Alex Ross Perplexed by Sokolov

As readers know, I am a big fan of the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov, about whom I have written quite a few posts. I also had the opportunity to hear him in Bologna in May in concert, which was quite an experience. He plays the same program for a whole season, so it was the same pieces that Alex Ross heard him play in Salzburg on August 1st. I linked to his piece on the Salzburg Festival in yesterday's miscellanea, but just now got a chance to savor his comments:

A cultish, worshipful atmosphere can prevail in Salzburg, to sometimes irritating effect. A case in point was an evening of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas with the enigmatic Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov, who avoids travel to the United States but has an avid European following. He has an extraordinarily sensitive touch, and specializes in the surgical separation and articulation of voices: when he plays a crisp, marcato line with his left hand and a flowing legato with his right, the parts are so distinct that it sounds as though two different people were at the instrument. He is also deeply eccentric. His accounts of Mozart’s Sonata in C, K. 545, and the Fantasia and Sonata in C Minor, rendered without pause, veered from porcelain prettiness to turbulent Romantic gesturing and back again, neither manner suitable to the music at hand. In Beethoven’s Opus 111, Sokolov’s interpretive meanderings matched the saturnine magnificence of the score: endless even-toned trills and ethereal figuration cast a spell. Still, a humorless self-indulgence prevailed. The crowd roared and stamped; I went away perplexed.

This is delightful, isn't it? Alex Ross really is a creature of his environment, Manhattan's Upper West Side, the world view of which was captured in this New Yorker cover, years ago:

 

Imagine if the artist had been looking East instead and how foreshortened Europe would have been. That's the sense I get from this phrase in the review:

Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov, who avoids travel to the United States but has an avid European following.

Norman Lebrecht expressed similar misgivings about a pianist who simply does not give concerts in the UK: after all, how good could he be? Well, good enough to pack halls in Europe. As a bit of a corrective, here is a quote from a review by Geoffrey Norris in The Telegraph:

An enigma in his lifetime, the Russian-born pianist Grigory Sokolov restricts his recitals to about 60 a year, refuses to make studio recordings and, for the past seven years or so, has declined to play in the UK. He used to but then withdrew from appearances here in 2008 when new requirements were introduced for Russian citizens seeking entry visas. It sparked a furore, but the stand-off continues.

To experience him in concert, therefore, you have to be on mainland Europe – no loss to Sokolov when he can draw capacity crowds to the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Berlin Philharmonie or the Vienna Konzerthaus.

 As Ross seems to have only the vaguest idea of with whom he is dealing, let me fill in the picture a bit. Grigory Sokolov is a very great artist and pianist in the Russian tradition. He won first prize in the Tchaikovsky competition in 1966 at age sixteen--the head of the jury was Emil Gilels. Here they are in a photo taken at the time with Mischa Dichter on the left:

Since then he has pursued a career in which his devotion to the art has completely overshadowed any desire for fame or commercial endorsement, which is why so many music lovers do not know him. In Europe, however, he gives a tour every year to packed halls. He refuses to do studio recordings as he sees his art as that of the live performance. After many years of being perplexed by this, one record company, Deutsche Grammophon, has given in and begun releasing CDs of his recitals. He is an astonishing performer. I have one recording, of the Bach Art of Fugue recorded live in St. Petersburg around 1980, that is absolutely transcendent.

So when I read that Ross thinks that Sokolov's performance:

veered from porcelain prettiness to turbulent Romantic gesturing and back again, neither manner suitable to the music at hand

I suspect he just doesn't get out enough and is unfamiliar with the idea of expressive interpretation. Indeed, he seems much more in tune with the young Chinese pianist, Yuja Wang, whom he reviewed like this:

The program, under the direction of the striking young Estonian conductor Anu Tali, consisted of Niels Gade's Hamlet Overture, Grieg's Piano Concerto, and Sibelius' Fifth. I'll save the Sibelius for an upcoming New Yorker column and comment briefly on the Grieg. Yuja Wang was the soloist; I knew her from Leon Fleisher's Carnegie Hall workshops, which I wrote about last year. Then, I was gripped by her playing, though I felt she hadn't fully grasped Schubert's language. She has certainly mastered Grieg's. She gets a huge sound out of the piano, which isn't surprising from a well-traveled young prodigy. What's more impressive is that she plays in big paragraphs, shows a powerful grasp of structure, brings delicate fantasy to lyric passages.

To my mind, Yuja Wang rather resembles a music box with legs:

Grigory Sokolov, on the other hand has a different relationship with the notes:

Unfair, apples to oranges? Well, sure. Just making a point here. On Sokolov's Beethoven, Ross has this to say:

Sokolov’s interpretive meanderings matched the saturnine magnificence of the score: endless even-toned trills and ethereal figuration cast a spell. Still, a humorless self-indulgence prevailed. The crowd roared and stamped; I went away perplexed.

 A humorless self-indulgence? You know, I would be just a tiny bit sympathetic with Ross' view if he had a shred of evidence to back it up. Which he doesn't. So, a pox on your house, Alex. You really should get out more. I think that endless string of Julliard note-spinners has dulled your ear.

