Greg Stepanich

Creative mind, overstuffed body

I did a book review last week of a new novel called Intoxicated, a nifty tale set in Victorian England in 1869 about the creation of a soft drink called Rhubarilla. It’s a semi-Dickensian tale with a hint of the Coca-Cola story, or at least the cocaine part of it, but for that, I’ll just refer you to the book. It’s a fun read.

The writer is a young Yorkshireman named John Barlow. I visited his site the other day, and found that he does a fun “open blog� that makes entertaining reading. The piece in question that caught my eye, not least because of the bulbous-stomached man pictured there, was a funny rumination on writers and how thin most of them are (you can read it here; it's the April 17 entry).

That, of course, got me to thinking about composers and instrumentalists (not singers, which is another subject altogether) and their standards of buffitude. I’ll say right off the bat that I certainly don’t fit Barlow’s ectomorph theory of writing: I’m a pudgy endomorph, and no, I’m not proud of it, but the fat facts are the fat facts.

Now, most of the instrumentalists I can think of seeing over the past few years have essentially been on the slender side. There have been one or two I can think of who were heavy, but most of them were older men, and they probably started playing when being musical and tubbulous was something to which you would aspire.

But composers don’t really fit the Barlow theory, either. I’ll review a few:

a) Rossini. Became quite heavy in his later years, and he paid for it. He had years of bad health, and it caused him extra pain at the end when he had cancer surgery in his nether regions with a minimum of anesthetic.

b) Schumann. Slender in his younger days, he became obese toward the end, and apparently suffered from high blood pressure, among his other ailments.

c) Brahms. Also thin in as a young man, became quite heavy as an adult. Many writers have speculated about the widely spread figurations in his piano music, arguing that he wrote things that way because he couldn’t get his hands in front of his belly while sitting at the piano.

d) Tchaikovsky. Certainly slender and tall as a younger man, when the young Igor Stravinsky saw him at the theater, he remarked about how fat his back looked.

Schubert was a very short man, and some thought him chubby, but others say he was solidly built, Georges Bizet, on the other hand, couldn’t keep his hands off the petit fours, and was considered plump.

And the cartoon at the top of this entry is by Joseph Goupy, a friend of George Frideric Handel's who was poking fun of the composer's fondness for food (there's a nasty poem that goes with it). Handel was not amused; he took Goupy out of his will.

I don’t know whether this tells us anything at all except that I know too much about the physical appearance and ailments of some long-dead musicians. But maybe it does: Perhaps there is some connection between the kinds of music you write and the way your body is shaped.

Anybody have a thought about that? Post away.

Weekend: A painful story in sound

This weekend, the Delray Beach String Quartet gives the last concert of its second season, and they’ve programmed a beautiful piece of Romantic writing that has one of the saddest back stories I know.

The Delray has programmed the String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, subtitled From My Life, by the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana. Smetana is one of the great heroes of Czech music, and he wrote this quartet, one of two he composed, in 1876. The piece takes a journey through the high points of the composer’s life: his youth, his enjoyment of dancing, his first love — but then in the finale, something extraordinary happens. The music stops dramatically, and there is a high, whistling sound in the first violin.

This is the sound that was going on Smetana’s ears at this time in his life, as the syphilis he had contracted started to take its toll on his hearing. The disease — so common among musicians and writers in the 19th century — was to kill him eight years later in a madhouse in Prague, after he’d lost his ability to concentrate, and temporarily lost his memory and ability to speak.

It’s hard not to think of this story when listening to the quartet, which I’m sure was at least part of Smetana’s intent. Always an artist, he thought it was important to describe his life through the medium of music as honestly as he could. If that meant the sound of his hearing deteriorating, so be it.

In his article for the 1980 New Grove on Smetana, the musicologist John Clapham quotes from a letter Smetana wrote to one of his opera librettists in 1877 about how miserable he was:

But how could I be cheerful? Where could happiness come from when my heart is heavy with trouble and sorrow? … Nevertheless please send me the second act soon. When I plunge into musical ecstasy, then for a while I forget everything that persecutes me so cruelly in my old age.

Smetana had only just passed his 60th birthday when he died in 1884. He had been in failing health for years, and it’s amazing that he was able to keep composing as long as he did. But he soldiered on, and he shared his pain with his listeners.

It’s a beautiful piece anyway, and well worth hearing, back story or no. Perhaps it’s a little too revealing for some, and if you don’t know what the sound means, it just sounds like a short bit of experimentation with string harmonics.

But I find it a remarkable act of artistic courage, and being an admirer of Smetana’s music in general, I’ll be hoping to stop by the Colony Hotel in downtown Delray on Sunday afternoon and hear it live. (This group has an unusual Web site that I can’t get to work for me. The program also contains waltzes by Dvorak and Brahms, and the Second String Quartet by Luigi Boccherini.)

