À mon chevet: The Rest Is Noise

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

Weimar politics aside, Moses und Aron stands as Schoenberg's most awesome achievement. It is a profound meditation on faith and doubt, the difficulty of the language commensurate with the difficulty of the subject; no doubt the God of the Old Testament would speak through atonal hexachords. At the same time, Schoenberg's parodies in the "Dance Around the Golden Calf" give the work a stylistic diversity that helps to sustain the ordinary operagoeràs interest. (The scene is a little like the moralizing politician's trick of waving pornography while he condemns it.) Yet Schoenberg does not exempt himself from judgment. Moses, his alter ego, ends Act II in abject despair, crying out, "O Word, you Word that I lack!" Admittedly, this aura of frailty dissipates in Act III (never set to music), where the prophet regains his confidence and wreaks vengeance on all who misunderstood him. Aron falls dead. The people cannot be saved, there is no promised land. Moses is destined to roam the desert in the company of his soldier-acolytes. "In the desert," he tells them, "you shall be invincible."

-- Alex Ross The Rest Is Noise (2007), "City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties," pp. 200-201

The nightstand at the moment is in Italy, for the last few days in Sorrento and tonight in Rome. You may have heard of this book, which I am devouring whole during a few days in Europe. Ciao tutti!

William Kapell's Rediscovered Radio Broadcasts

Kapell Rediscovered: The Australian Broadcasts (released May 6, 2008) RCA Red Seal 82876-68560-2

Way back in the prehistory of Ionarts, in 2004, we relayed the news that some new recordings of legendary American pianist William Kapell had surfaced. They were home-made recordings of radio broadcasts of concerts played by Kapell during his last, fated tour in Australia. On the return trip from that visit, in 1953, Kapell's plane crashed, cutting short an already brilliant, but all too brief, career. There is a distant personal connection to note, although it does not really account for my admiration of Kapell's playing. Mrs. Ionarts wrote her M.A. thesis on Kapell (William Kapell: A Performance History, Catholic University of America), which she undertook because of her relationship, professional and personal, with Kapell's daughter and grandchildren here in Washington. As it turns out, Eliot Leigh, the older of those grandchildren, is credited as the Assistant Engineer on this recording, which was finally released earlier this month. When we were living in France, we spent a weekend in Brussels, a trip that included taking in a performance of Magic Flute at the Monnaie, featuring young Eliot as one of the Three Boys.

As you might expect, the sound of live concerts broadcast on radio, recorded non-professionally, and digitally remastered leaves something to be desired. Still, in spite of the hiss and crackle, the distortion, the occasional lacuna, these discs allow you to reach back to 1953 and hear a legendary pianist at the height of his powers, undertaking demanding pieces that he did not have the chance to record in studio. A missing part of the third movement of the third Rachmaninoff concerto had to be filled in with a patch from a 1948 performance with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (the Australian orchestra on the radio broadcast is not identified). Similar audio surgery had to be performed on the Bach A minor suite (BWV 818), with the Allemande recorded in 1947. Kapell's Bach, still a couple years before Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations, crackles with energy.

William Kapell Box Set

Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition glistens with a dizzying array of colors, and the virtuosity of movements like the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks and Tuileries is astounding (the end of the final movement is also a patch, from a recital at the Frick Collection earlier in 1953). Not every track is necessarily something to be prized, as there are inevitable finger slips, as in most live performances. Mostly, the things that are thought to be Kapell's strengths are tantalizing listening -- Debussy's Suite Bergamasque, Prokofiev's hammering seventh sonata (a work that matches Kapell's musical personality and seemingly endless strength like a glove) -- and the reverse is also true (lackluster Mozart and slightly tarnished Chopin). An overblown arrangement of Thomas Arne's God Save the Queen, the Australian national anthem at the time of Kapell's visit, sounds like an obliging encore piece. Add in the excellent liner essay by Tim Page, and you are warmly advised to put this two-disc set on your shelf, next to the William Kapell Box Set that is already there (or should be).

Opera on DVD: Moses und Aron

Available at Amazon: A. Schönberg, Moses und Aron, F. Grundheber, T. Moser, Vienna State Opera, D. Gatti (released May 29, 2007) Arthaus Musik 101 259

Arnold Schönberg initially conceived his masterpiece, Moses und Aron, as an oratorio, and that unstaged vision of the work lingered in its incomplete operatic form. Only two of the three acts were finished in the score, and the stage directions basically ensured that the opera could never be staged. It remains a glorious impossibility (pace Robert Reilly). The work's genesis is bound up with Schönberg's realization that his Jewish identity had remained intact, in spite of a youthful conversion to Lutheranism (he had been forced to leave the resort town of Mattsee, where he had a vacation house, after it was closed to Jews). The composition of the music, from 1930 to 1932, was completed just before the Austrian composer fled the mounting Nazi threat to settle in the United States.

This remarkable DVD has been on my desk for several months, but do not let my tardiness in writing about it deter you. Moses und Aron does not get performed all that often, for obvious reasons (New York City Opera premiered it in New York only in 1990, and it did not reach the Met until 1999, a production revived in 2003). Released last year, this live recording from the Wiener Staatsoper is, at the moment, the only game in town. Whether you should own it or not depends on where your tastes lie. A listener who balks at dissonant music -- the opera is an example of Schoenberg's fully developed 12-tone style -- will probably curse my name for recommending it, but no one who is at all serious about contemporary opera should leave this stone unturned.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

Musically, this is a first-rate performance, with astounding singing (and rhythmic speaking) from the leads, bass-baritone Franz Grundheber as Moses and tenor Thomas Moser as Aron. An immense and excellent chorus, so important in this work, brings together the Vienna State Opera Chorus and the Slovak Philharmonic Chorus. Daniele Gatti expertly holds the huge forces together through this most complicated and densely packed of scores. Reto Nickler's staging, filling out the concept initiated by Willy Decker, is at first drably monochromatic. The Israelites, not unlike Decker's chorus of black-suited automatons in the Salzburg La Traviata, are in matching black and white costumes, with caps and suitcases that recall the exodus of 20th-century European Jews.

Then, at the forging of the Golden Calf, the strict black and white aesthetic is disturbed by the introduction of gold fabric. Suddenly, the desert becomes Las Vegas, a tasteless land of blonde wigs and gold jackets, a vapid swinger culture glutted with video images of pornography, breast augmentation, advertising, and violence. The libretto, by the composer, is loosely based on the Biblical account of the Exodus from Egypt, and the abstract nature of this staging takes us farther away from the story's origins, with admirable, if somewhat obscure, psychological results. If you are hoping for a titillating staging of the orgy scene (Act II, scene 3), you have come to the wrong place. (What young singer would not be proud to have a credit as Third Naked Virgin on her CV?) In an unexpected bonus track, Franz Grundheber gives a reading of the final speech of Moses, in the libretto's third act. It is the only way to try to "complete" this unfinished work, as Schoenberg left behind no sketches for the opera's conclusion.

I've Seen Things

I've been traveling quite a bit lately, seeing lots of art, but haven't been able to balance studio work and blogging: ahh these times. A few weeks ago I was in L.A., and thanks to a trusty GPS system in my rental car, gallery hopping was fairly easy. The only glitch was that Chung King Road, the heart of the China town arts district, is a pedestrian walkway and I circled several times before figuring it out (duhh). Now that I have my L.A. gallery bearings -- Chinatown, Culver, Santa Monica, downtown -- the next trip out I'll have my wits to even write about it.

Meanwhile, back in the East, I made a quick swing through Chelsea this past Tuesday and got to see the gigantic Mark di Suvero sculpture inhabiting the main gallery at Paula Cooper: it's a beauty. The spiraling center piece, kind of channeling Frank Stella, was cut from a solid steel plate and expanded with a crane in his studio; that's old school macho cool. I have lots of pictures and video of two smaller sculptures with moving parts on my Flickr site.


Neo Rauch has returned to David Zwirner. Still as mysterious as ever with his imagery and as inventive at moving your eye around the canvas. I don't care for Kerry James Marshall's new paintings at Jack Shainman, but I think the boat installation, covered with photos in medallions, is a very powerful piece.


Schroeder Romero has a gallery full of Charles Browning's reinterpretations of a Romantic 19th century we may be familiar with. Browning is a skillful painter with a sharp sense of humor: he made my day.

In the coming weeks I hope to post about a few exhibits that look interesting here in Baltimore. One is Paper Airplane at Paperwork Gallery and the other is Cottage Industry, which has installations spread around town via The Contemporary Museum, by Fritz Hoeg and Andrea Zittel, among others.

Difficult to find Baltimore based artists? Paperwork Gallery's co-director and artist, Cara Ober has recently gone online with The B-list, a soon to be comprehensive list of area artist's personal websites. Now there is one more way to browse and spend that huge rebate check!

In Brief: It's Summer Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond -- just a couple days late.

• Kriston Capps draws our attention to the case of an Australian photographer getting hassled by the government for nude pictures he took. To American ears, it all sounds eerily familiar. [grammar.police]


• Anne Midgette has a dispatch from the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. The program did not seem like that much of a draw, compared to recent years, but it has possibilities. [Washington Post]


• Matthew Guerrieri has just cornered all of the "Alma Mahler naked" traffic with this post on the legal dispute over Oskar Kokoschka's 1913 painting Two Nudes. The eponymous pair is Kokoschka and Alma. [Soho the Dog]


• Someone is going to make an opera out of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth .... ZZZZZZ .... (snort) oh, sorry, I fell asleep just telling you about it. [The Independent]


• "Qu'est-ce que vous avez contre les tierces?" -- "Ça me fait gerper! Qu'est-ce que c'est que ces conneries là? Majeur, mineur? Mais c'est pour les dégénérés! Il y a un seul truc de valable: c'est juste, juste, juste, juste, juste, juste!" Follow the link for the subtitles. [The Rambler]

Ferschtman, Weilerstein, Barnatan at Library of Congress

The final concert of the Library of Congress’s season featured the impeccable musicianship of violinist Liza Ferschtman, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, and pianist Inon Barnatan. All still in their 20s, the trio radiated an earned confidence in an all-Schubert program. The program was centered by the exquisite Fanstasy in C-major for Violin and Piano, D.934.

Given the work's sheer magnificence, it is understandable why Barnatan was so fully invested having committed it to memory. Ferschtman and Barnatan expertly navigated the works four elided movements with full control and planning of phrases, yet without sounding obsessive or overly-cautious. From the soft opening pianistic tremolos and long violin notes, it was clear that the people in the room setting the bar for active listening were the performers. Their intense, multi-dimensional focus of matching the ideal sound from their being to the outcome from their instruments, strikingly compelled the audience to complement the duo’s focus.

Ferschtman’s steady composure with head slightly up and away from her violin, reminded one of the cool poise of Heifetz. Indeed, mannerisms with the head may jostle the ears, thus tragically distorting a performer’s hearing. Ferschtman’s other Heifetz-like attributes – in addition to near technical perfection and detachment from instrument – included the ability to subtly veer on the high side of the pitch, yet always imperceptibly. The experience of the duo – they performed the complete Sonatas of Beethoven at the Concertgebouw a few years back – was in evidence as the they navigated the labyrinth of textures with Ferschtmann at times cleverly providing a bass line for the pianist, Barnatan enjoying gritty chromatic scales in the bass, and octaves of brilliant octaves ascending to the very end.

