The Sound of Silence

How often have we seen someone jogging, or taking a walk, or walking their dog, wearing headphones, completely oblivious to his or her surroundings? How often have we walked by a car, windows rolled up, but feeling the pounding bass of the subwoofer? Restaurants, shops, malls, gyms, would inevitably give you, like it or not, layers of musical wallpaper. Of course this is not new, which is exactly why we need to talk about it.

No wonder we are a generation of poor listeners. When we are constantly bombarded with sound, our ears become desensitized. When we really have to sit down and listen to a musical performance, we become fidgety, we want to check our e-mail, we text, we look at our watch to see when the concert will be over.

I was attending a performance at London’s famed Covent Garden Opera House, and noticed the man sitting in front of me e-mailing on his Blackberry. Does he really need to pay £100 so that he could check his e-mail? Are we not able to sit and listen to Mozart for a few hours without having to “multitask”?

In at least the last decade, when I attend performances by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, I noticed that people would applaud between movements of a symphony or a concerto. I have often attributed that to a lack of awareness or education in how to behave in a classical music concert, but I now wonder whether the need to applaud is merely a need to do something, a release of pent-up energy. 

Radio stations have marketed themselves to broadcast music for “easy listening”. Listening is probably one of the most difficult things that engage our brains. Listening to music is far from being a passive endeavour, not just catching the beautiful melodies whilst tuning out the other “bits”. True listening involves our total concentration, and should, ideally, elicit an emotional response within us. When listening becomes secondary to other mental activities, music becomes nothing more than one of the many sensory inputs clamouring for our attention.

Arts organizations everywhere are suffering, not only because of the financial climate, but because more and more people are unwilling to spend an entire evening listening to live music-making. Music is something we can access with the press of a button, so why pay and have to “waste” an entire evening when we can hear music and check our e-mail and surf the web and read our e-book?

I believe that we can learn from parents who give their children “quiet time”, and thank goodness there are still parents upholding such a lifestyle. Only by learning not to be bothered by silence can listening becomes, once again, a special experience. For those who learn music, the time to practice is really such a time, a time for listening to one’s own playing, and not merely repeating the same notes over and over again. I love the German word for practice or rehearsal – probe – to probe, to delve into the deeper meaning of the music. In order to probe, one must first listen. In order to listen, one must first have silence.

In our age of sensory overload, it really is worth our while to make time for silence.

Handel's Messiah

What is it about Handel’s Messiah that continues to move and thrill us year after year? George Frideric Handel wrote many oratorios in addition to the Messiah, and many of them are often performed. But perhaps no other works of the composer, none of his operas and oratorios, popular as they are in their own right, have achieved the universal appeal of this one single work. Every Christmas, we will find presentations of Handel’s Messiah in many different countries all over the world, performed by ensembles making up of the world’s greatest singers and orchestras to church choirs with piano accompaniment. Years ago, a recording of Handel’s oratorio came out of communist China, an officially atheistic country that continues to persecute Christians, especially Catholics, sung in Mandarin!

In Vancouver, the annual performance of Handel’s Messiah is usually done by one of three major choirs in the city. This year the honour went to the Vancouver Chamber Choir, a professional choir making up of trained and experienced singers, augmented by the Pacifica Singers, and conducted by Jon Washburn. The four soloists - Yulia Van Doren, Laura Pudwell, Colin Balzer and Tyler Duncan – did an outstanding job with the various recitatives and arias. I particular enjoyed the timbre of the two male voices and what they did with their respective solos. Soprano Yulia Van Doren has an extremely beautiful voice, but I feel that the clarity of her diction suffers a bit at the expense of this beautiful sound. All the soloists exuded palpable pleasure in what they did.

As much as the arias and recitatives were beautiful in the Messiah, the various choruses are for me the crown jewels of the work. The two choirs did a magnificent job Saturday evening, singing the music with lightness, agility, and much joy. Jon Washburn did a credible job in keeping all the performing forces together; I do, however, miss the energy that Bernard Labadie brought to the work in a previous performance, as well as his pacing of the music.

Why do audiences continue to flock to performances of Handel’s Messiah?

In attempting to become inclusive, our city, in fact, the western world, thought that one must erase one’s own traditions and customs and beliefs to make room for “the others”. Christianity is being rejected for a wide range of “reasons” by those who come from or brought up in such a tradition. The trend, at least for the last decade, has been to reject anything that has to do with one’s parents, one’s parents’ generation, European-centred or European-originated. This whole discussion of Diversity and Inclusiveness has been taken to mean rejecting out of hand anything western, rather than becoming INclusive – to include one’s own roots and traditions, including religion if religion is part of one’s makeup, while exploring, respecting, and understanding others’ cultures, beliefs, traditions, languages, and religions.

We therefore live in a time when Christianity has been increasingly marginalized from our consciousness as well as from the public square. When I witness the continued popularity of the Messiah, I can only assume, or hope, that there exists within all of us a yearning for the message contained within this magnificent work of art, brought alive by the genius of George Frideric Handel.

Recordings by Arthur Rubinstein

Oh, how I wish I have the extra cash!

SONY Classics is announcing the release of Arthur Rubinstein – the Complete Album Collection. According to the product description on Amazon, this is a collection of 142 CD’s, absolutely everything that the pianist ever recorded. From the earliest recordings the pianist made for HMV in England from 1928 to 1940, to the incredible series of recordings he did for RCA Victor until he retired from the concert stage. This collection will be even more comprehensive than The Arthur Rubinstein Collection, released about a decade ago by BMG Classics, which consisted of only about 80 plus CD’s. The collection includes two Carnegie Hall concerts that Mr. Rubinstein gave in 1961. At risk of sounding like a television infomercial, you also get a DVD of Rubinstein Remembered, a PBS documentary on the great pianist, and a 164-page hardcover book. It can all be yours for a little over $300.

I did not have the good fortune of hearing Mr. Rubinstein in concert, but I do remember the excitement every time a new recording of his came out. To be truthful, I do already own quite a number of the pianist’s recordings on compact discs – part of the aforementioned The Arthur Rubinstein Collection. Listening to those recordings now, I continue to be moved by Mr. Rubinstein’s interpretation and playing. For a discography that is as vast as that of Arthur Rubinstein, there will be many highlights. There are of course the pianists many recordings of the works of Chopin, many of which he recorded more than once. In addition, Mr. Rubinstein made some of the most beautiful recordings of both the concerti and solo works of Johannes Brahms. There are some surprises as well, such as his only recording of George Gershwin’s Second Prelude.

Fortunately for us, Mr. Rubinstein was actively recording at a time when the market was not saturated with dozens or more recordings of the same work. Therefore, there are pieces that the pianist was able to re-record, sometimes three or four times. Listening to the same pieces played at different stages of the pianist’s career afford us a glimpse into his artistic development as well as his insights into many of these musical masterpieces. One thing that I do notice is that the young Mr. Rubinstein played with a great deal more freedom than he did in his later years. If I have one criticism of the later recordings, it is that sometimes he played a shade too carefully.

Mr. Rubinstein was different from many virtuoso of his generation in his devotion to chamber music playing. He has, from his earliest years, played chamber music with some of the greatest string players of the century. In his discography, there are many wonderful performances of sonatas, piano trios, quartets and quintets by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Dvorak, Ravel, and Tchaikovsky. He had a long term relationship with the Guarneri String Quartet, and many concerts and recordings emerged from that friendship.

In an age where the performer often receives more attention than the composer, or even the music, Mr. Rubinstein’s many beautiful recordings remind us of a time when the performer, however great his or her talents, work to serve the music. When he was listening to playbacks of music that he had just recorded, Mr. Rubinstein often said that was a time for him to “take his lesson.” Those who have worked with him, from his fellow performers to recording engineers, often commented upon his complete humility in the face of the composer and the music. Perhaps because of this, we hear a playing that is both simple and direct, and always beautiful.

I might just break open that piggy bank under my bed and see if what is there…

Pianist Lilya Zilberstein

Pianist Lilya Zilberstein gave a solo recital in Vancouver last Friday. Although not quite as familiar to North American concert audiences, Miss Zilberstein, a graduate of Moscow’s Gnessin Pedagogical Institute, is highly regarded in Europe, playing with such artists as Maxim Vengerov and Martha Argerich. Her recording of Rachmaninoff’s 2^nd and 3^rd piano concerti with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic is spectacular.

Zilberstein has to be credited with original programming for her recital – Chopin’s Rondo in C Minor, Op. 1, Variations brillantes sur le rondeau favori “Je vends des scapulaires” de Ludovic, Op. 12, and the Sonata in C Minor, Op. 4. After the interval, she essayed Beethoven’s Twenty-four Variations in D Major on the arietta “Venni amore” by Righini and the almost-too-well-known Sonata in F Minor, the “Appassionata.”

Other than the Rondo, Op. 1, the Chopin pieces played in the first half were almost all unfamiliar to me. I had seen the score of the composer’s first piano sonata, but had never heard it played. In these early works by Chopin, we can already hear the characteristics that are unique to the composer. However, I cannot help but feel that Chopin had not yet become the Chopin we know and love in these early compositions. I feel that Chopin, at this stage of his musical development, was still thinking more as a pianist than as a composer. In his mature works, the technical and musical challenges to the pianist are parts of the inherent structure of the music, not difficulties for the sake of pianistic effects. The same can perhaps be said about the set of variations by Beethoven.

Miss Zilberstein’s recital was an incredible display of effortless, immaculate, and impeccable piano playing. She has a perfect technique that allows her to do almost anything at the keyboard. I must confess, however, that I came away unmoved by the music making that evening. At first I thought it was perhaps of the chosen repertoire, but I was equally unaffected emotionally by her playing of Beethoven’s Appassionata.

I hope to hear Ms. Zilberstein again, because she is obviously a very great musical talent and dedicated artist. No musician can really be fairly judged on the strength of a single performance. We must be grateful to Vancouver’s Chopin Society for bringing to our stages such internationally renowned artists for these past years. The large and appreciative audience once again shows that live music is alive and well.

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.