The Maestro's Cello

Talk about a blast from the past ...

We had a rare privilege last week at the summer community arts program of the Coral Gables Congregational Church. Amit Peled was in town with Pablo Casals' very own cello, a 1733 Goffriler that sounds wonderful despite pushing 300 years of age.

I'll get to the music later, but at the end of the evening Peled took questions from the audience in lieu of an encore. We learned that after he came to America from Israel to study, his teacher came to the conclusion that he needed a better instrument. He offered an introduction to Mrs. Casals, Pablo's wife, who he thought might be able to put him in touch with someone. Marta Casals Istomin is still with us thanks to her youthful alliance with the aging musician who passed away in 1973 when she was 36.

Peled auditioned for her, and received a rather thorough critique which "took him to pieces." However, she went on to inquire if he would be able to come to New York and try out the maestro's own instrument. The only answer to such an invitation is yes please, so it came to pass. The cello had been lying dormant in its case for decades. Peled described it as a sleeping old man who did not want to be disturbed. It had actually suffered seriously from neglect, but he was able to coax some sound out of it.

A short time later he was contacted by her again. Would he like to have the maestro's instrument on extended loan? Again, the only answer was yes please! He pointed out, however, that it needed major restoration before it would be up for any concert performances. So this too was arranged. A restorer ended up spending a year and a half, eight hours a day, to bring it back into condition.

Evidently he did a superb job. The cello has a rich and warm finish that glows as if from within, and a tone that sounds exactly the same. Combined with a modern bow, which Peled prefers to use, it proves itself capable of clear and incisive attacks as well as smooth and heart rending low tones. The instrument shone as a strong co-star in what amounts to a comeback tour.

To commemorate the occasion, Peled is performing a program of the same pieces played by Casals on his first American tour back in 1915, one hundred years ago. It consists of one of the Bach unaccompanied suites that Casals made famous, along with works by Handel, Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, and Fauré (who was a close friend and carousing companion of the maeI'vstro).

Peled is a big guy at 6'5", making the cello appear about the size of a viola as he cradles it in his arms. He's also very personable, and provided some disarming commentary between the selections intended to get us to loosen up and have FUN. After the Bach, for example, where some portion of the crowd annoyingly clapped between movements (a Miami pet peeve), he assured us that it was perfectly OK, and reminded us that in some times and places in the past it was customary to do so. At times he even launched into the next piece on the program before the applause had died down from the last one, making it feel more like a jazz performance -- quite in contrast to the expectant hush normally required.

Pianist Noreen Polera deftly commanded the resident Bosendorfer behind him and showed the value of being able to specialize in the accompaniment of the cello repertoire.

A good time was had by the sellout crowd. We look forward to our next tickets to this series which is a return engagement of pianist Awadagin Pratt, whom I've reviewed previously.

New World, New Hall

[I'm finally posting this review which I originally wrote for Suite101 now that the text is again mine to do with as I please.]

America's only orchestral academy, the New World Symphony, officially kicked off its new season in January of 2011 by breaking in its brand new concert hall, New World Center, in Miami Beach. And I was there to savor the moment.

We attended the first public concert (there was a private one for donors the night before) and came away knocked out by the one-two punch of performance and concert space. The Frank Gehry-designed structure has been turning heads even before completion. Its innovative and high-tech features seem destined to inspire a reinvention of classical music presentation for the 21st century. Inside, huge "sail" shapes on the walls spread out the sound and double as projection screens for laser and video images. Outside, a 6-story Projection Wall allows the performances to be viewed -- and heard -- from the adjoining two-acre park. Can't get a ticket? No problem!

To support these media capabilities, an entire audio-video production studio hovers over the rear of the concert hall, looking like NASA Mission Control. (For more about the Wallcasts, see my review of the one featuring Mahler's Sixth Symphony.)

None of these bells and whistles overshadows the music, however. Conductor Michael Tilson-Thomas (fondly referred to as MTT), who founded the New World back in 1988, picked up the reins at the podium and got an instant response from his highly-tuned ensemble. From the opening strains of Wagner's Overture to the Flying Dutchman we could tell we were in for a treat.

The sound in this new space is simply electric. Both intimate and expansive, without a bad seat in the house, it offers a degree of clarity and precision sometimes lacking in larger auditoriums. In our case, we were actually seated behind the string section in a bank of benches that can also serve as choral risers. This arena type of seating offers a chance to experience the music as if you are part of the orchestra, right in the thick of the action.

And it's impossible to overstate the abilities of the New World's youthful musicians. Their ensemble playing is impeccable, the brass gutsy, the strings capable of all kinds of sonorities and the strength to stand up against the rest of the instruments.

What would an opening be without a world premier? "Polaris," by Thomas Adès, was co-commissioned by the New World and a handful of some of the the best orchestras on the planet. The piece, accompanied by a commissioned film projected on three sides of the hall, challenged both musicians and audience, but it seems we were all up to the challenge. The texture of the sound at the end resembled a combination of a raging torrent of water and a jet of flame -- a sound perhaps never before uttered by any orchestra.

After this, I thought the closing Third Symphony of Aaron Copeland would sound tame by comparison. I was wrong! This work is perhaps one of the most ambitious of the prototypical American composer and demonstrates what it was possible to create even way back in 1946.

The final movement, based on the famous "Fanfare for the Common Man," formed a fitting conclusion to the evening and kicked off a standing ovation that lasted until Tilson-Thomas had to beg to be allowed to go home.

We left too, but can't wait to come back for more.

Rachmaninoff Reigns

On hearing it Live ...

One of the wonderful things about classical music is the way you can develop a personal history with a piece over the course of a lifetime. Last week I filled in another blank in my live performances by taking in Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony on the stage at the University of Miami's Gusman Concert Hall. Guest conductor Leon Fleisher led the Frost Symphony Orchestra in a spirited rendition of this soaring work which has been a lifelong favorite of mine.

It all goes back to one of the first recordings in my collection, a handed-down copy from my father which believe it or not was on 78 rpm records. For those to whom this is too antediluvian a technology to even imagine, let me just say that back before 33 rpm and the invention of vinyl put the "LP" (Long Playing) in "records," we had to struggle with thick heavy platters that spun twice as fast and contained a maximum of about 4 or 5 minutes per 10-inch side. And they were constructed from a more primitive form of plastic that was brittle enough to break. The needles that gouged out the grooves of these beasts resembled small nails and went dull at an alarming rate.

But worst of all, for those who wanted to enjoy classical performances, the limited playing time meant that we could never hear even an entire movement, let alone a complete symphony, without changing the disc multiple times. Lengthy works came on a collection of disks packaged in book-like "albums," which is why we still use that word to refer to a collection of pop songs. If there was no suitable pause in the music to end one disk and start the next, the orchestra had to create one while making the recording. Thus my first encounter with this Rachmaninoff symphony contained a series of scheduled interruptions that became so ingrained in my memory that I can still tell you where some of them happened to fall.

In spite of this, the music was so incredible that it quickly became one of my favorites. Once I began acquiring my own recordings I replaced the 78 version with a Hi-Fi (not Stereo, which cost a dollar more) LP with Arthur Fiedler conducting the Boston Symphony. Imagine my disappointment when I rushed home with this lucky find only to discover that it was badly warped. Again, for the uninitiated, the vinyl used to warp if it got hot or bent in a disorderly stack. If you were lucky it would still play, but with an obvious distortion of the sound. My new Rachmaninoff warp was so severe that I had to increase the weight of my tone arm to keep it from jumping off the record completely.

Why not return it, you may well ask? A number of reasons. That would have involved going back to the store, which was difficult for a kid without a car, and then convincing the sales person that 1) the record really did come out of the sleeve that way, 2) I had not left it locked up in the sun in a hot car, and 3) I had not leaned it the wrong way on a book shelf. But the real reason was that I knew I had just bought the only copy they had. This was before the days of browsing for anything you wanted online, and we settled for whatever the store might happen to have in its bins on a particular day. I might get my five hard-earned dollars back, but I'd come home without the music. So I kept it. I learned to overlook the horrible wavering that afflicted the first few minutes of both sides, the first and third movements, and to revel in the beauty of the remainder.

Naturally once CDs came along I had to buy another recording. This one is by Andre Previn with the San Francisco Symphony, and of course benefits from the advances in technology that have made us accustomed to flawless playback, perfect acoustics, wide dynamic range, and absolutely none of the pops, clicks, and hisses that we used to live with. And NO WARPS. Sure, you can damage CDs too, but you do copy them to your hard drive first, don't you?

The Previn recording came with a wonderful story. He performed it with the same orchestra on a trip to Moscow back when it was still the capital of the Soviet Union. Kind of nervy, performing the music of an expatriate Russian right in their faces. Not only that, but Previn made a point of performing the unedited version, without the cuts that used to be made to shorten it from nearly an hour to a more comfortable 40 minutes. After the concert, one man from the audience came up to him to say, "THANK YOU for the Rachmaninoff!" So we know at least one person got it.

All these years later, I finally got my chance to hear it performed in person. Leon Fleisher is the pianist who famously lost the use of his right hand, turned to conducting and commissioning works for the left hand alone, then miraculously recovered the use of the hand after many years, and earned an award for his debut comeback album, titled Two Hands. Now 83, he's still going strong, and still conducting. I don't know what it's like to work under him, but his relationship with the Frost ensemble appeared humble and loving. He must certainly be the kind of guy you'd try to do your best for, and that was the case this night. Despite some trepidation in the French horns, the soaring strings and gutsy brass, aided and abetted by the rest of the winds and a four-person percussion section, brought the work to fiery life.

There's the first movement that begins in murky darkness and builds to towering crescendos. Then the scherzo-like second movement with its fugal busyness, played at a rapid clip under Fleisher. Then the lyrical slow movement with a theme so song-like that I heard one woman actually singing it on the way out. Then finally the last movement that begins at a run and never lets up -- save briefly, when quoting that lyrical theme from the third -- until it pounds to a cataclysmic conclusion. Breathless! You gotta hear it!

[In this earlier blog post I wrote about Rachmaninoff's other symphonies, and how the Second has recently been transformed into a Fifth Piano Concerto.]

Still Giving After All These Years

What can you say about a performer who continues to give fresh insights even 30 years after his death? That's what Glenn Gould did to me recently, even though he passed away in 1982, and even though I've been listening to him since I was a high school student in the 1960s.

One of his most enigmatic recordings was Bach's Art of the Fugue, the treatise on that form that Bach himself did not live to complete. Gould left us with a recording of it which was maddening on two counts. First, the record did not even contain all of the fugues that Bach had written as part of this opus, including the last one that abruptly ends right where he happened to leave off composing. I suppose there was going to be a volume II someday with the rest of them, but it never happened. So this was an incompleteness of an incompletion, doubly frustrating to those of us who admire Bach's work and who doted on Gould's every performance of it.

But second, what Gould recorded was not even on the piano. Instead he chose to make this his only performance on the organ. Not that there was anything wrong with that in itself -- Bach, of course, was a renowned organist in his day. And in fact, he wrote this work on four separate staffs rather than the usual two for the keyboard, leaving it up to future performers to attempt it any way they liked. Since then it has been performed by string quartets, brass ensembles, and various other instruments besides the harpsichord or piano or organ.

But the piano (no pun intended) was Gould's forte. His phenomenal touch on the keys gave him an unsurpassed ability to accentuate the various lines of polyphony, to literally give each line its own unique voice, from a thumping bass pizzacato to a vibrant mid-tone to a bell-like clarity in the high notes. For him to limit himself to the elements of phrasing available on the organ was like painting with a limited palette. Though the performance was excellent as usual, and though he characteristically selected a small church organ whose voice and acoustics would not muddy the sound, still it left many -- including me -- wishing he had just bowed to expectations and done it on the piano.

So the years passed. Gould left us, entirely too soon, like Bach before him never returning to complete this piece of unfinished business. The recordings he left behind continue to sell voluminously to the present day. His reach is ubiquitous. One occasionally comes across an item like an interview with rock poet Patti Smith where she describes herself, "listening to Glenn Gould." Or hot Chinese pianist Lang Lang, who lights up at the mention of the name and says, "I love Glenn Gould! I think he is great genius!" At least half a dozen biographical films have been made about his life, and one of these led me to a wonderful discovery.

The film in question is Glenn Gould: The Russian Journey, a documentary in which various Russian musicians including pianists Vladimir Ashkenazy and Sviadoslav Richter are interviewed about Gould's visit to their country in the midst of the Cold War. It's hard to overstate the impression the young Canadian made there. No one had ever heard of him, and his first concert in Leningrad was only half full. But at the intermission everyone went out to the lobby to call their friends. The interval was lengthened to an hour and a half to allow time for people to get to the concert hall. One man who received such a call reported that his friend said simply, "Stop what you're doing, get dressed and get down here, you have to hear this."

So the second half was a sellout, and the subsequent concert in Moscow was standing room only, with barely enough room for those standing. One man said that he went to hear Webern, a modern composer on the program who was rarely performed in the Soviet Union because all that atonal music was considered elitist and decadent. What he remembered instead was Bach, sounding as new and modern and fresh as anything from the 20th century. Richter, himself a giant as a piano virtuoso, said: "I could play as good as Glenn Gould. Do you know why I do not? Because I would have to work so hard."

But I digress. After watching the DVD (thank you, Netflix), I thought to look at the "extra features" on the disk. One of them was a performance of one of the fugues from the Art of Fugue -- on the piano! Could there be more of them, I wondered? A quick search online revealed that in the process of re-releasing Gould's entire catalog, Sony had given us some "lost" recordings of him playing the same fugues -- with typical beauty and perfection -- on the instrument he was born to play.

I rushed to get the full set, which includes both the organ and piano versions. Two of them are very poor quality, sounding like they must have been done on a casette recorder during a practice session, but of course we're glad to have even those. Let me be clear -- it is only the recording quality that is lacking; the playing as always is amazing. The rest of them are in studio quality sound, and the subtlety of expression, the nuances of touch, are as impeccable as anything he ever did.

Again, they are not complete, and they are not even all the same ones that he did on the organ, but at least it does include the last one, the one that ends breathlessly at the beginning of a phrase ... You might call it the completion of an incompleteness. It will have to be enough, because it's all we're ever going to get.

Last Thoughts on Mahler

This is it, I promise ...

Just because Michael Tilson Thomas is blabbing to the whole world about Gustav Mahler on Public TV (see Keeping Score) there's no reason I can't add the rest of my thoughts as a kind of footnote. So here in no particular order are some further impressions that came out of my recent immersion in those nine symphonies.

Beginnings: Out of the silence, grandeur. Some of them emerge like pale shapes swimming up out of the depths of a dark ocean. Others begin in medias res, sort of like, "So as I was saying ..." or "Then the next thing that happened was ..." It feels like the composer was so familiar with his material that he could begin that way, fully confident of where he was going.

I'm reminded of something a friend said after listening to part of Wagner's Ring cycle in Germany: "It goes on forever, but then every once in a while there's this incredible music." (It's also been said that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds.")

While building familiarity with Mahler I sometimes felt that way, impatient to get to my favorite parts. But eventually I understood that these choice moments had been set up by the texture of everything that went before. The music is a continuum, an environment in which one wanders, stopping here and there to enjoy the expansive views. Clouds and fields of sound, oceans to swim, forests in which to wander. He's created an entire world, the way a novelist does.

Vocals? In a symphony? Yes, and not just material from his lieder, but soloists and whole choruses stray into the orchestra pit and demand to be heard. Melody is not enough, he seems to say. I must put a voice to the deep feelings here. It's another example of the great range of expression to be found, from the collosal augmented orchestra down to the intimate scale of chamber music. When is the last time you ran into an extended duet for violin and french horn in the middle of a symphonic work?

A lilting tune that becomes too much for itself, strains, develops discords, turns anguished. ... Wait, is that "Frere Jacques?" Yes, but in a minor key and reduced to only two parts while being scored for a hundred instruments.

All the time in the world, no rush to get anywhere. Endless brooding, currents and counter currents. And now it sounds so nostalgic, like "I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places ..."

And again, there's comic relief in the form of Jewish folk dances, or circus-style marches that sound like they belong in a Fellini film.

Long endings. Really long. Endings that make you consult the minute hand of your watch. One time in particular I sensed the vast gathering of forces that signals a Coda, the grand finale ... except instead of the usual thirty or forty seconds it was fully eight minutes until we got there.

And now here we are.

Learning How to Listen

One thing leads to another ...

Coming as I do from a home in which classical music was always prominent, with both of my parents playing the likes of Beethoven, Chopin, and Grieg on the solid upright piano in the living room, it's not surprising that I have grown into an avid collector and appreciator of such music. What's got me stumped is how it could possibly have taken me so long to get around to one of the most monumental composers of the last century and a half.

Granted, it takes time for musical tastes to mature. It was not until my teens that I started making my own selections of what to listen to and forming my own collection of recordings. As I recall I began with Gershwin, having got there through jazz, then moved on to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, the Romantics being among the most accessible.

Then my interest in learning to play the recorder sent me on a musical odyssey through the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque. There I crashed head first into Johann Sebastian Bach and fell down on my knees, awestruck -- a condition that continues to this day.

Once so afflicted, a person is probably doomed to move on to all the other gods in this pantheon of human achievement. Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin, Telemann, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Stravinsky, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Bernstein ... all these and more came crowding around me, demanding to be heard. They all got their chance, and I was seldom disappointed. I even tried some things that are darn hard to like, such as the clinically atonal works of Schoenberg and Berg, which sort of feels like wandering in a surreal desert. And as a technology buff I collected examples of the new art of electronic music way back before modern synthesizers had been invented.

It wasn't until recently, while trying to round out my collection through eMusic, that I ran into a speed bump by the name of Dmitri Shostakovitch. I already owned the set of 24 preludes and fugues -- one in every possible key -- that the 20th century Russian had been the first to attempt since the time of good old Bach (who did it not once but twice). But, suddenly appalled that I knew nothing about his 15 symphonies, I set out to listen to them all.

I was puzzled to find how impenetrable they seemed. Words like ponderous, harsh, chaotic, directionless, and unmelodic came to mind. I remember thinking, "This sounds like something enormous is being hauled by a cast of thousands tugging on ropes into a giant public space -- like maybe Red Square in Moscow."

It took a few more months, but I finally found out what my problem was. I had skipped someone. Someone important. Someone whose work both anticipated and laid the groundwork for those who came after. Someone in whose work lay the key to understanding.

That someone was Gustav Mahler. My curiosity about him had been piqued by an upcoming performance of the New World Symphony with the redoubtable Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. I was pleased to find that all of his recent recordings of Mahler with the San Francisco Symphony were available at eMusic, so I grabbed them all and started to absorb them.

It's hard to describe what an unexpected pleasure this was. Imagine going through your whole life in ignorance of Beethoven, and then suddenly discovering what you'd been missing. I had no idea that at this stage of my life there were any more such pleasant surprises to be found, but here it was.

I loaded them all onto my phone and started listening to them one after the other as I made my way to and from work each day. They became like a single huge opus divided up into chapters and books, one continuous stream of invention. This is a good analogy, because Mahler's music is literary, a composition consisting of long sentences and paragraphs that take their time to fully explore each idea. And absorbing them all is like working your way through a multi-volume set of novels, such as Patric O'Brian's seafaring yarns or Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Moody doesn't say half say it. These things wallow in mood. And there are wonderful recurring devices such as the dying crescendo -- kind of like saying "TA-DAAaaaa-ohhhh wait a minute I didn't mean to sound so positive about it ..." There is no excitement that can't be moderated, no sadness that may not turn triumphant, no exaltation that does not turn frenetic and threaten to self-destruct.

You can't help thinking of film music, because several generations of movie composers from Bernard Herman to John Williams have sat at Mahler's knee, learning from the master how to push the emotional buttons of their audiences on demand. But if you follow the rest of 20th century music you will also hear shades of Prokofiev, Aaron Copeland, even Bernstein ... and Dimitri Shostakovitch.

Fortified by my months-long immersion in pools of Mahler I ventured into Shostakovitch again, and this time found him readily accessible. Mahler had shown me how to listen and left me wanting more. The saga continued, as it has for centuries, as the thread was picked up by a new voice. Lead on.

Mahler Under the Stars

Remember drive-in movies? Like that ...

A couple of months back I reported on the debut concert of the New World Symphony in their new home on South Beach. Last weekend we got it into our heads to catch the final performance of the season, Mahler's Sixth Symphony, which was given outdoors as a Wallcast.

From Mahler Under the Stars

The whole idea of the Wallcast is a signature feature of the Frank Ghery-designed facility. What it does is to turn the concert hall inside out, transforming what used to be a closed performance for a select audience into an open one for the public at large.

Of course there is a long history of public concerts going back long before bandshells and bandstands in parks, and certainly before outdoor rock concerts. Mozart, for example, composed one of his finest wind serenades for such an event. It was so popular with both performers and the public that the musicians played it over and over again -- even late at night in front of the composer's balcony as a way of saying thank you.

But projecting the event from inside the building onto its exterior as it happens is a new wrinkle. So is the construction of a public park from which to enjoy the concert, including a permanently installed high quality sound system. We decided this was something we had to see -- and hear.

Apparently close to a thousand other people had the same idea. By the time we arrived, about 15 minutes before concert time, the grass between the tubular stereo speaker systems was packed with people, many with blankets and lawn chairs. (My advice -- arrive well in advance to stake your claim.) We found some space where the Wall was only partially blocked by a palm tree and settled in.

A bit after 8:00 the 5-storey screen bloomed into imagery with the colors of the sunset sky still fading behind it. Applause greeted the gigantic spectacled face of Michael Tilson Thomas as he launched into a brief introduction to Mahler's opus, including his own playing of a few bars on the piano. These commentaries before each of the four movements were brief but enlightening, and served to further open up the music to a wider audience. (They also demonstrated that there was at least a short delay between interior live performance and the external video, because indoors the audience did not see or hear those introductions.)

And what can you say about Mahler? (Actually I have so much to say about him that it will have to keep for another time.) Hearing the spacious majesty of this century-old music as it spilled out beneath the stars seemed somehow perfectly appropriate. The Sixth is all about Fate, from the ominous opening march to the fall of the famous hammer blows in the finale -- yes, that's a hammer, a big one, landing on a big rectangle to create a concussion unlike anything else in the orchestra. WHAM!

So, a good time was had by all, including a pair of toddlers trying to dance as if it were a rock festival, and one of the most well-mannered dogs I've ever seen -- and in spite of a smattering of those whose cell phones or private conversations were considered too important to postpone. But hey, that's the great American outdoors. I only hope that they absorbed something of the music, if only unconsciously.

Wending our way home we marvelled at the human ability to perform as well as to absorb such a complex tapestry, but even more the ability to conceive of it in the first place and to be able to write it all down for the ages. Mahler's music is fraught with meaning and portent. Composing this in 1903-4, he seems to sense the approaching doomsday of the two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the threat of nuclear Armageddon that were only decades away.

Hearing it now, we can only hope there are not more such events heading our way, perhaps only a matter of years in our own future. Mahler originally put three hammer blows into this work, but later took one of them out as if he couldn't bear it. Maybe in this he was being merciful, or maybe it was an expression of hope. I'd like to think so. Maybe that last strike of the hammer is the one that hasn't happened ... yet.

[Mahler specified the sound of the Hammer -- "brief and mighty, but dull in resonance and with a non-metallic character (like the fall of an axe)" -- but not how to produce it. Apparently lots of things have been tried, including just a large bass drum, but the prevalent solution seems to be a big wooden sledge hammer hitting a resonant wooden box. The one the New World used was, shall we say, very effective.]

Here's another review from the Miami Herald.

Attention to the Details

As Columbo used to say, "Oh -- just one more thing ..."

I just began writing articles for Suite101.com with a review of the opening night concert for the new home of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach. But one small thing I omitted is a wonderful example of the fantastic attention to detail that is evident in all aspects of this project.

You know that chime that tells people to put down their drinks in the lobby and get to their seats? The one that goes "bong ... bong ... bong ..." or maybe "bing bong ... bing bong ... ?"

Well that's not good enough for the New World Center. I was delighted to hear the chimes play an entire little tune. And even more delighted when I recognized it as one of the oldest known pieces of Western music: the "Seikilos epitaph" that was discovered engraved on a tombstone in Turkey, and which dates from over 2,000 years ago.

(If you're wondering how I happened to recognize such an old song, it's because I discovered it while researching the article I wrote about the discovery of some bone flutes from the Ice Age -- perhaps the oldest musical instruments ever found.)

So when you go to the New World Center, even in the act of being ushered to your seat you are being reminded of the wonderfully long and rich history that has delivered us to this new golden age. Here are the lyrics [translated] so you can sing along:

While you live, shine,
don't suffer anything at all;
life exists only a short while,
and time demands its toll.

So in other words, eat, drink and be merry!

The "Other" Christmas Music

Celebrating Bach's Magnificat ...

Looking back at previous entries I find that I've written twice about Handel's Messiah, appropriately enough at Christmas time. But how is it possible that I've found nothing to say about my favorite choral music for this or any other season? That distinction goes to J.S. Bach's Magnificat, a brief masterpiece that sails past the listener all too quickly, in contrast to Handel's monumental oratorio.

Maybe the soft spot I have for this work dates back to the way I first discovered it. I was about 15 years old and browsing through the dusty used record bins at a pawn shop with my music buddy. Suddenly there it was -- a rare, 10-inch LP just big enough to fit the approximately 30 minutes that it takes to perform the 12 short movements. I'd never heard of it, but it was by Bach and that was good enough for me. I didn't even particularly care for choral music, but hey, did I say this was by Bach? Not only that, but it cost no more than 50 cents. At that price I woudn't care if it had scratches on it. And it was by Bach!

Suffice to say, the piece has never failed to satisfy. From the first listening I felt I was hearing something like Bach's greatest hits. Each short aria and chorus was perfect and complete, each with its own "hook," as the pop song industry calls it -- that thing that gets it to lodge in your memory and beg to be repeated. I started out with particular favorites, but soon found that they had all grown on me until I had adopted each one and accepted the whole work as an old friend.

It begins with a bang, a big timpani-assisted BUM-bum! not unlike the opening notes of the second movement to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the one that used to open the NBC Nightly News. In the instrumental prelude that ensues, and the chorus after it, Bach manages to weave together an amazing number of contrapuntal melody lines. The feat is even more amazing because many of the voices -- flutes, oboes, violins, and trumpets -- are all playing in the same register, so their lines overlap.

One piece that caught my attention right away was the aria in which an alto voice is supported by a duo of flutes or recorders, which is kind of like adding sugar to the syrup. But since I was learning to play the recorder at the time it was wonderful to discover my instrument being put to such sublime uses.

Another highlight is the soprano aria "Quia respexit," which features a particularly delectable obbligato by the oboe that winds around the voice like a sinewy vine. And then there's the aria for three voices -- both sopranos and an alto -- in which all three twine around one another while the oboe sails long notes overhead like a halo of light.

Something happens in the mind when it is asked to follow three different melodic lines at once. Most of us have a hard time with just two -- apart from Bach, who could apparently handle four, five, and even six with his own two hands. But for ordinary mortals it seems there is just one tune, or two, or many. It's like watching a magician play the shell game. The result is that we get the delightful feeling that no matter how closely we listen there is always something new and unexpected emerging.

As I said, all the other movements are favorites as well. There's not a recitative in the whole thing, nothing but elegant melody from beginning to end. And speaking of the end, that's wonderful too. First comes the "Gloria," with voices rising and building before declaring "Patri" (father) and "Filio" (son), but then descending from on high like the symbolic dove to deliver "Spiritui Sancto" (the holy spirit). Then comes the finale in which the whole ensemble bursts into a reprise of the opening, while singing, "sicut erat in principio ..." As it was in the beginning, is now and always will be. Chills every time!

In my 30's I acquired a new and better recording, then later bought another version that included the "Christmas interpolations" -- four additional movements that were in the original version performed at Christmas Vespers in 1723, but which Bach later removed to make it appropriate for performance at any time of the year. Then I had to buy another copy when CD's came along, and just recently I downloaded yet another version from eMusic.

This latest acquisition is a unique performance by the Ricercar Consort from the Netherlands. They perform the work with a small instrumental ensemble like the one Bach would have employed, and with just one single voice for each part in the choruses as well as the arias. This minimalist approach delivers wonderful clarity, especially in the thickest of the choral passages. I can honestly say that after all the years of listening I heard new things in it that I had never heard before.

Many years passed between my original discovery of the recording and my first opportunity to hear a live performance of the Magnificat. And even then the circumstances were unusual. It was in 1992, just a few weeks after Hurricane Andrew had pasted South Florida like a wrecking ball. The Miami Bach Society had to decide whether to go ahead with their scheduled performance under such difficult conditions. They did it, and even imported a guest virtuoso on the trumpet clarino -- an instrument with a mouthpiece especially suited for the highest register -- to add a finishing touch.

I'm a big fan of our Bach Society, and I have to say they particularly shone on that evening. It was a wonderful and healing experience coming on the heels of natural disaster, and seemed to be greatly appreciated by all. The Magnificat shared the bill that night with abridged highlights from Handel's Messiah. That was all very well, but to my ear the scintillating perfection of Bach's inspired tapestry made Handel sound dull and heavy by comparison.

Maybe it's just me, but let's hear it for the magnificent Magnificat.

[See Wikipedia for the text and its history. It all started with two pregnant moms bumping into one another. Mary supposedly gave this eloquent recitation that was eventually set to music. Years later, all grown up, one of the kids encountered the other one while he was baptizing people in a river. No wonder they recognized each other -- they were cradle mates!]

Synesthesia City

"A neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway." (Wikipedia)

I can remember "seeing" music for the first time when I was only about seven years old. My parents were listening to a symphony on the radio one Sunday afternoon and I was just dreaming away the time when I became caught up in the sound as waves from the string section alternately broke over the rocks of the percussion with competing waves from the brass and winds. I picked up a knife and fork and began weaving them through the air in imitation of what I perceived the music doing.

Some people say they see colors in music, while others feel only emotion. For me it has always been structures and shapes, three dimensional forms that erupt and soar and collide. Even years later, after I had learned to hear the notes and keys, to understand the formalism of music and to appreciate all its subtlety of tone, I'm still able to hear the shape of it. Perhaps the closest anyone has ever come to showing what I see is the version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor as it was visualized in the original film of Fantasia. Those great rolling waves of abstract form, both surreal and tangible, struck me as being just about right.

The experience came to me again the other night while listening to -- and watching -- a recital by pianist Awadagin Pratt. I'd seen him once before and had been impressed enough to leave the performance with two of his CD's clutched in my hands. (We picked up another one this night.) As my wife noted, "He's a Big guy!" Large enough to play on the line in the NFL, Pratt uses his powerful frame to cause the piano to thunder. But of course it's not only a matter of pounding. He can evoke the tinkle of chiming glass in the topmost register, and soar from end to end of the keyboard with perfect grace and control.

This ambitious program began with Beethoven, Bach, and Schumann and concluded with Chopin and Liszt. The long suffering Bösendorfer at his command showed it was equal to the task, and Pratt seemed as full of energy at the conclusion as he was in the beginning. Along the way tens of thousands of notes must have been struck, and all to good effect. The Liszt sonata in particular produced the above mentioned effect of synesthesia most powerfully -- I found it best to close my eyes, the better to see the towering shapes that seemed to emerge from the strings, totter and collapse in pieces, only to rise again, wrenching and twisting at the dual demands of composer and performer.

Mr. Pratt is also an educator, who instructed us in the history of the Schumann variations on a theme of Beethoven. This was a work that never achieved a final definitive form in the composer's lifetime, though different versions of it were published. Pratt took it on himself to arrange the variations in a novel sequence, starting with those most free formed and farthest from the theme, and progressing through those more similar to it, then ending with a statement of the theme itself. He let us listen for it ourselves so we could experience what he called an "aha moment" somewhere in the middle. I'll spoil it for you: the theme is from the second movement of the Seventh Symphony, the funeral march, though there was nothing funereal about what Schumann did with it. It has to be one of the most virtuosic pieces he ever wrote, easily rivaling the calisthenics of Franz Liszt.

And speaking of Liszt, my favorite quote attributed to him is his reply to Georges Sand when she told him he played the piano better than anyone had ever played it. "But," he said, "I want to play it as well as it can be played." Which is something else again. Supposedly late in his life he began revising some of his more difficult compositions, fearing that after his death his music would be forgotten if no one else could play it. He needn't have worried so much. Just turn Awadagin Pratt loose on it and tell him it's impossible to perform.

You can see him in action through his website which has a video from his performance at the White House last year. He's playing what the New York Times called "his herculean transcription" of Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. This is the same piece he played for us the other night (though without the addition of "Hail to the Chief" at the end) and demonstrates what Bach might have done if the concert grand piano had been invented in his lifetime.

Like to experience synesthesia yourself? Have a look at this ...

The link to the White House video is no longer on his website, but here it is straight from YouTube --

A New Old Fave

That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

- Twelfth Night

Proving that it's never too late to discover classical works for the first time, I can say that I have a new favorite piece of chamber music following my introduction to Schubert's cello quintet in C major at a recent performance at the University of Miami.

No, silly, of course it's not five cellos, but a string quartet (in this case Miami's own Amernet) augmented by an extra guest cellist (in the person of Gary Hoffman). What this makes possible is the creation and evolution of some achingly beautiful dual melodies handed back and forth between the pair of cellos and the pair of violins, or in some cases violin and viola.

What I mean by dual melody is that the theme is written in harmony, with an upper and lower voice singing in unison or winding around one another in counterpoint, but impossible to separate. Neither voice can be said to represent the melody on its own; it exists for two voices or not at all -- something like the monumental double fugue built into the last movement of Beethoven's ninth.

Another facet of this inspired composition is the ineffability of the theme. Hearing it for the first time, I seemed to have known it all my life. But the day after the performance I was unable to reconstruct it in my mind. I had to hunt down a recording to end that maddening sensation of having a forgotten song on the tip of my tongue. (And let me say that the CD with the Cleveland Quartet and guest Yo-Yo Ma is at least as good as the live performance I heard.)

The slow second movement is a study in stasis, with measured accents in pizzicato like the ticking of a clock to punctuate a melodic progression that seems in no rush whatsoever to get anywhere. I found myself recalling the old song by the Talking Heads that says, "Heaven ... heaven is a place ... a place where nothing ... nothing ever happens ..." This movement is certainly ethereal enough to qualify for the afterlife. Then the piece achieves rebirth in the gutsy scherzo that follows.

Also fascinating is the way Schubert hearkens back to the first movement's theme in the fourth. It nearly sounds like it will be a recapitulation note for note, but instead he gives it a different twist. In fact, it turns out to be a wholly different melody that somehow alludes to the original one. While the tune in the beginning is full of yearning and becoming, the one at the end seems to be a fond memory, a summation while bowing out in conclusion.

We feel works like this are "deep" in proportion to what we bring to them and how they seem to reflect our experience of life. Perhaps my own attraction to this one is partly due to my own maturity and the ability to look back across a lifetime toward the distant events of childhood and adolescence.

But don't let age or experience get in your way of the rich enjoyment to be found in Schubert's works for chamber ensemble. The cello quintet doesn't stand alone; it's part of a large body of string quartets, piano trios and quartets, and at least one octet including a few wind instruments.

Another sea to dive into and swim around in. Come on in, the water's great.

Music and Transience

When you just can't get that tune out of your head ...

With all the furor over music piracy in recent years, it never ceases to amaze me that most of the music in question is of the most transient kind. The popular song is certainly one of the most enduring forms of music, with roots going back farther than we have written history. But start looking at what remains, and it's clear that most of the individual examples have the lifespans of houseflies.

Take rap, for example. They say the roots of this genre date back to the 1970's. You could place it even earlier if you link an instance like Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," with its semi-spoken lyrics delivered over a driving beat. But, Dylan aside, out of the hundreds and thousands of compositions since, how many are classics, still remembered and hummed (or chanted) by fans decades later? How many will there be in another few decades?

Or look at the earlier styles of the 20th century. This is still living memory for many of us, but styles changed with almost violent rapidity during those 100 years. In 1900 people were still turning out for oompah-band concerts in the park, with tunes like "The Girl on the Flying Trapeze" and "I Dream of Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair." Twenty years later we'd moved on to jazz and the Charleston, another ten and it was Swing, Big Bands, then post-war Pop, Rock, and all the Rock variations. Makes you dizzy, Miss Lizzy.

When you try to see farther back the details are soon lost in mist at the horizon. We have some choice examples of Civil War tunes, ditties like "Just Before the Battle, Mother, I Am Dreaming Most of You." And of course we still know "Yankee Doodle," which the redcoats sang to taunt the soldiers of the Continental Army in our Revolutionary War. But before that?

Well, let's see. We have some Christmas carols still in use after a few centuries. "What Child Is This" even uses the tune of the ancient "Greensleeves" that might go back over a thousand years. And we know some of Thomas Morley's compositions from the Elizabethan period because they were immortalized by being included in Shakespeare's plays, but we don't even know how many others have been lost.

Last year I reminisced about the music of Lennon and McCartney, but in spite of their hits that are still being performed today it's clear that many of the lesser works are already falling by the wayside. The chaff falls away, and the precious grains are few and far between.

What a different landscape it is in the world of classical music, and how glad I am to be living in that world. It's a place where you can wander for a lifetime, constantly discovering new composers and new performances of their work, even if there was never another new piece composed.

We can start in the Middle Ages with the quaint strains of recorder and crumhorn consorts, with lute music, madrigals, and the timelessness of Gregorian chants. (And what an odd best-seller that was when the album Chant was released in 1994!)

As if cruising down a river, we can progress through the glories of the Italian Renaissance with brass choirs and contrapuntal organ music, passing the monumental works of J.S. Bach along the shore, the scintillating diversions of Mozart, the heroic struggles of Beethoven, the soaring emotion of the Romantic period, the wrenching turbulence of Mahler, the startling iconoclasm of the atonal 20th century and its many conflicting ideas of what music could and should be.

The grand procession is ongoing, with an explosion of electronics and computer enhancements creating a growing arena of possibilities. Gaining full appreciation of it requires, and deserves, a lifetime of attention. You'll excuse me if I couldn't care less who wrote, or has the rights to collect royalties on each copy of [insert song of the week here].

Roll Over Beethoven

Pardon me, boy -- is this the philharmonic station?

One of the things that should endear Ludwig van Beethoven to all of us who live in this latter day egalitarian culture was his insistence upon being treated as an equal by his "betters," meaning the nobility. Even though he may not have granted that courtesy to others, and even though he was decidedly upwardly mobile himself, still he chafed at the tradition of patronage that decreed musicians had to arrive through the servants' entrance, even if they were the greatest composers of their day.

I like the story that the "van" in his name, a pretension to noble birth, was added by Beethoven himself. It is also said that when his brother added the sobriquet "Land-owner" to his card, Lugwig countered by having some of his own printed with "Brain-owner." If invited to a party as a guest who was expected to perform, he refused; but if not expected, he would perform, like it or not.

I was thinking about him today, as I do almost every weekday, because when I disembark at the Brickell Metrorail station I am invariably greeted with the strains of the first movement to the Fifth Symphony. Due to the efforts of local Beethoven enthusiasts, including the local homeowners association and at least one County Commissioner, this recording has been playing between the security and train announcements for several years now. You might think that it would get tiresome after all that time, or that the endless repetition -- never a full performance, or any of the other three movements -- would have turned the immortal symphony into mindless Muzak by now. But so far it has never failed to strike me as new and vigorous every time.

Surely this is a testament to what an enduring composition this piece is. In a recent biography, Beethoven: The Universal Composer, author Edmund Morris relates a story about being on the campus of Harvard University in the middle of winter. It was the first day the sun showed itself after a week or more of blizzardly darkness. As the snow lit up, someone opened a dormitory window and placed speakers on the sill to blare out the triumphant final movement of -- what else? -- Beethoven's Fifth. Supposedly everyone who was close enough to hear it stopped in their tracks and listened as the music gave perfect expression to their joy at the return of the light.

So I often still find myself with an additional spring in my step as I leave the station, and find myself humming the other movements as I walk to my office -- the lyrically swinging second, the waltzing scherzo that imitates the opening theme of the first movement, and then the victorious fanfare of the finale that emerges from the misty end of the scherzo like a sun cutting through morning fog.

There's another irony about the playing of the Fifth at the metro station, though. At the same time they were memorializing Beethoven, the Brickell Homeowners Association, fancying themselves loftier than the rabble who must ride the bus, engaged in a successful lobbying campaign to nix the rental of some space at their train station to Greyhound. Now the poor slobs who drift into town that way must remain content to disembark among some warehouses near the airport from which it is a long hike to anywhere.

Poor Ludwig, who insisted in his Ninth symphony that "all men will be brothers" and that "this kiss is for all the world," must be rolling over in his grave.

Handel's Gift

The music that keeps on giving ...

Miami used to be a provincial town when I was growing up here, with precious little in the way of big city cultural events. Times have changed since we've become a multicultural hub of the Americas, though, and sometimes we get performances here that are better than anything we have have a right to expect.

So it was on Friday evening when James Judd, former conductor of the Florida Philharmonic, returned to conduct a splendid ensemble and chorus in a world class rendition of the complete Messiah at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.

Only five years old, the Boca Raton Symphonia played with grace and clear intonation, as well as a good deal of oomph when it was called for, including a thunderous timpani and clarion clear trumpet (more on that later). The Master Chorale of South Florida, in existence for seven years, draws its talent from all three of our local counties. Under Artistic Director Joshua Habermann, they exhibit a mature and refined sound with many textures and a large dynamic range.

And then there were the guest vocal soloists. These kids can sing. And I have to call them kids, because the eldest of them were only 22 -- a very cultured mezzo-soprano, J'nai Bridges, and a striking tenor, Joshua Stuart. But then there was soprano Sarah Shafer, only 20, already with the resume of a 30-something, whose bio mentions that, by the way, she has also appeared as a piano soloist with two regional orchestras. I wonder what she does with all her spare time? And bass Thomas Shivone, with a stronger voice than any 19 year old has any right to possess, who began studying voice at the age of 13. So let's see ... six years, and for how many of them has his voice changed?

With such a cast, Maestro Judd could be counted on to wring every last drop of emotional content from Handel's enduring oratorio -- the Christmas gift that just keeps on giving. A couple of years ago I wrote about listening to a recording of this work, especially the chorus For Unto Us A Child Is Born. But good live performances always beat even the best recordings. There is a texture in the air, a complex of physical vibrations, that is far more subtle and expressive than what comes out of a pair of speakers -- even my very nice set by Bose. And of course seeing the performers, and getting the full resonance of the acoustic space in which they work, add even more.

One thing I noticed about this rendition of "Unto Us" was the way the words were first sung gently, as if to a babe in a cradle (or manger), and then with progressive gusto and emphasis. Naturally, the Halleluiah chorus was equally splendid and jubilant, and audiences can always be excused if they feel the performance could end right there. But Handel had more to say, to complete the story, and the rewards are there for keeping your seat.

"The Trumpet Shall Sound," for example, in which the first trumpet -- in this case, Jeff Kaye -- gets to show what he can do. They had him deliver this solo from the lectern where the lay reader stands during a mass, while the aforementioned bass vocalist, front and center, had to keep up with him and project over him. Talking of textures, you could practically see the brass notes in the air; if they'd been any closer you might have been able to reach up and grab them as they went by, each one perfect and buffed to a high sheen.

The work ends with "Worthy Is The Lamb That Was Slain," and one of the most rousing Amens ever rendered outside of a gospel meeting. I asked my wife on the way home, "How did he get them to hold that last note so long?" She replied that of course they were professionals.

Of course. Don't try this at home, kids. These were professional drivers on a closed course. Just say Amen.

Let's Hear It For Cleveland

---

Saturday evening we had the great pleasure and privilege of watching and listening as conductor Kurt Masur whipped the Cleveland Orchestra into as spirited a rendition of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony as I have ever heard.

The Cleveland is in the midst of its winter residency in Miami, an annual treat that gives us some consolation over our loss of the Florida Philharmonic, which did not survive long enough to move into the new home we built for them. Sitting through this all-Beethoven program I could not help recalling the summer Beethoven festivals that director James Judd used to lavish on us. I'll certainly never forget the finale of that performance of the Ninth that caused the audience to leap to its feet and utter a sound like the crowd at a basketball game whose team had just come from behind to win with a three-point shot at the buzzer.

But that was then. Now we have to be content with a few performances per year of a world class orchestra appearing with a variety of guest conductors. The German-born Masur, now past 80, may have been among the most elderly people in the room, but he was the only one of us who stood on his feet though the whole performance, and showed himself still full of energy and the ability to convey it to us through the orchestra.

First for a warmup was the Leonore Overture No. 3, which demonstrated old Ludwig's marvelous blending of orchestral textures and the Cleveland's stellar ability to bring them out -- including the use of an off-stage trumpet as a special effect for the fanfare that appears in a couple of places.

Then Canadian pianist Louis Lortie turned in a slick performance of the First Piano Concerto, full of liquid arpeggios and clear percussion. This first foray into a keyboard concerto by Beethoven is interesting because the first two movements -- especially the gentle and lyrical second -- could easily be mistaken for Mozart. But then the third begins and there's no doubt we're in the hands of someone new. There is even a playful jazzy figure perhaps not heard again until the time of Gershwin or Latin American dance music.

And finally the Seventh Symphony. What can I say? It's only the second time I've heard it live (the first was by the still-existing Miami Symphony, which did a fine job and really brought out the strong bass lines), but I've heard many other recorded performances. My recent favorite was by the Minnesota Orchestra with Osmo Vanska conducting, and they are said to be doing some of the best Beethoven right now. What I liked about Vanska's interpretation was the way they got the rhythm and tempo right in the final movement, which can easily turn stodgy if taken too slowly.

Well, slowness was no problem for Masur and the Cleveland. From the downbeat they were off to the races, running lickety split for the finish line. The effect was electric, and reminded me that one contemporary critic of Beethoven complained that his music "exceeded the range of the human nervous system." Well of course it did -- they'd never heard anything like that before.

Lucky for us, two hundred years later we can hear it still.

The Rest of Rachmaninoff

A while back in a piece called "The Rest of Tchaikovsky" I talked about filling in some of the gaping holes in my music collection with the help of eMusic. Well, I'm still at it, but this time I browsed the vacant aisles of one of our few remaining music stores armed with a Christmas gift card that was burning a hole in my pocket.

Poor old Specs Music. Originally "Specs Records," then belatedly and pointlessly renamed "Specs Records and Tapes" (remember tapes?), and now called "Specs Music" even though the old sign is still on the wall, it used to be my home away from home on weekends back when most of us still limited our music choices to what happened to be available in the bins. Back then only real hi-fi nerds bothered to place special orders for things they  had found in catalogs or in advertisements in magazines, and only they would pay the premium prices such service commanded. Over the years flipping through records changed to flipping through CD's, but now most of us are scrolling through screens instead.

To their credit, Specs has outlasted the mighty Virgin Music that moved into the mall down the street, and they have updated their browsing with digital scanners and earphones so you can instantly hear the disk in your hand without opening it. They even absorbed the competing used-CD store that opened right next door to them, and now offer used CD's in the same bins with new ones. If they wanted to rename themselves again, they could call it "Specs CD's, DVD's, and Video Games," but it probably would be for naught since consumers have moved on to MP3's and streaming media that don't require any shelf space. You are forced to the conclusion that Virgin closed first because they saw the writing on the wall first.

But I digress. The point of this is Sergei Rachmaninoff, whose complete three symphonies I acquired for a decent price on a 2-CD set. I've long been a fan of his Second Symphony, which is perhaps the single most beautiful concoction ever devised for a full orchestra to play. But I'd never become familiar with the First and Third, so these were new treats. I'm already on speaking terms with number 1, but number 3 is a bit stand-offish, with lots of percussive bluster, so it will take longer to get to know it.

It's been a great pleasure to explore Rachmaninoff again. The last of the 19th century Romantic school, he was an anachronism who lasted far into the 20th. But in many ways he surpassed those who went before, such as Tchaikovsky, his teacher and early influence whose untimely death came as a great shock to the young student. Besides extending the tonal and emotional range of music even further, if that was possible, he added his own prodigious abilities as a performer. His four piano concertos remain some of the most demanding yet lyrical in the repertoire, and it was his skill at the keyboard that enabled him to invent such dense and complex yet exceedingly melodic scores.

Moving from the music store back online to eMusic, I uncovered Vespers, also known as The All Night Vigil, Rachmaninoff's unique collection of pieces for a capella chorus. Rich in harmonic textures, with solo voices rising against the crowd, it references liturgical music from the Russian Orthodox Church, which must have held special nostalgia for the expatriate composer. Having left Russia after the 1918 revolution, he lived variously in Europe and the United States, where he died in 1943, in Beverly Hills of all places, temporarily in exile again from his favorite home in Switzerland.

These "new" works (to me) sent me back to listen to some of my other Rachmaninoff favorites -- the tone poem, Isle of the Dead, and the three Symphonic Dances, his last completed work. These are often recorded together, and taken that way they almost comprise a fourth symphony, with the Isle of the Dead forming a brooding first movement like a premonition of impending doom, including one of his many quotations of the 13th century Latin hymn called Dies Irae, or "days of wrath," that was all the rage during the Black Plague. This is a theme that would bind it together with the other movements to form a whole, since it appears yet again -- triumphantly this time -- in the last of the Dances.

Something else I intend to explore is a recent transcription of my old friend the Second Symphony into a new Fifth piano concerto. You can read here how Alexander Warenberg, a contemporary expatriate Russian pianist and composer, was commissioned to re-write the symphony to feature a piano, while boiling the four movements down to the concerto's traditional three. Love it or hate it, you can't deny it's an interesting experiment, and the music is fantastic either way. Rachmaninoff may be gone, but he's still giving us new material. 

Who says classical music is dead? Seems to me it's alive and thriving. Now, let me leave you humming this cadenza from the Third Piano Concerto:

Music of the Spheres

Making joyful noise ...


One thing notably absent from Quaker meetings is music. At ours, the only exceptions are the annual Christmas celebration at which carols are sung, and the rare occasions where one of our members is moved to give his message in song form -- a unique and pleasant form of vocal ministry.

I've been known to feel musical envy for those other religions, like the Catholic and Lutheran, which have generated such rich troves of sacred music. I suppose I got this from my parents, both classical musicians, to whom it was so important that it was the main reason we ended up being Unitarians for a time -- because the organist played a lot of Bach. Reason enough!

Of course, not all musicians are as profoundly spiritual as J.S. Bach, who was known for inscribing the title pages of his works, "To the Glory of God In the Highest." Yet in a very fundamental way, the impulse to sing, to "make a joyful noise unto the Lord," must have been there at the earliest beginnings of human music. It certainly formed the foundation of Western European music, the notes and scales and rhythms and forms of which continue to define what music is, however hard we may try to twist it into something new.

What else is there to do when contemplating Divinity, or the Universal, or simply a beautiful day, but to sing its praises? So perhaps it is not surprising that I often find myself with music on the brain as I sit in supposed silence in our meeting for worship. Today it was Tchaikovsky -- the achingly beautiful slow movement to his First Symphony -- and later part of Leonard Bernstein's Mass, where the priest sings, "Let us sing the Lord a simple song ... for God is the simplest of all." But other times it has been Bach, or Beethoven ("On your knees now, O millions? Do you sense your Maker, world?"), or any number of the other selections that my brain has become stuffed with over the years.

I ended up thinking of an interview I saw with a physicist (I believe it was Phillip Morrison) who was asked, if we ever established contact with a civilization of alien beings, what would we have to say to each other? He answered that one thing we might do was to compare accomplishments. For example, he said with a smile, we might say, "We've got Bach's B-minor Mass ... what have you got?"

Well, that sounds like bragging to me. But it does raise the prospect that if such communication ever does happen -- and it may -- then perhaps it will be the music of the alien civilization that speaks to us most directly, and tells us that we have a common origin, and that we share the same desire to praise That From Which We Came. In short, it could be the most profound thing we have to say to each other, though it will come as news to neither of us.

Doctor Atomic

Like eating vegetables, I watched because it was good for me ...

When John Adams' opera, Doctor Atomic, aired on PBS recently I made myself sit through the entire production. Actually they showed it twice in my locale, and that was good because the first time I made it only to the end of Part 1. But a few days later I started over and this time took in the whole thing in a single sitting, all two hours and fifty-five minutes of it.

You may well ask, why was it so difficult? And I would add, why should it be so difficult? I mean, after all, opera is supposed to be entertainment, and we all love to be entertained, right? Three hours is the same length as a football or baseball game, and we have no trouble sitting through those even with commercials. The main problem of course is the same one that "modern" music has been struggling with for the past century -- namely that it has become, for most people, impossible to listen to.

Even for those of us who are disposed to listen and attempt to appreciate contemporary works, it can be a struggle. A couple of years ago my wife and I attended a production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes by the Santa Fe Opera. As much as we were enjoying the story and spectacle of it, we still had to call it quits by the end of the second act because it seemed interminable and was not compelling enough to keep us in our seats any longer. The next morning I joked with some friends that the piece might not be over yet. (For all I know, it may still be going on.)

In the case of Doctor Atomic, I confess I'm not a fan of John Adams as a composer. Though he is classed as a minimalist along with Philip Glass (whom I discussed last year), to me his works are far less minimal and at the same time far less melodic than those of Glass, making him harder to like. And this is really the heart of the matter -- opera began as song, and it is difficult to identify anything as song when it lacks a melody. And never mind how to define that, we all know when we hear one.

Ever since the Baroque era, opera buffs have been familiar with the difference between aria and recitative. The latter is the quasi-spoken form that was used in Bach's time to tell a prefatory story before the lyrical aria. Later, in the golden age of 19th century opera, recitative was used the way dialog is used in Broadway musicals, as intermissions between arias in which the story was moved along. By the time we had degenerated to Broadway, the pretense was abandoned and the dialog was merely spoken.

My beef with Adams is that his work gives the impression of being 100% recitative. Heaven help us if anything resembling a melody should break out by accident. So in spite of the praise I am about to give for the overall result, listeners are doomed to leave the theater with memories of many sounds but no tunes in their heads.

Are we childish to expect to walk away whistling to ourselves? I don't think it's so much to ask. Even Leonard Bernstein once claimed that his greatest ambition was to compose something so simply lyrical and memorable that audiences could sing it as they came out. Of course, Bernstein was something of an exception to the rule of inaccessibility in modern music, for while he produced a number of demanding orchestral works he also gave us West Side Story -- perhaps the nearest thing to a popular opera since Porgy and Bess -- and the whole point of his great Mass was the inclusion of popular musical forms ranging from folk and blues to jazz and rock.

The human impulse to melody is just too powerful to ignore. Even some rappers are beginning to (gasp!) actually sing in some of their, um, songs. Their fans, long starved on a diet of percussion and doggerel verse, can be expected to lap it up and demand more. So I rest my case.

And Finally About Our Story

With all that said, the spectacle of Doctor Atomic still leaves a powerful impression that makes it an important work. The invention of the Bomb is arguably the defining moment of the whole 20th century, spanning the period from Einstein's 1905 theory through the World Wars and the Cold War up to the threat of nuclear terrorism. The figure of Robert Oppenheimer has been compared to both Prometheus and Doctor Faustus. So how can we not be endlessly fascinated by the subject?

Part 1 takes place about a month before the test at the site named "Trinity" by Oppenheimer himself. No wonder then that this part ends with what seems to be everyone's favorite moment, a recitation of John Donne's sonnet, "Batter My Heart, Three Person'd God." This soliloquy-like aria contains the closest thing to melody in the entire work -- in fact, while writing this a scrap of it came back to me, a sequence of a few notes that I could try to sing if asked. (But please don't.)

Elsewhere the libretto by Peter Sellars has an abundance of beautiful language drawn from sources as diverse as poets Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser and the Hindu scripture called the Bhagavad Gita. The latter is the source of Oppenheimer's famous remark upon the test blast: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Oddly, unless I missed it, that quotable line seems to be absent from the opera, perhaps omitted for dramatic reasons having to do with the ending.

The poetry competes with, and is balanced by, technical language quoted from government reports and other personal accounts of the time. I liked the contrast, and it was a good depiction of the dichotomy that existed within Oppenheimer himself, who was as complex a soul as any from the classical tragedies. Perhaps that's why the use of the cast as a Greek chorus is so effective, while also portraying what a group effort the bomb project was. And, it's a reminder that we are all in this together.

Part 2 covers the last night before the test, and is all about the building of tension that leads to the conclusion. Native American naturalism contends with militarism and technology. The feminine (personified by Oppie's wife, Kitty) counters the masculine. Thunderstorms threaten to detonate the bomb prematurely. General Groves, under time pressure from Washington, takes it out on his meteorologist, demanding favorable weather for the test. The scientists are taking bets on how powerful the explosion will be, and whether or not it will ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world. Not too much pressure!

The final turn of the screw is the way the passage of time slows near the end, expanding the final minutes to several times their size, until both audience and cast are waiting breathlessly for the sudden flash it seems will never come. It does, of course, as we know it must, and as the curtain descends the final voice is that of a Japanese woman calling for water for herself and her children, and our national guilt descends upon us as well.

Ultimately the opera works not because it tells the story, which has been told much more completely elsewhere, or because of its beauty, because beauty is not the first word that comes to mind to describe the rumbling and pounding score. Rather, it is a meditation on the event, a powerful invocation of all the forces at work and the effect they have had on us, irrevocably and forever. It was the day Pandora's box opened, and one we will never forget.

When the ancient Greeks went to the amphitheater to see Oedipus they didn't go to learn the story, because they already knew it well. They just went to bask in their mythology, to consider once again what it had to tell them about their own lives. Now Oppenheimer and Trinity are part of our mythology, and it behooves us to take what lessons we can from them. Doctor Atomic is one attempt to do just that.

[For more I recommend the biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird, which I mentioned in last year's blog about Los Alamos. There are also two definitive histories by Richard Rhodes called The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. I've recently ordered both of them and plan to read and report on them in the future, so stay tuned.]