jwilzewske: carnegie hall

Showing posts with label carnegie hall. Show all posts

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Victor Goldberg: Musical Meditation, Being a Blessing

I n a theme for [a set of] variations, it is almost only the bass [left-hand piano part] that has any meaning for me. But this is sacred to me: it is the firm foundation on which I then build my [musical] ‘stories’. What I do with a melody is only playing around ... If I vary only the melody, then I cannot easily be more than clever or graceful, or, indeed, [if] full of feeling, deepen a pretty thought. On the given bass, I invent something actually new; I discover new melodies in it--I create.”
— Johannes Brahms.

V ictor Goldberg’s performance last night in the [completely filled] Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall was a tour de force.

Scarlatti: Sonata in E Major, K. 380
Chopin: Scherzo in B-flat Minor Op. 31
Shostakovich: Sonata No. 2 in B Minor, Op. 61
Brahms: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, Op. 24

I n particular, the emotional diversity of this program fully lived up to the ambitious ‘Depths of the Creative Spirit’ billing.

T he Brahms variations and fugue are the epitome of developing and reprising an idea, turning it round and round, dwelling on it and expanding it. Unlike Bach’s Goldberg variations or Beethoven’s Diabelli variations that vary the subject with the aim of departing from it, the Brahms reiterates its subject and reiterates it until the ‘patterns’ in the ‘wallpaper’ take on new, ever newer meanings. The nominal ‘structure’ recedes as in some kinds of optical illusions, and the deep/hidden significance is revealed. Pure magic.

I have read about this piece in the illustrious books about Brahms; I have heard Op. 24 performed before. Its surface qualities seem straightforward enough. And its storied place in Brahms’s early career (and in his relationship with Clara Schumann, who premiered Op. 24 in December, 1861) makes it seem like a known quantity.

B ut the meditative, ‘wave-like’, strophic character of Brahms’s 25 variations was prominently featured in Goldberg’s account last night. In fact, this is the first time that I think I understand this piece? Meditating musically is Victor Goldberg’s specialty—meditating not on changing the world or persuading others of his point of view, but meditating toward deeply apprehending the reality that’s already here and allowing us to apprehend it, too.

T here are many forms of meditative practice, but their essence is to see the truth of what ‘is’. Many classical Jewish meditations do this by contemplating a particular object—a phrase, a sense-perception, even an idea—and focusing intensely on it so that all distractions drop away. Similarly, in Buddhist and other traditions, attention is drawn to the barest perceptions of breath or movement—simply to suppress our inner chatter. Saying the rosary may have a similar effect for Roman Catholics. ‘Oneg shabbos’—becoming ever more exquisitely attuned to emotions—takes real effort. Getting ‘neshama yeteira’ (an ‘extra’ soul) or revealing and engaging the ‘hidden’ soul—doesn’t come from magic. It comes from effective, concentrated attention, and this is the gift that Goldberg gives us.

I t was through Pro Musicis and [their] community service concerts that I began to truly understand the power of communication and, therefore, the power of music.”
— Peter Oundjian, violinist/conductor, quoted on Pro Musicis website.

G oldberg is a 32 year-old Russian-born Israeli who has performed extensively in Israel, Europe, and the United States. His honors include the 2008 Pro Musicis International Award, the Artist Recognition Award at the International Keyboard Festival in New York and the Vladimir Horowitz International Piano Competition in Kiev, and First Prize at the Arianne Katcz Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. Goldberg is a scholar of the American-Israel Cultural Foundation and holds degrees from Tel Aviv University’s Rubin Academy, Juilliard, the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, and the Manhattan School of Music.

Monday, June 2, 2008

Terry Eder: Lawyer, Romantic

T he traditional configuration of the keyboard—its arrangement of black and white keys—has had a largely unrecognized influence on the history of harmony, because of most composers’ dependence on the piano for inspiration, an influence that may perhaps not be considered entirely benign... Playing a melody in C major feels very different under the hand from playing it in [all black keys— ] F-sharp major. We are physically in a different realm.”
— Charles Rosen, Piano Notes, p. 229.

D ebussy’s music is different from any other. It was a leap into a new region of art. It is like the music of another planet.”
— Claudio Arrau, in Dubal, p. 14.

A t the heart of Romanticism lies transformation, a magic act conferring promethean powers on the artist.”
— Benita Eisler, Chopin’s Funeral, p. 120.

Terry Eder delivered a wonderful, inspired-and-inspiring recital last night at Zankel Hall. The thoughtful program was comprised of innovative romantic works. Each one in its day precipitated innovations in piano technic.

