Now and then I check in with the online music magazine Sinfini to see what's happening in the UK. Right now they are running an article about a series of concerts held in pubs of the music of Haydn played by members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. There seems to be a global initiative to take classical music everywhere you wouldn't expect it: pubs, night clubs, subway stations, public plazas, mall food courts and so on. Paul Morley writes:
Can Haydn fit in here – fancy, cerebral, delicately attractive chamber music without words glowing with specific period presence, lacking the basic sense of beat, crude catchiness and volume that music usually requires to survive in such an abrasive setting?
Apart from the mischaracterization of the music of Haydn as "lacking the basic sense of beat"(!!), yes, one might think that the music of Queen would seem more appropriate. The article says that Haydn works really well, due to the charming presentation of the musicians. The problem I have with the article is that the writer, while disparaging "strained, ugly attempts to make classical music cool, accessible, hip, fashionable" engages in a somewhat embarrassing one himself. He says of this kind of presentation:
It is not frozen inside a concert hall and played as if to breathe in response is an outrage, and to have any sort of audible emotional reaction a social embarrassment.
What is embarrassing about this is that the implication is that all conventional string quartet concerts, such as the ones at Wigmore Hall, for example, are "frozen". Again, I get the feeling that some of the people who seem to be supporters of classical music are actually our worst enemies! Mr. Morley is as much as saying that all concerts of string quartets by Haydn would be better in the pub.
Another problem I have with articles like these is that they are mere propaganda. This is not a news article that tries to report what happened when these musicians took Haydn on a tour of pubs. Were that the case we might have heard that halfway through op. 33 no. 2, a group of yahoos stumbled in and shouted out, "wat the fook kinda music is dis?" Actually, at no point in the article does Mr. Morley even mention what pieces by Haydn were played.
I would have appreciated an objective account of exactly how well the tour actually went. Instead we have a puff piece saying how wonderful the whole idea was and how wonderfully the musicians brought it off. No indication of how it was actually received, how many people turned up and so on.
Obviously we need to hear a Haydn string quartet now. Here is Op. 33, No. 1 in B minor:
I like to check in now and then with Alex Ross' site The Rest Is Noise even though I rarely find anything interesting there. He did make an intriguing statement on one recent post. Talking about some of the silly remarks that have been made recently about women conductors he makes the very good point that
the "physical aspect" or the "problem of maternity" hardly impedes the careers of female pianists, violinists, or opera singers. What is the difference with conducting?
But then he goes on to say that "the art of conducting is wrapped up in mythologies of male power." That is the sort of remark that sounds like unexamined propaganda and leads me instantly to ask, what mythologies of male power? Is it just waving that little baton? What is the evidence for these misty mythologies?
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There is a new online journal of music criticism, Classical Voice North America, that is the Journal of the Music Critics Association of North America. Let's have a look at one of the items on the site. I know a bit about Beethoven symphonies and Tafelmusik, so I want to look at this item: "Tafelmusik Shows Virtues, Limits in Beethoven Concert". Tafelmusik, a leading ensemble in Toronto since their formation in 1979, has previously released a recording of the Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8 of Beethoven in 2008. Regarding the present concert the critic Colin Eatock says:
Let’s start with the strengths. Thanks to Tafelmusik’s three-decade regime of period performance, this band has no truck with the Romantic ideal of the grande ligne. That’s good, because Tafelmusik’s players have instead cultivated a style that emphasizes detail, balance and transparency. Performing Beethoven in this way was illuminating: phrasing was clear, and every inner voice was heard to good effect.
But the other side of the coin wasn’t always so shiny. Since Tafelmusik — expanded for this concert to 36 players — was unable to produce the voluptuous sound of a large modern orchestra, the players, when striving for volume, resorted to an edgy attack that sounded forced and harsh. And throughout the concert, the wind instruments – equipped with only a few keys, or with no valves at all – struggled with intonation, not always successfully.
This seems very balanced, doesn't it? Journalists love to strike a middle path, finding things to compliment and things to criticize as that usually means that no-one can get too mad at them. But I often have the feeling, reading most music criticism, that the writer is simply walking down the aisles grabbing two or three positive things to say and one or two negative things to say without basing them on too much. Tafelmusik is a "historically-informed performance" group so the last thing they would be presenting is "the voluptuous sound of a large modern orchestra". Similarly, they would have been using wind instruments from the period, not ones that were developed later in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now I wasn't at the concert so I can't speak to whether they played in tune or "resorted to an edgy attack that sounded forced and harsh", but there are clips of Tafelmusik on YouTube playing Beethoven. Here they are with the Allegretto from the Symphony No. 7 of Beethoven with the same conductor, Bruno Weil:
Perhaps that could have been more dynamic here and there, but I liked the warm string sound and I didn't find the winds particularly out of tune. It is pretty common nowadays to have Haydn symphonies played on period instruments and Beethoven, especially in the earlier symphonies, is really working with pretty much the same orchestra that Haydn did, but with a few more strings. In limiting the orchestra to thirty-six players Tafelmusik is simply letting us hear what the concert-goers would have heard when Beethoven was alive.
