Notes from the 2012 Salzburg Festival ( 14 )Lutosławski, Simon Rattle, Berlin Phil

Berlin Philharmonic • Sir Simon Rattle

Accompanied by Lutosławski’s Third Symphony, Brahms’ Piano Concerto in B-flat looked like the pacification of the kind of Berlin Philharmonic-attending Festival audience member who has booked the tickets based on the orchestra’s reputation alone, and booked a table at the Goldener Hirsch for right after intermission. Surprisingly few of them seemed to have made such modern-music-avoiding reservations, though judging by comments overheard, the in-performance coughing, premature exits, and the very tame applause after the Lutosławski, a few more may have wished they had.

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Cage 100, Part 2: Freeman Etudes

J. Cage, Freeman Etudes, Books 1 and 2, I. Arditti (1993) J. Cage, Freeman Etudes, Books 3 and 4, I. Arditti (1994)

John Cage (1912-1992) would have celebrated his 100th birthday on Wednesday, and Washington's museums have come together to host a series of performances for the John Cage Centennial Festival over the next several days. On Thursday evening, the Phillips Collection got in on the act, with a solo recital by violinist Irvine Arditti that was billed as the "American premiere" of Cage's mind-blowing virtuosic showdown, the Freeman Etudes (the program clarified that it was Arditti's first American performance of the complete set). As described in a study by James Pritchett, Cage began this set of etudes for solo violin at the request of Betty Freeman in 1977, with Paul Zukofsky in mind as the performer. When Zukofsky pronounced the work unplayable -- probably on some level one of the things that the composer was hoping to achieve, music so detailed, with all of those details generated by chance operations, that it could not be played -- Cage halted composition at the end of the second book, only to take it up again when Irvine Arditti expressed an interest, expanding it to four books.

Cage followed a painstaking process to create the work, beginning by tracing points on star charts to determine the initial pitch and duration. Cage assigned all other performance parameters with a series of chance determinations -- articulation, dynamics, unusual effects -- that also indicated the series of pitches that he would follow. Pritchett, who studied this score in great detail and was the one who helped Cage reconstruct his long-forgotten method when he took the etudes back up, estimates that "each note of each etude is thus the product of hundreds of different chance operations." The result, lasting around ninety excruciating minutes without a break, is multifariously perverse, in the lovably eye-twinkling way that only Cage could muster. The compositional plan is a sort of anti-composition, akin to the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. A computer could be fed the pattern of random generators used by Cage and spit out another thirty-two Freeman Etudes. No note can be connected to any other note to make a melody or a form, by the composer's own design, reducing the performer to an assembler of random sound objects.

There is really no way to critique such a performance, either. The act of deciphering the score -- take a look at this excerpt of the score of Etude 18, and your eyes will cross -- to try to determine if the performer is actually hitting each note on pitch (or off pitch, as some notes are required to be), with the right dynamic, pitch distortion, number of ricochet bounces, and so on, is impossible. Arditti could play a rough approximation of the score and almost no one would know the difference. In fact, Arditti had to do just that at the end of one of the etudes, when his highest string broke under the pressure of all those scratches, squeaks, and squawks. To his credit, Arditti soldiered on, playing something vaguely resembling the piece, impossible to render correctly with the three strings he still had. (Returning from the green room with his restrung instrument, he observed drolly, "I only have two E strings left.")

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, ‘Freeman Etudes’ at the Phillips (Washington Post, September 8) Previously:Michael Lodico, Cage 100, Part 1: John Cage sans champignons (Ionarts, September 7)

The piece is often hailed as virtuosic, and the vociferous ovation from the specialist audience -- some of whom had zoned out or even slept for much of the performance -- was an appreciation of Arditti's accomplishment. To think of the work in those terms, to my mind, is to misunderstand what Cage was after on a fundamental level. The question of whether the piece is unplayable is actually irrelevant, since most listeners, if they are honest, have no way to assess if a performance is good or bad. The concept of virtuosity requires three things: challenging music, a talented performer who attempts to play it, and an audience that can distinguish whether the performer was up to the challenge or not. Without that last part, virtuosity is beside the point, and that seems to me exactly what John Cage was saying by writing this music and calling it, to make the irony explicit, "etudes" (the same goes for the Etudes Australes and Etudes Boreales). Rather than trying to assess if this music is unplayable, it seems to me that the real question is whether this music is unlistenable. I cede the point that Cage's ideas have been influential, but I refuse to admit that the experience of listening to these pieces is more about beauty or pleasure than it is about endurance.

Ionarts-at-Large: Maazel's Inauguration Concert in Munich v.2

No glitz, no speeches for the second of the two inauguration concerts of Lorin Maazel’s music directorship with the Munich Philharmonic—just music. Wagner and Bruckner: the Tannhäuser Prelude and Venusberg music, Tristan & Isolde Prelude and Liebestod, and then Bruckner’s Third Symphony. One last run-through before the orchestra is off to Lucerne to impress abroad.

They should impress, because as opposed to the spotty first night with Mahler Ninth, this second evening was thoroughly satisfactory.

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Der Frosch

This article was first published at The Classical Review on September 7, 2012.

R. Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten, S. Gould, A. Schwanewilms, M. Schuster, W. Koch, E. Herlitzius, Vienna Philharmonic, Salzburg Festival, C. Thielemann (released on May 29, 2012) Opus Arte OA 1072 D | 220'

The story of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, of course, does not make any sense. As some of the characters themselves admit near the end of the second act, with an air of befuddled mystery akin to that experienced in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, “Something is happening, but we do not know what it is.”

An Empress, captured like an animal by an Emperor on the hunt, has no shadow, a metaphor for childlessness — or is it? If Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto, as it is often described, is the 20th-century counterpart of Mozart’s Magic Flute, something has gone wrong with the fairy tale’s “happily ever after.” The spirit-world Emperor and Empress (an extension of Tamino and Pamina?) cannot have children, and the altogether human Dyer and his caustic wife (Papageno and Papagena) do not have a whole brood of little children either, mostly through the wife’s stubbornness. The Empress’s nurse, a spirit herself, tempts the Dyer’s wife to give up her shadow (fecundity) to the empress. The voices of unborn children moan woefully within the crackling of a frying pan in the fire, but in the end the Empress cannot bring herself to steal the humanity of the Dyer’s wife, and all are saved. It’s not really a spoiler — you will still be surprised when you hear the music.

In this inventive but strange staging from last year’s Salzburg Festival, director Christof Loy gets around the problem of von Hofmannsthal’s oddest libretto — and that is saying something — by ignoring it more or less completely. No need here to worry about how to stage a broom turning into the youth who tempts the Dyer’s wife, a sword magically appearing in the Dyer’s hand, the earth opening up and swallowing up the Dyer and his wife, a river overflowing its banks, or a boat carrying the Empress into Keikobad’s temple on the moon mountains.

In its place Loy creates a mise en abyme, a set of stories taking place during the first complete recording of Die Frau ohne Schatten, led by Karl Böhm in the 1950s, in the Sofiensaal in Vienna. Loy says the idea came to him when he read about the recording, for which Böhm convinced his singers to tolerate spartan recording conditions in an unheated hall in mid-winter. On a platform, with chorus risers behind it, the singers stand in 1950s attire, while supernumeraries create the sense of interaction between the singers and the engineering staff, in a booth above the stage. An assistant moves the principals around, searching for the right placement at the right music stand.

Whether this production irritates or intrigues will depend on the viewer’s tolerance for dissonance between the story being told by the words and the different one actually unfolding on stage. The latter sometimes recasts the former in an edifying light, as the story of the singers in the recording session is revealed: the escapades of the Dyer’s wife as the excesses of a star singer, the lonesome neurosis of the Emperor as the insecurities of a tenor burdened with a voice-crushing role, the isolated sadness of the Empress as a young singer’s estrangement amid a crowd of veterans.

In a bonus video about the production, Loy explains some of his ideas — “The shadow is a metaphor for the responsibility that you take on in life as a rational being. To me that is the only possible meaning,” he says, for example — but it is not always clear how they made it into the staging. (The boos lobbed at the production team at the end of the curtain calls indicate that some in the audience were left unconvinced.)

Loy’s direction helped Anne Schwanewilms capture the fragility of the Empress, central to his approach (“I always see her as a precious, privileged daughter who is driven around by a chauffeur all the time”) — the Empress’s longing for children, heightened by her awareness that her father, Keikobad, will turn her husband into stone if she does not bear any, is evoked when the supernumeraries are all replaced by child versions of themselves, and again when the chorus of unborn children appears in sailor costumes in the final scene, made into a Vienna Boys Choir Christmas concert. Michaela Schuster creates a fleering, almost vicious Nurse (according to Loy, “a Mephistophelean character: I think of her as a fallen archangel”). The group of cabaret revue girls with large feathers, added to the argument between the Dyer and his wife, was perhaps a bit much.

None of it matters, anyway, when the Vienna Philharmonic renders this most luscious of Straussian marvels with extraordinary sounds coaxed forth lovingly by the hands of Christian Thielemann. Strauss puts the elephantine orchestration of over 160 instruments — the Vienna Philharmonic is packed cheek to jowl into the Salzburg pit — to startling use, like the knot of avian woodwinds and solo strings that accompanies the entrance of the Empress in Act I. Otherworldly sounds go with her reference to the loss of her talisman shortly after, with muted low brass and low strings, celesta, and harp harmonics (the combination sounding almost like a gong). Plaintive solo cello and evanescent strings accompany the Emperor’s melancholy scene listening to his red falcon in Act II, while the clamor of the catastrophe at the end of Act II sounds like it will unmake the world. The whole score is full of moments like this, when one tries to guess what bizarre combination of instruments Strauss has called for and finds out it is something completely unexpected, like a wind-machine. The most pleasing part of the bonus video is the chance to watch Thielemann in rehearsal, a conductor who knows so clearly what he wants: he can get it from just smiling boyishly in the direction of the clarinetist.

This is only the third staging of the opera to make it to DVD, alongside the 1992 Salzburg production with Cheryl Studer, Thomas Moser, Bryn Terfel, and Eva Marton, conducted by Sir Georg Solti (Decca), and a version with Wolfgang Sawallisch at the helm (Arthaus Musik), filmed in Japan (with some regrettable cuts in the score, it features a different cast from his uncut studio recording, which remains at the top of my list). The unusual staging may dissuade some viewers, even die-hard Strauss fans, not to mention the fact that the vocal casting, while certainly good and capable, is a little strained by the score’s demands. Stephen Gould’s Emperor and Anne Schwanewilms’ Empress have a clarion sound, until they reach the highest notes, which shred just a bit. As the Dyer’s wife, Evelyn Herlitzius throws herself at the role with a wailed abandon, lacking some of the gorgeous soaring quality that Strauss, somewhat cruelly, also requires.

Schwanewilms, by contrast, has this in spades, even in the final scenes as she sings to Keikobad, against radiant strings and tender violin solo, followed by the magical deployment of both celestas and both harps with percussion. Michaela Schuster is a malevolent presence as the nurse, both vocally (blazing at the top) and dramatically, and Wolfgang Koch’s Dyer is, quite appropriately, a rather sad sack. The contributions of the supporting cast and the choruses, both the Vienna State Opera Chorus and the Salzburger Festspiele Kinderchor, are excellent.

SEE ALSO:
Jens F. Laurson, Phantasmorgastic, but with Shadows: FrOSch @ Salzburg — Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival (16) (Ionarts, August 30, 2011)

Ionarts-at-Large: Maazel's Inauguration Concert in Munich v.1

Thursday night was the official concert-inauguration of Lorin Maazel (82) as the new music director of the Munich Philharmonic. The mood in the Gasteig’s drab functionalism can’t ever be truly festive, with Mahler Ninth on the program, it took a turn to the downright morose. A good amount of the musical who’s who was there, and every critic who had to, or those who felt otherwise compelled. The audience didn’t quite follow suit: a few hundred bodies were missing to bring the 2500 seat Philharmonic Hall to capacity. But then Maazel really isn’t something very new to Munich audiences—many already know him from his ten years with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (1993 – 2003)—and the enthusiasm in town for him is tempered. So tempered, indeed, that an outside PR agency has been hired to create a little more enthusiasm about his tenure. Maazel tov, as it were.

