Eschenbach's 'Parsifal' (Act III)

Baritone Thomas Hampson
We covered the Verdi bicentennial yesterday and will again tomorrow, with Washington National Opera's production of the Italian composer's La forza del destino. In between, we were happy to observe instead the Wagner bicentenary -- again -- which the National Symphony Orchestra marked with a performance of the third act of the German composer's final opera, Parsifal. It is a work we have not heard in Washington since the staging by the Mariinsky Theater in 2006, so it was not as long a drought as that for Tristan, but we wish we heard more Wagner in these parts than we do.

The score is a wonder, austere in many ways but also mystical, surprising, and at times truly odd. Debussy singled out a particular quality one hears in the score, which he said was a model for the orchestration he was looking for in Jeux: "that orchestral color which seems to be lit from behind." Listening to only the exaltation of Act III, without the suffering and turmoil of the first two acts, seemed a bit like cheating at times. I cannot deny that I wished Christoph Eschenbach had chosen to do a single performance this week, say on Friday night only, but of the entire score. It may have made more sense for sales, too, since the NSO box office found itself having to offer some severe discounts to avoid having a drastically empty house.

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Cameristi della Scala

Charles T. Downey, Shutdown doesn’t stop Cameristi della Scala from leading a stroll through Verdi operas (Washington Post, October 11, 2013)

Is it perverse to celebrate the Verdi bicentennial year without singers? Excerpts of Wagner’s operas are performed in symphonic format all the time, so perhaps a precedent has been set. Cameristi della Scala, a chamber orchestra made up of musicians from the orchestra of Milan’s most famous theater, went one better on Wednesday night by performing other composers’ instrumental fantasies on themes from Giuseppe Verdi’s operas.

The musicians had the bad fortune to arrive in Washington during the government shutdown, which has canceled the free concert series at the concert’s intended venue, the Library of Congress. Happily, the Italian Embassy saved the day, offering its small auditorium for this performance, part of the ongoing festivities of the Italian Year of Culture. [Continue reading]

Cameristi della Scala
Verdi arrangements by Giovanni Avolio, Luigi Mancinelli, Camillo Sivori, Antonio Bazzini, and Antonio Melchiori (listen to an excerpt)
Italian Embassy

Braque at the Grand Palais, True Love

George Braque was a grand master. Involved in Fauvism with Matisse and Derain and, along with Picasso, in the development of Cubism and the first to use cut papers in his works, he redefined how we perceive the world visually. Georges Braque: A Retrospective, which just opened at the Grand Palais in Paris, is quite a tour de force. Consisting of some 240 paintings, drawings, graphic works, and collages drawn from both public and many private collections, this is one of those must-see kinds of exhibits.

At that time I was very close to Picasso. Although we were very different in temperament, we were driven by the same idea. Over those years, Picasso and I said things to each other that no one would ever be able to say again, that no one would ever be able to understand again.... things that would be incomprehensible now and that gave us so much joy... and it will all end with us. It was like climbers roped together on a mountain...

For me there is a more cerebral, meditative approach to Braque, which separates him from the more raucous Picasso. Braque lingered, he found nuance in the shapes and patterns and the application of the paint itself. He was, after all, a Frenchman.

Of all the work in this extensive exhibit, I was drawn to and returned several times to the painting The Duet, from the collection of the Pompidou Center. The cubist geometry is certainly evident in the multi-dimensional figures and complex spacial analytics, but there is romantic sensibility that is more attuned to Matisse than Picasso. However, The Duet, which is a riff on Matisse's Piano Lesson, is less severe in temperament. I'd prefer a lesson with Braque's music teacher. I think Romare Bearden also did.

I love the young student's hair bun and the triangular shapes surrounding her head, emanating from the picture on the wall. This girl has a lot going on. The puffed pink chest of her teacher boldly trys to keep her focused on the task at hand, as the world streams in through the window. These are the sights and sounds only a Frenchman can bring to a painting and Braque just keeps on giving.

Besides Paris, Houston will be the only U.S. venue for this exhibit. Houston, Paris, hmmmm.

Hidden Places

Act like you belong, as the phrase goes, and you'll get in the door. I've used the technique over the years, and more often than not, I did get in the door and never once took such a gift for granted. This past month on a trip to Italy, artist friends suggested that I visit the drawing library at the Uffizi Gallery. My friends had lived in Florence for many years and often visited the collection: "you can actually handle these fragile amazing master works," they said, still themselves amazed. Of course there is a catch. You have to have a letter of introduction from a professor or scholar to gain entrance. It's a bit complicated and being Italy, some things are impossible, but sometimes the impossible is quite easy.

