Greg Stepanich

Chamber fest programs look inviting

Chamber music offers many opportunities — perhaps more than other forms — for getting a hearing for new or unfamiliar music. Patrons of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival have seen this durable group scour the byways for fresh repertoire every summer, and the upcoming 15th season shows festival organizers are sticking to that path.

I've just been looking at the Web site, and I'm pleased to see some of the selections currently planned for the festival, which starts July 7. As usual, there's a good mix of the familiar with the obscure, and I'm looking forward to using the July concerts as the soundtrack for my hurricane denial, which is now total.

One of the high spots for me is a performance of the Piano Quintet of Shostakovich on the birthday-boy concerts of July 7-9 (the other two works are by Mozart: the A major Flute Quartet, K. 298, and a wind sextet, presumably one of the two divertimenti, K. 240 or 270).

Sir William Walton's Facade is on the second program (I don't know who's going to recite Edith Sitwell's wacky poems) along with two rarities: A quintet by Ludwig Spohr, once an immensely popular composer whose time might be coming back, and the Septet for piano, trumpet and strings by Saint-Saëns, which I'm not familiar with, but which scholars say is one of the French composer's best pieces.

More humor follows on the third program with a duo for bassoon and tuba by PDQ Bach, the fictional black sheep of the Bach family invented by the American composer Peter Schickele. The Barber Adagio is also on this all-American program, along with the Copland Sextet and a divertimento by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, a South Florida native and one of the most eminent of living American composers.

The last program contains the Tchaikovsky Souvenir de Florence; a suite for flute, harp and strings by Vincent d'Indy (I'm really looking forward to that one); and the Rome Suite for flute, clarinet and bassoon by the American composer and educator Luigi Zaninelli.

It's a fascinating collection of pieces, and raises interesting questions. One of them is this: Why do so few pieces by d'Indy get performances these days? He was something of a reactionary as a person, but that shouldn't stop brave musical souls from exploring his music.

The Symphonie Cevenole isn't even done as much as it used to be (I remember hearing it at some otherwise forgotten concert as a kid, but rarely thereafter), but I can live with that as long as someone's taking a look at the rest of his work. This suite, a late work from 1927, is likely to be well worth hearing, and I'm glad the festival is giving it an airing.

'Times' right on classical's golden age

In the New York Times this morning, Allan Kozinn weighs in with what has been quite clear to those of us interested in classical music, though it goes against the conventional wisdom: Classical music is flourishing, and flourishing like it never has before.

As I've said several times in this blog, there is now more classical music available out there than there ever was when I was younger, and there seems to be an incredible amount added every day. Look through the pages of Gramophone, for example, and be astounded at the outpouring of performances, and most importantly, not performances of the basic repertoire, either.

It's off-the-wall stuff that was completely ignored when I was a tyke, but that you can now get in several versions. (About the only thing I hadn't seen when I sat down to write this was a major Joachim Raff retrospective — not that we need one, especially, but as it turns out all 11 of the once-famous Swiss composer's symphonies are available on Naxos.)

Most of this is because the old distribution networks for records and performances have broken down, primarily for the simple reason that the technology that made the old labels and concert organizers omnipotent is now in the hands of Everyman. A person sitting at a modest computer can bring to his or her ears music from every corner of the classical apartment in an instant, and that has given that consumer an amazingly wide choice of material.

And besides that, as Kozinn points out, the old way of doing things, of going to concerts and hearing live music in the way that our forefathers did isn't dead, either. Since launching onto the Sea of Blog in late November 2004, I've made it a point to attend at least one concert each weekend since then, and most of them have been quite well-attended. Some smaller recitals in out-of-the-way venues with unfamiliar repertoire have not drawn all that many people, but most have had healthy houses that seemed to appreciate the music and gave the artists plenty of attention.

Indeed, at certain times of the high season, it's impossible for a classical music critic in South Florida to make it to all the things worth seeing that day. We could use a few more regular series in the off-season; as the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival and the first series of organ recitals last summer at Bethesda-by-the-Sea showed, there's a large, eager audience out there waiting to hear it.

But at its best, the mainstream classical listener who wants to hear the really big names, up-and-coming young stars, and perhaps for something more daring, an afternoon of brand-new music, can find all those things in an average year. We don't have quite the volume or variety of the major cities, and the major touring groups and artists tend to choose sure-fire repertoire, but that's typical of most places outside the leading music centers.

(Coming up in October, too, is the opening of the Miami Performing Arts Center, which is about 95 percent complete, according to its Web site. That will add some much-needed centrality to the local arts layout.)

And that's just by way of pointing to the tried-and-true byways of classical down here. Kozinn's larger point, and mine, is that if any time in history has been a golden age for classical, it's probably this one. Our technological advances have made available most of the music that's been recorded since the advent of Edison, and that music sounds better and better. At the same time, the expiration of the Cold War unleashed another treasure trove of recorded music, as well as relaunched the careers of many splendid writers and performers.

Now, the miracle of digital archiving has given the interested listener to hear all of that, and everything new, too. Among other things, it's an opportunity to research, in splendid depth, the music of whatever composer or performer he or she wishes, and to conduct a never-ending, enriching educational seminar into the marvelous variety of human creativity.

Not too many years ago, I interviewed the violist and radio personality Miles Hoffman about the state of all things classical, and before I'd finished my question, he jumped: "You mean the so-called death of classical music?" Not on your life, he said, and there's no question that he was right. Classical music is alive as never before; I'd even say that this might be the first time in all of history that the true scope of classical music can be properly appreciated by people at large.

It's a pleasure to see the Times address this topic today; those of us who have been giggling with delight at being able to find cheap recordings of obscure masterworks, and looking forward with glee to an afternoon of fresh music in an intimate setting, are happy to welcome fellow lovers of this great art form to the banquet.

Review: Roberto Sierra, Sinfonia No. 2

Late last month, composer Roberto Sierra’s Sinfonia No. 2 had its world premiere in Miami, in a concert given by the University of Miami’s Frost Symphony Orchestra, led by Thomas Sleeper.

I’ve finally found some time to listen to the work this week on a recording provided by the school, and the first thing that’s surprising to me is how traditionally minded this 16-minute, one-movement symphony is. Listening to the other music of Sierra’s on his Web site, you can hear a composer eager to use Latin and jazz influences that gives the excerpts I heard a sort of genial populism.

But this symphony is a work with a no-nonsense, serious heart. It's written in a corporate classical, tonal style popular somewhere around the 1940s. I don't say that to write it off as old hat; merely to say that it would fit comfortably on a program with pieces such as the Barber essays and symphonies.

Sierra's focus here, unlike the saxophone and guitar concerti that can be heard on the site, is not on solo display but on pure symphonic composition, building a structure out of the notes of the big, somber theme that opens the work. It's subtitled "Gran Passacaglia,� and Sierra fashions a wide variety of textures out of the dark, strident, brass-heavy opening.

It's more or less a concerto for orchestra in that virtuosic use of the whole orchestral palette is made here, with plenty of whirlwind passages for strings and winds, and aggressive use of the brasses and percussion. There are also much lighter, more tender moments, such as the early episode in which solo flute and horn do a gentle slow dance over the plucking of a harp.

The symphony is a series of variations, essentially, that go from manic to serene and back to manic again, in what sounds like a struggle over the direction of the piece or the meaning of its notes. The music is broken up by large perorations, particularly one all-out climax about 10 minutes in that reminds me of no one so much as César Franck (same thick orchestration, too).

Overall, Sierra brings a notable invention to the music, writing entirely different treatments of the passacaglia theme as if to show how sounds that appear to be completely unrelated can be drawn from the same source. It also sounds to me as though the design of the work falls naturally into two or three parts, the first one ending with a warm horn solo over strings; the third one beginning with a quasi-recapitulation of the opening material about three or four minutes from the end.

As the music builds again from that point, a restless dotted rhythm begins to take over, and eventually dominates, driving the whole orchestra to a rat-a-tat conclusion.

This piece is a strong, interesting composition by a man who knows how to manipulate basic material successfully and make it thematically interesting enough for a listener to follow. It's not particularly original or individual, but it is well-made, and it could serve as an attractive curtain-raiser on a program of new music.

To ask more of it than that, it seems to me, would be to ask for a couple more movements. A subsequent one that maintained one basic mood would contrast well with the turmoil of the first, but that's asking it to be heard on different terms than the ones Sierra has followed here.

Sierra, a native of Puerto Rico who's currently a professor of composition at Cornell University, wrote this work at the behest of the Abraham Frost Commission Series at UM. The school might have been expecting something with more of a Latin flavor, and got instead a very straightforward, somewhat old-fashioned piece much more in line with the European and American compositional mainstream of the first half of the 20th century.

Although it mines well-trod territory without bringing something distinctive or especially memorable to bear, Roberto Sierra's Sinfonia No. 2 is a solid piece of craftsmanship, and in a time when new-music concerts often present a helping or two of triviality, good workmanship in venerable forms is not a virtue to be scoffed at.

America's best classical from 25 years

This past Sunday, the New York Times Book Review offered an expert panel’s list of the greatest American fiction of the past 25 years (the winner was Toni Morrison’s Beloved).

That got me to thinking about a similar list for music: What would be the greatest American classical pieces of the past 25 years; in other words, the years from 1980 to 2005?

Right away, there’s something not so neat about that cutoff: In 1980, some of the veteran writers of the past couple generations still were turning out music, and that has to be weighed against the pieces we might otherwise think of as being associated with that period. When we think about past epochs, it seems to me we almost always think of the newer moments of the period, and not the older.

Secondly, there’s an incredible amount of music to account for during that time, and few are the people who could have heard most of the music and be prepared to offer a learned opinion. I’ve heard a lot of new American music over the past 25 years, and I don’t know whether I can even venture a list of the top 5. So I’ll list at least one piece I know of that I feel certain will continue to be performed in years to come, and that will be seen as a major work from that 25-year period.

That work is the Symphony No. 1 of John Corigliano (that's him above, with his Oscar for the score for The Red Violin). It premiered in Chicago in March 1990, having been composed for the centennial of the Chicago Symphony; Daniel Barenboim led the first performance with the orchestra for which it was composed.

In the years after the premiere, it was picked up by orchestras all over the country, not least the late, lamented Florida Philharmonic. The Florida Phil and James Judd gave what was in my judgment a blazing performance of this work, and it remains one of the highlights of my concertgoing here. It also was the occasion of a semi-amusing story:

At the concert, I was sitting in front of two young women who apparently were attending their first-ever symphonic program. I imagine they probably chose a night that was convenient for both of them, and instead of a night of Beethoven or Mozart, they happened to choose a concert with the Corigliano, which is a very different thing.

As the piece ended, I couldn't help but incline my ears slightly in their direction to hear what their reaction was. What I heard was a stunned silence amid the applause, then, from one of the women, a slow, tentative: “Ohhhhhhkaaaaaaay.�

The piece no doubt came as a shock to my concertmates. But the aggressive tonal language of this work, written in commemoration of the AIDS plague, wasn’t composed that way simply because it was the thing to do if you were a composer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You get the sense from this piece that Corigliano means every note of what he wrote; he’s trying to express his anger and distress as honestly as he knows how, and he succeeds admirably.

The piece also makes telling use of quotations, weaving in the Albeniz Tango in D as arranged by Leopold Godowsky, a favorite work of a pianist friend lost to AIDS, and in the third movement, a motif improvised by a cellist friend years before is transformed into an elegant tombeau. But throughout the piece, which I'm listening to now, there is a sense of a composer in control of his medium and determined to make a statement.

I find it as moving and gripping today as I did 15 years ago when I heard the piece for the first time, and while its basic conservatism clearly helps its wider adoption, I find something deep about the music in general that I find compelling. One friend of mine said after listening to the piece that he didn't care what the program was, that the music was good enough to stand without it. I find myself today in general agreement, though I think it's wonderful that Corigliano chose to remember his friends and commemorate the AIDS crisis in this way.

As for other pieces, I'd suggest something by John Adams, though I'm inclined toward El Niño more than his other things; I saw Nixon in China at the Kennedy Center after it opened there, and while I loved the kitschiness of it, I wasn't crazy about the music. But El Niño has a fascinating mix of different kinds of influences that are prophetically eclectic: a genuinely popular American classical music will probably proceed along these lines more than any other in the near future, if I can hazard a guess.

And I would think a 25-year survey of American classical would have to touch on opera, since many of the major premieres I can recall in recent years have been in that field, with composers such as Mark Adamo and Tobias Picker making their marks, and Andre Previn and William Bolcom widening theirs. Of the operatic work I've heard from American composers, the best I've heard was The Food of Love, a one-act by Robert Beaser, one of the trilogy of New York-themed operas that was broadcast on PBS not long ago.

Philip Glass, too, has made a huge impact in opera, but perhaps it's a piece such as his Violin Concerto that will have more staying power. I'm not certain, since I don't know that piece well, but it did grab me more than some of his other works.

I should spend a little more time researching this, but for now, I'll ask for input: If you had to name the five best pieces of American classical music over the past 25 years, what would they be? I know there are readers out there who are better-informed than I am on this, so let's have your thoughts.

I'd love to get some ideas for some wonderful music I'm not aware of, but should be.

Miami to host opera premiere

“I hope we can do it, because I can think of nothing more important in one’s life than finding another medium (the operatic) for this wonderful story.�
— Benjamin Britten, writing in February 1965 to Colin Graham

Britten was excited about doing the music for Graham’s libretto for an opera based on Anna Karenina, the great Tolstoy novel (and one of my personal favorites). But Britten, a pacifist, decided not to go ahead with the project in 1968 after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, and so one of the 20th century’s most important operatic composers never did set his hand to the tragic story of a woman led astray by her passions.

But next April, Florida Grand Opera will give the world premiere of Anna Karenina, directed by Graham, who has provided American composer David Carlson with the libretto. The production will mark a new stage for FGO, which will become a six-production company with Anna; all six of the performances will be given at the new Miami Performing Arts Center’s Ziff Ballet Opera House.

I’ve been browsing around looking for some of Carlson’s music; here are two sound clips from the Web presence provided by his publisher, Carl Fischer Inc. This one is from the Cello Concerto No. 2; this other one is an orchestral excerpt from his opera Dreamkeepers.

I find both of these clips quite in keeping with the post-Romantic tonal-but-gritty language so many composers seem to write in these days, and I'd guess that should work well with Anna. Britten's language would have been broadly similar, in any case.

Several thoughts come to mind, among them that it's exciting to see a local opera company mount a big world premiere like this. Judging from the various grant listings I've found on the Web, this project has been in the works for some time, and no doubt it will bow in Miami to a great sense of accomplishment for all concerned.

I'll be interested to see how this novel is treated for the opera. The British composer Iain Hamilton wrote an opera based on Anna in 1978. One scholar called Hamilton's opera "a very fine achievement albeit limited by tonal restrictions . . . it brilliantly highlights the emotional content of Tolstoy's novel.� I've also bumped into references to a ballet on the Tolstoy story from 1972 by the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin.

I'm sure there have been other settings of this story (if anyone knows of any others, post away). It's something of a natural for opera, being a drama of illicit passion and a violent, tragic end. Anna is a sympathetic character; we get caught up in the way she feels trapped, in the overwhelming power of her lover for Vronsky, and in her corrosive sense of shame:

She felt so sinful, so guilty, that nothing was left to her but to humble herself and beg forgiveness; but she had no one in the world now but him, and so to him she even addressed her prayer for forgiveness. Looking at him, she had a physical sense of her degradation and could not utter another word......

There are the makings there of a wonderful operatic heroine, tailor-made for the big emotions of this art form. It would be an enormous challenge to bring her to life in a memorable musical way, but that somehow makes the attempt even more worth making.

The only thing I wonder, as I think I've written before, is whether great novels are the best sources for opera. It's hard to substitute actual music for the literary music with which these works are constructed; so much of what is memorable about the novel is its incredibly astute depiction of the whole range of human emotion and behavior, which is an art of detail. Such details are harder to latch onto in an opera house.

I suppose if you write the libretto such that there's lots of room to fill in those details outside a few set pieces and major arias, it will work well as an opera, but the music has to be pretty good. It may be that Anna is drawn so majestically by Tolstoy that we can get a short version of her torment and remember her as an indelible operatic heroine as well as one from literature. (Anyone out there think it could work? How would it work best? Add a comment below.)

But that will be very difficult indeed, and all best wishes to David Carlson in trying to pull it off. It should in any event be a musical landmark for South Florida, and one I'll have to see.

Exploring Leonardo the musician

With the release Friday of The Da Vinci Code have come copycat projects, or at least things that want to capitalize on the success of the book and what undoubtedly will be a very successful film (having read it, I'd say it should make a better movie than a book).

Sony BMG has released two discs, one of music from the years Leonardo was alive (1452-1519), and another a pop song cycle inspired by the movie and written by a Norwegian musician named Jan Kisjes. I'm only just getting around to listening to them, but the first disc (Da Vinci: Music From His Time), contains recordings by four early-music ensembles, some of which date back to 1973. There are some lovely things on there, particularly several sacred pieces by Josquin Desprez, and a beauteous madrigal (Madonna, oymé), by Costanzo Festa.

I'm listening to the Kisjes record right now (The Da Vinci Project), and it's very bad so far, but nevertheless it's the kind of movie-ish pop music that has a big crossover audience. I'll be doing a review of both discs over the next couple of days; after all, I don't want to miss a crossover opportunity, either.

The thing is, Leonardo was something of a musician himself, which is perhaps not surprising from the historic personage who embodied the idea of the Renaissance man. There's this, from Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists, which first came out in 1550. Vasari is writing about Leonardo's youth:

He turned to music for a while, and soon he decided to learn to play the lyre, like one to whom nature had given a naturally elevated and highly refined spirit, and accompanying himself on this instrument, he sang divinely without any preparation.

We know from Charles Nicholl's' 2004 biography of the artist (Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind) that other early writings about Leonardo refer to him as a musician, and that he played the lira da braccio, an earlier version of the violin. Nicholls gives a fascinating picture of the musical world of Florence in the 1480s, after Leonardo had opened his first studio:

What kind of music did Leonardo da Vinci play? No compositions by him survive, and the soundtrack of late Quattrocento Florence is loud and various: the fifes and drums of the pifferi, the sing-along 'catches' of Carnival, the instrumental preludes and interludes that accompanied the sacre rappresentazioni, the fashionable dance tunes of Guglielmo Ebreo, the virtuoso organ music of Francesco Squarcialupi.

I like that description, because it gives me the idea that the music of Leonardo's early life was a music of great liveliness and variety, which is true of the musical scene in our own time. I like to think of Leonardo taking part in musical activities along with everything else, and I think he probably did.

There's something tapestry-like about a society in which the arts flourished daily and were natural accompaniments to life. Today, we tend to segregate the arts for special occasions such as music lessons or trips to the museum, but it seems altogether more sensible to mediate our experiences through the arts and enrich them.

The funny thing is that I think most people do this nowadays anyhow, but the primary artistic medium through which they do that is the theater arts, particularly cinema large (movies) and small (television). While humans centuries ago typically expressed their emotions extravagantly, in a way that would be most unbecoming for our post-industrial society, and then reflected on those feelings through the words of the great poets or the sighing of a sad song (i.e., the opening of Twelfth Night), we tend to cluster in theaters or on our couches and experience high emotions vicariously, letting the tears roll down our faces in the dark where no one can see them.

Leonardo's time was far more brutal in some ways than our own, but there were compensations. And one of them was living a life emboldened and strengthened by the arts. Music was part of that mix, and after listening to the Renaissance disc I'm going to go through my music collections and see what else I can find from the years Leonardo was alive.

In The Da Vinci Code, the scope of this artist's actual work is tangential; nonetheless the book and the movie give me an excuse to learn more about what Leonardo was really all about.

Review: 'Carmen' at Florida Grand Opera

The proud Roma cigarette woman Carmen invented by the dramatist and short-story writer Prosper Mérimée was the perfect siren for the typical French bourgeois of the mid-to-late 19th century: She sang of freedom from everyday constraints and a life lived according to passion.

She’s still a perfect heroine (or anti-heroine, depending on your point of view) for the frustrated cubicle farm dweller of today. Cast off your loyalty to the things that tie you to the world and be truly free, she says, and in this way she is the ideal metaphor for the life of quiet desperation.

The Florida Grand Opera closed its 65th season this past weekend with performances of Carmen, Georges Bizet’s much-loved 1875 opera (with recitatives added), and in general, it was a satisfying production, with fine performances in three key roles and a decent level of stage interest. The performance Saturday night at the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale, however, lacked something in the Department of Snap, Crackle and Pop, chiefly because of a few tempo choices and a decision about intermissions that lengthened the evening unnecessarily.

The Israeli mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham proved to be a fine Carmen, with the kind of dark, delicious voice that has come to be associated with this particular femme fatale. Shaham’s singing had power and verve to spare, and had a strong stage presence most of the time, even if she did not dominate the action at each appearance (that's her as Carmen at the 2004 Glyndebourne Festival at the top of this posting).

Still, there was something a little sluggish about her performance of the major arias, as if conductor Stewart Robertson was indulging a good singer who wanted to linger over some of the juicier writing. Près des ramparts de Seville, for instance, was pretty but too slow, so that the music and lyrics had less fire and caprice than the character demands.

The same went for the Les tringles des sistres tintaient, the second-act opener, which is marked quite slowly in order to give the music somewhere to go as it speeds to its brilliant conclusion. But this performance (in which Shaham was joined by two fine singers in Megan Besley as Frasquita and Kate Mangiameli as Mercédès) was a bit too leisurely at the start, and the conclusion was noisy more than it was thrilling.

The British tenor Paul Charles Clarke has a strong voice with an exciting top that made him a believable Don José vocally, and he was largely persuasive dramatically. His voice, too, kept up its strength throughout the evening, though he somewhat oversang the great second-act aria La fleur que tu m’avais jetée, peaking at the words “je m’enivrais,� somewhat diluting the impact of the passionate outburst at the end: “te revoir, O Carmen.�

Good singing was also to be had from the American soprano Christina Pier, who has a lovely, lightish voice that nonetheless is firm and strong at the same time. It’s well-suited for the Gounod-like music she has to sing at Micaëla, with its high-floating, long, sweet lines, and she blended well when singing with Clarke.

Escamillo, sung by the American baritone Matthew Arnold, was less impressive; Arnold had a pleasant sound but not a great deal of weight, to the point that the second half of the toreador's song could barely be heard amid the chorus of the denizens of Lillas Pastia's inn.

