Greg Stepanich

Playing music for peace

In time of war, music is often called on to express what cannot be expressed in words.

We live now in a period in which more war, not less, would appear to be in our future, and it seems to me that we can only be certain that dark days lie ahead. I don’t think we’re going to see street-by-street fighting in our own country, but we will be taking part in, and witnessing, a great deal of armed conflict elsewhere.

I suppose that’s a more pessimistic view than some would have, but I don’t see any other outcome at this point. Which leads me to believe that over the next few months, those of us who are non-combatants are likely to hear this or that piece dedicated to the victims of the failure of politics, or entire memorial concerts, or tours undertaken with the objective of raising awareness.

Last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice offered a “prayer for peace� by way of Johannes Brahms at a dinner hosted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Here’s a clip of that performance, which features a bit from a Brahms violin sonata (the violinist has pitch problems) and then Rice is heard in two very brief excerpts from the Intermezzo in A, Op. 118, No. 2.

It’s well-known that Rice is a major Brahms fan, and this piece has been a favorite of pianists for decades because of its beautiful tune and its autumnal coloring. It’s not that difficult to play, but it sounds harder than it is because of the canny writing for the piano that exploits all the riches of the instrument, which was by the time this piece was written in about 1892, essentially the piano we know today.

As a prayer for peace, the Brahms has something to recommend it in its sweet, reassuring tone and its sense of gentle forward motion. It would work just as well in a choral setting, or with strings, or a full orchestra, and I don’t doubt that some enterprising souls along the way have done just that. For that matter, much of late Brahms works for meditative, solemn purposes, such as the 11 organ chorales with which he closed his compositional career.

But are there other pieces that would serve well as prayers for peace, and there have been many that were written explicitly for that purpose. If you widen the net to include works that sound serene, then you’ve got quite a few to draw on.

Off the top of my head, I’d offer up:

a) Almost anything by Palestrina. His music has a built-in kind of serenity that is inherently transporting to a place where we think of nobler things. (In that same period, many of the sacred works of Schütz and Lassus would work well, too.)

b) The Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony of Mahler. Surely the most well-known of Mahler’s pieces, it’s nevertheless a beautiful, somewhat tortured song for strings and harp. The end of the Third Symphony works for this purpose, too, with its long, delayed D major cadences.

c) The slow movement of the String Quartet in A minor, Op, 132, of Beethoven. The Heiliger Dankgesang is a study in rapture, and the contrasting Andante sections (“Feeling new strength�), could be interpreted to represent the joy to be felt at the cessation of strife.

Just pulling those out of the air, really. Anyone else have a good peace-prayer playlist? Post something, and we’ll discuss it.

More on Stanzerl: The other afternoon, while in downtown Delray, I stopped at the newsstand to pick up new reading material to have dinner by, and as is my pretentious wont, I picked up (in addition to the Sunday NYT) a copy of Le Monde and and another of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. I studied French and German, but don’t really speak them, but I like to pick up papers in these languages now and again to see what I can remember.

And in the July 15 edition of the FAZ, on page 37 of the Feuilleton section, there was a short piece about the Frau Mozart photograph whose authenticity has been questioned. The piece, as far as I could read it, made the case for authenticity, saying scholars had noted a large growth on the right hand of Constanze Mozart, calling it a “gouty hand,� They cite this as proof of her advanced arthritis.

The article also says the picture was taken on Max Keller’s 70th birthday, which was Oct. 7, 1840, and that it was probably taken by the grandson of Johann Nepomuk della Croce, an artist who painted Mozart en famille when the composer was young. The mystery continues.

Time to finish long-delayed project

There are many projects I’ve started and abandoned over the years, and for the most part, I don’t feel bad about them. The things I’ve finished are the things I wanted to complete, and I’ve found a way to get them done.

But then there are the pieces on which I’ve spent a good deal of time, and yet they remain undone. If you define yourself, as I do in part, by your creative work, these things loom over you like the battlements of a ruined castle — the castle you erected yourself, and the one you always promised yourself you’d move into.

And so this week I’m trying to finish the last movement of a trumpet concerto I’ve been writing on and off for years. I sketched the first part of it in 1997, according to my records, and I did a lot of work on it around 2000, at which point a family crisis intervened and I put it aside.

Last year I got back to it, and completed two movements, and came up with enough material for the finale. But this year I’ve had so many interruptions that it’s remained two-thirds done for the first half of this year. And so this week, I’m vowing to buckle down and get it done; the only way to complete it now will be to schedule my free time very carefully so I can wrap it up. I’m optimistic, and I know I’ll feel wonderful when it’s complete at last.

It’s a funny thing, but finishing a big creative project isn’t about how when I’m done, it’s going to change the world. That’s not what it’s about for me. It’s about finishing something I promised myself I’d finish; what happens to it after that is sort of beside the point.

I think this is kind of odd, really. As a longtime resident of newsrooms and a onetime music school student, I’ve talked to many creative people. I’d have to say that most of them are interested in getting the novel or poem or story done, or the flute sonata, or the album of really great songs that will finally mint your disillusionment over your breakup with your nasty ex into the common coin.

But not me. If I meet my own deadline and standards for the piece, that will be enough. If I get fortunate, and I get some performances, so much the better. But the hard part will already have been over.

I don’t know whether other part-time creators out there (and there are lots of us) feel the same way, but I’d be interested to hear about it if you want to post something.

In the meantime, I’ve got an hour or two of composing to do.