I got a letter of introduction and made contact with the department, the Gabinetto dei Disegni. I then made my way to a side door of the Uffizi, where I checked in with security. I was then directed through a back hallway, up a stairway and an elevator, then through a massive oak door, to the main hall filling with the day's visitors. I crossed the hall to another massive door and entered to the offices of the director, a middle-aged woman who sternly asked for my letter of introduction, then almost begrudgingly pointed me to the adjoining room.

A two-story, dimly lit chamber is lined floor to ceiling with shelves of boxes. This is where you get down to business. Each box is labeled with an artist's name, like Michelangelo or Botticelli or Pontormo. In each box are photo reproductions of each drawing in the collection. Under most circumstances you could spend days happily pouring over these images.

I found a Pontormo image that spoke to me, four of them actually. Then the librarian in charge, a very nice man, struggled to communicate with me in English, as I desperately mangled Italian. Eventually it became clear that I needed to choose the image I wanted to see, write the file number on a note pad with carbon copies, and the librarian will clear my request with the stern middle-aged woman in the outer office.

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Kennedy Center Chamber Players

Charles T. Downey, Kennedy Center Chamber Players offer top-notch evening of Bach, Brahms
Washington Post, October 8, 2013

J. S. Bach, Gamba Sonatas, J. Savall, T. Koopman

The chemistry of a chamber music ensemble can be as elusive and mercurial as any relationship, or even more so. Many factors can contribute to making a performance excellent or not so much. Whatever those factors may have been, they all lined up for a top-notch concert by three members of the Kennedy Center Chamber Players on Sunday evening at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.

Cellist David Hardy and pianist Lambert Orkis showed two different musical facets in the first half. Bach’s Sonata in D for viola da gamba and continuo (BWV 1028), updated to cello and grand piano, was blithe and sweet, with only a few minor tempo inconsistencies between players in the fast movements. Orkis kept his foot off the sustaining pedal, adding some pleasing ornaments, and Hardy minimized his vibrato, both playing with consummate sensitivity. [Continue reading]

Kennedy Center Chamber Players
Music by Bach, Mendelssohn, Brahms
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Welcome to the Dover Quartet

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

The winners of the Banff International String Quartet Competition, held every three years, have gone on to be some of our favorite new string quartets. The list includes the Daedalus Quartet (First Prize, 2001), the Jupiter Quartet (First Prize, 2004), the Ensō Quartet (second prize, 2004), and the Belcea Quartet (third place, 1998). Add to that list the Dover Quartet, which made a complete sweep of all the prizes at Banff this year. Naturally, I took the chance to hear the group, formed and trained at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, when they came to the area on Saturday night, at the Candlelight Concert Series in Columbia, Md.

One of the prizes that the Dover Quartet won at Banff was for best performance of a Haydn quartet, and their rendition of the composer's "Sunrise" quartet (B-flat major, op. 76, no. 4) showed why. The group gave the piece a warm, glowing sound, especially in the gorgeous slow movement, with no instrument ever forced toward stridency. The third movement had a lively and dancing feel, with the folk-influenced trio particularly vivid in its modal turns and drone-like textures. The fourth movement was witty but understated, with only a few sour turns in the high range of the first violin, for which more time to place high notes may have helped. Violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt stood out for her loamy sound every time she came to the fore.

The Dover Quartet concluded this concert with a tragic and bracing rendition of Shostakovich's third quartet (F major, op. 73), hands down the best Shostakovich performance by a young string quartet to reach these ears since the Jerusalem Quartet. It was again not an oversized sound, scaled appropriately to the room and its less than stellar acoustic. Pajaro-van de Stadt, in brief spoken comments, listed the programmatic titles that Shostakovich had initially assigned to this quartet's movements, and the group took the business of creating narrative scenes quite seriously. The carefree banality of the first movement was followed by the viola's menacing ostinato and the eggshell staccato waltz in the second movement, evoking layers of anxiety. Almost toneless, scratching clusters underpinned the first violin's frantic melody in the third movement, followed by another incendiary viola solo, leading to a shrieked conclusion that was chilling. The laments and tense funeral march of the fourth movement, all of it beautifully balanced in each pairing, with no instrument ever shouting over the others, led to the eternal questions of the fifth movement, which comes to rest on a major chord, over which the first violin continued its dissonant but sweet inquiries.