Chopin—Barcarolle in F-sharp, Op. 60
Messiaen—Prelude: Chant d’extase dans un paysage triste
Beethoven—Sonata No. 32 in c minor, Op. 111
Bartók—Mikrokosmos 6, Nos. 148-153 (Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm); Sonatina; Three Folksongs from the Csík District
Debussy—Estampes; l’Isle joyeuse

Eder went straight to the heart of Chopin’s world-view, and gave insight not only into the artist himself—the interiority of an exile—but solid commentary on his technique and interpretation as well. Eder renders the Barcarolle’s natural rhythm as one more of ‘breathing’ than of ‘water flowing’—a legal theory for which there is reliable precedent.

In a moderate 6/8 or 12/8 meter (lilting; waltz-like triplets), the title ‘barcarolle’ (boating song) was used for many character pieces, by various Romantic composers. The ephemeral, liminal effects evoked in Op. 60 are informed by the hopes and dreams of the tubercular Chopin, who was within 3 years of his death at 39 and in the midst of ongoing difficulties with his lover, George Sand, at the time this piece was composed. One of Chopin’s last works, Barcarolle in Eder’s hands is laden with the passion that the piece demands. Eder’s light, dry pedal technique kept the gunwales well above the waterline.

The right-hand enjoys considerable independence from the left-hand, which Eder manages with ease. The pulse in the left-hand cannot be resisted by the right forever, though—the effect is evocative of small ‘eddies’ in the margins of a serene river. Particles caught up in an eddy may circulate for awhile but are eventually compelled to continue the course downstream, captured by current/hypermeter with a longer timescale than the activity in the eddy. With Eder as the boatman at the helm, this piece ‘pushes off’ not for a round-trip boatride in the present but instead a transformative one-way adventure into the future. River of no return, such is Life. Last night’s performance by Eder is the first time I have imagined that this is what Chopin may really have intended to say in this piece—in effect a much ‘darker’, ‘realist’ breed of Romanticism than Barcarolle is normally given credit for.

The Debussy l’Isle joyeuse, composed in 1903, was superb. One of its inspirations was Antoine Watteau’s (1684-1721) painting, L’embarquement pour Cythère. But Debussy eloped with his mistress, Emma Bardac, to Jersey in 1904, and he revised this piece after that visit—so it’s likely that this is more autobiographical essay than arms-length character piece. The piece’s close correspondence to D’un cahier d’esquisses has also been pointed out. The two pieces are sometimes performed as a single lyrical work, without a break (or even lifting the pedal) between them—much as Chopin’s Barcarolle is often played back-to-back with Berceuse.

Eder’s account of the Bartók was admirable for its coloristic depth, pensiveness—phlegmatic, festinating bagpipers and all. Her treatment of Messiaen yielded a fatalism that was fascinating for its existential qualities—despondency that still has energy to speak with friends and friends still gathered around with whom to speak; youthful ‘tristesse’ that gives way to a growing-up and taking measure of what one has learned; newly-attained worldliness that is not endangered or ‘damaged goods’. Eder’s topicality is genuine and persuasive.

Terry Eder made her Lincoln Center recital debut in April, 2006. She was a Recipient of Artists International’s Outstanding Alumni-Winners Award in Piano. She received her Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin Conservatory and her Master of Music degree from Indiana University at Bloomington. She served one year residencies at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest (under the guidance of acclaimed pianist and conductor, Zoltán Kocsis, where she also learned to speak Hungarian) and at the Banff Centre in Alberta. Ms. Eder is a practicing lawyer with special interests in international human rights practice. She received her J.D. from Fordham Law School in 1999. (As a musician-lawyer, she follows in the footsteps of such other musicians as Telemann, Tartini, Marcello, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky, each of whom studied law.)

Eder’s wonderful piano performance makes one yearn for lawyering so skillful and committed and storied as this. Eder lives with her architect-husband and their daughter in an 1861 brownstone in New York City.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

La Pasión de Rubén Lorenzo: El Sentimiento Falla’s Fantasía Bética Dentro y Fuera de España

I f Europe as a whole distinguishes today between Norwegian and Russian music it is because many years of practice in their grammar have taught us to distinguish them; yet, it would be easy to demonstrate that what Europe understands as ‘Spanish’ ... is nothing but a very limited aspect ... no more than a certain idiom fashioned principally on an Andalusian base ... Formal schematicism and brevity are essential qualities in the Concerto ... Not only is there never any filler or adornment in the instrumental parts, but these appear with abstemiousness in the extreme. Even the softness of the most idiomatic ranges is avoided, resulting in a timbre like that of old music played by primitive instruments, rude and astringent.”
— Adolfo Salazar, El concerto, 1927.