Preview II: Four American orchestras

In the coming concert season, four major U.S. orchestras will make stops in the area during the first three months of 2007, and it's worth taking a look at what they have planned. There are other major foreign orchestras coming to town, too, but I'm interested for purposes of this entry in the four American bands:

Jan. 15 (Kravis, West Palm Beach): The Pittsburgh, with director Yan Pascal Tortelier and violinist Olivier Charlier. The band from Pennsylvania brings music from France and Russia, opening with the Roman Carnival overture of Hector Berlioz and closing with Scheherazade, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's tone poem about the princess who staved off death for a thousand and one nights. I haven't heard this piece in concert in at least a decade, and it seems to have fallen from favor somewhat.

Charlier will play the Violin Concerto No. 3 by Camille Saint-Saëns, one of his most popular instrumental pieces. It's not one of my favorites, but it's an attractive listen, well-crafted and scored and full of melody and solo fireworks. Overall, a very traditional program, and one that could easily have been programmed in 1906 as well as 2006.

Go/No go: Go. Charlier is a compelling violinist, and it's fun to hear all that Rimsky color live.

Jan. 19-20, 26-27 (Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, Miami): The Cleveland, in the first two concerts of its new decade-long Miami residency at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, not yet open and already renamed from its working title as the Miami Center for the Performing Arts.

Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst is at the helm for these programs, which open with two symphonies: the First (Jeremiah) by Leonard Bernstein and the Ninth, of Beethoven. The Bernstein work appears to be getting more performances these days, which I'm personally happy about, though it reminds me that I could really have done without all of Lenny's conducting for the last 20 or so years of his life in exchange for some more composition.

The Beethoven Ninth is less a piece of music than a monument of Western civilization, and no matter how many times I've heard it, I never tire of it. The soloists are soprano Measha Brueggergosman, mezzo Kelly O'Connor, tenor Frank Lopardo and bass Rene Pape. The Master Chorale of South Florida handles the choral duties. An interesting and worthwhile pairing, but most attention will be focused on the Beethoven.

Go/No go: Go. The Beethoven's always worth it, and to have the Bernstein on the same program makes it even better.

The next weekend, the Clevelanders offer two Argentine works: Osvaldo Golijov's The Last Round and Alberto Ginastera's Variaciones Concertantes, followed by the First Symphony of Gustav Mahler.

Golijov is one of the hottest composers working today, and his Last Round is a tribute to another Argentine composer, the tango master Astor Piazzolla. Ginastera also is one of Argentina's most eminent composers; the Variaciones has a good helping of his most distinctive stylistic traits: huge chord clusters, violent rhythms and an overwhelming sense of drive.

The Mahler is a wonderful work, a masterful and sublimely beautiful piece that demonstrates the composer's astonishing command of orchestration and his highly personal fund of melody. All three works provide a clash of the vulgar with the elevated, and this will be a fascinating program.

Go/No go: Go. It's worth going for Golijov and Mahler; I'm not as enamored of the Ginastera, but it's a chance to hear one of his best-known orchestral works.

Feb. 14 (Kravis): The Chicago, with David Zinman at the helm and violinist Gil Shaham as soloist. If you missed the Golijov Last Round with the Cleveland, you have another chance at the Chicago Symphony concert to hear it again.

Shaham offers the Violin Concerto of Edward Elgar, and the orchestra concludes with the Schumann Second Symphony. I'm not a big fan of the Elgar concerto, but if it's played well, it has a certain melancholy attractiveness; this piece's star has risen in the past decade or so. I'm glad to see the Schumann on the program; it's been too long since I've heard a live performance, and it's a beautiful work of pure German romanticism. A worthy program, with varied challenges including good balances in the Elgar (the same goes for Schumann).

Go/No go: Go, but then again, I'm from Chicago. Still, I'll want to compare the Golijov performances, and I want to hear the Schumann live. I'm not very interested in the Elgar, but Shaham is an extremely expressive violinist, and perhaps he can make the most of its broad post-Romanticism.

Feb. 27 (Kravis): The Atlanta, with perhaps the most widely varied program of all, opening with Rainbow Body by the American composer Christopher Theofanidis. It's not a good piece, to my ears, but it's very attractive and audiences appear to like it. ASO skipper Robert Spano, who will conduct, has championed this short work.

Pianist Emmanuel Ax, a frequent guest in these parts, solos in the Concerto No. 22 of Mozart, and the concert closes with the Symphonic Dances of Rakhmaninov. This is one of Rakhmaninov's last works, and it's one of his best; I have no idea why it's not played more often. Compelling, interesting programming, with some fresh new American music on the bill along with an overlooked Russian piece and a classic of the Austro-German tradition.

Go/No go: Definitely go. It will be a joy to hear the Rakhmaninov, and perhaps I'll like the Theofanidis better live. I'm not expecting a lot from the Mozart, but the other two pieces will draw me.

March 16/17 (Carnival Center): The Cleveland, in the third and last of its programs. Two Tchaikovsky workhorses: The Romeo and Juliet overture and the First Piano Concerto, with the veteran pianist Horacio Gutiérrez. This will be a blockbuster for local audiences. Manuel de Falla's suite from his ballet The Three-Cornered Hat rounds out the program, which is conducted by the young Peruvian conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya.

Go/No go: No go. Don't get me wrong: I'm a big Tchaikovsky fan, and I think he should get more credit than he does for his craftsmanship, among other things. But I'd rather hear one of his operas (I heard Mazeppa, a lovely work, earlier this year) then hear R&J or the First Concerto even one more time. But I'm likely to be one of the few orchestral fans in South Florida to skip it.

Geeky musical humor still works

Every field of endeavor needs its nerd humor, the kind of comedy that might translate reasonably well to wider audiences but that leaves its target audience shrieking like beasts.

There have been several notable musical humorists in recent years, including Al Yankovic, the pop parodist, and the Danish pianist Victor Borge, who catered to a crowd that loved the masterpieces as well as the light classics.

But the true prince of geek music humor is Peter Schickele, a prolific composer in his own right but best known as the creator of P.D.Q. Bach, famously described as the last and least of the sons of J.S. Bach. Schickele's been unearthing pieces by PDQ for 40 or so years, and it amounts at this time to a substantial oeuvre.

Schickele began doing his thing at about the time the genteel culture that would have provided a larger audience for these jokes was beginning to lose its grip on American concert halls. Now his audience is smaller but has perhaps a better understanding of all the things he's mocking.

One of my favorite PDQ pieces, for instance, is Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice, billed as "an opera in one unnatural act." The title provided laughs for a 1969 audience familiar with a controversial movie, and the billing was another clever sex gag. And the songs were funny, as was the stage business (at one point, Schickele attempts to sing one of the arias while wearing a giant wolf's head).

But for us music nerds, the really giggly stuff was the inside-baseball humor, especially if you were really young and just learning more about the music you were playing at your weekly lessons. To hear the bridge to Hansel Hunter's aria —

The reason for wearing the mask
Is I have to conceal my secret well
In fact, if anyone asks
Say you just haven't seen me for quite a spell

— was to hear something very much like the music you were playing in your piano lessons, with one exception: It sounded fun, and charming, and logical. You could understand it, and you could hear how the chord changes set up the tension for the corny joke that followed as the music returned to the refrain:

You see, I ran away from home and I'm really glad I did
My sister is an ugly goat and she treats me like a kid

Dumb, but clean, and for a music nerd, actually funny. Again, though, the best part was that it was old-fashioned music that made perfect sense to your modern ears. You could stare at that Kuhlau sonatina all you wanted, and listen intently to how your teacher tried to explain how the music worked, and yet it remained remote. But make fun of it, and make fun of it in a way that sounded believable, and that old music started to come alive.

It wasn't just PDQ Bach that made classical attractive, of course. I've always loved the music, but in order to retain the requisite amount of cliquish coolness to survive puberty, you and your friends had to have something that was your dorky touchstone, and for people my age, it wasn't only Monty Python, it was PDQ Bach.

This weekend (tonight in Palm Beach Gardens or Sunday in Delray), I'll be stopping in at the third Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival concert, and PDQ's Dutch Suite for Bassoon and Tuba is on the all-American program (which includes Barber, Copland, Thomson and Zaninelli). I haven't heard it, but I'm certain it's quite silly, and yet silly within the bounds of a tradition that I know and love. These are inside jokes, but affectionate jokes, and I always feel myself in the company of friends when I'm with people who like to smirk at a Shickele con.

If you've got a favorite PDQ piece, let's hear about it. (A friend of mine was a devotee of the Blaues Gras cantata, with its wonderful Bachian take on a journey to Cripple Creek). It takes a lot of real compositional skill to pull this off, and what you're hearing with PDQ Bach is the voice of a fine American composer.

Organ recital series may return

Last year, I wrote several times about a new series of summer organ concerts at the church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach (pictured above). The four concerts were quite successful, and they proved a welcome addition to the calendar at a time of year when music activity has slowed, or many of the musicians are playing elsewhere for the summer.

Looking at the church calendar the other day, I was saddened to see that the concerts were not there. But now I'm hearing from concert organizer and organist Diana Akers that the series will return, though with three concerts instead of four, and will take place in September or October.

This is terrific news, because if there's one segment of the literature that is massive and ignored by most everyone except devotees, performers and composers, it's organ music. Here are some sites in which you can hear programs about the organ (Pipe Dreams being the most famous), and download some performances.

I've just been listening to the Prière movement from Léon Boëllmann's Suite Gothique, which was available on this site, and it's a reminder to me of the splendid depth of this literature.

Last summer, the series drew crowds of 150 to 200 people (which is pretty good for an organ recital in the dead of summer), and the audiences appeared to really enjoy the music, most of which had to be unfamiliar to them. The concerts also demonstrated that there are a lot of fine organists in the area who should get more opportunities to be heard — a couple players offered some most unusual, fascinating repertoire, which was another benefit of the series.

When I get more details, I'll post them, but I was happy to hear that the series is likely to happen again. Those of us who love organ music will be happy to stop in on a hot Sunday and hear something challenging and beautiful.

In the meantime, does anyone else have a favorite site for the King of Instruments?

Laptop orchestra points way to future

Here's an unusual group on the cutting edge of classical, tech and performance: The Princeton Laptop Orchestra, or PLork.

The group, pictured above, was founded last year at Princeton University, gave its first concert in April, and aims to take advantage of new technology as well as change what we normally think of when we think of orchestral ensembles. I'm listening right now to a streaming download of one of the pieces, and it's kind of like mild gamelan house music, or something like that.

But it's nice, and it raises interesting questions about how new ways to perform and present music.

While the idea of staying in time and preparing cogent musical ideas is common to this digital music as well as traditional music, it's important to note that the barrier presented by instruments as we know them is not a problem if you're sitting at a laptop. You simply have to make sure you get your bit to fit in.

The divide between a laptop-playing musician and someone who must learn to master an oboe, piano, violin or bass guitar will surely grow as groups like PLork start to appear more frequently. If you love music, but you can't seem to get all the physical things together to play a traditional instrument, a laptop orchestra might be your way to take part in the joy of ensemble playing.

But those who have spent a lot of time learning to play an older instrument are bound to have misgivings about the ease with which someone sitting at a computer can be musical. It's been pointed out many times that the process of instrumental evolution has essentially been frozen for the better part of the past 100 years (leaving aside the piano and guitar).

Now we stand at a new technological crossroads, and I can see a critical context in which a reviewer of a concert will give more weight to musicians playing the traditional instruments than he or she does to a laptop group.

Would that be fair? I think so; it would be sort of like judging the Olympics. You have to give people credit for overcoming certain physical limitations.

But that wouldn't change the music itself, which could be magnificent, even if it's played and composed by 15 people hunched over MacBooks. The PLork organizers point out other considerations on their Web site:

The students who make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and software developers. The challenges are many: what kinds of sounds can we create? how can we physically control these sounds? how do we compose with these sounds? There are also social questions with musical and technical ramifications: how do we organize a dozen players in this context? with a conductor? via a wireless network?

All of these are important questions, and I'm only sure of one thing: The music itself will have to stand alone, no matter how it's produced.

Good music, wherever it comes from, is good music, and while I have a certain pride in being able to play the piano, I can't ignore the fact that a much easier physical process could produce music just as beguiling as the wooden console in my living room.

Magazines show youthful classical

In the mail this week, the good folks at Britain’s Muso have sent me two copies of their classical music magazine for younger people. They sent two editions — British and North American — and while there are some overlaps of material, for the most part, the versions are quite different.

And they’re both pretty good. What Impromptu Publishing appears to have accomplished is the right tone for this effort: It’s youthful, energetic and smart, but it doesn’t oversell the genre, either,

In other words, the editors and writers don’t attempt to suggest that classical is a million times better than any other music, and that people who like it are part of a special elect who deserve the fawning respect of everyone else. They simply make it attractive, and for all the right reasons: it’s a wonderful form of music, and it’s great to be a part of it.

Under editor Femke Colborne (love that name), most of the articles are short and to the point, largely positive in tone, and illustrated in the busy, artily quirky style favored by publications with a younger readership. The North American version is a quarterly, while the British edition comes out six times a year.

There are some nicely cheeky British bits in the UK Muso, like this from a a back-of-the-book feature called The Green Room, written by the no-doubt pseudonymous Seymour Scandall, who savages Renee Fleming’s Baroque stylings as heard in the Met’s recent production of Handel’s Rodelinda:

The diva’s dodgy Handel album should have alerted wise ears to the fact that she treats the old boy’s arias as consonant-free zones. But La Fleming is so big with cloth-eared New Yorkers that it hardly matters to the powers that be at the Met, depressingly more concerned with box office dollars than whether anyone can hear a word being sung by the star of the show.

Meee-yow!

The North American edition’s cover star is Mason Bates (he's pictured at the top of this entry), a Juilliard-trained electronica DJ and classical composer profiled by Frank Oteri, who edits NewMusicBox, which really should be on my blogroll along with several other new entries (many thanks to the other classical bloggers out there who’ve added my site to theirs; I’ll soon return the favor).

Oteri shows us an interesting young musician who, like the majority of young classical musicians I’m aware of, does not observe the leftover genteel-culture boundaries that have prevented people from enjoying classical music as just another kind of music.

And both editions feature something on Carol Jantsch, a 21-year-old newly minted University of Michigan graduate who’s just been hired as principal tuba player by the Philadelphia Orchestra, a remarkable achievement made twice as notable because of the comparative rarity of female tubists.

There’s much more in the magazines — though not as much on their Web site, as my fellow blogger Garry Fung has noted — and I’m enjoying them, and I’ll sign up for a subscription.

The publishing group that makes Muso also publishes a bulletin board magazine for opportunities called Gig, a music education magazine named Link, and what should be my personal favorite given my horn-playing past, Brass Band World. These ensembles are very popular in the UK, though we don’t have many of them here in the States; I just like the idea of a whole magazine devoted to brass instruments, their players and their culture.

In the years to come, if Muso is successful, it will be interesting to see whether Colborne and crew add some deeper investigative pieces. There should be plenty of things to write about.

In the meantime, Muso really is worth a look, and I’m grateful to the folks at Impromptu for sending the magazines along.

'Terrorist' much better than its reviews

I wrote a review for the paper a few weeks ago of John Updike’s Terrorist, a novel in which an 18-year-old New Jersey high school student of Egyptian descent becomes involved in a terrorist plot — oddly enough, given the recent news, to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel.

I really liked the book in spite of its sometimes creaky plotting and recycling of old Updikean sexual tropes because I thought it was a compelling story that also demonstrated the power of one person’s religious belief. For me, the book was about that journey more than it was about anything else, and its admixture with an essentially sentimental but hopeful view about the appeal of American society made it a winner for me (here's a roundup of some reviews).

This book has gotten largely negative reviews, and I can understand why some people didn’t like it. As I said, the plot’s a little creaky and the denouement is a little hard to believe (spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal the ending here in a minute, so if you’ve not read it and want to, here’s your chance to exit). But what I don’t get is that most of the people who’ve disliked it seem to dislike it for the reason that it isn’t the book they expected it to be.

The reviews I’ve read that attacked it — The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books — all made the same point, more or less: That Terrorist doesn’t show us the thinking of the kinds of people who are mounting terrorist attacks against the United States or other countries. To which I say, well, no, of course it doesn’t. It’s not the reimagined life of Mohammed Atta.

It’s about an American kid who has been a devout Muslim for six years and finds, that when the time comes to push the button and blow himself and his explosives-laden truck sky-high, he can’t do it for two reasons: One is that despite his dislike of the seamier side of American society, he’s too much of an American to hurt it, and perhaps even more importantly, he has absorbed his religious teaching, and the Koran tells him that it is only God who can create life or take it away.

Obviously, the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center (and killed my cousin Jimmy as they did so) were more interested in making a political point than a religious one, and that’s not what Updike’s book is about. It’s about a young man trying to figure out his place in life and his faith, and he discovers that he really is a true person of faith, far more a devout Muslim than his teacher, a sheik whose concerns are clearly political and not religious.

Why is this so hard for some reviewers to understand? It’s not Updike’s fault that he wrote a book that didn’t fit their preconceptions about what a book on this topic was supposed to be like. They seem to want desperately for Ahmad to be a hateful person so that we can comfortably go on hating him and other Muslims without trying to understand why they do these things.

It seems to me that Updike has shown beautifully, and bravely, that a person could indeed turn away from a terrorist act because his faith has given him a different lesson than the lesson it gave Osama bin Laden. That idea gives me hope, and it gives Updike hope, too. Surely it stands to reason most people in the Muslim world are people like Ahmad — people of peace and hope, not hatred and nihilism.

What’s troubling is that some people are still so intent on demonizing the entire Muslim world for reasons of politics, apparently, that they can’t understand what’s in plain English right in front of their noses. I have a good personal reason — the senseless loss of a family member — to bear undying hatred toward the people who would do this, but I can’t bring myself to hate an entire segment of humanity because of it.

The real terrorists in the world are extremist political activists, no matter what religious verses they spout. The main character of John Updike’s new book is a teenager whose faith leads him away from an act of hatred. He is not an activist; he is an American kid who’s truly religious and lives by the precepts of his faith.

That might not be a message some reviewers want to accept, nor is it the book they want on the topic of terrorism. Here’s Jonathan Raban in the NYRB:

If only the novelist had spent more time dreaming himself into the paranoid and angry world of Qutb and his followers, and given Ahmad Mulloy sufficient intellectual and emotional wherewithal to justify his adherence to the crooked path of righteous violence, Terrorist might have stood among Updike’s best work.

This baffles me. Why should Updike have written a book about the angry paranoids? Just because he called his book Terrorist? Maybe he should have called it Ahmad’s Journey, so he wouldn’t have been criticized repeatedly on this point.

My feeling remains: Terrorist is one of the better things I’ve ever read by Updike, in spite of its recycling of old compositional tricks. Ahmad, despite being a teenager in full hormonal tilt, is an intellectually consistent character, and that’s why the book works; I can’t think offhand of too many other characters in fiction that are fully convincing religious adherents.

But Updike’s critics won’t permit him to use the word “terrorist� without making the lead character a cold, cruel extremist, presumably so he could shed some light on the mysteries of al-Qaeda and 9/11. That wasn’t Updike’s point, and because it wasn’t, there’s no reason for him to write a didactic explanation of the terrorist criminal mind.

That book will have to be left for someone else to write. This one works beautifully as is, and it should be read for what it is, not what it isn’t.

A week for Shostakovich chamber music

As the actual anniversary of Shostakovich’s 100th birthday nears, local listeners are hearing some of this composer’s chamber music, which I count among his most important work.

On Sunday afternoon at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre, members of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival played the Piano Quintet (G minor, Op. 57) of 1940 in a finely nuanced performance that did a good job of showcasing all the elements of Shostakovich’s special muse: The intensity of the second-movement fugue, which builds so solemnly and sadly; the vigorous marching of the third-movement scherzo; the strange, comic, whimsical ending, as the music suddenly evaporates with a salon-style wink.

Another nice thing about the piece and the performance Sunday was the tension on display between the quartet and the piano. Shostakovich uses the interplay between the two forces ingeniously, it seems to me. Heard one way, it’s clear the piece was originally meant to be a string quartet. But considered another way, Shostakovich has integrated the voice of the piano in a way that allows it to be an antagonist at one point and fellow mourner at another
.
What he has done is bring large drama to bear in a small space, and that’s also the case with the Second Piano Trio (E minor, Op. 67), which can be heard Thursday night, also in Delray, at one of St. Paul Episcopal’s Sommerabendmusik concerts.

The Shostakovich will share the program with one of Antonin Dvorak’s most beautiful pieces for piano trio, the Dumky Trio, Op. 90, so called because it is made up of a series of the slow Czech dance known as a dumky. The violinist is Mei-Mei Luo of the Delray String Quartet; she played Sunday in the quintet as well. The cellist is Brazilian-born Claudio Jaffe, who teaches at Lynn University, and the pianist is Paul Schwartz. The concert starts at 7 p.m.; the church is asking for a $10 donation.

The Shostakovich trio is a passionate, powerful work that the liner notes to the 1998 recording I have calls “one of the two greatest Russian piano trios,� the other being Tchaikovsky’s (which is one of that composer’s better pieces). It inhabits that same world of bleakness and fire that distinguishes Shostakovich’s mature voice, and I always find it harrowing and fascinating in equal measure. I won’t be able to be at the concert Thursday night, but I’ll be happy to allow mini-reviews of the concert as posts if anyone so desires.

Listeners who don’t know Shostakovich’s work well are advised to explore his chamber music; this is highly personal music of great depth in which, like Mahler, seemingly trivial material is milked for maximum emotional effect. I consider it vital listening, and I’m doing a lot of it in this centenary year.

Widow's photo brings Mozart closer

This entry has been updated as of July 13.

The BBC has unveiled a daguerreotype from 1840 that purports to show Constanze Nissen, known better to the world as Constanze Mozart, wife of the composer. That's her at the far left in the front row in the picture above.

