Greg Stepanich

Everything old is new again

Driving home late last night, I got to thinking about the way younger artists revitalize older art and make it new again.

WLRN’s Harry C. Sharp was playing a 19-year-old singer’s version of the great Gershwin song How Long Has This Been Going On? It was a breathy version, somewhat too melismatic in the way of contemporary singers, who tend to bring gospel stylings to everything they sing, but it was still lovely and compelling. Brother Ira’s words still worked with George’s melody, and it was still a song about a woman discovering real love for the first time.

Oh, I feel that I could melt
Into Heaven I’m hurled
I know how Columbus felt
Finding another world….

Earlier in the day, I heard part of the day’s broadcast of From the Top, the endearing radio program that features young classical musicians (and at the same time, through pianist Christopher O’Riley, pays tribute to Cole Porter and to pop artists such as Radiohead and Elliott Smith). I caught a little bit of a nice version of a Mozart song (Ein Veilchen auf der Wiese stand, K. 476), which reminded me that there are parts of Mozart’s vast output, even in this 250th anniversary year, that are unaccountably neglected.

Then it was a look at the cover story of the August Gramophone, which features a look at the young classical stars of today, including the British trumpeter Alison Balsom, who’s 27, and the Russian pianist Yevgeny Subdin, who’s 26. Paging through the blurbs about these singers, players and conductors, all apparently leading active, interesting careers, gave me a lot of hope about the musical future.

The one thing all three of these random encounters brought to mind again was that some critics of the classical life — and the jazz life, too — don’t have enough faith in the appeal of music in general, or understand how much of the spectrum of music is appealing to talented people.

While much of the critical world frets, the younger crowd is out quietly discovering the vast musical treasure house our common human culture offers them, and they’re making it their own. There’s no other reason a teenager needs to sing a 70-year-old song in a style that hasn’t been popular for decades, or that a young woman would want to begin a recording with trumpet pieces written 250 years ago, other than that the music still has something to say.

It never pays to hedge a bet on human creativity, or the capacity of talented people to take something as established as the sky and make a whole new firmament out of it.

Here’s another YouTube video, this one of the Hagen Quartet, an Austrian group, playing the opening movement of one of my all-time favorite pieces, the F major Quartet of Maurice Ravel. Head over to the site, and you can see the other three movements, too: