For Your Consideration: 'Pianomania'

The Austrian documentary Pianomania: In Search of the Perfect Sound, from 2009, has received a very limited release this summer in the United States. (The Goethe-Institut hosted a one-time screening of the movie last year.) It has had mostly tepid reviews, generally by film critics who are not really classical music-heads, and the gross has been low, even for a documentary about something that is fairly esoteric. Directed by Robert Cibis and Lilian Franck, the film follows the nerve-wracking work of Steinway piano technician Stefan Knüpfer, as he fine-tunes his company's finest concert grand pianos for some of the best pianists in the world to play in the concert halls of Vienna. Like Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, from 2007, it is something that anyone with a love of the piano must see.

Fortunately, for those who are not piano mavens, the film does not delve too far into the minutiae of what Knüpfer does. There are no technical explanations of the instrument's action and not too much focus on the many small tweaks and adjustments that the technician can make. What the film does trace is the interaction between Knüpfer and the pianists he works for, as well as the recording engineers and producers, sound technicians, and even piano movers -- the people behind the scenes who make great concerts and recordings happen. The main subject is the exacting search of Pierre-Laurent Aimard to find the right sounds for his rather wonderful recording of Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge. A work that is generally recognized to have been intended for the keyboard, it has gestures that suggest Bach had in mind at least references to or evocations of larger ensembles of instruments, and it is those various colors, or at least hints of them, that Aimard wants brought out in the piano he is playing. Anyone who enjoyed Aimard's recording or who loves to dissect the finest particles of sound will be captivated as Aimard goes in search of sounds, from a single piano, that evoke harpsichord, clavichord, organ, chamber music, and so on. To see Aimard's approach to the work made me appreciate the recording, and his live performance of the work, in a new light.

Other Reviews: Washington Post | Boston Globe | San Francisco Chronicle | Seattle Times Movie Review Intelligence

Knüpfer frets the most in his sessions with Aimard, fascinated from a scientific, technical point of view at how precisely the pianist hears every gradation of sound and feels it in the mechanism of the instrument. Knüpfer even makes a visit to hear some historical harpsichords and clavichords played by a specialist, recognizing his own deficit in that area as he tries to come up with the sound "families" that Aimard wants. This section of the movie makes so clear the difference between those small, intimate instruments and the wild beast that is the piano -- its method of producing sound so complicated, its tone so vast and ferocious, and its size so vast that it requires three strong people just to move it. All of the Steinways in the film are identified by three-digit numbers attached to them, and they are captioned by these monikers in the same way the artists are when they appear.

By contrast to Aimard, other pianists require less nuance once they have found the sound that pleases their ears: a bright tanginess for Lang Lang, an even smoothness top to bottom for Alfred Brendel (then in his final year of performing), a sense of magic for Julius Drake (shown rehearsing a Lied with tenor Ian Bostridge). Only the sensitive Austrian pianist Till Fellner, another Ionarts favorite who once referred to a local embassy's prize piano as firewood, comes close to Aimard's level of finicky meticulousness. Throughout, Knüpfer leavens the movie with his own gentle wit, even as he has to dash up and down stairs and call in favors to satisfy a pianist's demands (Aimard is not "neurotic," he insists, he is "specialized"). In one of the best moments, Knüpfer takes almost vicious delight in recounting the story of telling Aimard that the Steinway he played at a triumphant concert was to be sold, that he would never play it again. These moments of levity help brighten a film that could be overwhelmed by Knüpfer's own "specialized" obsessions, but he takes just as seriously an entirely different sort of work, as he helps keyboard clown Hyung-Ki Joo work up some new sketches for his Victor Borge-like piano comedy sketches.

In the Washington area, Pianomania is screening only at the E St. Cinema and only through this Thursday.

Phantasmorgastic, but with Shadows: FrOSch @ Salzburg — Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival ( 16 )

Richard Strauss • Die Frau ohne Schatten

Richard Strauss’ intended masterpiece, Die Frau ohne Schatten, is hard to hail without acknowledging that it has weaknesses, too. Best and most tersely put by Paul Brekker after the 1919 premiere: “The opera suffers from that most dangerous of ailments: it’s boring. It drains the audience’s willpower to object, lulls him with euphony and melodies, dulls her with images and theatrical phantasmagoria. A mix made lethal by stretching it over three acts and eleven scenes.” But it’s also Christian Thielemann’s favorite Strauss work because, as he explains, “it has it all; the finely articulated structure and full-blooded build-ups, poetry and hysteria, and glorious harmonies. Elektra meets Ariadne.”

R.Strauss, FrOSch, K.Böhm / WPh / Rysanek, Hopf, Goltz, Schöffler, Höngen Decca (stereo) R.Strauss, FrOSch, K.Böhm / WPh / Rysanek, Hopf, Nilsson, Barry, Hesse DG (live) R.Strauss, FrOSch, W.Sawallisch / BRSO / Studer, Kollo, Vinzing, Schmidt, Schwarz EMI (studio, uncut) R.Strauss, FrOSch, W.Sawallisch / Bavarian State Orchestra / DeVol, Seiffert, Martin, Titus, Lipovsek TDK (DVD)

The Salzburg production of Die Frau ohne Schatten must be hailed, in any case, because musically (if not vocally) it was a stunning success thanks to Thielemann’s conducting; succulent and lean in turns, modern yet intransigently sumptuous. The staging by Christof Loy, in four words, was too clever by half… but at least it was clever and pretty to look at, too.

Die Frau ohne Schatten, tenderly nicknamed “Frosch” (Frog) by Strauss, is not performed very often because of the demands it makes on casting, scenery, and orchestra: It basically needs two top-notch dramatic sopranos of Wagnerian proportions, one Heldentenor, a dramatic mezzo and one Wotan-esque bass-baritone. And all—please—with a lyrical bent. It asks for over 150 instruments and almost as many musicians, and the stage direction would seem to demand on the spot floods and several instances of magic. It would be perfect for a film version of the opera, but sufficient turn whole shocks of hair gray on directors trying to figure out how to stage the odd tale. One woman—the shadow-less empress—cannot bear children but wants to, in order to become truly human. Another would gladly give up her right (or ability) to bear children in exchange for the alleged liberty that comes with that. Their dramatically rather less relevant men are active bystanders. A Nurse, the Empress’ guardian—and creature of both worlds, the human world of the dyer Barak and his wife and the nether-realm of Emperor and Empress—is the catalyst and nefarious schemer. Strauss wanted to create an opera that was to the Magic Flute what he thought his Rosenkavalier was to Le Nozze di Figaro. The result is more of a Parsifal-themed Magic Flute… except that the works of Strauss (especially true when working with Hugo von Hofmannsthal) have an inextricably human, even bourgeois, element at their center, no matter how superficial magic is involved.

Reactionary—old fashioned, counter to our zeitgeist—might be the form of Die Frau ohne Schatten. But the expression itself, of the desire for love, marriage, and family as the nucleus of life, expressed not the least in childbearing, is not reactionary. It does not fit easily into a time dominated by narcissism and ‘self-actualization’—a time where children are deemed a burden or sacrifice, a manifestation of one’s own ego, or a territorial claim on a woman, an abdication of the fully lived life, rather than its noblest goal and fulfillment. But the desire itself is and will always remain a beautiful thing. Is that so hard to accept when staging this opera? The language of the catholic Hofmannsthal strikes 21^st century ears as patronizing, no doubt, but it is merely old-fashioned yet well intentioned (like Barak himself)?

Christof Loy strips away the immediateness of the subject and introduces distance by going the route of opera-performance-within-opera-performance. He sets the story like someone who does not believe in the emotion that lies at the heart of Hofmannsthal’s nostalgia-laced text, except on a superficial level. He describes and circumnavigates the core without feeling or touching it. The narrative is tied to the first complete* recording of Die Frau ohne Schatten with Karl Böhm in the winter of 1955 for Decca. Set (anachronistically) in Vienna’s Sophiensaal, the space for many other very famous Decca opera productions in Vienna, it focuses on the stories of the performing singers (among them the ‘innocent’ newcomer Leonie Rysanek as the Empress and Elisabeth Höngen—a German star in the war-years (!) and a favorite of Karl Böhm as the manipulative nurse), and the analogies between their collegial relationships and the relationships of the characters in the libretto. Eventually (late in the first, early in the second Act) there occurs an overlap of interpreters and roles. The jealousies, desires, and fears of interpreter and role blend into an intractable whole. The singer of the role of Empress enters a new, strange world populated with already-famous, experienced colleagues. Stephen Gould alias Hans Hopf alias The Emperor is a nervous tenor who seeks isolation and records his difficult aria in a secluded session at night. The Dyer and Wife are married but estranged (Christel Goltz and Paul Schöffler of the unpaid, unheated 1955 recording sessions were definitely neither) and—as in the opera, so in this opera about the recording of the same opera—find together again during the ‘recording’ of Act III. In a long dream scene all the extras are replaced with identically dressed and groomed seven-year-old alter egos.

(Confusing might be that some elements of this, Loy’s production, would easily fit the story of Karl Böhm’s other, later performances and recordings in the late 70s: Birgit Nilsson as the blond ‘foreign’ singer (Empress Dyer's wife)… except no longer new or an outsider, and two protagonists—Walter Berry and Christa Ludwig—as a famous married singer-couple… except then already divorced and she singing the part of the Nurse, not the Dyer’s wife.)

A sense of general unease is conveyed terribly-terrifically, the many supernumeraries that populate the set help create the unspoken tensions, and the gorgeously detailed set (Johannes Leiacker with Ursula Renzenbrink in charge of the costumes) is time-travel-inducing… down to the self-important 1950s secretary and groundskeeper. The specter of the Third Reich is clearly still hanging over the scene… and could he not, only a decade after 1945, with people like Böhm involved and taking place in the seedily anti-Semitic Vienna?! Anne Schwanewilms in her role as young-Rysanek/Empress moves about the set as if disconnected from the rest, observing and occasionally reacting. In line with the opera, she doesn’t really get going until act III, but then with minimal means to great effect. Her high notes were excellent, clean, penetrating, even as some of the murderous leaps fell short. But that’s peanuts in a live performance of this length and of such demands. Notable, though, that in one very small frequency band, stretching at the most a semi-tone in her lower mid-range, her vocal chords made worrisome noises, like a speaker’s busted and frayed tweeter fluttering and jittering.

Benefiting most from the fact that the performance was—on Thielemann’s insistence—uncut, is the Nurse whose role becomes the dramatic equivalent (and more) of the other four principals. Michaela Schuster, more stage-animal than a beautiful voice, jumped into the role head first and came out victorious—cajoling and oogling at her colleagues with an expressive face vaguely reminiscent of Stephen Fry’s. Dramatically it was a peak performance and any stridence appropriate given that her parts include the most modern music, reminiscent of Elektra or Salome or even Ortrud in Lohengrin.

The Emperor might be the least important of those five (even in the cut version), but he makes up lack of singing time and action with the difficulty of his parts. Stephen Gould performed admirably more than convincingly. Wolfgang Koch had more to do and did more with it; his bearish Barak plead believably for his idea of forgiveness, love, and family as something that spelled not servitude (as his wife first sees it; ditto Christof Loy) but a merging of two into one as an equitable partnership. The sacrifice of egoism yes, but not individuality. It’s mutual, tender, loving, even if the language to express it is archaic. His acting could have been better, though;

The emotions expressed by his Barak/Schöffler were not quite believable. In particular the rage and the relief felt staged, not lived. ‘Seething’ looks distinctly different than his hectic gesticulation, as do helplessly boiling over with anger and blood-rage. A lesson with Christian Gerhaher might prove the necessary treatment.

Evelyn Herlitzius, the Dyer’s wife, combined vocal prowess with dramatic skill in the best performance of the night. She gave much needed life to the frosty production, especially in the second act when musically and dramatically things really started to together. The ears woke up, or perhaps the music, or the performers (the Vienna Philharmonic had, on this, the penultimate of seven performances, smeared a few too many delicate bits in the first act), or all three… in any case one got a more palpable sense of the acoustic awesomeness of the work and a tear or two may have moistened my cheek. Thielemann coaxed and received from an orchestra that eats out of the palm of his hand, neither afraid of underscoring the score’s modernity nor hesitant when it came to luxuriating and reveling in the sound. One felt at all times the audience’s sensitive for the achievements that are CT’s in the success of this work.

Die Frau ends, like most Strauss operas, on a note of distinct ambiguity. Although superficially everything is hunky-dory, with the couples extolling humanity and praising their babies-to-be, mild uncertainty creeps in through the cracks. The scene—“a beautiful landscape” says the libretto—was set apart from the recording session theme… now set a few weeks later at a Christmas gala concert with a boys choir (those future children!) present and the Empress living through it as if it were still all-too surreal that she has made it into the upper echelon of continental opera stars—exiting to terribly contrived slow-motion applause. Clever, again. Just a little too clever.

Pictures courtesy Salzburg Festival, © Monika Rittershaus.

* “Complete” is relative. There is as of yet only one uncut studio recording of Die Frau ohne Schatten, which is that of Wolfgang Sawallisch on EMI, with fewer famous names than many of the bootleg recordings out there, but altogether the best and best sounding of the bunch. Since Christian Thielemann’s performance was captured by ORF and Unitel, we can expect the DVD of the production to be the second uncut Frau on record.

Heather Raffo's New Libretto

See my preview of a free reading of a new opera libretto-in-progress, this evening at Georgetown:

Reading of New Libretto by Heather Raffo Tonight at Georgetown (The Washingtonian, August 29):

New York-based playwright and actress Heather Raffo came to international attention a few years ago with her award-winning one-woman play Nine Parts of Desire. For her latest project, Raffo is writing a libretto for a new opera to be premiered at City Opera Vancouver next year. As part of Raffo’s ongoing residency at Georgetown’s Department of Performing Arts, a group of Georgetown students, faculty, and guest artists will join Raffo in a public reading of the current form of the new libretto. This reading will not include the opera’s music, which is still being completed by Vancouver-based composer Tobin Stokes.

Over the weekend, Raffo told The Washingtonian about how she came to be writing her first opera libretto. “It was a stroke of luck,” she says. “ Nine Parts was being performed in Vancouver, and the president of the board at City Opera Vancouver saw the show. She thought I might be a right fit for this libretto, and they had been looking for a writer. So my name got thrown into the mix. Around the time that my son was being born last November, I got a call that I got the job.” She did not meet the composer until the first workshop for the opera in Vancouver. As reported earlier this year, the Annenberg Foundation awarded a $250,000 commissioning grant to City Opera Vancouver, to bring the chamber opera to the stage. [Continue reading]

In Brief: Hurricane Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Chant Grégorien d'Aquitaine, Schola Hungarica St. Elizabeth of Hungary: Two Medieval Offices, Schola Hungarica

  The news came from Budapest this week that Prof. László Dobszay, one of the giants in the field of Gregorian chant scholarship, has died at the age of 77. He was a specialist in central European folk song, in the tradition of Bartók, and he brought that approach to a primarily oral form of music to his equally thorough and valuable research in Gregorian chant, specializing in the manuscripts and melodic tradition of Hungary and central Europe. With David Hiley, Ruth Steiner (my mentor in graduate school), and others he founded the Cantus Planus study group, a collection of international chant scholars who met regularly and opened up the field of Gregorian chant research. He taught, since the 1970s, at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, and among his many achievements was the publication of an enormous study of central European chant known as Corpus Antiphonalium Officii Ecclesiarum Centralis Europae (CAO-ECE). With his colleagues Benjamin Rajeczky and Janka Szendrei, Dobszay founded the Schola Hungarica, a choir of adults and, most strikingly, children devoted to the performance of Hungarian and other central European forms of chant. Their many recordings remain some of the most beautiful and most convincing interpretations of Gregorian chant ever made. How they ever taught children to sing Latin chant so well never fails to amaze me. [New Liturgical Movement]


• Ride out the effects of the hurricane with some online listening: this week, the Sixteen sing Allegri and Les Talens Lyriques perform oratorios by Carissimi and Charpentier, both at the Utrecht Early Music Festival; David Fray plays Mozart's 25th piano concerto and Yefim Bronfman play's the Emperor concerto, both with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra; Adam Laloum plays a recital and soprano Julie Fuchs sings, both at the Festival de Chambord; the Ensemble Zefiro plays Baroque music at the Festival Itinéraire Baroque en Périgord Vert; Handel's Rinaldo with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment from the Proms; the Zemlinsky Quartet from the Festival de Saintes. [France Musique]


• In London David Fray plays the same Mozart concerto with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; David Robertson leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with Yo-Yo Ma playing a new cello concerto by Graham Fitkin and Christine Brewer in Beethoven's ninth symphony; Zubin Mehta with the Israel Philharmonic; the Budapest Festival Orchestra; the BBC Singers in Tavener and Gubaidulina; an organ recital by Thierry Escaich; and Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. [BBC Proms]


• In online video, concerts from the Festival international de musique classique à Annecy all this week -- including performances by Renaud Capuçon, Valery Gergiev, the Apollon Musagète Quartet, and Denis Matsuev. [Medici.tv]


• Oh, yes, and someone named Irene came to visit yesterday, and she was not a pleasant guest. Winds took down a large tree in front of a neighbor's house: miraculously, it fell across the street and did not hit anything or anyone. Just as miraculously, the dead tree that has been darkening our doorstep for months lost some branches but somehow remained standing. Everyone at Ionarts Central is safe, we still have power after a harrowing night, but headquarters did sustain some heavy water damage overnight, after some bad wind gusts took off a section of our roof (and those of our two neighbors). As a result, transmissions from Washington will likely be affected this week, but you should be able to enjoy more reports from Salzburg. [Capital Weather Gang]

Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival ( 15 )

Chamber Concert • Beethoven, Ives

I still remember my first encounter with the Zehetmair Quartet: A cold January Sunday in 2003 at the National Gallery of Art, performing moving Schumann, strong Bartók, and exceptional Cage during which I sat up like electrified. Then as now the Quartet (Thomas Zehetmair, Kuba Jakowicz, Ruth Killius, Ursula Smith) perform their repertoire from memory… one of the exceptions where even I can appreciate the act of playing without a score. Not for the circus-trick element involved, but because it signifies an internalization of—and dedication to—the material that, for a quartet, is truly extra-ordinary.

The program at the Grand Hall of the Mozarteum on Monday, August 15th, with Beethoven’s late string quartets opp.131 in c-sharp minor and 135 in F, looked good, especially as the two works were bridged by a performance of Charles Ive’s Concord Sonata played by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. The Ives fulfilled its promise, the Zehetmair Quartet strangely not. The opening of op.131 hesitant, made it difficult for the ears to follow the line. Dynamic differentiation was kept to a minimum until the end of the first movement and, most surprising, intonation and entries were rarely clean. There’s always the question of whether one might mistake some curious interpretive choice for a bad performance, merely because it does not accord one’s own expectations… But by the time of the third movement I felt fairly safe in ruling that out. This just about above-average performance (to the extent one hears op.131 often enough in concert to establish a meaningful ‘average’) was considerably less than I had hoped for.

C.Ives, "Concord" Sonata & Songs, P-L. Aimard et al. Warner

What to write about the Concord Sonata, this bold and terrific work; massive and challenging as Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata (and referencing it, too)? There are too many facets, ups, downs, lefts and rights in it to list them all and still be meaningful. Hearing is where it’s at. (More about the Concord Sonata on ionarts here.) Playing it is certainly a full-contact sport, involving all of Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s body in the first movement—which the French pianist mastered with brawny excellence. Positively indulgent, actually. That first movement, “Emerson”, was smooth as pebbles and weighty as boulders with a Steinway stress-test thrown into the bargain. The sonata can be—and was—completely mesmerizing before bubbling away into marches and Yankee-doodling. Are the ‘serious’ bits in sent-up by the trivial or are they a send-up of the listener and his ideas of the serious? Whatever the case, one scarcely stops marveling at all the things happening before it’s over.

After the second intermission back came the Zehetmairs with op.135. The primarius was harsh in his attacks, strident at the expense of accuracy, and certainly sparse with any semblance of beauty. Hushed pianissimos were hesitant, quick and loud accents ugly. In late Beethoven, at least the latter may well be intent and the first three movements were in any case considerably better performed than op.131. The result was befuddlement on my part: Was I meant to hear it like this; meant to endure it for some higher artistic purpose I could not perceive? The encore, the second movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet (due to the amiable desire of “we wanted to play something all-together”), suggested it was just an off-night; all the extensive preliminary tuning didn’t help to get this to sound right, either. Not that it could dim the evening’s joy the Ives Sonata had brought.

À mon chevet: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

The bell rang. Ron and Hermione led the way to History of Magic, bickering. History of Magic was the dullest subject on their schedule. Professor Binns, who taught it, was their only ghost teacher, and the most exciting thing that ever happened in his classes was his entering the room through the blackboard. Ancient and shriveled, many people said he hadn't noticed he was dead. He had simply got up to teach one day and left his body behind him in an armchair in front of the staff room fire; his routine had not varied in the slightest since.

Today was as boring as ever. Professor Binns opened his notes and began to read in a flat drone like an old vacuum cleaner until nearly everyone in the class was in a deep stupor, occasionally coming to long enough to copy down a name or date, then falling asleep again. He had been speaking for half an hour when something happened that had never happened before. Hermione put up her hand.

Professor Binns, glancing up in the middle of a deadly dull lecture on the International Warlock Convention of 1289, looked amazed.

"Miss -- er -- ?"

"Granger, Professor. I was wondering if you could tell us anything about the Chamber of Secrets," said Hermione in a clear voice. [...] Professor Binns blinked.

"My subject is History of Magic," he said in his dry, wheezy voice. "I deal with facts, Miss Granger, not myths and legends." He cleared his throat with a small noise like chalk snapping and continued, "In September of that year, a subcommittee of Sardinian sorcerers ..."

-- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, pp. 148-49

As someone who teaches music history I could not help but take note of this portrait of the dusty, boring history lecturer: theater students dread theater history, art students dread art history, and music students dread music history, just as students of magic dread the History of Magic. The mean-spirited depiction cuts to the quick: the droning voice, reading from the same notes, so old and calcified that he did not even notice that he died, simply continuing to read from his note year to year as if nothing had happened. Plenty of stereotypes to be careful to avoid in class!

Wolf Trap Opera Turns 40

See my review of the 40th anniversary gala concert for Wolf Trap Opera in The Washingtonian:

Wolf Trap Opera Turned 40, August 26:

Each summer the Wolf Trap Opera Company stages high-quality productions of major operas for its cadre of young singers. Over the years, the best of these apprentice vocalists have gone on to important careers, which is one of the best parts of attending their performances: to see and hear great talent in the making. Wolf Trap Opera took stock of its 40-year history on Wednesday night, with a gala concert of opera’s greatest hits, pairing some of this year’s new talent with some of the best who got their start in America’s National Park for the Performing Arts. Like most events of this type, it had some memorable moments among others that were less so, and it ran too long with speeches, mostly entertaining but too many in number. (At least at an awards dinner, they serve you food and wine.) If two of the scheduled singers, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and tenor Carl Tanner, had not canceled, it would have gone on even longer than three hours.

At the top of the roster was tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who brought the house down with a gutsy rendition of “Ah, mes amis!” from Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, those famous nine high Cs all on pitch and laser-focused. He also paired off with baritone Richard Paul Fink, heard earlier this summer as an impressive Wozzeck at Santa Fe Opera, in the famous duet from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, “Au fond du temple saint.” Bass-baritone Alan Held was a brooding, granite-solid Wotan leading the gods into Valhalla (from the end of Wagner’s Das Rheingold), as well as a charming Leporello in the catalogue aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, played with an iPad highlighting 1003, the number of the Don’s conquests in Spain. Held’s Scarpia in next month’s Tosca, at Washington National Opera, will certainly be worth hearing, as will -- if the planets align correctly -- the return of his Wotan in WNO’s first complete Ring cycle. [Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:
Anne Midgette, At Wolf Trap Opera gala, enough star wattage to power operahouse 40 more years (Washington Post, August 26)

Susan Dormady Eisenberg, As Wolf Trap Opera Marks 40th Year, 14 Star Alumni to Return for Benefit Concert (Huffington Post, August 16)

Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival ( 12 )

Camerata 1 • Mahler Scenes 8

Picking my program for Salzburg, the first of the Camerata Salzburg concerts with Kent Nagano and Maria João Pires was one of the two, three most immediate choices. With Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Fourth Symphony and Mozart’s last Piano Concerto (K.595 in B-flat) as the main ingredients, it virtually selected itself. When the—presumably sole—opportunity presented itself to attend the Riccardo Muti / Peter Stein Macbeth the same day, I faced a dilemma. Attend the show that was the hottest ticket of the summer, or go with where my heart was, musically? Even before I knew that I would get to attend an earlier performance of Macbeth after all (review here), I opted for Nagano-Hartmann-Pires-Mozart. If I figured after attending Macbeth that it was the right choice; I knew after the Camerata Salzburg concert that there isn’t any Macbeth I wouldn’t have missed this concert for, and gladly.

It started with Ives’ Unanswered Question, a work impossible not to be moving. The space of the Mozarteum’s Grand Concert Hall had the solemn strings sit on stage, not outside, and the four answering woodwinds segregated to the back. The questioning trumpet went around the outside of the hall, from door to door, until it didn’t get an answer to its seventh question.

Elephant Graveyard of String Quartets

K.A.Hartmann, Symphony No.4, Cto.Funebre et al., Poppen / Munich CO / I.Faust, Petersen Q4t et al. ECM

Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Fourth Symphony for String Orchestra sounds like the place where string quartets go to die. Its opening is instantly reminiscent of the opening of the Mahler 10^th Symphony, but without the immediate bleeding-heart eruption that Mahler places after the reoccurring string laments. Instead the climax builds slowly, the textures are sparse and haunting, like an overwhelming, oversized string quartet for orchestra. The language is that of the post-romantic tonality that saw itself squeezed out of the Western classical repertoire—courtesy of the post war embrace of the avant-garde and complexity. The angular aspect of Hartmann’s music comes out in the second movement, rhythmically compelling like a Bartók quartet. Dark and narrative, like a walk through the scary forests of German fairy tale forests.

Ruined to fame by Bernstein & Visconti

Mahler’s Adagietto was performed as a prelude to the Mozart Concerto, with Pires already sitting at the piano which gives a visual clue to how piano-like the rising harp figures are. Ruined to fame by Visconti and Bernstein, the Adagietto has become clad forever in the garb of mourning, associated with the solemn steps along the hearse. It was played like that—lingeringly, funereal—too, but ‘my Gawd’: how gorgeous that can be, at least or especially outside the context of the whole symphony. That’s not what the Adagietto is really about, but it worked well enough in this case, and taking it virtually attacca from the movement’s key of F into the B-flat (subdominant) of K.595, was a gimmick—yes, but one that worked very well, indeed.

Subject to the Swansong Industry

W.A.Mozart, PCs nos. 20 & 27, M-J.Pires / A.Jordan / Lausanne CO Warner/Apex

It also gave the wistful air of hindsight to the Piano Concerto—Mozart’s last, as if it were the softly singing announcement of the composer’s leave-taking. Pires hits just the right (pardon) note between matter-of-factly playing (I love[d] Alicia de Larrocha for that) and unbleeding sentimentality: Classical restraint and a romantic-sensitive touch—to employ these wonderful, useful clichés—in tasteful, unmannered union. Her dynamic range roughly starts at mezzo-piano and ends at mezzo-forte, but her even, round tone is so sublime that it can make even constant mf sound sexy. It perfectly capped a concert that left one back into the busy post-performances streets of Salzburg with a feeling of gratification and elation. Ideal, in short.

Amateur Musicians Still Going Strong

See my preview of the September 11 concert by the World Doctors Orchestra for The Washingtonian:

The World Doctors Orchestra September 11th Concert, August 25):

The phenomenon of amateurs making music is not limited to the piano. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra had a huge success last year with its Rusty Musicians program, giving amateur orchestral musicians a chance to play with the professionals. The latest group of BSO amateurs will take the stage at Baltimore’s Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, side by side with BSO players and under the baton of Marin Alsop, on September 20. The concert is free, if you want to dream about making it into the next class of Rusty Musicians. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra brought together orchestral players from around the world for a concert at Carnegie Hall in 2009 and another one at the Sydney Opera House last March. The latter performance was reportedly the most-watched live concert event on the Internet.

Another group of amateur orchestral musicians, the World Doctors Orchestra, brings together physicians from around the world who are all avid classical musicians. A variable roster of musicians gathers in a city to perform a concert, with the proceeds going to benefit a charitable cause. After previous concerts in Berlin, Cleveland, Yerevan, and Taipei, the ensemble will converge on the Washington area this fall, to perform a concert on September 11, in the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda. The WDO claims that its mission is “to raise awareness that healthcare is a basic human right and a precondition for human development and productivity.” In keeping with that goal, the September 11 concert will raise funds for Whitman-Walker Health and “is also a remembrance of 9/11 and a plea for peaceful solutions to world problems.” [Continue reading]

Rott'n'Roll: Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival ( 14 )

Guest Orchestra • ORF RSO Vienna

With Berg on the program (ditto Webern or Schoenberg), ticket sales recede noticeably, predictably. In Salzburg just as anywhere else. When the composer/work that is coupled with Berg (in this case the Violin Concerto) is so completely unknown to audiences as Hans Rott’s Symphony in E, then it is almost surprising to find the Felsenreitschule (1400 seats) at about 95% capacity with only a few lacunae among the seats and “Looking for [cheap] Ticket” signs before its doors, roughly in balance with the “[expensive] Ticket to sell” signs. Reason to stay away for some, reason to attend for others; for me the combination of Rott and Berg spelled out a great concert! Unfortunately it didn’t guarantee a great performance.

HRott, Sy. no.1, S.Weigle / Munich RSO Arte Nova A.Berg, Violin Concerto, A.Steinbacher / A.Nelsons / WDR SO Orfeo

The ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by its young (1980-born) Chief Conductor and Artistic Director Cornelius Meister (also Music Director of the Heidelberg Philharmonic and Opera), performed Berg’s Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatchinskaja first. He started out with a warm and romantic, confident opening – Kopatchinskaja with a rough, darkly hollow tone in tow. Joyously swaying and bopping along the rhythms, she never descended to pianissimo and or gave that silvery-ethereal tone to the concerto that it is often endowed with. Whether it was that or not, something was missing from the performance; after the notably earthy, terrific start it petered out and offered two movements of well-intentioned tedium.

Hans Rott’s Symphony comes with a great story about which I have written before (for WETA’s now defunct column, and in an upcoming issue of LISTEN Magazine). It’s a grand work, not a great one. It’s flawed, but comprises an absolutely loveable smorgasbord of ideas, and most of them beautifully welded together. If romantic music is up your ally, and a hint of naïve pomposity doesn’t scare you, Hans Rott’s symphony is one you must hear. There are lots of Wagnerian bits, there’s some Schumann, here we go Bruckner, and whoa, Brahms! No wonder the already famous composer wasn’t amused when Rott showed him the audacious work: Rather than being flattered to find himself musically united in a work with these other composers, Brahms probably perceived the final movement of Rott’s symphony—with its more than explicit reference to the finale of his First—as making fun of him.

The ambitious but short (8 minutes, “Alla breve”) first movement, announced with an exposed trumpet solo, received (rightly) spontaneous applause which was of course quickly quelled by the Vigilant Applause Police. It nearly brought tears to my eyes when I imagined how Hans Rott, who—distraught, impoverished, confused—committed suicide at age 26, might have responded to such expression of public approval for his work. The ORF RSO, which recorded the Symphony on the cpo label under Dennis Russell Davis a decade ago, added a terrifically moving Adagio, even as the strings where still clumsy under Meister’s ambiguous, erratically waving direction. The triangle, popping up in some 600 (out of 1500) bars, was only partly reigned in, which added an occasional element of stuck doorbell. The expansive Scherzo and “Very slow – Lively” finale didn’t appear well rehearsed, but no sloppiness could steal the thunder of Hans Rott entirely, helping the composer, if not the performers, to a considerable success. Certainly not a great performance, but still almost a great concert.

The Kit-Kat‡ Conductor: Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival ( 13 )

Nestlé Young Conductors Award • Round Table

The Nestlé Young Conductors Award • Round TableNestlé, the oldest corporate sponsor of the Salzburg Festival, has as of late focused its attention (worth €700,000 or $1M) on the Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award. “An award, not a competition!” (Artistic Director Markus Hinterhäuser), the YCA—in its second year—tries to find a worthy young conductor every year and boost his career by means of prize money and, more importantly, international exposure: A proper Festival-concert in the Felsenreitschule with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. A CD release down the road on Orfeo’s line of Festival concert recordings. And of course plenty press coverage through a whole lot of journalists flown in from the US and Asia and pampered with lovely dinners† and Macbeth-tickets—all courtesy Nestlé, evidently eager to get the word out.

A round table discussion on August the 12th preceded the YCA concert: The lofty topic was “Can culture and arts create identity and peace or is economic prosperity more decisive?” It got poked at by Markus Hinterhäuser, the chairmen of Roche and Nestlé, Franz Humer and Peter Brabeck, Ann Veneman (who has held the jobs of executive director of UNICEF and US Secretary of Agriculture) and Catherine David who has been curator of several French museums in the 80s and 90s, and has focused on Arab and middle eastern art for over a decade. Festival President Helga Rabl-Stadler presided graciously over the event that veered close to becoming a farce.

With a topic like that, vague to the point of meaningless and throwing in a false dichotomy for good measure, it wasn’t too surprising that the discussion descended into an unbroken string of platitudes (courtesy Mme. Veneman) and finally got stuck in the utterly incomprehensible inane prattling of Mme. (“My-theory-is-that-sugar-is-even-more-dangerous-than-tobacco”) LangDavid. The latter referenced every name-dropped Middle-Eastern or French artist-philosopher-philologist-politician with a whole family tree, got endlessly entangled in obscure asides, and muttered heavy-accented, half-digested anecdotes masquerading as insight until she was finally interrupted and silenced to general relief.

The only useful contributions came from the three, mercifully level-headed, men; no-nonsense business-like attitudes of the two chairmen, unsullied by corporate-speak. In between came the devastatingly pithy comments from Markus Hinterhäuser who couldn’t quite hide his mild annoyance with the errant superciliousness of the topic. He boiled it down to a cut-and-dry: “A Schubert Symphony will not help people in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.” Or “Refugees on Lampedusa don’t need a Beethoven Sonata.” And finally: “We’re so intellectual about art, putting contemporary art galleries into social problem zones and find it very chic to be part of that [‘enlightened’] community. But people who struggle decidedly do not care about modern art galleries”. Those were crisp and refreshing comments sufficient—if they hadn’t been half lost on the audience—to expose the idea of burdening of music with extra-musical tasks, whether creating (cultural) identity or peace, as absurd. Neither Tottenham riots nor Rwandan genocide can be traced to a Mozart-deficiency, yet the dictatorships of this world have always marched along to a nice and steady beat of state-supported music. Music accompanies more than it creates. Dancing and singing, pace Mme. Veneman, might just not be particularly “important instruments to create awareness amongst local communities about issues that have an adverse effect on their lives, such as malnutrition, access to water or poor sanitation.” It doesn’t take a drum circle to realize the well has dried up.

Between Humer and Brabeck, attempts were made to bring perspective back into the discussion, which was particularly refreshing since both chair companies generously sponsor culture and might have been thought to have an interest in exalted ideas about what the thus-sponsored culture can actually achieve. Humer railed against imposing Western (management styles and) culture on companies in foreign countries, suggested that “our Chinese management couldn’t care less about our sponsorship of the Salzburg Festival ‘Kontinente’ series”, and then dryly referenced Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food, security, shelter coming well before art. Brabeck meanwhile agreed that music is an expression, not the origin of culture; not inherently good (or bad), but merely a good, which at best enriches the lives of individuals who then can either make something out of that personal improvement, or not.

The Venezuelan El Sistema horse was very nearly flogged to death—especially by Ann Veneman—as the epitome of all that is good and wonderful as far as peace- and identity-building music programs go. Comments that a similar project is missing in Europe, not the least due to the lack of local political support were restrained by Brabeck who pointed out that El Sistema’s origins were precisely not political; that the project had even been opposed by the political powers-that-were. The fact that the current regime makes good use of the orchestra as a propaganda tool was largely ignored, although a snide audience comment remarked that the orchestra’s outreach to Venezuelan prisons was “very gratifying, because it finally gave opposition politicians and independent journalists the opportunity to learn the clarinet.” In strange comparison to the tune of “Venezuela-wonderful”, the politically correct China-bashing was just about to set in when Franz Humer calmly suggested that lifting 400+ million people out of poverty in just a couple of decades, with as many projected to leave poverty behind in the next two decades again, was something worth checking one’s condescending, however–accurate, remarks about human rights abuses.

An apropos aside: As the roundtable the convened, AP sent out the news item that Daniel Barenboim was being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the East-West Divan Orchestra (to perform at the Festival just a week later). A whole different can of worms about culture and its pretensions for peace that was—fortunately—not opened.

† Disclosure: I, too, have partaken in the enjoyment of said lovely dinners.

The YCA Winner

A press conference the day before, with some of the same principal members (Brabeck, Hinterhäuser, Rabl-Stadler), had announced the 2011 winner of the Young Conductor’s Award that Nestlé sponsors. ‘Supporting young talent and honoring outstanding performance in an appropriate way’ are surely all among the reasons why Nestlé sponsors this event; a simpler explanation might be that the company’s chairman and former CEO, Brabeck, once wanted to be a conductor himself. (That he went on to feed the world instead of leading orchestras strikes as a prudent decision.)

A jury of nine musicians and arts administrators (including Mitsuko Uchida and Frans Welser-Möst) decided—after screening video tapes, whittling the applicants down to three, then sending them through ropes (a rehearsal- and ‘concert-like performance’) with the Gulbenkian Orchestra (dir. Lawrence Foster) in Lisbon—on a winner. At the end—after the second of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra (for everyone) and Brahms’ Tragic Overture (in the case of the would-be-winner), the process spat out Ainārs Rubiķis, a soft-spoken 33-year old Latvian who doesn’t look a day older than 19. With that bit of news out of the way, the conference moved on to the apparent highlight, the ceremonial cutting of a 20th Anniversary Nestlé-Salzburg cooperation cake.

The next day Rubiķis would get to perform with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra (“Monsters – in a good way” so Rubiķis), a program he, Hinteräuser, and the Alexander Meraviglia-Crivelli (General Secretary of the GMYO and member of the YCA jury) put on the back of a napkin, with Rubiķis’ repertoire in front of them.

The YCA Concert

The resulting program on the 13th, in trying to cover all the bases, offered bland aimlessness in the form of Debussy’s Prelude á l’apres-midi d’un faune, Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto, Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, and Stravinsky’s Firebird; by and large pieces in which conductors can lose more than gain. Even though the promise of Ainārs Rubiķis exceeds—so the unofficial opinion of the jury members—that of last year’s winner David Afkham, the latter’s concert program (Ligeti Atmosphères and Shostakovich 10th Symphoy) was much stronger in conception and—as the just-issued recording of the concert suggests—execution. (And Afkham is six years younger...)

Ligeti, Shostakovich, Atmosphères, Sy.10, David Afkham, GMYO Orfeo C797

The first thing Rubiķis displayed was that he has all the pompous conductor-poses down pat: Starting with ostentatiously shaking the concert master’s hand, then generously-portentously gesturing the orchestra to sit (an elongated, studied circular wave) and finally going for the obnoxious applause-prevention-conclusion-pose that fakes rapt post-performance audience-silence when the music (or performance) itself wasn’t sufficient to do so. Once invented to keep the early eager clappers in check, it’s become a bad habit that has spread to almost every conductor in every piece that ends with anything less than a triple-fortissimo chord.

It certainly followed the Debussy, which had an unchallengeable, unorganized prettiness about it. It followed the horsey percussion tic-toc and quiet cello pizzicato of the Shostkovich Concerto—with soloist Alisa Weilerstein. I cherish Weilerstein as a very competent cellist, certainly enough for a nicely buzzing Eastern seaboard career. But I am amazed at her continually growing international track record that suggests super-stardom where I hear mere pleasantness. So in the Shostakovich, which showcased a gorgeous tone in the opening before descending into something slightly whiney in a first movement that felt slower than it was. She is subtle (a plus, generally) without being quietly-understatedly overwhelming. Incidentally, she strongly reminds me of one of my favorite Muppet characters, except gripping, not chasing the frog.

The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra—given the gender distribution on this tour being almost the inverse of the Vienna Philharmonic’s a friend suggested “Alma Mahler Youth Orchestra” a more appropriate moniker for the band*—is not a typical youth orchestra. It’s basically a professional orchestra working in the finest concert halls with the best and most reputable conductors, minus the pay. As an educational institution, the players just get room and board. Or as the GMYO website flips the statement around: “The musicians’ participation in the tour projects of the GUSTAV MAHLER JUGENDORCHESTER is free of charge.” Perhaps that contributes to the excitement of performing in a professional setting not being audible at all times, as it would be with a youth orchestra that has at best one high profile outings a year. Or perhaps the orchestra’s edge was dulled by the foot of felt that covers the stage of the Felsenreitschule, courtesy Peter Stein’s Macbeth.

The Four Sea Interludes are great, exciting music that work well just with great dynamic extremes and gradations (of which the GMYO has many) even when color and nuance are in short supply (as they were). The conducting itself was an array of symmetric, soothing arm extensions which didn’t seem to much affect the orchestra one way or the other. During “Moonlight” orchestra and band were in sync; in “Storm” Rubiķis was at his most precise. The concluding Firebird (one of the orchestral Salzburg-highlights with the RCO last year) was monochrome and loud with self-conscious moments… very accurately played but neither on fire or quite taking flight, as it were. It was a good concert, without being a special moment, and it offered no insights as to the future or even quality of the 2011 Kit-Kat Conductor.

Picture courtesy Salzburg Festival, © Silvia Lelli

*One wonders how such a name might manifest itself… would the orchestra immediately start to cheat on the Salzburg Festival with any number of other, fine art and architecture festivals?)

‡ Temporarily forgetting about US American audiences I punned without taking notice that in the US Kit Kat is produced (under license) by Hershey, not Nestlé

What to Hear Next Season: Other Small Series

See my preview of more concerts for the 2011-2012 season, at the Freer and elsewhere:

What to Hear Next Season: More Chamber Music, August 23):

Another museum that hosts a free concert series is the Freer Gallery of Art, with occasional but always intriguing concerts in the Meyer Auditorium, an intimate venue with a lovely acoustic. As for the Library of Congress series, one needs a ticket for the Freer concerts, which can be ordered in advance through Ticketmaster, for a small processing fee. A limit of two tickets per person can be picked up at the auditorium, starting one hour before the concert (which generally begin at 7:30 PM), so early arrival is encouraged.

Because of the focus of the Freer’s collection, on Asian art, the concerts featured at the museum often, but not always, have a similar orientation toward the non-Western, and especially Asian, world. Some of their concerts are performances of traditional Asian music, like the concert of Indian classical music featuring Partha Chatterjee (sitar), Rajeev Taranath (sarod), and Nitin Mitta (tabla) on October 29. Others combine Western and Eastern, like a new concerto for Japanese koto and string quartet, by American composer Daron Hagen and drawn from Tale of Genji. The Lark Quartet will perform the work, with koto player Yumi Kurosawa, on October 13. On September 22, the Four Nations Ensemble will join with soprano Rosa Lamoreaux for a concert of 18th-century European music written in China and the Americas. More concerts on the Freer series will be announced later in the season, and some music from past concerts can be heard through the museum’s podcast series. [Continue reading]

What Else to Hear Next Season
Washington Performing Arts Society | Opera | National Symphony Orchestra
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra | Vocal Music | Chamber Music | Early Music
Phillips Collection | Washington Ballet | Dance | Library of Congress | National Gallery of Art

Artful Fugue

J. S. Bach, Die Kunst der Fuge, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (released on January 11, 2011) HMC 902064 | 77'41" J. Kerman, The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715-1750 D. R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

One would have thought that Bach had said enough about the art of writing a fugue -- in the Well-Tempered Clavier and his encyclopedic works for organ. Still, Bach came back to the fugue in his final decade, creating extensive contrapuntal elaborations of a single theme in both The Musical Offering and The Art of the Fugue. A first draft of the latter work, BWV 1080, shows that Bach had begun work on it in the early 1740s, but it is generally performed in a longer, but still incomplete, version published in the year after the composer's death. There is evidence that the posthumous published version has been altered and "finished" by others than Bach, which complicates matters.