This story says the daguerreotype was discovered in the archives of the town of Altötting, in Bavaria, and was taken at the home of Max Keller, a Swiss composer who was a good friend of Constanze (he's sitting next to her).

The picture shows an older woman (she was 78) in what looks like widow's garb (her second husband, Georg von Nissen, also had died); her face resembles the younger face we see in the paintings of Constanze that have come down to us, such as the one at right.

There's something very exciting about this, something really thrilling. It's almost as though we have a picture of Mozart himself, and I suppose it says something for the power of photography that this makes Mozart seem more real than he usually does.

Famous people who died before the age of photography always retain a certain mystery for me, though that might just be a journalist's bias for the proof we see in photographic images. Beethoven, for instance, died in 1827, a few years shy of photo technology.

But you can compare his life mask, taken by Franz Klein in 1812, with the many paintings of the composer, and when you look at the features of the mask, you see the cleft in his chin and the stern set of his mouth spring out at you from the paint (and you can judge the excellence of the various artists in question, too).

You know the mask once sat on the composer's actual face, and you can compare it with the death mask taken 15 years later: It's hard to tell it's the same person, so emaciated is the face.

This week I've also seen for the first time the Edlinger portrait of Mozart, supposedly painted in 1790 but only rediscovered in 2004, some 70 years after it first ended up in a Berlin gallery.

Somehow I missed the story of the painting when it first was reported two years ago, but I saw it while paging through Rodney Bolt's new bio of Lorenzo da Ponte (The Librettist of Venice), which I'm planning to read and review in the next couple weeks. There seems to be some controversy about the painting's authenticity, and I have to admit it strikes me as more Lovis Corinth than what I've come to expect from late 18th-century art.

But if it really was painted in 1790, and the subject truly is Mozart (and it looks a lot like him), it is as Bolt writes in the caption to the painting: "the effects of high living are clear.� In theory, this is a 34-year-old man, but he looks at least 10 years older, by our standards, and he doesn't look particularly well — he died the next year.

He's puffy and already graying in his hair, which fits the facts to some degree. Mozart was terribly busy for most of his life, and not just his aduthood, when he was one of the pioneering musicians to break free of court patronage and pursue the freelance life.

My guess is that this painting is really much later than 1790, but that could be just an ignorance of different portraiture styles at the time, not to mention that of Edlinger, with whose work I am completely unfamiliar. Still, it's an intriguing document, and if it's authentic, it actually gives us insight into the shaky state of Mozart's health (the picture's above).

Both of these portraits give us all a chance to get a little closer to Mozart in the flesh, and I find that comforting as well as compelling. The further they recede in time, the more baffling great artists become, but when you see what his widow actually looked like, and you see a portrait that shows a man who's been hitting the midnight oil a little too often and really needs to take better care of himself — they become a bit more understandable, a bit more like brethren and a bit less like gods.

It's funny that an art like music, with its extraordinary ability to communicate to humanity, should need more proof of its human origins. But it does, and I guess that's why I'm still staring at these pictures.

UPDATE: Looks like the daguerreotype of Constanze Mozart could be a hoax, according to this series of posts at Sounds and Fury.

I'll simply borrow these posts from the site, one of which comes from Agnes Selby, who's written a biography of Constanze:

I am terribly sorry to disappoint people ..., but this is certainly not Constanze but someone's aunt.

The whole story was concocted by Keller's grandson. I[n] Australia we refer to such rantings as "dropping names". If with good luck for the name dropper the press gets hold of it, fame for the name dropper ensues.

Constanze Mozart was crippled by arthritis by 1840 and died in 1842. There is absolutely no way she could have traveled to visit Maximillian Keller during the period when the photograph was taken. Contrary to the statements made in the newspaper, Constanze had no contact with Keller since 1826. There is no evidence that she had corresponded with him or visited him.

And here's one from Michael Lorenz, a professor of musicology at the University of Vienna:

The "newly discovered" picture of Constanze Mozart has already been published twice in the 1950s, the last time in an article by E. H. Mueller von Asow in the Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, March 1958, p. 93. For decades it has been known as a hoax among Mozart experts. There are no outdoor photographs of groups of people dating from 1840, because the lenses invented by Joseph Petzval, which were to make such portraits possible, were not available yet. It was simply not possible in 1840 to take sharp outdoor pictures of people as long as the necessary exposure time still amounted to about three minutes. The first outdoor portraits of human beings originate from the 1850s and the picture in question definitely looks like an amateur snapshot from the 1870s. If the BBC (or anyone else) knows a verified group portrait originating from 1840, I would like to see it. But the guys in Altötting wanted to have their share of fun and publicity in the Mozart-year.

I'd add that one of the first outdoor portraits of human beings, which I thought came from 1837, instead comes from 1842, and was taken by the English photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot. Here it is:

So the professor's wrong about the 1850s. But he's probably right about the photo not being Constanze (and here's his link to a photo expert), which makes me a little sad. I wanted to believe it, I think, and that's what happens when you suspend your normal skepticism because you want something to be true.

It'd be really funny if the painting of Mozart that I think is phony turns out to be the real thing. Then I'll have applied my skeptical glasses upside down.

Champion of old and new

Listened last night to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing La Anunciacion, from John Adams’ oratorio El Niño. It’s a lovely, powerful mezzo voice, and it was stilled Monday when Lieberson died at 52 of cancer.

I never got a chance to hear her live, though I wanted to — one of the reasons I went to a New World Symphony concert in March was to hear her sing Mahler's Rückert Lieder, but she canceled. Looking back on her career, one of the things that I like about it is her devotion to new music.

This link gives a good overview of her work, which also included a great deal of older music, and most memoirists are focusing on those two segments of the repertoire — ancient and new — as a good way to understand her contribution.

From everything that I’ve read in the past few days, she comes across as exactly the kind of musician you want on your side if you’re mounting something risky, innovative or freshly written. This is the career of someone fearless, someone thoroughly proficient at music and at the same time willing to take chances and make a bold mark.

I’ve known a good many musicians in my time, and the ones who were the most fun to work with were the ones who were ready at any time for a challenge. It’s at those times that you understand better what music is all about — there’s something anarchic and unlimited about it, something almost terrifying in its power — and all praise to the musicians who are willing to step into the unknown and try to make something work, who are willing to reacquaint themselves with music at the base, at its origins, and not settle for rote, or for glib mastery.

That’s when you know you’re in the presence of the real thing, and the world of music counts on artists like Lieberson to be its footsoldiers of innovation. You can’t do it unless you’re a musician of great gifts, great training and high musical intelligence, which by all accounts is what she was.

There’s been a real outpouring in the classical blogosphere about Lieberson’s death, and that makes me regret missing her all the more. Here’s a link to a National Public Radio story that included part of a performance of her singing a song by her husband, Peter Lieberson, to one of the many beautiful love poems of Pablo Neruda.

An American classical playlist

As another Independence Day nears, I’ve prepared a playlist of American classical music that I’ll have on the player as I do my ritual reading of the Declaration and my equally ritual hanging out.

I've got a good deal of American classical in my collection, and there are many good things I've not touched on in the following list. But this is what strikes me this year as a decent overview of American composition as we head into the Fourth.

John Adams. Short Ride in a Fast Machine; Shaker Loops. Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop.

Adams become perhaps the most prominent American composer working today, with a major recorded retrospective released a few years ago, and repeat performances of his operas and orchestral pieces.

Short Ride in a Fast Machine is an energetic little number full of chugging rhythms and big orchestral colors. It features the regular clicking away of a woodblock for much of it (which could lead to another SNL skit: More woodblock!) I'll pair that with Shaker Loops, a major work of high minimalism that has a very attractive nervous intensity.

Paul Creston, Symphony No. 5, Op. 64. Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz.

In addition to Shostakovich and Mozart, this is a Paul Creston year. The son of Italian immigrants, he was born in New York on Oct. 10, 1906, as Giuseppe Guttovergi, and later adopted a more American-sounding name. I remember playing a good deal of band music by Creston as a student, and he at one time had a major career in the mid-20th century, when American composers were a much bigger deal culturally than they are now.

Creston writes in a conservative idiom, with straightforward structures, prominent melodies and aggressive rhythms. It's attractive, confident music, fitting for the son of a tailor who had little formal education but made up for it with intense discipline and application.

Howard Hanson, Centennial March, Philharmonia à Vent, John Boyd, director.

This most famous son of Wahoo, Neb., was born 110 years ago this year, and he’s enjoyed something of a rebirth in recent years, largely for his Second Symphony.

His music is more European-sounding to me than other of his fellow Americans, maybe because he was so interested in his Swedish heritage. A new disc of his band music has come out on Klavier Records, and since I’ve made a point of talking about this Boca-based company’s work before, I’ll do it again.

I’ll be listening to his Centennial March, written for the 1967 centenary of Nebraska’s admission to the union. The disc is called Laude: Music of Howard Hanson, and features the Philarmonia à Vent, a wind orchestra based at Indiana State University.

Charles Ives, Symphony No. 2, N.Y. Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein; Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord, Mass. 1840-60), Gilbert Kalish

It’s not possible to have a July Fourth in my house without a little bit of Ives, and I like to throw on a couple of the shorter pieces from time to time during the day.

But there will be two large works on the player: The Second Symphony and the Second Piano Sonata (Concord). I admire both of these works a good deal. Ives is particularly valuable because his music so beautifully reflects the postbellum America in which he grew up.

Other writers have written more eloquently about the mix of hymn tunes, popular songs and folk melodies that wander through all of his work, but I’d like to say I hear them, too, and if you really want to know in your skin what the life of late 19th-century America was in a small New England town, listening to Ives will help you get there.

David Diamond, Symphony No. 2; Symphony No. 4, Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz.

Diamond died last year, leaving behind a distinctive body of work that impresses by its special harmonic language and its powerful emotion. He, too, is a conservative, tonal writer for the most part, but he well represents the more passionate strain of American symphonic writing.

Both of these symphonies offer a good overview of Diamond's style and language; the Fourth is quite a bit shorter than the Second, but in some ways it's a more attractive, muscular work.

Samuel Barber, Violin Concerto, Op. 14, Hilary Hahn, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Hugh Wolff.

Here’s one composer whose work remains solidly in the repertory without an ounce of critical respect or attention that I’ve seen recently. It’s easy to roll your eyes when it’s time for yet another playing of his Adagio for Strings, but it works every time, involving the listener in its high emotion, so beautifully controlled.

One of my favorite Barber pieces is his relatively early Violin Concerto, which is one of the best of all American violin concertos, perhaps the best of all, with the possible exception of the Bernstein Serenade. All of Barber’s gifts are on abundant display here: Lyricism, masterful orchestration, and a strong personal profile.

Aaron Copland, Clarinet Concerto, Richard Stoltzman, London Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas.

Copland is hard to escape on the Fourth, in part because he worked hard to create a national American style. His success was remarkable; it’s hard not to hear his stripped-down style and think immediately of the open prairie, or the hills of New England, or whatever cliché of the American landscape you want.

We’ll certainly play Appalachian Spring in our house, though I’ll also be listening to the Clarinet Concerto, which he wrote for Benny Goodman and which is a short but lovely addition to what is a rather small repertoire.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk, The Banjo; The Union, etc. Leonard Pennario.

A pianist who was one of the country’s first musical celebrities, Gottschalk was a native of New Orleans who was the first writer of classical music to work the music of black America, the Caribbean and Latin America into his music.

Already in the 1850s he was writing pieces such as The Banjo, a toe-tapping work that’s entirely American not only in its subject matter but its special kind of melody; in its own way, it’s a precursor to rock and roll. And since he was such a Lisztian, it’s fun to hear pieces such as The Union, which mixes all kinds of big American tunes into a festival of Romantic fireworks.

George Whitefield Chadwick, Symphonic Sketches, National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, Theodore Kuchar.

An eminent figure in American classical music for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Chadwick is receiving more attention nowadays as enterprising orchestras start going through the libraries in search of fresh music.

Chadwick’s Second Symphony bears the marks of his training; it sounds just like Dvorak in many of its pages. I’ve got a nice Naxos disc of this piece along with his Symphonic Sketches, which has more of an American feel to it, but is still very much in the contemporary European mode. Still, it’s an interesting listen because this is what so many of our composers were writing like at the time.

Dudley Buck, Festival Overture on The Star-Spangled Banner, London Symphony Orchestra, Kenneth Klein

Buck was primarily known for his organ music, and was part of the same school of East Coast academicians to which Chadwick belonged.

Buck’s Festival Overture on The Star-Spangled Banner was written in 1887, decades before the tune became our official national anthem. But it had already been our “national air� for years before that (it’s in Gottschalk’s The Union, too). He uses the tune as his secondary theme in this piece, which isn’t a great work, but which entertains reasonably well for its 6 or so minutes.

William Grant Still, Symphony No. 2 in G minor (Song of a New Race), Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi.

Still is the most prominent African-American classical composer our country has produced, as official history would have it. That’s certainly true, but leaving aside the question of his ethnicity, he’s simply one of our country’s most important classical composers, and his work deserves more attention.

His Second Symphony (Song of a New Race) is a straightforward, well-crafted, eminently listenable piece from 1937. Still said it represented the “colored man of today,� which he saw as an admixture of the various races in the country. It’s a beautiful piece, quite conservative by late 1930s standards, and a good showcase for Still’s lyric gifts.

Charles Griffes, etc. Dream Chasers: North American Nightscapes, Heather Coltman, pianist.

A little American night music: I’ll close the Fourth with selections from a recording by Florida Atlantic’s own Heather Coltman, who recorded a disc of piano pieces by American and Canadian composers for FAU’s new Hoot Recordings series.

Dream Chasers has music by older American composers such as Charles Griffes, Roy Harris, Edward MacDowell, David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti, as well as contemporary writers such as Stuart Glazer and Jeremy Beck. The Canadians are celebrating their national day today (it fell on July 1), so in honor of both of us, I’ll probably play the whole disc.

That’s my list for the Fourth. Anybody else have some music they're planning to play on the national holiday? Post away.

Pianist Cliburn fights for Texas classical

Out in East Texas, pianist Van Cliburn has stepped up to fight the good fight for a classical music station at Kilgore College.

As this story shows, the Kilgore trustees have agreed to sell off KTPB radio to a company that will turn it into a Christian rock station. I’m sure it’s pointless to protest that there are many outlets around the nation for Christian rock, and apparently, plenty of religious-based radio programming in that part of Texas, too. It’s pointless to protest because the money will out in the end, and there are big bucks riding on this thing.

I’m sure what will happen is that Kilgore will get its Christian pop, and the classical will disappear. But Cliburn, who has been famously reclusive for much of his career, did a good thing by making the case for classical:

There is no way to give a monetary evaluation to the world's heritage of great music. The temporary music of our day, (the fads and trends), is fast and fleeting — but the permanent ageless masterpieces are enduring and forever. What is popular is not always good and what is good is not always popular.

You can make the case that this argument is the sort of thing you would have heard for decades as the old genteel culture asserted its prerogatives and stood up for the timeless. You could say that this is an elitist argument that is completely out of step with its times, with its insistence on the “ageless masterpieces� of the great composers of the Western tradition.

But Cliburn is right: A college needs to stand up for this corpus of human creativity as much as it needs to instruct its students in the great books and the great artworks. Arguments about what should be in that canon are best addressed after the idea of a canon, and its worth, is first imparted. Plenty of once-canonical composers -— Joachim Raff, Ambroise Thomas, even Meyerbeer — have slipped back into obscurity, but the idea of a group of special masterworks goes on, and should go on.

Most lovers of music love all kinds of music, and I’m one of them. I don’t denigrate Christian pop simply because I don’t find it all that interesting, or its message compelling. But this form of music already has plenty of outlets and plenty of cash, and it doesn’t need to bump a classical station at a small Texas college to survive.

If Kilgore loses its classical station (and I bet it will), another small battle in the idea of a college as a citadel of the arts and of the best of human creativity will have been lost. I suppose it’s old-fashioned to think that’s what colleges are supposed to be about, but if that’s not their whole mission, it needs to be at the bedrock of what they do.

So here’s a salute to Van Cliburn for breaking his silence to say what needs to be said about the importance of classical music, and the importance of having a public outlet at which we can hear it. I’ll hold out a little hope, because as Dr. Johnson said:

Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.

Fight on, Van.