Category Archives: Fleisher Collection

Paul Hindemith

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Saturday, May 5th, 2012, 5:00-6:00

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963). Five Pieces for String Orchestra, Op. 44, No. 4 (1927). Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Werner Andreas Albert. CPO 999783. 12:00

Hindemith. Trauermusik (1936). Dmitri Jakubovsky, viola, St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, Saulius Sondeckis. CBS/Sony 48372. 7:55

Hindemith. Symphony in E-flat (1940). BBC Symphony Orchestra, Yan Pascal Tortelier. Chandos 9060. 29:58

Once the darling of new music and his country’s rulers, Hindemith ran afoul of both groups, and lately it seemed as if nothing was going right.

This was new to him. He was one of the best-prepared composers of the 20th Century. He played violin so well, at 23 he was concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera (he also married the conductor’s daughter). He founded a string quartet, moved to viola, and eventually learned to play every instrument he could find, modern or ancient. He started music festivals, wrote theory books, soloed and conducted internationally. Everything he wrote was immediately performed and published.

But he made some enemies along the way. He had long since rejected the 12-tone orthodoxy in new music’s rising tide, and its influential disciples were quite happy to ignore him.

The new German Reich liked his educational leanings (exemplified by Five Pieces for String Orchestra, written for intermediate players), but finally wearied of his dissonances and thinly veiled swipes at authority. His wife was partly Jewish, and he worked with too many Jews to suit their purposes. Goebbels had him placed on the Entartete (“degenerate” music) list.

In 1936 London he was trying to make the transition to a more international profile, as opportunities in Germany dried up. He was to perform his viola concerto Der Schwanendreher with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The folk-tune-filled Schwanendreher (the person who turns the roasting swan on the spit: always humorous, Hindemith identified with the swan) would be a springboard for his usefulness as both composer and soloist.

But two days before the concert, England’s King George V died, and all performances were cancelled. It was a national tragedy, but a personal blow to Hindemith, trying to patch together a career. A lesser artist might have moped, cursing his fates, but Hindemith was practical to the core. From 11 am to 5 pm he sat down in an office at the BBC and composed Trauermusik (“music of mourning”) for solo viola and strings. Sir Adrian Boult gathered the BBC string players into a studio the next day, and they performed it in a live broadcast with Hindemith as soloist, galvanizing a grieving country.

Trauermusik quotes from Schwanendreher, from Mathis der Maler (his operatic jab at national-socialist repression), and from a Lutheran chorale, usually translated into English as “When in the hour of utmost need.” This last melody made the British perk up, not because they knew it, but because it sounds very much like the beloved “Doxology,” or “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” Hindemith hadn’t a clue, but proved Seneca’s dictum, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Four years later, an almost unknown immigrant in the U.S., he would write his outstanding Symphony in E-flat, and his career re-blossomed, commissions and students flocking to him. Hindemith was nothing if not prepared.

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.

Zoltán Kodály

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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.

Howard Hanson

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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.

Igor Stravinsky

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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

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Saturday, January 7th, 2012, 5:00-6:00

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.

Shakespeare in the Park

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First published in the Broad Street Review, 14 August 2011, and slightly edited since.

“No tights,” I said. I would dress up as an Elizabethan king, but I was not going to wear tights at the re-opening of Shakespeare Park. It’s the bit of land across Vine Street from the Free Library of Philadelphia’s front door. I didn’t know until last year that it was called Shakespeare Park. I knew the sculpture there, devoted to The Bard; I often ate lunch at a bench facing it, with Bob Gallagher (the poet and actor who would’ve been perfect for this job), and later, Sid (whose love of literature has inspired me for years).

The Library is in the midst of major renovations at Central, on Vine between 19th and 20th, and included in the project was an overhaul of the Park, fallen on hard times. New landscaping, lighting, benches, plantings, and irrigation has transformed it into an archetype of an urban oasis. Today was the day the protective fences would come down, and the Library’s President and Director would mark the occasion with brief words. I was to introduce her.

“I’m sure you won’t have to wear tights,” an Administrator assured me. Then I was handed over to the Development people, whose agenda the Administrator was innocent of. They wanted me to be, you know, like a King Henry. “King James, surely?,” I said, “if you’re talking Shakespeare,” but privately I was glad they didn’t insist on Elizabeth herself. Game, I am, but no dress.

Well, the costume came in, tunic, belt, chain, bloomers, and… tights. But at this point, in for a dime, in for a dollar, and besides, the bloomers are downright modest. Shoes? “I have brown loafers and black dress shoes, you know, like wingtips.” “Oh, they’ll be perfect.” Oh. Kay. Then there was this crown. Wow, they really did mean a king. At this, I decided to throw down the not-included gauntlet. “C’mon, let’s lose the crown. No crown.” “OK, fine,” they readily agreed. What did they care. They had a guy from staff willing to dress up in a Shakespeare costume.

Of course, at this, nobody—least of all, me—knew whom I was supposed to be. Stripped of a crown, I was not recognizably Henry or James or anyone else. I was not Shakespeare, as I would refer to him in my remarks. I was, simply, an Elizabethan male, or, as the tag attached to my tights stated, “Elizabethian.” (Privately I cast myself as a Friend of Shakespeare.)

What saved me from the slough of jaundice, however, was the real reason I took this on. My speech. Here it is, written by a very smart young staffer:

Hear ye, hear ye, and welcome to the Free Library’s re-opening of Shakespeare Park. The Bard himself knew of the importance and sanctity of finding nature in the midst of our busy existence. He wrote, “And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing.” Here to speak about this verdant space and its importance to the Free Library, is President and Director Siobhan A. Reardon. A hearty welcome to the good lady!”

That was it. That’s what sold me. Forty-five seconds, but good stuff. It is utterly remarkable that a city, that a functionary writing for a petty bureaucrat in a special collection in a department in a city, would present these words to the public. As if it were a normal and a good and an admirable thing that a city would do—in the course of its city-ness—that it would do for itself, for its citizens, for its visitors, for its indigent, and even for soi-disant poets and composers eating meatball sandwiches, looking up at a sculpture and not knowing that this place had a name.

I memorized it, parsed it, massaged and analyzed it, brooded, added breaks, lifts, laughs, moved and mixed them, practiced smiles, lifted eyebrows, waved hands, winked, gestured, barked, cooed, and tried to say Hear ye hear ye so it wouldn’t sound like Hear ye hear ye. And practiced it all again and again. How I ended up doing it at the time, I don’t know. But I felt those trees, I knew those brooks, and inside I pined and cried for public exemption. I didn’t care about tights or shoes, and even though I saw the looks of all the guys I work with who were thinking, “You’ve got. To. Be. Kidding,” I wasn’t embarrassed, not in the least.

When a reporter asked me afterward what I did, I said that I worked at the Fleisher Collection in the Library. “And you’re a Shakespearean actor, of course,” he replied.

I thought of Jacobi, and Branagh, and Olivier, and of my quasi-Irish-that-I-could-never-make-English accent, and of Robert Duvall asking Robert De Niro at the coffee counter in True Confessions if he wanted a piece of pie or something, and I thought of my Giant of Gath in Milton’s Samson Agonistes 35 years ago, the last time I did anything like this, and I almost fainted.

I did manage, “Well, today.” That was a lie—I’m no Shakespearean actor—but I’m telling you, it sure felt good to take the place of one, at least for 45 seconds.

A mother brought her little daughter up to me. The little girl wanted to meet Shakespeare.

Pictures at WHYY and the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Jean Sibelius

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Saturday, December 3rd, 2011, 5:00-6:00 p.m

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). Nightride and Sunrise, Op. 55 (1907). London Symphony Orchestra, Adrian Boult. Vanguard 1202, Tr 2. 14:02

Sibelius. Romance in C, Op. 42 (1904). Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi. Bis 252, Tr 4. 5:16

Sibelius. Valse romantique, Op. 62b (1911). New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Pietari Inkinen. Naxos 570763, Tr 12. 4:13

Sibelius. Humoresques, Opp. 87, 89 (1917/23). Mela Tenenbaum, violin, Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, Richard Kapp. Essay 1075, Tr 1-6.  21:42

Gustav Mahler famously remarked that the symphony “must be like the world—it must embrace everything.” This explains those disjunct themes delightfully butting against each other in his symphonies. What is often forgotten is that he said this to disagree with Jean Sibelius, who told Mahler that every part of a symphony must have a logical, ruthless interconnection with every other part. Not the world, replies Sibelius: a symphony is like the earth.

The orchestra was the reason Sibelius composed. He wrote songs, and early on dabbled in the string quartet. But mostly, he had no time for chamber music, which he considered too aristocratic—too Viennese—for his taste. No, only symphonic forces could express what he felt from the earth, the landscape, and the people of Finland.

Each country is unique, but Finland is remarkably set apart. It had been controlled by Sweden for centuries, so the language of commerce, culture, and education was Swedish. Russia took it over in 1809, and Finland wouldn’t gain independence until 1917, two days before Sibelius’s 52nd birthday. Finnish is unlike any other language; it’s not Romance, Germanic, Russian, or Scandinavian, and only distantly related to Hungarian and Sanskrit, of all things. Those who spoke it—usually rustics far from the cities—were almost foreigners in their own country.

The Swedish-speaking Sibelius was caught up in the Finnish patriotism burgeoning in the late 19th century. He took classes in Finnish, and immersed himself in the growing nationalistic literature. His music is so steeped in the national ethos that his own melodies have been mistaken (over “the smirks of the self-appointed authorities,” he wrote) for traditional tunes, such as the famous ending of Finlandia. His numerous tone poems based on the folk epic Kalevala would shape Finnish music.

But after popular works of the late 1800s he turned deeper, trying new sounds in the orchestra as he embarked on his run of seven symphonies. He continued to write smaller pieces, mostly to work out his ideas. Nightride and Sunrise is, frankly, odd. In the almost interminable churning of the horse ride, Sibelius strives for a gravelly, essential sound. It borders on mesmerizing.

In his Romance for strings and the little-played Valse romantique, another side of Sibelius emerges. It’s the husband and father Sibelius, living in the idyllic house in the country, away from urban distractions, close to nature. He composed the six Humoresques during the burst of brilliance of his final symphonies to keep his name in front of the public, as writing symphonies was tough sledding. Normally performed separately, they were originally heard together. There’s an element of gravitas hearing them this way, and it’s an education listening to an extended solo violin work other than his Violin Concerto, one of the greatest in the repertoire.

In the awakening of Finland, Sibelius invented its music. But it’s also true that Finland—its people and landscape, even its very earth—created the music of Sibelius.

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 nine years and counting!) every Wednesday at 7:00 pm on WRTI HD-2. For a look at all the shows, click here.