This was a good-looking Carmen, from the bright yellow costumes of the soldiers to Allen Charles Klein's multipurpose set, which served equally well as a plaza in Seville and, with some well-placed draperies, the smuggler's hideaway. Stage director David Gately kept things moving, and was unafraid to show some sexual heat as Carmen and her amour de jour nearly coupled on an inn table.

The Florida Classical Orchestra lent expert support to the proceedings, and were well-directed by Robertson. Fine solo work in the woodwinds helped illustrate Bizet's beautifully balanced orchestral writing, and the Florida Grand Opera chorus also acquitted itself well (though the Miami Children's Chorus was not as successful).

One final note: This was a long evening at the theater, and I'm one of those who thinks it doesn't have to be all that long. Carmen is a melodrama, and a tight, fast-moving one at that. It's Law and Order, not Masterpiece Theatre. The only intermission I think it really needs is between Acts II and III.

Here, three intermissions were promised, though in practice, there were only two. For the third, the orchestra gave a mini-concert of the three entr'actes, one right after the other, before opening Act IV. This is not a good idea, and it robs the play of its forward motion and Bizet of his scene-setting triumphs in the places where they are supposed to be.

Encouraging the composers

Jerry Bowles at Sequenza21 has come up with a nice index of blogs called blognoggle; he's got links to classical music blogs, as well as blogs for politics and business (given my current job, that's pretty much a home run.)

Spend some time blognoggling, and you'll soon lose yourself in a number of interesting links. One that I found at New Music Box is from a young (he's 22 or 23 and doing grad work at my alma mater, the University of Illinois) composer named Colin Holter, who writes:

A composer is expected to be a craftsperson, which is to say that he or she has to write pieces that are generally acknowledged to be well-made. If his or her manner of composing demands a kung fu grip on species counterpoint or LISP programming, so be it, but I'm referring chiefly to the capability to shape an experience, a skill that supposedly comes only with practice and experience. This is really hard.

As at best only a part-time composer, I'd have to agree: It's really hard. The only thing I can say from benefit of being much older is that there seem to be many more opportunities nowadays, simply because of technology, than there were when I was a theory/composition student. Maybe it means there are only more ways to be ignored, but I think what it really means is that the composers of today have to operate like small businesspeople.

You have to create a company of You — you are the corporation, and you have to do what businesses everywhere do: Look for great opportunities and go after them aggressively. If you find them, I think you'll discover that follow-up is a little easier than it was in my day, because you have so many other ways to get the music out, even if that means doing it all on a synthesizer.

This reminds me, too, of something I've been doing for years in honor of a friend. Since 1993, I've endowed a composition prize at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore in honor of my late friend Frank Willis, who died that year at 42 of a drug overdose.

He was a good friend, but he had a hard time battling substance abuse. When I knew him best in the late 1980s, while living in West Virginia, he was sober and working hard.

The product of those years was a large three-movement symphony, redolent of Mahler and Shostakovich, but beautiful, moving and personal in its own way. The great Australian hornist Barry Tuckwell conducted the premiere in 1988 at the helm of the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, a group in the western Maryland city of Hagerstown. After that, he was composer in residence for the Wheeling (W.Va.) Symphony, and wrote a Mountain State Overture for that ensemble.

He also did a good orchestration of the Schubert F minor Fantasy for two pianos and finished a big, bristling piano quartet. He was working on a piano concerto and a wind quintet (after massive study of Reicha) when he died.

I loved him, and I miss him still, but his problems were too great for me to know how to help him.
The best I could do was found the prize — at Peabody because Frank studied there in the early 1970s — to encourage young composers, in the hope that a monetary pat on the back would help them gird for the big task of living a difficult life of the mind. I've been giving the prize ($350) to Peabody composers ever since, and I like to think it's given good writers the encouragement they need.

This week, in the mail, the news of the latest winner: He's Judah Adashi, holder of a master's and a student of the eminent British composer Nicholas Maw. Here's his Web site.

I should go ahead and post all the Web sites of all the winners over the years at some point in the future, but for now, it makes me feel good to do something for emerging composers.

Robert Nesta Marley, O.M., composer

On this day 25 years ago, the Jamaican songwriter and political activist Bob Marley died of cancer in Miami. He was only 36 years old.

I'm not sufficiently grounded in either Jamaican or African politics to venture any sort of opinion on what his long-term impact has been in those realms, though at least as far as Africa goes, he would still have had plenty to write about today.

Although Marley worked in popular music, which tends to be collaborative rather than solitary even when the artist is by him or herself, I think there's a good case to be made for the king of reggae as a melodist, and a significant one. Melody is crucial to the success of most music, whether we like to admit it or not, and despite all the fine music that's been written without particularly good tunes.

In Marley's case, his music is even more popular today than it was when he was alive, and there's not just one for reason for that. But one of the reasons that gets overlooked is the excellence of his melodies. They are plain melodies, harmonized often in dark minor keys, and they don't head off in surprising directions, either.

And yet they do what great melodies are supposed to do: They carry the song's message in a way that won't let go of your ears. I'm listening right now to Survival, one of my favorite Marley records, and I'm struck by how relatively simple but powerful these songs are. They are angry songs, defiant songs, but withal they are sweet and memorable because the melodies are so good.

You don't find that with any other reggae artist that I can think of, though there are fine tunes here and there; when I do hear new reggae these days (often on WLRN), it's interesting music but not particuarly memorable. I'm sure it's out there, but I haven't run into it recently. I'd be the first to admit I'm not following it all that much these days.

That doesn't detract from my point, which is that the continued popularity and durability of the music of Bob Marley comes at least in part from the music itself, not the fierce message, not the rebel iconography, not the piety. It comes from Marley's ability to string a memorable line of song on top of basic harmonies, and thereby take a form of Jamaican popular music into the stratosphere.

One song in particular illustrates for me Marley's basic inclination to melody, and that is Redemption Song, beloved not only of many cover artists, but half-skilled guitar players everywhere who like to bang through it. In the chorus, he sings:

Won't you help to sing/These songs of freedom/Cause all I ever had/Redemption songs...

The word "redemption" is set to a melody (it's in G, by the by) that scans it this way: Re-daym-uh-SHUN songs. That "shun" falls on what we call the "and of 4" and holds over into the "and of 1." Few of the cover artists sing it that way because it's hard to understand (though I'm sure some do), and while I'm not an expert in Jamaican argot, I don't think it's pronounced that way in Caribbean English.

But if you've got a good tune in your head, the words are just going to have to fit. And that's what Bob Marley was thinking of first there, even if he wrote it all at once. It was the melody that was guiding the song, not the words.

That's what it sounds like to me, anyway. I'm sure there are many who will disagree. But on this sad anniversary, I wanted to point out how important the art of melody is to songwriting, say that it's actually a rare ability, and to add that Robert Nesta Marley, O.M., was one of its masters, and that explains a lot about why his music continues to catch a fire.

Another chance for Ferguson fans

Because the system this blog operates on cuts off comments after two weeks, some folks haven’t been able to post anything on the entry they’re interested in.

And so we return to Craig Ferguson, the TV host and novelist. Someone else has posted a comment about his book (and meeting him) on an unrelated post, so I’ll run it here on this entry. This is from a reader named Diane:

Going back to the subject of Craig Ferguson's novel, I had the pleasure of being in L.A. last weekend to attend the LA Times/UCLA Festival of Books, at which Mr. Ferguson was a participant. He sat in on a panel discussion, and afterwards signed his book. We had come from Idaho, attended his Late Late show Friday night, and had high hopes of getting to meet him. At the Festival book signing we asked if we could have our picture taken with him, but his publicist snappily said no, no pictures. He then said since we came all the way from Idaho we could have a picture. One of the highlights of the weekend was seeing him sit in with the band the "Rock Bottom Remainders" on his show and at a benefit concert Saturday night. If you don't know this band, it is made up of several best-selling authors, and has been playing for charity for something like fifteen years. They all have a lot of fun, and are surprisingly talented, obviously having spent time developing talents other than writing during their lives. Craig played the drums, very impressively, and seemed to enjoy himself immensely. I add my praise and admiration to the comments already posted regarding this talented man. We are lucky he chose to immigrate to the United States.

And in so doing, I’ll invite anyone else who wanted to comment about Between the Bridge and the River to go ahead and add something here. You’ve got a couple weeks to have at it, and I know at least one of the commenters on my original post wanted to opine once he or she had finished the book.

I have yet to read it, I confess (too many other reviews to do), but here is a recent review from the Los Angeles Times that gives it a thumbs-up.

Ferguson fans, let’s have your thoughts and reviews.

Getting reacquainted with vinyl

Not long ago, my father handed down his old turntable, receiver and speakers to me. I remember when he first got it, at least 30 years ago, but he’s kept it in first-class condition, and the other day Sharon hooked it up in the living room.

And suddenly, I’m back in the days of vinyl.

I’ve still got some actual records in the house, and I’ve recently added to them by buying a bunch of things from the discard bins (25 cents apiece) at the main Broward County Library. I suppose I picked up about a dozen of them, all classical records, and most of them appear to have been played very little, if at all, so they’re in excellent condition.

What’s been very interesting has been how fast I’ve returned to the proper vinyl procedures. I pull the record slowly out of the jacket, gently place my hand inside the sleeve, and take care to lift it out with my fingertips on the label and my right thumb resting at the first joint on the outside rim.

If it’s a Deutsche Grammophon disc (I picked up one, a classic performance of the Bruckner Sixth by Eugen Jochum and the Bavarian Rundfunks), I pause for a moment to sigh in appreciation. “Mmm, that’s quality,� I murmur to myself, feeling the record’s extra thickness. Even the DG sleeve is good: it’s a marvelously light drapery, not a sticky piece of paper and plastic that seems to be sealed to the record, like you get in cheaper products.

Heading to the turntable, I take a moment to look at the record under a good light, and solicitously blow off random clumps of dust that have taken up residence on the deep black surface of the vinyl. I cast a jeweler’s experienced eye over every groove, looking for trouble: A scratch, a nick, even — heaven forfend — a chunk. Satisfied that no major problems await, I check the turntable for particles that might sully the obverse surface, and take a quick glance at the needle at the end of the playing arm, looking for dust there, too.

All is well. I place the disc carefully on the table, making certain that the record is seated perfectly, and use the switch to lift the arm up from its cradle. The disc begins to spin, and I patiently push the head of the arm to the place I think the needle will hit the record without sliding off or causing too much hiss before the music begins.

Then I lower the switch, and hear the pop and crackle that announces a listening experience is about to start. There’s a feeling of reverence about the whole thing that takes me back to the days when everyone I knew was a budding audiophile, and taking care of vinyl records was something that you only wanted to do if you were serious about music.

Anyway, for my return to the land of records, I’ve been listening to two discs that I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to find had not the price been right. But it’s been a good listening experience.

One of the records is a selection of music by the Estonian composer Eduard Tubin, who lived in Sweden for the last half of his life and is often considered a Swedish composer. His centenary was last year (he died in 1982), and the record contains a Prelude Solennel, the Suite on Estonian Dances for violin and orchestra and the Violin Concerto. Neeme Jarvi, perhaps the world’s best-known Estonian musician, leads the Gothenburg Symphony and violinist Mark Lubotsky in this collection, and it’s very pleasant music.

Tubin’s language is largely conservative, but not in a retrograde way, and there’s something exotic about the ethnic materials he selects that gives this music a diverting flavor. Certainly one or another of these works would be well worth hearing on an ambitious orchestra program hereabouts. You could program the Tubin concerto, for instance, with the two Romances of Wilhelm Stenhammar, both beautiful works that never get played.

I’ve also got a Czech recording of Psyché, the symphonic poem for chorus and orchestra by César Franck. It was written about the same time as the D minor Symphony, and it’s got a lot of the same kind of melodic material. But it’s not half-bad, and some of it is quite lovely. The chorus seems a little tacked-on, and you wish they had more to do (Franck also scored the piece for a chorus without basses, giving it a very light, almost weightless sound).

But it’s worth hearing, too, even though it’s not a masterpiece. Again, a programmer with some nerve might want to add it to an evening of late Romantic French music, a setting in which its distinctive sound could be heard to its best effect.

I’m enjoying listening to these odd pieces on my old-fashioned phonograph, and though the limitations of vinyl are quite clear with about 20 years of non-use by which to measure them, they offer other pleasures, too: Hard-to-find performances, big cover art and program notes in nice big type.

Anybody else have any vinyl memories? Still have some records you play now and again? Go ahead and post.

Sneak previews of next season, Part I

The schedules for the upcoming concert season (the one that starts after what I'm hoping will be a mostly hurricane-free summer; forgive me for being so overwhelmingly in denial) are showing up in several of my mailboxes, and there's a lot to look at.

Some of the more interesting things (so far — I'll be looking at more stuff later this week) include:

Master Chorale of South Florida: The group that survived the implosion of the Florida Philharmonic will be joining Maria Guleghina and Salvatore Licitra in the two performances of Il Trovatore scheduled for Dec. 9 at the new Miami Performing Arts Center and Dec. 12 at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale.

And they're also doing the Brahms Requiem April 13-15 in Boca Raton, Lauderdale and Miami. It's been a good long time since I've heard the Brahms work, but I like it better each time I hear it.

One of the things I particularly enjoy is the mindset that brought it to fruition. Rather than a terrifying vision of flames and the dread Last Trumpet, Brahms' texts bring to the music a quality of acceptance and the understanding of life's fragility:

Und alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen....
(For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass)....

It's set to a big minor-key march tune that nevertheless is stern rather than frightening. The whole piece is very, very beautiful, and one of this composer's finest works.

When I was younger, I wasn't much of a fan of Brahms, and one day I confided this to a couple of older music lovers. They looked at me with puzzlement, and then one said: When you get older, you'll appreciate him.

How right he was.

The Delray String Quartet: I caught the final concert of this young group's second season last weekend at the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach. It's hard to talk about how the group is doing because its roster keeps changing.

This past weekend, violist Richard Fleischman, former conductor of the now-defunct Renaissance Chamber Orchestra, filled in on the Bratsche seat for Dmitri Pogorelov, a fine violinist (I recently wrote about his Mendelssohn concerto performance) who's playing the viola for the Delray. But he apparently had a wrist injury and couldn't make the performance.

I found the performance overall rough at the edges, all the way through the Boccherini and Smetana quartets featured on the program. But the little Dvorak waltz in A (Op. 54, No. 1) that closed the concert was better balanced, and it worked better.

This quartet is not a group that has yet found its sound, nor has it focused on a core repertory it wants to pursue. Here's hoping the lineup solidifies for a season, and that the members of the group have more time to work with each other in the future and develop a good ensemble sound.

The Delray has planned five concerts for its new season, four of which will feature guest artists. Guitarist René Gonzalez joins the quartet for one of the Boccherini guitar quartets for the first concert Dec. 10, while flutist Christine Nield will be on hand Jan. 7 for one of the Mozart flute quartets.

The group has scheduled the great Schubert Quintet in C, D. 956, for its third concert on Feb. 15, but the second cellist has not yet been named. Pianist Tao Lin plays the Dvorak A major Quintet with the Delray on its final concert, set for April 1, 2007.

There's also some challenging newer music on two programs: The Fourth Quartet of Shostakovich (in D major, Op. 83), on the first concert, and on the program with the Schubert quintet, the First Quartet by Thomas Sleeper of the University of Miami.

The fourth concert, on March 18, contains quartets by Mozart (No. 23 in F, the "Prussian,� K. 590), Tchaikovsky (No. 3 in E-flat minor, Op. 30) and an arrangement of Sibelius' Valse Triste.

Is modern life too fast for symphonies?

A friend sent along a link to a piece from Wired the other day in which columnist Tony Long bewails the speed of modern life and uses classical music to make his point.

He begins with an interesting observation about radio stations that play just solitary movements of whole symphonies, not trusting that there will be a listener on the other end who has the time or inclination to wait out the whole thing.

It reminded me of WTMI, the former classical music station in Miami, and how I knew the end was near for them when they started playing movements instead of whole works. That showed me that this was a management team that was chasing the wrong audience — an audience that couldn't sit still for anything — and that no matter how hard you tried, you'd never catch them.

It would be like momentarily getting the attention of a young child at Christmas with an old-fashioned toy, only to have it completely forgotten moments later as the newer objects glittering under the tree hove into view.

As I've said before, I think the Internet is proving to be more of a blessing for classical music than anything else, opening up vast new tracts of audience members who didn't know they might be interested. But where does the attention span of that audience come into play?

I've been to quite a few concerts in the past couple years, and I can't deny that I quietly breathe an inner sigh of relief if the program doesn't look like it's going to be too long. I've got so much to do, after all.

And I think there are plenty of concert organizers who know their audience is starting from a point of restlessness that's only going to get worse: they walk in the door impatient, and you have to take that into consideration and not tax them unduly.

I've also noticed quite a number of composition contests in recent years that call for short pieces. No more than 7 minutes here, no more than 12 there. Please — no full-length symphonies, just something short and sweet that will get us from Point A to our cars in the parking lot as fast as possible.

That leaves us where Long indicates we are: a place where there is not a lot of tolerance for the long drink of water at the Ars Fontana. We feel somehow guilty if we spend too much time at a concert, soaking in the music and listening to the thoughts it inspires. We have to gobble up the music, too, and move quickly on to the next thing.

But you have to not be afraid to adapt your life to the rhythms of the art. If a real appreciation of it requires a few hours of your time some weekend, give it, and give it willingly.

There's a much-battered tree of some kind (we think it's a bombax) in our backyard that I used to like to sit under not all that long ago and while away half a weekend day simply reading something absorbing. I haven't been out there in a long time; I may have gotten to the point where it seems a wasteful thing to do.

But nothing could be more productive than enriching your mind, and that's where the music and literature come in. It's well past time that I took a busy weekend afternoon off and just got comfortable out there, reading, willing to match my pace to that of the writer, and happy to be taken along for the ride.

We all do too much, someone once wrote. Sometimes we need to make room for doing little else than letting our minds luxuriate. So let's hear that symphony, and take it from the top, please.

In my e-mail: A blogger named Garry Fung writes to introduce himself and others to his site, called A Beautiful Theme. It looks good so far; have a look around. And again — other recommendations for good classical blogs out there in the sphere are welcome.

Review: Jacek Kortus, pianist

It’s difficult to write about a very young pianist without falling prey to one of the two demons of criticism that haunt the emerging player: The Astonished Witness and the Killjoy Pedant.

Jacek Kortus of Poland is only 17 years old and has embarked on a tour of the country under the auspices of the Chopin Foundation of the United States. He appeared Saturday night at the main Broward County Library in downtown Fort Lauderdale in a free concert of major works by Chopin and Liszt.

The standing-room-only audience might have been in the presence of a major talent, and I’m inclined to think on this one hearing that Kortus is. He has plenty of technique, and clearly he has thought about the interpretive choices he’s making, both signs of a musician who can play the notes and has the ability to bring his own stamp to them.

My only reservation comes from hearing a certain stiffness in much of the music that could indicate a maxed-out technical apparatus but more likely betrays the presence of a recent learning curve for some critical pieces that all pianists should have at their fingertips. And I would also like to see whether he will have the curiosity to pursue some of the neglected but vital corners of the repertoire.

Without hearing him some more, I can’t say. But I think it’s fair to assert that young Jacek Kortus is a pianist to watch, and that one day we may hear great things from him.

For his Lauderdale concert, the Poznan teenager offered two of the Chopin scherzi (Nos. 1 and 3), the big A-flat Polonaise (Op. 53), the Second Ballade (in F, Op. 38), two of the Op. 17 mazurkas (including No. 4), a waltz (in A-flat, Op. 34) and a nocturne (Op. 48, No. 1). That is a fair representation of the range of Chopin’s art, from his most experimental miniatures to his biggest, showiest canvases, and Kortus proved generally equal to all the challenges.

Kortus knows how to communicate with his audience, and in overall, he seemed more comfortable with the poetic side of things, as in the very opening piece, the C minor nocturne. Here, he demonstrated good control and a lovely tone that suited the sad, halting melody of this piece quite well. The driving octaves that change the mood into something strenuous after that were a bit muddy and overpedaled, but by the end of the nocturne Kortus had managed to make a persuasive picture of a ravaged emotional landscape.

Kortus gave a quirky but attractive rendition of the first Op. 17 mazurka (in B-flat), making the most of its rhythmic trickery, while in the well-known No. 4 from that same set, he played it mostly straight, which was a little to its detriment; the more mature poetry of this beautiful work seemed to elude him.

The B minor Scherzo (No. 1, op. 20) had power and an impressive display (except for the very first entrance) of well-drilled notes. Kortus hammered the first beats of the theme, sending it shooting off like a savage rocket. But he slowed things down at the end of the theme — perhaps in an attempt at breathlessness — but for me it stopped the scherzo’s forward momentum.

Kortus chose a very brisk tempo for the C-sharp minor Scherzo (No, 3, Op. 39), almost too fast to make each new section stand out. The rapid left-hand murmurs before the entrance of the slow contrasting theme and “waterfall� effect weren’t clear and crisp, and that had the effect of losing some of the setup before that theme’s appearance.

Similarly, while the A-flat Polonaise had a suitably heroic main theme, the big E major contrasting theme, with its treacherous descending left-hand octaves, was blurry and indistinct, so that you couldn’t hear the contrast that followed. The F major Ballade that opened the second half had some of Kortus’ loveliest playing in the opening bars, but he had a harder time in the rest of the piece making sense of each section and making it all cohere.

All that said, these are some of the most difficult, taxing pieces in the repertoire, and Kortus gave every one of them a strong basic reading. As he grows more familiar with these works, his performances will gain subtlety.

Kortus ended his program with three works by Liszt — the etude on the deathless 24th Caprice of Paganini; the dazzling Tarantella from his Venezia e Napoli collection, and a relative rarity: the 11th Hungarian Rhapsody. Kortus showed that he has the makings of a good Liszt player; the composer’s rapid change of moods and dramatic pauses for effect seem to work for this pianist. Again, he has the ability to handle these monstrous technical hurdles, and his basic level of audience connection is amply in evidence. I enjoyed the Rhapsody the most — Kortus brought a freshness and sympathy with its showboating style that I found compelling.

As an encore, Kortus played a transcription of the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy, from Tchaikovsky’s ballet score for The Nutcracker.

A word should be added about Kortus’ basic demeanor on stage. He is cool, calm and collected, deliberate and serious, and it made for an interesting contrast to the fireworks he was having to set off at the keyboard.

A good debut, then, and audiences fortunate enough to have seen this young pianist here for free might have much to feel smug about in future years if Kortus is able — and I he think, all things considered, he might be — to build a major career at the piano for himself. He is, in any event, off to a promising start.