The middle of the concert was given to the world premiere of a new string quartet by American composer Eric Sessler. It was in a pretty, mostly tonal idiom, with many nice ideas, particularly in the elegiac second movement, and the Dovers gave it a better performance than it probably deserved. Sessler had some nice ideas but seemed to take them nowhere, chewing over some motifs over and over again. The piece could stand significant trimming, possibly the entire third movement, which struck me as too similar in quality to the second and started to wear thin not far into it. It is perhaps unfair to put this work in comparison with Haydn and Shostakovich, but that is the peril of composing string quartets. Even worse for this piece was comparison to the encore, the third movement of Beethoven's final quartet, op. 135, a light-filled performance like a hymn of peace to dispel Shostakovich's fog of war.

The Dover Quartet will be back in Washington next spring, for a concert at the Phillips Collection (March 23), to play a work for marimba and string quartet by Andy Akiho with percussionist Ian Rosenbaum.

In Brief: Hot 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.) Some of these streams become unavailable after a few days.

• Watch Christophe Rousset lead Les Talens Lyriques at the Festival d'Ambronay, performing settings of the Stabat Mater by Pergolesi and Tommaso Traetta, plus Leonardo Leo's Judica me Deus. [Medici.tv]


• From the Bayerische Staatsoper, the first of this season's live streams is today, Berg's Wozzeck with Simon Keenlyside and Angela Denoke, at 1 pm EDT. [Staatsoper TV]


• Puccini's greatest score, La Fanciulla del West, in a performance at the Wiener Staatsoper, starring Nina Stemme (Minnie) and Jonas Kaufmann and conducted by Franz Welser Möst. [ORF]


• Earlier this week, Esa-Pekka Salonen took the helm of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, leading performances of Beethoven's König Stephan Overture and Choral Fantasy, plus Luigi Dallapiccola's opera Il Prigioniero. [BR-Klassik]


• Hear the Pittsburgh Symphony Orcehstra on tour: Manfred Honeck leads Strauss's Ein Heldenleben and Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, with pianist Yuja Wang as soloist, recorded last month at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. [France Musique]


• Also from the Salle Pleyel last month, the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle perform Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, plus the Three Wozzeck Fragments, with soprano Barbara Hannigan. [France Musique]

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Osmo Vänskä Quits Minnesota

MPR State of the Arts reports from the Goodbye-Concert: Standing ovations, tears for Vanska as conductor begins waving his baton goodbye

He said for the encore he wanted to perform some Sibelius. He said the piece he chose is about a girl who dreams she is dancing with a young man. Then she realizes she’s not dreaming, and the man leading her in the dance is Death.

From Minnesota Public Radio: Live Broadcast: Osmo Vanska's Farewell Concert

[MPR is] seeking permission to rebroadcast/archive the audio from the live concert; as soon as they have approval from the interested parties, they will make its availability known.

From Michael Anthony at the MinnPost: Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra: He was the right man at the right time (October 2)

OpEd from Larry Perelman in the Star Tribune: The Minnesota Orchestra as we know it must die (October 2)

Musicians should follow Vanska's example and resign. It’s the only way the orchestra can be reborn. Here’s the model to follow.

From the New York Times: Vanska Quits Minnesota Orchestra as Labor Dispute Drags On (October 1)

Anne Midgette, A dark day: Minnesota Orchestra loses music director; NY City Opera declares bankruptcy (Washington Post, October 2)

Management and Orchestra have official responses to his departure - via CBS Minnesota.
The Musician's message is a bit bland, the message from Orchestra Board Chair Jon Campbell is a little dickish between the lines, and suggests a lack of true comprehension of what just happened.

Star Tribune article here: Conductor Osmo Vänskä quits Minnesota Orchestra

The orchestra's musicians and the board have now managed, with mutual incompetence, negligence, wilfull stupidity, and ignorance to doom the orchestra—among the country's very finest, most interesting for a moment—to lasting mediocrity that will unlikely ever be undone. At this point it's hard not to say: Well deserved! But it's also very sad to know their Sibelius Cycle won't be finished, nor their Beethoven Piano Concerto Cycle with Yevgeni Sudbin.

More links, comments, and baseless speculations to follow.

Like the one that sees Osmo Vänskä now succeed Valery Gergiev with the LSO. He could form a cultural Little Finland in the British capital: Sakari Oramo and Esa-Pekka Salonen are already there.

Chris Steller tweets:

Seeing a lot of tweets out of Cleveland about Osmo Vanska leaving the MN Orchestra

— Chris Steller (@chris_steller) October 1, 2013

Osmo as MD of the Cleveland Orchestra? What a supremely tantalizing suggestion. They would be so lucky! But doesn't Franz Welser-Möst's contract run until 2048, anyway?