 5 (I was 16), my piano teacher wanted me to perform a piece by Beethoven
in a competition.  I played it the
way I had heard it on my dad’s recordings.  But my teacher told me that was wrong, that it needed to be
more gentle and melodic and I learned to play it her way.  My father told me my teacher was wrong
and I was torn.  I always aimed to
please, too uncertain of my own tastes and opinions, too eager to please.  In the competition I played for my
teacher.   The judges said I
could have won if I understood Beethoven better, if I had played the piece my
father’s way.

 The music of
Beethoven was like a part of me; but a part of me I am not sure I ever fully
understood.  It was there, I recognized
it, but I did not know it.

 Years later,
G and I went to a series of concerts at Lincoln Center.  It was 1997 and the Emerson Quartet was
presenting the complete Beethoven Quartet Cycle, with other works, in a series
of 8 concerts. I was in heaven. 
When the cycle was released on CD, G and I bought the set.  For years, when we listened to a
recording Beethoven string quartets, we listened to the Emerson play them.

Just this
past week I have listened to them again, and I have made a rather shocking
discovery.  I don’t like the
Emerson Quartet’s performance of the Beethoven String Quartets, at least I
don’t like the recorded performances. 
I don’t like them at all, with, perhaps, the exception of No. 11 in F
minor, but that one quartet is not enough to redeem a series of recordings that
seem emotionally void, empty, and vapid, even if precisely and expertly
performed.

I am forced
to wonder what I was listening to. 
Was I listening, actually listening, or I was listening through the ear
of memory, through the haze of the desire, through the fog of expectation?  I really don’t know. The truth is often
listened to these CDs in the car, when we were travelling somewhere, and the
car is a less than ideal venue for music.  The noise of the car, the road, conversations, the
distractions of driving — listening to music in the car can be as much about
expectation as what is actually heard.

It came to
my attention, while sorting through our CD collection for an upcoming project,
that we have two complete sets of the Beethoven String Quartets, and another
set of just the late quartets.    This came as a bit of a surprise; I expected
some overlap, just not quite so much. 
Of course I had to listen to them to see if we actually needed all three
recordings.

The entire exercise makes me question if I would have liked the
Emerson’s rendition more if it had been the first recording I listened to.  But it wasn’t. 

First I
listened to a recording of the late quartets by the Alexander quartet.  I purchased it after a concert in which
I had been completely blown away by the music.  They performed Beethoven and Shostakovich and I bought
recordings of each.  I recall that
G asked me at the time why I needed more Beethoven when we had the Emerson at home,
and I had said that I didn’t recall the Emerson sounding like “that” meaning
the concert we had just heard.  But
after I got home, and listened to the recording a few times, it was just filed
away and forgotten.

 My loss.

 I was
immediately struck by the emotion and power the Alexander Quartet brought to the
music.  The music was gripping:  sometimes shockingly aggressive,
sometimes meltingly tender and filled with humanity.  I sat on the edge of my chair, gripping the armrests,
remembering how I felt exactly this same way at the performance two years
before.  Admittedly there were
times when the players seemed to skim past a few notes and this was even more
evident when I compared the playing to that of the Emerson.  But I seem to be a person who reacts to
music on an emotional, almost visceral, level, and to me, the emotional depth of
the performance seemed to far surpass the minor imperfections.

 Listening to
the same piece as recorded by the Emerson was a disappointment.  Yes, the notes were recognizably the
same.  But the music seemed cold
and almost superficial; they were playing Beethoven but it was only a shadow of
Beethoven.  The overwhelming
spirituality of the 15^th quartet was particularly lacking.  My mind wandered; in fact there were
times when the performance seemed almost boring.  The music was a background melody to the landscape of the
mind.  There was nothing
compelling, nothing to make me take notice.

 At this
point I turned to the third set of Beethoven String Quartets in our
possession.   This set was by
the Takacs Quartet and I was eager to see how they compared in this case.  In terms of the late quartets at least,
they came in second best. Technically I think the playing was tighter and even
richer than the Emerson, and there was emotion and depth to the performance, but my heart had already been won over  by the pure  power of the Alexander Quartet.

 I didn’t
stop there however.  I went on to
compare the Emerson and Takacs in selections from the early and middle
quartets.  Here the Takacs really
surpassed the Emerson in terms of power, emotion, and precision.  Both groups seem better suited to the
earlier quartets than to the late quartets.  Even so, the recording by the Takacs Quartet displayed a
strong balance of precision, emotion and grace, at times seeming almost edgy in
its strength.  The Emerson
occasionally seemed scattered and disconnected; in fact I think their
performances were superior on the late quartets, at least as compared to their
own performances of the early quartets. 

 I am no
longer particularly interested in the Emerson Quartet's Beethoven recordings,
but I will keep them because G adores them and I am not going to force my point
of view on him.  Instead of
eliminating a set of CDs it seems I will have to add more, because now I want
to hear the Alexander Quartet’s version of the early and middle quartets.  If I had not heard the Alexander Quartet, the Takacs Quartet's recording of the Beethoven String Quartets would be my favorite, and they are incredibly beautiful, capturing the range of emotions found in the music, and yet they are not enough….for me.

But I have heard the Alexander and now I want to find their recordings of the early and middle quartets.  I can understand that they may not be to everyone's taste, but then they are to mine.  But then, I like Mahler too, so obviously outrageous eruptions of emotion are right up my alley. 

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