jwilzewske: rhetoric

Showing posts with label rhetoric. Show all posts

Saturday, November 17, 2012

DiDonato, Sinkovsky, Il Complesso Barocco Bring Down the House

W e singers tend to boast that our careers offer the best form of psychotherapy in existence, for we are allowed to work out the bulk of our inner demons courtesy of the larger-than-life drama queens we encounter on the stage—divine ladies who weep, love, moan, and avenge more grandly and stylishly than in any other art form.”
— Joyce DiDonato, 2012.

T he Joyce DiDonato/Dmitry Sinkovsky/Il Complesso Barocco performance last night in the Harriman-Jewell Series was really phenomenal. Many extraordinary, seldom-heard works by lesser-known Baroque composers, like Antonio Cesti (1623-1669), Geminiano Giacomelli (1692-1740), Giuseppe Orlandini (1676-1760), and Giovanni Porta (1675-1755). Extraordinarily dramatic and vivid vocal and instrumental interpretations. Extraordinarily tight and responsive interactions between the ensemble members and Ms. DiDonato throughout.

A scending cadences, each with the forte dynamic they require, imparting a strong sense of closure. Descending cadences to pianissimo, imparting a sense of sorrow with aspiration. The sort of gestures that Hatten once characterized as “yearning” (see links below).

F ormalized emotion—a dialectic of ‘drama queens’—DiDonato rations her body movement, reserves it mostly for recitative passages, while her body is relatively still during arias: her regal rhetoric is well-suited to these stories of queens and princesses. The arias ‘frame’ the dramatic recitatives, not the other way round (that is, ‘decorative’ arias, see Taruskin, p. 25).

M ost online reviews from performances on their current tour do focus, understandably, on Ms. DiDonato’s singing. But, my God, this ensemble! Gorgeous! And, my God, Sinkovsky! Prodigious!

W hat strings is Dmitry Sinkovsky playing!!? Silver-plated, copper on gut? Pirastro Eudoxa? Chorda? Sensuous with a glint, a sound that is a perfect match for DiDonato's rich mezzo-soprano voice!

T he wound G-string was common on violins in the 18th century. Beyond 1840 and already far beyond plain gut strings, composers were writing things that were, essentially, only playable with a wound G string. With modern strings, we’d lose this rich, complex sound of very thick gut strings. We’d lose the consort timbre within the violin family. We’d lose the diversity of articulation, and we’d lose subtleties of this 17th and 18th Century sonic architecture.

T o a software engineer like me, the musical score is an object-oriented ‘method’, procedural code executed on an instance of an object-class that may or may not grant all of the behaviors specified by the arguments passed to it. But Dmitry Sinkovsky and Il Complesso Barocco accomodate all args, all flavors!

T he range of Dmitry Sinkovsky’s articulation is especially interesting, because it allows him to imitate the singer’s diction, with diverse ‘consonants’ beginning each violin-syllable (or bow stroke) and diverse glottal and quasi-labial and -dental and -fricative sounds to match each of DiDonato’s vocal gestures. Through the centuries, the imitation of the human voice has always been an ardently sought goal for instrumentalists. Sinkovsky totally owns this! (He has even mastered American folk-fiddlish, jiggy “hoe-down” technic, which he improvised to humorous effect at DiDonato’s prompting for one of her encores, to the raucous delight of her hometown Kansas City audience!)

S inkovsky’s pulsatile, fluid bow-and-whole-body gestures, dance-like, match DiDonato’s operatic arms-and-whole-body gestures. Sinkovsky’s bow stroke is Transitional Period? Russian? Energized ‘non-legato’, at any rate! Because of the ‘give’ of the bowhair, the bow does not emit full sound immediately at the onset of the stroke, but only after some pressure has been exerted and some bow excursion has occurred—the momentary softness followed by a crescendo in each stroke.

H e plays fast passages with energy abounding but with still a roundness to his sound and supple articulations. A player trained in a modern, pressure-on-the-bowstick style feels immediately that baroque bow does not give the attack of a modern bow—it’s more from the wrist and fingers. But Sinkovsky’s Baroque bow attack is astonishingly sharp—more so maybe than would be achieved with a modern bow. Our jaws were agog for 2 hours in gob-smacked amazement.

A re these tempi faster than normal, or are we just glad to see you all? Was the room hot, or was it just you? :)

N ext up for these artists is Carnegie Hall tomorrow.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Rheingau Musik Festival, Piano Trio at Schloß Johannisberg

W hen the unexpected and non-functional seventh chords of mm. 5-6 yield to the relatively stable A minor of m. 7, the significant aural affect is heightened...”
— William Hussey, MTO 2003;9(1).

