NSO Celebrates Love

For what can be more wretched than the wretch who has no pity upon himself, who sheds tears over Dido, dead for the love of Aeneas, but who sheds no tears for his own death in not loving thee, O God, light of my heart, and bread of the inner mouth of my soul, O power that links together my mind with my inmost thoughts?

The Confessions of St. Augustine, Book I (trans. Albert C. Outler)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Paolo and Francesca ("A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it. / That day we read in it no further.")

Thus Augustine of Hippo described the dangers of the books he loved as a young man, books that celebrated legendary lovers like Dido and Aeneas. This was likely in Dante's mind when he wrote the fifth canto of Inferno, where he speaks to Francesca da Rimini in the circle of the lustful. Francesca refuses to accept any blame for her adulterous affair with her husband's brother, Paolo, speaking instead of the danger of a book they read together, the legend of Guinevere and Lancelot. Swirled around in the foul whirlwind with the great lovers is Dido herself, Lancelot and Guinevere, and Tristan and Isolde, much later the subject of Richard Wagner's music drama. Christoph Eschenbach's first subscription concert of his third season with the National Symphony Orchestra, called "Celebrating Love" and heard on Friday night, brought together these and other legendary lovers. Refracted through the lens of the 19th century, however, this music does not focus on the destructive ends of these great loves but on the poignancy of love's power over human hearts.

None of these stories of love ended happily, beginning with the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. This will be a season for Wagner, as we are coming up on the bicentenary of his birth next May, and Eschenbach is featuring his music this week and next. The story of the doomed love between the Irish princess and the nephew of the man she was to marry was told many times before Wagner, a love that was represented as enduring even after death by Marie de France in the chèvrefeuille vine that entwined the lovers' twin graves ("bele amie, si est de nus: / ne vus sanz mei, ne mei sanz vus!"). Eschenbach took this music at an astonishingly slow tempo, with the chromatic non-resolutions of the famous half-diminished seventh chord -- the obsessive motto heard over and over in Lars van Trier's Melancholia -- stretched out to the breaking point in the winds and brass. The slow introduction served to point up the contrast with some of the faster, more urgent music later, but most of the pacing was stately, even funereal, making for some shiver-inducing sweeps of sound.

Other Articles: Anne Midgette, National Symphony Orchestra give lush tribute to love (Washington Post, October 5) Emily Cary, Making 'Neruda Songs' her own (Washington Examiner, October 3) Katherine Boyle, ‘Neruda Songs’ at the Kennedy Center: A lost love’s legacy (Washington Post, September 27) Donald Munro, Clovis High grad Kelley O'Connor to open Fresno Philharmonic season (Fresno Bee, September 22)

The second half was devoted to Tchaikovsky blockbusters, like the Wagner both programmed by the NSO within the last five years. Dante would not have placed Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in the second circle with the lustful, since they were married in secret -- it would be the Wood of the Suicides in the seventh circle for both of them. Although the Russian composer's overture-fantasia on Romeo and Juliet began with a brooding, tense quality, some of the fast sections and the famous love theme were a little helter-skelter in terms of ensemble cohesion. The results seemed much more solidly rehearsed with Tchaikovsky's tone poem Francesca da Rimini, op. 32, with tightly coordinated playing from all sections. Tchaikovsky, who knew something about the negative impact giving in to one's passions could bring, devoted much of the piece to the musical description of the screams and cries of hell, the dark blast of the whirlwind that swirls Francesca and the other lustful souls about. Francesca's plaintive words are expressed in a melancholy clarinet theme, later taken up by flute and cellos, but as is so often the case Tchaikovsky, not knowing when to stop, dragged the work's conclusion out far too long.

P. Lieberson, Neruda Songs, L. Hunt Lieberson, Boston Symphony Orchestra, J. Levine

What to make of the inclusion of Peter and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, represented by the composer's Neruda Songs written for his singer wife, in this company of damned lovers? We covered the song cycle's premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, both here and in Boston, when Hunt Lieberson herself sang it. Within a matter of months, Hunt Lieberson was dead, followed by her husband just last year, both after protracted battles with different types of cancer, which had seemed to be in remission. The Spanish poems, by Pablo Neruda, are thus now much more poignant than they were at the time of the premiere: "My love, if I die and you do not die, / My love, if you die and I do not die, / let's not give pain more territory." Lieberson's harmonic idiom is lush, mostly triadic, even Straussian at times, with hints of Latin beats and percussion in the fourth song -- used in a way that is original, not just a simple recycling of popular music like what one hears in the music of Osvaldo Golijov. Most of the orchestration is transparent, but Eschenbach took care to keep the volume extra soft so as not to cover the smaller voice of mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor, whom we first admired in the (amplified) role of Lorca in Golijov's Ainadamar. O'Connor had an unenviable task standing in for Hunt Lieberson in this piece, and while she sang the songs well, it was hard not to miss the irreplaceable LHL.

This concert repeats this evening, in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

BSO Goes for Baroque

Charles T. Downey, Markus Stenz makes BSO debut in concert influenced by early music movement
Washington Post, October 6, 2012

Beethoven, Sy. 3, Helsingborg SO, A. Manze Rebel, Les élémens, Les Musiciens du Louvre, M. Minkowski

The historically informed performance movement continues to have an impact on mainstream orchestral ensembles. For a time, conductors shied away from that territory, often leaving baroque and early classical music to the early music specialists. As the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra showed in its program at Strathmore on Thursday night, application of the lessons of the movement can help reclaim that repertory for modern instruments, with gratifying results.

German conductor Markus Stenz, in a noteworthy debut with Marin Alsop’s orchestra members, led a chamber-size group in the “Chaos” introduction to Jean-Fery Rebel’s choreographed symphony “Les elemens,” from 1737. In an early flirtation with atonality, Rebel depicted the formlessness of the world before its creation by using all the notes of the D harmonic minor scale simultaneously. Two piccolo players, set perilously high, chirped away in intertwined lines against a cushion of crisply coordinated strings. [Continue reading]

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
With Markus Stenz (conductor) and Kolja Blacher (violin)
Music Center at Strathmore

This concert repeats tonight, at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore.

WNO's Don Giovanni: Eros to the End

Many thanks to Robert R. Reilly for this review from the Kennedy Center.

Halfway through its run till October 13^th, on October 1^st, I caught the Washington National Opera’s performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni.

The theme of the opera is that Eros unbound and undirected to an end that can fulfill it—such as marriage—is destructive. We see this destruction all around the decidedly unmarried Don Giovanni. We see it in the murder of the Commendatore, in the attempted despoliation of women, and, finally, his self-destruction. At the end, Don Giovanni actually chooses hell: the logical conclusion to his libertine life.

Director John Pascoe added interesting touches. I have never seen a baby in Don Giovanni before, for example, but there’s Donna Elvira, one of the Don's former conquests, showing up with one in her first scene in the Piazza. This cleverly shows the consequences—the incarnation, let us say—of the Don's actions. The point of the baby becomes especially poignant in the interior of the cathedral of the next scene, which contains a stunning depiction, in the form of a large statue, of the Madonna and Child. The same statue reappears in the central square in the second act when Donna Elvira invokes justice and prays for guidance. The clear contrast between divine love and love profaned is thus neatly and subtly dramatized.

Pascoe also begins where he ends. During the overture, through a scrim, we see a graveyard and cross before which a woman is praying (presumably Donna Anna, though we cannot see clearly) and Don Giovanni standing on the rock above female wraiths draped in white gauze, lying about like flotsam and jetsam, ghostly victims of his spent passion cast ashore. This highly evocative scene is as neat an encapsulation of the opera, as is the brilliant overture. The graveyard returns in the next-to-last scene of the opera, where Don Giovanni and Leporello encounter the talking statue of the Commendatore.

The sets and costumes are effective, but present some problems. In the first scene, the opera seems to be taking place sometime in the 19^th century. In the second scene the setting has shifted to the early 20^th century. There is even a photo op with the flash camera, and the soldiers are carrying guns. Why the time-travel? In the director’s notes, Pascoe explains that the setting is supposed to be “the historical period of Fascist and Royalist Spain,” and this is supposed to express the defining element of religion in Catholic Spain and the privileges of its ruling class. I don’t think this is dramatically conveyed… on the other hand it doesn’t do much damage. Having pistols onstage, however, did make the sword fight in Don Giovanni’s palace at the end of act one extra silly. Since Don Ottavio had a pistol in his hand, why didn't he simply shoot Don Giovanni and put an end to it? Also, what was Donna Elvira doing in a pants suit, a form of garb certainly not worn during any time of Fascist and Royalist Spain?

The bluish grey color that predominates in the sets also had me puzzled until I read the director’s notes in which he explained that “the set of riveted and rusting steel that is the framework of Giovanni's life; it is literally his prison.” Is everyone in the Don’s prison of ‘sexual freedom’ and should therefore the whole set be a prison? Does Don Giovanni’s unbridled sexual passion imprison everyone? In a way, that’s what moves the action of the opera; so Pascoe’s idea here is not so far-fetched.