Most composers don't get along very well and some even seem intent on disparaging other composers every chance they get. But the great exception was the genuine friendship and respect between Haydn and Mozart who influenced one another considerably. Sometime in the 1780s Mozart wrote down the themes of three of Haydn's symphonies, probably as he intended to conduct them at one of his concerts. One of the three was the Symphony No. 47 with the palindrome minuet and trio that I covered in this post. Another was Symphony No. 62 in D major that I haven't covered and the third was the Symphony No. 75, also in D major, that I will talk about today.
One of Haydn's tasks as Kapellmeister to the Esterházys was the composition of opera and the discipline of handling the setting of dramatic events within the symmetrical forms that were part of Classical style is one of the things that aided the development of Haydn's symphonies around this time, about 1780. There is a new efficiency, a new focus of all the elements on the overall effect.
The Symphony No. 75 begins with a Grave introduction that moves to the minor. It begins like this:
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When the movement proper begins, a Presto, it has this theme:
Haydn's themes are becoming more crisply crafted and effective. There is one distinctive element here, D#, the chromatic lower neighbor to the E, and it will color the whole movement. Another element, the three short accented quarter notes in mm 4, will also play a large role. One new element is the use of counterpoint. In the recapitulation the theme appears in canon between the first and second violins:
The slow movement, a theme and variations in G major, the subdominant (now Haydn's usual key for slow movements) has the kind of hymn-like melody that Haydn specialized in:
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The minuet and trio are crisply elegant dances. The last movement is a rondo with a theme in small ternary form. This just means that an opening theme is contrasted with a middle theme after which the opening theme returns. This is usually indicated with the letters A-B-A'. Here is the A section, a perfectly balanced period:
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The B section is a looser ten measure phrase in flowing eighth notes:
After which the A returns. There are three episodes between recurrences of the rondo theme, the first a minor version which balances nicely the minor section of the opening grave introduction.
Now let's listen. Here is the complete symphony with the Academy of Ancient Music conducted by Christopher Hogwood:
Tom Service keeps plugging away, writing articles on different symphonies about once a week. So far he has covered:
Beethoven No. 5
Shostakovich No. 15
Mozart No. 38, "Prague"
Elgar No. 2
Haydn No. 6, "Le matin"
Pretty good choices, though I cannot make sense of the order unless the idea is "jumping around randomly". I will have to try to get into the Elgar, but my first impression was that it was everything I disliked about late romantic style. Just tried again--nope, I seem to be allergic to it. Frankly, it sounds like a parody of bad Brahms in British style.
But the most recent guide is on one I have already covered: the Symphony No. 6, "Le matin" by Haydn. Here is the link. And here is the link to my post, if you want to compare.
Performers live in a high-stress environment where you are only as good as your last concert. That being the case, there are a lot of things that give us nightmares! In fact, I used to have a recurring nightmare where I had been hired to play one of the Rodrigo guitar concertos with an orchestra and arrived at the first rehearsal (the day before the concert) only to discover that the rental company had sent the parts to the wrong concerto!!
Here are some other nightmares that sometimes come to pass:
You arrive at the hall with your guitar and as you are opening the stage door, it sticks and you break off your thumbnail! (Solution: always carry with you a ping pong ball, Swiss army knife, Krazy Glue and sandpaper for polishing. You just cut a half-moon slice out of the ping pong ball and glue it on top of your regular nail. Sand and polish, voila!)
You open your case and discover that your 4th string has broken at the bridge. (Yes, this happens. Solution: have spare strings!)
You are running up the stairs to backstage, trip and stumble into the bannister, breaking the neck of your guitar. (Solution: there is no solution. Don't run with scissors or guitars!)
You are playing in the pit for an opera and for some reason the oboe gives an A to tune to that is way above A 440. You are not used to making big tuning changes when forty other people are tuning. (Solution: put your ear right up against the body of the guitar and do your best.)
You open the case of your guitar and discover that the bridge has popped off:
Yep, sadly that happened to me Sunday morning. I just took her to my guitar builder/repair guy and he said she should be good as new in a couple of weeks. The glue just gave way, but there was no real damage.
Let me put up a piece I recorded on this guitar a number of years ago. Asturias (Leyenda) by Isaac Albéniz:
I was working on a great post this morning when the power went out. It is still out, so I am posting from another computer. Sorry! Assuming the power comes back I will definitely have a post up tomorrow morning.
I am surprised to discover that I don't have a tag for "conductors". I suppose the fact that I don't says something: I have managed to post to this blog for more than two years without ever feeling the need to comment on conductors! But they certainly occupy a lot of the public space in the classical music world. I suppose I feel that the conductor is not nearly as important, nor interesting, as the music itself.
But I just read a rather intriguing article about Fritz Reiner who is depicted as being both a fine conductor and a nasty piece of work. The article is very hard to excerpt from so I encourage you to read the whole thing. Reiner was so stern a disciplinarian that he was perceived by many to be, simply, a sadist. But he got results. Imagine being given the task of managing a room full of individualistic, virtuoso artists! Like herding cats. The article doesn't seem to capture how difficult it is training an orchestra to really play together. Here is a quote from Philip Farkas, principal French horn at the time that gives us an idea:
We’d had a long number of years of lax discipline and too many guest conductors. The men were good, it was a good orchestra, but undisciplined and far from being a cohesive group. So Reiner took over and tore that orchestra apart. In a two-hour rehearsal he pulled us apart and put us together again — literally — and in the course of doing it actually fired one of the men. He said, “I don’t accept that kind of playing in my orchestra.” We thought, “Gee, you haven’t even got the orchestra yet, it’s only an hour or so.” But it was his orchestra, he had a contract to prove it. Anyhow, he took us apart and we needed it, we all knew that. And when he put it back together and we went straight through Ein Heldenleben (by Richard Strauss) the last hour of rehearsal, it was a revelation. There we had it, and we knew we had it, but we couldn’t do it until he came along.
Reiner is portrayed as being sadistic, but it is hard to be sure just how sadistic he was. I know of many long and bitter disputes within orchestras that really boiled down to a difference of opinion. A lot of orchestral players come to really detest their conductors, but it is just as often because of incompetence as it is for being excessively harsh! I know of one conductor who got the nickname "pizza beat" because of the sloppiness of his conducting style--his beat was very broad instead of being precise. Other conductors are thought of by their orchestras as having no sense of rhythm. Sometimes veteran players advise newbies to not look at the conductor during crucial passages as they will be sure to be thrown off! Sometimes this is even written into the parts: "don't look up!"
I have to say that I have had no real beefs with any conductors I have worked with over the years. Most of that was as a soloist, which is rather different from being in the orchestra. You may not know this, but as soon as there is an instrumental soloist, in the case of a concerto typically, the conductor's role changes from being the directing intelligence onstage to being an accompanist. This is built into the stage protocol: the soloist enters before the conductor and it is the job of the conductor and the orchestra to follow what he or she does. I have never had any problems as every conductor I have worked with has been happy with this--indeed, you couldn't do it any differently!
I was playing the Villa-Lobos Concerto for Guitar with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra conducted by Mario Bernardi and when we got to the end of the slow movement a funny thing happened. Here is the passage:
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It is really just a texture, with "rall. e dim." (slow down and get quieter) indicated. I didn't hear a melody in my part, which was just arpeggios, I thought that the orchestra had the melody. So I was following the conductor. Sometimes the guitar does have accompaniment figures. Turned out he was trying to follow me. So as soon as we finished he said "don't you want to slow down there?" Glad we got that figured out! Bernardi had the reputation of being tough with soloists, but that certainly wasn't my experience. He was courtesy personified. He was pretty sarcastic with with the orchestra, though. First rehearsal, opening of the first movement, he let them get about four measures in--a pretty ragged four measures--then stopped them and said, "now let's try it pretending you know how to read music!"
I think that there is something that Gerald Stein does not get to in his article on Reiner and this is that the world of music has a very inegalitarian bias. Talent is honored and anti-talent is disparaged. In other words, if you play well, you will be appreciated and liked by your fellow musicians--all else being equal--but if you are a poor player or poor musician, you will get little respect and a lot of sarcasm. So what I wonder is if the really good players in the orchestras Reiner conducted were not so much his targets, and therefore did not perceive him as being as sadistic as the poorer players that he was trying to either whip into shape or drive out of the orchestra.
I am reminded of a very fine choral conductor (the exception to the rule that there are three kinds of conductors: conductors, semi-conductors and choral conductors) who also taught some ear-training classes. He was in charge of administering a final dictation exam one year and provided an excellent example of conductor-style sarcasm. Dictation exams, by the way, are rather grueling. This one, as I recall, involved taking down from a few hearings a four-voice chorale in the style of Bach, some complicated rhythms, an eight measure melody, and, most challenging, some two part counterpoint. The fellow giving us the test prefaced it by saying, "don't worry about this exam--I am going to play every musical example so slowly that even the most dull among you will be likely to get it." You really had to hear the sneering, nasal voice with which he delivered this to get the full effect.
Let's end with a performance of the Villa-Lobos Concerto. This is Gôran Sôllscher with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Ironically, no conductor is listed.
UPDATE: Purely coincidentally an orchestral musician friend of mine just sent me this hilarious clip of what happens when you let random bystanders conduct an orchestra:
