On the Arts

Queen’s University in Ontario just announced that it will be closing its fine arts programme, citing a shortage of resources to continue to sustain the programme.

This is only another reminder of how the arts have been relegated to the sidelines in our society. In Canada and the United States, whenever there are cutbacks, the arts are always the first to suffer. In Vancouver, we spend millions of dollars just to build a new roof for the stadium, but the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, a “multipurpose” hall (which only means that it does not serve any purpose at all) that is home to the city’s opera company, has deplorable acoustics that is a disgrace to our beautiful city. Even the Orpheum Theatre, home to the symphony, is no more than a converted movie house, despite its superficial splendour and opulence.

Newspaper would devote pages to an “Arts and Leisure” or “Arts and Entertainment” section. The implication is, of course, that art and music are things that we do when we have nothing better to do, or that the arts serve no greater purpose than to entertain us. Radio stations advertise “easy listening” music – to me listening to music far from “easy.”

When will we begin to realize that the arts – music, theatre, painting and sculpture – are essential to life? Imagine a world where everything has to be “useful”, and that we are all doctors and engineers, as much as these are noble professions.

Arts organizations, in order to attract new supporters, have had to resort to clever advertising tactics and glossy brochures, in order to project an image that they are just as “funky” as anyone else. Instead of educating the public, elevating the public, to an appreciation of the arts, we now rely on marketing in order to bring people into our concert halls and art galleries. The result is that audience relies on advertising and newspapers to tell them what they should see and hear. Another result is the mass marketing of artists, something that is especially apparent in the world of Classical music. Just look at the latest album cover for pianist Lang Lang, an example of arts marketing taken to the extreme. Those who are willing, so to speak, to sell their souls to the devil, will succeed, whereas many true artists unwilling to compromise end up playing to empty halls, if they get any engagements at all.

I am a great believer in government support of the arts, something that European governments have been doing for a long time. If we devote resources to education, to sports, to healthcare, or to social services, we should, we must, devote as much resources to the arts.

Why do we have the phenomenon of fully enrolled Music Programs at universities and of an overwhelming number of young people being given private music lessons, but not seeing these same young people at concerts and other performances? Home is where the nurturing of music and arts appreciation takes place. How can we create awareness among parents to include arts in their upbringing of their children – museum visits, going to concerts, looking at paintings, even once-a-year’s attendance of the Nutcracker or plays by the local theatre companies?

Leonard Bernstein, that great musician and educator, once said to his orchestral musicians, “The art you care for is precious, treat it with care, gently.” No, music and art do not make our stomachs full, nor do they serve any “useful” purpose. But the idea of arts for arts’ sake should be something that we are reminded of more often.  

Alfred Brendel Lectures

On Friday, October 21^st, I had the privilege of attending a lecture given by the distinguished pianist Alfred Brendel at the School of Music of the University of British Columbia. No stranger to concertgoers and music lovers, Alfred Brendel was of course one of the great pianists of the 20^th century. What fewer people realize is that Brendel was and is a prolific writer of various musical topics as well as a poet. His two volumes of collected writings – Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts and Music Sounded Out, make for stimulating reading for musicians and serious music lovers. Since his retirement from concertizing several years ago, the pianist has been travelling giving lectures on music as well as poetry readings. Vancouver was fortunate to have been one of Mr. Brendel’s stops in his lecture tour.

The subject of Alfred Brendel’s lecture, Must Classical Music be Entirely Serious, drew materials from two essays on the same subject the pianist previously wrote – The Sublime in Reverse and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.

With a generous sampling of musical examples played by Mr. Brendel, he set out to show how composers, namely Haydn, in his piano compositions, injected their music with “a sort of innocent mischievousness,” to quote an early biographer of Haydn. In the case of Beethoven, Brendel quoted Friedrich Rochlitz, who wrote, “Once Beethoven is in the mood, rough, striking witticisms, odd notions, surprising and exciting juxtapositions and paradoxes occur to him in a steady flow.” The musical examples chosen by Brendel certainly served the purpose of proving the above points.

Mr. Brendel focused his lecture on three major works, Haydn’s C Major Sonata, Hob. XVI: 50, Beethoven’s G Major Sonata, Op. 31, No. 1, and the same composer’s monumental Diabelli Variations, a work usually treated by most performers with the utmost seriousness, revealing it to be a highly humorous work.

In the music of Joseph Haydn, Mr. Brendel discussed the composer’s “tricks” in his comic traits – breaches of convention, the appearance of ambiguity, proceedings that masquerades as something they are not, for instance, a deliberate show of ignorance of musical skill, veiled insults, and sheer nonsense. The great pianist also devoted much time in discussing humour in the works of Beethoven – the two hands that are unable to play together in the first movement of Beethoven’s Op. 31, No. 1 Sonata, making fun of a prima donna’s coloratura embellishments in the second movement of the same piece, the “abuse” of fugal writing technique for burlesque purposes, and the “laughing theme” in his the final movement of his Sonata in F Major, Op. 10, No. 2.

Alfred Brendel’s discussion on Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations reminds us of the humour that can be found in abundance in this work. I think pianists and music lovers either treat this piece as highly serious, almost like a holy relic, or extremely boring. A pianist friend said that he often falls asleep during performances of the Diabelli, and when he wakes up, the music is still being played. Perhaps it is not so much that the work itself is boring, but performances of this work that fails to bring out the humour and the joy in the music. Mr. Brendel certainly proved his point in the examples that he played for us.

The name of Mozart was not mentioned in Mr. Brendel’s lecture. He thinks that Haydn and Beethoven were predominantly instrumental composers, where sensual beauty of sound was not an innate quality. Mozart, and Schubert, had imaginations that were primarily vocal and, to quote Mr. Brendel, “singing, like sensuality, is hardly funny.” It is also more difficult to discover humour in the Romantic composers, because by the 19^th century, music became “an entirely serious business.” Composers and performances in the Romantic era took themselves very seriously, and were expected “to function as heroes, dictators, poets, seducers, magicians, or helpless vessels of inspiration.” Schumann’s monumental Humoresque, great music as it is, is “capricious, lyrical, and unpredictable,” but not funny in the sense he discussed above. Mr. Brendel said that he was completely unable to find any sense of humour in the music of Chopin.

The pianist’s sense of humour and obvious enjoyment in sharing his musical thoughts were not lost on the audience, who responded fully with much laughter. Mr. Brendel is a man with a wonderful sense of humour, who enjoys the Far Side cartoons of Gary Larson, and who once said that his favourite hobby is “laughing.”

I, for one, was, and am, grateful for Alfred Brendel for coming to Vancouver and sharing his insights, his humour, and his obvious joy in music with us.

West Side Story - a Great OPERA

I cannot begin to tell you how much I love Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.

It is easy to love the music of West Side Story, with all its memorable and catchy tunes – Maria, Tonight, America, to name just a few. Like any musical masterpieces, though, West Side Story is more than the sum of its parts. Looking through the music recently, I was reminded again how innovative the writing is from a compositional standpoint, not just melodically, but harmonically and rhythmically.

Some of the most interesting and innovative music in the score can be found in Bernstein’s writing for the orchestra, which also serves as a sort of Greek chorus to the drama. Because the tunes in West Side Story are so well known, we often overlook the music that serves as intermezzi between scenes, and as introductions to the many beautiful numbers. In the introduction to The Dance at the Gym, for instance, a seven-measure introduction with no key centre, finally settles harmonically, and gives way to a rather raunchy tune, marked “Rocky” in the score. It is also in the same scene that we first hear the famous melody to the song Maria, in the introduction to the graceful Cha-Cha, which precedes the dramatic meeting scene between Maria and Tony.

Bernstein was very interested in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and made a wonderful recording of the opera in his last years. In the justly famous Maria, Bernstein, like Wagner, introduces a chord that reappears often, a chord that is left unresolved. Unlike Wagner, Bernstein does not so much resolve the chord, but abruptly shifts the music from B Major to C Major (two completely unrelated keys) in the final three measures of the opera.

In the Tonight ensemble, Bernstein gives us a contrapuntal tour de force, merging the thoughts and emotions of all the main characters. It is one of the most exciting and innovative scenes in the opera where, like Mozart at the end of Act II of Le Nozze di Figaro where, in spite of the complexity of the music, every vocal line can be clearly heard.

Vancouver Opera is opening its 2011 season with a production of West Side Story, using a 30-piece orchestra. I think it is a mistake to perform West Side Story with a small orchestra. When Bernstein recorded West Side Story, he did so with a symphony orchestra, with a full complement of strings. Using an ensemble the size of a Broadway pit band trivializes the music, emphasizing only the “brassy” elements in the score, but taking away, almost completely, the lyricism that is such an important part of the score. 

Towards the end of his life, Leonard Bernstein was upset that people might only remember him as the composer of West Side Story. His fear was that people would overlook his “serious” compositions, and remember him merely as the composer of the famous tunes. Indeed, many critics, especially during Bernstein’s lifetime, have excoriated Bernstein as a composer of serious music, adding that his compositional talents should have been applied towards Broadway and not Carnegie Hall. Critics are almost always suspicious of works of art that are popular, as if popularity and greatness are mutually exclusive.

I think Bernstein should have been proud of being the composer of West Side Story. It is an American work, but it is also universal. It is music that is greater than any interpretation can bear, whether it is the local high school production, or one by the greatest opera companies with the most famous singers. And it is a towering, timeless, masterpiece, a great opera, just as loving and tender as La Boheme, just as brutal as anything Bartok wrote, and just as shattering as Tristan und Isolde. 

Critics

There is almost always a gap, sometimes a big gap between the intention and the realization of what you are trying to achieve. It is that gap which is so painful. The critic criticizing the concert doesn’t know that you had worked forever in building up a crescendo, and that you didn’t succeed in making it come out.

                                                                                    Vladimir Horowitz

The critic as aesthetic arbiter has, I think, no proper social function, no defensible criteria upon which to base his subjective judgments, and, historical precedent to the contrary notwithstanding, no strong case at law with which to defend them. (The critic) has served as a morally disruptive, and aesthetically destructive, influence.

                                                                                    Glenn Gould

It is perfectly correct to disregard all the bad reviews one gets, but only if at the same time, one disregards the good ones as well.

                                                                                    André Previn

Other than in the arts, in no other profession do we find the critic in procession of such incredible power over our thinking and psyche. Do we see people who are not physicians criticizing the surgical technique of a surgeon? Or someone who has no training in law writing about the arguments of a lawyer in a court case?

Yet this is precisely what we have in music and art, where we have the critic, sometimes with little training in the field, exerting enormous influence on how the audience or museum visitors feel about a musical performance, a painting, a movie, a novel, or a play. How many people would rush to pick up a copy of the New York Times after attending a concert in Carnegie Hall, just to find out how the distinguished critic of the newspaper feel about the performance. Or even before deciding whether to attend the performance in the first place. This in turn would affect how we tell our friends at the next dinner party about how we like the performance ourselves.

Performers themselves have also been guilty of hanging on the word of the critic. Naturally, a great review in a distinguished newspaper can make a career, while an adverse one can send the performer into artistic oblivion, if not traumatize and scar him or her for good.

We ourselves have given the critic enormous power, and we need to regain that power, to not be afraid to form our own opinions.

The arts, music in particular, elicit in all of us an emotional response. For a member of the audience, whether or not we are moved or touched by a performance should be the sole criteria of judging whether it is “good” or not. As Glenn Gould said in the quote above, the critic does not, or should not, have any role as “artistic arbiter”.

Glenn Gould often talked about the circus mentality in a musical performance. If we like someone, we cheer him to the rafters, and we make him a star. If we dislike him or her, we boo until the person leaves the stage. The critic has certainly played a crucial role in cultivating this kind of thinking, because we see a great deal of plain nastiness in music criticism. For one of his recordings, Gould himself infuriated the critics (I hope) by writing four “reviews” of the album, using all the catch phrases and clichés favoured by musical journalists.

Music is perhaps the most fluid of all the arts. As soon as a note is played, or sung, it becomes something that has already happened. An artist can play that same note one way tonight, and an entirely different way tomorrow.

When we try to seize upon something so fluid, we are in fact impeding creativity and originality in the arts and in the inherent process of art making, and taking away what is pure and precious in all our artistic endeavors.

Chopin's Orchestra

One would be at risk of stating the obvious to say that Frédéric Chopin’s two piano concerti contain highly original, ravishing, and brilliant writing for the composer’s chosen instrument. Musicians have been much less fulsome, however, when it comes to Chopin’s writing for the orchestra in these same concerti. Even some of the greatest pianists have considered the orchestral parts for Chopin’s concerti ineffective, if not downright weak. Other pianists and composers have been guilty of “re-orchestrating” Chopin’s writing, or cut out chunks of the tutti when performing the works.

Chopin wrote his two piano concerti at the outset of his career, and he wrote these works in order to showcase his talents as a composer for the piano, and as a virtuoso pianist. If we really listen carefully and examine the scores for these two concerti, we will discover the beauty and the sensitivity of the orchestral writing.

I content that Chopin knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote the orchestral parts for these concerti.

For a composer who did not know how to write for the orchestra, Chopin certainly did not skim on the orchestral forces. The instrumentation for both concerti are remarkably similar – strings, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, and two trumpets for both concerti, as well as timpani; four horns for the first concerto, and two for the second concerto; a trombone for the first concerto, but bass trombone for the second concerto – rather a large orchestra for an “inexperienced” composer!