Although the MPhil is the city’s orchestra (as opposed to the state associated BRSO and the Bavarian State (Opera) Orchestra—state vs. city being an eternal feud between Munich and Bavaria), and this was purportedly a big event, the city’s culturally disinclined major was missing. Fortunately the new in-house hagiographer Elke Heidenreich, an author and TV personality of apparently local renown, was at hand to speak (without first introducing herself) a few laudatory, slightly banal words on the duties of a conductor in general and the abilities of Maazel in particular, peppered with third-hand anecdotes.

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Cage 100, Part 1: John Cage sans champignons

Wednesday evening for a full house, the Contemporary Series at La Maison Française, in conjunction with the John Cage Centennial Festival, presented a tribute evening led by French cellist Alexis Descharmes. For the most part, contemporary works by Cage, Beat Furrer, Pierre Boulez, and Klaus Huber were paired with Descharmes's own instrumental arrangements of piano music by Erik Satie, a composer Cage held in high esteem. There is an apparent "proximity to silence" that these composers share. High points of the program included a 1982 letter from Pierre Boulez to John Cage, recorded in French and English by French actor Michael Lonsdale, that spoke of "keeping freshness for times to come." This letter was followed by Boulez's own tour-de-force Messagesquisse for cello and cello ensemble (though Descharmes recorded their parts himself), where the patron's name, Sacher, is spelled both melodically (E flat-A-C-B-E-D) and rhythmically through vivacious morse code.

A visual dimension was added when Descharmes shared 200 closeup photos of Gerhard Richter's series of six paintings titled Cage on a big screen overhead. Descharmes rigged the slides to change whenever he tapped his foot on a pedal -- every 7 to 10 seconds on average -- while performing Cage's extended Music for Two with violinist Irvine Arditti. The colorful, visibly raw brush strokes paired cogently with the bow strokes of the string players, who used stopwatches to pace their respective periods of silence and movement. While pianist Jenny Lin's approach to the Satie Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes was refreshing to the overall tone (or lack thereof) of the program, Descharmes idea of adding string and clarinet parts often undermined the works. In these slow works, Satie masterfully combats the decay of the piano by having accompanimental chords subtly sustain melodic notes. The expressive clarinet (Bill Kalinkos) and string players (Lina Bahn with Descharmes) tended to push the intensity of long notes in a way that moved the character of these pieces away from the proximity of silence.

Other Reviews: Stephen Brookes, Cellist Alexis Descharmes and friends pay tribute to John Cage (Washington Post, September 7)

Program note writer Erik Ulmann quoted Descharmes, writing that he spent a July evening "eating mushrooms" while preparing for this Cage evening, and that it was then that he came upon the Richter retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. There is an authenticity in Descharmes's magic mushroom consumption when planning a Cage evening, though who knows if Descharmes actually gently picked the shrooms off of cow dung in green farmland as Cage, a renowned mycologist, may have done, or obtained them from less earthy sources. No matter the caliber of one's ears and listening experience, this repertoire is challenging. Imagining the aid of having consumed magic mushrooms prior to listening to seemingly randomized cello scratches by Descharmes interspersed with snare drum stick taps on the stick holding up the piano lid by and other interesting techniques by Steven Schick in Cage's Etudes Boréales gives one the feeling of hope that it is possible to be in the know. Indeed, we too may be able to understand Cage's music, and even the painful fingers scratching-down-the-chalkboard, spine-twinging disharmony of Klaus Huber's ...ruhe sanft... for cello, recorded cello, and a few recorded words, by listening after eating magic mushrooms. The key being to be mentally distorted by an organic drug before experiencing the intentional aural brutality of some of this repertoire. I look forward to comments from readers who have experimented with Cage avec champignons.

Paris Street Walker

I've been walking the streets of Paris for the past three weeks. I don't speak French. I'm a descendant of the first French settlers of Canada, but my grandparents chose to assimilate as they worked their way down the New England coast, dropping the French language with each move. Canadian French may not be so useful after all, as films from Canada have subtitles here, but I only wish. For the most part I've picked up enough to get by and many Parisians speak several languages including English -- I'm working on it.

The advantages of a longterm stay in this city are many. My favorite is not having to rush in tourist mode, checking off a to-do list: I can get lost, go with the flow, and enjoy the amazing light that makes this city so special to me. I arrived at the end of August, the last of the tourist crush. The Louvre was a mob scene, no different than the Met has been, I might add. It's wonderful that so many consider the great museums as destinations. Whole families are experiencing art, many for the first time, and these crowds bring in big money. My one suggestion is, please, look at the art, it's the real deal. Put the cameras away! That's coming from someone who has no problem with taking a few snaps in the galleries. It's gotten crazy.

Once September came, it was like magic, as most all of the tourists were gone. No mobs; shops that were closed for holiday are now open; school is open, and it's a whole new scene. The lines at the Musée d' Orsay are much smaller, enabling me to get a good fix of some of my favorites: Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, and Redon -- it's a great collection. The exhibition Misia, Queen of Paris, which Charles mentioned recently, closes this week. What a life, what a collection of artists, musicians and writers she treated and entertained -- those were parties.

The fashion line Louis Vuitton may be known these days for its bling appeal or excess. I came away from the Vuitton Marc Jacobs exhibit at Les Art Décoratifs with new respect for his design innovation in the turn-of-the-century steamer trunk trade, which is how he got started. Steam ship leisure travel was growing and couture clothing needs couture luggage -- amazing craftmanship. That nefarious logo is everywhere these days. It originated by a need to waxcoat the cases to waterproof them. The original logo was raised wax, very practical almost by accident, without the kitsch. More posts coming, and pictures are on my Flickr site.

Notes from the 2012 Salzburg Festival ( 13 )

George Frideric Handel • Giulio Cesare in Egitto

Four countertenors on stage at a time exude a fascination all of their own. Especially when those countertenors are Andreas Scholl, Christophe Dumaux, Jochen Kowalski, and Philippe Jaroussky—in that formation to be heard in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto at the Salzburg Festival.

You could have put eight countertenors on stage, alas, and it wouldn’t have begun to salvage this tacky and juvenile production by the Zurich-regulars Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier. To be fair though, the lion share of the dubious credit for the on-stage shenanigans likely belongs to Zurich-regular Cecilia Bartoli, a frequent Leiser & Caurier collaborator who undoubtedly had a say in how her stage appearances were orchestrated.

The only thing more disturbing than the cringe-worthy jokes was that the audience reaction: The more vapid the gag, the more heartily the laughs. In the second of the summer performances (the opera had already premiered during the Bartoli-run, Cleopatra-themed Salzburg Whitsun festival), only one self-respecting patron in the upper circle had the heart to boo during the most fearfully vulgar scene: As part of the entertainment act of Cleopatra-in-disguise in the second act, Bartoli mirthfully straps herself to a rocket and soars off stage. The whole thing looked like Miss Piggy imitating Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” video, calculated to elicit the cheap laughs it got; a vision into Kermit’s most cruel nightmares.

With its heavy handed Personenregie and ham-handed jokes, the production was very early 90s; a perfectly preserved specimen, as if time had stood still. Wallowing in tastelessness and narcissism, it never made up its mind whether it wanted to be kitsch and horseplay with plastic crocodiles and assorted rubber raptors or a bit of social criticism. Any  attempt at the latter didn’t, unfortunately, amount to more than lazy visual references to the upheaval in Northern African states over the last few years. Even the ballet of soldiers seemed confused whether they wanted to engage in scary make-believe fighting and shooting, or whether just to do jocund ballet moves with and without dummies.

Amid this, Bartoli’s Cleopatra—unintentionally looking like an ageing bordello queen in crotch-high leather boots—doles out the camp as liberally as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Seeing her imitate Uma’s Pulp Fiction dance hurts, and so does watching the slap-stick flowers wilt and smoke as poisoned wine is poured out over them: Knee-slappers, for those who find Benny Hill too sophisticated. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the political statements are just as trite and prop-heavy. Economic colonialism, attaché cases with EU flags, oil-rigs, Sesto-as-suicide-bomber, laser guided bombs being called in, and another swift ballet of the desecration of the corpses… it’s an oh-so-clever, unremitting string of banalities and visual platitudes. Heterosexuality is portrayed only in the crudest, crassest terms, reduced to crotch-grabbing and pelvis-pounding. Tolomeo’s shtick is that he constantly kicks things… preferably boxes. Because, you see, he’s an angry young man, and that’s an angry young man’s only way to express anger, apparently.

When the soldiers—Mission Accomplished, the oil flowing again, Cesar-as-Brussels reigning safely—finally strip their uniforms, they turn out to be ushers of the Salzburg Festival. The singers gather for a frivolous new years’ eve party ‘round the grand piano, and even the deceased characters mingle again. Far away in the background, the fighting continues, and in the very end the cleared stage of the House for Mozart reveals a view, through the open stage doors, to the Toscanini Courtyard, where a real Austrian light tank pops its 105 mm gun in, aiming at the audience. A coup de théâtre, no doubt, but to what avail? If the preceding five hours hadn’t been an endurance test of un-ironic daftness and infantilism, this could possibly be taking as a scathing comment on how war goes on as we turn back to our daily plaisirs. But as is, it only caps the stupidity with one last martial gag. You would think the whole thing insults the intelligent opera-goer… but judging by the reception, that’s too small a minority group to matter.

What’s there to take away then, other the insight to give the firm of Leiser, Caurier, & Bartoli a wide berth in the future? In a word: Come for the show, stay for the music: The cast would have been sensational twenty years ago and it’s still very respectable recycling. Il Giardino Armonico under Giovanni Antonini provided moments of great loveliness, and they tried hard to bring some dramatic life into those endless repeats of the strophic arias. They weren’t as lively as Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens de Louvre in Tamerlano a fortnight earlier, but they made good on the promise of the music.

Anne Sofie von Otter’s Cornelia is made to look like a doddering senior citizen and seeing Tolomeo woo her wildly feels uncomfortably like a case of Gerontophilia. She punched above her weight most of the time, but her great lament was so beautifully sung and so tastefully played, that the saddest thing about it might have been that Handel could not hear it himself, to hear in what high regard his music is held, still 288 years after its first performance.

Feel about Bartoli how you may, at 46 she’s still in shipshape, vocally—ever unique and compelling. Dramatically, Andreas Scholl was saved from the worst by his innate reticence. His Cesare’s lament (lots of lamenting in this opera!) was sung with a velvety, veiled voice, very controlled, and given the necessary gentle-enough accompaniment that allows Scholl to be heard in the house. Agility is not his strength, but Jochen Kowalski in his drag role as Nirena delighted with his strong and comfortable alto. Christophe Dumaux, torpedoed by the shtick he had to perform, brought his virile voice to bear extremely well. Jarousky’s youthfully strong and bright voiced performance was most magnificent, even as he tried to act earnestly through the pitiful role he is given, which involved endless smearing of things— alternating blood and tar—on him and others. Ruben Drole, an ensemble member of the Zurich Opera, and Peter Kálmán a former ensemble member of the Zurich Opera rounded the Zurich-in-Salzburg production out blamelessly with their Achilla and Curio, respectively.

Speaking of Zurich, one wonders: Why does Salzburg have to rummage through the theatrical costume stock of the Zurich opera for almost everything it did in this first year under former Zurich Opera Indendant Alexander Pereira? Bringing one’s Rolodex from the past job is understandable. But simply moving the whole operation, singers, directors, administrators, and PR personnel some 200 miles east seems unsatisfactory, even for a first year of operations.

Pictures above and below courtesy Salzburg Festival, © Hans Jörg Michel (taken at the Whitsun Festival)

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