Prelude and Fugue? No... Prelude & Food; a new show hosted by Sarah Willis

Sarah Willis with actor Christian Berkel; in episode to be released July 19

She has become a significant presence in the classical music world, and a new series featuring Sarah Willis that is called “Prelude & Food” is worthy of your attention.

Willis is a member of the horn section of the Berliner Philharmoniker, the iconic orchestra that has successfully expanded its audience with a collection of high quality live concert broadcasts in the Digital Concert Hall.

Live broadcasts in the Digital Concert Hall often include specially created “interval talks” that play during intermission. These conversations almost always feature a member of the orchestra who interviews the conductor and/or soloist of the evening. The conversations range over practical topics and often give insights about the music and those who perform it.

Willis has become a popular interval host. She has a journalistic flair, and also has a distinctive kind of charisma that puts the people she interviews at ease. Ideas flow naturally.

Alexander Lück and Daniel Finkernagel from finkernagel & lück medienproduktion met Willis through their work on the broadcast team of the Digital Concert Hall. They conceived of the original concept for “Prelude & Food,” and as they worked with Willis they became convinced she would be the perfect host.

Taped in German with English subtitles, Prelude & Food is not a cooking show in the tradition of Julia Child. Instead, each episode is centered on a guest who arrives with a grocery bag of food to cook. Other friends of the guest are already assembled, and the group begins to cook a dish at various times and in various combinations.

One might not catch all the steps necessary to reconstruct the meal at your own home, but that result is not the central focus of the show. Instead, we see the process of working together; of sharing the joy of communication in a chamber music of chopping and mixing.

Camera shots cut away from discussions from time-to-time to show interactions among the friends in another part of an adjacent dining room. The camera positions move slightly during conversations to create energy and unusual angles help shape our connection and make us feel involved.

While food is simmering, baking, or boiling there are opportunities for short musical works that are like sonic hors d'oeuvres. These works can be light-hearted and fun or can be surprisingly gorgeous, but they are an important link to the awesome talents and skills that these musicians have developed to the point where even casual playing is graceful and entrancing.


The process of preparing a dish becomes the narrative around which conversations, surprise guests, and musical interludes intersect. It is a clever format for revealing the charm of creative people, and its energy is youthful and fresh.

Willis is the perfect host for this kind of semi-indeterminate network of conversations. She directs, persuades, and develops a special kind of conversational polyphony.

In the first episode the guest is singer Anna Prohaska, who has appeared in the digital concert hall twice; once as a soloist in Mahler 8 and in an engaging concert in 2011 singing Mozart and Berg.

Prohaska explains that singers must be very careful of their health and must be aware of every change in their voices, so she shows us how to make her own special version of chicken soup. Her secret is in not using too much water, so that the taste is stronger, and she puts spices into a newly fashioned tea bag so that it can hold juniper berries and other spices.

Christoph Schneider (the drummer in Rammstein) is the surprise guest for the first episode. Like several classical musicians, Prohaska has a metal side and like many rockers, Schneider seems happy to hang out with classical musicians.

The second episode of “Prelude & Food” will be available on July 25. Cellist Alban Gerhardt is the featured guest, and he will show us how to make Moussaka. Gerhardt's friends on the show are the actor Christian Berkel, and manager Boris Orlob.

Two other episodes are in the process of being edited and will appear soon.

Episode three will feature the conductor Donald Runnicles as a main guest, with mezzo-soprano Anna Smirnova, and tenor Massimo Giordano. Episode four will feature oboist Albrecht Mayer  as main guest, along with pianist Markus Becker and woodwind instrument repair guru Ludwig Frank.

We have become accustomed to thinking about audience development for classical music as consisting of concerts in the Bernstein tradition given to children. But this show is audience development for people who can become immediate subscribers; for folks in their 20s and 30s who will discover that people who are devoted to classical music are people who are basically like them (and maybe even just a little bit cooler). 

Some thoughts on "July" from the Tchaikovsky "Seasons"

The Russian magazine "Nouvellist" commissioned Tchaikovsky to write twelve short piano pieces inspired by the each of the twelve months. The corresponding music appeared in each publication in 1876.

The editor chose the subtitles that set the mood for each month. July was inspired by the "song of the reaper." An additional epigraph was given based on a phrase from a poem by Aleksey Koltsov:

"Move the shoulders, shake the arms!
And the noon wind breathes in the face!"

Tchaikovsky wrote dance music built on a collision between formal and informal movement.

There is an elegant and restrained quality in the opening 7-bar phrases. The music is almost processional. Metric groupings shift to keep one off-balance: [3+2+2], [3+2+2]. The opening 3-patterns of both phrases are expanded by attaching a one-measure "bow" [0:04, and [0:20] to an otherwise two-bar metric pattern.

Pletnev takes a great deal of time [0:27-0:30] between sections in this live performance to create more space for transition between musical ideas. This delay eliminates collision and normalizes the music: too bad.

The music shifts suddenly into C minor [0:31] and sports a backbeat. This is music of diabolical fun with rustic figuration in the bass. Three fanfares culminate this section [0:42, 0:49, and 0:55]. Each fanfare is followed by a solistic break--the middle one in rising contour and the outer ones falling.

The return [1:06] introduces a curious triplet figuration in the tenor that becomes a parody of the formality of the opening section. There is a brief codetta [1:31] that allows the triplets to extend into ever-higher registers to create a closing for this first part of the piece.

"Now doe the Reapers try their backs and their armes," wrote English writer Nicholas Breton (1545-1626) about July, "and the lusty Youthes pitch the sheafes into the Cart."

His entry, from "The Twelve Moneths," shares the sense of contrasts in July that caught Tchaikovsky: "The Souldier now hath a hot march, and the Lawyer sweats in his lyned Gowne...In summe, I thus conclude of it, I hold it a profitable season, the Labourers gaine, and the rich mans wealth. Farewell."

Dvořák Symphony No. 8 Allegretto grazioso – Molto vivace; A waltz of concerns that closes in a smile

The third movement of Antonín Dvořák's 8th symphony is a waltz of concerns.

Against a bed of quiet triplets, played by the clarinet and flutes and a rich figuration of double reeds, plucked strings, and a viola drone, the first violins dance. The opening passage is marked forte for the first violins but piano everywhere else.

Listen to the sweep of line as the strings dance a phrase of 4 measures then stretch to 6. One feels the lightness of motion at this higher level of articulation. In embellished figuration [0:12] the line echos 4 then 7 measures, but the gesture quiets. It expresses concern:



There is a disintegration [0:24]. Five four-bar phrases uncoil chromatic gestures in the rhythm of snare drums as the sense of dancing drains. The music becomes almost motionless.

Its motion resumes in advance of the connection to a written-out repeat [0:48] where the dance begins again; this time scored for flutes and oboe, with clarinet joining afterward. The parallelism is exact until the cadence [1:32] where the phrasing 4+3 brings the larger section to an articulate close.

The trio turns rustic, in the tonic major [1:40] and celebrates the memory of innocence. The phrasing(4+4)(4+6)(6,6,2) develops the stretched phrase lengths of the minuet with a sophisticated design. As with the minuet this stanza is restated [2:18] in a different scoring.

There is a third statement of the main theme of the trio [2:57] identical to the others during its first half but altered to close the section over a pause. This third statement overbalances the minuet and will lead to a surprising moment at the close of the movement.

The minuet returns [3:37] and so does its echo [4:26].

G major returns [5:18] in a molto vivace codetta. The phrase structure rocks between 4 and 5-bar phrases:

(4+5)(4+5)(4+4)
(4+5)(4+5)(2+3+...)

The movement closes with a sudden and surprising sonic smile.

Two Celebrations of Dale Clevenger to mark his Retirement from the CSO

Dale Clevenger

On Monday there will be a special concert featuring members of the Chicago Symphony to celebrate the long and memorable career of one of the greatest horn players of his generation: Dale Clevenger. Clevenger has been principal horn of the CSO for 47 years and will officially retire at the end of June. The concert event is no longer open to the general public but only to friends and other guests who registered online by May 27. The highlight will undoubtedly be the "mass horn choir" performance of the adagietto from Mahler 5 in an arrangements for horns only!

As a prelude to that rather private celebration, we are all invited to a special "horn hangout" hosted by Sarah Willis. This event will be streamed live at 2:00 EST from her website. Willis will take questions, memories, and tributes from the live chat. Don't miss this opportunity to celebrate the career of the player with one of the most readily identifiable and distinctive horn sounds in the history of classical recordings.

Arguably, the best introduction to his sound as a soloist can be heard on "The Chicago Principal; First Chair Soloists Play Famous Concertos," where Clevenger performed as soloist in the Mozart Horn Concerto No. 3, and in ensemble in the Schumann Konzertstück and the Britten Serenade. This classic Deutsche Grammophon double disc (released in 2003) was selected from performances recorded between 1976 and 1983.

The Chicago horn sound in Mahler symphonies during the Solti years was centered by Clevenger. That fact alone is reason for celebration! I will be tuning in to the Willis Horn Hangout on Monday.