Eight Questions for Daniil Trifonov

Here’s a brief interview with Daniil Trifonov at the Wiener Konzerthaus, before a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under Gianandrea Noseda on November 11^th. Eight questions (the Ninth question, how he liked Questionnaires, didn't somehow work as intended, which could, in truth, be said of several of the questions) that we might pose to other artists, should the occasion arise. The transcript is below.

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For Your Consideration: 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'

The Grand Budapest Hotel, directed by Wes Anderson

In my list of the best things seen and heard and read last year, The Grand Budapest Hotel was noted as "one of the best films of the year." It seems likely now, to me and to the readers who have taken the Ionarts Oscar Poll so far, that Wes Anderson's latest feature will win the Academy Award for Best Picture, edging out Richard Linklater's Boyhood. This is an odd situation, to be sure, when two directors like Anderson and Linklater, both visionary outsiders for so long, are neck and neck for such a mainstream honor. These two movies seem likely to split a large number of the awards this year, but how it falls out may determine the winner of your Oscar pool. For Boyhood, my money is on Patricia Arquette for Best Supporting Actress and Linklater for Best Director, the latter in recognition of the movie's unprecedented filming process.

Grand Budapest Hotel could take Best Picture, plus Film Editing (Barney Pilling), Costume Design (Milena Canonero), Make-Up and Hairstyling (Frances Hannon and Mark Coulier, possibly for Tilda Swinton's fossilized heiress alone), Original Score (Alexandre Desplat, heavy on the balalaika and with Vivaldi's lute concerto thrown in for good measure), Production Design (Adam Stockhausen and Anna Pinnock), and Original Screenplay (Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness). Anderson's last feature, Moonrise Kingdom, was even better than this film, and it was left with no Academy Award two years ago, increasing the likelihood of a retroactive righting of that mistake this year.

The story covers a lot of territory in the remote mountaintop resort of Zubrowka, a fictional republic that stands in for Eastern Europe, passing from Austro-Hungarian Empire to independence to Soviet police state. Layers of the story peel away deliciously, like the famous pastries that feature prominently, but while the film's pink and otherwise candy-bright color palette may initially leave a sugary taste, there is a bitter edge to the story, inspired as it was by the cosmopolitan Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. The writer, played at different ages by Jude Law and Tom Wilkinson, remembers a story told to him during a stay at the legendary hotel, involving the eccentric concierge of the establishment, M. Gustave, played with excessive squirts of cologne by Ralph Fiennes. The story comes from the current owner of the hotel, played with melancholy relish by F. Murray Abraham, but it happened to him when he was just a young lobby boy (Tony Revolori) under M. Gustave. How the latter became the former is a long story.

Other Reviews: New York Times | Los Angeles Times | Washington Post | The Atlantic | TIME Christian Science Monitor | Wall Street Journal | Rolling Stone | NPR | David Edelstein

Fiennes towers alone in the central role, created for but then abandoned by Johnny Depp (probably to the film's betterment), but this is an ensemble cast. Much of the fun comes in seeing scores of Anderson favorites, including kids from Moonrise Kingdom, appear and disappear: Mathieu Amalric as a shifty butler, Adrien Brody as a mustache-twirling villain, Willem Dafoe as a knuckle-dragging hit man, Jeff Goldblum as a mysterious lawyer, Harvey Keitel as the muscle-twitching leader of an absurd jailbreak, Edward Norton as a courtly fascist officer, and Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, and several others as a team of string-pulling concierge-desk factotums. Anderson does all of this with his trademarked home-made, down-to-the-last-detail look, including the use of miniature sets and stop-motion animation that glows with sentimental old-fashionedness. In the best Anderson style, this movie clings to high culture in a way that is not pretentious, indeed that even pokes fun at itself. As M. Gustave himself puts it at one point: "You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant... oh, fuck it."

Classical Month in Washington (April 2015)

There is so much good music to be heard in the month of April: here are the ten performances at the top of our list, plus one.

ORCHESTRAS:
Krzysztof Urbanski takes the podium of the National Symphony Orchestra for an all-Russian program, combining Shostakovich's tenth symphony with Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto, featuring Daniil Trifonov as soloist (April 2 to 4).

A couple of good programs from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra this month, too, including flutist Adam Walker in the East Coast premiere of the new flute concerto by Kevin Puts (April 9 and 12).

One of the top picks for the whole season happens in April, when John Eliot Gardiner leads the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, presented by Washington Performing Arts in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall (April 21).

KEYBOARD:
Washington Performing Arts presents the local recital debut of British pianist Stephen Hough, playing music by Chopin and Debussy, at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater (April 1). At least one thing has remained constant in the upheaval at Washington Performing Arts, and that is the biennial recital by Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin, this year presented in the Music Center at Strathmore (April 22). His program this year is centered on Prokofiev's fourth sonata, plus some Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt.

Handel, "Great" Harpsichord Suites (vol. 1, 1720), J. Vinikour (Delos, 2009)

One of the harpsichordists we most want to hear these days, Jory Vinikour, gets his turn in a free concert at the Library of Congress (April 25), in a program that includes two of the Handel suites he has recorded so beautifully.

Rounding out the keyboard category, go hear one of the best organists in the world, Olivier Latry from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, when he plays a recital at St. John's Episcopal, Georgetown (April 28).

CHAMBER MUSIC:
Pianists Katherine Chi and Aleksandar Madžar perform Stockhausen's Mantra, with percussion and electronics, in a free concert at the Library of Congress (April 24).

Rounding out the year's British Choir Festival, the Choir of St. Paul's Cathedral, London performs at Washington National Cathedral (April 26).

Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke performs songs by Schubert, Copland, and Wolf with the Miró String Quartet, plus some movements for string quartet, on the Fortas Chamber Music Concerts series at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater (April 29).

EXTRA:
I moved to Washington to pursue a doctorate at the Catholic University of America, and although most of the professors I worked with there in the 1990s have retired, the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music still has a special place in my heart. That institution is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year of being a school of music, and the festivities include a commissioning project, on the theme of the Stations of the Cross, which will be performed later this month (February 20, at the Church of the Little Flower in Bethesda). In April, CUA musicians will mark the anniversary with a big concert in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall (April 12).

See the complete calendar after the jump.

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Briefly Noted: Telemann's Cantatas

G.P. Telemann, Festive Cantatas, M. Feuersinger, F. Vitzthum, K. Mertens, Collegium Vocale Siegen, Hannoversche Hofkapelle, U. Stötzel (released on February 10, 2015) Hänssler Classic CD98.047 | 58'04"

The story is guaranteed to get a laugh, that the Leipzig town council, when searching for its new Kantor in 1722, settled on Johann Sebastian Bach as its third choice, first offering the job to Georg Philipp Telemann and then to Christoph Graupner. Rather than seeing these events as short-sighted, however, we must see them as inevitable. Of course, Leipzig wanted Telemann, who had a proven track record as prolific and ultra-talented, not to mention by far the best credentials. Unfortunately for Leipzig, Hamburg had snapped up Telemann first, and there he was producing cantatas at a dizzying rate. Blessed with a stable work ethic and a healthy constitution, by the time he died Telemann had penned around 3,600 works, including some 1,750 cantatas of every conceivable type and for every sort of occasion. Leipzig had little hope of luring him away.

One can hear around one-tenth of Telemann's cantatas in modern recording, by a rough estimate. Three of them came to my ears in this new disc from conductor Ulrich Stötzel, the period-instrument ensemble Hannoversche Hofkapelle, and the Collegium Vocale Siegen: Der Herr lebet (for Easter Sunday), Ehr und Dank (Michaelmas, September 29), and Der Geist gibt Zeugnis (Pentecost). Of the three soloists, soprano Miriam Feuersinger has the most pleasing sound, although she is given relatively little music here, the one rather charming aria Hilf, dass ich auch. The choral sound is not always as balanced or in tune as it could be, but these performances generally offer a pleasing way to learn about Telemann's cantatas. Although Telemann sometimes simply repeats the opening choral movement by way of concluding a cantata, there are beautiful discoveries, like the striking mezzo-soprano aria Wer bin ich? from the Pentecost cantata.

Ian Bostridge's Slightly Touched Winter Journey

Franz Schubert's Winterreise is one of the monuments of music history. It may be the composer's masterpiece, in a bountiful corpus of compositions completed over the course of a tragically short life, and the greatest song cycle ever composed. Laden as it is with many layers of significance -- in the poet's life, in the composer's life, in the lives of listeners and performers alike -- it means many things to many people. Tenor Ian Bostridge gave the latest of his many performances of the work, over one hundred by his own tally, on Saturday afternoon at the Library of Congress, in a recital that did little to change my mind that his voice is not quite right for this music.

I. Bostridge, Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (Knopf, 2015) Schubert, Die schöne Müllerin / Winterreise / Schwanengesang, I. Bostridge (3 CDs + DVD) (Erato, 2015) S. Youens, Retracing a Winter's Journey: Franz Schubert's "Winterreise" (Cornell University Press, 1991)

The original keys Schubert chose for the songs in Winterreise were intended for a tenor, but baritones always seem to sound best in this cycle to my ears, and Bostridge's recording, made with Leif Ove Andsnes, did not change my opinion on the matter. That impression was borne out in concert, as the lowest notes in this transposition seemed not quite in Bostridge's range, requiring him in some cases to snarl in a guttural way, and not always on pitch. When the high notes could be floated softly, Bostridge's unusual tone -- detached, heady, light -- was just right, as in the concluding song Der Leiermann, but not always so when it required force, as in Mein Herz.

It had been a while since my last experience of Bostridge live, at the Library of Congress in 2006 and in a Shriver Hall Schubertiade in 2009. Besides his normal bizarre gyrations and facial contortions while singing, he did a few genuinely weird things, like a sort of affected smile of surprise that accompanied the narrator's description of the will-o'-the-wisp near the start of Irrlicht. The musical effect made this sort of emoting unnecessary, as he and his accompanist, the talented Julius Drake, gave the whole song a slippery rubato of sudden accelerations, perhaps evoking the apparition's shifting lights.

Rather than sounding like he was reciting poetry through music, Bostridge's interpretation often struck me as stilted, with some unimportant words hammered and some phrases whispered or murmured in a way made incomprehensible by its softness. This was matched by similarly odd gestures in the accompaniment, with Drake alternately banging and coaxing out various threads at the keyboard. Attacca transitions ran some of the songs together, but some slow tempi dragged the length of the performance out to about 80 minutes. The timbre of Bostridge's voice just could not communicate much menace, which is where this cycle's narrator seems to lean, and Schubert at least to my ears cast the songs with an ear for that kind of sound.

Other Articles: Anne Midgette, Tenor Ian Bostridge performs a compelling rendition of ‘Winterreise’ (Washington Post, February 9) Michael Dirda, Ian Bostridge’s ‘Schubert’s Winter Journey’ examines the composer’s melancholy work (Washington Post, February 4) David Weininger, In a new book, Bostridge explores Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ (Boston Globe, January 29) Matthew Guerrieri, ‘Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession’ by Ian Bostridge (Boston Globe, January 24) Michael O'Donnell, A Masterpiece to Make You Shiver (Wall Street Journal, January 23)

This performance comes on the heels of Bostridge's new book on Winterreise, a song-by-song analysis of the cycle that relies in large part on literary associations and on Bostridge's personal experience with the work. Bostridge wrote the book, by his own admission, without "the technical qualifications to analyse music in the traditional, musicological sense," making its value principally as a performer's memoir. Although I have not yet read the entire book, my impression so far is that one is still better served by the masterful study of musicologist Susan Youens as far as understanding the historical background of the music and its poetry. Bostridge, for example, suggests that we may fill out the poet's sketch of his narrator by turning to a literary example: perhaps, like Saint-Preux in Rousseau's Julie, he is a tutor to the daughter of a wealthy family, forced to leave when she is married to another. Bostridge relates this to the composer's devotion to Countess Karoline Esterházy, whom Schubert served as music tutor, even wading into the polemic battles between Maynard Solomon and Rita Steblin over Schubert's sexual orientation. Youens, more circumspect, relates the narrator's situation to an unrequited love in the youth of the poet Wilhelm Müller, the man who wrote the words.

Perchance to Stream: Tour of World Orchestras Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio and online video from the week gone by. After clicking to an audio or video stream, you may need to press the "Play" button to start the broadcast. Some of these streams become unavailable after a few days.

• Listen to a performance of Niobe, an opera by Agostino Steffani, recorded last month at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. [France Musique]


• Soprano Sandrine Piau joins Les Paladins and Jérôme Correas, performing music by Rameau, Grétry, Charpentier, and Lully. [RTBF]


• Oltremontano and the Ricercar Consort perform Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine in the Cathedral of Basel, part of the Basle Early Music Festival. [France Musique]


• Listen to Antonello Manacorda conduct Schubert's Alfonso und Estrella, recorded last month at the Mozartwoche Salzburg, starring Mojca Erdmann, Toby Spence, and others. [ORF]


• Anne-Catherine Gillet and John Osborn star in Massenet's Manon, recorded at the Opéra de Lausanne. [RTBF]


• Bernard Haitink celebrates his 85th birthday with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, leading music by Webern, Mahler, and Shostakovich, with baritone Christian Gerhaher. [BR-Klassik]


• The Présences Festival opened on Friday, with a concert featuring Gautier Capuçon, Olivier Doise, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, with music by Conlon Nancarrow, Richard Dubugnon, Esteban Benzecry, Darwin Aquino, and Evencio Castellanos. [France Musique]


• Thomas Zehetmair leads a performance of Haydn's Creation at the new Philharmonie in Paris, with the choir Accentus and the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, with soloists Sunhae Im, Werner Güra, and Florian Boesch. [France Musique]


• Bernard Haitink celebrates sixty years conducting with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, leading music by Purcell, Schumann, and Brahms, with pianist Murray Perahia as soloist, recorded at Carnegie Hall in New York. [France Musique]


• Vasily Petrenko leads the San Francisco Symphony in music by Bartok, Respighi, Pärt, and Shostakovich, with pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. [France Musique]


• More from the San Francisco Symphony, with Charles Dutoit conducting music by Ravel, Lalo, Elgar, and Mason Bates, with violinist James Ehnes as soloist. [France Musique]

• Neeme Järvi leads the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, with mezzo-soprano Lilli Paasikivi, recorded last November in Geneva. [RTBF]


• Music by Shostakovich, Musorgsky, and Glazunov from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ilan Volkov and featuring bass Yuri Vorobiev. [BBC3]


• Hugo Reyne conducts La Simphonie du Marais, with music by Jacob an Eyck, Bernardo Pasquini, Henry Purcell, Michel Pignolet de Montéclair, and Handel, recorded last month at the Wiener Konzerthaus. [ORF]


• From the Mozartwoche Salzburg, Pablo Heras-Casado leads the Camerata Salzburg in music by Schubert, Carter, and Mozart. [ORF]


• Listen to a concert by the Latvian Radio Choir at the Sydney Festival. [ABC Classic]


• Music by Liadov, Rachmaninoff, and Sibelius performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, pianist Simon Trpceski, and conductor Robin Ticciati. [France Musique]


• Handel concertos performed by the Ricercar Consort, with Philippe Pierlot, Maude Gratton, and Emmanuel Laporte. [RTBF]


• Conductor Thomas Søndergård and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor join the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, in music by Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart. [BBC3]


• Stéphane Denève and violinist Leonidas Kavakos join the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR, with music by Adams, Bartók, and Brahms, recorded last September in Stuttgart. [ORF]


• The BBC Symphony Orchestra, under Ryan Wigglesworth, performs music by Kagel, Strauss (Lieder, with soprano Sophie Bevan), Wigglesworth, and Schumann. [BBC3]


• From the Folle Journée de Nantes, Bach concertos played by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, with flutist Christoph Huntgeburth, violinist Georg Kallweit, and harpsichordist Raphael Alpermann. [France Musique]


• Listen to the performances at the Soirée des Victoires de la Musique Classique, featuring the Orchestre National de Lille, conductor Jean-Claude Casadesus, and many soloists. [France Musique]


• Mark the passing of pianist Aldo Ciccolini by listening to his recital of music by Mozart, Franck, Grieg, and Falla, recorded at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 2006. [France Musique]


• The vocal ensemble Exaudi performs music by Leonin, Machaut, Holliger, and Finnissy, recorded at the Wigmore Hall in London. [BBC3]

Dip Your Ears, No. 193 (Les Choéphores: Repent and Amend)

D.Milhaud / A.Honegger / A.Roussel, Les Choéphores / Sy.5 / Bacchus et Ariane I.Markevitch / Orchestre Lamoureux DG Originals

Markevitch’s Milhaud Mono-Glory

Such is the stuff that golden oldies are made of: Igor Markevitch’s recording of Darius Milhaud’s Les Choéphores, one of Milhaud’s most exciting works. An intoxicating choral tableau (anywhere from Gounod to Dukas) and a distinctly modern early 20^th century idiom are interwoven by an inventively scoring hand. Just when you expect another dose of twisted perfume, Milhaud opts for percussion-only sections or lets the chorus growl, speak, huff, hiss, puff, whistle while a speaker rhythmically chants the text. All in 1915, seven years before Walton’s Façade. Good start, but Markevitch lets his hair down in Arthur Honegger’s Symphony No.5 and then puts a Bacchus et Ariane by Roussel that rocks harder than any on record, in glorious 1960s (mono) sound.

Upon re-hearing this disc, I must admit that I was dead-wrong when I dismissed the disc, taking a casual swipe at it in a 2010 Salzburg Festival review of Les Choéphores from 2010. 

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Vilde Frang Debuts with the NSO

Nielsen / Tchaikovsky, Violin Concertos, V. Frang, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, E.G. Jensen (Warner Classics, 2012)

We had been following Vilde Frang on disc and streaming audio when we first heard her live, with her mentor, Anne-Sophie Mutter, and the Camerata Salzburg in 2008. The young Norwegian violinist had been announced at one point for the tour with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic last season, hosted here by Washington Performing Arts, but the first chance to hear her in a solo concerto came last night, in a concert with the National Symphony Orchestra. She should have been playing Carl Nielsen's violin concerto, which she has recorded so beautifully for Warner Classics, but instead she played Bruch's first concerto, last heard just in 2011 with Joshua Bell. The piece was sandwiched between Stravinsky's charming suite from the ballet music for Pulcinella, last heard from the NSO in 1993, and Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony (unreviewed).

Juraj Valčuha, Chief Conductor of the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI in Turin, chose lovely tempi in the Stravinsky, a piece that is a modern reworking of 18th-century music, usually considered the beginning of the composer's neoclassical period. The concertino, comprised of the principal string players, had a delicate, chamber music sound, featured prominently in the gently paced opening movement. The oboe solo lilted beautifully in the second movement, all guided by the confident gestures of Valčuha, albeit with some questionably violent accents insisted on here and there. The Tarantella was rollicking in its off-beat shifts, and the boisterous trombone solo in the Vivo movement was a hoot, the whole thing sounding like Baroque dance music hybridized with Offenbach.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Conductor Juraj Valcuha takes NSO program to a near-slog (Washington Post, February 6)

Frang has most impressed me with the trance-like sound of her pianissimo tone, which served her well in the concerto's opening exchanges between soloist and orchestra. She played the faster sections of the first movement with a free sense of rubato, her vibrato-heavy left hand producing a rich throaty sound. Valčuha helped to control the orchestral volume to suit the smaller scope of his soloist's tone, giving the musicians their head in the lush, full-bodied tutti sections, producing outbursts of sound. Occasionally, especially in the Adagio, Frang's vibrato was so heavy that the intonation erred a little too far south, but the pyrotechnics of the Finale, a few minor intonation issues aside, were impressive. This was not an earth-shattering debut, but Frang more than proved her worthiness to receive another invitation. Please, NSO, let it be Nielsen next time.

This concert repeats tonight and tomorrow, in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.