Scratchings

Dave and I saw both halves of the San Francisco Symphony’s two-part “Baroque Delights” concerts (what an awful name that is), each concert including three of the six Brandenburg concertos and one or two popular Handel suites. The tickets were discounted on Goldstar, and the Brandenburgs are always terrific and, well, I’m sure Handel won’t care if my mind wanders while listening to his Royal Fireworks and Water Music once again. (After all, he wrote them in the first place as background music, as music intended to accompany but not distract you from whatever else you might be paying attention to at the same time. It seems to me that he was altogether successful in this, and the suites are perfectly pleasant pieces to listen to while reading or working; but why they keep turning up in concerts baffles me.)

The first of the two concerts, which was conducted by Jane Glover, was lovely. The sound balance was poor during the Water Music suite that opened the concert, and the lower strings were just about inaudible (couldn’t they have borrowed a shell from Berkeley Symphony or somewhere?). This boded ill for the rest of the concert, but as it worked out, different subsets of the orchestra were needed for each work, so the players rearranged themselves in between works, and the balance problems were mostly fixed for the rest of the concert. Whew.

I’ve heard more exciting performances of these three Brandenburgs (I love the sharper tang of period instrument performances, myself), but this was certainly one of the suavest — clear and polished and full of crisp colors. The first of them to be played was No. 3, which was enjoyable but a little on the polite side for my taste — in the last movement especially, I like a faster pace and for the occasional cross rhythms to have more of a kick to them.

No. 2, which was next on the program, was a particular joy — all four soloists (Nadya Tichman on violin, Robin McKee on flute, Jonathan Fischer on oboe, and John Thiessen on trumpet) were terrific, both individually and as an ensemble. In No. 6, the four solo violas were led by Jonathan Vinocour, who can produce an amazingly beautiful, rich sound out of his instrument. (He is also looking very woofy lately with his scruffy red beard.) The ensemble playing, the back-and-forth conversations where a theme is tossed around from instrument to instrument, all of it was clear and intricate and a lot of fun to hear.

The concert ended with Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and I’m afraid my mind started wandering again.

The second concert, a few days later, was conducted by Alexander Barantschik, who also played all the violin solos — halfway through the program it finally dawned on me that Brandenburgs Nos. 1, 4, and 5 have in common a violin among the soloists, and that’s why the six were divvied up that way.

This concert is now a strong candidate for the least enjoyable concert I’ve ever attended performed by an orchestra that wasn’t actually playing wrong notes. The Brandenburgs aren’t concertos in the modern sense; they’re not showpieces for a virtuoso soloist with the rest of the orchestra reduced to a supporting role. Each of the Brandenburgs has at least three soloists, and they spend more time playing as a small ensemble than they do playing individually. The point is in the musical conversation back and forth between the large group and the small group. So — with the exception of one portion of one movement, which I’ll get to in a moment — the orchestra is every bit as important as the group of soloists.

Mr. Barantschik and his players, though, seemed to think that these were bravura violin concertos in the Romantic style, or at least that they could be turned into something resembling that with enough determination. The result wasn’t happy.

No. 1 (my personal favorite of the six) was the most successful of the three, mostly because the violin is only one of six soloists. Three of the others are horns, in fact, and the parts Bach wrote for them are scene stealers.

But now and then Mr. Barantschik did have a violin solo, and when he played, it suddenly seemed like he’d stepped in from the wrong century. His playing was yearning, passionate, rhythmically free, with more than a touch of Gypsy in it, and it floated above all the other instruments instead of blending with them. His violin was even tuned slightly sharper than the rest of the orchestra, the way a soloist in a nineteenth-century violin concerto will sometimes do to make him stand out against the orchestra rather than blend in. There was no back-and-forth between the solo violin and the other instruments, just the violin soaring rhapsodically above the background music provided by the rest of the orchestra. Which is perfectly fine for a bravura showpiece for a star violinist, but not so good for intricate baroque counterpoint. Considered apart from its context, it was beautiful, even sumptuous playing, but oh did it ever not belong in this music.

This was only an intermittant annoyance in No. 1, but it got sillier and more irritating in No. 4. With fewer soloists, and none of them horns, there were more frequent opportunities for the violin to seize attention at the expense of the music as a whole.

But then No. 5 actually made me angry. I had already said to Dave at intermission that I didn’t see why they didn’t just use a modern grand piano instead of a harpsichord if they were going to play the concertos in this way. With the louder modern instruments playing in the louder modern style, the harpsichord was very difficult to hear in the first two concertos, just an indistinct tinkling in the background.

Well, in No. 5, the soloists are the violin, flute, and harpsichord, and the first movement — the exception I mentioned earlier — ends with a very lengthy, difficult, and flashy cadenza for the harpsichord. This is far and away the most prominent solo turn in all the Brandenburgs, the one time any instrument is actually called on to show off for a couple of minutes while the rest of the orchestra keeps quiet. Music historians point to this movement as a percursor, in fact, to what the concerto later became.

Furthermore, playing the harpsichord was Robin Sutherland, the Symphony’s phenomenally wonderful keyboard player. So we figured at least the harpsichord cadenza would be stunning, as it’s the one place in the Brandenburgs where this kind of all-focus-on-the-virtuoso approach is not completely misguided.

Well, the way the orchestra was arranged for No. 5, the harpsichord was behind the other two soloists, the violin and the flute, when it desperately needed to be up front and center — no, it really needed to be positioned smack in the middle of the audience, if only that were possible. In any case, something, anything that would have helped correct the imbalance ought to have been done. Even just seeing Mr. Sutherland more clearly might have helped things, if only psychologically. But as it was, even during the passages where no one was playing but the three soloists, the harpsichord was faint against the other two instruments, and the effect was of a duet for flute and violin with some unimportant harpsichord doodling in the background to fill in the harmonies.

What’s happening in the music during this passage, as we move toward the cadenza, is that the harpsichord is gradually taking on more and more importance and the flute and violin are being reduced to melodic fragments. But with the harpsichord weak in the background, none of that came off — it just sounded like Bach was running out of music for the two real soloists, the violin and the flute, to play.

During the big cadenza itself, the rest of the orchestra was silent, so at least we could finally hear the harpsichord distinctly. But the volume was still so low compared with everything else we’d been hearing the whole evening that it came off as anticlimactic.

This was frustrating, but hey, even great artists now and then make really dumb miscalculations, and I was ready to give everybody the benefit of a doubt and write it all off as a bizarre but ultimately well-meaning attempt to try something different that just didn’t come off. However, Mr. Barantschik’s manner during the cadenza pushed me over from merely frustrated to actually angry.

As I said, the way the soloists were arranged for this concerto, Mr. Barantschik and the flautist were standing in front of the harpsichord. As the cadenza started, Mr. Barantschik stepped several feet to one side, which sounds innocuous enough in writing but which in the moment seemed like an ostentatious, attention-drawing movement — the star of the show gracious stepping aside to let someone else have his brief moment. Even sillier, Mr. Barantschik actually picked up his music stand and carried it with him, which had no purpose that I could see other than to make the gesture that much more theatrical — it wasn’t like moving the music stand was going to help us hear the harpsichord any better. The flautist, I have to say, did the same thing, but a moment later, and it looked like he had not been expecting this and was uneasily following Mr. Barantschik’s lead.

Then, instead of paying attention to (or at least feigning attention to) Mr. Sutherland’s cadenza, Mr. Barantschik stared intensely at his music, nodding his head with the beat all the while — an attention-drawing movement that I and my fellow amateur musicians have been sternly warned against by the conductor in every musical group I’ve been part of since grade school, so how is it that Mr. Barantschik doesn’t realize how distracting it is? Anyway, I know the cadenza well enough to know roughly where we are in it without having to stare at the music — just by, you know, listening — and surely Mr. Barantschik knows the music far better than me. So this seemed like gratuitously ungracious behavior.

As Mr. Sutherland approached the climax of his showpiece, Mr. Barantschik lifted up his violin with an air of getting himself ready to come in on time — except that it was much earlier than he actually needed to get ready, and I cannot see what point there was to this other than to make a large physical movement that would pull the audience’s attention back to him (or at least the attention of that portion of the audience that wasn’t already focused on the bobbing of his head) a moment before the high point of another soloist’s turn.

The Handel piece that night — yet another Water Music suite — turned out to be the most satisfying thing the whole evening, in spite of its relative triviality as music. The orchestra was clearly enjoying itself as it played, everybody was listening to one another and responding to one another, and nobody was trying to twist the music into something it wasn’t. This is a fine orchestra, and if they’d played the three Brandenburgs in that spirit, it would have been a fine concert.

Dave and I went to a terrific concert at Davies last night. Osmo Vänskä, who has become a favorite conductor for both of us in the last couple of years, was conducting. First was a new work by Thomas Larcher, titled Red and Green. It was interesting and listenable, but all in all it seemed rather cerebral and I didn’t get much of a sense of shape from it. Still, I’d have to hear it again to have much of an opinion: I’m not good at picking up new music from a single hearing, and the list of works that I found rather dull the first time I heard them but later grew to love is embarrassingly long. So I can’t say much about it.

However, in a discussion after the concert, the composer at one point mentioned that the title, Red and Green, was deliberately unspecific in order to “give the listener space” to create his or her interpretation. I think this is a bad idea, rather like saying I’m going to keep as much sand as possible out of the oyster bed in order to give the oysters more space to create their own pearls. It just doesn’t seem to work that way. What I have always found is that the audience’s determination to create its own interpretations (and misinterpretations) of your work is limitless, or at least vast beyond your power to affect; you don’t have to do anything to help make it happen. Write as specifically as you can and you provide the material onto which each listener can project a different, deeply personal interpretation; write generally and the audience will have less for their unconscious minds to grab onto, and they’ll find your work vague and bland as a result.

Whether this is in fact true of Red and Green, I can’t say, not after one listening; what the composer says about his own process of creation isn’t necessarily true. It was just a comment that set off an alarm for me.

Next was the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, with Alexander Barantschik soloing. Dave and I heard this work live not that long ago, and I didn’t need to hear it again so soon — my sweet tooth for this kind of showpiece is easily satisfied. But this was a wonderfully light and transparent performance, taken more drily and less sweetly than I’ve heard the piece before, and I enjoyed it.

After the intermission came the best part, the best performance of Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony that I ever expect to hear in this lifetime — just stunning from beginning to end. Dave pointed out to me today that Vänskä was conducting the slow movements of the Vaughan Williams rather as though he were conducting Sibelius, with lots of airiness and gradual unfolding of the themes. Well, whatever it was that he was doing, it was wonderful, each phrase seeming to blossom organically out of the previous phrase throughout the piece.

Unfortunately, this was also one of the noisiest audiences I’ve sat among in quite a while. To our left was an elderly man, apparently hard of hearing, who was unaware of how much noise he was making adjusting his headset and rattling his program booklet and opening and closing some kind of case he had on his lap; the couple directly in front of us snuggled and whispered to each other throughout, despite catching my glare at least twice. And everywhere was coughing, coughing, coughing. You’d think that people would have coughed themselves out with all the noise they were making during the quieter sections, but then at the breaks between movements the coughing would really let fly and you’d realize that they’d actually been holding back. And every time a movement ended quietly, you could count on somebody having a coughing fit about one measure before the final note. It’s been explained to me that I should be more understanding and sympathetic, and that if you have to cough, then you have to cough, and I’m just fortunate in not having the kind of health problems that make coughing unavoidable. But if people know they are frequent coughers (and you can’t convince me that they all have conditions that just suddenly seized them for the very first time on entering the hall that night), couldn’t they bring handkerchiefs to cough into and at least try to muffle the sound a bit that way?

Really terrific concert last night at Davies, David Robertson conducting Dukas’s The Sorceror’s Apprentice and Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto and First Symphony, the Classical, along with the first public performance ever of a new piece, Uriah: The Man the King Wanted Dead, by a young Israeli composer named Avner Dorman. Tickets had been discounted so I went online the night before and bought the pair of seats in the very center of the very last row of the last balcony, Dave’s favorite place to sit. (In most concert halls, Davies included, the sound is best in the back of the last balcony.)

Dave and I had just heard MTT conduct The Sorceror’s Apprentice maybe six months ago, but it’s always a treat to hear it — there’s always a difference between hearing a piece on a recording and hearing it live, but with Sorceror it seems almost like hearing a different piece that happens to use the same melodies. And it was interesting to hear it played by the same orchestra but under a different conductor with a different take on the piece. Both were delightful in different ways; it was brighter and brisker and more of a showpiece under MTT, and there was more irony and earthy humor under Robertson. At times Robertson’s tempi seemed plodding compared to what I’m used to hearing, but the very choice of a plodding tempo in those places was itself a wonderful bit of scene painting and made me chuckle more than once.

I don’t really know the violin concerto, but Dave tells me it’s usually performed as a fiery, virtuoso showpiece (which I expect is exactly how Prokofiev intended it). Under Robertson, though, it sounded light as chamber music or a baroque concerto. Leonidas Kavakos was the soloist, and his playing was terrific, graceful and understated, never calling attention to his technique or the difficulty of the music. The whole thing was irresistible. Dave’s heard the piece many times and he told me during the intermission that he’d never heard it played that way, and that he liked Robertson because he always seemed to have a fresh take on even a familiar piece and could make you think about it in a new way. (Little did we realize there was one more such, and a jaw-dropper at that, to come.)

