Carnegie Hall: Orpheus Performs Handel, Mozart and Fine

After having been on Friday evening to a recital of Baroque music given by students at Mannes, it was interesting to hear Orpheus open yesterday evening's concert at Carnegie Hall with music by Handel.  The Concerto Grosso in F, Op. 6, No. 2 is one of twelve that Handel composed in London in 1739.  In these pieces, the composer deliberately set out to move his work in a new and more financially viable direction following a series of reversals he had experienced during the 1737 season.  It was at this time that Handel for the most part gave up writing Italian opera and instead concentrated on the production of oratorios to be performed in English.  The Op. 6 concerti were intended to be played during intermissions at the same concerts as the oratorios.  It was a reflection of popular taste among the English that Handel used as models for these works the older concerti formats of Corelli rather than those of Vivaldi.

Following the Handel, Orpheus performed the Clarinet Concerto in A, K. 622 (1791), the first of the two Mozart pieces on the program.  It was primarily to hear this piece that I attended the concert.  Even among Mozart's late works, the concerto stands out as one of the composer's greatest compositions, especially when performed on the basset clarinet designed by Anton Stadler for which it was originally written.  My own favorite recording is that of David Shifrin (with Gerard Schwarz conducting the Mozart Festival Orchestra) using this extended range instrument.  The soloist yesterday evening was Martin Fröst whom I had never before heard perform.  According to his website, Mr. Fröst has just released his second recording of this concerto.  He is an extremely talented musician and gave an impassioned performance that earned a huge round of applause from the audience.  He then returned to the stage and gave an encore, Klezmer Dances arranged by Goran Fröst.

The first piece following intermission was Serious Song: A Lament for String Orchestra by Irving Fine, a composer best known today for his association with Leonard Bernstein.  Together with several other composers, they made up the Boston School whose neo-classical style of music was heavily influenced by that of Stravinsky.  This particular piece seemed to me more an academic exercise than anything else.  Though polished and technically adept, it never really came alive even in the hands of an ensemble as talented as Orpheus.

The final item on the program was Mozart's Symphony No. 29 in A, K. 201 (1774).  Unlike the Clarinet Concerto, this was a very early piece, written when the composer was only 18 years old.  Though a pleasant enough work, it lacks the sophistication of Mozart's more mature compositions and would have been better placed on the program as an introduction to the concerto.  As it was, the performance was somewhat anticlimactic and provided a weak ending to the concert.

Mannes Baroque Chamber Players

In recital yesterday evening, the Mannes Baroque Chamber Players commingled works by well known seventeenth and eighteenth century composers (Antonio Vivaldi, Henry Purcell and Arcangelo Corelli) with those of their less famous contemporaries (Dario Castello and Francesco Geminani).  Though the performers did not play on original instruments, the strings did use the Baroque bows rather than their modern counterparts.

The first piece to be performed was Castello's Sonata No. 7 from Sonate concertante in Stil Moderno, libro secondo.  Not very much is known of the Venetian composer Castello, not even his dates of birth and death.  The program indicates that he flourished circa 1620, and the Wikipedia article speculates that he may have perished in the plague in 1630.  This particular sonata was scored for an interesting combination of instruments - harpsichord, violin and bassoon.

Next on the program were three Fantasias by Henry Purcell - the No. 7 in C minor, Z. 738; the No. 12 in D minor, Z. 743; and the No. 8 in D minor, Z. 739.  Purcell is best known today, along with Benjamin Britten, for being one of the very few talented composers to have been born in Britain.  This historical accident has provided him much greater posthumous renown than he would otherwise have enjoyed.  The fantasia itself was a form popular primarily in the Renaissance and had already fallen out of favor during Baroque period. Purcell's were among the last written in the genre.  The instrumentation was for string quartet, but with two violas rather than two violins.

The final piece to be performed in the first half of the program was Vivaldi's Concerto Grosso in D minor, Op. 3, No. 11 (1711), one of the twelve concerti contained in L'estro Armonico. This collection, one of the earliest works published by Vivaldi, had an enormous influence in the development of the Baroque repertoire.  Six of these concerti were later transcribed for keyboard by Bach.  In an online article, the conductor and musicologist Christopher Hogwood writes:

"Of the whole set, it was the Eleventh Concerto which excited most comment and imitation. The drama of its opening could never be repeated, but the following fugue subject tempted many to the sincerest form of flattery. It was even remarked on that Vivaldi, 'being of a volatile disposition (having too much mercury in his constitution)', should have shown such contrapuntal skill."

The first work performed after intermission was Geminani's Variations on La Folia after Corelli's Violin Sonata, Op. 5, No. 12.  Geminani, in his youth in Italy, studied the violin under Corelli's tutelage.  After having left Italy and settled in London, he enjoyed success by transcribing Corelli's sonatas into arrangements for string orchestras. The performance of this piece served as a good introduction to Corelli's own Sonata in D, Op. 5, No. 1, which was played immediately afterwards.

The final work on the program was Vivaldi's Concerto in G minor for Two Cellos, RV 531. This was the only concerto composed by Vivaldi for two cellos and was probably written specifically for two of the composer's students at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice.  Despite the unusual choice of solo instruments, this is an exceedingly popular piece and has been recorded often, most notably in recent years by Yo Yo Ma on Vivaldi's Cello.  The largo, in which the soloists are accompanied only by harpsichord and a third cello, is particularly beautiful in its languid phrasing.

Mannes Chamber Music: Mozart, Shostakovich and Schubert

There were no programs available at yesterday evening's recital at Mannes.  Instead the assistant director came to the front of the room and announced each work, listed its movements and named the students performing it before the piece was played.  This, however, was only a slight inconvenience.  More important to the audience was that the recital featured major works by Mozart, Shostakovich and Schubert that are standards of the chamber music repertoire.

The first piece was Mozart's Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, K. 478 (1785).  The passage of time has given the work a familiarity that masks how revolutionary and difficult it must have sounded to audiences when first performed.  It was the first of three (or six) quartets originally commissioned by Franz Anton Hoffmeister.  The publisher, however, was deeply unhappy with the complexity of the music and wrote to Mozart: "Write more popularly, or else I can neither print nor pay for anything of yours!"  The contract between them was eventually canceled over this issue.

There followed Shostakovich's String Quartet in C minor, No. 8, Op. 110 (1960).  Written in East Germany while Shostakovich was composing the score for a Soviet film memorializing the horrific destruction of Dresden by the Allies in 1945, this is an extremely dark work that has become the most popular and frequently performed of all the composer's quartets.  It was not the the gloomy reminiscence of World War II alone, though, that gave this work its black texture.  Shostakovich was at the time undergoing serious personal problems that led him so far as to consider suicide.  The causes of his depression were multiple.  For one thing, he felt he had betrayed his principles by bowing to pressure from Khrushchev to join the Communist party.  For another, the muscular disorder (poliomyelitis) from which he long suffered was progressing to the extent that he found it difficult to continue playing the piano. These afflictions prompted Shostakovich to regard the quartet as his valediction and even epitaph.  As he wrote to his friend Isaak Davidovich Glikman regarding the piece:

I reflected that if I die someday then it's hardly likely anyone will write a work dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write one myself. You could even write on the cover: 'Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this quartet'.

Closing the program was Schubert's Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat, D. 898 (1827).  Although written close to the end of the composer's life, there is little in it to suggest the melancholy that pervades many of his other works from this period.  Though a comparatively long piece, the music flows smoothly from beginning to end in a beguiling stream.  Even the andante, however subdued, has an air about it of calm acceptance.  In all, the trio has an uplifting quality to it that here provided an appropriate end to the evening.

Mannes Chamber Music: Shostakovich, Haydn, Barber and Debussy

Yesterday evening, the student recital at Goldmark Hall included two string quartets, one by Joseph Haydn and the other by Claude Debussy, as well as chamber pieces by Dmitri Shostakovich and Samuel Barber that featured a lighter style of music than is usually associated with either of these two composers.

The program opened with Shostakovich's Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano.  The five movements - Prelude, Gavotte, Elegy, Waltz and Polka - are taken from film scores, ballets and even a cartoon (The Tale of the Priest and His Servant Balda) that Shostakovich composed over a twenty year period from 1935 to 1955.  The Gavotte and the Elegy, for example, are both taken from the Third Ballet Suite (1952).  It should be noted that the arrangement of these selections was not completed by Shostakovich himself but more likely by his associate Lev Atovmian.

The other piece of "light" music on the program was Barber's Souvenirs, Op. 28 (1951).  The work exists in several arrangements.  That performed yesterday evening was the version for four hands, but here played instead on two pianos.  As the titles of the six movements - Waltz, Schottische, Pas de deux, Two-Step, Hesitation-Tango and Galop - would suggest, the work is intended as a fond remembrance.  Barber himself wrote:

"Imagine a divertissement in a setting of the Palm Court of the Hotel Plaza in New York, the year about 1914, epoch of the first tangos; 'Souvenirs' —remembered with affection, not in irony or with tongue in cheek, but in amused tenderness."

The first of the quartets to be played was Haydn's String Quartet in D, Op. 64, No. 5 (1790), nicknamed The Lark after the soaring melody played by the first violin in the opening movement.  Haydn is known as the "Father of the String Quartet" and no piece demonstrates as well as this how fully deserving he was of the title.  This work is probably his most popular in the genre and the first movement the most exhilarating he wrote for any quartet.

The second quartet, and the final piece on the program, was Debussy's String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10 (1893).  Debussy himself intensely disliked having the term "impressionism" applied to his music, and yet there are few other phrases that so aptly describe the shimmering quality of this work.  Debussy here adapted the cyclic structure devised by César Franck to the extent that he had the opening theme reappear in each movement.  But rather than content himself with repeating the theme unchanged, the composer instead subtly transformed it at each appearance so that the sensations evoked through its reiteration constantly evolved throughout the length of the quartet.

Mannes Chamber Music: Milhaud, Beethoven, Franck and Shostakovich

Yesterday evening's recital at Mannes began with a piece by Darius Milhaud entitled Scaramouche pour deux pianos, Op. 165b (1937).  Originally adapted from his incidental music to Le medécin volant by Moliérè, this was one of Milhaud's most popular works during his lifetime.  He programmed it to be played at concerts held in Paris during the German occupation and created arrangements for a number of instruments, including one for clarinet and saxophone.  I was intrigued listening to this jazzy piece after having just heard on Saturday two chamber works by Francis Poulenc, a fellow member of Les Six.

The second piece was Beethoven's Violin Sonata in A, Op. 30, No. 1 (1801).  Written in the period immediately following his confessional Heiligenstadt Testament in which he disclosed to his brothers his thoughts of suicide, the composer in these works began to progress beyond the classical traditions of Haydn and Mozart and as he entered his middle ("Heroic") period.  Interestingly, Beethoven titled the Op. 30 sonatas “for piano and violin,” an indication of the importance he placed on the keyboard parts as a full partner and not mere accompaniment.

The second half of the program began with the Sonata in A for Violin and Piano (1886) by César Franck.  The piece was written as a wedding present for the famous Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe and is a standard of the violin repertoire.  It was a great favorite of Marcel Proust, and it has been speculated the author used it as the source of his imaginary Vinteuil sonata when writing À la recherche du temps perdu.

The final piece was not shown on the program.  The same Mannes students who had earlier performed Shostakovich's Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 (1940) at a downtown recital gave another performance of the work yesterday evening.  I've always considered this to be the Shostakovich's most successful work.  While I've found his symphonies sometimes too cold and formal (which might at least in part be due to the Stalinist strictures under which the composer was forced to work), the quintet is a much more personal and accessible piece though still imbued with Shostakovich's distinctive style.  I recently heard another excellent performance of this work by the Chamber Music Society in a program presented on WQXR. The rendition by the students may have been a bit less polished than that played by the CMS but still showed great musicianship and ably conveyed the full power of the music.

Orientalism in America, 1870 - 1930

Not surprisingly, the most pervasive influence in Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870 - 1930 is that of Edward Said whose 1978 study Orientalism led to a major reevaluation of the manner in which the Moslem peoples of North Africa and the Near East had traditionally been viewed by the inhabitants of Europe and, to a lesser extent, the U.S.  On the most basic level, Said posited a political agenda that willfully introduced cultural misconceptions and stereotypes of the Near East as a means of fostering a sense of otherness that in turn allowed Westerners to see themselves as superior to and more moral than Eastern cultures and populations.  Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures, written to accompany an art exhibit of the same name, takes as its subject the manifestations of Orientalism in the U.S. from roughly the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Depression.  Through a study of these artifacts, it attempts to document the transformation in the American imagination of the very concept of the Orient during this same period.

While the implications that Orientalism holds for political scientists and sociologists are at once obvious, it should be noted that Said's thesis has had a profound impact on feminists as well, for nowhere have the depicted differences between East and West been so pronounced as in the differing roles of women in their respective societies.  This has been made most manifest in Western portrayals of the odalisque, the slave woman of the harem, as shown in the paintings of Ingres and Gérôme.  It is a subject where exoticism has led inevitably to eroticism.

If the above summary sounds a bit dry, the book itself certainly is not.  Instead, the text challenges American preconceptions of the East in several well written and provocative essays.  The authors accomplish this primarily by tracing the development of Orientalism from high art, as exemplified in the 1870's in the paintings of such artists as Frederic Edwin Church, through the representations of the Near East presented at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago to the uses to which Oriental imagery was put in the early twentieth century in mass entertainment, such as the 1921 silent film The Sheik, and advertising.  There are lively discussions of subjects as diverse as belly dancing and cigarette packaging.  The essays are well illustrated and the catalog of the exhibition includes a fascinating array of excellent reproductions.  In the end, the reader is left with a better understanding of the ways in which Americans have projected their fantasies of the Near East into a distorted viewpoint that even today complicates international relations and cultural interaction.

NY Philharmonic Performs Poulenc and Mozart

Yesterday, the NY Philharmonic gave the second concert in its Saturday matinee series.  As usual, members of the orchestra performed chamber music in the first half of the program; in the second half, the full orchestra played Mozart's final symphony.

This season, the selection of chamber works has been taken entirely from the early twentieth century French repertoire.  The two pieces played at yesterday's concert were both by Francis Poulenc - his Sextet for Wind Quintet and Piano; and the Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano.  Poulenc will always be associated with the Paris of the 1920's.  During that period, he joined with such luminaries as Milhaud and Honegger to form Les Six, a group of talented composers who reacted against both German romanticism and French impressionism and adopted in their place a neo-classical style influenced by Stravinsky and Satie.  The sextet was written somewhat after this period in 1932, when Poulenc's musical aspirations were already changing, and was revised in 1939.  I have always enjoyed its opening movement that to my ear echoes Gershwin's music and evokes the sounds of big city traffic.  The trio, written in 1926 and dedicated to Manuel de Falla, is slightly shorter but equally memorable.

I heard a performance of Mozart's Symphony #41 in C, K. 551 (1788) just last week when Iván Fischer led the Orchestra of St. Luke's in a concert at Carnegie Hall.  With the same piece scheduled to close yesterday's program, I was interested to hear how Fischer's style compared with that of the Philharmonic's Music Director Alan Gilbert.  In the end, my own preference was for Fischer's interpretation.  I felt that St. Luke's under Fischer gave a tighter and better articulated performance than did the Philharmonic under Gilbert.  Both sets of musicians were superb, but in the Philharmonic's version I heard little that was new or inspired.  This impression was only strengthened when I listened yesterday evening to a live WQXR broadcast of the Philharmonic in a performance all three of Mozart's final symphonies, again with Gilbert at the podium.