Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 8 )

Honegger Delights

I am in beautiful Dresden – home of the oldest paddle steamer fleet– for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-joys, Malkovichean divertissement, Bach despairs and delights, Thielemann’s Bruckner, a triple-bill of violinists, and a Princess’ opera re-premiere it was time for a Gergiev sighting, a time-honored become a tradition at music festivals around the world, sometimes – purportedly – concurrently.

A.Honegger, Cello Concert et al., C.Poltéra / T.Ollila / Malmö SO BIS R.Strauss, Ein Heldenleben, Christian Thielemann DG

At the Semper Oper with his Mariinsky Orchestra, Gergiev first churned out the concert version of Béla Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin. Magically, with a few incoherent flicks of his wrist, the orchestra’s wheels started whirring right away, and the winds and brass were variously taking bites out of the music. Soon director and band were making a stupendous noise… a racket high-octane, low on character. It set the stage for what is one of the few classical pieces that can make you feel sticky afterwards: A good interpretation will see blood, sweat, and not-tears on the floor, once the titular Mandarin his been climactically dispatched. This particular one was rich in body liquids, and any lack of nuance didn’t bother me.

It bothered me much more in the official meat of the event, Strauss’ Heldenleben which occupied the concert’s second half. The result was a superficially appreciable but a disoriented mess – the thing that happens if you have all the notes but are lacking a map. If they had played the Alpine Symphony, they would have gotten to a peak alright, and with valleys all around to hear about it loud and clear. Alas it would have been the wrong summit.

Apart from outright baffling rhythmical choices and some shoddy ensemble work, it seemed the players’ lack of empathy for phrasing that tanked Strauss. Each phrase in Strauss (much like Mahler or any classical music that relies on folk inflections), however sappy, is densely filled with emotional content that leans one way or the other. Like Nietzschean aphorisms, they present keys to much bigger universes of flavor than cannot be contained in the notes (or letters) alone. Mere correct playing of what’s in the score can’t begin to tell the story.

That left the highlight of the evening right where the Festival Intendant Jan Vogler might have wanted it to stay: On his performance of the Arthur Honegger Cello Concerto. Or rather: the performance of the Honegger Cello Concerto, because it really wasn’t so much Jan Vogler’s playing that was the main ingredient of selective delight, but his programming of it. His performance betrayed the many hours spent in the office, organizing the Festival. But with his resonant full tone, rich in the lower registers and a bit like a baying elk, Vogler took the lyrical, beautiful concerto out for a ride that affirmed its would-be status as a 20^th century masterpiece if only it were better known. The concerto takes a beautiful bent through realms of calm, then energetic-stubbing, then relentlessly angular, and finally the lyrical again. Along its way the 1929 concerto hits upon an easy elegance that won’t be heard again until certain film scores of the 40s or 50s. Programming and performing it was a musicians’ job, and if the number of those who appreciated it was a little smaller than that of those who loved the Strauss, there is the likely probability that they appreciated it all the more.

Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 7 )

Operatic Repremiere

I am in beautiful Dresden – birthplace of the coaster– for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-joys, Malkovichean divertissement, Bach despairs and delights, Thielemann’s Bruckner, and a triple-bill of violinists, it was time for the re-premiere of a royal opera.

Princess Amalie of Saxony (1794-1870) was by all accounts an eager student of music and a successful writer of light plays. Her tutors included Carl Maria von Weber (only eight years her senior), and you could read his diary entry about his royal student in any number of ways: “[Princess Amalie] has a beautiful talent and admirable diligence.” Once you’ve heard her long-lost opera “La casa disabitata” (The Uninhabited House), a one-act Farsa unperformed for 177 years, you’re more likely to know how he might have meant it.

There’s nothing wrong with the very charming overture in which the Princess strings together a series of well-formed conventional phrases. At their best they amount to occasional touches of Spohr, within otherwise plain classical flair. The “Phrase-A, repeat – Phrase B, repeat – Phrase A, Phrase B, repeat, repeat” approach is not unusual for music of her time – or rather music before her time, since the prudent rest is like lesser Cimarosa all the way home, and if there was any hint Rossini in there, it wasn’t the good kind. Easily patronized, darling stuff this is; a pleasant 100-minute divertissement that would go down well if iced drinks were served during the performance and if one could lounge on comfy ottomans. The Russian archive that still owns the vocal parts (they were ‘protected’ from Germans after World War II) only allowed one concert-performance (broadcast on August 11^th on Deutschlandradio Kultur), but then maybe it’s enough to dig this uninhabited house out only every 177 years.

The Italian libretto, written by the Princess, is a little clunky. In the name of efficiency, I’ll try to convey its lack of eloquence by rhyming the synopsis:

This flat, so says a sign, is free!
The People gather mightily,
“Just how”, they wonder, “can this be?
Should I say yes, the joke’s on me??”


Eu•stich•io studied Lit-Ra-Ture,
And nat’rally he is rather poor.
“Free”! It’s what I can afford!
And my old wife will be on board.


A caveat: A ghost lives here!
E. has a gun, so what the hell,
He deftly manages his fear…
'Til midnight rings the bell.


Callisto, butler, saucy chap,
Followed orphan-rescue with kid-nap,
He locks her up and feeds her Schnitzel,
He’s, if you will, an early Fritzl.


The girl, her name’s Anetta,
Won’t marry him, that cad.
Raimondo would be so much bettuh,
(He’s the owner of the pad.)


At night Anetta runs away,
And after some discussion can convey,
She’s not a ghost per se,
Euastchio takes her on her way.


Sinforosa (wife, no money, aged)
Feels jealously enraged.
Callisto shows - as ghost disguised...
Gets shot, found out, and then despised.


The scheme is up, the truth emerges
A happy-end ensues for all
Raimondo and Anetta satisfy their urges –
And Eustichio: He gets rent-control!

The Dresden Chapel Soloists under Helmut Branny did their merry best and the cast of singers was overqualified throughout: Ilhun Jung, the eager, brazen baritone as Don Raimondo, the ever professional bass-baritone Allen Boxer as Callisto, the delightfully goofy, light baritone Matthias Henneberg with his clean, strong, dramatically anodyne voice in the main part of Eutichio, Anja Zügner’s bright and chirpy Annetta, Tehila Nini Goldstein’s Sinforosa, whose melted into her bits of music and was a real pleasure on the ears, and everyone else. The atmosphere was helped considerably by the surroundings of the Summer Palace in Dresden’s Großer Garten, easily the most charming of the many venues that the Dresden Festival uses.

Requiescant in pace

We wish a peaceful Memorial Day to our American readers. Continuing with our remembrance of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, here is an excerpt from the Libera Me movement of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, with Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Pears singing and the composer conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. The text is Wilfred Owen's poem Strange Meeting: "I mean the truth untold, / The pity of war, the pity war distilled."

Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 6 )

I am in beautiful Dresden – birthplace of the (mass produced) tea bag– for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-joys, Malkovichean divertissement, Bach despairs and delights, and Thielemann’s Bruckner, it was time for a day of variety with, depending how you count, up six concerts.

All You Can Hear

It started with the “All You Can Hear” event at Dresden’s convention center. A promising and interesting concept with Kristian Järvi, the MDR Symphony Orchestra and the (strangely German) Baltic Youth Philharmonic (BYP)… an series of performances that vaguely suggested an open floor plan, a variety of different concerts (orchestral and chamber) to chose from, and active exploration on the part of the visitor who paid a one-time fee of 20,- got a stamp, and was then free to roam.

Except that when you got there, assuming you found the place on your first attempt, there was hearty little roaming, no open floor plan, and no concurrent concerts to hear. Reality proved pernickety on this first attempt at an ambitious and vastly intriguing concept and in the end it turned out a succession of regular concerts in semi-suitable spaces that no one was allowed to enter late, and during which people sat still to reverently listen to the music (including full observance of the ironclad “don’t-clap-between-movements-even-when-it’s-obvious-that-the-first-movement-is-eliciting-applause” rule)… only that they sat in rafters in a convention center hall, rather than on the cushioned seats of a concert hall.

Give the project thick carpets, creak-free seating, curtains instead of doors, parallel musical events, more open minds, and willing, enthusiastic, inexpensive participants (the BYP seems a good place to start) and something wonderful might come of that yet in years to come. The mixed audience was already there, from different social and economic strata, including a legion of tots that were ill advisedly fitted with little DIY-garden-hose French horns. Instruments that proved wonderfully effective in the reverberant halls. “Toooot, tooooooot!” they went, though far enough from the hermetically sealed concert spaces, to do any damage beyond the nerves of innocent bystanders and regretful mothers.

Palace of Culture?

If falling short of its own ambitions, the “All You Can Hear” thing was at least an opportunity to hear a fine Korngold Violin Concerto with Vadim Gluzman (and BYP), a really quite stupendous Beethoven Eighth with the MDR SO, all under Kristian Järvi, and the realization that for all its aesthetic limitations and acoustic difficulties, the convention’s center halls make a better venue for an orchestral concert than the city’s official performing space, the concert hall of the 1969 architectural and ideological sin of the Kulturpalast, Dresden’s “Palace of Culture”. Since the place, home of the spirit of Walter Ulbrich, is unfathomably protected as a listed landmark site, only a merciful fire might one day help the Dresden Philharmonic to a concert hall that underscores, not undermines its value.

There might be better orchestras in smaller cities, and better ‘second’ orchestras in bigger cities. But by that mix of quality and reputation that make the amorphous status of an orchestra, the Dresden Philharmonic is easily the best ‘junior orchestra’ of a city the size of Dresden. That knowledge didn’t help during Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto with an engaged Vadim Repin and Markus Poschner conducting, because you couldn’t hear very much from the seats I had, and what I heard sounded as seductive as Tango-dancing by numbers. Whether the thing ever came together on stage is questionable, if so, it didn’t reach me. A pity, too, because the preceding Coriolan Overture somehow did, and that was a most enjoyable performance. Not the fresh and exciting quality of the MDR’s convention center Beethoven, but well played and with enough promise to make the prospect of staying for Beethoven’s Seventh attractive.

Bartók Beneath the Conveyor Belt

Still, with the third movement of Prokofiev not getting better even as it was encored, it seemed prudent to move on to Volkswagen’s Transparent Factory, the spotless, Canadian maple hardwood floor production facility for VW’s Phaeton luxury sedan. It’s a fascinating place and even if the sales numbers for the Phaeton were better than they are, it’s understandable that VW – a main sponsor of the Festival – is very eager to show the place off in imaginative ways.

It’s certainly memorable to hear a program of Moldavian - Hungarian - Romanian folk-influenced works amidst five-and-a-half ton luxury vehicles in various states of un-finish, hanging on telescoping trapezoids from the ceiling’s conveyor belt. The mind raced to future productions of Die Walküre or the possibilities to stage B. A. Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten. Instead the Kopatchinsky family turned up, famous violinist daughter Patricia (with a terrific Beethoven Concerto as part of her ever-increasing discography) up front, violinist mother Emilia and the cimbalom playing father Viktor in tow. A dapper buddy on double bass provided for the groove in Eastern European, Moldovan folk music larks that opened and closed the recital. I find the charade of really letting lose in such a concert, as properly suggested by such music, always an awkward affair. Especially in front of a (German) classical music audience… But there was no denying that it brought fresh air into a recital that came close to suffering from anoxia at several points.

Not during the Bartók Romanian Folk Dances though; those were played as well as I’ve ever heard. Partly thanks to Mihaela Ursuleasa’s pianism, but mostly because it was endowed by Kopatchinkskaja with the requisite seediness, that bit of musical lace that alluringly, suggestively hangs half of one shoulder… the complete confidence of knowing what she was doing, the ability to do it, and a thankfully shameless joy in sharing it. Which is really just the roundabout way of suggesting that it was authenticity that made the Bartók.¹

György Kurtág’s Eight Duos for Violin and Cimbalom (op.4) tested my love for Kurtág, its pp glissandi softer sounding than the factory’s incessant AC. Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane – even in such a coy and wicket-wily performance – is a work I’ve always suspected of appealing more to violinists than their audiences, and while George Enescu’s Third Violin Sonata (on Popular Romanian themes) is one of the great works of its kind, I wish that the composer had made two sonatas from it. The first movement opens with a magnificent lilting lament but in connection with the Andante sostenuto it punishes any lack of concentration on the listener – before the third movement, just as long but subjectively brief, injects much-needed oxygen back into the affair.





¹ As opposed to the airs other performers might put on when emulating such music’s spirit, which causes little more than vicarious embarrassment. There are various musical examples (Dieskau as Pappageno comes to my mind), but really the best analogy are male Russian figure skaters after the collapse of the Soviet Union who bought leather trousers and rocked out on ice, to cringe-worthy effect and music ranging from Bill Haley to Tom Jones. Or the most brilliant counter-cultural film maker of East Germany, Gregor Voss, and his first trip to the West.

