In the Broad Street Review, my career in orchestral percussion:
Not loud enough. The conductor looks my way, waves a cutoff, and says, “Yes, we could use more slapstick there.” We’re rehearsing the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. It runs about a half-hour, and the slapstick plays once. I’m holding the slapstick.
Saturday, April 7th, 2012, 5:00-6:00
Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967). Summer Evening (1906). Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Deutsche Gramophon 447109. 16:26
Kodály. Marosszek Dances (1923/29). Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Adrian Leaper. Naxos 550520. 13:20
Kodály. Háry János Suite (1926/27). Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Solti. London/Decca 443444, 22:48
In 1944 the German Wehrmacht was in control of Budapest, but the Soviet Red Army had laid a siege around it. Among the citizens trapped there was a world-famous composer, writing a Missa Brevis in the basement of a convent.
“The composer whose works are the most perfect embodiment of the Hungarian spirit”—according to no less an authority than Béla Bartók—is Zoltán Kodály, Bartók’s colleague in research, education, composing, and his lifelong friend. Kodály’s music “is rooted only in Hungarian soil,” he said, “but the deep inner reason is his unshakable faith and trust in the constructive power and future of his people.”
Long before Venezuela’s El Sistema took the world by storm, Kodály tackled many of the same issues in children’s musical education. He developed methods of pitch and rhythm memorization, but beyond that, believed that two factors were indispensible to teaching it: real folk music and excellent new music. So throughout his life he collected one and wrote the other.
The debut of his student work Summer Evening was in a 1906 concert by the Royal Hungarian Opera orchestra. He later revised it for a 1930 performance by Arturo Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic, for by then his reputation was established. His Marosszek Dances premiered that same year in Dresden, and his most famous work, the Háry János Suite taken from his singspiel (that is, an opera with lots of talking), had already premiered three years earlier, also with the the New York Philharmonic.
Each of these pieces exemplifies, to one degree or another, the combination of folk and original genius that permeates his music. They sound as fresh today as they ever did, in large part because of what Bartók, again, called Kodály’s “striking individuality; he works in a concentrated fashion and despises any sensation, false brilliance, any extraneous effect.”
Kodály helped people to escape the war, hid in that convent with his wife, and then after the war continued to compose. He became the international statesman for folk music research, and the series he and Bartók inaugurated eventually published more than 100,000 folk songs. Hungary instituted his music education method, it has been used around the world, and his music is as popular as ever, continuing to breathe with vital energy.
With Germans and Russians swirling around Budapest, Kodály’s Missa Brevis premiered in 1945, in the home of the same opera orchestra that had premiered his student piece almost 40 years earlier. If his “faith and trust” in Hungary were ever to be shaken, it would be now, but perhaps a smile crossed his face as he remembered the connection to Summer Evening, and as he gazed at these musicians. For they weren’t in the concert hall—that was far too dangerous. The world premiere of the Zoltán Kodály Missa Brevis was in the Opera House cloakroom.
On the first Saturday of the month Jack Moore and I host Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on WRTI 90.1 FM in Philadelphia and on the all-classical webstream at wrti.org. We also broadcast encore presentations of the entire Discoveries series (now ten years and counting!) every Wednesday at 7:00 pm on WRTI HD-2. For a look at all the shows, click here.
My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.
Soliloquy: Music of Mark Hagerty
Mark Hagerty’s music is smart and sneaky. Let’s start with sneaky. He doesn’t show off: his music is so nicely grounded that you don’t appreciate the intelligence and difficulty needed to bring it off until later. Whether it’s the hipness grooved into High Octane (written for the new-music ensemble Relâche) or the Clavier Books 1 through 3 and Cello Suite 2 in his new CD Soliloquy, his music keeps surprising you.
In the 2-disc Soliloquy, the surprise is the strength carried by lightness. These suites float like a dragonfly and zing like peppermint tea. The Cello Suite 2, performed soulfully by Douglas McNames, is profound but never moribund, and it may occur to you later how seldom you hear that nowadays. I’d call it optimistic, but that’s not quite it. It’s full of life, the parts that are good and the parts that are, perhaps, just real.
Hagerty’s three books for harpsichord, played with precision and vigor by his wife Tracy Richardson, lay out a wonderful trajectory through Baroque dance forms of Capriccios, Arias, Toccatas, and Saltarellos. The bite of the harpsichord can make deviations from tonality appear tendentious. Hagerty knows this as well as anyone, and composes suites that are a refreshing—even remarkable—series of harmonic acrobatics that push to the edge of imbalance, but never topple. Ooh and ah if you like.
So it’s sneaky and it’s smart. Hagerty writes on his website, “the 20th Century is over. Pastiche, irony, alienation, avant-garde posturing, minimalism, and shock are played out. We need music that fights back and evinces the positive that still does, or could, exist.” A fine soliloquy, that.
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012, 5:00-6:00
Howard Hanson (1896-1981). The Lament for Beowulf, Op. 25 (1925). Seattle Symphony and Chorale, Gerard Schwarz. Naxos 559700, Tr 4. 19:11
Howard Hanson. Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G Major, Op. 36 (1948). Eugene List, piano, MIT Symphony Orchestra, David Epstein. Pantheon 14104, Tr 5-8. 21:20
Howard Hanson. Elegy in Memory of Serge Koussevitzky, Op.44 (1956). Eastman-Rochester Symphony, Howard Hanson. Mercury 434302, Tr 5. 11:21
An ancient Roman seeking signs from the flights of birds would climb the Janiculum hill, overlooking the city from the west, across the Tiber. If an augur had been stationed there in 1921, he might just as well have considered the progress of a young Howard Hanson, from Wahoo, Nebraska, son of Swedish immigrants, and the first winner of the American Rome Prize for musical composition. Hanson lived for three years at the American Academy in Rome, which sits on that very hill.
One of the greatest engines for American music ever, Howard Hanson was a conductor, director of the Eastman School of Music for 40 years, and composer of one of the great American symphonies, his Second, the “Romantic.” The First, he penned in Rome. After seeing Hanson conduct that in Rochester, N.Y., Kodak founder George Eastman hired him to direct his six-year-old music school.
In Italy, Hanson had also composed The Lament for Beowulf, depicting the funeral pyre of the mighty hero. Hanson’s voice is already evident, with echoes of his much later Song of Democracy (on the Walt Whitman text), popular with college and high school choirs. Hanson’s affinity for choral music meshes with his Lutheran heritage, and his studies with organist/theorist Percy Goetschius and with Peter Lutkin, a founder of the American Guild of Organists and composer of one of the most-sung choral works ever, The Lord Bless You and Keep You.
Hanson founded the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, and through decades of recordings and concerts, conducted (he once estimated) more than 2,000 works—many of these titles now deposited in the Fleisher Collection—by more than 500 American composers. Eastman became one of the most influential music schools in America.
All along, Hanson composed. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 with his Fourth Symphony. To honor the great Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor and friend of American music Serge Koussevitsky, who had died in 1951, he composed the Elegy for Boston’s 75th Anniversary in 1955. It was most fitting, as it was Koussevitsky who had commissioned Hanson’s “Romantic” Symphony, in 1930, for Boston’s 50th Anniversary. Koussevitsky had also commissioned the 1948 Piano Concerto.
The life of Howard Hanson was one long series of honors, but his greatest honor may be the benefit to others in his educating, conducting, and, of course, composing. His years on the Janiculum augured well for the life of American music.
On the first Saturday of the month Jack Moore and I host Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on WRTI 90.1 FM in Philadelphia and on the all-classical webstream at wrti.org. We also broadcast encore presentations of the entire Discoveries series (now ten years and counting!) every Wednesday at 7:00 pm on WRTI HD-2. For a look at all the shows, click here.
Saturday, February 4th, 2012, 5:00-6:00
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). Symphony No. 1 (1907). Scottish National Orchestra, Sir Alexander Gibson. Chandos 8345, CD1, Tr 1-4. 33:14
Stravinsky. Capriccio (1929). Geoffrey Tozer, piano, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Neeme Jarvi. Chandos 9238, Tr 8-10. 16:59
Rimsky-Korsakov was not a man given to high praise. So when he wrote the words “Not bad” in his diary about the music of one of his students, that was unusually complimentary. The student was Igor Stravinsky.
Even though he already was a talented musician, Stravinsky followed his family’s wishes and studied the law. But as chance would have it, one of his classmates at St. Petersburg University was the youngest son of Rimsky-Korsakov. A meeting was arranged with the famous composer, and private lessons began. The professor had once told another law student (and prospective composer) not to give up the law, so he obviously detected some promise in young Igor. He advised him not to enter the Conservatory, fearing that dry scholarship might dull his instincts.
Stravinsky dedicated his first symphony to Rimsky-Korsakov, and well he might. His teacher arranged to have the middle movements of it performed, and then to have the entire symphony published. The first complete performance took place in 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died.
The influence of Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky in it is not surprising, nor is the solid orchestration. Stravinsky was hardly making a splash—barely registering in the various new-music concerts of the time—but he was growing. He continued to write, and slowly became known to some who, like the impresario Diaghilev, would later figure so prominently in his career. In two years they would collaborate in the creation of the groundbreaking ballet The Firebird. This may have completed his final graduation from his late teacher. Rimsky-Korsakov detested ballet.
Not 20 years—and more ballets—after that, Stravinsky was a world-famous composer. Even so, lean times forced him to compose concert music in which he could perform and earn extra money. Capriccio is a piano concerto in which he performed often. Serge Koussevitzky, the new director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, heard it and commissioned him for his orchestra’s 50th Anniversary celebrations in 1930. For that, Stravinsky produced another major work, the Symphony of Psalms.
Stravinsky may be the most important composer of the 20th Century, but his teacher kept him out of music school. Rimsky-Korsakov knew something about that. He had been in the Navy, never took a formal music class, and became himself a great composer. His music and his handling of the orchestra influenced generations around the world. Perhaps he saw something of himself in Stravinsky. Not bad.
On the first Saturday of the month Jack Moore and I host Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on WRTI 90.1 FM in Philadelphia and on the all-classical webstream at wrti.org. We also broadcast encore presentations of the entire Discoveries series (now ten years and counting!) every Wednesday at 7:00 pm on WRTI HD-2. For a look at all the shows, click here.
Béla Bartók (1881-1945). Two Images, Op. 10 (1910). Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez. Deutsche Grammophon 445825, tr 7-8. 18:28
Bartók. Romanian Folk Dances (1917). Chicago Symphony Orchestra, George Solti. London 443444, tr 9-15. 6:06
Bartók. Four Orchestra Pieces, Op. 12 (1921). London Philharmonic, Leon Botstein. Telarc 80564, tr 6-9. 25:01
The Fine Arts Commission told Bartók that his opera, the only one he would ever write, was no good, not suitable for the stage. With only two singers and no set changes, Bluebeard’s Castle just wasn’t operatic. He’d later tinker with it some, but the immediate effect of the rejection was that, for four years, he almost completely stopped writing music. Now recognized as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, Béla Bartók, just entering the height of his powers, in 1911 went into a composing blackout.
It may have been the best action he could take. A few years before, he had started to collect folksongs with his friend Zoltán Kodály. They had been classmates in conservatory, and, discovering a common interest, traveled throughout the countryside to find and transcribe old tunes, sung to them by old villagers and farmers. The music liberated the two students, and started to creep into their own creations.
The effect on Bartók would be profound. He was a devotee of Richard Strauss and Debussy, which can be picked up in his Four Orchestra Pieces, finished and put away in 1912, not orchestrated until 1921. The strange peasant music with asymmetrical rhythms, however, started influencing him right away. We can hear it already in Two Images, with the movements “In full flower” and “Village dance.” Bartók and Kodály discovered that the music wasn’t all “Gypsy,” either, at least what concert audiences had considered (by way of Liszt) to be Gypsy. There were five-note scales thought only to be Asian, and surprising harmonies that didn’t trudge along well-worn European paths.
So instead of giving up after the 1911 disappointment, Bartók decided to be useful. He went back to the field and started collecting folk music again. Recording tunes throughout Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, he made arrangements of them as he went. And then, when World War I brought his traveling to a halt, he started composing revitalized, original music. The popular Romanian Folk Dances come from this time, 1915, when he put them together for piano, orchestrating them two years later.
In 1918 he would write the century-shifting work The Miraculous Mandarin. Later would come the great Cantata Profana, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and the last four of his six string quartets. His immensely successful Concerto for Orchestra and Piano Concerto No. 3 were decades away, after he was forced, by another war, to leave Europe and move to America. But his self-education from the music of the people was the springboard for his entire output.
That his career was steeped in folk music is no revelation; he talked of it himself. He thought that a composer could use folk music in three ways. It could be lifted; it could be copied (with new tunes sounding just like old ones—no different from the first way); or it could be absorbed to create something completely new.
That is Bartók. His music could be highly dissonant, but it would always remain tonal and vocal, if wildly so. Quirky and relentless rhythms abound, and harmonies follow their own rules. But it took a crashing rebuff and a return to the country for Bartók to absorb and create anew. These three middle-period works show the emergence of a composer who would define the 20th century in entirely new terms.
On the first Saturday of the month Jack Moore and I host Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on WRTI 90.1 FM in Philadelphia and on the all-classical webstream at wrti.org. We also broadcast encore presentations of the entire Discoveries series (now ten years and counting!) every Wednesday at 7:00 pm on WRTI HD-2. For a look at all the shows, click here.
My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.
Musik Ekklesia: The Vanishing Nordic Chorale
It’s well past time to listen to historical instruments because they’re, well, historical. Or “informed,” or “accurate,” or whatever word we might use to feel scholastically correct. It’s time to listen because they sound beautiful.
Musik Ekklesia, “music for the church,” is an Indiana-based Baroque ensemble led by bassist and violonist Philip Spray. He’s rounded up some of the top period-instrument players—including Stanley Ritchie, violin, Wendy Gillespie, viol, and Kathryn Montoya, oboe—for this sparkling CD of surprising chorale arrangements.
It’s immediately surprising because in addition to the expected chorale setters Praetorius, Scheidt, Crüger, and the later J.S. Bach, who should show up but 20th-century Carl Nielsen? There’s also Grieg, and Mendelssohn’s deeply felt Verleih uns Frieden (Now grant us peace, Lord, in these troubled times), sung in Danish (Forlen os freden, Herre, nu). The light sweep and brilliance of the older instruments bring out new colors, which ought to make Mendelssohn, that lover of old music, smile.
The Lutheran chorale began in Germany but quickly spread to Scandinavian and other countries. They added their own tunes to the repertoire, and emigre enclaves in the U.S. continued those traditions. Musik Ekklesia brings the music all the way to today. There’s some Christmas music here, and even a brand-new work, an improvisation by the Budapest-born Bálint Karosi, Music Director of the First Lutheran Church of Boston, performing on its new 27-stop North German Baroque-style organ.
The times and instruments and composers spin, making any putative correctness happily unnecessary. It just sounds beautiful.