String quartets are hot: The April edition of The Gramophone features a cover piece on string quartets, contending that things have never been better for foursomes. I certainly have seen a lot more activity in this field over the past few years than I used to. I’d say the Kronos Quartet is probably the primary reason for that, but in any event it’s good to see so many quartets making a go of it these days, and performing plenty of new pieces.

The Gramophone cover featured the Pacifica Quartet (pictured at right).

Fresh music in unexpected places

In the course of my concertgoing last weekend, I managed to bump into some interesting pieces of contemporary music.

At the Florida Atlantic University wind band concert, the Symphony Band, joined by the FAU Mixed Chorus, performed Sleep, a piece by the American composer Eric Whitacre (b. 1970). A day after hearing the piece, I saw a new disc — Cloudburst, sung by Polyphony, under Stephen Layton (the group on a Britten disc I wrote about a while back — out in the stores of music by Whitacre, including this choral song.

It’s a very pleasant piece, built largely of big, rich chords moving slowly across the musical landscape in service of the words, which originally were supposed to be those of Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The Frost estate wouldn’t permit it, though, so Whitacre used a poem by Charles Silvestri in its place. You can hear where Whitacre must have heard something in his head to go with the last line of Frost — (And miles to go before I sleep) — but the text he had to use worked just as well.

This performance of Sleep has piqued my interest in Whitacre’s work, so I might get the disc and hear what the other pieces are like. Kudos to FAU for programming it, and giving audiences a chance to hear some music that’s currently making the classical rounds.

On Sunday, I stopped by the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Boca Raton for a performance by a 14-flute orchestra called Flute Fantasia, directed by Shaul Ben-Meir, former principal flutist with the Detroit Symphony (must be a connection with the DSO over there; the last concert I saw there featured DSO principal cellist Robert deMaine). It was apparently the third time the group has appeared, and it offered a widely varied program of music from Bach to Saint-Saens.

The flutists (one piccolo; eight soprano flutes; three alto flutes and two bass flutes, all accompanied by a string bass) also programmed music by
Catherine McMichael, a pretty piece called Legend of the Sleeping Bear. This apparently is an American Indian legend from Michigan about the formation of two islands and some dunes in the north of the state.

McMichael’s piece is quite nice, full of color and decent melody, and you can hear the nature pictures she’s trying to paint. It doesn’t break any new ground musically, but there are a lot of composers out there who are happy to just write things using the old, familiar tools from the workshop, and McMichael is one of them.

The group also played an Andante from Suite No. 2 by Kathleen Mayne. This was a brief, direct and again, nice piece, that sounded like movie music, which is not all that surprising given Mayne’s background as a film composer.

I didn’t take very extensive notes on the performances, so that’s all I have to offer about this, but I wanted to mention it in order to show that even in lower-profile concerts at the end of the season, there are plenty of interesting things going on if you know where to look — or in my case, even if you’re just guessing.

Young violinist gets star treatment

The German violinist Julia Fischer has been getting an increasing amount of notice lately. This month, the BBC Music Magazine named the 22-year-old Munich-born fiddler its Newcomer of the Year.

Local concertgoers will be able to see her next year, in a recital with a pianist to be named later (the program says Milana Chernyavska, but the Web site, which was updated last week, doesn't list her) at the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale. No program has been announced for the March 7 concert yet, but Fischer is one of several violinists making an appearance in the 40th anniversary season of the Concert Association of Florida.

Judy Drucker's group also has scheduled Maxim Vengerov (recital, Oct. 16); Robert McDuffie (with the Hamburg Symphony on Feb. 6); Itzhak Perlman (a recital sometime around March at the new Miami Performing Arts Center); and Gil Shaham (doing the Elgar concerto Feb. 12 with the Chicago Symphony under David Zinman).

Fischer's Web site hasn't changed much since I last saw it, but I'm listening again to one of the sound clips: A gentle, lovely version of the Sarabande from the Partita No. 2 of Bach, part of her CD of all the Bach sonatas and partitas. It's these performances that so excited the judges at the BBC Music Magazine:

There are many recordings of Bach's works for solo violin but rarely do they reach such breathtaking heights of musicianship as this one. Julia Fischer is an incredible technician and soulful musician who doesn't let an ounce of ego come between the music and the listener.

Now I'm listening to the Fuga from the Third Sonata, and it's strong playing, though perhaps there's something a shade careful about it. Still, there's little doubt from the evidence of this clip that she has the chops for these difficult masterworks. One other very nice thing about this performance is its steady line — the music's got direction, and it's been well thought-out.