Pascoe’s straightforward production clearly and happily trusts the opera enough not to put it through the sieve of a modern ‘concept’ in order to make it relevant to us. This also means being spared—largely—the vulgarity sometimes injected into this opera, such as in San Francisco’s Don Giovanni (read “The Loving and Loathing of Don Giovanni in San Francisco”), with its Cabaret-style sexually explicit poses.

Ildar Abdrazakov’s imposing bass and his rock solid portrayal made for an attractive Don. He was especially convincing and believable as a handsome seducer because he was vocally seductive. His darker side, though, was not quite as apparent: You could not see the moral corruption in this Don. Abdrazakov was matched by Barbara Frittoli's powerful and supple Donna Elvira. Meagan Miller’s soprano voice is extraordinarily potent, but became stentorian in her portrayal of Donna Anna: Too much of a good thing where delicacy and feminine vulnerability would have served her better. Unfortunately her Anna and Don Ottavio (tenor Juan Francisco Gatell who sang his arias with convincing tenderness) were physically mismatched, with Ottavio considerably smaller than his betrothed, in height, breadth, and width.

Veronica Cangemi as Zerlina and Aleksey Bogdanov as Masetto meanwhile were very well matched. Bogdanov especially—a fine actor and singer—brought life to everything he did. He could have given lessons to some of his fellow cast members who were wanting in the animation apartment. Cangemi’s voice blossomed in the Don's seduction scene with her, and she sang her “Batti, batti” aria exquisitely. Andrew Foster-Williams sang well, but could have infused his Leporello, Giovanni's faithful manservant, with greater personality and character. The ensemble singing in the trios, quartets, and the closing sextet was among the evening’s highlights.

Conductor Philippe Auguin leading the WNO Orchestra in a highly expressive performance didn’t just support the characters onstage, he became one of them, and properly so.

Don Giovanni will be repeated on October 7, 9 and 13. RRR

Picture [modified] courtesy Washington National Opera, © Scott Suchman

Tharaud and the Cabaret

Le Boeuf sur le Toit: Swinging Paris, A. Tharaud et al.

Alexandre Tharaud is an Ionarts favorite, and his upcoming recital at La Maison Française (October 26, 7:30 pm) is high on our list of concerts to hear this season. Tharaud plays well, obviously, but we also admire him for some of the more unusual projects he takes on. For example, at the moment, he is involved in a recreation of Le Boeuf sur le toit as a cabaret act with the Théâtre de Cornouaille in Quimper, in the Finistère region of Brittany. Marie-Aude Roux wrote an article about it (Alexandre Tharaud et les fantômes du cabaret, October 4) for Le Monde (my translation):

This project, says Tharaud, takes him back into his DNA -- that of his maternal grandfather, Charles Auvergne, a violinist at the Concerts Colonne. "There is a photograph of him that I look at in the evenings. He is with the orchestra directed by Paul Paray at the Châtelet. He is the only one looking at the camera. He was a versatile musician, who played with the symphony orchestra as well as for popular dance groups, accompanying silent films, and recording with Ray Ventura. He had stopped playing by the time I was born, but that era has always fascinated me."

Tharaud has chosen the mythic Paris of the Années folles, an epoch blessed in both art and people, such as at the Cabaret de la rue Duphot, better known by the name of Boeuf sur le toit, after its owner, Louis Moysés, took it across the Place de la Madeleine to 28, rue Boissy-d'Anglas, and borrowed the title of the pantomime that Darius Milhaud wrote on a theme heard at the Carnaval in Rio. It was there, from 1922 to 1927 -- the belle époque du "premier Boeuf," as enthusiasts would call it -- that all of Paris, drawn by the magician Jean Cocteau, would celebrate life, love, and music in a country devastated by World War I. The journal of the pianist Jean Wiéner (1896-1982), Allegro Appassionato, gives a glimpse: "At one table were André Gide, Marc Allégret, and a lady. Next to them, Diaghilev, Kochno, Picasso, and Misia Sert. A little further away, Mistinguett, Volterra, and Maurice Chevalier. Against the wall, Satie, René Clair, his wife, and Bathori. Then I saw Picabia arguing with Paul Poiret and Tzara... Cocteau and Radiguet go give their greetings to each table. Arthur Rubinstein will come this evening after his concert" to play Chopin. There was also Ravel, Milhaud, Stravinsky, black musicians from the American jazz bands. Everyone did "Le Boeuf," in fact, sometimes with Cocteau beating the drum.

