Sounds & Fury

The Met's Peter Grimes

Writing in 1853, Richard Wagner declared that the as yet unwritten music for his epic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, "shall sound in a way that people shall hear what they cannot see," and when the music was finished, it proved Wagner as good as his word.

Benjamin Britten has little to do with Richard Wagner (or as little to do as is possible for a post-Wagner composer of opera), but one can imagine Britten saying the very same thing about his music for Peter Grimes. Virtually every measure of the extraordinary score is vivid with the sense and sounds of the sea in all its various moods and vagaries, and richly evocative of life in those coastline villages and towns whose very existence depends on the sea.

Last night, New York's Channel 13 (WNET) telecast the Met's 15 March Live In HD film of its new production of Britten's Peter Grimes directed and staged by Tony Award winning theater director John Doyle in his Met debut. We just finished watching our tape of Act I, and our extreme annoyance, even anger, has not as yet had enough time to subside to manageable enough proportions to permit us to go on to Acts II and III with due equanimity — beyond, that is, our skipping ahead to confirm our worst fear that the Prologue and first-act, two-scene set by set designer Scott Pask is used for the following two acts and their two scenes each as well.

And of what does that set consist? Primarily, it's a huge wall of blackened, sea-weathered wood planks, the wall provided with a number of open-doored or -shuttered cutouts along its width and height in which appear various of the opera's characters, the wall spanning the stage from extreme left to extreme right, and rising from stage floor into the flies.

And how is this supposed to symbolize or represent the fishing village (called the Borough in the opera, but meant to be an almost verbatim representation of Britten's native Aldeburgh) limned so brilliantly by Britten's music and Montague Slater's splendid libretto?

Only The Shadow and John Doyle know for sure, but we'd bet our last bippy that clever Tony Award winning theater director took his cue from this exchange at Grimes's "hearing" which forms the opera's Prologue:

Grimes
Stand down you say. You wash your hands.
The case goes on in people's minds.
The charges that no court has made
Will be shouted at my head.
Then let me speak, let me stand trial.
Bring the accusers to the hall.
O let me thrust into their mouths
The truth itself, the simple truth.
The truth itself!

Townspeople (chorus)
When women gossip, the result
Is someone doesn't sleep at night.
But when the crowner sits upon it,
Who can dare to fix the guilt?

Swallow
Clear the court!

Grimes
The truth — the pity — and the truth.

Ellen
Peter, Peter, come away!

Grimes
Where the walls themselves
Gossip of inquest.

And that for Doyle becomes everything that is the Borough; ergo, The Wall.

OK. We get it. Very slick.

And very empty, too; most especially as Doyle places the anonymous, gossiping townspeople — all clothed in dark-green and black, Puritan-like dress — in mostly static blocked masses in front of The Wall, not behind it and seen through the cutouts where the metaphor might have made some dramatic sense.

But in any case, the Borough is more than the malevolent gossiping of its inhabitants. It's a fishing village every detail of the daily life of which is centered on and ordered by the sea as Britten's music makes powerfully and abundantly clear. Where is all that village life in this production? It doesn't exist, and, further, is made of no consequence by Doyle's Konzept; a Konzept that blunts Britten's brilliant and evocative score at every turn.

But we don't wish to be misunderstood. We're not calling here for the fussy, natural realism of a typical 19th-century staging. The many-layered depth and profundity of Britten's music coupled with Slater's libretto can stand up to and even glory in an abstract stage treatment. But the abstraction must meet both music and text on their terms, not be some director's postmodern deconstruction of those terms; a deconstruction such as this one that fights against those terms every step of the way. We shudder even to think of how The Wall will play out in Acts II and III.

What's that? How was the performance itself? So far, pretty much first-rate for the most part, although we could, at times, have asked for a more passionately realized reading from the conductor, the excellent Donald Runnicles.

But we're running ahead of ourself. We're holding our considered judgment of the performance for another time. We have first to get through — and over — the staging of this production. I suspect that, ultimately, the only way we'll be able to accomplish that is to imagine our own staging as we listen to the performance with our eyes closed.

Off-Message But Noteworthy

George W. Bush may be a heart-in-the-right-place simpleton, and he and his entire Administration criminally incompetent, right-wing-loony, Neo-Conservative ideologues, but his speechwriters are apparently another and eloquent story.

Following is an excerpt from Mr. Bush's speech delivered earlier today to Israel's Knesset on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel.

President Peres and Mr. Prime Minister, Madam Speaker, thanks very much for hosting this special session. President Beinish, Leader of the Opposition Netanyahu, Ministers, members of the Knesset, distinguished guests: Shalom. Laura and I are thrilled to be back in Israel. We have been deeply moved by the celebrations of the past two days. And this afternoon, I am honored to stand before one of the world’s great democratic assemblies and convey the wishes of the American people with these words: Yom Ha’atzmaut Sameach (Happy Independence Day).

It is a rare privilege for the American President to speak to the Knesset. Although the Prime Minister told me there is something even rarer — to have just one person in this chamber speaking at a time. My only regret is that one of Israel’s greatest leaders is not here to share this moment. He is a warrior for the ages, a man of peace, a friend. The prayers of the American people are with Ariel Sharon.

We gather to mark a momentous occasion. Sixty years ago in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s independence, founded on the "natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate." What followed was more than the establishment of a new country. It was the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David — a homeland for the chosen people Eretz Yisrael.

Eleven minutes later, on the orders of President Harry Truman, the United States was proud to be the first nation to recognize Israel’s independence. And on this landmark anniversary, America is proud to be Israel’s closest ally and best friend in the world.

[...]

The fight against terror and extremism is the defining challenge of our time. It is more than a clash of arms. It is a clash of visions, a great ideological struggle. On the one side are those who defend the ideals of justice and dignity with the power of reason and truth. On the other side are those who pursue a narrow vision of cruelty and control by committing murder, inciting fear, and spreading lies.

This struggle is waged with the technology of the 21st century, but at its core it is an ancient battle between good and evil. The killers claim the mantle of Islam, but they are not religious men. No one who prays to the God of Abraham could strap a suicide vest to an innocent child, or blow up guiltless guests at a Passover Seder, or fly planes into office buildings filled with unsuspecting workers. In truth, the men who carry out these savage acts serve no higher goal than their own desire for power. They accept no God before themselves. And they reserve a special hatred for the most ardent defenders of liberty, including Americans and Israelis.

And that is why the founding charter of Hamas calls for the “elimination” of Israel. And that is why the followers of Hezbollah chant “Death to Israel, Death to America!” That is why Osama bin Laden teaches that “the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties.” And that is why the President of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.

There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It’s natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

[...]

Sixty years ago, on the eve of Israel’s independence, the last British soldiers departing Jerusalem stopped at a building in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. An officer knocked on the door and met a senior rabbi. The officer presented him with a short iron bar — the key to the Zion Gate — and said it was the first time in 18 centuries that a key to the gates of Jerusalem had belonged to a Jew. His hands trembling, the rabbi offered a prayer of thanksgiving to God, "Who had granted us life and permitted us to reach this day." Then he turned to the officer, and uttered the words Jews had awaited for so long: "I accept this key in the name of my people."

Over the past six decades, the Jewish people have established a state that would make that humble rabbi proud. You have raised a modern society in the Promised Land, a light unto the nations that preserves the legacy of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And you have built a mighty democracy that will endure forever and can always count on the United States of America to be at your side. God bless.

RTWT here.

More Distressing News

More distressing news from the MSM classical music critical front. Longtime New York Times classical music critic Bernard Holland has accepted the buyout offered him by the Times to relinquish his staff position as a Times classical music critic. That means the Times is now left with no-one on the classical music staff who deserves the title of critic.

Sign of the times (P.I.).

A Heads-Up

In the unlikely event you don't regularly read Matthew Guerrieri's blog, Soho the Dog (and if you don't, you should), here's an excerpt from at least one post you shouldn't miss reading. Writes Matthew:

Washington, D.C., has always seemed to me a place suffused with intellectual insecurity (especially this millen[n]ium) but it seems to have spread into its musical life this past week. First, Greg "We Must Kill Classical Music In Order To Save It" Sandow — who's jumping the shark on pretty much a weekly basis these days — finds that Felicity Lott just isn't pandering to him as much as he would like.

[...]

My initial reaction — which I still think is true — is that if your idea of listening is to sit back in your chair and wait for something to hit you in the gut, then, yeah, the glories of Duparc and Debussy and Baudelaire are probably going to slip past you. The power of Baudelaire isn't just in his transgression, it's in the combination of that transgression with his formal discipline and poetic restraint. Decadence is supposed to be elegant, after all — that's part of the whole point. It's why Duparc's Baudelaire settings, or, to give a more extensive example, Faure's Verlaine settings, are so successful — the polished surface in quiet tension with the implications of the poetry. That demands an active engagement on the part of the listener/reader, and active engagement is what those composers would have expected; the unease is more profound if you find it on your own. Duparc and Debussy knew what Baudelaire was up to. Sandow doesn't.

Sandow blames standard recital presentation — "The form of the concert at war with its content," he writes. As usual, he implicitly proscribes something closer to popular culture — a presentation that underlines whatever the content "is." (Felicity Lott in torn nylons and safety pins, maybe.) But the form isn't at war with the content — even given the way that term has been cheapened through overuse along the banks of the Potomac — the form is content-neutral. The conventions of recital performance are designed to stay out of the way of as wide a variety of content as possible.

Precisely — all of it.

There's more, of course, with not all of which we agree.

RTWT here.

Hahn, Salonen, Schoenberg, Sibelius: A Brief Note

Thanks to a heads-up by Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette (see this Sounds & Fury post) and a serendipitous subsequent airing on WQXR, we've now heard the new Deutsche Grammophon recording of violinist Hilary Hahn's reading of the Schoenberg and Sibelius violin concertos with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and it's an impressive outing through and through. While Ms. Hahn's reading of the Sibelius is somewhat too cool and distant for our tastes and our understanding of the work, her reading is in every way a perfectly valid one and performed here with flawless violinistic virtuosity.

But it's the Schoenberg that most captured our interest as it's a work we've now heard for the very first time. Ms. Midgette says that in this reading Ms. Hahn (and Mr. Salonen as well) are "smart enough not to get tied in knots by [the 'density' of] Schoenberg's score, and to see through it to the composer's inner romantic." After our one-time audition of this work and this performance, we respectfully disagree with that assessment — or, rather, with its wording. There's nothing in Schoenberg's score to "see through," and nothing "inner[ly] romantic" about this work. Its romanticism is up-front-and-center and in full flower throughout the work's lushly orchestrated three movements; not the lyric romanticism of a Brahms or Tchaikovsky of course, but a full-blown romanticism nevertheless, 20th-century style, everywhere replete with unresolved dissonance and ferocious atonal 20th-century angst. Against big and sometimes sweeping romantic gestures in the orchestra the solo violin plays a largely "spiky" and "angular" counterpoint (to use praisefully two terms used pejoratively by Ms. Midgette) to electric effect, the gestalt deeply, arrestingly, and unabashedly heart-on-sleeve impassionedly expressive. And Ms. Hahn handles the impossibly difficult solo part with perfect assurance and a seeming effortlessness, her playing, again, flawless throughout, her tone rich and round whether playing angst-ridden fortissimos or whispered harmonics.

We love this concerto at first hearing, and Ms. Hahn's performance here seems to us exemplary as does the performance of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mr. Salonen. This CD will soon occupy a place in our highly selective, still rebuilding CD library where you may be sure it will be accessed numerous times in future so that we may become more intimately familiar with this remarkable work and with this apparently equally remarkable performance.

And Speaking Of First-Rate Writing On Classical Music...

Also from The Washington Post, here's a background piece on David Del Tredici's Final Alice — one of our all-time favorite 20th-century works — by classical music journalist Stephen Brookes. Writes Mr. Brookes:

It was the most outrageous thing the music establishment could have imagined. Here was Sir Georg Solti leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a new work by a leading avant-garde composer, and there were . . . arias! With actual melodies! Contemporary music, as everyone knew, was supposed to be thorny and atonal stuff, with no use for the outdated conventions of the past. Yet here was bar after bar of lush, unrepentant harmony, hummable tunes, symphonic gestures right out of Mahler. Even a fugue.

To the ruling avant-garde it was a slap in the face -- and as a final insult, the audience leapt to its feet, cheering, when the piece came to a close.

It was Oct. 7, 1976, and the work was Final Alice by 39-year-old composer David Del Tredici. Until that moment, he'd been a card-carrying member of the avant-garde. But in one bold stroke, Del Tredici jettisoned the strict composing system known as serialism (which dominated new American music, to the despair of most audiences) and embraced a neo-romantic style -- scandalizing his colleagues and setting off an earthquake in American music whose aftershocks are still being felt.

"Final Alice changed the face of music in this country overnight," recalls Leonard Slatkin, the National Symphony Orchestra's music director, who was in the Chicago audience that night. "It destroyed all conceptions of what 'new music' was supposed to be, and many composers will tell you that they were now liberated to write how they felt. It was the start of a revolution."

RTWT here.

A Hat's Off

We've often in the past come down fairly hard on classical music reviewer and commentator Anne Midgette (most famously — or as famously as anything written on this blog can be considered famous — here), but since her move from The New York Times to The Washington Post in January of this year to take the place of the Post's on-leave Pulitzer Prize winning chief classical music critic, Tim Page, and where her official designation is, "interim chief classical music critic," Miss Midgette has been turning out reviews and commentary that are of consistently high quality and well worth one's time reading. Take, for instance, her review of a recent Deutsche Grammophon release of Hilary Hahn's readings of two violin masterpieces by Schoenberg and Sibelius. Writes Ms. Midgette in her opening grafs:

Somebody forgot to tell the violinist Hilary Hahn that Schoenberg is ugly.

The music of Arnold Schoenberg, of course, isn't ugly at all; in fact, he's one of the last of the romantics. And that's exactly how Hahn understands him. Her new recording of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto on Deutsche Grammophon, released last month, shows no traces of the spiky, unpleasant angularity that represents Schoenberg in the popular consciousness. And this is quite a feat, since the concerto is one of the more technically difficult pieces to play in the repertory.

Hahn used to strike me as a somewhat wooden, obedient player: the paradigm of the young prodigy. In this week's program with the National Symphony Orchestra, she offers the Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1, which she has also recorded — the kind of virtuosic but rather empty fireworks piece that she seemed to me well suited for. It's interesting that her tone, which had seemed slightly thin, blossoms in the Schoenberg. The density of the score can make the piece sound clotted, but on this recording, it sings. All of that ferocious virtuosity is harnessed here in the service of a larger, expressive purpose.

Hahn's sensibility dovetails well with that of Esa-Pekka Salonen, who conducts the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra on this recording. He, too, is someone who focuses expressivity through a quality of analytic intellectualism. Both musicians are smart enough not to get tied in knots by Schoenberg's score, and to see through it to the composer's inner romantic.

Or take for another instance her review of the most recent concert by the National Symphony Orchestra. Writes Ms. Midgette:

Guilty pleasures. Serious fun. Heavy entertainment: It's hard to know what to call the National Symphony Orchestra's program last night. It was filled with music that many people might dismiss as light, or even in bad taste: Paganini's Violin Concerto, written as a showpiece for a flashy virtuoso, and David Del Tredici's hour-plus Final Alice, as untrammeled and in-your-face as a piece of orchestral music can get.

Yet the concert was utterly intense and compelling. Many classical music fans will readily believe that the violinist Hilary Hahn can make something breathtaking out of the Paganini, but they may not be prepared for a dramatic reading of the last two chapters of Alice in Wonderland, performed with ceaseless energy and stratospheric high notes by a soprano who appears to be channeling Lucia di Lammermoor on acid. Believe me, the latter is as much worth hearing as the first.

[...]

Hahn...made her entrance in a black dress with decollete [sic] that reached nearly to her navel. I would not mention the soloist's dress had it not so well matched the piece she played, and the way she played it. On most women, that dress would have appeared provocative, vulgar; on Hahn it epitomized cool and classic elegance. By the same token, she took Paganini's showy and probably vulgar piece and treated it as if it were the finest music, and as if her prodigious feats of violin playing were all in its service.

I personally am a recent Hahn convert (though plenty of listeners could have told me my error long ago), so perhaps I speak with a convert's zeal: Her control over the instrument last night was jaw-dropping. She held a singing legato all through Paganini's leaps and double-stops and Italian-opera-style figurings, and in the cadenza she put all that aside and wove her own delicate net around the long lines of the music. When it was over, called back by applause, she offered a pure, clean, honest reading of the "Sarabande" from Bach's Second Partita; it says a lot about the way she played the Paganini that the Bach seemed a complement rather than a departure.

And then: Final Alice. It was written in 1976, and is in a way a psychedelic relic of its time, with lots of wild, luscious orchestral colors (including a theremin uttering its horror-movie "woowoowoo" sound effect at Alice's unpredictable growth spurts) to illustrate Lewis Carroll's inimitable dreamscape. It is easy to forget today that composers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s felt constrained to write in a particular kind of intellectual academic style, and with this piece Del Tredici is not merely throwing off those constraints, but giving the whole style the figurative raspberry. The work's tonal passages are less the issue than its sprawling, glorious self-indulgence: its obsessive focus on a forbidden love (the tacit fixation on the figure of Alice is at its heart); its length; its flashes of quotation (was that a big band? do I hear Ravel's La Valse?); and even, at the end, the composer's signature, when the soprano counts, in Italian, the chimes of miniature cymbals, until she reaches the 13th, when the whole orchestra whispers "Tredici!"

Both these excerpts are first-rate, insightful writing by anyone's standards whether one agrees with Ms. Midgette's expressed opinions or not.

We've no idea what's responsible for this flowering of Ms. Midgette as classical music reviewer and commentator, and we quite frankly don't care. Our only concern is with the result, and that result is indeed impressive. It's precisely what the MSM face of classical music most needs today.

Our hat's off to Ms. Midgette.

A Curiously Appealing Concept

This strikes us as a curiously appealing concept:

[B]eneath Kings Place, 150 strides from Eurostar St Pancras, rumbles a cultural revolution. Peter Millican, the out-of-town developer who bought the land in 1999, has created an office block that will also present classical music concerts and art exhibitions, completely free of public subsidy.

[...]

This is the plan. Half of Kings Place is let to the Guardian newspaper, the rest to Network Rail and other tenants who pay a commercial rent. Restaurants, bars and other amenities will be open to the public from breakfast to midnight, just like any other gherkin on the map.

The difference, however, hits the eye as you enter the lobby. On the right of security is an open sculpture gallery with a fully-curated programme and a working artist, Abigail Fallis, in residence. Down one escalator flight is a visual art gallery.

Another flight down are the concert halls, one space with 420 seats, the other 220.

[...]

Along with the art galleries, the music programme is filling up with famous acts. The opening in October will present 100 concerts in five days featuring Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Musick; the Brodsky, Duke and Chilingarian quartets; the Classical Opera Company and the pianist Jean-Bernard Pommier.

Two groups, the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, are moving onto the site. Both are officially resident at the subsidised South Bank but it’s the private developer of Kings Place who is giving them waterside offices at peppercorn rent, as well as a free hand with programming content.

RTWT here.

And You Thought We Jews Just Made Good Fiddlers

This is really quite amazing, actually, and goes beyond being a mere circus stunt. The performers are members of the Israel Philharmonic: the finger guy is Ariel Zuckermann, and Eyal Ein-Habar is responsible for the embouchure.

Muti To Chicago Updates

First, we've been expecting this, and it's arrived, but, curiously, not from the expected quarters.

In response to our snarky closing quip in this post, one correspondent writes (and it's typical of the rest):

The Philly Orch safe? Safe from what? Muti wouldn't go back there as MD under any circumstances. Besides, you've no grounds for your nasty remark. Muti is one of the world's great conductors, and was at the time that he was appointed MD of the PO. How else do you think he got the job?

How Muti got the job is a matter to which we're not privy, and therefore can pass no comment. We can, however, supply the grounds for our "nasty remark," which is that during Muti's 12-year tenure as the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director, he all but destroyed its signature sound, and turned the orchestra into an oversized if precise Italian opera pit band. It was saved from total destruction as a unique orchestral entity only by Muti's leaving and his being replaced by the perfect antidote: Wolfgang Sawallisch.

All by itself, that's grounds sufficient, but there's more. Muti has absolutely no feel for the cornerstone of the symphonic concert canon: the entire 19th- and early 20th-century Austro-German rep from Beethoven onward. His Beethoven cycle with the PO, for egregious instance, is a characterless, yawning bore, and we won't even speak of his insipid Brahms and Mahler, Schubert and Schumann, etc., etc.

How does this speak as to what to expect when he assumes directorship of the CSO? We'd rather not speculate. It's too depressing. Other commentators seem more sanguine. There's this and this (added 5/7) from Daniel J. Wakin of The New York Times, this from John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune, and this from Andrew Patner of the Chicago Sun-Times.

And then there's this from Alex Ross (added 5/7).

Take your pick.