Here is another quote from Norris' review in The Telegraph:

As is so often the case with the greatest musicians, it is hard, and perhaps not always desirable or essential, to analyse what makes them great. It is simply a fact that, listening to Sokolov, you know unequivocally that you are in the presence of someone extraordinary, someone possessing special insights and a thoroughly individual way of articulating, clarifying and communing with music so that his interpretations seem to find its very heart.

Yep, that's pretty much it.

Deconstructing a Quirk

Before we let Alex Ross' piece on Kate Soper's "philosophy-opera" drift away in our rear-view mirror, let's have a look at the genuflecting paragraph that he opens with:

There is a good argument to be made for retiring the words “genius” and “masterpiece” from critical discourse. They are artifacts of the Romantic religion of art, implying a superior race of demigods who loom above ordinary life. Such terms are rooted in the cult of the male artist—the dishevelled Beethovenian loner who conquers an indifferent world. Above all, these words place an impossible burden on contemporary artists, whose creations are so often found wanting when compared with the masterpieces of the past—not because the talent pool has somehow evaporated but because the best of the present diverges from the past. In a decentered global culture, a few great men can no longer dominate the conversation.

This is a kind of stylistic quirk that might be fun to deconstruct. Mind you, I have my little quirks too, among which is my liking to start off in a place very different from my main theme. Don't know what we should call that: the "finessed open" maybe? But Alex Ross' gesture is a rather familiar one that has sometimes been called "virtue signaling." In a social environment where certain ideas are thought to be self-evident, but about which there still seems to be, mysteriously, a controversy, virtue signaling is simply a kind of shibboleth indicating to your fellow travelers that you are on their side, one of the good guys. So let's unpack Mr. Ross' opening gambit and see what lies therein.

The implicit claim is that what we are reading is in fact "critical discourse" which, these days at least, prefers to eschew the terms "genius" and "masterpiece". Yes, they were terms that came into currency in the late 18th century and were used frequently during the 19th and part of the 20th century. My feeling about them is not that they imply a "superior race of demigods" --please!-- but that this was part of the changing nature and function of the fine arts as they came more and more to fulfill a role in the identity of the middle class and less and less were just an ornament to the aristocracy. In the ancien regime, the important person was the patron, the nobleman, who commissioned the work. If the work was truly masterful, as so many of them were, then this just redounded to the glory of the patron, as it should. But as the middle class began more and more to be the widely diffused patrons of art, the idea of the genius of the creator became a crucial selling point and hence a central theme of aesthetics. This "superior race of demigods" phrase is just a clumsy way of sneering at the people who wrote masterpieces in the 19th century and as such is hardly "critical discourse" but mere regurgitation of an ideological talking point.

Dragging in the misandrist "male artist" smear is just more of the same. Poor Beethoven, who has to bear the responsibility for so much historic badness! Sadly, the creations of contemporary artists are so often found wanting in exactly the same way that the creations of most of the composers contemporary with Bach and Beethoven are found wanting compared to theirs. No news there.

Now what could Ross possibly mean by "the best of the present diverges from the past?" All I can deduce from that is that what someone like Steve Reich (or, sure, Kate Soper) is doing is different from what Bach or Beethoven were doing. Yeah, sure, ok. I kinda knew that already.

For his final genuflection, Mr. Ross tosses in a couple of standard ideological planks: "decentered global culture" which likely means little more than culture these days is no longer centered on Paris and New York (and isn't that an ironic observation by the music critic for the New Yorker?) and one last weak uppercut to the chin of "a few great men".

If I were unkind, and I am, I would characterize this typical example of Ross' prose as semi-clever smoke and mirrors concealing a rather vacuous ideological stance. Doesn't anyone else ever notice this?

For an envoi let's pick something by Beethoven that goes against the "dishevelled loner" meme and shows rather his genius for whimsy and humor. This is the Piano Sonata op. 31 no. 3 in E flat major played by Daniel Barenboim:

Composers of Quiet

Honestly, I wouldn't enjoy tweaking Alex Ross nearly so much if he weren't so damnably earnest about his rigorously progressive ideology. But there it is. So let's start off this post on his latest New Yorker article, "The Composers of Quiet" with a little hommage.























Was that enough space? Perhaps we need more...













These composers, you see, begin, metaphysically, with John Cage's 4'33. Which is about silence. Oh, heck, let's have some more.














Are you having fun yet? Just let me know. I could go on like this all day.

Ssshhhh...

So the basic fact about silence is that it is the absence of something. Music, in this case. If you live in a musically-rich environment, say, the apartment of Alex Ross, simply stuffed to the ceiling with free review copies of every CD released in the last decade, then some silence, or at least music with a lot of silence in it, might be the perfect palate-cleanser before your next excursion out to a Big Apple concert. So the Composers of Quiet, or as he and they delightfully refer to themselves, the Wandelweiser, are like a musical sorbet, light and refreshing if a bit low-cal. Let's let Alex tell us about it:

...the magic of the ending, in which the percussionist stands over a set of cymbals placed on the floor and pours grains of rice and millet on them. Stuart began with fistfuls of grains, creating a sound like a rainstorm or a chorus of crickets; later, following instructions in the score, he reduced the stream to a trickle, eliciting intermittent plinks. (Pisaro cherishes these rice noises, and also features them in a pair of pieces entitled “ricefall”; the International Contemporary Ensemble will perform the second at the Abrons Arts Center, on Grand Street, on September 16th.) Bush, meanwhile, played lone tones separated by huge intervals, ending on the lowest A on the piano. I imagined a bell ringing in a ruined cathedral and raindrops falling into a pool. This is the Wandelweiser illusion: from almost nothing, vast forms arise.

Or as I like to think of it: from almost nothing, even less arises.

There are quite a few pieces by Jürg Frey, one of the Wandelweiser, on YouTube. Let's have a listen. This is "Fragile Balance":

Our Finest Music Critic

I simply cannot wait until Friday to share this gem with you: Alex Ross has a recent piece in the New Yorker titled "Listen to the Future" in which he makes this comment on a new piece by John Adams:

In his latest phase, Adams leans on unison lines that go crawling through various sections of the orchestra, defining harmony horizontally rather than vertically. 

Let's just savor that for a moment, shall we?




Ahhhh.




We actually have a different word for "unison lines that go crawling through various sections of the orchestra". That word is "melody". Melody is defined rather well as "a linear succession of musical tones." Wikipedia contrasts this with harmony as follows:

Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic line, or the "horizontal" aspect.

Often said, because it is true. Harmony is the musical texture considered vertically, while melody is the horizontal line of the music. In his ongoing effort to explain music without actually talking about it in any satisfactory manner, Alex Ross finally trips over himself.

And this lackwit is the most prominent music critic in North America, if not the world.

For an envoi, here is John Adams' Violin Concerto from 1993-94:

Of course, what Ross should have said is that Adams tries to avoid harmony a lot of the time in favor of unison lines and simple counterpoint. But that would have seemed rather too ordinary. Ross prefers to say things like:

The form is restless, unpredictable, yet ultimately confident in its progress. Adams attached a feminist program, highlighting the misogyny of the Scheherazade legend; the protagonist holds her own against dogmatic thrashings of the orchestra, and steals away in a mood of melancholy rapture.

Whatever the hell that means... I mean, I sort of understand what "thrashings" in the orchestra might be, but how to make them "dogmatic" is, I believe, entirely beyond the powers of music.

Alex Ross' Concerts of the Year

One of the most interesting writers on music is the New Yorker's Alex Ross who summarizes the year's concerts in this piece. While the topic is supposed to be the best performances of the year, and there is a list of such, he prefaces it with an essay about the political and social relevance of classical music in 2011. Well, ok. He makes the point that the big pop stars are more part of the "1%" than classical musicians.

Pop stars and their parent corporations are the true élites of the cultural sphere, reaping vast rewards from a winner-takes-all system.

He mentions that investigating the sources of corporate support for classical music reveals that much of it comes from places that we now consider unsavory like the financial and tobacco industries. He goes on to cite instances of composers supporting the popular causes of the day such as protection of the environment, being anti-war and civil disobedience. He ends with this:

Over the centuries, classical music has been allied with wealth and power, and it has also caused trouble for wealth and power. Its present marginal position gives it, at least in theory, critical distance from the materialist excess of pop culture—the ruthless equation of monetary and aesthetic value. Tellingly, classical music in America reached its maximum popularity in the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the country came closer to disavowing the capitalist faith than at any time in its history. One measure of the levelling spirit of the age was that millions across the land could tune in to NBC radio and listen to Beethoven symphonies. Are d.j.s blasting Beethoven in the V.I.P. lounges of the Second Gilded Age? Not that I’ve heard.

This is perilously close to proclaiming that classical music is a kind of epiphenomenon of socialism. I suppose I could add more evidence such as the enormous popularity of the symphonies of Shostakovich in the Soviet Union. But while there may be some correlation here, the actual causation seems weak... Those very Beethoven symphonies that Ross cites were the product of an aristocratic society, after all. As was the music of Haydn, Mozart and Bach. Actually, all that we call 'classical' music from the Middle Ages well into the 19th century was patronized by and listened to very largely by the nobility and the elite of the Church.  I would agree with Alex that the "ruthless equation of monetary and aesthetic value" is one of the great problems of popular music today. I just think that this is a problem having more to do with the problem of cultural values in general than with music in particular. The give-away word is "tellingly" because he doesn't tell us what it tells: socialism causes people to listen more to Beethoven while materialist excess causes people to listen to Jay-Z?

Interesting list of concerts, though. The one that I most wish I had heard is Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès performing music of Dowland, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Kurtág, and Adès at Carnegie. Here is Adès' arrangement of the great song by John Dowland "In Darknesse Let Mee Dwelle":

And here is the original: