Ewa Podleś at Shriver Hall

Ewa Podleś and Garrick Ohlsson Live (Chopin, Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Mussorgsky) (2003) Ewa Podleś and Garrick Ohlsson, Chopin Songs (op. 74) (2000) Online scores: Chopin op. 74 Tchaikovsky -- op. 6, op. 47, op. 57 Scriabin -- Sonata No. 2, Poèmes op. 32, Etudes op. 42

Ewa Podleś, a Polish singer whose voice defies description, recently returned triumphantly to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in La Gioconda, after an absence of over twenty years. She had not been away from Shriver Hall that long, only four years, when she came with her frequent recital partner Garrick Ohlsson for a recital that opened the venue's fall season. The program opened with one of her signatures, a set of Chopin songs, settings of poems by Stefan Witwicki from op. 74 (last under review from Rosa Lamoreaux in 2005). Many of these songs are fairly simple and strophic (Chopin wrote them for amateur use), but they proved most effective vehicles for Podleś, who had the advantage of native pronunciation of Polish. She created winning characterizations for each song, from the simple charm of The Wish to the driven force of The Warrior and especially the folksy appeal of Merrymaking, which was performed as a sort of boozy waltz. Here, where Podleś sounded so close to a male timbre, as elsewhere, this was a volcanic voice that seemed to erupt from somewhere under the earth's crust.

Now in her 50s, Podleś is still singing with husky ferocity. She was well matched with Ohlsson, who played with the piano lid up and mostly at full bore, as in the booming postlude of the first song of their Tchaikovsky set, Does the Day Reign?. Podleś seemed no less authoritative in Russian, and the scope of her voice seemed to broaden with Was I Not a Little Blade of Grass, in which she brought to life a young woman married to an old man. The theme came back in Zemphira's Song, sung by a young wife who detests her husband and falls in love with a younger man, a sort of predecessor of Katarina Izmailova. The set also highlighted the singer's outrageous range, which stretches from fairly high for a contralto to shockingly low.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, The Elemental Power of Ewa Podles (Washington Post, October 21) Tim Smith, Ewa Podles electrifies Shriver Hall (Clef Notes, October 20)

Ohlsson opened the second half with a set of Scriabin pieces, beginning with the second piano sonata. For all that much of Ohlsson's playing, here as noted elsewhere, was on the overly hammered side, much of this part of the program was more delicate. The sonata had some una corda sections with little wisps of chromatic melody tailing off, Chopinesque arpeggiation, twinkling harmonies in the background. In fact, the second movement, while technically just fine, could have done with a wilder edge. One of the Scriabin Poèmes (op. 32, no. 1), an enigmatic wandering through an aimless Debussyesque landscape of perfumed veils, was more effective than an etude (op. 42, no. 5) that was a bit four-square and oddly clattering.

Nothing could have prepared the listener, however, for the abject terror elicited by Podleś as the specter of death in her final set, Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death. Here as throughout the recital, Ohlsson accompanied from memory, with his eyes almost always focused on his singer, allowing him to calibrate the folk-style accelerando in Trepak precisely to her pace, for example. As much as she may have overplayed some of Death's campier sides, strumming an air guitar during the Serenade, for example, the combination of the dark, earthen tone of her voice and the snarl of ruthless hate on her face were bone-chilling. Podleś was quite correct to decide that there could be no encore to follow such a thing.

The next concert at Shriver Hall will feature the soon-to-retire Guarneri String Quartet (November 2, 5:30 pm).

Happy Birthday in Two Different Keys Simultaneously!

Today is the birthday of Charles Ives, as I was reminded when driving into work by hearing his second symphony on the radio. Jan Swafford, who wrote a biography of the composer, summed up the role Ives played in American cultural history by calling him the "Walt Whitman of sound." Yesterday, the Ives Day celebrations in Danbury, Conn., were disrupted, however, because a large section of the roof collapsed in the composer's childhood home. The house is normally opened to visitors only on this day, meaning that there are probably some people who have traveled all the way to Connecticut only to be disappointed. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

Some of our Ives posts from the archives:

• Ives songs (CD review)
  
• Gerald Finley, Ives songs (CD review)
  
• Concord sonata (CD review)
  
• Second string quartet (Concert review)
  
• First string quartet (Concert review)

If you want to hear some Ives in concert, you have to wait only until next month, when pianist and notorious masochist Jeremy Denk will play both the second Ives sonata, Concord, Mass., 1840-60, and Beethoven's Hammerklavier, in the Barns at Wolf Trap (November 7, 8 pm).

The Haydn Songbook

Collegium Vocale Gent
Washington Post, October 20, 2008
Please write a comment on the Post site!

Collegium Vocale Gent
With guest director Kristian Bezuidenhout, fortepiano
Library of Congress

• Piano Sonata in G Minor (Hob. XVI:44)
  
• Piano Sonata in C Major (Hob. XVI:48)
  
• Variations in F Minor (“Un Piccolo Divertimento,” Hob XVII:6)

John Lyon fortepiano, copy of Mozart’s Anton Walter fortepiano

In Brief: Fall Weather, Finally

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

• With hat tip to ArtsJournal, Joe Brown, the entertainment critic of the Las Vegas Sun, is the subject of an online haters' forum. He's actually happy about it, except that it is not attached to his articles. Seriously -- anyone who has anything to say about an article (including mine for the Post) should take the few seconds to write an online comment about it at the paper's Web site. Then the editors will know that people are reading! [Las Vegas Sun]


• When an opera composer publicly critiques another composer's opera, one is tempted to cry sour grapes. Still, if you can disregard the possible professional conflict of interest, this is one of the more salient assessments of Doctor Atomic to have appeared. [Mark Adamo Online]


• Speaking of John Adams, WTF? [Opera Chic]


• Could the political fallout from Valery Gergiev's victory concert in south Ossetia damage the jet-setting maestro's career? First, the critics turn against you. [Norman Lebrecht]


• Thanks to everybody who links to Ionarts and follows those links to read! We're Number 9! [Sounds and Fury]


• The hand-wringing over classical music's white whale, the young audience, continues, although Leon Botstein says we should not worry. [Sandow]


• But wait one second, says Matthew Guerrieri, about those numbers... [Soho the Dog]

Music for Two Pianos: Martha Argerich et al.

Martha Argerich: Music for Two Pianos (Brahms, Lutosławski, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky) (released September 16, 2008) EMI Classics 50999 2 07623 2 2

Over the last several years, a number of videos have been embedded in our pages featuring Martha Argerich and other pianists (Nelson Freire, Evgeny Kissin, Lilya Zilberstein, and others) playing four-hands or two-piano pieces, mostly in live recordings from the Lugano Festival, concerts in the series she organizes, known as the Progetto Martha Argerich. Argerich clearly loves the spirit of collaboration, and she regularly uses her own fame to showcase other pianists in whom she believes, at Lugano and La Roque d'Anthéron. This disc puts many of those two-piano performances, recorded live at the Lugano Festival between 2002 and 2005, onto a two-CD set priced to move, to put alongside the series of chamber music CDs from Lugano released by EMI in the last several years.

Some of the fiercest playing comes from Argerich's pairing with Gabriela Montero, on Rachmaninov's second suite (op. 17). The two have similar temperaments, pianistically feisty and a little unpredictable, and the combination in this devilishly difficult music is mercurial. The two-piano version of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite is fun and light-hearted, if far from simple, played here with Mirabela Dina. Lilya Zilberstein is featured in two works, Rachmaninov's Six Morceaux for Piano, Four Hands, and the much more interesting F minor sonata by Brahms (op. 34bis, adapted from a now-lost string quintet and eventually "finished" as the op. 34 piano quintet). The latter is a performance to savor. Lutosławski's Paganini Variations are as much fun to play as they are to listen to, and Argerich and Giorgia Tomassi go all out, although it is hard not to want instead this piece from Argerich-Montero (shown in the video below, from the Verbier Festival, about 10 seconds faster than Argerich-Tomassi and more secure technically). Yefim Bronfman is his usual iron-fingered self with Argerich in Rikuya Terashima's two-piano transcription of Prokofiev's first symphony, and Polina Leschenko sits second piano to Argerich in the brilliant two-piano transcription of Brahms's Variations on the St. Antoni Chorale.

146'19"


Gabriela Montero / Martha Argerich (Verbier Festival 2007)
Variations on a Theme of Paganini

Slowly Awakes the Beauty of Mahler Iván Fischer Conducts the NSO in the Third Symphony

Our thanks to guest critic Robert R. Reilly for contributing this review of the NSO's Mahler.

Thursday night, Iván Fischer embarked on his official duties as the principal conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra (for a two-year stint until Christoph Eschenbach takes over) with a performance of the Mahler Third Symphony. Anyone who had heard his performance last April of the Mahler Second with the NSO would not have been surprised at his interpretive choices – with their respective merits and demerits.

At that time, I described him as the master of pianissimo, and so he remains. (In case anyone did not know that the NSO can play like this, they can.) I also said that his perspective was the polar opposite of Bernstein’s hyper-angst tendencies. Fischer’s Mahler, in contrast, is solidly sane, and that is how he plays the music. This works particularly well in the Third because it is one of Mahler’s symphonies with the least amount of underlying anxiety.

Mahler, Symphony No.2, Fischer / Budapest Festival Orchestra / Milne Bach, Mahler, Symphony No.6, Fischer / Budapest Festival Orchestra

However, as dreamy as the Third may be in places, Pan is supposed to awaken from his dream in the first movement. Fischer captured the somnolence of Pan in a very special way, or what Mahler called “Nature’s inertia.” I am not being sarcastic; I mean it. Others, like Klaus Tennstedt in his LSO recording, caught a minatory and threatening aspect to the music at the beginning of the first movement. Fischer actually shows us someone waking up and slowly throwing off slumber. Perhaps too slowly.

Yet, I recalled that Fischer likes to take his time laying in each musical strand with care and attention. He does not rush; he takes an chamber music-like approach to the delicate textures of Mahler’s quieter moments. But Fischer also knows how to build a climax, and he delivered the full punch of the first big climax.

The first movement – with 35 minutes on the broad side – was neither emotionally indulgent, nor was it given to any sense of wild Dionysian abandon. One gets the sense from Fischer that he is not only conducting the music, but listening to it at the same time. In other, words, he is in it ­and seeing it from the outside which gives his approach an ‘objective’ character.

Fischer’s approach came into its own in the remaining movements in which objectivity surrendered to beauty. The playing here was gorgeous. The charm of “what the flowers in the meadow tell me” was exquisite. In the middle of the third movement, Mahler called for playing “in the manner of a posthorn,” with a background of soft strings played “as if listening.” The NSO caught this magic to perfection. Special plaudits must go to posthorn player Steven Hendrickson.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Full-Blown Mahler (Washington Post, October 17) Charles T. Downey, DCist Goes to the Symphony (DCist, October 17) Tim Smith, Ivan Fischer Leads NSO in Majestic Mahler Concert (Clef Notes, October 20)

Contralto Birgit Remmert, in her NSO debut, gave as moving a rendition of the Nietzsche text in the fourth movement as I have ever heard live. There is a kind of smoky richness to her voice that is perfect for this, especially when matched with the expressivity she conveyed. The University of Maryland Concert Choir and the Children’s Choir of Washington were admirable in the fifth movement’s expression of a kind of Christmas joy in the Wunderhorn text.

The strings of the NSO shone throughout, as did the timpani (playing true pianissimo when required) and winds. The brass, aside from a few flubs, came through in the big moments.

In sum: Seldom did one feel in the grip of anything inexorable, and one might have wished for a stronger interpretive stance, but so what? One could surrender to the sheer beauty of it. Which, if that is what Fischer wanted, he achieved.

The concert repeats on Friday, October 17 and Saturday, October 18.

The U.S. Flag as Art

Tyler Green has a post about the imagery of the American flag, how it's used/abused by both political parties. He has asked for suggestions. My most vivid memory of the flag is Stanley Forman's 1976 Pulitzer Prize-winning photo (above) at an anti-busing demonstration in Boston. That probably falls into the photo-journalism category but - how powerful. Others that come to my mind are shown below.

Childe Hassam

Jasper Johns

From Charles:
Art that uses a recognizable symbol, like the U.S. flag, does so best when it calls into question the conventional meaning of that symbol. This is not to say that it has to be necessarily a negative meaning, which is a temptation for many artists, I suppose, when treating something like the U.S. flag (like James Rosenquist's recent Xenophobic Movie Director, or Our Foreign Policy). It may be too obvious for Tyler's survey, but Nam June Paik's Video Flag (1985-1996) immediately came to mind. It is a much more positive version of the concept than an earlier form of the work, Video Flag Z, owned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and now unable to be shown. Both subvert a symbol we take for granted by assembling the symbol out of images that incarnate the shifting meanings of that symbol for many people. (My love of Paik's work has nothing to do with the fact that he was a musicologist, either.)


In a similar vein and perhaps less obviously, Romare Bearden's Roots Odyssey (1976) uses the symbol of the flag to represent the shores of the United States as the destination of a slave ship. Once again, the symbol does not necessarily mean what you think it does, and it may have different meanings for different people. The United States is a large, multifaceted country with a complicated history, and the flag has greater meaning if it is not a one-dimensional symbol. (Related: David Hammons, African-American Flag, which the MoMA curator Connie Butler already picked for Tyler).

Gilles Vonsattel Connects with the Modern

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

After an unconventional opening to the National Gallery of Art's free Sunday concert series, it was back to the more traditional this week. Swiss-born, Juilliard-trained pianist Gilles Vonsattel (pictured) gave a recital on Sunday evening, after a slight delay while a piano technician sorted out a few intonation and action issues on the Steinway in the West Garden Court. When he had the entire action pulled out of the case, apparently to carve down a slightly sticky hammer, it seemed like the concert might fall victim to technical issues. Happily, Vonsattel sat down again after the technician's ministrations and pronounced the instrument acceptable.

Vonsattel's program (.PDF file) was strongest in the second half, where more recent music seemed to capture his attention more than earlier music had. A daunting, multilayered piece by 20-something Nico Muhly, Booklet, was the only work Vonsattel played from a score. Muhly and Vonsattel both did the dual-degree thing at Columbia and Juilliard, graduating a year apart from one another (2004 and 2005, respectively). The piece, about which precious little information is available, is comprised of massive structures that seem organistic in the use of prominent pedal octaves, recalling Muhly's interest in early church music. The basic pulse is a steely triple pattern, disrupted often by added beats, creating the effect of a sort of unpredictable toccata, in which the left hand focuses on booming loudness and the right hand predominantly on piling up soft, bristling harmonies, even at some points what one might call cocktail chords. Vonsattel, with a broad dynamic range at his disposal, distinguished the many voices from one another with orchestral color contrasts.

The high point of the program was Luigi Dallapiccola's Sonata canonica, composed in 1942 to 1943, a work that Vonsattel should think about recording (although it is not exactly unrecorded). Vonsattel showed a clear-minded understanding of the tonal ironies of the work, a tribute to (parody of?) the caprices of Paganini, and a mastery of its technical challenges -- full-pedaled music box sounds, crashing dissonance, manic trills, sforzando octaves, and rocketing tempi. Any doubt as to Vonsattel's virtuoso credentials was allayed by his concluding work, Liszt's Après une lecture de Dante, which played to the pianist's tendency toward a perhaps over-forceful touch in its outrageously loud, almost manic excesses. (It and several other pieces from Liszt's Années de pèlerinage are featured on Vonsattel's new CD.)

Vonsattel brought the same orchestral scope, unsatisfyingly, to the works on the first half, too. Bach's C minor toccata was made to sound as if it were a Busoni expansion, thanks to a fairly heavy use of the sustaining pedal in the already murky acoustic. The Schubert C minor sonata (D. 958, one of the composer's last three piano sonatas) seemed chosen out of a sense of duty to round out the program, as much of the work's finer points were hammered over in a largely too edgy performance. The encore of Schumann's Arabesque seemed to confirm that, for now at least, Vonsattel is more a showman than a finesse player.

This Sunday's free concert at the National Gallery of Art should be a good one, featuring the Festival Strings Lucerne (October 19, 6:30 pm). Show up early to get a good seat.