Sretensky Monastery Choir Goes Secular

The concerts of the Sretensky Monastery Choir made our picks for October principally because we wanted to hear them sing Orthodox liturgical music. Anyone who went to their second concert, at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on Monday night, hoping to hear that repertory was, like me, disappointed to learn that this program, unlike the one at the Library of Congress over the weekend, was devoted exclusively to Russian folk and secular songs from the first half of the 20th century. In many ways it was a program meant for a Russian audience, who showed up in great numbers and by the end had not a dry eye among them. No translations of the Russian texts were available and at one point an invitation to the audience to sing along with one of the tunes ("Evening on the Roadstead," by Vasily Solovyov-Sedoi) was met with hearty participation from memory. The fervent nostalgia inspired by this music, much of it composed during the two world wars -- an era in which this sort of patriotic music was used to bash superior composers like Shostakovich over the head -- may trouble some listeners. The rumored connection between Archimandrite Tikhon, the abbot of the Sretensky Monastery, and Vladimir Putin is not likely to ease anyone's mind.

Other Articles: Anne Midgette, Sretensky Monastery Choir at the Library of Congress (Washington Post, October 8) Carl Schreck, Orthodox Official: God, Not State, Should Protect Believers’ Feelings (RIA Novosti, October 6) Kathy Lally, Moscow’s Sretensky Monastery Choir visits D.C. (Washington Post, October 5)

The sound of an all-male Russian chorus was not so long ago something that principally inspired fear. It is a full-throated sound, from the shrill shriek of the nasally placed high tenors down to the rumble of the lowest basses reaching notes near the edge of the capacity of human hearing -- rather than a well-rounded, beautiful one. One of its hallmarks is the use of staggered breathing that gives the impression of an endless music, with the complex sounds of the Russian language placed with precision and unity. The music was of various kinds -- tender love songs, comic riffs (with ear-piercing whistles accompanying it), somber evocations of the tragedies of war and the loneliness of soldiers -- but it was all cut from the same stylistic cloth, none of it all that sophisticated. Of the four soloists presented over the course of the evening, bass Dmitry Belosselskiy, who has a burgeoning opera career after getting started with the Sretensky Monastery Choir, stood out for the broad caliber of his prominent, unnuanced voice. Tenor Alexey Tatarintsev, smaller in scope and slightly swallowed in tone, was strongest in soft, slow selections. Conductor Nikon Zhila led with one of the oddest vocabularies of gestures ever seen, and that is saying something for choral conductors, with an elaborately choreographed lead-up to a downbeat that was never quite clear.

44th Annual ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards Announced

44th Annual ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards Announced

New York, NY, October 9, 2012: The American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers has announced the winners of the 44th Annual ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for outstanding print, broadcast and new media coverage of music. The winners will be honored at a special invitation-only ceremony and reception on Wednesday, November 14th at ASCAP's New York offices. Over the years, tens of thousands of dollars have been distributed in cash prizes to winning authors, journalists and broadcast producers and personalities.

http://www.ascap.com/Press/2012/1009_deems_taylor_award.aspx

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Jupiter Quartet Brings Music Back to NAS

Mendelssohn (op. posth. 80) / Beethoven (op. 135), Jupiter String Quartet

After winning the Banff Competition in 2004, the Jupiter String Quartet gave a pair of top-notch concerts in Washington in 2005, at the Corcoran and the Library of Congress. For that and for personal reasons (the first violinist, Nelson Lee, is the son of my undergraduate piano teacher), their subsequent performances here -- back at the Corcoran in 2008, was the most recent -- have been must-hear events. The group's recordings have trailed off a bit, too: the last thing we heard from them were made live at the 2010 Music@Menlo festival. (Second violinist Meg Freivogel and cellist Daniel McDonough had a baby last December, so life must be getting interesting.) We were happy indeed to get to hear them on Sunday afternoon, for the first time since 2008, when they brought music back to the eccentric auditorium of the National Academy of Sciences, which has been closed for renovations the last couple of years.

It was sometimes brilliant, sometimes tender Mozart first, the genial D major quartet, K. 575, which featured the Jupiter's warm, cohesive ensemble sound quite scrumptiously in the second movement. The other three movements moved perhaps a bit too fast for their Allegretto tempo markings, not harried but also not allowing this gentle music to unfold comfortably. The sound panel-fueled acoustic brings sounds quickly to the ear, including individual bites of attack, but it also made it easy to appreciate the best individual tone of this foursome, the ripe, flavorful viola of Liz Freivogel (sister of Meg). McDonough also had a pleasing turn in the cello's solo musings in the trio of the third movement. The concert's final work, Brahms's first quartet (C minor, op. 51/1), impressed even more, because it made a strong case for the piece, when this composer's string quartets have generally struck me as inferior to the chamber music with piano. The Jupiter's interpretation did not go for loud and aggressive sounds, giving a hushed, interior quality even to the agitated first movement. The second-movement Romanze glowed with an introspective softness, and the violins soft-pedaled their parts in the third movement, revealing the viola theme as the central melody, also taking the pizzicati in the trio quite gently. This approach, not squeezing the emotion out of the piece, really allowed the music its secrets, its shyness, even in the often strident Finale, up to the overwrought coda.

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, Music review: Jupiter String Quartet (Washington Post, October 9)

As we have noted time and again with this quartet, their forte is with more recent music. At their previous concerts, it was Britten's quartets especially that impressed, and here it was Bartók's first quartet, op. 7, that seemed the work the group most loved to play. All four musicians dug into the piece, with a sense of released power perhaps held back in the Mozart, which did sound a little precious by comparison. This was Bartók that was alternately intense and elegiac in the first movement, and then cranked up to ferocity in the second movement. After a somber introduction, the third movement was launched with the barbaro repeated notes and a folk-like growl in the tone, yet coordinated at the same time that the tempo was handled with great flexibility.

You will have to wait until this winter for the next chance to hear a concert at the National Academy of Sciences, with the Imani Winds (February 10, 3 pm).

Ionarts-at-Large: MPhil Season Opening Concerts

After two introductory concerts (Mahler and Wagner/Bruckner), Lorin Maazel’s first season with the Munich Philharmonic was well under way in a variety—deliberately varied—of concerts. The inclusion of works by Bach, Schubert, Strauss, Stravinsky, Puccini, Fauré, and Ravel was no accident, it’s all part of the consistently stressed, heavy handed at times, repertoire-diversity that Maazel is meant to bring to the Munich Philharmonic. The less-than-subtle suggestion that that’s what was missing under his predecessor never far away. At least it’s a better narrative than the 82-year old, by now tottering Maazel being the future of the orchestra.

On the four-concert program on the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th, and 16^th of September (as if two or three weren’t enough) was Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.5, Schubert’s Fourth Symphony, and Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra. Bach, with the slightly silly inclusion of a harpsichord in the 2500 arena that is the Philharmonic hall of the Gasteig, is good to play for the orchestra, and they should do more of it by all means. It’s music that philharmonic audiences all over the classical world are increasingly deprived on, but shouldn’t. Eventually, as familiarity with the idiom is being re-introduced to the orchestra, it will be good to hear, too.

Schubert’s Fourth, “Tragic”, Symphony was next in this ‘travel-through-the-style-periods exercise’. It’s said that there is quite a bit of Schubert in Bruckner; on this occasion there was quite a bit of Bruckner in Schubert. The most tragic thing about the work is that

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Krenek Symphonies

This article was originally published at The Classical Review on October 7, 2012.

E. Krenek, Complete Symphonies, NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover, T. Ukigaya, A. Francis (released on May 29, 2012) cpo 777 695-2 | 229'39"

It took a while, but the last installment in the cycle of Ernst Krenek’s symphonies, recorded by the NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover, has finally appeared. For those who had acquired the earlier three discs, under conductor Takao Ukigaya, the fourth came out last year, almost two decades later, under new conductor Alun Francis. Listeners who are new to these recordings can buy the box set from CPO, which brings all four CDs together.

Born in Vienna in 1900, Krenek is best known for his jazz-infused opera Jonny spielt auf, if anything, while the CPO set remains the only available recording of most of his symphonies. There have been some earlier recordings of the first and second, both composed in 1921 and 1922, shortly after Krenek had completed his studies under Franz Schreker and just before a short-lived marriage to Gustav Mahler’s daughter Anna (he was the second of her five husbands, and she the first of his three wives). Krenek, a prolific polystylist, produced an extensive body of music that was a compendium of 20th-century composition, embracing at various times neo-romanticism, atonality, neoclassicism, jazz, serialism, imitation of medieval counterpoint (the complex contrapuntal music of Johannes Ockeghem was a particular fascination for him — Stravinsky and Webern, among others, had similar interests in early music), electronics, and aleatory techniques. Not much of it made its way into the five symphonies recorded here, which hover somewhere between late Romantic harmony and vociferous atonality.

In Ernst Krenek: The Man and His Music, scholar John L. Stewart published excerpts from many interviews he conducted with Krenek during the composer’s years in the United States. Krenek produced the first three symphonies in a burst of youthful activity, about which he said: “I am unable to figure out how it was possible even mechanically to write down so many notes in so short a time, not to mention the creative effort that had to go with it or before it.” They are bombastic pieces, seemingly full of the excess of youth and admiration for the rhythmic savagery of Bartók, especially the first, with all of its spiky, hammered qualities played to the hilt by conductor Takao Ukigaya. Krenek wrote of the experience of learning on his feet about orchestration in the 1920s, how to write for the different instruments and combine them, showing progress in the second symphony — at nearly an hour in length, by far the most substantial work Krenek ever completed for orchestra — but both of these pieces often sound like a young man taking a fast car for a joyride. In the same year, 1922, Krenek took a detour through a smaller-scale symphony (for nine solo instruments, op. 11, not included in the set), too, and the lessons learned seem to have played out in the third symphony, which Stewart rightly called “more ingratiating than challenging.”

The change in direction occupied more of Krenek’s time in the next several years, as he avoided full-scale symphonies for smaller works: two concerti grossi (no. 2, from 1924, is included in this set), a symphony for winds and percussion (op. 34, 1924-25), a Kleine Symphonie (op. 58, 1928), and a fluffy, neoclassical Potpourri for Orchestra in 1927, with only the last one making an appearance in this actually incomplete set. Krenek’s world was turned upside down in the 1930s, when the Nazis pilloried his atonal music as “degenerate art” (especially the black hero of Jonny spielt auf), pressuring the Vienna State Opera to take back its commission of his opera Karl V. In 1938, Krenek emigrated to the United States, teaching at a number of American universities and becoming a naturalized citizen in 1945. It is by this chance of history that Krenek wrote his memoirs in English, although they were never published, except in a hard-to-find German translation. The composer’s typescript remains, largely forgotten and unread, in the collection of the Library in Congress in Washington, D.C.

Up to this point in the set, none of the works really stands out as all that compelling — worth discovering, yes, but not the sort of piece one hears and wonders where it has been all one’s life. Upon arriving in the United States, Krenek went through the heartbreak of discovering that he was a virtual unknown in his new country, and times were often lean. Fortunately, Krenek found a champion in the Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, then at the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (known today as the Minnesota Orchestra, which has tragically announced plans to cut player salaries by up to 50%), who encouraged Krenek to take up the symphonic genre again in the 1940s, urging him to go in a different direction. In response, Krenek renounced serialism in his fourth and fifth symphonies, premiered in 1947 and 1949 by Mitropoulos. (A final symphony in 1954, nicknamed “Pallas Athene” because it is a symphonic distillation of his later opera Pallas Athene weint, is not included in the CPO set; neither is the Symphonic Elegy for Strings, a serial work dedicated to Anton Webern in 1946.)

All of Krenek’s symphonies are spined with dissonance, but in many ways his forays into atonality, inspired certainly by the trends in European music in the 1920s and 30s, also are refracted through the lens of the composer’s study of Renaissance and Baroque music. The fifth symphony’s final movement, for example, is a compact fugue that sort of limps to a quiet end, punctuated by thwacks of percussion. In Horizons Circled: Reflections on My Music, Krenek wrote that his “main interest was devoted to the form of the symphony, and in this I can see a certain symptom of being conscious of historical continuity.” While seeking, as he remembered writing in his diary, “to become the successor of Mahler in the field of the symphony,” he brought together both atonal and traditional elements, incorporating in a rigorous way his study of counterpoint and historical forms. “Such encapsulated remnants of another age evoke frequently a feeling of nostalgia and melancholy,” he concluded. “The procedure as such is related to the principles of surrealism, of which at that time I had not the slightest idea.” Sadly for Krenek, in spite of Mitropoulos’s help, he did not become part of the symphonic mainstream, something that this set of recordings could help to remedy.

SEE ALSO:
Will Robin, Sounds Heard: Ernst Krenek—Complete Symphonies (NewMusicBox, September 4)

John L. Stewart, Ernst Krenek: The Man and His Music (1991)

Ernst Krenek, Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music, with contributions by Will Ogdon and John L. Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974)

In Brief: Baroque October Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond. (After clicking to an audio or video stream, press the "Play" button to start the broadcast.)