T he performance last evening (of Shostakovich’s Op. 67 in E minor and Tchaikovsky’s Op. 50 in A minor) at Schloß Johannisberg by the piano trio comprised of Erik Schumann (violin), Leonard Elschenbroich (cello), and Anna Vinnitskaya (piano) was exceptionally good. These artists, each of whom is approximately 30 years old and each already with a number of competition wins and honors and awards behind them, are superbly matched to each other in terms of their musical vision or interpretive conception of each of these pieces and in terms of their playing style. That they thoroughly enjoy playing together is palpable and plain for all to see in performances like the one in the Fürst von Metternich Saal last night.

I n the last movement of the Tchaikovsky, Schumann broke a string. The music stopped, and the audience was expecting some confusion on stage—at least a 10-minute break while the string was replaced. The trio exited the stage, and we were astonished to see them return less than 3 minutes later, the violin re-strung and tuned. They took the last movement again in stride—with expressive coherence and emotional continuity as if no interruption, no catastrophe of breaking a string had taken place. Tremendous!

T he entire performance was admirable, but, for me, the poignancy of the first movement of the Shostakovich—and of the passacaglia—was especially compelling emotionally. The high-pitch harmonics in Elschenbroich’s walking figures at the beginning, with Schumann’s violin notes much lower, and Vinnitskaya’s piano in the depths below that—create a sense of profound danger and loss: as if denoting a war-time sorrow that has not fully registered with those who have experienced the loss, and as if it will take a lifetime to register it. The techniques include artificial harmonics excited at intervals other than a fourth. Different artificial harmonics can be produced by touching a perfect fifth above the stopped pitch, which sounds an octave higher than the note under the touched node. Another artificial harmonic is sounded by touching a major third above the stopped pitch, which then sounds two octaves above the lightly-touched spot on the fingerboard. Naturally, the pitches of these high-register harmonics are far less precisely controllable than ordinary stops in normal register—so the expressive effect is one of scary tight-rope walking, or great anxiety, or coping under great pressure and external constraints.

T he linear chromatic lines and their mercurial, untrustworthy melodic direction beg the questions ‘Where will the line end? Will it end?’ This cadence created by melodic contrast opposes traditional diatonic cadence mechanisms and tampers with our emotions. Hussey terms this ‘cadence by contrast’ in his analysis of the passacaglia in Shostakovich’s Op. 67, and, based on the experience of last night’s concert, we can say that when it is executed with conviction it is a really powerful rhetorical device!

T he slippery, descending chromatic bass lines in the cello and the piano erode our sense of certainty and demolish any comfort zone to which we might nostalgically have hoped to cling. This piano trio is, to me, Shostakovich in 1944 describing the conjectured future, now become our present 70-years-on fully-materialized reality. No more conjectures; no more chances to choose again.

T here are exuberant, happy figures in Op. 67, to be sure. But the overall effect of these, juxtaposed with the poignant and tenuous content, is ironical or backhanded horror-inducing. Fantastic performance; we went home with lots to absorb and think about!

Sunday, March 25, 2012

New Waves in Ferrara: Appealing on Many Levels, Enargeically

George de la Tour: ‘Quarreling Musicians’ (1625-1630)

S wain argues that in Renaissance music stylized cadences—7-6 suspension cadences, with the penultimate soprano note raised a half-step, where necessary, to create a leading-tone—served to provide an easily recognizable cue to phrase endings. From this developed the V7-I cadence, a gesture whose pitch content was so distinctive that the strict rhythmic conventions of the Renaissance cadence were no longer necessary. He argues that it is no accident that the rise of genres such as the string quartet and the symphony—lacking, as they did, the solo/ripieno contrast of the Baroque concerto—coincided with a new interest in the possibilities of large-scale tonal contrast. With one kind of contrast no longer available, something new had to be found to take its place.”
— David Temperley, commenting in 1999 on Joseph Swain’s ‘Musical Languages’.

G esualdo proves [that] ... individual compositions, in the last analysis, count not for what they contribute to the development of a [musical] language, but how they handle their own ‘native’ language [that encompasses expressions and idioms in the broader culture, far beyond music], and it remained for a later perspective to rediscover the intrinsic value... It is a cliché to say of a great composition that it appeals on many levels, but the [inevitably] stratified nature of any musical community makes the cliché a real—almost indispensable—virtue. The health of a musical community depends on great numbers of people who simply listen with sensitivity and intelligence ... plus a few listeners who may attend to the more abstract effects of syntax as well.”
— Joseph Swain, p. 165.