The Concert Association of Florida's complete schedule is available here for its Miami and Lauderdale venues. I'll note that some leading and rising pianists are coming: Evgeny Kissin, Olga Kern, Emmanuel Ax, Jonathan Biss and Paavali Jumppanen, and in addition to the Chicago and Hamburg orchestras, the Boston Pops Esplanade (under Keith Lockhart) and Atlanta orchestras will be appearing. Robert Spano will lead the Atlanta in a program that includes Christopher Theofanidis’ Rainbow Body (a piece I’m not too crazy about on record, but maybe it’s better live).

And then there's the currently hot Mexican tenor Rolando Villazon (Nov. 28), the soprano Angela Gheorgiu (March 23) and two concert performances of Verdi's Il Trovatore (Dec. 9 and 12) with Salvatore Licitra and Maria Guleghina.

In any case, I'm planning to go hear Fischer. Of the three young violinists I mentioned in a blog last year, two — Janine Jansen and Nicola Benedetti — have appeared here this year in concert. Fischer was the third I mentioned, and now she’ll be here, too. (And Benedetti's on the cover of the May issue of the BBC Music Magazine, as you can see here.)

A lot of the musical world is paying attention to the careers of these young players. Playing the violin has turned into much more of a glamorous profession than it used to be, and there are a number of terrific fiddlers now competing for your attention.

So far, it looks as though there's plenty of room for all of them to make a decent mark on the world of music.

Music-making: A community affair

You have only half the story when you say piano, he announced, and half the notes as well. The word is pianofurty.
I heard that before, said Shanahan. Correct.
The furty stands for the deep notes on your left hand side. Piano, of course, means our friends on the right.

— Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

(Read this the other day and couldn't help writing it down and quoting it.)

Out and about this weekend, catching concerts here and there, and decided to pass on a piano recital in Miami Shores simply to economize on gasoline.

So off to an FAU student concert I went, hearing four ensembles for the price of one: the wind and percussion ensembles, the mixed chorus, and the Symphony Band.

It was an interesting evening of music, most of it contemporary and American, and though I don’t have a review in mind, it did strike me again that here was more evidence that no matter how old-fashioned it looks, playing in a big instrumental ensemble is something that many young people are perfectly happy to do.

The Symphony Band, one of the speakers said, is a new invention for FAU, and consists mostly of non-music majors (and some music majors who are playing their non-major instruments). I’ve written before of the appeal of the wind band and its surprising durability, and there are in addition to the Symphony Band a couple wind ensembles around these parts that have been playing concerts for many years (the Palm Beach Gardens Concert Band and the New Gardens Band come to mind, for instance).

I think the beauty of these groups, whatever their musical prowess, is their sense of common purpose. I played a bad French horn in bands like these when I was younger, and while in a good number of cases the musical level outside of me was high enough to get real enjoyment out of being part of the band, in other cases it was just great fun to be with other folks playing our instruments.

In that sense, such groups are like the several non-professional choruses here; there’s real effort and real talent at work in all of these ensembles, even if the end result falls short of the best examples. There’s little harm done in the long run there, I think, and certainly much more good than harm. An individual singer or instrumentalist might not be able to execute his or her part with world-class panache, but that person has met the music on its own terms, and come away knowing something about it, and perhaps with deeper affection for it.

When I was a younger, more callous person, I used to silently smirk at people I thought had meager talent talk about how much they loved a certain piece or a given composer, thinking to myself that it was unlikely that they could appreciate it the way we real artists could. But now I am older, sadder and wiser, and I’ve understood for some time that it doesn’t take any real musical talent at all to truly love music; it only takes an open mind and a vulnerable heart.

And so I salute all the weekend music-makers out there who get out their clarinets and trombones every once in a while, sit down with a bunch of good friends, and enter into the sacred mysteries of sound. I guess what I’m getting at is I’m missing the unique pleasures of communal music-making myself, and thinking about dusting off my horn, and really practicing this time around.

It doesn’t have to be a beautiful noise to be joyful.

Composer marathons: Too much?

Is there anything wrong with devoting a series of concerts to the work of one composer?

Browsing through the archives of On an Overgrown Path, I came across this entry on Shostakovich, in which Pliable (Bob Shingleton) suggests that marathon performances of any composer are not such a good idea, and an anonymous post-er agrees:

I actually feel that wall to wall performances of any composer's work is a rather dodgy thing to do - although much does depend upon the composer I guess! I just feel that no composer ever really writes a piece with the idea of having it performed alongside everything else he has ever written. There is something rather unfair about the exercise.

Both of these writers make a good point, in particular the idea that composers don't plan to have their pieces heard one after the other when they write them. And what about sylistic differences? Many composers have tossed out all their earlier work (Carl Orff, for instance) as unrepresentative of the composer they want the world to know. Listeners interested in the complete picture might find something valuable about hearing how the writer altered his ideas over the years until the sound he or she wanted fit his or her intentions.