In Brief: Still Missing DFD Edition

Here is your regular (overflowing) Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Listen to a Schubert recital by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Sviatoslav Richter, recorded in Salzburg on August 29, 1977, followed up with some excerpts from Fischer-Dieskau's recordings (Wolf, Britten). [France Musique]


• Another tribute to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau from Radio France with some rare recital performances (Festival Pablo Casals in Prades, July 1955; Mahler's Kindertotenlieder with the Orchestre National de l'ORTF and Georg Solti, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, 1964) and recordings. [France Musique]


• Round out your Fischer-Dieskau fix with the tribute from Austrian radio: Fischer-Dieskau in the title role of Verdi's Macbeth, with Grace Bumbry and Wolfgang Sawallisch at the podium of the Vienna Philharmonic, recorded in Salzburg in 1964. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Paul Agnew conducts (and sings with) members of Les Arts Florissants in a complete performance of Claudio Monteverdi's third book of madrigals, at the Cité de la Musique -- also available as audio only. [Medici.tv]


• From the Wiener Festwochen 2012 at the Theater an der Wien, Omer Meir Wellber conducts the Arnold Schoenberg Chor and the ÖRF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien in a performance of Verdi's La Traviata. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Watch the Orchestre de Paris, under the baton of Paavo Järvi, play music by Nielsen (the overture to Maskarade), Shostakovich (the second piano concerto, with Alexander Toradze), and Grieg (the incidental music for Peer Gynt) -- embedded here. [Cité de la Musique Live]


• Live from that interesting season of the Opéra Comique, a performance of Marco Stroppa's opera Re Orso, with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and conductor Susanna Mälkki -- the world premiere on May 19. [France Musique]


• Most of the films critics thought would be big at Cannes this year were, with the one surprise setting everyone atwitter being Jeff Nichols's new film Mud, leading the American films in competition. [Le Figaro]


• Pianist Bertrand Chamayou joins conductor Tugan Sokhiev and the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse on tour in Buenos Aires, at the Teatro Colón, with an all-French program of music by Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Ravel, and Berlioz. [Medici.tv]


• A second concert by the same forces, also in Buenos Aires, features music by Musorgsky, Liszt, and Chopin. [Medici.tv]


• From the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Jérémie Rhorer conducts the early music ensemble Le Cercle de l'Harmonie in a performance of Mozart's Così fan tutte, with a cast led by Camilla Tilling and Michèle Losier. [France Musique]


• Selections of music by Joseph Woelfl, a composer celebrating a bicentenary this month. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Rare performances of the Te Deum and Mass in D of Jean Gilles, a Baroque maître de chapelle at Toulouse Cathedral, with the chamber choir Les éléments and Les Passions, Orchestre Baroque de Montauban, under the baton of Jean-Marc Andrieu. [France Musique]


• Vladimir Jurowski conducts Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmila from Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, recorded last November. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• At the Concours Reine Elisabeth, 26-year-old Russian violinist Andrey Baranov took the top prize in the violin competition. The local audience was rooting for Marc Bouchkov, the only Belgian to make it to the finals, but he did not place. Runners-up, in order, were Tatsuki Narita (Japan), Hyun Su Shin (South Korea), Esther Yoo (U.S.A.), Yu-Chien Tseng (Taiwan), and Artiom Shishkov (Belarus). [La Libre Belgique]


• You can watch videos of the performances by the finalists in Brussels, and listen to a lot more from the competition. [Concours Reine Elisabeth]


• Christoph Prégardien conducts the Nederlands Kamerkoor and Le Concert Lorrain in a performance of Bach's St. John Passion, with Andreas Scholl, Dietrich Henschel, and others. [France Musique]


• More Bach from this past Holy Week, the St. Matthew Passion, with the Chœur d’enfants de la Maîtrise de Paris, the Chœur Arsys Bourgogne, and Les Talens Lyriques, under the direction of Pierre Cao, from the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. [France Musique]


• Even more Bach, Cantus Cölln performs all six of Bach's motets in Gerona. [France Musique]


• An all-Beethoven concert by the Belcea Quartet, from the Wiener Konzerthaus. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Cartoonist Georges Wolinski has donated a vast number of his papers and drawings to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in advance of a major retrospective on his work there next month. In preparation for the celebration, Wolinski has published a memoir, in graphic novel format, called Le pire a de l'avenir. [Le Point]


• Kurt Masur leads the Orchestre National de France in a concert to benefit Amnesty International at the Théâtre du Châtelet, playing Shostakovich's first symphony and Tchaikovsky's violin concerto with Sarah Nemtanu. [France Musique]


• From the Wiener Musikverein, as part of the Wiener Festwochen 2012, Angelika Kirchschlager performs a recital with cellist Gautier Capuçon and pianist Helmut Deutsch. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Fabien Gabel leads the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in a rare concert in the main hall of the Musée d'Orsay, including Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and La Mer and two pieces by Sibelius. [France Musique]


• The Opéra de Nice just staged Alessandro Scarlatti's Tigrane (Naples, 1715). Raphaël de Gubernatis took it in, along with a tour of the Baroque architecture of the city. It was not the music director there, Washington National Opera's own Philippe Auguin, who conducted, but Gilbert Bezzina, director of the Ensemble Baroque de Nice, which did the honors in the pit, with a staging directed by Gilbert Blin. [Le Nouvel Observateur]


• Ensemble Masques performs rare Baroque music by Biber and Schmelzer in the Liechtenstein Museum. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Stefan Parkman directs the Chœur de Radio France and friends in a concert of music by Debussy, Hindemith, Satie, and Poulenc, in the Basilique Sainte-Clotilde. [France Musique]


• The Steude Quartett performs music by Cherubini, Korngold, and Beethoven, also as part of the Wiener Festwochen 2012. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]

I've Seen Things -- and Got Soaked

So much to see, so little time: add a few monsoon-like downpours and you have perfect gallery hopping. Why is there always wind to eat my umbrella? I think there could be a painting in this.

Many good painting shows to see this month, some closing this week. Kathryn Lynch's simplified paintings of dogs and those that follow behind them at Sears Peyton -- funny stuff. More simple joy with Katherine Bradford's super cruise ships and super heroes at Edward Thorp, Superman Responds!

With new paintings and a new dealer, Friedrich Petzel, I'm a fan of Dana Schutz's crazy wildness. A series of small paintings of people yawning are great -- even more simplified forms.

There never seems to be an end to the late great Alice Neel's body of work: I'm forever coming across new images. David Zwirner is showing a selection of late portraits and still lifes through June.

Ok, I'm vulnerable: I get painter crushes. While attending a few Thursday night openings I spotted Alex Katz and his muse, Ida, checking out Nicole Wittenberg's work at Freight + Volume (I gushed and shook hands -- I know). Another crush I have is for Chantal Joffe's juicy, dripping goodness at Cheim Reed. The big beautiful baby in a white dress is fabulous.

A few more shows to see this month: Nicole Eisenman's prints have eclipsed her painting, for me -- lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, and monotypes, all at Leo Koening. I got to meet paintress and FB friend Janice Nowinski at her opening at Bowery Gallery, and it was nice to finally meet her and her wonderful small, washy figure paintings -- totally worth waiting for the slowest elevator in Chelsea.

Lastly, just when you think you know everything, The Steins Collect at the Met is loaded with the great art and artists the family collected and befriended and, best of all, the stories. Where would Matisse and Picasso have been without them? Many works in the exhibit are from private collections and rarely seen by the public. If the weather permits, which it did not for me, the Met's rooftop space has a space-age Skylab-esqe sculpture by artist/engineer Tomás Saraceno. From what I gather, it's pretty interesting and fun to crawl through. That will be my next visit.

Hint: the tourist crowds in the city are insane, so plan ahead to avoid the masses at both the Met and MoMA -- and bring your umbrella.

The Unnecessary Orphan and the Canadians!

One of the most important openings happened this past week in Philadelphia, the reinvention of the Barnes Foundation. I was unable to attend the press preview so I can't provide an opinion. Of the reviews I have read so far many find the building impressive and full of light, even going so far as to claim the art is now free! I will get there at some point and will then share my own take.

As you may know I have not been supportive of the move of Dr. Barnes's collection. With all its issues the move was a drastic over-reaction and frankly morally and legally questionable. The collection is now branded and the gift shop is open - see for yourselves.

Opening this week at Mass MoCA is Oh, Canada. The exhibit is billed as the first comprehensive survey of contemporary Canadian art in decades, a major undertaking for curator Denise Markonish. She scoured nearly every province and made over 400 studio visits to organize this exhibit. I was there this past Thursday, and a lot of work still needed to be installed or completed to pull it off by Saturday. Some very interesting work from a distance. I wish them luck with the install and look forward to returning.

I did get to see Michael Oatman's all utopias fell, which is not open during the winter months. Oatman has perched an old airstream trailer high above the old boiler room building, surrounded by spent and tattered parachutes -- re-entry from another time and place. A Lost in Space remake, Buck Rogers, or Gilligan's Island -- unfortunately, no one is home but all the gadgets are buzzing and the music is on. Maybe they'll be there when I return for the Oh, Canada exhibit.

To get to all utopias fell visitors must make their way through the old boiler room building, and it's one of the most stunningly beautiful spots at the museum. This hulking rusted corpse, once the life blood of the former factory, has the feel of an ancient organ that comes to life when the wind blows through the open walls.

Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 5 )

Dresden's Bruckner and their Thielemann

I am in beautiful Dresden – birthplace of the coffee filter – for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-joys, Malkovichean divertissement, Bach despairs and delights, it was time for a concert of the Dresden Staatskapelle – the musical crown jewel of this musically well endowed city – under their new music director Christian Thielemann.

The intelligent program that night took place at the Summer Palace in Dresden’s Großer Garten where Pierre-Laurent Aimard performed a clever medley of Schubert, Kurtág, Liszt and Ligeti. But sometimes brains are not as important as looks – or rather sound – and Thielemann in Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony with his orchestra is too promising, too beautiful, to centrally “Dresden”, and ultimately too prestigious to miss. Especially when the point of the stay in Dresden is to get a big whiff of Saxonia.

Read more »

Pathetic, Peter Gelb?

Peter Gelb, and with him the Metropolitan Opera, enjoyed “an 8-hour New Coke/Coca-Cola Classic day” last week… an inadvertent (yet perfectly predictable) PR debacle about alleged censorship. The background is best provided by Dan Wakin in the New York Times, here. Shortly after that came the turn-around (well covered here and here and here) – although Gelb’s “I think [!] I made a mistake” (emphasis mine) confession will hardly undo much of the damage.

When it comes to art, I love boldness – which includes, as its main ingredient, bold failure. Performances that do not try something new or don’t take risks fail by default. This is a much more maddening failure than even the worst performance (or production) that had ambitions either unmet or fatally flawed, but tried.

It is in that sense that I rather admire, from afar, Peter Gelb’s efforts (whether successful or not) to drag the Met into the 20th [sic] century. At least he does something about the staid and stale reputation of the house, at least he shakes a few things up, dares change. I even like that he’s got a pronounced commercial side about him. Art is a product, a special one perhaps, but one that needs selling. (Quality control is another matter.)

I can understand how infuriating ignorant, stupid, or most commonly: lazy negative reviews can be. Even I, perfectly uninvolved with the criticized productions, can get physically ill reading the narrow-minded shlock that parades around as a review yet merely boils down to (and sometimes even admits as much): “This is not how it was done when I grew up, therefore Yuckatypoo!” (Watch for the words “Regietheater” and “Eurotrash” as signifiers of diminished intellectual activity.)

I can also understand the temptation of wanting to do something about such (or in fact any) criticism… were I only in a position to do so.

That’s as far as I can go with Peter Gelb, re: the recent hubbub of trying to strong-arm the Met-affiliated magazine Opera News into being less critical of the mothership. But the criticism of the Met’s productions, specifically but not exclusively its Ring, goes well beyond the narrow minded kind of criticism. And much more importantly, anyone who cannot resist the temptation of squelching criticism (of any kind) only because they can, has no business being in the job Peter Gelb is in. It touches uncomfortably on basic artistic and social principles. The “Free Speech” thing might be overblown, since the Met certainly has the right to bully other economic actors around – and the immediate backlash showed, if anything, how resilient the freedom of opinioneering still is, when properly irritated). And Gelb’s actions are outrageous not primarily for being wrong principally, but for being so counterproductive to the goals he ought to be wanting to achieve.

Even if this latest (of several) attempt to use the Met’s weight for the purpose of soft self-censorship hadn’t blown up in the institution’s face, it would still have served it ill. Honest and sincerely critical reviews are an essential part of a thriving artistic environment. Reviews that hedge, and ache to be friendly, and are all ‘uncritical sunshine’ meanwhile, are worse than no review. They are tedious to read, easy to see through, and dismissed, eventually even by the densest reader. No artist (since Kubelik) has really ever been severely torpedoed by (undeserved) bad reviews. But arts criticism has already been damaged by shills and PR texts masquerading as honest journalism. To think that expressing (occasional or recurring) negative opinions is harmful to an institution like the Met is spectacularly misguided. They are, in their own small way, part of the essence of vital arts. Vitality, after all, is to-and-fro. Not relying on a sad bunch of yes-men and women.

Then again, Gelb also reminded Opera News readers that they are not an independent magazine and that their reviews of the Met really shouldn’t be expected to be fair and unbiased in the first place (even if they were). Their continued coverage of the Met (perhaps ‘a little more careful now’, or, less likely, with increased vigor) is a small, gratifying victory for the magazine’s readers and perhaps other institutions that Gelb will think twice about trying to convince to alter the tone of their coverage, but it won’t make Opera News an inherently independent objective source.

None of this alters the fact that the duty to distinguish between a shill and sufficiently independent reviews (never mind the actual quality of the writing or expressed opinion) still lies with the reader. In that sense Gelb’s Opera News moment, including the backlash, was about choice, not quality control or editorial independence.

Oundjian with the BSO

Tenor Nicholas Phan

Anton Bruckner's setting of the Te Deum, premiered in 1886, needs an ally at the podium to help it win over listeners. The composer's friend and biographer, August Göllerich, recounted a famous anecdote about attending a pretty awful performance of Berlioz's operatic setting of the Te Deum in Vienna with Bruckner. After leaving the performance, in a secular concert hall, Bruckner reportedly shared his thoughts about the work, with his strongest criticism being that the work was "not very ecclesiastical." Not that Bruckner's Masses and the Te Deum do not have their more operatic moments, but Bruckner's approach to sacred music was, by contrast, extremely ecclesiastical. As scholar Paul Hackshaw has put it, Bruckner was "the most important composer since Johann Sebastian Bach to spend almost his entire professional life in the employ of the church," beginning as a choir boy with the Augustinian monks at the Stift Sankt Florian. He published the Te Deum with the Bach-like inscription "Omnia ad maiorem dei gloria," and the work ends with a monumental fugue, a tour de force that is one of the most important contrapuntal achievements of the 19th century, not a particularly contrapuntal age.

Which is all a way of saying that Bruckner's Te Deum can be a bore, leading many conductors to juice up the tempos, exaggerate the tone of declamation from liturgical to hysteric. Such was the approach of guest conductor Peter Oundjian, last heard in the area when he led the National Symphony Orchestra in 2005 (we missed his 2009 appearance in Baltimore), when he led the work, in its first-ever performance by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, at Meyerhoff Hall on Thursday night. A rather fast tempo in the opening was hard to accept as "Feierlich" (solemn), although the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, standing in mixed formation in the chorister seats above the stage, gave the work plenty of "Kraft" (strength). A good thing, since the piece is mostly a choral show, and they sang it with force and beauty, down (up) to the high C in the sopranos on the final chord. The fugue -- with subtle irony, Bruckner composed rather complicated counterpoint for the concluding lines, repeated several times, "O Lord, I have hoped in you, let me never be confounded" -- made up for the rushed feeling in other places, grand and with an eye on eternity.

Part of the problem was that the Te Deum, rushed through in just slightly over twenty minutes, served as a sort of overture to the main course, yet another performance of Beethoven's ninth symphony. The BSO last performed the piece only in 2009, but it will almost always sell out a hall, so it is hard to resist over-programming it -- and equally hard to make a performance distinctive. Oundjian actually did that in some ways, applying the same sort of insistence as he had in the Bruckner, keeping the tempo of the first three movements on the fast side (the scherzo's trio was a delightful romp), so much so that concertmaster Jonathan Carney had some vigorous head-nodding to do to keep the violins on track with Oundjian at the opening of the slow movement. Oundjian, a violinist by training (formerly a member of the Tokyo Quartet), kept the strings in the background at many points, allowing the woodwind parts, often working over themes in motivic bits, to percolate to the top of the texture (one noticeable gaffe, somewhere in the winds, marred the central section of the third movement).

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, BSO’s Ninth Symphony not perfect, but it still stirs the blood (Washington Post, May 28) Tim Smith, Peter Oundjian leads Baltimore Symphony, Choral Arts in Beethoven, Bruckner (Baltimore Sun, May 25)

The famous choral finale was just as urgent, with the cellos and basses almost frenetic in their recitative section, until the introduction of the new theme, which was ruminative and slow, picking up triumphantly in tempo when the brass took it up. The janissary section was a tangy, sharp-footed march, punctuated by the robust blaat of the contrabassoon. In a beautiful effect, the chorus sang some sections of the piece from memory, and it is hard to overstate the emotional impact of all of those faces looking out at you instead of at their scores as they belt out Schiller's ecstatic poetry. Oundjian had a mixed bag of soloists for both pieces, with bass Morris Robinson like a growling linebacker and tenor Nicholas Phan doing a bang-up job filling in for an indisposed Brandon Jovanovich -- the tenor has a fairly central part in both the Bruckner and the Beethoven, and Phan is to be commended for taking on that heavy responsibility, his achievement being more on the side of subtle beauty than that of heroic strength. The female half of the quartet, especially soprano Joyce El-Khoury in a disappointing BSO debut, was mostly evanescent and overwhelmed by the mass of sound from the rest of the stage.

This concert will be repeated tonight and Saturday night (May 25 and 26), at the Meyerhoff and Strathmore, respectively.

Bach, Death, and Antihistamines

Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 4 )

I am in beautiful Dresden – birthplace of magnetic tape – for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-delight, Bach-despair, and Malkovichean divertissement, it was time for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Ian Bostridge to showcase Bach in Dresden’s bombed-out and privately [!], recently re-built Frauenkirche.

The splendor of the ornately catholic-looking Frauenkirche is almost too neat, too clean, to develop all its potentially astonishing effect. There is a hint of artificiality about it in our minds, because the aesthetic of the new is incongruent with our expectations of the historic. Habit has turned the ravages of time, historical wear and tear, an essential, rather than incidental element of anything historic. Not unlike we believe, despite knowing better, that both World Wars were fought in black and white, and how it just feels right that Greek statues appear elegantly white, hewn of pure marble – rather than in their original garish colors.

Read more »

Sex, Lies, and Mozart Arias

Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 3 )

I am in beautiful Dresden – birthplace of milk chocolate – for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-delight and Bach-despair, it was time for something completely different:

The Infernal Comedy, Malkovich, Haselböck et al. ArtHaus DVD The Giacomo Variations, Malkovich, Haselböck et al. ArtHaus DVD

John Malkovich is Jack Unterweger, innocent mass murderer, world famous in Austria [sic], back from the dead, and on a publicity tour for his tell-all-or-does-it biography. But John Malkovich is also being John Malkovich (pun hard to avoid), capricious actor, on tour with a Viennese baroque orchestra performing the morbid musical comedy “The Infernal Comedy”. For a while there is a deliberate ambivalence between the characters, which contributes to the hard-to-pin-down quality of the show. Whether that’s good or bad would depend on how keen the viewer is on pinning things down hard. Jack Unterweger, with about a dozen sexually assaulted murder-victims to his name, would presumably have been all for pinning down. Creator and director Michael Sturminger, co-creator and conductor Martin Haselböck, and the pivotal Malkovich less so apparently, or else they wouldn’t have brought something on stage (and toured with it for four years) that leaves half the audience wondering what they had just witnessed.

Is “The Infernal Comedy” a play with applied music? Is the music integral or incidental? Do they demand each other; does one improve the other hierarchically (like whisky improving a cigar, but a cigar not improving whisky), or is it arranged for mutual benefit? Is it a dubiously efficient ploy to get people into the theater and listen to beautiful but obscure (and a few famous) classical and baroque arias that interactively alter with the ‘chapters’ of Malkovich-Unterweger’s story? “Sposa son disprezzata” (Vivaldi, Ottone in Villa) “Berenice, che fai” (from Haydn’s dramatic cantata Scena di Berenice), Carl Maria von Weber’s patchwork aria for an Étienne Méhul opera, “Ah, se Edmundo fosse l’uccisor” are all magnificent to hear, and Martene Grimson—one of the two sopranos that are part of the play—was delectable in Vivaldi and Weber and Beethoven’s “Ah perfido!”. Sophie Klußmann, substituting for the other soprano of the cast, managed her vocal and scenic duties admirably, too – whether she was being strangled, molested by Malkovich’s lusty-disturbed Unterweger, or singing Gluck and Mozart. The scraggy, committed Vienna Academy Orchestra was a delight, buzzing through the music with a transparency that brought out voices within the music that are all too often hidden by smooth homophony.

Amid this, Malkovich (who has done several projects that combine classical music and theater since the inception of this production) went through concentric circles of contrivance with a Pepé Le Pew routine in pseudo-Austrian accent (strategic mispronunciations alternating with eloquent runs of idiomatic American) and the slight difference that he didn’t just want to smooch his Penelope, but strangle her with her own brassiere. (A tragic end for any pussy.) Are we not entertained? Most of the audience seemed sufficiently engrossed with these “confessions of a serial killer”: drawn in by the enigmatic presence of Malkovich’s creepy predator and entertained by terrific music.

Picture of John Malkovich courtesy Dresden Music Festival, © Stephan Floss