Greg Stepanich

All-Schoenberg program a bold choice

Seraphic Fire, the Coral Gables-based vocal ensemble, announced last week three solo song recitals featuring their members, and the first one is of more than casual interest.

Mezzo-soprano Misty Bermudez has chosen for her Dec. 1 recital to present an all-Schoenberg program, including the early Cabaret Songs and the groundbreaking Book of the Hanging Gardens, his cycle of 15 songs on texts by Stefan George.

Arnold Schoenberg is still controversial a century after he began composing his first works that departed from the tonal tradition that had been in place for hundreds of years. And he doesn’t get many performances even now, after all that time. What he certainly doesn’t get is entire song recitals devoted to his work.

The Book of the Hanging Gardens (Op. 15) had its premiere in 1910, to a chilly reception. It’s not hard to see what people disliked about it: It doesn’t have any direct melodies or predictable patterns that help the listener figure out what’s going on.

But this is such intimate, perceptive music, despite the continuing difficulty of its idiom. This is a little puzzling to me, actually. The music of each of the three composers of the Second Viennese School — Schoenberg, Webern and Berg — is distinct from each other. While Webern is a careful crafter of color, a cerebral composer whose music deserves intense attention, Berg is much more fully Romantic, and it’s easy to feel the sweep of his writing even if you don’t care for the language.

And Schoenberg, especially in this earlier period, is even more traditional. This is music that sounds like a commentary on the music that’s come before; by that I mean that it’s audibly part of the tradition that Schoenberg was trying hard to escape.

The Book of the Hanging Gardens, to me, a highly personal, well-crafted work, sounds to my ears almost like a very cool, somber jazz. It beautifully communicates the conceit of the lyrics: A couple meet in a garden and fall in love. They break up, and the garden dies. The cultural historian Carl Schorske analyzes the work in his classic study of fin-de-siecle Vienna:

In his setting of the poem cycle, Schoenberg remained faithful to its fundamentally conservative spirit through one major device: the establishment of a Gesamtstimmung, a single atmosphere.

That atmosphere is almost painfully introspective, sad and brooding throughout, as the composer navigates lines like these:

Wenn ich heut nicht deinen Lieb beruhre.
Wir der Faden meiner Seele reissen
Wie zu sehr gespannte Sehne.

(If today I do not touch your body,
The threads of my soul will break
Like strings stretched too much.)

This is a moving, lovely song cycle that rewards continued attention, and it is wonderful to see that someone is bold enough to put it on a program. There can’t be many other times in South Florida history that anyone has presented an all-Schoenberg recital, so hats off, and good luck, to Misty Bermudez, and hats off, too, to Seraphic Fire for adding another layer of interest to the local classical scene.

Do a little Danse, if you can find it

Whatever happened to the Danse Macabre?

I mean the piece of music, of course: I can’t think of the last time I heard Saint-Saens’ once-popular paean to all things spooky.

Time was you couldn’t get through Halloween without hearing this work, with its creepy, catchy waltz tune and ghostly fiddle solos. The New World Symphony, for instance, is paying tribute to the season this afternoon with Saint-Saens, but they’re doing the Bacchanale from Samson et Dalila. That’s catchy, too, but there’s no real connection to the night when the goblins walk.

It’s possible that the vogue for this piece, which admittedly works better on pops programs than loftier symphonic efforts, has evaporated. It might be that it has joined other once-popular works of its time — such as anything by Ambroise Thomas — on the shelf of the forgotten.

If so, that’s something of a shame. Pieces like the Danse Macabre deserve to be aired out now and again because sometimes you just need to hear a novelty piece: there’s something about the low-ball nature of its ambition that makes it a guilty pleasure.

I remember well a concert back in the late 1980s, hearing Iron Foundry, Russian composer Alexander Mosolov’s one and only success from the 1920s, with its hilarious sounds of machinery getting under way, its bangs, its booms, its slams and crunches. The audience at the Maryland Symphony Orchestra concert went out of its mind, cheering and standing, which left conductor Barry Tuckwell with only one option: Play it again. Which he did, to the same effect.

Now no one would call Iron Foundry a great piece of art; it was socialist agitprop. Well-done agitprop, but still a piece of limited utility. And yet take it for what it was, and it was a blast.

So it is with the Danse Macabre. It’s a much more conservative, elegant piece of writing than the Mosolov, but it also has a very attractive main theme and colorful orchestral touches. In its straightforwardness it holds the audience’s interest from the beginning, and it winds up with a great big whirling dance that builds to a huge climax and then disappears in a puff of smoke.

It’s also not a great piece of music, but it’s entertaining, and a charming selection for a family audience. Maybe I’ve just outgrown it and that’s why I don’t see it programmed anymore — you can only find it on kids' programs. But I think the last time I heard it was around 30 years ago at a Chicago Symphony concert, and there’s something a little sad about that.

There’s more room these days for all kinds of music in our concert life, which is a positive thing. I only wish there was still room now and again for an old-fashioned piece from our pops concert past.

Here’s an arrangement by Edwin Lemare of the piece, played by the Spanish organist Raul Prieto on YouTube. That I can find this version, but not the original, is part of my point:

When the band came to town, circa 1906

The U.S. Marine Band is coming to town Saturday night at Florida Atlantic University, and a new book that takes a look at the career of one of its directors, John Philip Sousa, offers some insight into how American musical tastes have changed — or haven't — in the past 100 years.

Sousa led the Marine Band from 1880-1892, and then left to form his own band, with whom he eventually gave more than 15,000 concerts. That is an enormous number of concerts; they did no fewer than 730 in 1902, according to Paul Edmund Bierley, whose The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa is just out from the University of Illinois Press.

As I've noted before, most Americans in pre-radio days got acquainted with classical music either at home or in concerts given by touring wind bands, for whom no town was too small to play in. And there were few towns too small to put up a gazebo in the town square for when the musicians came calling.

One of the interesting things about this book is the list of various concert programs Bierley has included. Here, for example, is what you would have heard the night of Jan. 30, 1906, at the Chattanooga Opera House in Chattanooga, Tenn. Sousa's music was always a big part of every program because that's who people had come to see:

Sousa: El Capitan, King Cotton, The Stars and Stripes Forever, Hands Across the Sea, The Man Behind the Gun, The Diplomat (marches); At the King's Court (suite); two songs from The Bride Elect (operetta).

Those first four marches, I'd bet, are heard almost every day in bandrooms across the country, and The Stars and Stripes is basically a national folksong. I don't know the other two, and the operettas and the other occasional pieces are pretty much forgotten these days.

Also on the program:

Weber: Overture to Oberon; Donizetti: Sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor (in brass arrangement); Mendelssohn: Second and third movements of the Violin Concerto (with soloist); Wagner: The Ride of the Valkyries.

These pieces are now, and were then, standard repertory, and are played all the time. Maybe the Weber overture doesn't show up as much as it used to, but it's still canonical.

The band also played Dixie, Dan Emmett's cakewalk from minstrel days in the 1850s and still one of the most familiar tunes in the American conciousness, as well as a bunch of light pieces that no one hears much anymore, such as The Mouse and The Clock, by Howard Whitney, written in 1905 (found the sheet music on the Web; here it is).

The Strauss family rival Karl Ziehrer was represented by his Vienna Darlings waltz, and two Sousa band members, cornetists Herman Bellstedt and Herbert L. Clarke, also had pieces on the program — Bellstedt's Everybody Works but Father, and Clarke's Bride of the Waves.

There also was a selection from a ballet called The Gypsy, by the French operetta composer Louis-Gaston Ganne.

Most of the lighter works have vanished from our daily musical life, which is what you would expect from the ephemeral music of any day. But what's most interesting here is how much of the program is still with us, durable as ever and still reaching people.

No doubt that's partly because of Sousa's skill at presenting this music as the cream of the classical crop for his audiences in Chattanooga and thereabouts.

And some of it is because of the music itself. It's testimony to the ability of music to give us a living link to the audiences of the past as well as the times they lived in.

Looking ahead to 'Aida'

I’ve been sidelined since Wednesday with a bad cold that’s had me sound asleep most of the past few days, so that means I missed a couple concerts I wanted to attend Saturday night, including a recital by the South Korean violinist Chee-Yun as part of the University of Miami’s Festival Miami series. The program included sonatas by Faure and Saint-Saens.

The New World Symphony also gave its first performance of the season in a program featuring can’t-miss showpieces: Dukas' Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven. Also Saturday, pianist Christopher Schmitt gave an all-Chopin recital, and the piano faculty of Florida Atlantic University was mounted its annual faculty monster concert featuring five pianists.

But I missed all of this because of my illness, so I’m going to chalk it up to bad luck and take a look ahead at next weekend.

Perhaps the biggest event takes place Saturday night at the new Ziff Opera House at Miami’s Carnival Center, when the Florida Grand Opera opens its new season with Verdi’s Aida.

This will be an important opening for the FGO, which is doing a six-opera season for the first time, and is doing it in a brand-new house. The American soprano Angela M. Brown, who sang Aida at the Met recently, is doing the honors here.

The funny thing about Aida is that this opera was for many years considered the summit of Verdi’s achievement, but in our day it’s seen more as the biggest of his operas in terms of extravaganza, but not necessarily his best. Today, Otello and Don Carlo appear to be at the top of the list for sheer greatness, and it’s probably La Traviata that gets the most outings overall.

And only opera houses with really big resources can pull off something like Aida, which needs a giant chorus and scenic grandeur, not to mention singers in the main roles who can pull off something like Celeste Aida early on and still be in beautiful voice for O terra, addio at the very end — and it’s a long, slow ending at that.

So it will be most interesting to see whether FGO is able to mount a persuasive production. All the signs look good, and you have to hand it to them for deciding to do even more performances, and one of them a world premiere, in a new theater.

Also that weekend: A chance to hear the Wind Quintet of Carl Nielsen in a performance Sunday afternoon by members of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival at St. Paul’s Episcopal in Delray Beach. I’m going to write more about this later because Nielsen is perhaps the most underrated major composer there is, and I always try to hear his music when someone’s got in on their program.

And the Ars Flores Symphony features pianist Mei-Ting Sun in the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto down at NSU in Davie on Saturday night, while the U.S. Marine Band is at FAU that same night for a free concert.

So some good things coming up. I’m planning to be in good health for these things and make at least one of them.

Making a case for early Brahms

The music of Johannes Brahms has been established in the repertory beginning in the 1850s, but as with most composers, his earliest efforts aren’t frequently heard.

One case in particular comes with his three piano sonatas, the third and last of which was completed in 1854, the year Brahms turned 21, though much of the work was written two years earlier. While the late intermezzi and capriccios appear on piano programs everywhere, it’s not often that you hear someone making a case for a work like the F minor sonata, which is Op. 5.

But this past Sunday night, pianist John Perry made a persuasive argument for this sprawling piece, which is structured as though Brahms wanted to lasso every Romantic mood then current and give it a place in his sonata. Perry, who teaches at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, was at Lynn University to give a recital and conduct a master class for Roberta Rust’s students at college’s conservatory.

Also on Perry’s program were Debussy’s Estampes and the Op. 90 Impromptus of Schubert (plus encores by Schumann and Grieg). Perry is a fine pianist, intensely musical and capable of fluid virtuoso work (as in the Pagodes movement of Estampes) as well as great power (the first of the Impromptus, and the Brahms overall). Perry’s work might not be particularly well-known to the general public outside the academy, but he’s the kind of player who gets great respect from his peers and has lifelong influence on generations of students.

The Brahms is a brave choice, because one of the things that militates against frequent outings is its many passages of frankly awkward writing. Already here we can hear the symphonist Brahms was to become; he’s striving to sketch as huge a canvas of sound as he can, and virtually every register of the instrument gets a workout. But the opening bars of the first movement, as well as the finale, are almost impossible to get exactly right each time. They’re treacherous and not all that effective; you end up thinking how much better the music of the first 15 or 20 seconds would sound with an orchestra rather than a piano.

And yet to focus on that is to miss the wealth of imagination in this sonata. There is the big secondary theme of the first movement with its climbing chords leading into far-off territory as they’re answered by a four-note motif that Perry made the focus of the passage, carefully enunciating each note. There is the deep poetry of the Andante, with its incredibly beautiful trio section, here played with exceptional delicacy, and then unfolding into all-out ardor.

The third movement is a waltz-like scherzo with the gruff humor Brahms was celebrated for, and that is followed by a mysterious, funeral-march intermezzo (Schumann died in 1854; this might be a memorial to him, but I’ll need to look that up). The finale bursts with as many ideas as the first movement, has many difficult passages, and ends in a blaze of F major glory. Perry gave all of this a compelling reading, and sent me back to the scores of the sonatas to try to see what Brahms’ contemporaries were seeing when they turned the pages of these first major works.

What they saw was an enormous talent, someone who would make his mark on the musical world in due time. That’s why I was happy to hear this piece live — it’s as though we’re privileged to hear the potential there as well as his contemporary listeners did. We can hear all the pieces that came afterward when we hear it, but to listen to it and evaluate it on its own terms requires us to clean out our memory banks for a bit and try to understand the music as it was when it was new.

For that, you also need a committed performance, and John Perry gave that to his sold-out audience. It was a useful demonstration of how fresh such pieces can sound when they’re in the right hands.

To Sir Paul: Notation won't kill the music

Taking a week off work in an attempt to catch up with yard work, reviews and composition. So I’m going through some new discs right now and I’ve come across an idea that always bothers me each time I see it.

It can be found in the liner notes to Ecce Cor Meum, Sir Paul McCartney’s new oratorio, which I’ve been listening to for the past day or two. It’s not very good, though parts of it are pleasant. Most of it sounds like Sir John Stainer-meets-Patrick Doyle, if that makes any sense.

I’m listening right now to the fourth and final section, the title of which gives its name to the whole piece. It’s a little better than most of the piece, though it kind of goes south in the middle.

Just inside the booklet cover, McCartney writes:

Apart from some piano lessons when I was a child, I’ve never had a lesson in composition or notation — and if you haven’t had the lessons you have to figure out everything for yourself. But then, if you haven’t been taught anything and have a happy accident you’re more likely to recognise it.

It’s the second sentence there that drives me crazy. In other words, if you’re an unschooled naif, you’ll know quality when you hear it, but if you‘ve been trained, you won‘t? That’s total nonsense. Inspiration is inspiration, whether it comes to someone who knows how to write it down or not. The entire history of Western music argues against him: Were Bach and Beethoven blowing off their best ideas because their training got in the way?

The simple fact is this: It’s only within the past century that notating music has come to seem as something that screams too much of the overeducated, and it’s really the rock folks that have adhered to this idea than the jazzers. Fats Waller, for instance, legendary for his melodic abundance and his happy-go-lucky approach, was also a guy who knew how to write things down, and did , and would we say that Honeysuckle Rose is less of an infectious tune than Martha My Dear because poor Fats had been permanently ruined by his education and was able to notate the melody?

That’s absurd. McCartney clearly has some strange, mystical attachment to his inability to read music or notate it, and feels that if he were ever to learn, his magic gift would vanish like Samson’s hair. I can guarantee him that being able to notate doesn’t hurt “happy accidents� one single bit, and that those of us who know how to write things down have to have our lucky breaks, too.

It’s just that we can scribble it on a piece of paper right away when we’re noodling away on our instruments, rather than what happened to McCartney years ago, stuck with an idea he’d dreamed up at the piano but dependent on an aide to run out and buy some batteries for the tape recorder, while he played it over and over and over and over until the aide got back.

The thing I want to say here above all is that young musicians have nothing to fear from being able to notate music or read it: Honest, it opens up all kinds of other worlds that otherwise would be closed off to you. Notation began in the days before people had electronic technology to preserve their ideas, and it’s actually not that complicated. It was designed to be a relatively easy system, and proof of its effectiveness is that it hasn’t had to be altered much in 1,000 years.

It’s one of the astounding ironies of our time that as we gain more and more technological power we get more mystical, not less. Only in our day and age could a very modest education in the rudiments of musical notation be seen as an impediment to communication.

Go ahead and learn how to read and write music, Sir Paul. It won’t hurt your talent one little bit, and you might find you’ll get more inspiration from the simple act of putting the notes on paper. I promise you it’s happened before.

Review: The Biava Quartet

Proof that the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich deserve their recently found place in the canonic literature could be found no further than the old Harid Conservatory in Boca Raton on Saturday afternoon.

Concertgoers who traveled to the Harid for the first concert in the Florida Atlantic University Chamber Soloists’ Shostakovich centenary heard a magnificent peformance by the Biava Quartet, a young American ensemble whose rendition of the composer’s Eighth Quartet was as compelling and absorbing as any quartet I’ve heard in years. They were no less wonderful in the second Rasumovsky quartet of Beethoven, which like the Shostakovich is a brilliant and difficult work whose challenges as presented by the Biava illuminated rather than undermined the music.

Founded in 1998 at the Cleveland Institute of Music and now based in New Haven, Conn., the Biava consists of first violinist Austin Hartman, second violinist Hyunsu Ko, violist Mary Persin and cellist Jacob Braun. They won the Naumburg Chamber Music Award in 2003 and have the busy schedule of concerts, recordings and commissions you’d expect from a quartet that’s received that kind of honor.

And the small audience at the Harid Theatre heard why they might be worthy of the hype.

Here is a group of young, fine musicians who have internalized the most important rule of chamber music playing: Listening to each other, breathing almost as one in a common purpose. All except cellist Braun performed while standing, which probably helps each player hear the others a little better.

In the first work on Saturday’s program, the Beethoven E minor quartet, Op. 59, No. 2, the Biava’s attention to tight ensemble was noticeable everywhere. Right off the bat in the first movement, the unison passages that trail the end of the first theme were beautifully in tune and seamlessly handed off from one player to another, an aspect of the performance that could be heard underlined to great effect in the development section.

In the slow second movement, the rising figure that starts the second half of the hymn-like theme also was carefully judged by the players in turn, as if they were entrusting each other with a precious piece of fragile pottery. This is a group that also knows how to lay back for solo passages; the high-climbing solo passages of Hartman and Braun in this movement took on real radiance.

The tricky third-movement rhythms were precisely dispatched as well, although the Trio section featuring the “Slava� tune that links Beethoven to Rasumovsky, his Russian patron, came together better on the second time through than it did the first. For the finale, the Biava chose a good fast tempo, but not too fast, which left them somewhere to go for the closing bars and also helped its audience appreciate Beethoven’s dramatic imagination as he took bits of his themes and scattered them hither and yon across the page.

A first-rate reading of this masterwork, and a good programming companion to the Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110, of Shostakovich, that followed. The overall sound of the Biava is warm and elegant, with very little of the roughness that seems to afflict less polished groups. Each of the players has a sound that blends with the others; Hartman in particular is a violinist with a controlled sound that seems to rise naturally out of the Biava environment, not dominate it like a guest soloist in for a quick Mendelssohn concerto and a large honorarium.

The Shostakovich Eighth, with its dramatic subtext of a memorial to the “victims of fascism and war,� seems to draw more than its share of chilly performances. But this is red-blooded, passionate music, and the Biava demonstrated that. Most importantly, they kept the narrative tension absolutely on target for the length of the work, whose five movements are played without a break.

The quartet raised an enormous amount of sound at the big outbreak in the second movement of the Jewish folk theme Shostakovich was to reuse in his E minor Piano Trio, playing all out to thrilling effect. The third movement waltz was marvelously light, and the passage that features sliding harmonics in the upper voices over the cello solo was most effective.

Also, the great hammer blows in the fourth movement that attempt to interrupt the sad song of the first violin were richer, and more expressive, than you often hear; these are chords, after all, not just percussive effects. Only the final C that ends the piece might have been more strongly emphasized to make the sense of shock, numbness and exhausted arrival more powerful. By keeping the purely musical drama in the forefront throughout and not letting it slacken, the Biava gave its audience a sublime journey trough a shattering emotional landscape.

The concert closed with more Shostakovich, the Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57. Accompanying the Biava was pianist Leonid Treer, the artistic director of the FAU Chamber Soloists. The quintet often pit’s the quartet against the piano, and vice versa, instead of treating the all five as one ensemble.

Most of this performance was also quite good, with the precision the quartet displayed in the first half clearly evident here in the numerous quartet-only passages. Treer’s playing was on the heavy side, which made for some ensemble difficulties now and again, but it didn’t detract much from the success of the performance overall.

The opening fugue was notably somber and beautiful from voice to voice, and the quasi-Italian song of the fourth movement soared to lovely effect. The almost casual ending of the quintet is hard to bring off persuasively, but Treer and the Biava’s surpassingly gentle expiration of the closing bars had plenty of charm.

I'll be happy to hear this quartet again, and aficionados of this literature would be well-advised to seek the Biava Quartet out and do the same.

Mini-review: Lynn Philharmonia

Many orchestras from outside the area pay us a visit during the season, but it's encouraging — especially in the absence of our own professional regional orchestra — to be able to hear a good local ensemble doing major works and bringing them off not just with aplomb but distinction.

The Lynn University Philharmonia is something like Palm Beach County's answer to the New World Symphony in Miami Beach. Made up of student players (and some professionals) at the Lynn University Conservatory of Music in Boca Raton, the group launched its concert season this past weekend with works by Ravel, Weber and Elgar.

Elgar's Enigma Variations, which took up the second half of the concert Sunday afternoon at St. Andrew's School in Boca, is a virtuoso work as much as it is a late Romantic cornucopia of lovely melodies and powerfully expressed sentiment. The orchestra, under the fine direction of Albert-George Schram (pictured above), proved more than equal to Elgar's challenges; he wrote for big ensembles that could play anything he threw at them, and that's what the Lynn ensemble provided.

This was a beautiful performance of this work all the way through, from the carefully judged string playing of the theme at the beginning, to the stuttering woodwinds in the middle, and the all-out all-sections triumph at the end. But it's the Nimrod variation, slow and solemn, that remains the touchstone, and the Lynn rendition was everything it should be: Measured but passionate, with attention to Elgar's long melodic line paramount.

The program contained no list of orchestral personnel, so I can't credit them by name, but there was good solo work here, too, particularly from the first-stand viola and cello players.

The woodwinds also had plenty of time to shine in the opening work on the program, the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales of Ravel. Here, too, the orchestra was right in sync with the composer's luxuriant yet precise style; each of the individual waltzes had plenty of character, and balances between the sections were expertly weighed.

Lynn faculty member Paul Green also joined the orchestra as soloist in the Clarinet Concerto No. 1 of Carl Maria von Weber. Green has a large and powerful sound throughout the instrument's compass, which is gratifyingly different from so many clarinetists who tend to squeak when the music heads into the stratosphere.

Green has clearly played this work many times, and he navigated its extensive virtuosity with grace, fast fingers and a real affinity with its high spirits. Schram and the orchestra were sensitive accompanists.

Full disclosure: I work with Green's wife, Lisa, here at The Post, and I'm slightly acquainted with him (though I wasn't when I wrote about the Florida Woodwind Quintet a year or so ago), which is why I didn't take elaborate notes about the concert. But I felt I had to write something, because although I've lived here since the early 1990s, I'd yet to make it to a Lynn Philharmonia concert until Sunday.

That's to my everlasting shame, because this is quite a good orchestra that's doing some fascinating programs in the months ahead (you can read about them here). For instance, my favorite Shostakovich symphony (No. 10) is on the list for the weekend of Dec. 2 and 3, and I'm going to make sure I'm there.

Anyway, it's a reminder that there's a lot of good music around here if you really know where to look.

Music gives Iraqis something to live for

The NewYork Times ran a piece last week about the trials and travails of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, which carries on despite the appalling security problems in the country engendered by the war there.

This is a link to a transcript of the podcast the paper did with the writer of the story. The story’s available on the paper’s archive; it talks about how the situation for the arts has changed dramatically with the coming of the war.

This is of course to do nothing less than state the obvious. Arts activities tend to go the way of the triceratops when you don’t know whether you’re going to live through the day. And yet, here again is another example of the power of music to give even shattered lives meaning, and in this case, something literally to live for. Here’s the Times reporter, Edward Wong:

And so three times a week — Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays — in the late afternoons, after their jobs or businesses have ended, they will come to this compound in eastern Baghdad and they’ll sit down and they’ll practice. And I really did get the sense from them that they would feel their lives would be empty without music.

I’m reminded here of Vedran Smailovic, the cellist of Sarajevo, the orchestral musician who went out into Sniper’s Alley every day to rehearse in the open air. It was a strong rejoinder to the savagery going on around them, and at the same time it was the embodiment of the two sides of humanity at its most extreme: Its deep-wired tendency toward conflict, and its ability to manufacture something beautiful simply because it wants to.

That is the fundamental paradox at the center of being human, of these violently opposed tendencies existing in the same person, the expression of one or the other dependent too often on political circumstance: The watercolorist Hitler, enabled to ride a wave of anti-Semitism by the folly of the dreadful leaders who made World War I possible; the actor Booth, a murderer who changed the course of American history by joining a conspiracy that rose out of the resentments of defeat in a civil war.

That our art is often informed by our most appalling proclivities is also a fact of being human, and for me it reinforces the idea that it is another human invention — politics — that is critical to keeping these things in check, that is vital to allowing the better angels to be in control.

And so it is with the Iraqi orchestra, a group of music lovers trying to hang on while politics has failed. Although the repertoire of this group is European, traditional Arab music players also are finding things quite difficult as the civil war, which is what is going on there, continues.

But both kinds of music are valiantly pursued amid the chaos, and lovers of our fellow human beings can only wish them safe harbor and better days ahead.

Concerts increasingly found on Web

Here's more evidence that classical musicians increasingly are embracing technology to get their message across.

The first bit of evidence is this set of downloads from Ibis Camerata, the Miami-based chamber group that gave the first concert of the new classical season Sept. 10. It was also the first concert in a series called An die Musik at the Church of the Palms in Delray Beach. The series has been organized by Stuart Gardner, who used to mount similar kinds of programs at St. Paul's Episcopal on the other end of Swinton Avenue.

I misplaced my notes from that first concert, which is why I didn't write a review, but overall, I thought the group showed itself to be a fine quartet of experienced chamber musicians who put on a varied, well-played, interesting program. The audience particularly liked the two Piazzolla pieces that closed the concert, and one of them, Oblivion, is included here.

Piazzolla, as I've noted before, isn't that much to my taste, but everyone plays it with great feeling, particularly cellist Ian Maksin, who wrings everything he can out of the piece.

The group has done a smart thing by putting these MP3s and videos on their site. This is how classical players — as well as pop and jazz — are getting the word out, and it' s good to see.

Another example can be found by visiting the site of Olga Goija, a Latvian violist now living in Southern California. Her site (that's the home page at the top) has the obligatory dishy pix everyone is putting up these days, but she's also done a wise thing by being part of YouTube. Call up her site, and there are several videos of her in concert, playing Schnittke, Schumann, Bach and Handel.

Here's one I like: The Adagio movement from Handel's Sonata No. 6:

I also appreciate that since she's part of YouTube, she leaves up all the comments from viewers, some of which are not so complimentary, but in a constructive way; i.e., you need to bring out more of the lower register; you need to strengthen your pinkie.

Goija plays with a noble, elegant sound at her best, judging from these videos. She's still a work in progress, but I applaud her determination and her tech savviness. This is increasingly how we'll be finding the musicians of the future.

Concert notes: Organist Stephen Kolarac, who was the soloist Sunday in a short recital at Bethesda-by-the Sea, gave two fine performances of music by Bach and Franck. The Bach E minor Prelude and Fugue (BWV 548) in particular received a powerful reading that reminded listeners that Bach was not just a great composer, he also was perhaps the finest organist of his day, a man who loved to demonstrate his prowess at the keyboard.
It would be good to hear Kolarac do a full concert sometime in the future.

Mozart's king and a crisis in Berlin

"It sets an appalling precedent. An opera house is an amphitheater in which the battle of ideas should be taking place. Every belief is a free subject for questioning, criticism.''

That’s theater director David Pountney, quoted in this Bloomberg story about the decision by Kirsten Harms, chief of the Berlin Opera, to pull a revival of a controversial production of Mozart’s Idomeneo on the grounds that it could offend Muslim sensibilities.

Harms canceled four productions of Hans Neuenfels’ 2003 staging of Mozart’s breakthrough opera about a legendary king of Crete because of a scene added by Neuenfels in which Idomeneo displays the severed heads of four religious figures — Neptune, Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad.

Neuenfels said the idea was to express Idomeneo’s estrangement from all religion after breaking a promise to the gods.

The news reports I’ve read say the scene was booed when it first appeared, and I’m not too surprised. It sounds like a silly idea. But Harms’ decision, taken, she says, at the behest of the police, has infuriated critics all over Europe, who argue that she has caved in to terrorism.

The opera might be staged after all; German and Austrian cultural leaders are pushing hard for it, and Harms has said she'd consider it if security can be guaranteed.

I’m not quite sure what to think about all this. On the one hand, Harms says she has good reason to think that there were some credible threats. On the other, I never want to see artistic expression, no matter how offensive or inept, to be squashed because one segment of the society might not like it or threatens violence because of it.

Mozart and his librettists certainly knew a few things about censorship. All of the texts of his operas had to be cleared before they could be mounted, though in his case it usually was autocracy in general that was being shielded from unkind comments made by mouthy playwrights and the composers who set their words.

And as an opera composer, Mozart represented a new path away from static libretti like those of Idomeneo to those that reflected the landscape of the human heart: Figaro and Cosi, exceptionally. Emperor Joseph II’s court objected to Figaro originally because the Beaumarchais source play questioned the rights of monarchs so sharply.

That questioning comes through loud and clear in Figaro, but the pill was made sweeter to swallow by the beauty and brilliance of Mozart’s music. We know that Mozart ultimately took more of an interest in politics by becoming a Freemason in 1784; one of the lodges he visited was suppressed by authorities the following year.

Mozart lived at a time when the verities were being questioned as never before, and one wonders what he would have thought had he lived long enough to see his ex-employer, the prince-archbishop of Salzburg, lose his temporal throne. We still question our verities, whatever they may be, but we also want to respect everyone else's (and surely we'll hear from offended Christians and Buddhists).

Probably the best thing to hope for here is that everybody's truths are strong enough in their lives to tolerate any sort of attack. Monotheism has proved quite hardy over the centuries, and no staging of a Mozart opera is going to bring it to its knees.