Reminds me that in several well-known cases, composers are most represented by their most unrepresentative work. I remember reading a few years back some critics complaining that everyone was programming Webern's Im Sommerwind, which is nothing like his later work. And Saint-Saens is still best-known by Carnival of the Animal, which he didn't want published (except for The Swan).

I think there is a lot of value in hearing lots of one composer at a stretch, but you sort of have to be in a scholarly frame of mind. After a while, even the best composers start to become overfamiliar, and you start to hear their mannerisms writ large, and then you're in the disenchantment phase of your relationship.

Having heard a lot of Verdi recently, for instance, I'm struck by how often he uses grace notes. And having listened to a good deal of Liszt, I hear him run out of steam time and again, unable to create a narrative, just set up sections block on block. Shostakovich resorts to martial rhythms repeatedly; his model Mahler overuses that slow-appoggiatura Wagner cadence that ends up resolving to the subdominant of the relative major rather than the tonic minor.

Too much familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saw says, but for me it's not so much contempt as it evidence that even the greatest writers have a bag of familiar tricks they dip into with frequency.

Anybody else think composer marathons are a bad idea? Like them? Post a comment and we'll discuss it.

Classical helps you cross genres

Whilst trolling the byways of the Web, I came across a piece in Canada's Ottawa Citizen that got me thinking about what happens when you freely cross musical genres as a listener.

As I've said before, people these days are basically unafraid, it seems to me, to listen to whatever they want, and that's all to the good. Violinist Hilary Hahn, about whom I've written before, told the Ottawa paper something interesting about her own listening habits:

Citizen: Your list of recommended CDs on Amazon is quite wide-ranging. What do you listen to when you want to listen just for fun?

Hahn: I listen more to non-classical music, because I live so much in classical music. You hear other music from a completely different perspective when you come to it from a classical perspective. You hear all the complexities, and I listen for all the little neat details that pop out.
If you listen that way, you discover interesting artists who might not be played on commercial radio all the time, but are just doing their own thing . . . There's a lot to be learned from non-classical music, but at the same time classical music ties it all together for me.

In addition to her recordings of Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Bernstein, Bach, Elgar and Mozart, among others, she's guested on an album by . . . And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, an alt-rock band based in Austin. Now that's the kind of thing that would be rare when I was in music school 25 years ago, but nowadays it's much more common.

What struck me about Hahn's perspective was that she's able to tie together everything she's hearing through the medium of classical music. I think she's on to something important there: If you're able to bring a well-grounded classical overview to whatever music you're hearing, I think you hear less of the distraction.

This has always been the problem with so much writing about music in general. In popular forms, we tend to hear tons about the words people are singing, and not enough about the quality of the music: Was it interesting harmonically? Did it have a melody that was any good?

For me, it helps to have a classical background, because you tend to analyze it right away without being all that conscious of it. I'm sure this is because as classical musicians we begin serious study as readers, having to hear music in our heads from the printed page. It might sound dry, but actually it pays big sonic dividends down the road when you realize how much you got out of it.

I guess my point is this: Classical music can open the unlikeliest doors, once you love it as music, and once you let yourself love every other kind of music, too.

The composer as artist of the sacred

With two major religious observances this week — Passover and Easter — I’m finding myself thinking a lot about what makes a composer turn to sacred music.

Many composers wrote religious music all their lives, and it was inseparable from their musical vocation. That’s interesting enough in itself -— I’m thinking of Anton Bruckner, who said he dreaded facing God after his death, and finding himself unable to account for his seemingly paltry production, would be excoriated for wasting the talent he was given — but I’m a little more fascinated by writers who are more anchored in the secular world but find themselves drawn to religious expression.

I’m listening right now to the Quatre Motets Pour un Temps de Penitence, written in 1938-39 by Francis Poulenc. The French composer’s Catholicism became more and more important to him as his career continued, and these four short choral pieces are marvelously beautiful and intensely felt.

Their texts are part of the ancient Office of the Tenebrae, which a perusal of the Web finds that many churches still observe (here’s something about a Cincinnati church that was doing one of the Poulence motets for its services). It’s a moment of high drama during Holy Week, and I can remember as a child taking part in some version of this, in which all the candles were put out one by one, and you were left in the darkness to ponder the sacred mysteries.

Here was the old connection between church and theater made manifest, and that theatrical touch no doubt helped get the message across in an unforgettable way. I don’t know whether Poulenc’s affinity for the music hall helped make that connection easier, or whether he simply didn’t associate any part of his faith with the secular world. (Any experts out there who might know are welcome to post.)

But what most intrigues me about Poulenc and his devotion to the faith of his fathers is that he found compositional questions there he couldn’t find the answers to anywhere else. For me, it’s enough to be challenged by the work of composition, but for Poulenc, it was vital to explore his gift through piety and devotion.

It must have been a most interesting way to compose; to feel that while you are writing, you are also doing good office, and that there is with you all the time the presence of the recording angel.

