Dave and I went to hear Mikhail Pletnev conducting the Russian National Orchestra at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley Friday night. The program began with a short cycle of three songs composed by Pletnev himself, based on Yeats poems. The music seemed rather ordinary to me, no surprises in how the words were set, and the poems by Yeats are not particularly exciting subjects to begin with, but the orchestration was clear and full of vivid colors. The soprano, Lisa Delan, was very good. The best of the three was the last, a setting of the poem “When You Are Old”.

Next was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, with a young violinist named Stefan Jackiw as soloist. Jackiw has plenty of technique and it was a very showy performance, lots of dazzle but not much heart. However, he looks very young, so one can hope he’ll grow into it. The second half of the program was Shostokovich’s Ninth Symphony, a piece I don’t think I’d ever heard before. Even without knowing anything about the musical codes that I gather are said to be planted in the melodies, it wasn’t hard to figure out why Stalin thought Shostokovich was flipping him the bird.

Pletnev’s conducting throughout was extremely low-key, often barely keeping time, yet the orchestra was always very crisp and polished in their playing. The encores were two more pieces by Pletnev, very jazzy and a lot of fun; once again the orchestration was startlingly bright and colorful, while the melodies and harmonies seemed much less inventive.

Friday night Dave and I went to Davies Hall to hear MTT conducting an orchestration by Henry Brant of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. The Concord, as Ives wrote it, is a very difficult and densely written work for solo piano; I’ve listened to it a few times on record but never with much comprehension. As arranged by Brant, it is much clearer, much easier to make out what is going on. Still a difficult work to figure out, but I felt I could see much further into it this way, and I came away with some sense of the work’s overall shape that I never did with the piano sonata. Now I want to get hold of a recording of the symphonic version and listen to it some more, and that’s saying something because I had pretty much figured the Concord Sonata was a work I was probably just never going to figure out how to listen to with understanding or enjoyment in this lifetime.

Brant worked for several decades on the orchestration, in between other projects, as a labor of love. The orchestration is terrific; some of the orchestral colors didn’t always sound quite like Ives’s own, but it rang true to my ear all the way through and I’m not sure that it wasn’t actually a more skilled orchestration than any of Ives’s own. At any rate, I often felt there was a greater variety of colors and a greater transparency to the orchestration than Ives generally had. There are also some appropriately inexplicable Ivesian quirks, such as a wind machine in the the percussion section that as far as Dave and I noticed only gets used once, and for only a few bars.

The other work on the program was a short Schubert mass which they could have skipped as far as I was concerned, though I did notice quite a few people came only for it and left at intermission, so I guess it had its purpose on the program. It was probably chosen as something easy and pleasant that the orchestra could just about sight-read through, so as to save all the orchestra’s rehearsal time for the difficult and unfamiliar Ives/Brant work.

Terrific San Francisco symphony concert tonight. Everything full of life and crisply played, every piece a highlight in its own way.

Yan Pascal Tortelier is a very bouncy conductor, both figuratively and literally, actually jumping into the air at the big moments.

The concert stated with a selection from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne music, but it wasn’t either of the suites I’ve heard before. It had an unusually large orchestra, probably because they were going to need all those musicians for the symphony at the end of the program and might as well use them for something. Delicious.

The rest of the program was pieces I hadn’t heard before. Next was Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, which is a very odd but likeable work, often changing moods in a moment. After intermission was Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, with a really stunning violin solo by Nadya Tichman.

Finishing the concert was Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, a dense, harsh, many-layered work that Tortelier nevertheless conducted without a score. I liked it a lot but it’ll take another few hearings before I really grasp it. There’s a remarkable — maybe insane is a better word for it — fugal section at the end that is a bit like watchng a tornado sweep up all the music up to that point, swirl it up, and drop it In a huge heap.

Last night Dave and I went to Davies Hall for a concert. When we’d bought the tickets a couple months ago, the program was to be conducted by Oliver Knussen, and it was to include some of his own music (including some music from Where the Wild Things Are) as well as Pictures at an Exhibition in the Stokowski orchestration, which was an attraction for Dave and me because it’s performed much less often than the standard Ravel orchestration, and neither of us have heard it live.

But Mr. Knussen got sick (probably with the flu that’s been going around, I figure — Dave and I have both had it, as have quite a few of our friends), and then his replacement got sick, and on Wednesday I got an email message from my friend Donato Cabrera that he was going to be conducting all three concerts, Thursday through Saturday, on less than 24 hours’ notice. The program had been changed, though, obviously to pieces that could be gotten up on a minimum of rehearsal time. All Mozart for the first half, and Pictures in the Ravel orchestration for the second.

Donato and I met because he was the original musical director for the Tales of Hoffmann at Berkeley Opera in February, and we had a few meetings back in late summer of last year to discuss the production, but he had to drop out shortly after auditions. Donato’s a very sharp guy and I was sorry not to have the chance to work with him. Maybe another time. (As it turned out, Ernest Knell, who took over for Hoffmann, was wonderful to work with, very sharp and meticulous.)

The concert got off to a terrific start with the Figaro overture, which struck me as one of the best I’ve heard. Dave said to me afterward that you could tell he’d conducted the whole opera before and not just the overture, and that he understood it. Next was the cantata Exsultate, jubilate, which I’m sure was very nice if cantatas are your thing, but they aren’t much mine. Clearly they had had to find something that the soloist for the canceled Knussen songs, soprano Lisa Saffer, could perform with the orchestra on very short notice. Nothing much wrong with it, just not much to my taste — I’d really wanted to hear her sing the Knussen pieces.

Finishing the first half was a very good Prague Symphony, crisp and confident and enjoying the constant sidestepping into and out of the minor that runs through all the movements. The second half was Pictures. Donato told me by email that he’d had rather performed the Stokie orchestration if he’d had more notice, but that the decision was made before he took over the podium. Dave mentioned, too, that it’s possible that the orchestra scores for the Stokie were traveling with Mr. Knussen (or, at the moment, not traveling) rather than in the symphony library, whereas they certainly would have had scores for the Ravel version at hand. Anyway, Donato conducted a very impressive Pictures, more straightforwardly paced than finely nuanced, but sounding very, very good all the way through.

Didn’t hurt, either, that the piece ends with a big, exciting, brassy fanfare, the sort of thing that audiences go wild over. And sure enough, the audience went wild when the music ended, and Donato and the orchestra got a long, long ovation, with a lot of people bravoing and maybe a third of the audience even standing. I was surprised by that, as it was a very good concert but didn’t seem like a standing-O concert. The audience may have come prepared to enjoy it, though — there’d been a good review in the Chron that morning, and always increases an audience’s enthusiasm.

More stuff I’m behind with blogging about: Last Wednesday Dave took me to see Annie Lennox at the Masonic Auditorium.

I had a good time, but it was also frustrating because I didn’t already know the songs, and from the beginning of the concert to the end I could make out only maybe a dozen words in all. I thought it was just me again with my one deaf ear, which makes it hard to tell which direction a sound is coming from and therefore hard to focus on one thing when there are sounds coming from multiple directions, even though I can hear about as well as ever. (For example, it can be very hard to focus on the conversation at my dinner table if there are equally audible conversations going on around me — all those conversations have equal prominence as far as my brain is concerned, which can make following and keeping focused on a conversation in a crowded restaurant a really exhausting job of concentration for me these days.) But Dave said later he had trouble too, so it was apparently a combination of the Masonic’s echoey acoustics and too much amplification for the space.

Other than two Eurhythmics songs that I remembered from my college days, I didn’t know any of the songs, and there was no program given, so I didn’t even know what the titles of the songs were until afterward when Dave showed me the list he’d made during the concert. But that’s my own ignorance at work, I’m sure, and Dave told me later than the program was mostly her most popular songs from earlier albums and only maybe two or three from her most recent.

However, I seemed to be the only person there who didn’t have every one of the songs memorized, as I could see people mouthing the words all around the audience. Folks were dancing in the aisles and generally having a great time.

On the blog University Diaries:

The critics’ acclaim for Joyce Hatto
Had reached an impossible plateau,
And her falling from grace
Was quite clearly a case
Of her spouse over-egging the gateau.

— Rex Lawson

But: “Quite clearly”?

Most people seem to be partial to the theory that the fraudulent recordings were entirely the work of Ms. Hatto’s husband, and that she herself was either already dead or too sick to realize what was going on. That seems likeliest to me, too — but then I wonder whether I’m giving in to the same sweet tooth, the same desire to connect the available dots in this affair in such a way as to create a sentimental story I would enjoy believing — The grief-stricken widower, bitter about the rotten deal his wife got out of life, madly tries to recreate the career he thinks she should have had! How human! How forgivable! — that same desire to believe that caused some music critics never to question the legitimacy of her 120 CDs, a discography that looks in 20/20 hindsight to be just begging to be questioned. Without knowing the first thing about Joyce Hatto, I find myself not wanting to believe that she had any part in the fraud, but where does that come from? Why do I prefer to believe that an artist of any merit could not be capable of this, when I know perfectly well that plenty of artists, some of them quite great, have been perfectly capable of worse fraud than this? Really, for all I can tell right at the moment, Joyce Hatto may have been in on every detail of the scheme. Or not. No way of knowing.

Yet I want to believe she didn’t know. Why? Sweet tooth, maybe.

A sad hoax in the classical music world is unfolding right now. Dave has been following it on the newsgroups.

The British pianist Joyce Hatto retired from public performance in the late 1970s because of cancer. According to most sources, she died last June. However, in the last few years of her life, her husband — a recording engineer who owns his own studio — began issuing a series of recordings that he said had been made privately, mostly in the 1990s.

Since then, Dave tells me, there has been steady debate in the classical music newsgroups, some heralding her as nothing short of miraculous and others skeptical at the quantity of recordings (over 120) and the unlikelihood that someone would make that many recordings and wait so long before releasing them. Granted, the technology to issue ones own CDs is recent, but you’d think that a man who owned a recording studio would have tried to use his connections to interest a major record company, and you’d some label would be ecstatic to contract a pianist this spectacular.

A 2005 Boston Globe article about Joyce Hatto begins:

Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of.

Hatto, now 76, has not played in public in more than 25 years because of an ongoing battle with cancer. She was once told that it is ”impolite to look ill,” and after a critic commented adversely on her appearance, she resolved to stop playing concerts.

Instead she has focused her prodigious energies on recording an astonishing collection of CDs — 119, so far, on a British label called Concert Artists. A few years ago, Arthur Rubinstein’s lifetime legacy of recordings filled 94 CDs, but he recorded many works several times. Among Hatto’s discs, 95 survey most of the standard repertoire for solo piano, along with many rarities, and an additional 13 document her performances of the concerto literature. And she is still going strong. Future projects include Ravel, Granados, Hindemith, Messiaen, and the complete Haydn Sonatas.

An excerpt from a long swoon on the site for online CD store MusicWeb International:

Joyce stopped playing in public in 1979. Hospitalisation, near-death encounters, and alternative therapies followed — to become the pattern of her existence. She returned to the studio, 3 January 1989, playing Liszt. Since then she has maintained an annual recording schedule, reaching a peak of intensity in 1997-99. No discernible pattern or progression of repertory is apparent. Rather a mêlée of works, of stark emotional juxtapositions, of dramatically differing linguistic, spiritual and style states seemingly as the mood and impulse takes her, of projects begun, taken up again, or completed. In the five days between 4th and 8th January 1998, for example, she ranged from Chopin (four ballades) and Beethoven (Hammerklavier) to Prokofiev; in the corresponding period the following year, 3rd-7th, from Saint-Saëns (Fourth Piano Concerto), late Beethoven, Mendelssohn (the two piano concertos [CACD-9070-2]), Rachmaninov (B flat minor Sonata [CACD 9079-2]) and Schumann to Schubert (last sonata) and Liszt, and back again to Beethoven (middle period sonatas). Prodigious. … Impossible, many cynics would uphold.

Impossible indeed. Just a week ago, a reviewer for Gramophone magazine put one of Hatto’s CDs — Liszt’s 12 Transcendental Studies — into his computer. iTunes, of course, as it always does, compared the tracks against the GraceNote database. It correctly identified the music as Liszt’s 12 Transcendental Studies but came up with the information that the pianist was in fact Lászlo Simon. The reviewer then listened to the Simon recording and Hatto’s, one after the other, and found that they sounded identical in every detail of performance. Computer analysis has confirmed that they might as well be different issues of the same performance.

Since then, investigation has identified several more of Hatto’s recordings that exactly match recordings issued by others, sometimes major labels and major artists. On Pristine Classical’s website you can read the details, look at the matching waveforms, and even listen to combinations of two recordings at the same time, Hatto on one track and the earlier release on the other, and hear how exactly alike they are. The Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music has also investigated.

Sometime yesterday, all the text disappeared on the website of Concert Artist Recordings, the label under which Joyce Hatto’s recordings were issued. It was there yesterday morning; by afternoon there were only blank template pages.

Today there is discussion on the newsgroups of the possibility that a woman named Joyce Hatto who died not in June 2006 but back in 2002 may be the pianist herself. The recordings issued by her husband began appearing in 2003. Someone in the group is traveling to the town in question today to check the official records.

Later: It occurred to me to wonder, if Joyce Hatto died in 2002, who gave the interview to the Boston Globe reporter in 2005. On reading the article more carefully, I see that it was a phone interview with both Ms. Hatto and her husband, and that the writer says that “[t]he pianist has a high-pitched, girlish voice …”. Oh dear.

Dave and I went to Davies Thursday night to hear Michael Tilsen Thomas conduct four French works: Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture and Les Nuits d’été, the latter sung by Susan Graham, Debussy’s Nocturnes, and Dukas’s The Sorceror’s Apprentice.

The concert got off to a poor start with a slapdash performance of the Roman Carnival Overture. Entrances were ragged, rhythms were off, accents were not quite where they should have been. I leaned over to Dave during the applause and murmured, Well, I guess we know where the rehearsal time didn’t go to. Dave noted that MTT wasn’t conducting from a score, which may have had something to do with it, too. The Roman Carnival Overture is one of my favorite pieces of light music but I could have skipped this performance.

Les Nuits d’été, on the other hand, was beautiful, lush and sumptuous both in playing and in Susan Graham’s singing. MTT asked beforehand that we respect the silences between the songs, and the audience complied, but personally I think it’s just plain unnatural not to applaud songs that were so clearly written as separate units and are so beautifully performed.

Being more of a word person by nature than a music person, and not being very familiar with the songs (I’ve heard them a couple times before, but not often and not recently), I followed along with the French text as well as I could, with the help of the sometimes inaccurate English translation. I think for the most part Berlioz gave the poet much better than he deserved — the poems are a bit overheated and flowery for my taste. Birds don’t just sing, they either recite poetry or they weep for their departed mates; dew doesn’t take the form of drops of water, it comes in pearls or in silver tears. But the music is delightful and the performance was delicious.

Nocturnes was terrific, too, very suave and subtle. And then the big surprise was how good The Sorceror’s Apprentice was. I’d figured by that time it was going to be like the Roman Carnival Overture, an old warhorse that they’d filled out the program with because it wouldn’t require much rehearsal to do a passable job on. Well, it was a complete delight — detailed and crisp and funny. Neither Dave nor I had ever heard the piece performed live (the one piece on the program, in fact, for which that was true for both us), and I gotta say, it is a much funnier piece of music than I’d realized from recordings, or even from Fantasia, where you figure it’s Mickey Mouse that is making you laugh. The music isn’t funny in the sense of being witty and sly and sophisticated, in the way that, say, Richard Strauss could be funny; it’s funny in the way that the Arabian Nights stories or the Uncle Remus stories are funny, a skillfully told comic fable. I was hearing a lot of things in the music I’d never heard before, so much so that I rarely found myself picturing Mickey at all — though of course it’s also true that my ideas about precisely what is happening at any given point in the music have been shaped by Fantasia and may not always be exactly what Dukas thought was happening — if he had such specific ideas at all. So I’m sure the mouse has had its influence over my response to the work all the same.

About a minute into the piece, a couple in the next section over to our right got up and very ostentatiously departed, with a lot of huffy-sounding whispering and letting their seats spring back up with a wham. Jeez, people, if your sensibility is too refined to enjoy ten minutes of earthy comedy, fine, it’s your life, but what’s with making the big show of it? Was the break of several minutes after the Nocturnes too short for you to make a sufficiently Grand Departure? Or did you feel a need to wait until you could be sure of our undivided attention before you oh so ostentatiously demonstrated the superiority of your taste over ours?

Later: Joshua Kosman, music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, had the scoop on the sloppy first piece:

The first half of the evening, devoted to music of Berlioz, proved less satisfying. Even the programming itself was a bit of a disappointment, since the program had originally called for Thomas to conduct “Les Bandar-log,” one of Charles Koechlin’s seven orchestral meditations on Kipling’s “Jungle Book.”

But according to a Symphony spokesman, the extended rehearsals required for last week’s partial premiere of Robin Holloway’s massive Fourth Concerto for Orchestra made it impossible to work up the Koechlin score. Instead, the orchestra ran through Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival” Overture in a spirited but rough-hewn performance that testified all too clearly to a shortage of prep time.

I was disappointed to see, though, that he let Fantasia get in the way of his enjoyment of the Dukas. His review began with:

The effect of Walt Disney’s efforts on behalf of the music of Paul Dukas has been ambivalent at best.

On the one hand, Mickey Mouse’s hilariously panicky travails in “Fantasia” mean that “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is well known to nearly any listener, even one for whom the rest of Dukas’ meager legacy is no more than a rumor.

But it also means that no performance of this exuberant scherzo — not even one as dynamic and exciting as Wednesday’s offering by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony — can ever be heard without conjuring up images of white-gloved rodents and multiplying broomsticks.

I’m not seeing why this is a bad thing. The Disney cartoon of The Sorceror’s Apprentice is memorable precisely because it’s a masterpiece, brilliant animation tied to brilliant music. Why is it a problem if I’m reminded of it as I listen to the music in the concert hall? It doesn’t keep me from engaging myself with the music, any more than my uncountable associations with uncountable other pieces of music detract from my listening to them again.

And this was a rare opportunity to hear this piece performed live by a first-rate orchestra, and to hear things in it that I never noticed before. Where’s the downside?

At least Joshua Kosman had something to say. Rather like the poems that Berlioz set to music in Les Nuits d’été, the review in the Contra Costa Times is full of swooning, florid writing that doesn’t say much:

That program arrived Wednesday night at Davies Symphony Hall, with [Susan Graham] guiding Hector Berlioz’s six songs of “Summer Nights” into their diaphanous dominion. What a performance by the Texas-bred singer: flickering, refined, delectable, airy, pure, lustrous and emotionally aglow, even feverish, yet as muted as her peach chiffon gown and the sheer shawl around her neck.

Equally remarkable was the performance by Tilson Thomas and the orchestra. With this program, which repeats at Davies through Saturday night, the conductor and his players seem to have walked through a veil into a French mystery room.

The program is devoted to music by Berlioz, Debussy and Dukas. And, as magnificent as was Graham, the evening wound up being a statement by the orchestra about its ability to control music of the most rarified atmosphere and temperament. It stepped up to the challenge of the repertory, playing with supreme delicacy and titillating tension.

Imagine that! A concert about an orchestra’s ability to control music! What next? How about a column about the columnist’s ability to control words!

Like, say, the spelling of “rarefied”.

What a character, Berlioz. Think of him as the Thelonious Monk of 19th century French classical music: clearly arising out of a tradition, yet standing so outside of it with his strange, unforgettable melodies, slanting rhythms, and private worlds of color and expression. …

His “Roman Carnival Overture,” which opened Wednesday’s program, sounds as if it were composed for a private circus: a scorch of strings, an outbreak of pulsating brass, then a calm, salubrious solo for English horn (beautifully played Wednesday by Adam Dinitz) before it all grows lush again, with whorls of flutes and a tensile rush to the finish line.

Boy oh boy, somebody is making his high school music appreciation teacher very, very proud today.

Of Les Nuits d’été, he writes:

Graham’s entrance into this entrancing music was electrifying for its lustrous clarity, and her tone sustained warmth and richness throughout her register. Her diction was perfect, and there was a sense to her performance of a flower opening and releasing elusive fragrances.

That’s some serious wood this guy was sporting. Lustrous clarity. Her tone sustained warmth throughout her register. He uses words like an artist uses tiles in a mosaic.

(The image of a flower opening and releasing its fragrance actually occurs not once but twice in the poems of Les Nuits d’été. Unconscious influence? Plagiarism? Deadpan parody?)

Of one of the songs:

She and the orchestra — those fabulously quiet clarinets, horns, cellos and violas — seemed balanced and poised en pointe, like dancers.

Oh, that orchestra, the one with the musical instruments in it. En pointe, like dancers. Man, I hope Davies dry-cleaned his seat before letting the next person sit there.