Greg Stepanich

For Shostakovich's 100th: My top five

Today is the 100th birthday of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose reputation in the 31 years since his death in 1975 has done nothing but grow steadily, to the point that it is now safe to assert that he is by common assent Russia’s greatest 20th-century composer.

It’s instructive to look back at the Shostakovich article in the 1980 Grove, which asserts that it is Shostakovich’s symphonies that will prove his most enduring legacy. And yet while most of the symphonies appear to be more frequently programmed than they once were, it’s his chamber music and the concerti that have benefited the most from Shostakovich’s ability to reach new generations of audiences. The First Violin Concerto in particular, to judge from the new recordings of it that have been made in recent years, is now a firmly established part of the repertory.

I’ll reiterate here what I’ve said before about the tricky question of Shostakovich’s politics: That while he did his bit for his noxious one-party state, I believe that he essentially sacrificed himself to the greater cause of Russian music in general, to its history and its future, making a conscious decision to endure the nastiness of the Soviet regime in order to bear witness and to offer through his work whatever he could to his compatriots. I don’t believe for a minute that anyone who saw his best friends hauled off and shot in the gulags could have had any illusions about the regime he served, nor was he in any way happy about it.

I think he believed in Russia, and Russian art, and that the government he lived under would one day pass, but the creative contribution of its citizens would be unbroken, and their achievements laudable.

I love the music of Shostakovich because of its great power, its ability to seize center stage and say deep things memorably, and above all the distinctive voice we hear speaking to us in the music. And so as a birthday tribute, here are my five favorite Shostakovich pieces, in no specific order:

1. Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 77. This concerto has everything: Beauty, anguish, strength and fireworks. One particularly gripping moment comes with the Passacaglia before the finale. By this time, the listener is aware he or she is in the presence of a major, serious concerto.

2. Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93. I admire several of Shostakovich’s other symphonies: Nos. 1, 5, 8, and 13 in particular. But the Tenth has a kind of Hindemith-style grandeur that I really like, and the special coloring provided by his frequent use of the horns only adds to that.

3. Preludes and Fugues for Piano, Op. 87 This is an extraordinary collection, worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as Bach’s 48. Shostakovich shows throughout his mastery of counterpoint — he was a stickler for good craftsmanship — and the emotional territory mapped out by these wonderful pieces is immense. Like Bach’s set, it reveals something new every time.

4. Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 102. This is a controversial choice, because Shostakovich himself called it a piece of no real merit. But for me it shows the Mozartean side of this composer’s music, seen in pieces like the First Piano Concerto and the First and Ninth symphonies. The second concerto has flat-out beautiful melodies (the second movement) and an abundance of easy charm that we associate with the Salzburg master.

5. String Quartet No. 8. I’ve yet to find any of the quartets of Shostakovich to be anything less than masterful, and this rich literature will make quartet players happy for decades to come. But the Eighth is special for its memorial content (it was written for the “victims of fascism and war’), and its incredibly dark, somber material. Few quartets demand such intense involvement on the part of the listener, who is asked to absorb repeated stops and starts, shrieks of folksong over a chugging bass, and long passages of hushed, near-motionless music. This is the music of suffering, and few composers knew how better to convey that than Shostakovich.

I realize in putting together this list that I’ve chosen music from a relatively short period of Shostakovich’s creative life (the late 1940s to 1960). But there’s plenty of other great pieces throughout his career; this is one composer who never weakened as he aged; his Viola Sonata, completed a week or so before he died, is innovatory and shattering.

What are your five favorite Shostakovich pieces? If you need to, make it 10. Please post away.

Here's part of the First Violin Concerto, done by Hilary Hahn:

Review: Seraphic Fire

One has to admire the sheer ambition and scholarship of Seraphic Fire, the 16-voice chamber choir that opened its fifth season this weekend with a typically bold program of old and new American music as well as a compelling rendition of a Renaissance masterpiece.

Director Patrick Dupré Quigley is one of those prime movers of music, an engaged musicologist who is passionate about the pieces he presents, ever curious about finding fresh repertoire to offer along with the rich canon already available, and a true believer in this particular art form who insists on the necessity of bringing it to South Florida audiences. It’s a pleasure to have him and his talented crew working in our area, and one hopes they’ll be here for years to come.

That said, Seraphic Fire is still a work in progress. Only four of the Coral Gables-based group’s founding members were on hand Saturday night at All Saints Episcopal in Fort Lauderdale, and it’s pulled back from last year’s expansion into Palm Beach County. Like most other area classical ensembles, fund-raising pitches are a regular feature of each concert, and the choir is represented at this point by only one full-length recording (made under less-than-optimal conditions) as well as a guest appearance on a Shakira album.

But there is also much good to report. The programming for the rest of the season looks just as innovative and exciting as this weekend’s concert was, and every audience I’ve seen at the group’s events is enthusiastic and attentive in a way that betokens a crowd that loves the ensemble and knows it’s in the presence of something special. It remains a can’t-miss group, and that’s perhaps the best recommendation that can be given about it.

Vocally, Seraphic Fire sounds smoother and more even than it did last year, and to my ears that’s because there’s greater consistency , and perhaps more stamina, in the sopranos. These are terribly difficult pieces to sing, even more so because they’re unaccompanied, and last year the strain during concerts featuring the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 and the complete Bach motets was audible (although admittedly those were the last concerts of the series).

There was very little vocal fraying to be heard Saturday night, and that made it much easier to judge the newer works on the program, especially the three contemporary American pieces. Most prominent among those was an “acoustic� version of Hymnodic Delays, a four-part work for choir and electronic looping by Ingram Marshall. Ensemble member Suzanne Hatcher, who teaches at the University of South Florida, has done a first-class job in transcribing the echoes and other layering effects Marshall created from the quartet of shape-note hymns he uses as the basis for the work.

What results is a haunting, delicate rumination on texts about death and the afterlife, in which the hymns — only the third, Swept Away, appears to be heard in its original version, and that only for a moment — are disassembled into fragments which then are expanded, as if a diamond were held aloft into the light so that the characters of the shadows thrown on the wall could be explored. The electronic effects sound quite reasonable in their acoustic versions, even the choral chromatic slide at the end of Swept Away, or the multiple iterations of “goodness� in the fourth piece, Low Dutch, which is a rhymed version of the 23rd Psalm.

Each of the hymns expires rather than ends, with gasps of minor seconds at the close of Broad Road, the second song, and that, too, is fitting for the somber nature of the material. Hatcher and Seraphic Fire have done a service to the repertory by adding this more traditional version of an electronic piece; while it takes away the element of chance, it also is a fair reflection of one of its versions, and it’s no less moving a piece for that.

The Marshall was preceded by Steven Sametz’s I Have Had Singing, a pretty, too-short piece about the last days of a hearseman, and Knowledge: For Chorus, by Kevin Puts.

Puts' work makes effective use of a drone figure at the muted beginning of the piece, which soon grows into ecstatic outbursts at the words “Conceiving art! Music!� before returning to the drone. The ending was beautifully judged by Quigley and the choir, as was the piece in general.

The other major work on the program in addition to the Marshall was the Officium Defunctorum Mass of Tomás Luis de Victoria, published in 1605. This is a wonderful work, full of beautiful harmonies and melodies; it doesn’t flow the same way that the music of his Italian contemporary Palestrina does, but there’s something more down-to-earth about Victoria’s music that makes the grief more real.

The singing here was quite good all the way through, with even the chant portions folding neatly into the texture of the whole. Perhaps for musicological reasons, Quigley took no breaks between the sections, leading one right into another, which was sometimes jarring when the keys shifted. I haven't heard it done that way, and I don’t think this was a particularly good idea, because it took away a sense of the real space that would have occurred in the context of an actual mass, it didn’t allow listeners to a moment to take stock of the new texts and appreciate how Victoria had set each of them.

Perhaps there was something gained here in an overall sense of mourning, but it would not have been seriously disturbed by a pause of even five seconds between them movements.

The concert opened with two excellent readings of hymns by William Billings (Invocation and Creation), and closed with a motet by the English Renaissance master Orlando Gibbons, O Clap Your Hands.

Seraphic Fire gave this expansive piece a full-throated, powerful reading — impressive, given all the strenuous singing that had come before — and its built-in echo effects provided a sort of commentary on the Marshall work, another example of the shrewd programming choices made by this fine choir.

Next: Seraphic Fire’s next concerts are set for Nov. 10-12, and feature choral works by Domenico Scarlatti — Te Deum, Stabat Mater and the La Stella Mass. He’s best-known for his hundreds of short piano pieces, but he was a formidable composer in all fields, and this will be a great opportunity to hear this rarely heard repertoire.

A reserved cheer for Met's Gelb

I suppose I wouldn't be much of an American classical music commentator if I didn’t have something to say about the changes Peter Gelb is hoping to bring to the Metropolitan Opera.

The grand dame of American opera houses gets moving Friday with free tickets for its final dress rehearsal of Anthony Minghella's production of Madama Butterfly, and then opens Monday. Gelb has added two new broadcasts: One into the plaza outside Lincoln Center and another into Times Square, where 650 seats will be set up for an outdoor audience.

Add to that Gelb’s plan to offer wider broadcast performances to movie theaters, over the Internet and now on Sirius satellite radio, and you have the makings of what could be a very savvy and exciting makeover for the Met.

I’m aware of the opprobrium that hangs over Gelb’s non-classical stewardship of Sony Classical, and that he is responsible for some of the more egregious crossover projects that have been loosed upon an unsuspecting world. If it turns out that the season is a total disaster, with “Popera� presentations of operas that vandalize the works and more train wreck than entertainment, then we will know that soon enough.

The season itself relies heavily on proven crowd-getters, three-fifths of them by Italian composers — five (or seven, if you count the three of Il Trittico separately) by Puccini (Trittico, Turandot, La Boheme, Tosca, Butterfly); four by Verdi (Rigoletto, Traviata, Don Carlo, Simon Boccanegra), four others by Italian verismo one-hit wonders (Giordano’s Andrea Chenier, Mascagni’s Cav and Leoncavallo’s Pag, Ponchielli’s La Gioconda), and one each by Rossini (Barbiere) and Bellini (Puritani).
Mozart is represented twice, with Idomeneo and Die Zauberflöte (plus an abridged English-language version for families during the holidays), Gluck (Orfeo) and Handel (Giulio Cesare) get one apiece, Wagner is in the house with Die Meistersinger, and Richard Strauss’ Die Ägyptische Helena gets a rare outing. (Five German operas, in other words, three of them with Italian libretti.)

The French, Czechs and Russians get a solitary example — Gounod’s Faust, Janacek’s Jenufa, and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and there is one world premiere, an opera by the Chinese composer Tan Dun, whose subject (The First Emperor) is drawn from his country’s imperial past.

No American, Canadian or British works, and only Tan Dun’s opera will be in English.

In other words, there’s not a lot of innovation or risk-taking in the choice of operas, which is one way of bringing the non-opera going public to the opera in the first place: Here, the Met is saying, is what we get so excited about, and you will, too. It’s entirely possible — probable, even — that the beauties of Puccini in particular will bring some neophytes to opera and convert them into fans.

(And there's plenty of star power on tap, with Ben Heppner, Renee Fleming, Deborah Voigt, Samuel Ramey, Juan Diego Florez, Maria Guleghina, Salvatore Licitra, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Placido Domingo, Elizabeth Futral, David Daniels, Karita Mattila, James Morris, Anna Netrebko and Thomas Hampson, among others.)

Personally, of course, I’d much rather see a far more adventurous lineup, but these choices were made to reach as wide an audience as possible.

And that’s where Gelb’s approach comes in. He’s trying to demystify the art form for people who might like it but are too intimidated by its cultural accretions to give it a try. I’ve said several times that technology is already advancing the cause of classical music and will continue to do so, and Gelb’s moves to satellite radio and Internet broadcasts, as well as the sheer campiness of the outdoor opera in Times Square, show that he’s plugged in to the way the world’s citizens now get their culture.

I’ve got reservations about the level of success Gelb will think he needs before calling his innovations a success. Will he cut the productions back, do even safer things, if this season doesn’t bring in the houses he wants? Maybe this season of the Met will prove to be something of a test case for the power of technology to spread the word about the music.

But I’m going to give a small cheer in Gelb’s direction for now because of his understanding of the importance of using new technology to find new audiences. I just hope I don’t have to endure another season of broadcasts in 2007-08 with so many venerable old workhorses lined up to be trotted out once again.

(The Met's Saturday afternoon broadcasts start Dec. 9 with Idomeneo and end May 5 with Orfeo. Local stations participating are: WXEL-90.7 FM in Boynton Beach; WQCS-88.9 FM in Fort Pierce; WDJA-1420 AM in Delray Beach and WJBW-1000 AM.)

Review: Assaff Weisman, pianist

How much of Franz Liszt’s enormous output do we get to hear these days? A Liebestraum or two, a Consolation, maybe a Hungarian Rhapsody and a few of the shorter bits from the Années de Pèlerinage.

But piano refashionings of work for other instrumental and vocal combinations was a large part of what Liszt wrote for his own recitals, and that includes a monumental series of transcriptions of all nine Beethoven symphonies. The young Israeli pianist Assaff Weisman, appearing as part of the Piano Lovers series at the Steinway Gallery in Boca Raton, took a brief excursion into this repertoire Sunday with the opening movement of the First Symphony, on a program drawn solidly from the core of the Germanic canon that also featured works by Haydn and Brahms.

Weisman, 29, who teaches in the evening division of New York’s Juilliard School, is a fine player, sensitive of phrase and nimble of finger. His style is clean and free of posturing, the kind of pianism that allows the listener to admire the architecture of the works under consideration while also appreciating the poetry of the flourishes.

The Liszt transcription of the muscular Beethoven First is quite difficult, particularly because it requires the pianist to jump registers frequently as the higher and lower instruments trade phrases. Also, it forces the player to come down quickly from a major all-out climax and return seemingly instantly to the bare-bones presentation of the opening bars.

That’s much easier to do with an orchestra than a single piano, but Weisman handled it well, keeping the exuberant drive of Beethoven’s piece on track and the power of the composer’s groundbreaking conception to the fore. Weisman had difficulty at times with making those small upward riffs Beethoven sprinkles throughout the movement as distinct as they need to be, more proof of the inherent problem of transferring orchestral concepts to a keyboard.

Weisman’s purity of approach served him well in the opening work, the Sonata in E-flat, Hob. XVI/49, of Haydn. Some of the deepest demonstrations of this composer’s art are to be found in his piano music, including this sonata. In the opening movement, Weisman made much of the slowly rising secondary theme, as well as the contrapuntal passage that begins the development section, drawing as much soulfulness as he could out of its gently falling interior lines.

He followed that with a lovely rendition of the slow movement, a gorgeous piece of high emotion and profound contrast. Weisman has a large singing tone that is even more effective when the music around it is as carefully judged as it was here. Each new bit of color stood out beautifully from the others, making Haydn’s journey not just intimate but profound.

The brief finale sounded somewhat dry and cautious; I think the usual minuet tempo taken here doesn’t offer enough of a break with the slow movement to make it effective. While Weisman’s playing was correct and fleet, a swifter speed might have made it easier to get the maximum benefit from the rather plain piano layout.

Weisman was most persuasive in the seven pieces from the late Op. 116 (Fantasies) collection of Brahms. He’s essentially quite a good Brahms player in that he doesn’t try to de-emphasize the composer’s late Romantic aesthetic. This is thick writing for the piano, with overripe chords and more than a little bombast.

Weisman doesn’t shrink from any of that, nor does he shy away from the huge contrasts Brahms is fond of pursuing within these small confines. In the G minor Capriccio (No. 3), for example, the march-like middle section had a growling forward motion that marked a sharp break with the anguish of the opening section, and yet also led logically to its recapitulation. I also particularly liked the tenderness Weisman exhibited in the A minor Intermezzo (No. 2) as well as the loveliest of these seven pieces, the E major Intermezzo (No. 4).

For an encore — “That’s enough German music,� he said — Weisman showed his aptitude for Debussy, with a radiant version of the Reflets dans l’Eau from the first book of Images.

Next up: American pianist Mia Vassilev comes to the gallery Nov. 5 with music by Beethoven (the E major Sonata, Op. 109), Chopin (the Third Ballade), Ravel (La Vallée des Cloches and Alborada del Gracioso), Granados (Allegro de Concierto) and Ernesto Lecuona (excerpts from the Suite Andalucia). More information here.

Sting interprets Renaissance master

This might sound a little strange, but here’s a disc I’m looking forward to hearing:

Sting does Dowland.

Early next month, the prestige classical label Deutsche Grammophon releases a disc of songs by the English Renaissance composer John Dowland (1563-1626). Dowland is celebrated for his lovely melodies and dark sentiments, something that could be applied to the songs of Gordon Sumner as well.

Apparently, Sting began playing this music in earnest after getting a lute as a gift. On the album, he’s accompanied by another lutenist, Edin Karamazov, a Bosnian musician.

Here’s part of an early review (by Scott Paulin) on Barnes & Noble:

Sting doesn't pretend to be a classical singer, but the eloquent melodies are intact, despite a gravelly grain and an occasional strain in his voice — something that actually turns out to be ideally expressive when he sings a line like "Oh let me living die, till death do come," in the devastating closing song, In Darkness Let Me Dwell. The only moments that feel really indebted to pop are Sting's multi-tracked vocal harmonies on Fine Knacks for Ladies and a few other songs that momentarily bring the Beach Boys to mind. Yet as the album progresses, you appreciate more and more how much Sting's pop talents and his very personal approach allow him to penetrate and animate the inner emotions and meanings of Dowland's timeless music.

To be frank, I’ve always admired Sting despite his evident arrogance and his lounge-lizard lapses of taste (i.e., La Belle Dame Sans Regrets). A lot of those Police songs would be much harder to take without the Andy Summers-Stewart Copeland stripped-down arrangements. (Roxanne, Sting has said, originally was a beguine, of all things. Holy Cole Porter!)

But there’s no denying that at his best, he writes good stuff: Strong melodies, adventurous harmonies
and time signatures, and he’s even able to smuggle in his teacherly knowledge of literature, toss it off and make it work (“that book by Nabokov�; “nature red in tooth and claw,� etc.)

You can look long and hard at songwriters, and you’re not going to find many that can take all those attributes and mix them together without sounding pretentious or boring or both. In short, whatever he’s doing is always worth paying attention to because it just might be important.

On the DG site, Sting argues that Dowland is the father of English songwriting, and he has a point. Certainly he is one of the more important artists of the personal in that period, along with his great contemporary, Shakespeare.

There have been other well-known Dowland fans, in particular the late American sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, who named one of his books (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said) after Flow My Tears, one of Dowland’s best-known songs. And Dowland himself appears to have been a complex, moody man himself, according to biographer Diana Poulton (from my trusty old Grove):

Described by (17th-century historian Thomas) Fuller as “a cheerful person ... passing his days in lawful merriment,� there is, nevertheless, much evidence to show that he suffered periods of intense melancholy. Though capable of writing charming trifles, all his greatest works are inspired by a deeply felt tragic concept of life, and a preoccupation with tears, sin, darkness and death.

Although Sting has led a charmed life in comparison to Dowland — whose music was very popular in his own day but who remained bitter about being unable to obtain a position at the court — the former Policeman has always been drawn to sad and tragic themes. In some fundamental way, he probably relates to Dowland’s aesthetic, and that makes me hope that this will be a collection well worth listening to.

Here’s a version of Fine Knacks for Ladies, a happier Dowland song, published in 1600. The great tenor Peter Pears sings along with lutenist Julian Bream:

Honoring Alfred Reed: The University of Miami honors the memory of the preeminent American band composer Alfred Reed tonight in Coral Gables. As I’ve written before, Reed is central to the band repertoire. He taught for years at the University of Miami; he was 84 when he died on this day last year. I couldn't make the concert, but I'll be happy to hear any comments from anyone who did. Go ahead and post away.

The endless Wagner controversy

The other day, a note arrived in my mailbox from an Australian poet and critic named Peter Nicholson, who writes regularly for a provocative blog called 3 Quarks Daily.

Nicholson has sent along a three-part essay on Richard Wagner and Wagnerism (here's Part One; this is Part Two; and here is Part Three) in which he assesses the impact of the composer's art.

(The YouTube excerpt above shows Jon Vickers in the finale of Parsifal.)

It's an interesting read, written by someone who clearly loves Wagner's work, has done a good deal of research into it, and is fascinated by the sheer immensity of the composer's accomplishment.

There never will be any end to the controversy over Wagner, for two major reasons: The unique conception of his operatic output, and his rabid anti-Semitism. "If only Wagner hadn't written Judaism in Music or any of those other interminable essays he cooked up between bouts of supreme creativity ... Artistic grandeur survives the unedifying spectacle of an advancing anti-Semitism,� Nicholson writes.

It's fair to say that had there been no Hitler to turn hatred of Jews into a murderous state policy, Wagner's fulminations probably would be seen today as a sad example of one of the composer's more regrettable character flaws.

But there was a Nazi Germany, and its leader was inspired by Wagner's art, which was a grandiose reactionary incarnation of traditional, mythic German values against a perceived threat from outside influences. (The New Grove Guide to Wagner and His Operas, by Barry Millington, is just out from Oxford, and it touches on this idea. It's also a good overview of this composer, his music and the history of the various stagings of his operas.)

The key question here is this: How much responsibility does Wagner bear for the excesses of the Nazis? Obviously, since he died in 1883, none personally, but if the audiences of his day saw his anti-Semitic characters (Mime, Beckmesser) for what they were, weren't they knowingly indulging their prejudice, and on an epic scale? Nicholson argues that "Wagner knew perfectly well that art had to get beyond chauvinism and prejudice if it was to take its place in the great chain of cultural being,� but I'm not so sure.

It seems to me that Wagner's chain of cultural being was not global but parochial; his operas ultimately are about the superiority and greatness of German art, and that the chain he was after was one defined by a non-Jewish Germanism. It's hard for me to listen to Wagner without thinking that here is a sonic personification of a particular strain of European political and cultural thought that was transformed into something truly monstrous.

Would Hitler have pursued his path to power so fervently without the soundtrack of Wagner in his head? Probably, but Wagner offered a powerful sanctification of the idea that German culture was superior, and writ a cauldron of middle-class prejudice large. We can't escape the times we are born into, but it is a singular tragedy that Wagner used his undoubted genius to elevate, and champion, a paranoid strain in his society that otherwise might have faded into insignificance.

Wagner's greatnesses are multiple: He was a wonderful melodist, and an orchestrator of astonishing resource, a born symphonist who redefined forever the role of the orchestra in opera. It's a titanic achievement, but more than a little poisonous for me.

I'm not nearly as familiar with Wagner as Nicholson evidently is, so I freely admit that I might be off base here. In any case, I found these essays interesting reading, and I thank Peter Nicholson for sending them along.

Another concert: One more in Miami: On Friday the 22nd, it's the Kronos Quartet, with their new cellist, Jeffery Ziegler, whose fine Boca recital I reviewed on this blog. They’ve got a typically adventurous program planned for their appearance at Miami-Dade College, with music by John Zorn, the Mexican corrido singer Chalino Sanchez, Argentina’s Osvaldo Golijov, Canadian composer Derek Charke, and Gabriela Lena Frank, an American composer who concentrates on Latin themes. Details here.

Solace on a tragic anniversary

The picture above is of my cousin Jimmy Geyer, who was in the North Tower five years ago this morning, working for Cantor Fitzgerald. (My wife took this picture at the wedding reception for his sister.)

One of my biggest regrets in life as I get older is how limited the time has been that I’ve spent with other family members. I didn’t know Jimmy nearly as well as I should have, and five years later I should have learned from the tragedy we commemorate today that this is something I need to fix.

As I’ve said before, the most poignant lesson I drew from the funeral service we had for Jimmy three weeks after the attacks, and from the life stories of the lost that we all heard, was how decent and kind and well-intentioned all of these people were. The world needs more people like Jimmy, not less, and one can only hope that the legacy of everyday good human beings like him triumphs over the legacy of those who would do harm.

And today, I have no doubt it will.

Here’s something from Slate, which asked prominent literary and other creative types what art had helped them make sense of 9/11. It’s an interesting exercise; for me, there’s not much that helped — except various pieces of music for solace — but I’d be interested to hear if anyone else found some guidance in art after this terrible tragedy.

An exciting classical September

The classical season is just getting under way, but there are a handful of interesting concerts I'm thinking about attending in September:

Choral music: Seraphic Fire. On Sept. 22-24, this fine Miami-based chamber choir opens its fifth season with the Officium Defunctorum mass of the great Spanish Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. This beautiful mass was written in 1603 as a requiem for the dowager Empress Maria of Spain and was premiered and published two years later.

Victoria is one of those wonderful composers from an earlier era whose music should long ago have been considered part of the classical mainstream, but performances still remain too infrequent (in fact, these performances are being billed as the South Florida premiere of this mass).

I've attended several Seraphic Fire concerts, including one featuring Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610, a Christmas concert of widely varied repertoire including a new piece by a young Miami composer, and an afternoon of the six motets of J.S. Bach. It's a shame that Patrick Dupré Quigley's group isn't holding concerts in Palm Beach County this season, but this is an ambitious, accomplished group that's well worth spending some time on the road.

Along with the Victoria, the group is presenting the Florida premiere of the American composer Kevin Puts' Knowledge: For Chorus, and the world premiere of an acoustic edition of Hymnodic Delays, a piece by another American, Ingram Marshall, who has favored electronic music for much of his career.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a more ambitious program than that for a very young group still working hard to deepen its imprint on the classical music scene hereabouts. The concerts are set for Coral Gables, Fort Lauderdale and Miami Beach. Details here.

Piano music: Israeli pianist Assaff Weisman. The winner of the 2006 Iowa Piano Competition, Weisman appears Sunday, Sept. 17, at the Boca Steinway Gallery in a program of music by Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms.

The Haydn is the big Sonata in E-flat (Hob XVI: 49), perhaps his finest keyboard piece, and the Brahms is the late Op. 116 collection of short works, which have been beloved since they first appeared in the early 1890s. The Beethoven is unusual, and that will probably bring me to the concert: Weissman has scheduled the first movement of the First Symphony in the solo transcription done by Franz Liszt.

I don't think I've ever heard this piece live, but I'm glad to see someone tackle it. There's a good deal of Liszt, though he's not one of my favorite composers, that really should be heard more often, and this piece brings us back to the heyday of the Romantic period piano recital. More details here.

Instrumental music: The New World Symphony. The Miami Beach-based orchestral academy offers chamber music for brass and winds on Sept. 15, with a fascinating program of music by Ensecu, Dukas, Daugherty, Franzetti, Ligeti, Barber (the Mutations on Bach), Takemitsu — and even Mozart.

The next day, the NWS strings are on hand for the lovely String Serenade of Antonin Dvorak, and the equally lovely Apollon Musagète of Stravinsky. On the 24th, the whole orchestra offers music from A Midsummer Night's Dream by Mendelssohn (whose bicentenary is next year), the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra of Benjamin Britten, and the powerful Fifth Symphony of Sergei Prokofiev. All three of these concerts are free, and it's a good chance to hear some truly excellent up-and-coming musicians. Details here.

And on the 30th, the University of Miami launches its fall gala with an appearance by jazz pianist Marcus Roberts and his trio in the Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue, along with the Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3 of Roberto Sierra. Details here.

Organ music: Bethesda-by-the-Sea Sunday series. As hoped, the recital series has returned for a second year. The first concert is set for Sept. 24 and features organists Ivy Adams, Robert Demmert and Dennis Janzer. Adams will play works by Purcell, Francois Couperin, Vaughan Williams and J.L. Krebs, while Demmert will play his own St. Denio Variations from 1996, as well as Herbert Brewer's Marche Heroique. Janzer will offer his South of the Border, a piece designed to demonstrate the capacities of the organ.

The concert starts at 3 p.m. Here's the church's Web site.

I'll be checking a lot of this out; there are some truly fine programs here, and it'd be a shame to miss any of them.

The 'envy' debate continues

The Tallahassee-based composer and blogger Steve Hicken responded recently on his blog to my comments about Jay Greenberg inspiring envy in other, older composers, and he had some interesting things to say, particularly this comment in one of his notes:

I was hoping that someone would point out that there isn't as big a gap between Mr. Greenberg and his cohort as the press (especially the (n)on-musical press) has let on. When I was an undergraduate there were many composer writing passable, if uninspired, tonal music. Not to say they were at Mr. Greenberg's level, but the gap wasn't all that huge.

Another commenter, remaining anonymous, had this to say:

One thing you oldsters are going to have to get used to is that young people are going to come to the table having heard a huge amount from CDs, and having access, by hook or by crook, to most of the music written pre-1913 in some version of score, and having access to scoring programs that will do a great deal of the grunt work of common practice harmonization.

It’s an interesting debate. I think they’re both right, as I ultimately said in a comment on Steve’s blog. We are at a very interesting juncture in the world of composition these days. Composers have so much information at their disposals these days that I think we’re going to see a great deal of interesting but unbelievably unfocused music from young writers.

I mean, how in the world do you find a voice when you have so many voices to choose from as models? It’s almost as though the best thing for a young creator is to simply choose one narrow style and just everything you have to say in that one format before you get tired of it and move on.

But then you move on not to an altered version of the narrowness you pursued, but to something completely different. One day, you write chamber music in a French neoclassical style (cue the ostinatos), and the next day you wake up and decide to write an entire album’s worth of retro Western swing.

It seems a much more logical path than that of synthesis. The composers we celebrate today, in almost any field, are the ones who have absorbed the influences they find around them and fashioned them into a highly personal voice. Great stuff, we say, while congratulating ourselves for hearing Michael Haydn and J.C. Bach in the work of Mozart, the military obsessions of Mahler in Shostakovich, the buzz of Mercadante in the climaxes of Verdi.

But the person who’s able to put all of today’s influences together, assuming he or she can’t avoid them, and then craft his or her own style into it — that might be asking too much. It could be that what we’re in for, thanks to our all-powerful technology, is a series of very gifted people who can write persuasively in a variety of specific genres, who can write music that’s memorable, exciting, even beautiful, but not truly original.

I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing, if the music’s interesting enough. The late Harold Schonberg’s last edition of his Lives of the Great Composers made the point again that the world was at that time — 1996 — still without a composer who could “put it all together.� It might be that such things are no longer possible, that there can never again be a composer like that, at least in the classical sphere (perhaps in popular music, where the forms are generally much more restricted, it’s still doable).

What we might be in for is a long period of excellent music that isn’t very profound. It may take a very different kind of musical intelligence to make something truly lasting out of all the influences that are now so abundantly available.

I stand corrected: Philip Wilder of 21C Media Group writes to say that his company is happy to sponsor a banner ad on Classical Lounge, but 21C didn't found the site, nor does it host it. That honor, he says, belongs to someone else: "Our wonderful client, the Miró Quartet is responsible, and the site is hosted by its cellist Joshua Gindele.� Here’s the Miro site (and here they are at right).

Wilder also says the site is doing well: "The site has been receiving thousands of hits, and gathering up to 100 new members every day!�

(The art at the top of this entry is by Marta Dahlig.)

Hanging at the Classical Lounge

I just got an invitation through the mails, as the old Irving Berlin song says, and even though it’s e-mail instead of paper, I still answered.

New York-based 21C Media has recently founded a site called Classical Lounge, and I’ve spent some time there in the past couple days, browsing in what is essentially a MySpace-style deal for classical players, composers, critics and enthusiasts.

It’s worth taking a look at, and I’m planning to spend some time there in the next week or so and getting a better view of things. I can see how it would help me and other composers, in particular. You can meet players who are just dying for a new double concerto for oboe and ocarina, dust off your sketches, and away you go.

The idea behind Classical Lounge is to build a community, introducing devotees of this music to each other for mutual benefit. I found a piece by Ken Smith from 2000 on NewMusicBox that discusses the founding of the 21C group of enterprises. He found that there’s a lot of passion behind it:

(Albert) Imperato, though, is trying to raise the national classical music consciousness with both guns blazing, borrowing elements he likes from the Country Music Foundation, which he credits with "turning a regional music and turning into a national hit," and of course, Hollywood, the standard bearer of popular culture.

This touches right at the heart of what I think today’s classical music environment is all about. It has more of a polyglot energy than it did when I was in music school 25 years ago. Back then, people who played the cello one day in the orchestra and hammered a guitar in a blues band on the weekend were rare. My fellow young composers were beginning to write in a more tonal style, with heavy borrowings from pop and jazz, but that was considered the right of the young writer, one which he or she would soon outgrow.

But it’s been that cross-fertilization, along with the technology that’s spread more examples of this to homes far and wide, that is giving classical the boost it needed. It’s a musical scene that has a lot of unafraid, confident vigor from the young, the musicians who think nothing of founding a piano trio while still in their early 20s (like the Claremont Trio, pictured above) and taking their act on the road, certain there will be audiences down the road to welcome them.

And there will be.

At the risk of repeating myself too much, I think this is a wonderful time for classical music, and it’s with real excitement that I look forward to its future. Classical Lounge, for me, is further proof that this is a music that is alive and well.

One last Ibis note: The Camerata (see my Aug. 26 entry) has rescheduled its Coral Gables concerts for Sept. 14 and 15. But more to the point for me, they’ve added two free concerts in Delray Beach, at the Church of the Palms. Both are on Sunday afternoons: Sept. 10 and Sept. 24. The Sept. 10 program features the Mozart K. 548 trio, the Brahms Clarinet Trio and the two Piazzolla pieces. The Sept. 24 concert includes the Beethoven Op. 11 trio as well as a set of pieces for clarinet, cello and piano by Max Bruch and the Fantasy Trio for the same forces by the American composer Robert Muczynski.
The Delray concerts start at 4 p.m.