After the intermission came Uriah, a tone poem in five sections. I’m not musical enough to venture much of an opinion after a single listening, but I liked it and would like to hear it again sometime. The first movement is powerful and fierce, representing (according to the composer’s short talk before the piece, assuming I’m remembering it correctly) God’s anger at King David, who arranged for Uriah to be abandoned by his own men in battle so that David could marry Uriah’s beautiful wife; the second movement is slower and somewhat melancholy, representing Uriah’s thoughts and feelings on the morning of the coming battle; the third is a “presto barbaro” representing the battle and ending with Uriah’s death; the fourth is gentle and lyrical and represents the angels whom the composer hopes attended Uriah and guided him into heaven (2 Samuel is silent on this point, however); the final movement is a short epilogue repeating themes from the first movement.

Last was the Classical Symphony, which is usually played as a relentless snarkfest of mockery, and which I usually find pretty tiresome — a very clever music student’s prank, sure, and lots of fun the first two or three times I heard it, but since then I have felt like, OK, I get the point already and now I’d rather hear something else — like maybe one of the symphonies by Haydn or Mozart that Prokofiev was parodying, which stand up to repeated listening many times better than the Classical, but which nevertheless get programmed far, far less often. (I am a great lover of Prokofiev’s music, by the way, including all his other symphonies. It’s just his first one I don’t like all that much. But that’s the one that gets performed over and over and over again.)

Well, Robertson played the Classical as though it were one of those symphonies by Haydn or Mozart — the texture was light and transparent, the tempi were lively without being frenetic, the wit didn’t sound sneering, the lyrical sections were allowed to be sincerely and unsnarkily lyrical, and I heard all kinds of subtleties in the music I’d never heard before. Wow. It was wonderful and astonishing and ear-opening and probably the complete opposite of what Prokofiev meant it to sound like. I said to Dave afterward that I thought we’d just heard the first performance of the Classical Symphony ever to be informed by period performance style.

Last Thursday Dave and I went to hear the Berkeley Symphony’s season opener, a performance of not just one but two violin concertos, the Beethoven and the John Adams, both played by violinist and superhuman Jennifer Koh. In both works the violinist is kept very, very busy, and just to play the solo parts of both adequately in a single evening, without your bowing arm falling off, would be an amazing enough accomplishment. But Ms. Koh also played them both dazzlingly well, with all sorts of wit, insight, power, and precision. Dave and I have been hearing the Beethoven violin concerto rather a lot lately, including a really terrific performance with Hilary Hahn as soloist that was broadcast from the BBC proms; and still I heard details and nuances in Ms. Koh’s performance that I don’t remember noticing before. Really wonderful.

I had not heard the John Adams violin concerto before. I’m not sure how much I like it; it’ll probably take me a few hearings before I know. It’s certainly striking and atmospheric music, but it didn’t feel to me like it moved or developed much. However, I’m not always a good listener and sometimes it takes me a while to start hearing things in a piece of music that’s new to me, so I have to grant the possibility that I just haven’t gotten this one yet. In any case, Ms. Koh played it with great spirit and precision and, at times, physical vigor. I figure after a double bill like this one, she gets to skip the gym for a week.

This is Joana Carneiro’s second year as conductor and music director, and I thought the orchestra was sounding very polished, much more so than it has in the past; as exciting as the performances usually were when Kent Nagano was conducting, there was always a bit of scrappiness in the playing. Not so this time. Dave and I went to only one of their concerts last year, and that was early in the season, so this is the first time we’ve heard the orchestra in about a year; under Ms. Carneiro they’ve come a long way in a short time.

Well over a hundred violists stood elbow to elbow on the stage, in the aisles, and all around the hall at Freight & Salvage earlier tonight, playing the solo part of the Telemann viola concerto, while four violists seated in the center of the stage played a much reduced version of the orchestral parts, in a stab at the world record for number of violas playing together.

The result was flip-flopped from the usual concerto experience, and deliciously silly: The solo part was big and lush and loud, and the orchestral part was delicate and concertante-like. The right to play the cadenza in the third movement was one of the many prizes drawn in the raffle earlier in the program.

The all-viola program started with a prelude for solo viola by Bach (really wonderfully played, but there was no program given out and I don’t remember the name of the violist), followed by a duet, a trio, a quartet, a quintet, and an octet, all actually written for viola ensembles, and finally the Telemann concerto. A completely daffy idea for a concert but a lot of fun.