Bach notated the score with each voice on its own individual staff, seemingly to encourage the study of the parts and their contrapuntal interweaving. Nevertheless, Joseph Kerman stands by the assessment of most specialists that Bach conceived the work -- and intended its performance -- for the harpsichord. As Kerman puts it quite wisely, "for this composer learned display was inseparable from practical performance" (p. 34). Many of the recordings we have enjoyed have been for keyboard instruments, like those by Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano), André Isoir (organ), and Gustav Leonhardt (harpsichord). In this recent recording by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, the instrumentation changes with each movement, ranging from solo harpsichord or organ, to small chamber groups (string quartet, combinations of winds with brass or harpsichord), to the full ensemble. This is in line with some irresistible transcriptions of other Bach keyboard works, for various sizes of instrumental ensemble.

The results are rather idiosyncratic and quite wonderful listening. The group spreads out the four canons among the contrapunctus movements, which are performed more or less in order (the "correct" ordering of the movements, which differs significantly from source to source, is a matter of speculation). Cues in the music seem to have inspired the choices of instrumentation: for example, the explicitly written-out notes inégales of Contrapunctus II are played on solo harpsichord. The instrumentation also often illuminates the formal structures, as in Contrapunctus VI, the French overture, where stronger or softer instruments are used to differentiate fugal entrances from episodes of filigree notes, and in Contrapunctus VII, where the harpsichord plays most of the figuration and string quartet reinforces entrances of the subject and answer.

Since the interpretation is not trying to hew to the musicologically "correct" (thank heavens), it would have been great to have some more ornamentation and flights of improvisatory fancy (for example, the final cadence of the Canon at the 10th, marked "cadenza," gets only a few notes from violinist Bernhard Forck). The two mirror fugues (XII and XIII) receive two performances each, the rectus and inversus forms mirroring each other in different instrumentations. The best decision of all is how the players treat the fragmentary Contrapunctus XIV, the possibly quadruple fugue left unfinished by Bach, weaving in the theme of his own last name: eschewing any of the completions -- the attempts are legion -- the group just plays it until the final notes of what Bach finished trail off into silence.

Kerman's book is about a vast assortment of Bach's fugues, not only Die Kunst der Fuge, and he notes that "most of the fugues [in the work] differ significantly from any Bach had composed earlier," adding that "some are contrapuntally much more complex" and "some are simpler." As Kerman sees it, Contrapunctus I, the first fugue in The Art of Fugue is an "elemental fugue" stripped of all (or most) contrapuntal devices, never even modulating beyond the tonic and dominant keys.

Also extraordinary, and paradoxical, is Bach's decision to open a work like The Art of Fugue with a fugue that evokes improvisation. There is actually a written-out cadenza at the end. Paradoxical, because if one improvises a fugue with a simple subject tailor-made for strettos -- as this subject is -- it is almost perverse to eschew them.

As if to make the point about the plainness, the rudimentary quality, of the first fugue, Bach weaves in a near-complete statement of the answer form of the subject in the final measures, hidden in the tenor line as the other voices ornament it in a cadenza-like way. As Kerman notes in his study, Bach added these final four measures, not found in the manuscript first draft, only in the version published after his death, and it seems to make a circular gesture.

Kerman labels the first subject of Contrapunctus X the "Enigmatic Subject," opening as it does on the seventh scale degree and immediately launching this fugue into strange harmonic territory, leading to an "utterly improbable contrapuntal feat that throws up new expressive chords on almost every beat" (p. 40). The "singular rhetoric of the first subject," he notes, "fascinates and mystifies. [...] What matters is not the truth but the multifariousness of fugue." Kerman also takes note that much of what makes this fugue so striking was part of the revisions published in the 1751 version; many editions include both versions as variants for comparison.

Douglas R. Hofstadter, in his fascinating book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, uses the example of the Bach fugue (mostly focusing on Das Musikalische Opfer) and the enigmatic art of M. C. Escher as comparisons to very complicated mathematical theories (explained for the layman). The uncompleted quadruple fugue of Contrapunctus XIV appears memorably in his explanation of Gödel's theories about incompleteness: was the incompleteness of the final movement "caused by Bach’s attainment of self-reference?" The appearance of the B-A-C-H theme right before the manuscript runs out generally makes me think that Bach intended that final fugue to be incomplete just as he left it, a gesture to the infinite, to the circularity of the form that is implied by the end of Contrapunctus I. About Die Kunst der Fuge, Charles Rosen stated that the work "must, indeed, be played many times before its deceptive lucidity can be penetrated." The fugue, after all, is a process rather than a defined form, strictly speaking, and perhaps the ideal fugue is endless.

Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival ( 11 )

Recital • Mullova & Bezuidenhout

J.S.Bach, Sonatas & Partitas, Viktoria Mullova Onyx 4040 W.G.Mozart, Keyboard Music vol.2, Kristian Bezuidenhout Harmonia Mundi

The many variables of music-performance mean that it is difficult to predict the success of a concert. Some fulfill or exceed low expectations, others meet or exceed high ones, some merely disappoint mildly. And then there are absolutely tantalizing programs that fall flat on their face. On paper, Viktoria Mullova performing Beethoven sonatas together with Kristian Bezuidenhout, was such a tantalizing proposition. The latter is one of my favorite forte-pianists (on record). Mullova, known for her exacting standards and as of late with an interesting approach to historical performance, would usually be a treat, also. Her 2009 Bach on the Onyx label, after initially failing to raise my eyebrows, turned on closer inspection (review here) out to be one of the most compelling recordings of the Sonatas and Partitas.

Alas, it wasn’t to be. Performing Beethoven’s fourth and third sonatas, opp.23 and 12/3, in the first half, the feeling was one of befuddlement. Either I was missing something crucial, or it really was only a so-so performance. Exaggeratedly shortened phrases purposely, intriguingly matched the quick decay Bezuidenhout’s 1820’s Conrad Graf fortepiano, but sounded awfully harsh, with a dull edge. With Mullova’s instrument’s tangy and dark tone—squeezed and boxy in the frantically fast first movement of op.12/3—all three Beethoven sonatas were utterly de-sentimentalized, which might have been interesting but was marred by pitch and intonation problems, most of it on the considerably flat side.

Bezuidenhout, sensitive and witty, tickled wonderful facets of the music out of his instrument: here a phrase in a new light, there a quick melody one isn’t used to hearing like that. If true joy never settled in—despite a very considerably improved Kreutzer Sonata (op.47) in the second half—it wasn’t his fault. The way he played a virtual duet with her pizzicatos and his trills was a brief moment of utter delight. Just not enough in a program that felt like Mullova and Bezuidenhout are still at the very beginning of their partnership in exploring Beethoven.