Aspen: Closing Thoughts
I took my leave of Aspen a week ago, so today I'd like to offer (in no particular order) a few closing thoughts on the festival. The festival's 2008 "theme" was "Once Upon a Time", which per festival president Alan Fletcher entails exploring music that "weaves together folklore, legends, mythology, and fairytales" and "the way our stories - personal, social, and national - create and are created by our sense of identity and place." So far, so good. But in reality, I'm afraid, this "theme" served more as a marketing catch-phrase than as a path to deeper, more meaningful understanding of the musical works presented. And furthermore, the festival's promotional materials and program notes often lapsed into a saccharine conception of folkore and fairy tales that is itself, well, a fairy tale. Any reader of Grimm's Fairy Tales knows that they're often downright gruesome, as in a treacherous servant's punishment in The Goose-Girl: "She deserves no better fate than to be stripped stark naked, and put in a barrel that is studded inside with sharp nails. Two white horses should be hitched to it, and they should drag her along through one street after another, until she is dead." I suppose I should bear in mind that Aspen is a performance festival, not an academic symposium. Still, I thought the festival's theme could have been explored a bit more rigorously.
One of classical music's more troubling characteristics is its high-culture, high-class veneer. Why is this troubling? Certainly it's foolhardy to believe that music can be abstracted from its social context, but I would rather see music appreciated on its own merits rather than due to a misguided ideology of past-worshipping. It's difficult to avoid the impression that many concert-goers are present more to advertise their alleged cultural sophistication and high social status than because they genuinely like the music. (It may sound like I'm conflating age (permanence? timelessness?) and social status. I am; but this association is fairly ubiquitous in culture and the media. See, for instance, the luxury Swiss watchmaker Patek Phillippe's tagline: "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely take care of it for the next generation.".) As you probably know, Aspen is an unfailingly wealthy town, giving it a certain feeling of irreality. Simply by virtue of its setting, the AMFS fairly oozes this classical music/high class association. I don't mention this as a particular criticism, but more as an observation; and in truth Aspen is much like any other classical venue in this respect. It's just that the town's ambience makes the connection unusually salient.
There were a few noteworthy performances I didn't get a chance to mention. One was Wu Han and David Finckel's performances of the world premiere of Pierre Jalbert's Cello Sonata. Han displayed a masterful command of a protean multiplicity of sounds and colors, and Finckel's playing was hardly any less impressive. Particularly interesting was the debt I thought the piece owed to electronic music. A trill on high harmonics played by Finckel reminded me of the buzzing of a live wire, while Han had the piano sounding remarkably like an electric bass (by placing her hand on the piano's bass strings while simultaneously playing them). The sounds of electronic music have often (to greater and lesser extent) taken their cue from acoustic instruments, so it's intriguing to see this cross-pollination occuring in reverse. Perhaps the most fun I had at any performance came at a burly, boisterous account of Dvořák's Piano Quartet op. 87 with Alexander Kerr, violin, Alan Gilbert, viola, Eric Kim, cello, and the lion-hearted Joseph Kalichstein prowling the keyboard. Kalichstein in particular played with the sort of full-throated abandon this music frequently demands, and got some great sounds during the cymbalon-esque passages.
Lastly, I should have mentioned earlier that streaming video of the first 1.5 weeks' concerts is available at www.medici.tv. And for the curious, festival President Alan Fletcher has a blog at http://www.gramophone.co.uk/interviews_detail.asp?id=2969&f=. Fletcher is a solid writer, though he maybe hasn't quite mastered the idiom, referring to individual posts as "blogs", as in "I'm writing a blog right now". OK, that was a bit snarky, I'm sorry. But this is a blog, after all!
Posted by lawson 2008-07-29 19:18:01Comments(0)
Alan Gilbert comes to town
The Aspen orchestras (Chamber Symphony and Festival) played host to a pair of big name soloists this past weekend: Julia Fischer, violin, and Alisa Weilerstein, cello (not to mention percussionist Cyro Baptista of Beat the Donkey, who didn't recieve top billing but probably deserved it). But I thought both these stars were out-shone by the Festival Orchestra, which turned in its finest performance of the season under Alan Gilbert, a relative unknown until his appointment last spring as the New York Philharmonic's next music director. If Sunday's performance is any indication, the size of his name will soon be inflating Zimbabwe-style.
But first, the Chamber Symphony. The highlight of that concert was a performance of Osvaldo Golijov's Azul. I recently wrote about what's been called the "postmodernist" impulse in contemporary composition. Golijov, a Jewish Argentinean native, has incorporated folk elements from these dual strands of his heritage while working within such characteristally Baroque forms as cantata (Oceana) and Passion oratorio (the St. Mark Passion). In other words, he's the poster boy for postmodernism. I find his work more successful than, say, Harbison's, because he filters these traditions through his own compositional voice rather than simply aping them. Azul is loosely structured as a Baroque adagio, "in which the pace of the music is slow but steady, though always continuing in motion at some level". Indeed, the solo cello line frequently employs characteristically Baroque vocal ornamentations, while a battery of percussion with hyper-accordion (essentially an electric accordion - not quite as exciting as it sounds) serve as a continuo of sorts. The music is contemplative and unashamedly beautiful: the percussion rather sighs and whispers than bangs, the strings produce a finely-sheened curtain of sound. My only (slight) misgiving is that Azul's "world music" feel and uninterrupted beauty veer towards Kum-ba-ya-ish-ness, a sort a musical representation of the idea that if we all just listen to the music of each other's lives then everyone can live in peace and harmony. Or maybe I'm just a cynic.
I can't resist commenting a bit further on Weilerstein. If Aspen were a political campaign and a poll was taken of the musicians here, we would doubtless discover that she has fairly high "negatives". Why is that? Simple jealousy may play some role: she's my age (early 20s) but already has a major international solo career. Yet I've usually found that musicians, despite the competitiveness of their field, are not unduly vindictive and don't excessively begrudge others' success, if they believe that success is warranted. (I saw her play the Rococo Variations with the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra a couple years ago, and found the performance overly flashy and superficial.) Another reason may be her stage demeanor: she seems to be going for the tortured, angelic look, and engages in frequent bouts of staring at the ceiling as if in a kind of rapture. I'm all for musicians displaying physical involvement in the music (indeed, C.P.E. Bach once said the same), but with Weilerstein it all seems a little too calculated. And unlike Fischer, who consistently engaged members of the orchestra in her performance of the Dvořák concerto, Weilerstein rarely acknowledged the other musicians on stage.
I spoke earlier of how impressed I was by the AFO's playing under Alan Gilbert. It certainly didn't hurt that two of the composers on that program, Anders Hillborg and Maurice Ravel, are true masters of orchestration. The first work on the program was Hillborg's Eleven Gates, completed in 2006. In Hillborg's words, "The title Eleven Gates refers to the idea that the piece falls into eleven sections, each section being entered through its Gate either abruptly or by a slowly merging transition...". Hillborg gave each section a title; here are some examples: "Suddenly in the Room with Chattering Mirrors", "Confused Dialogues with Woodpecker","Toy Pianos on the Surface of the Sea", and "Waves, Pulse, and Elastic Seabirds". Needless to say, I was hooked before a single note was played. Once the music did start, Eleven Gates quickly proved itself to be a masterful deployment of orchestral colors and timbres. Meanwhile, a deplorable couple in front of me checked email on their iPhones, she grotesquely over-makeuped, he over-cologned (or was that insect repellent?).
Ravel's ballet score Daphnis et Chloé contains some of the most ravishingly beautiful music ever penned. Indeed, I would warrant that it is unsurpassed in that regard. Gilbert paced the orchestra exquisitely through the "Dawn" scene that opens the second suite from the ballet, from the murmuring strings and distant horns that open the scene to the sunburst of sound that concludes it, before whipping the players into a frenzy for the concluding bacchanal. The orchestra was impressively responsive to Gilbert, and more importantly, sounded superb throughout.
Posted by lawson 2008-07-12 12:50:17Comments(2)
Aspen Week 2
Rach and Bach
I'm not especially fond of Rachmaninoff's 3rd piano concerto. Not because it lacks beautiful melodies, high drama, sensuous piano writing, and skillful interplay between soloist and orchestra; in fact, it has all of these in spades. But because the extraordinarily virtuousic piano part is so often held up as the end all be all, the ne plus ultra of pianism. To me this is emblematic of the unholy thrall in which a certain idea of the 19th century pianist-virtuoso holds the classical music world - what you might call the Piano Hero school of piano playing. Still, if you're going to be a Piano Hero, you might as well do it right, and Feltsman's performance proved himself worthy of his very own Marvel series at the least, and maybe even a summer Hollywood blockbuster. (Leaps tall buildings in a single bound! Faster than a speeding bullet! Plays Rach 3 like a champ!) More interesting to me was a glassy-surfaced, almost minimalist account of the E minor prelude from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The repeating right-hand figure rolled placidly along, barely disrupted by the ripples of gently rolled left-hand chords. Bach as minimalism is new to me, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend playing it this way, but it made for an illuminating listen nonetheless. There is something about Bach's music that survives translation exceptionally well, be it to electronica, jazz, or Sunday's unusual performance.Marin Alsop
Marin Alsop made headlines in 2005 for her controversial appointment as Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The headlineswere, of course, because she was the first woman to become music director of a major American orchestra. In a way, it's unfortunate that this was a Big Deal; in a perfect world, female music directors would be routine. But I can't deny that given all the attention I was quite looking forward to her appearance with the Aspen Chamber Symphony on Friday a week ago. The verdict: mixed. A performance of Christopher Rouse's Friandises to open the concert went well enough, followed by a lackluster reading of Prokofiev's 2nd violin concerto, with Cho-Liang Lin as soloist (though this can be laid largely at Lin's feet: he frequently rushed faster passages, forcing Alsop and the orchestra to play catch-up). Brahms' 3rd symphony closed the program. I have rarely if ever heard Brahms played so aggressively, particularly this the most contemplative of his symphonies. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but somehow the performance felt unsettled, the orchestra a little off-kilter, as if the bond between conductor and orchestra was imperfectly set. Alsop is also extraodinarily active on the podium, beating with unusual vigor and even jumping about at times. Again, there's nothing inherently bad there, yet...this may be a matter of personal taste, but I've often found that the best conductors know what they need to show and do no more than that.Contemporary Music can be Fun!
Last Saturday's chamber music concert featured two works of more or less recent vintage: Henry Cowell's Set of Five for piano, violin, and percussion, and Peter Eötvös's Snatches of a Conversation. Cowell was a gleefully iconoclastic experimentalist and pioneered the use of "tone clusters" (try smashing your forearm against a piano keyboard) and "string piano" (plucking the strings in the piano by hand). He also displayed substantial interest in non-Western performance traditions, studying gamelan with Javanese and Balinese masters, and this interest is given expression in Set of Five, which employs an array of non-Western percussion instruments. Unfortunately Saturday's performance (Virginia Weckstrom, piano, Paul Kantor, violin, percussion) had a serious, dutiful air about it at odds with Cowell's enthusiasm for exploring a world of exotic sonic landscapes. Fortunately, the impressive Aspen Contemporary Ensemble (after a lengthy set change) followed with Eötvös's beguiling Snatches, seeming to say "Hey Kids! Contemporary music can be Fun!". The work grew out of the composer's childhood experience of clandestinely listening to jazz (an illicit activity in Hungary at the time) on shortwave radio, the music mingling with static, random voice-overs, and other gremlins of the æther. Snatches marvelously captures this experience: trumpets play jazzy riffs that dissolve into nothingness, a sometimes histrionic Speaker intones periodically into a microphone, a synthesizer plays various sampled sounds. The ACE's exuberant performance was a perfect antidote to the contemporary-music-is-yucky-medicine-but-good-for-you-so-you'd-better-TAKE-IT attitude one encounters too frequently in classical concert halls. Posted by lawson 2008-07-06 11:13:36Comments(1)
Music Review: Aspen Festival Orchestra
Richard Wagner was not a particularly precocious composer. His early (and little-known) Symphony in C was essentially a competent but second-rate Beethoven knock-off, and his first two operas, Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot, met with middling success and are rarely heard today (though the latter will be performed at Glimmerglass this summer; with luck, I may attend). Rienzi was a first-rate Meyerbeer knock-off, and his first major success. But it was not until The Flying Dutchman that Wagner, like Hillary last January, truly found his voice. On Sunday afternoon, with David Zinman at the helm, the Aspen Festival Orchestra presented a swashbuckling reading of that opera's overture. Oboist Richard Woodhams and an unidentified English horn player contributed lovely solos representing the heroine Senta's prayers for the Dutchman, in that delicious juxtaposition of bombast and tenderness so characteristic of Wagner.
Richard Goode then joined the orchestra for Beethoven's 4th piano concerto. About this work I have surprisingly little to say, save that Goode's interpretation was sensitive, nuanced, and perhaps just a little too polite for my taste. After intermission came the "world premiere" of John Harbison's Great Gatsby Suite, essentially a series of Tin Pan Alley jazz tunes as reimagined by Harbison, with orchestral interludes. The heading "World Premiere" should be taken with a lump of salt, since this music had previously been heard as part of Harbison's opera of the same name, though not in the particular guise of a concert suite. The work itself is an excellent example of the perils of postmodernism. Composers today have unpredented freedom to borrow from a mélange of styles and influences: conventional tonality, serialism, jazz, Latin, folk music, and even hip-hop, are all in bounds. At the whim of the composer, dissonance can be emancipated, or it can be shackled. To this I say: Huzzah! And yet performance traditions cannot simply be lifted off a shelf somewhere and plopped down wherever one pleases. On one side of the equation is the composer, who (at best) internalizes and makes his or her own the conventions and musical language of a particular tradition. On the other side is the performer or performers, who must realize the composer's score. On both, the Gatsby Suite fell short, though hardly catastrophically.
To his credit, it seems Harbison was aware of at least one potential hazard of his Gatbsy endeavor: that the lithe, snappy songs he aimed to imitate would sound ponderous and overinflated when played by a large symphony orchestra. So within the very large orchestra the score calls for, there was a small, "concertino" group, comprised of piano, drums, rhythm guitar, and a handful of brass players. This was a step in the right direction on Harbison's part, but here, through no particular fault of their own, I thought the players fell short. There's no getting around the fact that conservatory-trained musicians aren't taught to play this kind of music. Certainly, they have the technical facility to physically play the correct notes at the correct times. But endowing those notes with true zing requires more than that. The piano playing, for instance, I found sadly somewhat limp. I'm reminded of a recent exchange on the Linux-audio-users list, in which someone suggested that playing reggae entailed simply going "plink, plink, plink" on the offbeats, and that only by the use of "herbal remedies" could reggae players endure the monotony. It didn't take long for a slightly piqued reggae player on the list to respond that "at least three things are wrong with what you said" and proffer an explication of reggae rhythm's subtleties. To play "plink" on the offbeats is one thing; to truly groove is another. The analogy to Sunday's concert should be clear.
The music itself is certainly better than competent. The concertino "songs" were fun if not tremendously memorable, but the score occasionally lost its way in the large orchestral sections. Passages intended as dramatic buildups were meandering, almost static. Here the juxtaposition with Wagner was particularly revealing. While no one will ever accuse Wagner of short-windedness, his ability to maintain a work's dramatic arc, to propel a piece constantly forward, is unerring (though dissent is welcome on this point). Think of the famous Rheingold prelude, which never flags in 100+ bars of uninterrupted Eb major sonority. True, Wagnerian standards for dramatic writing are of Olympian dimension, but to these standards Harbison did not quite measure up. Nevertheless, the Gatsby Suite was if nothing else a pleasant summer afternoon's divertissement.
A slightly ragged account of Strauss's Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche closed Sunday's performance. Next week the AFO is joined by blockbuster pianist Vladimir Feltsman for Rachmaninoff's pianist-busting third concerto, the centerpiece of an all-Russian concert also featuring Prokofiev and Kabalevksy.
Posted by lawson 2008-06-30 15:10:57Comments(0)
Week 1 in Aspen
The Aspen Music Festival kicked off its first weekend of concerts on Thursday with a recital by the Takács Quartet. Unfortunately, the expansive Benedict Music Tent was the venue, to the detriment of the performance. For the first half of the concert, I sat in the tent's upper bowl, and despite constant straining simply could not hear very well. A halfhearted attempt at a wooden backdrop behind the performers, presumably to help reflect sound outwards, didn't seem to have much effect. So while my eyes showed the four musicians sawing away mightily in the last movement of Beethoven's third Razumovsky quartet (op. 59 no. 3), my ears were none the wiser for their efforts. After intermission, I was able to move closer to the stage, much the better for a big-boned account of Franck's Piano Quintet, with Jeffrey Kahane at the piano. (Kahane is music director of the Colorado Symphony, where he succeeded Marin Alsop, now music director of the Baltimore Symphony.) Perhaps the festival organizers wanted to use the largest possible venue for the festival's opening concert. But it is a shame to see a fine performance lost in space, as it were. As I've said before, chamber music really does belong in chambers.
On Friday Kahane returned to the Benedict Tent as both conductor and pianist with the Aspen Chamber Symphony. But before this, Gabriel Chodos played Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata (op. 106) as a pre-concert appetizer in Harris Hall. Some appetizer. Occasionally one forgets just how fantastically, mesmerizingly insane Beethoven's late works can be, until a fresh hearing provides a fresh jolt of realization. At the same time, Chodos's playing illustrated the perils of playing Beethoven on a modern Steinway instrument in a fairly warm hall. These instruments are designed to project a rich, singing tone with lengthy reverb, qualities that are well-suited for the 19th century, Romantic era piano repertory (which for many people is all too often *THE* piano repertory). But these qualities, combined with a slightly injudicious use of pedal, frequently rendered Beethoven's dense, turbid score opaque. With the lighter, more articulate sound of the pianos of an earlier age, there is less danger of this. The historical performance practice crowd may be guilty of occasional overzealousness and dogmatism, but there's no doubt that they're on to something.
The ACS concert began with a less weighty Beethoven work, the Piano Concerto no. 1 in C, op. 15. Jeffrey Kahane did double duty as conductor and soloist. Unfortunately, the demands of the flesh kept me away for the first half of the piece, as my truculent stomach demanded immediate dinner. But what I did hear from outside the tent sounded lovely. After intermission, the orchestra presented a lively, impish reading of Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony, op. 25. This work poses noticeable challenges in ensemble, as the potential for rushing in the last movement is nearly overwhelming, yet the mostly-student orchestra handled these challenges with brio. Joshua Bell joined the orchestra for two violin favorites, Chausson's Poème and Ravel's Tzigane. His command of harmonics in the Ravel was impressive. But this Gypsy-tinged score couldn't help reminding me of a concert given by the Roby Lakatos Ensemble in Ithaca a few years ago. Lakatos bills himself as a real-life, genuine Gypsy violinist, and his act included a generous helping of shtick. (Such a moustache!) This aside, Lakatos is no fake. His array of freakish violin tricks was breathtaking to behold, and his bow control was unbelievable. And though he was the undisputed front man, the other members of his band played at a similarly high level, especially the cimbalon player, who I only wish had taken more solos. The upshot of this little digression is this: ever since, all these "gypsy violin" showpieces like Tzigane or Sarasaté's Zigeunerweisen have seemed, well, a little lame.
But for me, the clear high point of the festival so far was the Takács String Quartet's Saturday night concert at Harris Hall, which proved a far more amenable locale than the tent. The program began with Haydn's String Quartet op. 74 no. 3, nicknamed "The Rider". The first movement's eponymous bouncing rhythms were delivered with gusto, but the group's playing shone most brightly in the tender second movement, marked Largo Assai. The ensemble was absolutely exquisite, and a marvelous reminder of what a finely wrought superorganism a great string quartet can be. After intermission came a transcendent performance of Janáček's String Quartet no. 2, "Intimate Letters". This is not a word to be used lightly, and I hope I don't come to regret employing it so early in the festival. Yet for the Takác's magnificent playing, by turns boisterous, somber, spiky, tender, and ecstatic, there is really no other word. As I learned from Steven Ledbetter's program notes, this work had something of an unusual genesis. In his seventies, Janáček became extremely close to a young married woman named Kamila Stösslova. Their relationship was conducted in large part through frequent letters, from which the piece derived its name. (Incidentally, Janáček originally planned to name the piece "Love Letters" before deciding against it.) You might think this sounds a little creepy, but such thoughts are soon dispelled by the otherworldly purity and emotional intensity of the score. As played by the Takács Saturday night, it was enormously moving.
Posted by lawson 2008-06-23 22:17:08Comments(2)