Other seasonal listening: Also in my various disc players these days is a Naxos recording from 1994 of the Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of St. Peter), recorded by Ars Nova, the Danish concert choir led by Bo Holten. Lassus wrote this series of 21 spiritual madrigals in 1594, the year he died. (The notes say he finished the work only six weeks before his death.)

This is also a sublimely beautiful work by another composer who straddled the worlds of church and city, and he wrote them at a time of mounting religious awakening in Europe generally.

New Stravinsky book absorbing

The second half of Stephen Walsh’s biography of Igor Stravinsky comes out Wednesday, and so far I’m finding it a compelling read. Walsh, a professor at Cardiff University in Wales, brought out the first
volume in 1999, covering the years from the composer’s birth in 1882 until 1934.

The new work, titled Stravinsky: The Second Exile — France and America, 1934-1971, takes the reader from a Europe in the early stages of tumbling into another world war to Stravinsky’s death in New York in April 1971. I’m about halfway through the book, and in the first place, I’m enjoying reading something that contrasts with the Robert Craft version of things.

That’s not to say I don’t value Craft’s work; it’s just that when reading Craft’s stories of his unofficial son-hood to Stravinsky, I’m always too conscious of Craft — he has a way of filling the entire space with his brain, so that what he’s looking at is hard to see. I got the sense after reading the Stravinsky-Craft and Craft books that Stravinsky was a nicer person than Craft wanted him to be.

It’s as though, being Stravinsky, he should have been an imperious jerk. But the man who comes through in Craft and Walsh is much more fragile than that. The composer needed to be indulged and fussed over (somewhat like Serebriakov in Uncle Vanya, but without the pretense), but that didn't keep him from working hard.

He was an old-fashioned man even in his time, thoroughly a citizen of the old patriarchal Russia, and devoted in a profound way to his native country. His family life, split between his wife Katya and his children on the one hand, and his mistress Vera on the other, was difficult to manage, but in a strange way he tried to make everyone happy, even when he did terrible things, like this example cited by Walsh:

Not only did Igor make his mistress an allowance, but he expected Katya to hand the money over in person, which she dutifully did, meeting Vera at the bank and talking to her for a while in the car afterward. Any resentment or bitterness she may have felt at this atrocious act of self-immolation she typically sublimated by telling Vera that ‘she wanted to kiss me and … that she was thinking of me.’

He also thrived on the routine that Katya made sure he had for his work:

When he was composing, he would go home, shut himself in the studio all morning, appear promptly for meals, spend part of the afternoon with his family, then work on till dinnertime. Sometimes the pattern would be broken by visits of one kind or another, and it would vary in intensity. But in its essential, calming regularity it never changed, for the good reason that he needed it so.

I’ve also learned some interesting things about his early days in Los Angeles, his negotiations with Walt Disney, and all the hustling he had to do to make ends meet when the war cut off a large part of his royalty income. He worked hard and steadily through this period, trying to keep the commissions and conducting engagements coming.

Somehow, it’s comforting to know that even people such as Stravinsky, who changed the course of music history, had to keep at it, had to keep the work coming, had to keep managing expectations and finding challenging projects on which to work. I’m listening to the Symphony in Three Movements as I write this, enjoying its brute energy and distinctive colors. Reading Walsh will ultimately take me through all the Stravinsky in my personal collections, and perhaps I’ll have a revised view of the importance of this composer.

Although I don’t find all his work equally interesting or fulfilling, there’s something Bachian about many of his pieces, in the sense that each note has been weighed for maximum impact, and there’s an overwhelming sense of careful planning. It seems to me that future composers and listeners will draw more from Stravinsky than perhaps they do now — there’s always something to learn from a composer who tries to compose the world anew each time, instead of recycling old formulae.

That Ferguson book: If you’re interested, and you haven’t seen them yet, take a look at some of the comments on Craig Ferguson’s novel I’ve received since posting a blog about it a few days ago. It always gladdens the heart to see how many interesting, fascinating people there are out there in the wide world beyond my computer screen, and yours. One of them might be near you right now, reading Between the Bridge and the River.

Levin's Mozart should be preferred

Just getting a chance to go through my notes on the Master Chorale of South Florida's performance April 1 of Robert Levin's new completion of the Mozart Mass in C minor.

I enjoyed the performance of the piece in general; the level of musicianship was high, there was a palpable sense of commitment on the part of the chorus, soloists — sopranos Rebecca Sherburn-Bly and Hannah Sharene Penn; tenor Matthew Tresler and bass Graham Fandrei — and orchestra, and the chorale deserves to be commended for tackling this version of the mass and bringing it to area audiences.

I didn't plan to write a review of the concert, but I did want to say something about the Levin completion and its effectiveness.

