It means a prayer for both inner and outer peace, and Beethoven wrote the line to help focus the energy he was looking in the Dona Nobis Pacem that brings the great Missa Solemnis to an end. The work is more than 85 minutes of music and it is built with the complexity of design that often reflects both inner and outer struggle.
In a concert simulcast live in the Digital Concert Hall, guest conductor Herbert Blomstedt brought a classical clarity to this great work as he conducted the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks.
On the very edge of turning 85, Blomstedt is probably best known in this country for his tenure as music director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1985 to 1995. Blomstedt conducted from memory and without a baton and brought a delicious youthful vitality to the event.
During his prerecorded address to the digital audience aired a half-hour before the event itself, Blomstedt emphasized how all levels of this work are "charged with meaning." He handed us neatly wrapped examples of musical motives which he sang, and also unraveled some specific connections to religious symbolism contained in the work.
Soft-edged balances in the Kyrie set the mood for this performance, and Blomstedt placed the opening choral invocations without diminuendi so that the quiet downbeats were subito. This made the soloists seem to emerge from the resonances in the hall and was quite magical even over the internet. Though there were glorious moments in the celebratory Gloria it was the Apollonian quality that Blomstedt created in the Credo that was most memorable.
Guy Braunstein played the extensive solo violin writing in the Benedictus with liquid phrases shaped in lyricism, and made even more poignant by his recent announcement to step down as concertmaster of the Berliner Philharmoniker at the end of the 2012-2013 season.
The soloists were effective both in individual phrases and in blended ensembles. Soprano Ruth Ziesak was captivating with colors that could pierce any texture and rhythmic buoyancy that drew us close. Tenor Richard Croft showed how a thinking tenor can phrase and blend and still sound effortlessly brilliant. Bass Georg Zeppenfeld and contralto Gerhild Romberger both contributed magical moments to this quartet of soloists.
At the end of the Benedictus, Blomstedt allowed the final fermata to sustain longer than any others in the work. He froze, then with a sudden gesture he seemed to grab the sound with both hands and pulled it inward as the chord was released into silence. Throughout this performance the music felt cherished.
Showing posts with label Beethoven. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beethoven. Show all posts
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Irwin Edman; A Philosopher Listens to the Radio
Irwin Edman (1896-1954)was a music lover. He was also a philosopher who wrote more than 20 books and taught for many years at Columbia University.
"I grew up in the years 1900 to 1910 in simple Manhattan," wrote Edman, "through which one could cheerfully ride a bicycle from the farms in outlying Harlem to forty-second street and fifth avenue, and I saw it transformed into megalopian New York. There could really be some charming sketches of the open-air trolleys--of shouting 'Get a horse!' to goggled automobilists in rare and precarious automobiles."
In his book "Philosopher’s Holiday," written in 1938, he reflects on growing up in a generation when access to music changed regularly as technology made private listening possible, and as media made music available upon demand.
"It is a great boon, doubtless, to be able to hear the symphonies time and again," wrote Edman, "interrupted by the telephone, by visitors, by a sense that one doesn't have to listen at all, by the consciousness that this is not a major event."
"Music has ceased to be something sacramental and eventful," he writes with regret, "and has become the familiar staple, the carte du jour, of our lives. The young music-lover of today knows all the themes far better than his predecessor of twenty years ago. He hears Beethoven at four, at five, at midnight, on cigarette and bank programmes; he does not need the announcer to tell him it is a Bach concerto or a Schumann sonata. But he also does not have the sense of a high and signal occasion that music meant to us in the days before the phonograph and the radio put it as casually as a news bulletin in our homes."
Early in his essay called "For the Love of Music" from Philosopher's Holiday he relate and experience created from that relatively new technology called radio:
"It was midnight. I had been working all evening and found myself suddenly with that hunger for music which often at inconvenient hours assails the long-habituated lover of it. Heaven knows, one has enough music in New York. And now with that aristocrat among radio stations, WQXR, broadcasting the choicest records five hours a day, one need not even go to Carnegie or Town Hall.
"I could have put on a record; but I was lazy and tuned in on the radio instead, hoping against hope that at this unlikely hour there would be something worth listening to. WQXR was silent; the major stations were sending various swing bands into the midnight air.
"Suddenly, I could scarcely believe my ears: there was the sound of a symphony orchestra:
"I hesitated to turn on the volume very loud; after all it was midnight and the neighbours had once, at an earlier hour, complained when I had played quite loud (in a desperate desire to get the last barbarous violence over the loudspeaker) Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps.)
"I listened scrupulously. The low volume made careful listening necessary. The orchestral harmonies had a remote clarity, like music remembered in solitude or heard in a dream. But the dream was precise and steady now, and the details of orchestration clearer than I ever managed to hear them in memory, my musical recollection centering on themes that it is possible to hum or whistle. What could this be, Eighteenth century surely, Mozart or Haydn. One could not always be sure. There was one crude test. If it were Haydn one could be fairly certain at most given points what was going in essence to happen next. But that unexpected turn, that felicity, surprising but inevitable, like Aristotle's requisite for tragedy, that was Mozart, surely.
"But wait now. A long rising line [3:51], a deep musical exaltation, a sudden sharp descent [3:58], an inelegant, almost barbarous breadth and intensity [4:08]; a phrase here that neither Haydn nor Mozart would have thought of [4:14], a modulation [4:44] that suggested a range of consciousness and feeling in tone that could have been only one thing.
"'You have been listening,' said the announcer, 'to Beethoven's Second Symphony. It is part of a musical jamboree presented each night at this time by the Music Shop.' I went to bed not unpleased with myself for having identified a style, and not sufficiently displeased for having failed to remember a symphony had so long known."
"I grew up in the years 1900 to 1910 in simple Manhattan," wrote Edman, "through which one could cheerfully ride a bicycle from the farms in outlying Harlem to forty-second street and fifth avenue, and I saw it transformed into megalopian New York. There could really be some charming sketches of the open-air trolleys--of shouting 'Get a horse!' to goggled automobilists in rare and precarious automobiles."
In his book "Philosopher’s Holiday," written in 1938, he reflects on growing up in a generation when access to music changed regularly as technology made private listening possible, and as media made music available upon demand.
"It is a great boon, doubtless, to be able to hear the symphonies time and again," wrote Edman, "interrupted by the telephone, by visitors, by a sense that one doesn't have to listen at all, by the consciousness that this is not a major event."
"Music has ceased to be something sacramental and eventful," he writes with regret, "and has become the familiar staple, the carte du jour, of our lives. The young music-lover of today knows all the themes far better than his predecessor of twenty years ago. He hears Beethoven at four, at five, at midnight, on cigarette and bank programmes; he does not need the announcer to tell him it is a Bach concerto or a Schumann sonata. But he also does not have the sense of a high and signal occasion that music meant to us in the days before the phonograph and the radio put it as casually as a news bulletin in our homes."
Early in his essay called "For the Love of Music" from Philosopher's Holiday he relate and experience created from that relatively new technology called radio:
"It was midnight. I had been working all evening and found myself suddenly with that hunger for music which often at inconvenient hours assails the long-habituated lover of it. Heaven knows, one has enough music in New York. And now with that aristocrat among radio stations, WQXR, broadcasting the choicest records five hours a day, one need not even go to Carnegie or Town Hall.
"I could have put on a record; but I was lazy and tuned in on the radio instead, hoping against hope that at this unlikely hour there would be something worth listening to. WQXR was silent; the major stations were sending various swing bands into the midnight air.
"Suddenly, I could scarcely believe my ears: there was the sound of a symphony orchestra:
"I hesitated to turn on the volume very loud; after all it was midnight and the neighbours had once, at an earlier hour, complained when I had played quite loud (in a desperate desire to get the last barbarous violence over the loudspeaker) Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps.)
"I listened scrupulously. The low volume made careful listening necessary. The orchestral harmonies had a remote clarity, like music remembered in solitude or heard in a dream. But the dream was precise and steady now, and the details of orchestration clearer than I ever managed to hear them in memory, my musical recollection centering on themes that it is possible to hum or whistle. What could this be, Eighteenth century surely, Mozart or Haydn. One could not always be sure. There was one crude test. If it were Haydn one could be fairly certain at most given points what was going in essence to happen next. But that unexpected turn, that felicity, surprising but inevitable, like Aristotle's requisite for tragedy, that was Mozart, surely.
"But wait now. A long rising line [3:51], a deep musical exaltation, a sudden sharp descent [3:58], an inelegant, almost barbarous breadth and intensity [4:08]; a phrase here that neither Haydn nor Mozart would have thought of [4:14], a modulation [4:44] that suggested a range of consciousness and feeling in tone that could have been only one thing.
"'You have been listening,' said the announcer, 'to Beethoven's Second Symphony. It is part of a musical jamboree presented each night at this time by the Music Shop.' I went to bed not unpleased with myself for having identified a style, and not sufficiently displeased for having failed to remember a symphony had so long known."
Friday, July 2, 2010
König Stephan Overture; Beethoven, Bernstein and the art of Orchestral Joy
Beethoven's music comes to mind in moments of grandness. He was master of the heroic, of the epic, of the transcendent--but he also knew how to enjoy a good snicker.
The König Stephan Overture Op 117 was written during the summer of 1811. It was commissioned to celebrate the opening of a new theater in Pest. The work seldom acquires advocates: "Neither the text [of the stage-work in which it was included] nor the music was of the highest standard," wrote Anne-Louise Coldicott in "The Beethoven Compendium."
The work found its first sympathetic interpreter in Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein could articulate collisions of formality, lightness and laughter. In less than two minutes of introductory discourse he clarified the energy of this work in 1978 with classic Bernstein wit. "It is a charmer and a curiosity," said Bernstein, "a cross between Béla Bartók and Shortnin' Bread."
The relationship to Bartók is not literal, but the metaphor serves well to indicate that the combination of fourths in the openings fanfare is more common to the twentieth century than the nineteenth.
The first four pitches in the fanfare: Eb-Bb-F-C are deflected into a light march in A-flat major. The next fanfare interrupts the march, F-C-G-D, and interprets the final D as part of a dominant seventh of E-flat in order to allow the music to land, without skipping off the atmosphere into deep space.
Bernstein brings some "West Side" later in this "Story" giving everything to the backbeats during the closing theme.
Putting the pure joy of orchestral musicianship on display was part of the Bernstein legacy. "I'm only trying," said Bernstein "to Rev You Up!" Thirty-two years later it still works.
The König Stephan Overture Op 117 was written during the summer of 1811. It was commissioned to celebrate the opening of a new theater in Pest. The work seldom acquires advocates: "Neither the text [of the stage-work in which it was included] nor the music was of the highest standard," wrote Anne-Louise Coldicott in "The Beethoven Compendium."
The work found its first sympathetic interpreter in Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein could articulate collisions of formality, lightness and laughter. In less than two minutes of introductory discourse he clarified the energy of this work in 1978 with classic Bernstein wit. "It is a charmer and a curiosity," said Bernstein, "a cross between Béla Bartók and Shortnin' Bread."
The relationship to Bartók is not literal, but the metaphor serves well to indicate that the combination of fourths in the openings fanfare is more common to the twentieth century than the nineteenth.
The first four pitches in the fanfare: Eb-Bb-F-C are deflected into a light march in A-flat major. The next fanfare interrupts the march, F-C-G-D, and interprets the final D as part of a dominant seventh of E-flat in order to allow the music to land, without skipping off the atmosphere into deep space.
Bernstein brings some "West Side" later in this "Story" giving everything to the backbeats during the closing theme.
Putting the pure joy of orchestral musicianship on display was part of the Bernstein legacy. "I'm only trying," said Bernstein "to Rev You Up!" Thirty-two years later it still works.
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