I n the present Blair-ite age of cultural thinness, it’s all too easy to feel depressed at the comparative indifference shown towards serious music and the arts, and deplore their lack of purchase on our national life. Imagine such contemporary figures as Birtwistle, Benjamin and Ades being conscripted into the search for a redefinition of Englishness in the face of the threatened breakup of the UK and further integration into Europe... By contrast, Carol Hess’s excellent study, ‘Manuel de Falla and modernism in Spain, 1898-1936’, reveals the composer in the context of the Generation of ‘98. Appalled by their country’s shattering defeat by the USA in the Cuban War, these passionate intellectuals proceeded to conduct intense self-examinations on questions of national identity and foreign influences. Musical controversy at first reigned over the merits of the indigenous zarzuela—its conventionalised nationalism (españolismo) appealing to isolationists as opposed to the more Eurocentric cult of Wagner which gripped cosmopolitan Barcelona. … With an agenda of his own, uniting the Latin cultures of Spain and France, [Falla] defended European music’s ‘racial borders’ from the hegemony of the German tradition, and joined Unamuno in condemning the rationalistic legacy of Protestantism with its lack of ‘sensory grounding’… In the eyes of his numerous detractors, however, the modern French school had now replaced Wagnerism as the musical threat to the Spanish sense of ‘race’.”
— Andrew Thomson, Musical Times, Autumn 2002.

I n the reception of Falla’s works in Spain, self, circumstance, and music intersect in compelling patterns that expose the innate idiosyncrasies in the
‘narrative urge’. It also reinforces the idea that music cannot exist as ‘the score itself’, reified in some utopian preserve where aesthetics alone holds sway, but as an utterance whose meaning will shift depending on the premises of a particular environment. The political Right promoted both Falla’s music and his character, emphasizing the period from 1932 on. In concentrating on this period, the Franco government was able to find powerful ammunition for its propaganda machine so that, with censorship wiping out all other points of view, franquismo singlehandedly laid the foundation for Falla’s legacy in Spain. There were, of course, some major discrepancies between this Rightist orientation, with its fustian diction and warped nostalgias, and the reality of Falla’s life... There is nothing to suggest that Falla actively opposed the principle of religious freedom. He was willing to criticize the administration and practices of the Church as he was the vandalism against holy sites. The latter he saw not so much as an attack on a corrupt power as a direct assault on God, and he feared that the Republic was bent on destroying not only the external trappings of the Church but the religious impulse itself... We do not know the composer’s understanding of the darker aspects of the Nationalist enterprise, namely, the role of its German and Italian allies, the effects of fascism throughout Europe, and Hitler’s designs. Nor could Falla have had foreknowledge of the virulence of Franco’s post-war reprisals. Having gone to Latin America for professional reasons and with every intention of returning, he was not a political exile, as is sometimes suggested. His rejection of Franco’s enticements no more indicates opposition to the regime than his donations to Republican camps and advocacy for friends on the ‘wrong’ side imply support for the vanquished Republic.”
— Carol Hess, Sacred Passions, p. 285-7.

Rubén Lorenzo provided an intriguing and passionate account of de Falla’s Fantasía Bética as part of his recital on Monday at Carnegie Hall. Lorenzo is noted for devising programs that he calls ‘monographic’ in their anthology-like scope, surveying the Spanish piano repertoire. But Monday’s recital was no dry academic monograph. Instead, it had more the impulse of an exciting suspense novel!

According to Carol Hess, the rejection of ‘localist andalucismo’ and adoption of a ‘universalist neoclassicism’ was a strong and recurring theme in Spanish modernist compositions in the first half of the 20th Century (2002, p. 4) and Falla was one of Spanish modernism’s leading exponents. Hess takes universalism to be stylistically and philosophically equivalent to neoclassicism, in part based on the force of Stravinsky’s enthusiastic endorsement of Falla’s late works and Stravinsky’s analysis of the compositional structure of Falla’s oeuvre. Like Hess, Falla biographer Tomás Marco (pp. 31-42) also notes Falla’s use of neoclassical compositional techniques in place of strictly nationalistic, andalusian ones—especially in his later compositions.

De Falla’s output ranges from late-romantic pieces to evocations of flamenco to the later neoclassicism. Lorenzo’s Bética emphasizes the piece’s flamenco features, maybe with more force and less restraint than is typical of flamenco. It seems that Falla was reluctant to let go of idiomatic flamenco elements, even if he eventually felt hemmed in by them. Maybe his life also manifested psychological ‘retentiveness’ in other ways, too: his conservative-flavored Roman Catholicism reportedly brought him both comfort and trouble throughout his life.

Incidentally, Bética is the Spanish name for the Roman province that is now Andalusia, transliterated from ‘Baetis River’ (now called the ‘Guadalquivir’). Fantasía Bética was dedicated by Falla to Artur Rubinstein, who used to play frequently in Spain and liked to perform vernacular Spanish music, including the Ritual Fire Dance. Bética’s nominally the final piece in Falla’s flamenco period, flanked by ‘El Amor Brujo’ and ‘Three-Cornered Hat’.

I t is easy to let Falla’s ‘complete respect for and loyalty to his Excellency, the Generalisimo’ and praise for Franco’s ‘undefeated soldiers’ slide into complete oblivion. But we must ask to what extent we ought to condemn a sickly [and, by then] old man whose faith, although it blinded him to many bad realities, caused him to make remarks that now seem tragically flawed. Unlike Picasso, who refused to exhibit Guernica in Franco’s Spain, or Casals, who turned down invitations to play there as long as Franco remained in power, Falla could have spoken out after the War. That he did not do so may make us uneasy today. But one who sees God before all else may become curiously tongue-tied over temporal matters.”
— Carol Hess, Sacred Passions, p. 288.

Q ué estimulante pensar en el futuro! Porque la música comienza a avanzar ahora mismo; la armonía aún debe ser un medio artístico. Por ejemplo, las canciones de Andalucía están basadas en escalas con intervalos más sutiles que las escalas en las que la octava es dividida en doce semitonos. Como compositor, todo lo que puedo hacer por el momento, es crear la ilusión de esos cuartos de tono, por medio de la superposición entre acordes de una tonalidad y otra.

[How stimulating to think about the future! Although music begins to advance right now, harmony still should be an artistically legitimate means of expression. For example, the songs of Andalusia are based on scales with more subtle intervals than the scales in which the octave is divided into twelve semitones. As a composer, all I can do for now is create the illusion of [reconciliation between] those realms of tone, by superimposing harmonies of one tonality on another. ] ”
— Manuel de Falla, 1919.

It was a revelation for me to discover that in the 1920s and 1930s Falla had remarked on aspects of his works that exhibited what today would be termed ‘microtonality’. Way ahead of his time! The biographers seem either not to have noticed those remarks, or else did not think the concept of microtonality sufficiently important to merit coverage in the context of Falla’s many accomplishments and overall significance in generating a Spanish national identity. Or else the biographers simply weren’t familiar with microtonality per se and didn’t know what to make of the remarks. Hmmm.

And how often do we think of microtonality in the context of solo piano works? Not often! The default prejudice is to think of a piano as tuned to a conventional temperament. It is not like a fretless stringed instrument or a wind instrument that’s amenable to an infinite range of pitch bending. When we think of piano, we think of note heads sitting precisely on staves, of white and black keys whose depression neatly yields sounds that have highly predictable pitches. We do not ordinarily expect a piano to be capable of microtonality. And yet here it was! Had the interpreter been one whose technique and athleticism and emotional exuberance were any less than those of Lorenzo we would not have heard the microtonality that this Falla piece contains. Had the recital hall been one whose acoustic properties were inferior to those in the Carnegie Weill venue we, likewise, would not have heard it. But the confluence of this Lorenzo, this Steinway, and this nice recital hall gave us this unique revelation. I had come with the intention of hearing Lorenzo educate me about Spanish culture and politics, but instead was delighted to receive this unexpected ‘bonus’—a revelation about piano physics and a revelation that Falla had been deliberately exploring microtonality decades before it became fashionable to do.

The Russian physicist Alexander Galembo has done considerable research on microtonal capabilities of the piano. If you are interested in the microtonal possibilities of conventional (‘unprepared’) piano, you may like to try to locate a copy of Galembo’s book. It is out-of-print and it is in Russian. But it’s a relatively slender volume, and Galembo’s writing is clear and concise, so with even a modest ability to read Russian it is possible to comprehend Galembo’s points.

T he microtonal effects are a result, mainly, of velocity effects and both vertical and horizontal motions of the piano strings after they have been struck by the hammers—and a result also of the detailed vibrational modes of the soundboard. The most interesting factor contributing to the existence of aftersound is the presence of more than one string for each piano note, and the consequent dynamical coupling that occurs among the strings struck by the same hammer. The data indicate clearly that we are dealing with two independent modes of vibration, which are producing sound waves through two separate radiating ‘antenna patterns.’ It is a dynamic thing: at various times after the attack, one or the other mode dominates—that is, near the beginning the dominant mode is different than it is near the end of the note. In fact, it is quite reasonable to suppose that the vibration pattern of the soundboard in response to a vertical force at the bridge is quite different from what it is for a horizontal force.”
— Gabriel Weinreich, KTH, Stockholm.

[Lorenzo is 48. Besides his extensive repertoire of Spanish music he also has performed and recorded Makrokosmos by Crumb. He is currently professor of the Upper Conservatory of Music of Zaragoza.]