September 15, 2015 • 11:37 pm Comments Off on Ehnes Quartet Review
My review of the Ehnes Quartet and their Beethoven cycle from this summer’s Seattle Chamber Music Society Festival has been published in the current issue of String magazine. A link to it is here (pdf).
Filed under: Beethoven, chamber music, James Ehnes, review, Seattle Chamber Music Society
July 14, 2015 • 9:04 am Comments Off on James Ehnes on His “Other” Life as a Chamber Musician
photo © Benjamin Ealovega 2012
Here’s my piece for The Strad about violinist James Ehnes and his string quartet, who recently opened Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2015 Summer Festival:
James Ehnes has long been a familiar presence on the international circuit, but he remains known to many music lovers primarily as a solo violinist — a virtuoso who, armed with a stunning technique, also has something compelling to say. When he does appear in chamber programmes, it’s often been with a piano partner or in varying chamber formations.
Filed under: Beethoven, chamber music, James Ehnes, Seattle Chamber Music Society
June 11, 2015 • 8:36 am Comments Off on “May It Return to the Heart!”
This week brings the San Francisco Symphony’s performances with Michael Tilson Thomas of the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven — a work that certainly belongs to my top-ten list of all time.
Following a trial run in Los Angeles in January, it’s being given as a “multimedia staged event”, complete with scenic, lighting, and video design; James Darrah is the director.
Of the earlier run in January, Mark Swed had this to say about MTT’s relationship with the Beethoven score:
In the grandest sense, this “Missa Solemnis,” with all its attendant baggage, is a kind of mission statement for MTT. He sets out to unpack a complicated artistic and musical construct, to reveal its workings and to treat it as a large-scale act of discovery.
The Missa Solemnis held intense personal significance for its composer as well: “Von Herzen — Möge es wieder — Zu Herzen gehn!” (“From the heart –- may it return to the heart!” wrote Beethoven on the copy of the score he presented to its dedicatee, his pupil and friend Archduke Rudolf.
For its public “premiere” in Vienna, three of the Missa‘s movements were given as part of the grand concert of 7 May 1824 that also unveiled the Ninth Symphony. (The secular context brought objections to performing the entire Missa.)
Next week MTT and the SFS continue their Beethoven Festival with a recreation of an earlier “marathon concert”: the one on a cold December night in 1808, when Beethoven premiered his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, and Fourth Piano Concerto in a program that also included a concert aria, three movements from his other Mass setting (the Mass in C major), a piano fantasy, and the Choral Fantasy, that fascinating precursor to the Ninth.
Filed under: Beethoven, choral music, directors, San Francisco Symphony
January 25, 2015 • 12:18 pm 1
“When your heart beats irregularly from heart disease, it does so in some predictable patterns. We think we hear some of those same patterns in his music,”says Professor of Internal Medicine Joel Howell about Beethoven, referring to findings in an article he recently co-authored: “The Heartfelt Music of Ludwig van Beethoven” (together with cardiologist Zachary D. Goldberger and musicologist Steven Whiting.
Their article, according to the abstract, “strengthens the hypothesis that Beethoven suffered from cardiac arrhythmias by placing Beethoven’s music in its historical context, and by identifying several compositions that may reflect Beethoven’s experience of an arrhythmia.”
Of course Beethoven’s best-known physical condition was his deafness, which started setting in around the turn of the century, when he was entering his thirties. The causes, however, remain a matter of speculation. In her post on the Futurity website, Beata Mostafavi remarks that additional claims have been made over the years that the composer suffered from “a litany of mysterious health problems including inflammatory bowel disease, Paget’s disease (abnormal bone destruction), liver disease, alcohol abuse, and kidney disease.”
As for the claim of an abnormal heartbeat, the new study zeroes in on such compositions as the late string quartets: in particular, the Cavatina from Op. 130 in B-flat major. Mostafavi cites the famous score indication in the middle of the Cavatina — “beklemmt” (“anguished,” “pinched,” “oppressed”), which the authors apparently render as “heavy of heart”:
[The] authors note that “heavy of heart” could mean sadness but may also describe the sensation of pressure, a feeling that is associated with cardiac disease. “The arrhythmic quality of this section is unquestionable,” they write.
I wonder, though, whether their premise might be working the wrong way. Scientists and artists approach unpredictability and patterns in a radically different way. Musical genius deliberately expresses itself via unpredictable patterns. One of the key factors that makes mediocre music mediocre and boring is precisely because (usually unconsciously) we can tell “where it’s going” as it repeats the same formulas over and over.
(Note this is NOT to be equated with the techniques of Minimalism: predictability can also be made artfully unpredictable.)
But to the extent that this study is trying to “explain” pattern aberrations, I think it may be on the wrong track. On the other hand, there are plausible arguments for a composer like Mahler — who we know did suffer from a serious heart ailment — inscribing his bio-rhythms into something like the halting rhythmic patterns at the start of his Ninth Symphony.
I’ve also seen convincing descriptions of the finale of Beethoven’s Second Symphony — one of the great examples of humor in music — as alluding to the composer’s digestive problems to create a musical joke:
Pay attention to how that chirpy opening figure is set against the rumble lower in the strings that follows it — the leap from this “hiccup” high up to the rumbles and quivers below, like a belch with belly-growl. The Second was actually considered bizarre and even shocking music at its premiere in 1803. One contemporary review on the piece as a whole: “a hideously writhing, wounded dragon that refuses to die, but writhing in its last agonies and, in the fourth movement, bleeding to death.”
August 4, 2014 • 8:32 am Comments Off on Seattle Chamber Music Festival Closes on an Elegiac Note
My review of the concluding concert of the 2014 Summer Festival is now on Bachtrack:
The days are starting to grow noticeably shorter in the Pacific Northwest, and the end of the month-long Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival brings yet another wistful reminder that we’re now facing the season’s inexorable downward slope. An immersive atmosphere of four weeks of three concerts each (plus free prelude recitals and additional events) gives the festival much of its flavour, making one all the more reluctant to bid adieu.
It’s been a month especially generous in discoveries, from the world première of an imaginatively crafted single-movement piano trio commissioned from Derek Bermel (with the Saramago-inspired title Death with Interruptions) to a welcome dose of vocal chamber music gems and other rarities mixed in with more standard fare.
On Saturday night the festival drew to a close with a typically diverse roster of musicians (totalling 15 over the course of the concert).
Filed under: Beethoven, chamber music, review
April 22, 2014 • 9:13 am Comments Off on Earth Day 2014
Two musical selections for this day:
An overview of the world of John Luther Adams:
and a journey with Beethoven:
Filed under: Beethoven, John Luther Adams, nature
April 18, 2014 • 2:33 pm Comments Off on Stéphane Denève and Paul Lewis with the Seattle Symphony
Stéphane Denève; photo by J Henry Fair
My review of this week’s Seattle Symphony program, with guest conductor Stéphane Denève and pianist Paul Lewis, is now live on Bachtrack:
This week’s Seattle Symphony programme brings the third and last of the current season’s co-commissions — all of which are United States premières — with The Death of Oscar by James MacMillan. Music director Ludovic Morlot led the SSO in the previous two (Pascal Dusapin’s violin concerto Aufgang and Alexander Raskatov’s piano concerto Night Butterflies); for the MacMillan, Stéphane Denève, a champion of the composer since his tenure with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, was on hand as guest conductor. Denève had also premièred The Death of Oscar in November in Stuttgart, where he currently helms the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Filed under: Beethoven, commissions, conductors, review, Seattle Symphony
April 13, 2014 • 10:51 pm Comments Off on Nike Wagner on Talking Germany
Nike Wagner, the third of revolutionary director Wieland Wagner’s four children and the great-granddaughter of Richard, headed the Weimar Festival for a decade before being named new director of the Beethoven Fest Bonn.
Here’s an interview (in English) she recently gave host Peter Craven for Deutsche Welle’s Talking Germany program. Craven gets Nike to talk about what it was like growing up after 1945 as a Wagner, her relationship to the family (and especially her father), and its connections to Hitler.
There’s not very much about great-grandpa himself, though she attempts a capsule summary of the essence of Wagner’s genius. And Nike discusses some of her ideas about the Beethoven Festival, including the importance of dramaturgically thoughtful programming.
On his blog, Craven offers a few more glimpses of his guest:
Our initial encounter is very warm. She offers me a hand and, while I’m thinking that I like this lady, I’m also registering just how small her hand is, how thin her bones, and how frail and delicate she seems. It’s certainly a light frame, I reflect, to shoulder the heavyweight history of her family and the role it has for the better part of two centuries played here in Germany.
Eventually he gets Nike Wagner to share this:
“You know, everybody has a specific weight. I’m light. I love to jump, to run, to swim. And … what do you call it in English? … to hover. Not in a moral way. They always think I’m strict. I can be strict. I’m not a moralist: but any kind of injustice drives me mad. I change planes, trains, apartments. But I’m faithful. When I love a person, I love a person. And I love to go dancing. Waltzing. Discotheques. Well, not any more. Private parties these days. I love to move!”
As a descendant of Richard and Cosima Wagner, Nike is also the great-great-granddaughter of Franz Liszt. Here’s an interview (in German) on her planning while she was still heading the Weimar Festival:
Filed under: Beethoven, music festivals, Wagner
January 16, 2014 • 3:02 pm Comments Off on Garrick Ohlsson’s Seattle Recital
My ears and nerves are still buzzing from the excitement of last night’s recital by the always-dependable Garrick Ohlsson (at the University of Washington’s Meany Hall). What generous programs he offers: Beethoven’s Op. 109 Sonata, Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy (D760), a triptych of selections by Charles Tomlinson Griffes, and Chopin’s Third Piano Sonata in B minor. And as if that weren’t enough, two superbly characterized Chopin waltzes for encores: the Op. 18 Grand Valse Brillante and the Waltz in C-sharp minor (Op. 64, no. 2).
I tend to think of Ohlsson as one of today’s least pretentious and fussy pianists, an artist to be counted on to give performances that are filling and satisfying. Of course that’s possible only because of his utterly confident technique — that left hand! — and his deep knowledge and love of the repertoire. What seems at times to be a “straightforward” approach turns out to reveal subtle insights. In the miracle of late Beethoven, for instance, he was able to explore different facets of the last movement’s variations (the new angle on the ultra-minimal two-note motif over which Beethoven obsesses in the first movement) without seeming to short-shrift the larger architecture beauty.
The Schubert Fantasy emerged as it should: a virtuoso showpiece on the surface, sure, but far more exhilarating for its sheer scope of invention and the pleasure Schubert takes in the powers of transformation of a basic idea. Ohlsson left no doubt as to why the next generation of Romantics fell so deeply in love with this spectacular but anomalous example of Schubertian ambition.
The Chopin Sonata may have been the most satisfying interpretation among these three well-known works. What struck me as especially successful was Ohlsson’s understanding of Chopin’s rhythmic articulation, both in his swooningly beautiful skeins of melody and in the robust, hell-bent momentum of the finale. But this didn’t come across as an affected exaggeration, or at the expense of those other aspects essential to this magnificent score. The whole picture is always in view – it’s just that it resembles getting a higher resolution, more dpi for clarity and detail.
Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920)
And then there were the pieces by the early-twentieth-century American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes. Two of the Roman Sketches, Op. 7, from 1916 (“The Fountain of the Acqua Paola” and “The White Peacock”) and the Scherzo from his Op. 6 Fantasy Pieces (1913). I found these to be an utterly delightful discovery. Hints of Griffes’s infatuation with then-new French music abound, but there’s something fresh about it all. The killer-energy Scherzo made for a nice cross-link with the Schubert.
Ohlsson recently released a recording devoted to this fascinating artist who died very young, a victim of the influenza pandemic. A gay man from Elmira, New York, Griffes was still of the generation when studying abroad was the done thing to gain any cred as a “classical music” composer.
Here’s what Aaron Copland had to say about this predecessor (in 1952, 32 years after Griffes’s death):
Charles Griffes is a name that deserves to be remembered … What he gave those of us who came after
him was a sense of the adventurous in composition, of being thoroughly alive to the newest trends in
world music and to the stimulus that might have derived from that contact.
Review (c) 2014 Thomas May – All rights reserved.
January 1, 2014 • 2:50 pm Comments Off on The Budding Buddhist
Like modern physicists, practitioners of contemporary literary theory of the post-structuralist persuasion trade in ideas that can seem uncannily reminiscent of the ancient insights of Buddhism: ideas like the slippery elusiveness of language, the self/author as an illusion.
But even without the filter of once-fashionable theory, certain artists themselves trigger comparison with aspects of the Buddhist quest. Beethoven’s final piano sonata, the Opus 111, replaces the conventional design with a two-movement dialectic that is frequently likened to a transition from Samsara (the stormy world of struggle of the C minor first movement) to Nirvana (the serene variations of the Arietta). “The farewell of the sonata form,” as Thomas Mann’s character Kretschmar in Doktor Faustus puts it.
According to the writer Pico Iyer, Marcel Proust is another artist who brings Buddhism to mind. Proust “ventures into the farthest reaches of self-investigation and reflection on subjectivity, but brings his understandings back into language and archetypal episodes that anyone can follow.”
The Buddha, as I understand it, ultimately devoted himself to the simple exercise of sitting still and resolving not to get up until he had looked beyond his many delusions and projections to the truth of what he was (or wasn’t) and how to make his peace with that.
A recreation of Proust’s cork-lined bedroom (Musée Carnavalet in Paris)
Am I the only one who thinks that this sounds very much like someone in a cork-lined room, almost alone for years on end and turning a fierce and uncompromising light on all his experiences and memories so as to see how much of them might be wishful thinking, and what they owe to illusion and the falsifications of the mind? Marcel Proust never formally meditated, so far as I know, and he never officially quit his gilded palace to wander around the world, practicing extremes of austerity and cross-questioning wise men. But if I want to understand the tricks the mind plays upon itself—the ways we substitute our notions of reality for the way things are and need to dismantle the suffering false thoughts can create—I can’t think of a better guide and friend than the author of “À la recherche.”
[…]
Proust’s genius, like that of his compatriot Cartier-Bresson (who called himself “an accidental Buddhist”), is to register every detail of the surface and yet never get caught up in the superficial. Here is the rare master who saw that surface was merely the way depth often expressed itself, the trifle in which truth was hidden thanks to mischievous circumstance (or, others would say, the logic of the universe). It takes stamina, bloody-mindedness, concentration, and a fanatic’s devotion to stare the mind down and see how rarely it sees the present, for all the alternative realities it can conjure out of memory or hope. Proust had the sense to belabor us with little theology, academic philosophy or overt epistemology; yet nearly every sentence in his epic work takes us into the complications, the false fronts, the self-betrayals of the heart and mind and so becomes what could almost be called an anatomy of the soul. I’m not sure sitting under a tree in Asia 2,500 years ago would have produced anything different.
Filed under: aesthetics, Beethoven, Buddhism, creativity, Proust, spirituality
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