Overall, I think he did an excellent job, and the work we have before us, instead of being a beautiful torso, is, in its full dress, a deeply serious, moving, dramatic, powerful piece of 18th-century Catholic church music. Levin's scrupulous notes tell me that he actually had a great deal of material from which to work, and that he can cite a Mozart source for all the invention that he brought to the work.

The closing Dona nobis pacem was composed by Levin based on Mozart's sketches from 1783, for instance, and the aria Et in Spiritum Sanctam was transcribed from another aria in the Mozart cantata Davide Penitente, which was compiled in 1784 from the music of the C minor Mass. He has much to say about the sketches themselves, and how much of the material in there is highly likely as being intended for the mass, though it might not be marked that way.

The Crucifixus is a good case in point. Levin writes: " . . . the first theme of an eight-part double fugue in D minor found, like the Dona nobis pacem sketches, in the Oca del Cairo fascicles, fits the Crucifixus text convincingly, and D minor is a plausible key to follow the F major of the Et incarnatus est.� Well, yes, and in performance, the Crucifixus sounds quite convincing. The theme itself as I remember it (my memory jogged by attempting to notate it during the concert) is a simple tune that, in its plainness and modest range sounds ideal for building a fugue.

The Dona nobis pacem subject, on the other hand, sounded a little florid, and somewhat hard to sing. I'm not sure that had the theme been originally noted for use in tandem with the Dona nobis pacem text, it wouldn't have been simplified.

Levin also provides much fuller orchestration, some of it perhaps anachronistic, such as the tick-tock offbeat chords in the winds in the middle of the Agnus Dei. They sounded like they'd wandered in from about 30 years in the future, but that's the only really jarring example I can recall or that I made notes for. Many of the textures were much richer — in particular the Sanctus, with the restored double choir Levin is sure Mozart intended.

In sum, it's a piece of great musical weight, and very impressive. One small voice in my ear wonders, though, whether or not Mozart, had he decided to finish the Mass, might have varied the approach of the final movements. They're quite contrapuntal and massive, and though Mozart's approach to sacred music is worth a dissertation to itself, I think he might have tried something a little less severe had he done the work himself.

But to make that assumption is to make the task of recomposition just about impossible. You'd have to steal opera arias or something like that and set them to Latin church texts. There'd be plenty more controversy then.

No, after all that, I think Levin's completion of the Mozart C minor Mass should be the preferred version; I'd rather hear the work in this guise than be left wondering what might have been. It's a first-class work of scholarship and musical detective work, and I'm glad I had the chance to hear it.

And now, novelist Craig Ferguson

April 10, 2006

Today, the first novel by late-night talk show host Craig Ferguson hits the bookstores. It's called Between the Bridge and the River, and this piece by the NYT's Jacques Steinberg says it's a novel with plenty of grounding in works by writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov, whose The Master and Margarita is one of my favorite novels.

Ferguson plugged the book on his show the other night, and it got me to thinking about how few actors there are in the American entertainment industry who could pull something like that off. Ethan Hawke has written some literary fiction, and Steve Martin has authored novellas and a couple popular plays. Fannie Flagg, too, found a fulfilling calling as a writer of Southern genre fiction such as Fried Green Tomatoes.

But aside from those examples and the children's book thing that many entertainers have done, what Ferguson has accomplished is rather unusual. Maybe there's something basic about British culture (Ferguson's a Scot) that leads them to hold the literary life more dear: Simon Callow, a terrific actor, is also a fine writer and has done a good bio of Orson Welles. Michael Palin of Monty Python fame has written fine travelogues and novels.

I can't really see his three colleagues in the world of late night doing something like this. That may have something to do with their backgrounds: Jay Leno always has been a standup comic, David Letterman was a broadcast journalist who became a standup, and Conan O'Brien was a writer for Saturday Night Live. But Ferguson is an actor, and that makes a big difference.

The beauty of his show, if you haven't seen it, is that the interviews he conducts with other members of that profession are quite different, and mostly much better, than the other three hosts, because he's one of them. He understands the people who drop by on his program more than the others do, and the result is interviews that are much more interesting than the usual I'm-here-for-a-plug thing.

The other night, Sir Ben Kingsley was on, and he said something about being an actor that was not only lovely, but provided the kind of insight into the way this actor works that you wouldn't find anywhere else except in film journals. Kingsley said he tries to imagine himself completely in whatever role he's doing, knowing there's someone in the audience to whom that portrayal is close to real life.

And he can imagine, Kingsley said, reaching out into the audience and clapping that person on the shoulder and saying: I understand, you know. I understand what it's like to be you.

Now you may think that's actorly pomposity, or a method that can't possibly communicate on the big screen. It doesn't matter — what we found out was how this actor thinks, and that's valuable stuff for students of the entertainment world.

So I'm looking forward to reading Ferguson's book when I get a chance. In his monologue (which is quite long each night and is basically a riff on some topic or another that he develops like a dramatic piece; it's sort of like Eddie Izzard meets Garrison Keillor), Ferguson paid tribute to Herman Melville's Moby Dick, saluting the great white whale novel as an "explosion of genius,� by way of noting that the book was roundly excoriated when it appeared in 1851. At this point, you could hear most of the audience lapse into a baffled silence, which they often do when he uses words like "allegory" and "agrarian.� They just can't follow him.

But he's a rare talent, and if his book betrays the same intelligence, humor and sensitivity to the human condition he displays most nights on his show, it should be a pretty good read. (Here's an Entertainment Weekly review that didn't like it much.)

Has anybody out there already read it? Planning to read it? Post your comments.

Speaking of Scotland: The young Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti appears tonight at the Rinker Playhouse at the Kravis Center in a concert of music by Mozart, Debussy, Wieniawski, Brahms, Schubert and Franck.

I'm enjoying her rendition of the Szymanowski concerto on her debut disc; this was a nervy and offbeat choice. I don't know that it will bring many converts to the cause of the Polish composer, but it at least shows there's a fine post-Romantic concerto out there that deserves a few more airings.

And there's an interesting extra on the disc. In addition to the inevitable Massenet Meditation from Thais, Benedetti has included a separate track with just the orchestral performance. Would-be violin heroes can download the sheet music from her Web site and play along. Classical karaoke!

Benedetti takes the stage at 7:30 p.m. Details here. I can't attend, but if you did, post a comment here.

A handful of classical blogs

Haven't been able to post for a few days because of other workloads and computer trouble. But all that's clearing up.

So first, here are some classical blogs I've been perusing recently. No particular order or preference, just some decent commentary:

Twangtwangtwang: British harpist Helen Radice offers her thoughts on concertizing, but she also throws in ruminations on other aspects of culture, particularly English literature, in which she majored at Oxford.

So in recent days, she's talked about Britain's love of amateur music-making, mused on the greatness of Benjamin Britten, and included two Auden poems for good measure. I like the back-and-forth between literature and music in this blog, and in blogs in general.

The Fredösphere: Choral composer Fred Himebaugh blogs about such things as God, choral music, living composers, architecture and the state of Michigan, where he lives.

He refers to his world as the Fredösphere and his wife as, perhaps inevitably, the wifeösphere, which is kind of amusing, depending on your tolerance for whimsy. He has some interesting things to say this week about early music and Henri Duparc, and I've also looked back at his earlier posts for something about writing counterpoint (which is important to us composers). It's an unusual mindset at work here, and I enjoyed poking around on this blog.

Sounds Like New: Houston-based composer Marcus Maroney, a former Yale professor, blogs about once a week on art music topics.

He's harsh on a recent review by the New York Times' Bernard Holland, taking the critic to task for reviewing the pieces he's listening to rather than their performances. It's an interesting post, and reminds me of how much fun it was to read the Review of Reviewers in the old Spy magazine.

Oboe Insight: Patricia Mitchell, an oboist in Northern California, offers a looser, more bloggish blog than some, with random thoughts and quotes she bumps into.

Mitchell says some good things about the joy of playing music: I love my job. It's not easy. I don't make enough money to support a family. There's a lot of stress. I get nervous, sometimes at the craziest of times with the silliest of pieces. I've been known to cry about my performance. I've been known to lose sleep. But I still love my job! Making music is an incredible thing to be able to do.

And she has an interesting thought about the national anthem that I rather agree with: I'd rather not hear an opera singer do the anthem.

Hugh Sung: A pianist and technophile who runs a site aimed at helping musicians do more with tech.

This is a good idea, of course, and his site is full of interesting tech-geek stuff and straight-ahead music things, too. He's got a useful post about free sheet music sites, and another that touts a series of video podcasts on YouTube.com featuring a cellist named Luke Stanley, who Sung says "does a wonderful job of presenting video podcasts of music for the cello with friendly commentary and a laid back, down home style of performance. What a great idea! This is a terrific way to introduce folks new to classical music to the beauty of the cello literature.�

Think Denk: A thoughtful blog by the splendid pianist Jeremy Denk, who often plays with violinist Joshua Bell.

This is the kind of blog I really like: He writes about the beauties of a triple-chocolate brownie cookies at Starbucks and the Second Viennese School's abandonment of tonality all in the same entry, and is able to do it with a deft, readable touch.

Anybody else seen some good classical blogs lately? Post some ideas here and spread the word.

Hail to Erika, patron of the late bloomer

The Society of Late Bloomers has a new patron saint, and her name is Erika Sunnegårdh.

Sunnegårdh, for those who missed the story Saturday, made her Metropolitan Opera debut Saturday in Beethoven's Fidelio, singing Leonore. She's 40, and made her official professional debut only in late 2004, in her native Sweden, singing Turandot.

The wonderful thing about this story is that she's lived over here for about 20 years, and most of that time, she's been waitressing and singing gigs at various church ceremonies and that sort of thing. She has a great pedigree, as this story shows, but she's basically been toiling outside the full-time music industry for a long time, and now things are starting to happen for her.

She's got a nice Web site, and she's made a recording, too, of some new music (here's the site for that; I can't call up the clips on my computer, so I don't know how it sounds). I heard most of Fidelio on Saturday without knowing who she was, and I was doing other things while it was on, but I remember a big, strong voice as Leonore, and now I wish I'd paid more attention.

Sunnegardh has an interesting little essay on her site about obscurity and fame, part of which reads:

I think we all grow up thinking that somehow, at some point in our lives, we will arrive at this place where we feel significant. Where we rise up out of obscurity. Magically we will feel that we have had some impact, some purpose. I believe we all secretly suspect we ought to be up to something big, something that in the most idealistic sense could be classified as “good.�And unfortunately, I think most of us are attached to the idea that we need a serious number of “witnesses� to our deeds.

She goes on to say there's nothing wrong with obscurity, as long as you make some connection to one other being in your life, and I think she's right about that. There's nothing more important for me than the creative work I do, but it doesn't mean as much unless my wife Sharon has listened to my music or read my writing. In a certain sense, it's all for her, anyway, and when that happens you can count yourself blessed no matter how unknown you are in the wider world.

The thing I like most about the Sunnegårdh story is that she kept at it, finding a new vocal coach a few years ago who steered her in the right direction. She always was working on her art, even when standing around in a polyester tux holding champagne bottles at a party in the Hamptons. And it's that path — the solitary one of seeker and their art — that's important.

We tend to forget that a lot of famous composers and writers were artists first, and that if the fame and recognition came, so much the better. But even the most money-obsessed composers were still trying to solve artistic problems, and it's those things that we remember most, not where they were at the time, or what they were doing, or how broke or rich.

What we remember is what they did as artists, and that's why it's important that even if you write, say, only small works for your local church choir, you have to think about it as a great artistic problem that must be solved, not as something you can do a half-hearted job on because no one's ever heard of you or the choir. It's the art that matters, and the age at which you do it doesn't make a difference.

I think we're going to hear more stories similar to Sunnegårdh's in the future, as people live longer and longer and find fewer reasons to stop them from pursuing their art. For now, she's the role model for folks like me, in our 40s and still at it. Most of us will never make it as far as she has, but she shows us it's still possible.

Filling out an unfinished Mozart mass

This weekend, the Master Chorale of South Florida takes on the Robert Levin completion of Mozart’s Mass in C minor, K. 427, written in 1782-83 as a gesture of thanksgiving for the recovery from serious illness of his wife-to-be, Constanze.

Mozart gave a performance of the Mass in October 1783, apparently with other music filling in for the parts he hadn’t finished, and departed Salzburg forever the next day. The piece remained unfinished, though he borrowed some of it for a cantata the next year. A completion has been attempted several times, but it’s Robert Levin’s version, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in January 2005, that’s been getting the most attention.

He apparently has added about 25 minutes of music, all of it compiled from Mozart sources such as sketches and other works. Levin, a fine pianist, also has written a new performing version of the Requiem, which Mozart also left uncompleted (he was working on it when he died in 1791).

There’s lots of information on the Web about this version of the Mass; here is a site that proved useful to me (this one has a page of the Levin score).

Editing a piece people already like in its torso version, especially when it’s by Mozart, has to be a great challenge. There you are, trying to enter into the mind of one of the supreme masters of music, and trying to carry out his wishes.

The helpful thing is that even though Mozart is a titanic musical figure by any reasonable assessment, that’s more true for the entire body of his work than it is for most individual pieces, wonderful as they are. When it comes down to the detail of individual pieces, you might be impressed by what the composer has done, but you also are aware that you’re dealing with things you know something about, too. And you’re armed, in Levin’s case, with a lot of sketch material to work with that will make the job easier.

But it’s still a huge task. I remember looking at the scores of a composer friend who died at age 42 a few years back, having succumbed to substance abuse. I was at his house, and his widow was gathering his sketches and scores. Among them was a wind quintet he’d been working on. He'd only laid out about 12 complete bars amid a bunch of sketches, but it was clear he'd been working hard on it.

I took it over to the piano and played through it, and apparently, at the end of the fragment, my friend had begun to quote a hymn tune dear to him and his wife. She, of course, recognized it right away, and for a moment it was possible to see one way he might have wanted to finish the work.

But ultimately, there was too little material to attempt a completion of any kind, which made me miss my friend all over again.

There was plenty to work with from Mozart for Levin, and all reviews I’ve seen while browsing the Web indicate he did a remarkable job. I’ll try to be in Fort Lauderdale tonight to check it out.