The program opened with the Piano Sonata in C-minor, D. 958 in which Barnatan offered bounteous nuance. While he had the audience in the palm of his hands in the slower sections, excessive mannerisms in more active bits perhaps limited his power, and over-pedaling at times obscured some of the smaller notes of the right hand. Barnatan sounded best when his nose was out of the keys.

The second half of the concert comprised the Piano Trio in E-flat Major, D. 929, performed with a patient, constantly-sustained motion. It was pleasing to again hear Weilerstein’s resonant instrument after her BSO performance one year ago. The cellist’s perfectly pruned tune in the second movement Andante was profound. In the final movement, Schubert cunningly combines much of the prior material – often charming, but perhaps thin on its own – into a grand display of virtuosity well worth the wait.
Photo by Marco Borggreve
Link to Washington Post Review

String Beans

I Fagiolini
Washington Post, June 2, 2008

I Fagiolini
Music by Monteverdi, Poulenc, Berio, and others
A Cappella: Singing Solo Festival
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Trio Mediæval and Cantus

Trio Mediæval (L to R) Anna Maria Friman, Torunn Østrem Ossum, and Linn Andrea Fuglseth

A stunning 2005 concert by Trio Mediæval made their next appearance in Washington a musical imperative. The chance came on Friday night, when their portion of the program, part of the Kennedy Center's A Cappella festival, featured pieces from their recent recordings of medieval English polyphony and Norwegian folk song. By performing English conductus and clausule, the three Scandinavian singers are trespassing on the territory of Anonymous 4, the group that disbanded just as Trio Mediæval was becoming known. The American quartet's many excellent recordings are beloved occupants of my CD shelves, but at the risk of committing heresy, the sound of Trio Mediæval is even purer and imbued with an even lovelier fragility.

Trio Mediæval: Folk Songs Stella Maris

English and the Scandinavian languages are historically related, which made Trio Mediæval's pronunciation of the Old English texts seem natural. Likewise, their Latin diction was so clear that those texts came across clearly enough to be understood, even though none of the words Trio Mediæval sang had made it into the program. In the motet selections, the three voices, who are so perfectly matched, handled the Stimmtausch, or exchange of parts among the voices, as one organic sound. Of exceptional beauty was the conductus Salve virgo virginum, sung at a slower pace than Anonymous 4's recording and exquisitely shaped in ever more and more delicate shapes.

The second half was given over to selections from Trio Mediæval's most recent disc of Norwegian folk song settings. The three women began with a sort of improvised cantillation, reminiscent at times of Meredith Monk, calling to each other from the steep aisles of the Terrace Theater as if from opposite sides of a fjord. The lovely lullaby So ro, godt barn recalled the 13th-century Dou way Robyn, a mother's plaint to her husband not to wake the baby, sung as an ostinato background to a solo invocation of that most maternal of mothers, Mary.

The concert was shared with Cantus, an all-male ensemble founded at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. Their program opened auspiciously, with the near juxtaposition of Eric Whitacre's Lux aurumque and the opening piece of Tallis's delectable setting of the Lamentations. Both pieces made for worthy listening, clearly tuned and with careful calibration of dissonance and resolution. Overall, to place them in terms of their competition, Cantus is generally more consistent in sound than the Suspicious Cheese Lords but not yet at the level of Chanticleer.

Other Reviews: Cecelia Porter, Cantus and Trio Mediaeval (Washington Post, June 2)

Their rendition of Biebl's Ave Maria, the famous setting of the Angelus, was lovely, although one wished that Trio Mediæval had sung more than just the three plainchant phrases, especially in the final, high-flying section of the work. The final collaborative piece, Velio Tormis's Helletused, was a more evenly weighted partnership, although the stratospheric demands on the female voices were a bit much at the end of the evening. The rest of Cantus's program, a mish-mash of crossover and world music experiments, was an easy way to please the crowd but seemed too much a lingering in the world of the collegian a cappella group. Perhaps it is time to put away childish things.