I’ve listened to all six Brandenburgs from the BBC Proms concert now. They’re terrific — as they’re live recordings, there are a few bloopers here and there, but they’re full of life, very joyous. In a couple of cases, the performance caused me to think about the music in a new way, and how often does a performance of such a familiar work manage to do that?

I’d blogged before that #1 had the most raucous horns I can remember hearing in the piece, and I found it very fresh and exciting. The other performance that I thought was particularly ear-opening was #3. Two reasons. First, #3 is the Brandenburg with the empty middle movement. Bach wrote only two slow chords, a cadence, for the movement. He gave no explanation, but the usual assumption is that he intended that one of the soloists would play a cadenza here, and that the two chords were what the orchestra would come in with to close off the movement and get you into the right key for the final movement. The violin cadenza here is terrific and more substantial that what I’ve generally heard done in this slot.

Then in the last movement, I’ve never heard the cross-rhythms emphasized so strongly. The whole movement is in 12/8, but there’s a certain figure that keeps recurring, that has a tendency to sound like it’s in 6/4. Then near the end of the movement Bach adds a tie to a couple of the notes in the figure, which eliminates one of the stronger beats in the middle and just about forces the figure to be heard in 6/4. In most performances I’ve heard, this is smoothed out; either the pulse is kept in 12/8 throughout or when the cross-rhythms occur they’re done somewhat subtly; in this performance, though, they let the cross-rhythms have a lot of weight, so that some instruments are very definitely playing in a strong 6/4 while others are playing in 12/8. And not just in the measure with the explicit syncopation but to a lesser degree in all the measures where the figure appears. It gives the movement a real kick that I can’t recall ever hearing it have before.

Dave let me copy his podcast of two concerts from the 2010 BBC Proms, the six Brandenburg Concertos conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner and played by the English Baroque Soloists. They’re not performed in numerical order, but in the order 1-6-4-3-5-2. I’ve listened to the first two so far (that is, to numbers 1 and 6).

The performance of number 6 is delightful, but the performance of number 1 is a standout, with very raucous horns. Easily the rowdiest horns I’ve ever heard in a recording or performance of this piece! They even make several flubs along the way (easy to do with period horns) and I don’t care much, I love them. No attempt at all to make the horns blend smoothly with the rest of the orchestra, which is exactly as I feel it should be for this piece. I couldn’t say why, but it just feels perfectly right to me this way. In an interview on the podcast, Gardiner calls them “party crashers” — yes! yes! yes!

Number 1 is my favorite of the six, and those horns are the main reason why. The very first recording I ever listened to of a performance of anything played on period instruments was a recording of the six Brandenburgs issued back in the 1980s by the Smithsonian Institution. I was in college and still finding my way around classical music. I’d heard the B’s by that time — they got played a lot on the radio (remember classical music radio stations?), and I think I must have owned a recording or two. I liked them okay. I thought of them as very smooth, suave, graceful, polite pieces.

I was buying vinyl from the Smithsonian already because they had a neat series of historical recordings of American musical. For some reason, I don’t remember why, the catalog blurb for the recording of the B’s intrigued me and I added it to an order of something else.

Well, I started with number 1, of course, and it just blew me away. There was the sheer novelty of the sound of the period instruments, first of all. But more than that, it was no longer a particularly polite piece of music. The first movement was taken at a faster tempo than I’d ever heard it, breathlessly zippy and incredibly full of joy and life. And those squonking horns cut through the texture in the most excitingly audacious way. I’d heard the piece before but I’d never heard anything the least bit like this.

I played that recording, and especially the first concerto, over and over again. That was the start of my love of period instrument performances, and a quarter of a century later I’m still at it.

I have a feeling I’m going to be listening to this performance of number 1 quite a few times, too.

I’ve been on a Richard Strauss listening binge the last few weeks, including spending some quality time listening to Tod und Verklärung, which I hardly know at all, and Don Quixote, which I don’t know well enough. Dave provided me with several recordings I hadn’t heard before, including a wonderful, wonderful recording of Don Quixote with Jacqueline du Pré on cello. (DQ is loosely in the form of a theme and twelve variations, and the main theme, representing DQ himself, is on a solo cello; some of the variations also use the solo cello to portray him. So, while the cellist is not exactly a featured soloist in the manner of a concerto, he or she gets a lot of opportunity to stand out.) Du Pré poured an astonishing amount of depth of emotion and thought into her solo passages. No other recording I’ve heard so far comes anywhere near it in that regard.