T he performance last night in Kansas City by Piffaro & King’s Noyse with Ellen Hargis entitled ‘New Waves in Ferrara: Two Bands, Fresh Sounds’ illustrated a number of 16^th and 17^th Century innovations. “Large-scale tonal contrasts” of the sort referred to in the quotes above and a surprising amount of chromaticism were among them.

T he King’s Noyse consists of five members (two Renaissance-design violins with the neck in-line with the box, two tenor-register violins slightly larger than a viola, and one cello-sized ‘bass violin’) plus Ellen Hargis (soprano). And Piffaro nominally has seven members, but they have on their on-stage table an arsenal of recorders of various sizes/registers, shawms (pre-cursors to oboes, ranging from tiny sopranini ones to giant basso ones), Renaissance bagpipes, sackbuts (trombones), dulcians (precursors to bassoons, in various sizes/registers), harp, lute, guitar/vihuela, percussion instruments). The instrumentation of the ensemble changes with every piece!

I n contrast to the ‘modern’, ‘individualistic’ intimacy that characterizes chamber music from the Baroque forward, the works that Piffaro-plus-King’s Noyse performed (by de Rore, Gesualdo, Luzzaschi, Agostini, and others) reveal the astonishing degree to which each individual musician had to envision and remember and anticipate the voice-leading of others’ parts as well as her/his own part. What I mean is, the kind of intimacy that is evoked in the chamber music ensemble literature from Baroque times onward entails each voice in the ensemble responding to one or more of the others on a relatively short timescale on the order of milliseconds to seconds. By contrast, the kind of intimacy evoked in the ‘New Waves in Ferrara: Two Bands, Fresh Sounds’ program embodies a kind of ‘collective’ intimacy—arising partly from the mostly-barline-less musical text, and from the musicians’ relation to that text, which entails their planning (conceptualizing in advance, and remembering) their playing on a time horizon of multiple bars, multiple phrases, or even an entire piece. The Renaissance ‘evenly-written polyphony,’ orchestrated such that each instrumental part resembles the human voice, compels a collective ‘band-like’ mentality and rhetoric—as David Douglass and Bob Wiemken said during their pre-concert lecture. [There are various writings on Renaissance poetry that characterize this sort of rhetoric as ‘enargeia’—‘to create or energize a communal actuality’ (see Norton, Plett, and Sharpling links below). I don’t notice that this term is used in the Renaissance musicology research literature, but, if it’s true that it’s not already so used, it seems to me that the musicologists might do well to adopt/adapt this expression from their literary colleagues.]

B efore attending the concert I looked at my copy of Anne Smith’s book (link below), which contains photomacrographs of original scores of Renaissance ensemble and vocal music. In some scores, 16^th-Century composers corrected some notes and made the revisions in the margins or with the correction immediately following the passage as it was originally written. In other words, due to the costliness of paper the composer chose to fill-in empty spaces rather than use a new piece of paper for revision work. In other examples, the parts/voices were not notated in bar-vertical-alignment with each other—again to save paper. The rehearsal and performance consequences of this Renaissance Northern Italian notational practice in terms of performers’ reading and memory and interpretation were (and are!) monumental. And, regardless whether Piffaro/King’s Noyse/Hargis have created for themselves fair-copy transcriptions (using contemporary music software like Finale® or Sibelius®) that conform to modern practices for readability, the inherent challenges and the virtuosic complexity of the parts remain.

O f course, to deliver an emotionally-moving performance and coherent, worthy interpretation of any music requires each performer to have a vision of the whole piece in mind; requires conceiving the trajectory of the whole. Even if there are random/aleatoric/improvisatory elements, you have to have some advance plan or vision or notion of how you will execute those. The distinct or special aspect of this Renaissance music is the long scope this planning has—the autocorrelation and inter-part crosscorrelation with look-aheads/lags of multiple bars, multiple phrases, or even an entire piece. Makes our frenetic little attention-spans of today seem even tinier than usual!

M ore than that, though, these long timescale inter-relationships—and the look of the scores, and the notations’ shapes, and the composers’ revisions in the margins—seem like beautiful schematic diagrams—wiring diagrams!—that specify meditations on courtly love, loss, reminiscence, and how people related to each other (or, how the composer conceptualized those relations, conditioned by the values and morés of their patrons) in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. With evocative Italian poetic lyrics (very nice English translations by Hargis and others in the program notes, by the way)— every passage unfolds an ineffable narrative, charting the process, drawing us in, revealing more and more of the human condition—what it means to be human in any Age. Emulating Walt Whitman’s famous phrase “I contain multitudes,” we consider the “you” in this Renaissance music: we imagine that, in this Renaissance music replete as it is with all of these Large-scale Mutual Awarenesses, the “you” of each performer truly contains multitudes. This is why we like serious music of all kinds, and why we love to attend concerts; at least partly why—one major reason among many.

T he idea ... that one can understand the ratios of musical consonances [in tempered scales] without experiencing them with the senses is wrong. Nor can one know the true theory of music without being deeply versed in its practice.”
— Letter from mathematician Giovanni Battista Benedetti to composer Cipriano de Rore, 1563.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Higher-Order Virtuosity: Richard Goode and Chopin’s Ballade No. 3

I n everything Chopin wrote, no matter how complex and virtuosic, that powerful simplicity is there at the core. Although he wrote some very difficult and impressive stuff, the ultimate effect of his music, I feel, should never really be to ‘impress’. But that’s exactly what the pianists we usually hear are striving to do: impress the contest judges, the critics, the public. The world we classical performers live in gives us very little room not to play big ‘show’ pieces, or make everything we play into one... Chopin’s third ballade suffers particularly from this problem. The ballades are all difficult, but No. 3 is the easiest of them—sort of like the shortest Himalaya. It seems as though all the star performers I’ve heard end up trying to make it as hard as the others, plowing through it with virtuosic flare, and thus trivializing it. [And how wonderful it is when, instead, someone like Richard Goode plays this piece with selfless transparency. –DSM]”
— Paul Cantrell blog, In the Hands, 02-MAR-2005..

M y favorite part of Richard Goode’s performance last night in Kansas City [a program that included Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin] was the Chopin Ballad No. 3, Op. 47. This 9-minute piece is maybe the strangest of Chopin’s four ballades, on account of its unrelenting optimism. Goode’s expressive dexterity handles the staggering complexity with seeming ease and imparts a vigor suffused with warmth... perfect for this sweet, cheerful work.

G entle A-flat 6/8-meter dolce, evoking donkeys Chopin observed in the hills of Majorca? Donkeys with jobs, but happy jobs that they enjoyed doing.

T he technique [of musical gesture] is perhaps a musical version of what is referred to as a ‘suture’ in film theory: placing the camera in such a way that it functions as the eye of the protagonist of the film, thereby drawing us, as unwitting spectators, to become the subject of the film ourselves, since we share the same visual field and same [Majorcan] point of view.”
— Patrick McCreless, in Almén & Pearsall, p. 13.

W hat a narrative trajectory! What storytelling! Social media of 1841! Our minds engage, imagination runs free, and we ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ this peripatetic, vacationing Chopin voice from the beginning to the end. The feeling is physical, not just emotional; it coheres—for Goode, and for us in the audience—throughout the piece, all the way to the satisfying, happy ending. For example, the motion from C (mm. 230, 232) down to the E-flat (mm. 231, 233) suggests the subsequent plunges to the low A-flat at the end. Energy flows! We “feel” the path that we are on, anticipate things along the way, anticipate them accurately. And this experience of uncanny accuracy is part of what is pleasant and thrilling for us: in material that is this complex and unpredictable, we don’t usually experience ourselves as being so graceful or right as this. We love being unexpectedly better than we are!

U ltimately, our minds and bodies gladly go everywhere Chopin’s and Goode’s narrative aims to take us. Theirs is a higher-order virtuosity that doesn’t strive to impress. It strives only to reveal what’s True, to tell this true story. But it’s not just ‘telling’, not just a musical ‘text’. The human body is involved—fingers, arms, flesh, nerves, mortal gifts, physical mass. The higher-order virtuosity inhabiting the body averts its gaze and embodies Laws of Physics in action—beauty incarnate; a kind of transcendence—something for which we surely hadn’t planned on our Friday night out, and something for which we feel thrilled and grateful. Bravo!

V iewed as a sign, ‘formative repetition’ refers to what is repeated: it is usually a marker of segmentation, a grammatical feature. When a figure is repeated more than once, the attention begins to be attracted by the repetition itself; instead of focusing on the repeated material only, we focus on the act of repetition as an activity signifier per se and seek a symbolic interpretation of it. It is then a sign, not of segmentation or grammar, but of connotative meaning. It evokes extra-musical associations of... emphatically [re-]emphasized speech, dancing, laughing, etc.”
— Raymond Monelle, p. 88, quoting Lidov.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

REBEL Baroque with Rufus Müller: Luminous, Numinous

G ood art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize—the minute and absolutely random detail of the World—and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form... the belief that the work of art reveals something of which the natural world is an imperfect image or symbol, and can reveal it more luminously if not more truly than [inartistic; uninterpreted] Nature.”
— Richard Elfyn Jones, p. 29.

L ast night’s Friends of Chamber Music REBEL performance with Rufus Müller (tenor)—a program entitled ‘Out of the Eclipse: Music of Transformation and Revelation’—was really excellent.

T he program was a meditation on Baroque idioms in terms of the Baroque chronotope of formation, the dynamics of space-time/dark-light interactions. Such interactions test the boundaries between truth and fiction, creation and destruction, conformity and iconoclasm.

Handel – Overture to Agrippina in G minor, HWV 6
Vivaldi – Sinfonia al Santo Sepolcro in B minor, RV 169
Handel – ‘Total Eclipse’ and ‘Your Charms to Ruin’ from Samson, HWV 57
Purcell – Chacony in G minor, Z 730
Telemann – ‘Wie? Kehren sich bei Jesus Krippen’ from Cantata No. 2 in C minor, TWV 1:1625
Bach – Concerto in A major, BWV 1055
Bach – ‘Zerschmettert mich, ihr Felsen und ihr Hügel’ from St. John Passion, BWV 245
Vivaldi – Sonata à quartetto al Santo Sepolcro in E-flat major, RV 130
Telemann – ‘Bei heißer Tränen dickem Regen’ from Cantata No. 13 in B minor, TWV 1:862a
Blow – Chacony in G major
Telemann – ‘Was gleicht dem Adel wahrer Christen’ from Cantata in F major, TWV 1:1511
Purcell – Fantasia No. 13 in F major ‘upon one note’, Z 745
Handel – ‘Tune Your Harps’ from Esther, HWV 50a
Handel – ‘His Mighty Arm’ from Jephtha, HWV 70

Q uestion’ figurations in ‘Wie? Kehren’ and ‘Bei heißer Tränen’ and elsewhere [much like mm. 8-9 of the tenor recitative ‘Wie hast du dich, mein Gott’ (Bach’s Cantata No. 21) or mm. 7-8 of the tenor recitative ‘Der Heiland ist gekommen’ (Bach’s Cantata No. 61] involve exchanges between the tenor part and the ‘contratenor’ line (viola in TWV 1:1625; violin in TWV 1:862a; oboe in TWV 1:1511). The questions—and the accompaniments to the answers—unfold a contrasting melodic pattern and a contrasting rhythmic pattern—which is how the composer creates structural contrasts among the motivic statements and develops depth. Constructing contrapuntal links out of the countersubject is a powerful method—a canon use-case that evokes a ‘receptive’ posture in the audience.

L eading/leaning tones abound, as we heard in the pre-concert lecture—especially in the pieces in the ‘dark’ keys (more than 2 sharps or flats), but the effect is not a cadential one. Instead, the melodic line moves in a peripatetic way... voice-leading that captures our attention by suggesting a self who has not made up her/his mind, or who is still discovering or questioning Life and the Divine... interrupted cadences on a large, “meta” scale that transcends the scope of individual works. This program—juxtaposing these pieces, strung together with hardly a pause between them—generates ‘hypercadences’, cosmic-scale implied plagal cadences. (Am I stupid for only now figuring out that that is what we mean by an excellent program or a good playlist?)

H andel’s cantatas have the women characters speaking/singing in their own voices, revealing a lot about their inner mental state, while the men tend to be detached, obscured by form and narrative. Stereotypically circumspect male, voluble woman. Lucrezia, Armida, Clori, or Diana, for example, versus Samson or Abdolonymus or Ruspoli [Harris, p. 51; presents arguments for interpreting the encoding and restraint used to veil same-sex meanings, while presenting alternative interpretations as well]. Müller’s Bach, Telemann, and Handel were powerful, inspiring, luminous.

I ndeed, as we listened our thoughts were wingèd, full of luminous hopes and dreams. And the dramatic changes in lighting in the darkened Grace & Holy Trinity sanctuary where REBEL performed helped to construct and reinforce the narrative authority that the music revealed to us... Revelations: by definition, novel; like dreams, they are subjective, and not readily corroborated by ‘evidence’. They persuaded us listeners to all-out belief, rather than reasoned with us or prove a specific predicate. One of my favorite performances! Bravo!

O , zerschmettert mich, ihr Felsen und ihr Hügel! Wirf, Himmel, deinen Strahl auf mich! [O, crush me, ye rocks and mountains! O, Heaven, cast your bright beam upon me!]” — Bach, aria from St. John Passion.

T his is a peculiar passage that occurs several places in the Bible, notably Revelation 6:16... I imagine that Karen Marie Marmer (REBEL violinist who curated this ‘Transformation & Revelation’ program) selected this aria for inclusion in part because of this (compare Isaiah 2:19). This is not some Romantic, intellectual, filial, reverent ‘Crush me, please!’ This is a servile, prostrate Fear-of-the-Almighty-consuming-fire-and-brimstone-before-whose-alienness-and-majesty-none-can-stand ‘Crush me now, then!’ wish of a prey animal for the predator to just finish it off. The voice grows silent, no protection or security for her/him. Because Christ is now unfurling the once and future scroll that had been closed with seven seals. William Cowper (1731-1800) was fascinated by this same passage and used it in his poem ‘Truth’. I wonder whether the pietistic, Lutheran Bach ever read Cowper.

P ieces of music are like any other form of human construction: whatever the patterns of intention lying behind them [sacred or secular], they instantaneously acquire an element of autonomy whether we wish them to or not... music, or any art for that matter, can affect us in ways that we could not expect—not because they have some secret property that only posterity reveals, or purely because our climate of reception predisposes us to see or value something that was irrelevant before, but because there is an unpredictable and circulating relation between the piece and its reception—it is not a one-way process.” — John Butt, p. 27.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Luca Guglielmi and Ovid’s Harpsichord at Midnight

T he late-night BEMF program last night was organized around themes from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’:

Louis Couperin - Prelude & Passacaille in C major (Bauyn m.s.)
Francois Couperin - La Regente ou la Minerve; L'Atalante; Les Silvains
Girolamo Frescobaldi - Cento Partite sopra Passacagli
Baldassare Galuppi - Sonata in E minor, Op. 2, No. 3
Dieterich Buxtehude - Praeludium in G minor (BuxWV 163)
Johann K.F. Fischer - Passacaglia in D minor (Suite ‘Urania’)
J.S. Bach - Prelude, Fuga & Allegro in E-flat major (BWV 998)

I especially enjoyed Guglielmi’s varied treatment of the cadences in the Buxtehude, emphasizing a diversity of rhetorical aims and composerly intentions and showcasing widely-varied articulations in Baroque form.

I n keeping with the theme of Ovid’s rhetoric, Buxtehude’s Praeludia embody architectural structures that are parallel to the ‘Dispositio’ in the Classics, basically a forensic method or form for conducting oratory: (1) ‘Exordium’, the orator capturing his audience, (2) ‘Narratio’, the orator presenting salient facts of the case, (3) ‘Confirmatio’, the orator explaining evidence and logical proofs, and (4) ‘Peroratio’, the orator passionately expressing the logical conclusions that are justified by steps (1) through (3).

I n harpsichord rhetoric as in spoken oration, the orator/composer/harpsichordist has the latitude to insert a ‘Digressio’ here and there. An extra ‘Exordio’ or a ‘Peroratio may optionally be inserted to reinforce a point here and there as well.

I n Buxtehude’s Praeludium in G minor, a wild, improvisatory, mind-blowing ‘stylus phantasticus’ prevails—not only in the ‘Exordium’ but elsewhere—and this is what can really make audience members gasp, emotionally caught-up as they are in the thing.

O ur minds were thoroughly convinced by objective forensic and evidentiary harpsichord arguments, but hearing and seeing the emotional ‘finish’ is what captures our hearts’ imagination! Guglielmi’s account of the Buxtehude ‘Peroratio’ was given in an all-out, athletic toccata style, more like a winning jockey-and-racehorse than the closing statements of a dramatic, rhetoric-genius trial lawyer.

T he whole peformance was gorgeous and elicited a prompt standing ovation at the end from the large, appreciative midnight BEMF audience.

B onus vignette: It was beautiful to see Guglielmi pat his harpsichord on the right-hand "cheek" of its body, on the wood to the right of the keyboard following a couple of these very difficult pieces, as if to thank it for its performance. The gesture resembled nothing so much as that of a jockey, patting the horse after winning a big stakes race. Or a human master petting the much-loved dog or other companion animal.

T he 2-manual instrument by William Dowd, on loan from James Nicolson, is one based on a Ruckers Franco-Flemish design of 1628 and it bears this inscription on its lid: “Saltatur me canente ... ubi melos, nec ibi mali” which I believe means something like: “Dance as I sing ... ever sweet, never sour.” Or was it ‘canum’ instead of ‘canente'’? ... “Turn me tummy-up like a beloved pet dog ... always well-behaved, never bad.”

L uca Guglielmi was born in Turin in 1977, where he studied music and humanities. He studied Composition with Alessandro Ruo Rui, and Choral Music and Choral Conducting with Sergio Pasteris at the Conservatory "G. Verdi" of Turin. In 1999 he was chosen to participate in the Extraordinary Course in Conducting under the direction of Carlo Maria Giulini at the Fiesole Music School. He has served as harpsichordist and organist with the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale di Torino. His study of the harpsichord has been diverse, with Patrizia Marisaldi among others and most recently under Ton Koopman. He studied organ with Vittorio Bonotto, piano accompaniment (including lieder) with Eros Cassardo. When he was 20 he was invited by Jordi Savall to join his ensembles Hesperion XX (now XXI). Guglielmi teaches harpsichord, organ and orchestra at courses at Urbino, Pamparato, San Feliu de Guixols (Catalonia) e Barbaste (France).

L ast night’s 11:15 p.m. recital in the atmospheric sanctuary of Boston’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church was financially supported by Ruth M. McKay and Don Campbell. Bravo!

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin: Baroque with Attitude(s), Baroque with Mixed Taste(s)

J osé Bowen writes of the ‘illusion that there is such a thing as a neutral performance style’... I believe it is an illusion principally of the listener; but even then perhaps ‘illusion’ is not the right idea... If Bowen typifies the view of a scholar making a ‘forensic’ examination after the event, rather than that of a performer who, for an ulterior artistic purposes, may need to have faith in some starting point without going too far into its credibility, he is nevertheless right to imply that performers do always display an attitude towards their music.”
— Jon Dunsby, in Rink, p. 227.

B uilding and shaping narrative is fundamental to effective interpretation, for musicians to bring a composition to life in performance (see esp. William Rothstein, in the book edited by John Rink, link below). In regard to constructing exciting and coherent narratives, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin is second to none. Their performance last night was warmly received by Kansas Citians.

G.P. Telemann - Overture (Suite) in F minor, TWV55:f1
J.S. Bach - Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major, BWV 1050
J.S. Bach - Violin Concerto in E major, BWV 1042
G. F. Handel - Concerto Grosso in F major, Op. 6, No. 2, HWV 32
G.P. Telemann - Concerto in E minor for Recorder & Flute, TWV52:e1.

T he Baroque slurred dotted-eighth-sixteenth ornament: this ‘punctuation’ conveys a certain tension, but it is not ‘tense’; it is instead athletic, like the taut muscles of a horse executing patterns in a dressage ring.

C onnecting the sixteenth note back to the dotted eighth with a slur has special and different meanings in Bach and Telemann and Handel. Telemann is more ‘French’ (see the excellent recent book by Steven Zohn, Baroque flutist and Assoc. Prof. Music History, Boyer College of Music & Dance, Temple Univ, link below, pp. 13ff). In the TWV 55:f1 Overture, there is an implied or interpolated ‘rest’ or suspension in the middle of the figure. By contrast, in the Akademie’s interpretations of Bach, the dotted-eighth-sixteenth slurs feel ‘pastoral’; these feel like distance is being traversed over soft earth or a hummocky pasture. In the minor keys, it feels solemn; it carries some gravitas. How wonderful to experience the diversity of German Baroque... the saturated colors and widely varying ‘feel’ and ‘sense’ that Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin impart to these pieces!

[30-sec clip, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, Telemann - Concerto in A minor for 2 recorders, TWV 55:a2, 1.1MB MP3]

T he musicians had already moved through several approaches to color and texture — a dark-hued French overture; a pair of light, graceful Menuets; a supple, rubato-laden Sarabande; and a pair of full-throttle fast movements — before arriving at the Plainte, a second slow movement. Suddenly, the string sound was hushed, velvety and nearly motionless. The ensemble addressed the Adagio of Bach’s Violin Concerto in E (BWV 1042) similarly, and the effect was no less surprising the second time... But for sheer inventive oddity, Handel’s Concerto Grosso in F (Op. 6, No. 2) proved the evening’s most memorable performance. Building on the gracefully modulating chord progression at the start of the work’s Andante Larghetto, the players produced a lush sound that painted Handel as an early avatar of English pastoralism.”
— Allan Kozinn, review, NY Times.