Tharaud will perform a version of the cabaret reconstruction in Paris and other places around France through October 19, just before coming to Washington, and a new disc of the project is due out at the end of the month. The pianist says that what he wanted to capture was the effervescence of the "salad concerts" organized by Jean Wiéner, bringing together older classical music, jazz, and contemporary composition. For example, the first cabaret included Milhaud's Sonata for Winds and Piano, an American jazz band, and excerpts of The Rite of Spring played by Stravinsky himself via player piano. "I am not nostalgic," says Tharaud, "but I believe that there is nothing more enlivening than to make lesser-known music known again, to weaken assumptions, and especially to be reminded that stylistic isolation is the worst thing for an artist."

Historical Brahms

Brahms, Piano Sonatas 1 and 2 / Scherzo, op. 4, A. Melnikov (released on February 8, 2011) HMC 902086 | 69'23"

Recordings of 19th-century music with historical pianos are becoming an obsession of mine -- Andreas Staier's Diabelli-Variations on a Graf, Edna Stern's Chopin on a Pleyel, or Kristian Bezuidenhout's Schumann on an Erard. Publicists, please keep sending them to me, because I find them fascinating when a beautiful instrument is matched with an excellent musician. Add to that growing pile this recent disc of early Brahms played by Alexander Melnikov on an 1875 Bösendorfer piano. The choice is perhaps not perfect, as Melnikov himself notes in his booklet essay: Brahms did prefer Viennese pianos for much of his life, but later in life opted for the new American Steinways and was sometimes critical of Bösendorfer. The two sonatas featured here, nos. 1 and 2, were the young composer's calling card when he made his first visit to the Düsseldorf home of Robert and Clara Schumann in September 1853. As described in the other liner essay, by Guido Fischer, Schumann and his wife were so taken with Brahms that, later in the same year, Schumann lionized Brahms in Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. With mythological hyperbole, Schumann described Brahms as "a young fellow at whose cradle graces and heroes stood watch," the young musician Schumann had prophesied would "spring like Minerva fully armed from the head of Jove," to "give expression to our age in the highest and most ideal manner." No pressure or anything.

Brahms was finished with the piano sonata not long after that, completing no. 3 (by far the most often recorded of the Brahms piano sonatas) in the same year and then focusing on large sets of variations and sets of smaller character pieces. Schumann gave an insight into Brahms's approach to the genre, equating the sonatas he heard Brahms play with "veiled symphonies," and describing the young man's playing "turning the piano into an orchestra of wailing and jubilant voices." We have a good idea of what that could sound like on the modern Steinway, but how might it have sounded when Brahms played it? Admittedly, this instrument was built a couple decades too late -- an Erard, like the one heard on this Dichterliebe recording, was the prized instrument chez les Schumann, or Clara's Graf piano, which the Erard replaced and she subsequently gave to Brahms, would be better. Still, the Bösendorfer gives Melnikov a whole side of soft and murky shading in its tone, with some limitations on the amplitude of sound at the forte end. Having a better idea of what was possible on the instruments Brahms played can help fill out our understanding of what Brahms meant when he wrote down what he did. Add the fact that there is no clear favorite for these two sonatas on modern piano -- perhaps the Richter set (Decca) -- and this disc is easy to recommend.

NSO Opens Third Season with Eschenbach

Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter

Our recommendation of the National Symphony Orchestra's Season Opening Ball Concert came with the caveat that such gala events rarely merit serious consideration. Christoph Eschenbach, who embarked on his third season as the NSO's music director on Sunday night, has made an effort to make this and his earlier gala concerts of at least some interest. He did that partly with his choice of soloist, German star violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, and partly by the choice of repertory, which was not (thankfully) the sort of fizzy pablum one generally hears at gala concerts. Well, mostly.

Mutter's two vehicles were split between the two halves of the concert, beginning with Mendelssohn's evergreen violin concerto (E minor, op. 64), a piece that she probably learned when she was a child and has played hundreds of times. Perhaps searching for a way to keep herself interested in such a familiar work, she turned in a performance that some would call eclectic, others merely weird. Her approach to the rhythmic pulse was mercurial, requiring Eschenbach to keep one foot on the brake and the other on the gas at all times, but it brought out many little gem facets in the piece. She has a growling tone on her instrument, biting with a burr's edge into the G string, creating folk fiddle-like effects, shining wanly at the top of the E string. The technical demands, especially in an astounding first-movement cadenza, were dispatched with little trouble, even though the third movement was pushed to a blistering speed. It was clearly too much to expect Mutter also to play Sarasate's Carmen Fantasy after the intermission, and the results were not up to her normal technical standard, with some sketchy double-stops and flawed intonation. Mutter was probably exhausted: she had played a similar season opener just the night before with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, NSO opens with pretty sounds, fancy dresses, striking decor (Washington Post, October 2)

The good news is that the NSO sounds better and better, and Eschenbach took the ensemble for a spin in Beethoven's short, effervescent overture to The Creatures of Prometheus. With an energetic bite to the playing, it featured all sections well, except perhaps the violins in the endless runs of sixteenth notes. Even better was Strauss's suite from Der Rosenkavalier, which the NSO dusted off last spring, to take on their Central and South American tour. The piece now sounds wonderfully lived in, but not tired, with suave handling of the soft passages, without too much sugary wallowing, a surging passion in the love music, and waltzes that were not overly mannered but full of nostalgia. The highlights included splendid playing from the principal musicians, some new this season. Concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef soft-pedaled her normally buzzsaw-intense vibrato, in intimate company with the other solo strings. Acting principal horn player Laurel Bennert Ohlsson, formerly the associate principal player, whooped it up in the ecstatic horn calls of the opening, and acting principal flutist Aaron Goldman, formerly assistant principal, had some lovely turns, too. The battery, led by a new principal player, Eric Shin, did not all seem to be quite firing at the same rate at times, but only just enough to cause concern.

The NSO's regular season gets under way this week, with Christoph Eschenbach leading performances of music by Wagner and Tchaikovsky (October 4 to 6), with mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor joining for Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs.

'Creation' on Cathedral Day

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

President Theodore Roosevelt spoke on the grounds of what would become Washington National Cathedral on September 29, 1907, when the building's corner stone was set in place. The anniversary of that event is celebrated as Cathedral Day, for which the cathedral's choirs and hired period orchestra performed Haydn's oratorio Die Schöpfung on Saturday evening. This was a suitable tribute to the overarching theological theme of the Gothic edifice's decoration, the creation of the world. It is represented in swirling quasi-abstraction in the tympanum sculptures by Frederick Hart at the façade portals (pictured) and in vivid technicolor in the cathedral's west rose window. It was a fine performance of an extraordinary but also problematic oratorio, in which Haydn was inspired by the later 18th-century overblown performances of Handel's oratorios he heard in London. Haydn worked with a German text, translated by Baron Gottfried van Swieten from a now-lost English libretto. English "re-translations" of the text are often awkward at best, although scholar Neil Jenkins has gone to great lengths to restore the English text. This was unfortunately not the version used here.

In Haydn's ingenious depiction of the maelstrom of chaos at the opening of this oratorio, conductor Michael McCarthy (on what is otherwise known as his name day, Michaelmas) and his musicians had the huge canvas of the cathedral echo chamber to work with, and the result was messy and beautiful, unfolding amorphously. Canned amplification played havoc with balances when the soloists sang, enhancing some of the least attractive features of their voices: the fluttery agitation of soprano Gillian Keith, who tended to be too often ahead of the beat, and the wooly tone of bass Christòpheren Nomura especially. The treble part in the chorus was performed by the amassed boys and girls of the Cathedral choirs, making a heavenly sound at their first entrance ("And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters"). The less present sound of the adults on the other parts came to the fore in the full ensemble moments, like the majestic introduction to the creation of light on the fourth day, the conclusion of the sixth day, and the conclusion of the entire work. Instruments popped out of the texture in appropriate ways: the rumble of the timpani ("And awful roll the thunders on high"), the pale warble of transverse flute ("Through silent vales the limpid brook"), the blaat of the enormous contrabassoon sticking straight up, and many others in the musical depictions of the animals created on the sixth day (the tawny lion's roar, the leaping stag, a pastoral tune for the cattle, the flocks of birds, the shoals of fish). Tenor Rufus Müller had the most consistently beautiful sound as Uriel, but in diction and musical choices tended just slightly to the precious.

Time Stands Still

Charles T. Downey, Folger Consort explores the tunes of 17th-century London
Washington Post, October 1, 2012

Dowland, The Collected Works, The Consort of Musicke, A. Rooley

The Folger Consort is presenting a musical tour of five European cities for its 35th season of concerts of early music. On Friday night, it began with a delightful survey of music in early 17th-century London, quite appropriately for a historically informed performance ensemble based at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Most of the credit for this concert’s success is due to the dulcet voice, rarefied diction, and pure intonation of tenor Aaron Sheehan. He excelled most artfully in the exquisite songs of John Dowland and Tobias Hume, accompanied simply by lute and bass viol, and in one case with choral parts sung quietly by the instrumentalists. Sheehan’s is a voice one is content to listen to all by itself, as he showed in an unaccompanied version of “The Northern Lasses Lamentation,” the most innocent of three less-than-lofty Broadside ballads. [Continue reading]

Folger Consort
With Aaron Sheehan, tenor
London: Music from the City of Shakespeare
Folger Shakespeare Library