What is remarkable, especially in the outer movements of both concerti, is that while the composer marshals his orchestral forces to create some stirring sounds, the orchestral writing is so sensitively written that at no time is the solo piano part ever overwhelmed by the orchestra. This same sensitivity can be found in Anton Dvorak’s justly famous cello concerto, in which the single cello can always be heard along with a similarly large orchestra.

Another aspect of these concerti that catches my ears is the incredible beauty of the writing for the woodwinds, especially in the slow movements. In the slow movement of the first concerto, for instance, the bassoon plays a descending countermelody (first appearing in measure 31) that sets off beautifully the predominantly ascending melody of the piano part.

Yet another interesting orchestral effect can be found in the third movement of the second concerto. When the pianist plays a jaunty unison melody marked scherzando (measure 145), Chopin instructs his string players to play the accompaniment figures col legno (hitting the string with the wood of the bow), an effect that perfectly suits the character of the piano theme.

No one is claiming Chopin to be an orchestrator on par with Ravel or Rimsky-Korsakov, but we need make no apologies for him when it comes to his orchestral writing in these concerti. I find it interesting that no one ever comments upon the orchestral writing in Paganini’s violin concerti, which is much more bombastic, and less sensitively written than Chopin’s piano concerti.

When I listen to pianist Krystian Zimerman’s recordings of the two Chopin concerti, with Carlo Maria Giulini and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, I feel that a sympathetic conductor can make these concerti a true collaboration between soloist and orchestra. Perhaps what we need are sensitive podium maestros who can really bring out the beauty of the orchestral writings in this pair of youthful concerti.

In Search of the True Musician

A recent article in the New York Times bears the eye-catching title Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen. In it, Mr. Anthony Tommasini, critic for the paper, wrote that, “A young pianist has come along who can seemingly play anything, and easily, is not the big deal it would have been a short time ago.” Mr. Tommasini went on to discuss how technical proficiency at the piano has been raised to an incredibly high level, comparing it to athletes breaking the record for the four-minute mile, once thought to be an impossible feat. 

The role of the interpreter is to bring forth the logic and beauty of a great piece of music, to draw the attention of the listeners toward the music and not the player. We have a problem when the interpreter uses music as a mean to glorify oneself, something that we do see in some of today’s musicians.  Naturally, a great musician will inevitably bring his or her own special view of the music and inject freshness into the score. Even so, the music is, or should be, the focus of the listeners’ attention.

To be sure, musicians like Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Herbert on Karajan and Arturo Toscanini, were very strong personalities. But when these artists came on stage, they knew they were there in service to the composer and the music, not to themselves. Today, there are many pianists who can play the piano very well indeed. Nothing seems to elude them, at least technically.

But are they better musicians?

To be sure, we can measure how fast an instrumentalist polish off a Chopin Etude, or a Paganini Caprice, or how many false notes he or she had played. But we cannot quantify interpretation, depth, musicality, or whether the playing moves an audience.  Playing an instrument is not quite the same as running the four-minute mile.

Ever since the advent of the long-playing records, where recorded technology allows the elimination of wrong notes in a performance, audience attending a concert have pretty much expect the same level of polish in a live performance. We live in an age when, with the press (or touch) of a button, we can instantly access a “perfect” performance of any piece of music. Because of this, audiences have come to expect perfection in performance, at least from a technical standpoint. Or they might expect a live performance to sound "just like my CD at home."

I once listened to Yundi Li’s live performance of Chopin’s First Piano Concerto. Afterwards, I listened to one of Arthur Rubinstein’s many recordings of the same piece. In terms of musicality, depth of feeling, and getting into the core of Chopin’s music, Mr. Rubinstein’s performance made Mr. Li sound like a very talented conservatory student. Ironically, Mr. Li’s live performance was technically more polished than Mr. Rubinstein’s studio recording. Can any of the no doubt talented Julliard students playing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto match the unbearable excitement and indescribable tenderness in Horowitz’s performance of the same piece? Can anyone today play Bach with the same clarity and passion as Glenn Gould? And I challenge any of today’s young keyboard titans to give a performance of greater sweep and sense of grandeur than Alfred Cortot’s recording of Chopin’s Etude in C Major, Op. 10, No. 1.

Yes, there are indeed many pianists today who can play their instrument very well. But look at whom we had in the first half of the 20^th century – Emil von Sauer, Moritz Rosenthal, Harold Bauer, Leopold Godowsky, Frederic Lamond, José Vianna da Mota, Eugene d’Albert, Alexander Siloti, Edouard Risler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Josef Lhévinne, Marguerite Long, Ricardo Vines, Josef Hoffman, Erno von Dohnányi, Alfred Cortot, Ossip Garbilowitsch, Harold Samuel, Egon Petri, Artur Schnabel, Ignaz Friedman, Wilhelm Backhaus, Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Myra Hess, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Clara Haskil, Annie Fischer, Walter Gieseking, Alexander Brailowsky, Guiomar Novaes, Simon Barère, Robert Casadesus, Solomon, Rudolf Serkin, Claudio Arrau, Wilhelm Kempff, Dinu Lipatti, Maria Yudina, Mischa Levitzki, Vladimir Sofrontisky – and this list is not even exhaustive. A little later on, we had Alfred Brendel, Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, Rudu Lupu, Martha Argerich, Daniel Barenboim, Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, Byron Janis, Van Cliburn, Maurizio Pollini and Glenn Gould, to name just a few.

Would Mr. Tommasini have said that virtuosos were a dime a dozen then?

The fact is that all the pianists I named above were stupendous technicians, but the difference is that they did not make technical perfection their chief concern. And I believe that is what made them such interesting artists, each in their own right.

It is a happy fact that we still do have great artists in our midst. Thank goodness we still have pianists like Richard Goode, Murray Perahia, Krystian Zimerman, Andras Schiff, and Mitsuko Uchida, pianists who play with musical integrity, and depth of feeling. In the younger generation, I would single out Ingrid Fliter, runner-up to Yundi Li at the 2000 Chopin Competition, and Ingolf Wunder, coincidentally another silver medallist in the 2010 edition of the same competition. Both are original artists with interesting ideas about music. Again, although equipped with a complete technique, they use it in service to the music, to the composer, not as an end in itself. Certainly true artists are not a “dime a dozen”, a phrase that cheapens both the art and the artists. 

And thank God many of these artists would play a wrong note now and again. It serves to remind us that there is a human being playing in Carnegie Hall.

Mahler in Bellingham

There is something very special about hearing young musicians play. Not jaded by “experience”, young people can sometimes bring freshness and excitement to even very familiar repertoire.

Such was the case yesterday at the final concert of the Marrowstone Summer Music Festival, based on the campus of Western Washington University in Bellingham. This is a two-week festival in which young musicians from both the United States and (to a lesser extent) Canada participate in coaching, masterclasses, rehearsals, culminating in performances of both chamber and orchestral music.

There were two full-sized orchestras that played yesterday – a Concert Orchestra made up of younger and less experienced players, and a Festival Orchestra made up of pre-college musicians with more performing experience. In the first half of the concert, the Concert Orchestra gave exciting performances of Brahms's very familiar and justly popular Academic Festival Overture, and Benjamin Brittien’s less familiar but nonetheless beautiful Symphonic Suite from his neglected opera Gloriana. I would judge the Britten to have been more successful than the Brahms. Conductor Ryan Dudenbostel brought incredible energy and excitement to the Brahms, but failed to gage the many climaxes within the relatively short piece. This was unfortunately not helped by the very resonant acoustic of the university’s Performing Arts Centre, and this made for a very loud performance. In the Britten, the conductor was able to bring out more of the many subtle shades of colours to the four sections of this very beautiful suite.

It is difficult to imagine that audiences in Gustav Mahler’s day found his symphonies largely incomprehensible. Today, performances of Mahler’s nine symphonies are inevitably considered as “events” by both orchestral players and audience. The Festival Orchestra’s performance of the composer’s first symphony was extremely successful. Conductor Stephen Rogers Radcliffe had obviously thought carefully about the music, and led the young artists in a highly polished and exciting performance of Mahler’s first symphonic opus. The musicians obviously responded to the kaleidoscopic changes in colour and the angst-on-sleeve feeling of the music. From the hushed opening of the first movement to the exultant finale, musicians and conductor were one as they journeyed through Mahler’s huge orchestral canvas. Only in the second movement did I wish that Mr. Radcliffe had made more of the idiosyncratic rhythm of the ländler. Likewise, in the third movement, at letter 5 (Ziemlich langsam), the playing was perhaps a touch too straight-laced. According to Bruno Walter, Mahler’s one-time assistant, this section should be played with a degree of vulgarity. Nevertheless, this performance was a remarkable accomplishment, especially considering the relatively short (but I am sure intensive) time that the musicians had lived with this music.

Regardless of whether these young musicians would go on to a career in music, an experience such as Marrowstone is an invaluable experience in any young person’s personal and artistic growth. In today’s society, obsessed with competitive sports and popular culture, it is extremely touching to see young people with as much dedication to the arts as many others would to hockey or soccer. These young players give us hope in a future where great music remains an important part of our humanity.