T he Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (which loosely translates to the Berlin Academy of Early Music) features about 15 players trained in techniques employed in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the orchestra itself was still a relatively new idea. Friday’s concert confirmed that the uproar is warranted. The compelling program of music by German Baroque composers was one of the highlights of the concert season. What sets this ensemble apart from many others is the combination of technical expertise, extraordinary energy and sheer musicality... From the outset, the ensemble produced a soft but vibrant sound that was beautifully balanced. As it progressed through the nine-movement suite, the group demonstrated not only the ability to play well, but to infuse each movement with a sound and shape that was well conceived and effectively delivered. For example, the second movement contained two contrasting minuets. Not only was the instrumentation different — two recorders, lute and cello as opposed to strings — but differences in articulation also helped define each section...”
— Timothy McDonald, review, Kansas City Star.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

NEC First Monday: Buvant à la Source, Laurence Lesser Explains a ‘French’ Program

T onight’s program is… ‘French’. Stravinsky? French? Well, yes, at least part of him is.”
— Laurence Lesser, cellist, introductory remarks.

T he New England Conservtory ‘First Monday’ program featured, among other things, Belgium-born violist Dimitri Murrath introducing each movement of Couperin’s ‘Le Parnasse’ homage to Arcangelo Corelli by reading aloud the movement’s title and subtext, in impeccable French. Quel réalisme! Quel charme! Vive l’authenticité!

Couperin – Le Parnasse, ou L’apothéose de Corelli (James Buswell, John Holland, violins; Laura Blustein, cello; John Gibbons, harpsichord)
Stravinsky – Apollo (Masuko Ushioda, Wanzhen Li, violins; Dima Murrath, Sarah Darling, violas; Laurence Lesser, Natasha Brofsky, cellos; Donald Palma, double bass)
Ravel – Piano Trio (Hung-Kuan Chen, piano; James Buswell, violin; Laurence Lesser, cello)

L esser gave a 15-min pre-concert talk, explaining various things to us… about his experiencing the then-elderly Stravinsky’s pungent advice to him first-hand, when he was a young cellist just starting out in the mid-1960s; about how Couperin was enthralled with what was shaping music in Italy in the 17th Century and early 18th… the unifying, glorious transnationally-strategic possibilities of it. Parnassus, the home of the Muses, is where the soul of Corelli is conducted—ascension (‘remerciment’) to join the god, Apollo… who is the subject of the second work on the program by Stravinsky. And the piano trio after that… Ravel, who in his own time meditated upon his musical predecessors and the debt owed to them (‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’, etc.).

T he violin cadenza performed by Masuko Ushioda in the Prologue of the Stravinsky was spectacular… indicative of the sonic aggressiveness and beautiful iconoclasm ahead.

I love that the words ‘analysis’ and ‘performance’ have such wide purviews. The ensemble surely ‘analyzes,’ in preparing and interpreting each work, examining the score and its style including notational idiosyncrasies (e.g., ‘void’ functions, expanded tunings, etc.), music theory, historical practices, and so forth. And ‘performance’ may refer to the live performance, to recordings, to practice, to memorization, to improvisation, and to aesthetic, hermeneutic, social, psychological, cognitive, or motoric/musculoskeletal/neurophysiological aspects of all of these.

U shioda’s cadenza served the rhetorical function of announcing the Apollo character in the story and establishing that figure’s authority. It clarifies which key that character operates in, and transforms the thematic material that has preceded the cadenza. The cadenza provides convincing proof of Ushioda’s violinism prowess. But the supervening ensemble members’ parts reveal that there will be disagreement ahead—Apollo may be a god, but he doesn’t rule the Universe.

T his piece was originally orchestrated by Stravinsky for a 28-piece chamber orchestra. Last night’s performance was arranged for string septet. Both orchestrations have their merits, but I especially liked the septet last night. How clear everything is! How much more intimate, compared to the larger version!

T hought #1: Each of these three pieces is characterized by motives and phrases, repeated and massaged and turned round and round through the whole piece and all the movements and variations... Is this particular delight in variational permutations psychologically an archetypically ‘keyboardist’ thing to do (i.e., composers who are not primarily keyboard artists tend not to do it), or is it in some way idiomatically ‘French’, across these centuries?

T hought #2: Each of these three pieces is ‘cinematic’ in terms of structure and narrative. Is the fondness for the picturesque a distinctively ‘Gallic’ trait, or is this feature more an artifact of what it takes to make a living as a musician/composer in each century, in an exchange-economy, market-driven society?