A Hat's Off

We've often in the past come down fairly hard on classical music reviewer and journalist 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 journalist, 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.