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RECITAL
The Spirit of
SYMPHONY
Farmer Wozzeck
RECITAL
Fine Slavic Voices
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
As Hand in Glove
RECITAL
A Winning Artist
MUSIC NEWS
On the Pacific Rim ...
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Responses to Our 11/29/05 Question of the Week
Voices Future
By Janos Gereben
Adler Fellows Recital
(12/1/05)
By Jeff Dunn
Berkeley Symphony
(12/2/05)
By Stephanie Friedman
Irina Mataeva
Dmitri Voropaev
Larissa Gergieva
(12/4/05)
By Jonathan Russell
"New Music Séance"
(12/3/05)
By Anna Carol Dudley
Sari Gruber
Cameron Stowe
(11/29/05)
By Janos Gereben
Mickey Butts, Executive Director/Publisher
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A Classical Music Lover's Buying Guide
Home, to Sir Simon Rattle, is the familiar musical repertory we most often hear at concerts and on the radio, music from the 19th century or before, when the tunes and the harmonies were friendly and set the mind at rest. Leaving Home is the television series that Rattle and some friends dreamed up at the BBC some years ago, to tell where music has gone since then. Produced in 1996, the series is now being released here on ArtHaus DVD and is, I think, the best package of music-plus-information I have yet come across on the media.
There are seven programs, each lasting 50 minutes. Rattle is at the center of each, with his City of Birmingham Orchestra. His eyes skewer you to your seat as he talks with spellbinding intensity about the directions that music has followed through the 20th century. He traces the unfolding of rhythm though the century, starting (as expected) with the ecstatic outbursts in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring but moving farther afield toward Steve Reich's purely rhythmic concoctions and the wild, mechanical creations of Conlon Nancarrow's player-piano rolls. On another episode he steers us through the dark passions of Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, the tortured elegies of the late Shostakovich. The great Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski is on hand to join Rattle in an explanation of his ideas on chance music, of allowing performance choices to be decided in part by the players themselves.
One program is all about American music, a topic I entrust to British speakers only with extreme hesitation. This one is gorgeous, however, starting with Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the lithe curve of pianist Wayne Marshall's playing and continuing with a splendid collage of short works (Feldman, Carter, Ives, Copland's Appalachian Spring with Martha Graham's first dancers, Cage, and the smallest shard of West Side Story) set against New England autumnal scenes of heartbreaking beauty. The whole 50 minutes becomes a tone-poem about American music, an achievement in itself.
The marvel of these programs — the three that have been released so far (by Naxos) and the four on the way — is their extraordinary success in reaching a level of seriousness and importance that is informative, valuable, and totally free from condescension. This is a rare happenstance. People my age are supposed to go all weepy at the reissue, several months ago, of a large box of Leonard Bernstein's New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts, and those discs are supposed to rekindle all the first things we ever learned about music, on top of which all our future artistic wisdom has been erected. I respectfully bow out; these programs are riddled with so much misinformation, glibly delivered, to establish false points about musical history or sonata form or what-have-you that are simply wrong, For all the famous Lenny charm, a matter I find arguable at best, I find these programs next to unwatchable. Thirty-eight years separate the first of the Lenny series from these excellent essays by Simon Rattle and his musical forces. Let that stand, then, as a measure of civilization's advance in those years.
What makes it great? asks Rob Kapilow about Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony, but he leaves the question, alas, unanswered. Composer, pianist, lecturer, former student (at 19) of the legendary Nadia Boulanger, the first-ever licensee granted access to the words of Dr. Seuss, leader of the "What Makes It Great Players," Rob Kapilow and I have somehow eluded one another up to now. His "What Makes It Great" number on Mozart's Symphony, issued on Vanguard's "Everyman" Classics, is at hand. On it he talks his way through selected passages of the "Jupiter" Symphony. Once in a while he will identify a previously mentioned theme as "bub-bub-bup," so that we will know what he's referring to.
About halfway through the first movement, just before the first appearance of one of the juiciest themes, he gives up and moves on to the second movement. That strikes me as strange. Maybe there wasn't room on the disc for discussion of the whole symphony, although the theme he leaves out is one of the things that makes the "Jupiter" Symphony great, or so it seems to me. The point is: Discs are cheap and easy to make, and you don't have to have much going for you nowadays to turn out lousy product like this. (The actual performance of the "Jupiter" on the disc is a Vanguard performance first issued in 1960.) I understand that quite a few people buy tickets to Rob Kapilow's lectures, and that makes me wonder what makes him great.
You don't need the 29 volumes of the latest Grove's Dictionary, and you can probably squeak by without the six volumes of the New Oxford History of Western Music. But everybody feels kindly toward penguins these days, and the Penguin Companion to Classical Music is by some distance the best single-volume reference I have ever encountered. Paul Griffiths is its author, and, considering its 896-page heft and its manic drive toward completeness, there is enough of Paul's own wit in the book to make it a bedside-reading delight. Try driving that home about your Grove! Of course there are the Griffiths pals: Betty Freeman among the patrons, but not Alice Tully. But there is no Rosemary Brown in Grove; for her glowing presence we must consult, and treasure, the indomitable Paul.
(Alan Rich is the music critic of LA Weekly and the former chief music critic of Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. His recent books include the four volumes of Play-by-Play (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, including CDs of complete works) and American Pioneers in Phaidon's 20th-Century Composers series.)
©2005 Alan Rich, all rights reserved
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