• Watch a performance of the Orchestre de Paris, with Tomas Netopil and Anja Harteros, in music by Janáček, Strauss, and Dvořák. [Cité de la Musique Live]


• A rare performance of Soler's opera Il burbero di buon cuore, from the Gran Teatro del Liceu in Barcelona, with Jordi Savall conducting a cast including Véronique Gens, Josep Miquel Ramón, and Patricia Bardon. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• A top-notch program of Baroque music by Campra, Quantz, Telemann, Graun, and Vivaldi, with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and sopranos Sunhae Im and Raffaella Milanesi, from this summer's Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci 2012. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From the Festival Itinéraire Baroque, a program of music from the pilgrimage route of Santiago de Compostela with Ensemble Amadis. [France Musique]


• From the Internationalen Haydntage last month in Esterházy, Il Giardino Armonico performs music of Carlo Tessarini, Vivaldi, and Haydn. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Watch the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France perform music by Debussy and Tchaikovsky, with pianist Jean-Frédéric Neuburger at the Salle Pleyel. [ARTE Live Web]


• Listen to a performance by violinist Renaud Capucon and friends, with chamber music by Brahms and Fauré from the Wiener Musikverein. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• The Orchestre National de France performs Fauré's Requiem Mass. [France Musique]


• Listen to a program of new music performed by the Arditti Quartet, from Musikprotokoll 2012 in Graz. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Simon Rattle conducts the Berlin Philharmonic at this summer's Lucerne Festival, in Debussy and Ravel, plus the prelude to Act I of Lohengrin and Sibelius's fourth symphony. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From the Festival de Radio-France Montepelllier-Languedoc Rousillon, the Trio Wanderer performs music by Friedrich-Robert Volkmann, Schubert, and Dvořák. [France Musique]


• Chamber music by Josef Suk, Artur Avanesov, and Dvořák, performed by the Szymanowski Quartet and friends, from the Klosterkirche Traunstein at this summer's Chiemgauer Musikfrühling 2012. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Music of Charpentier and other Baroque composers performed by the Ensemble Correspondances, at the Abbaye de Royaumont. [France Musique]


• Pianist Christopher Hinterhuber plays music of Bach, Schumann, Rzewski, and Beethoven, at the Stiftskirche in Millstatt as part of the Musikwochen Millstatt 2012. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From the Festival Classique au vert, a concert of music from the world of Marcel Proust. [France Musique]


• A vintage performance of Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, recorded in Munich in 1977, with Rafael Kubelik conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]

Ionarts-at-Large: BRSO Season Opening Concerts

The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra’s courtship (perhaps already engagement period) of the wonderfully, sharply musical Andris Nelsons, currently Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, continues: In 2012/13 by handing him the season opener and letting him play with the BR’s unequaled chorus in a very smart program of Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, and—treasure of treasures—Joseph Haydn.

Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Strauss’ Metamorphosen for string orchestra, and Haydn’s Missa in angustiis, better known as the Nelson Mass, are three different takes on war. The uplifting Haydn mass reminds us to be grateful, after a first half that reminded us to be mindful, vigilant, humble, and never forget.

In front of a German audience, more so than anywhere else, A Survivor from Warsaw for chorus, speaker, and orchestra, sounds like an accusation and a warning that has not been tempered by history—if a speck of time like 60, 70 years could at all be considered history. The rightly hesitant applause afterwards was therefore telling and gratifying, as was Gerald Finley’s

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Dip Your Ears, No. 124 ("get happy")

"get happy", Rodgers, Berlin, Gershwin et al., Jenny Lin Steinway & Sons [Release date 30.10.12]

A new release by Jenny Lin – a long time ionarts favorite in Shostakovich and Mompou (Best Recordings of 2011) and various clever piano exotica – is always something to delight about. Even when it is ‘only’ one of “virtuoso show tunes for piano”, titled Get Happy… I suppose.

Hodge-podge releases of light virtuoso piano tunes aren’t up my alley in the first place, but they can be when they’re a little more diverse than Richard Rodgers up and down, Irving Berlin, enriched with fluffy Gershwin. I very much prefer Michael Sheppard’s such collection, which includes Rodgers’ “The Carousel Waltz” and “My Favorite Things” and Earl Wild and Stephen Hough transcriptions, just as “Get Happy”, but also Barber and Bolcolm and Crumb. That’s no fault of Lin’s wholly amiable playing, but it’s hard to not think that her talents are wasted on an album of hotel-lobby pianism, presumably meant for us to say: “Play it again, Jenny”. But on second thought: Could you play something else, please?