Shiny crania versus hirsute (Stu Rosner photo)

The principal players of the Boston Symphony Orchestra are all exalted musicians. When they gather as the BSO Chamber Players, they are certain to make music on a very high level.  Their execution is never less that super-refined. This year their programming is geographically themed, with previous forays in some out-of-the-way places. On the past Sunday in Jordan Hall though, we were serenaded in Austro-German style by works of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms—not much of a geographic stretch!

Mozart’s top-drawer Serenade in C minor, K.388 (384a), for two oboes, two clarinets, two horns, and two bassoons, got things started. The movements alternated Mozart’s pathos with his humor and light. Some moments sounded quite volkish, but the scary Commendatore always hovered, sending his warning themes from an icy depth. The players adopted a somewhat early-music approach with limited vibrato and rather too much refinement for my taste. Some raucous moments such as those one hears with early authentic instrument ensembles might have better suited the piece.

The middle of the programatic sandwich was meatless early Beethoven, his familiar Serenade in D for flute, violin, and viola, Op. 25, which we all have heard so often in elevators and cocktail receptions that even the lively and attentive performances by flutist Elizabeth Rowe, violinist Malcolm Lowe, and violist Steven Ansell, could not redeem it from occasional-music status.

The seating for Alan Boustead’s nonet arrangement of Brahms’s Serenade No. 1 in D, Op. 11, was in the shape of narrow horseshoe with James Sommerville in the middle. The string players on the left were almost in a straight line which, although giving an appropriate soloistic prominence to Malcom Lowe, also made for a generous blend for the three other strings: violist Steven Ansell, cellist Jules Eskin, and double bass Edwin Barker.

After the chirpy Beethoven, what a pleasure it was to be in Brahms’s beery world. In this hefeweissbier reduction from the orchestral arrangement, all of the froth was maintained while the clarity was enhanced. Here, finally, the players let down their hair a bit and succumbed to the surging and urgency endemic in the master’s best works, perhaps also because they have played Boustead’s arrangement several times before. Stylistically the players served Brahms’s passion with juicier tone and more throbbing vibrato. There were qualities of pleasure, surprise and momentum that had not been so noticeable in the Beethoven and the Mozart.

With the exception of Edwin Barker, who provided the cheerfully dependable foundation, all of the players had predictably excellent solo opportunities. Of course, Malcolm Lowe and James Sommerville played superbly, and there were no less ravishing moments from the others, especially clarinetist William R. Hudgins and oboist John Ferrillo.

In the opinion of this experienced chamber music presenter, though, the program order was poorly planned. The Beethoven serenade should have been the sprightly opener with deeper Mozart and Brahms works following in order of musical substance and weight.

Lee Eiseman is the publisher of the Intelligencer.

The renovated Tapestry Gallery (BMInt staff phjoto)

In the run-up to its public opening on January 19, the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum has been inviting contributors and press to a series of events over the last few days. BMInt’s executive editor, Bettina A. Norton, and I were invited to a gala for members of the Friends of Fenway Court. In addition to a performance in the new Calderwood Hall by Paavali Jumppanen, piano and Corey Cerovsek, violin, we were treated to a mimosa and a mini-eggs Benedict-infused buffet with a variety of rolled soufflés. And we were invited to tour the old and the new ISGM.

Visitors now enter the museum through a glass courtyard on Evans Street. The Miesien mis-en-scene was rather chilly on this 10-degree morning, but nevertheless gleamed invitingly. In any Renzo Piano building, the materials are never less than top-drawer. Evident right at the entrance is the feeling that only the best finishes were used, and that everything was designed to fit together with well-considered connections. One could argue about certain details such as the decision to color the mortar red in the extensive brick interior walls, but overall the feel was expensive and elegant.

The Palace is now reached through a steel-framed glass passageway into a new vestibule with a very shallow brick vaulted ceiling. The only changes of note within the Palace are in the Tapestry Gallery, the former site of Sunday afternoon concerts. This noble space was much improved by the removal of the stage and the stripping of paint from the Mercer Tile floor. An 1890’s art-case Steinway B from Mrs. Gardner’s fourth-floor apartments was restored and installed for occasional informal concerts, usually by NEC students, which will continue on an irregular basis here.

Detail of seating (BMInt staff photo)

Reaching the new Calderwood Hall in the Renzo Piano wing requires a climb (there is of course an elevator) of a very grand double staircase of glass and steel (note the glass risers which mimic the glass balcony fronts in the auditorium) which yields wonderful views of the backside of the Palace. After a pair of right turns, one finds oneself facing the auditorium’s entrance, a consecutive pair of doors (with very expensive hinges) forming a sound isolation chamber. The effect of going through this claustrophobic space and emerging into a 44-foot cube is reminiscent of the sense one had of entering the Palace through the low hall from the Fenway entrance.

The new hall is breathtaking. One’s eyes are first drawn to the 20-foot-square skylight, and then one pans down the three tiers of glass-fronted balconies with bright red upholstered seats and on down to the bleached wood floor. The scene evokes an elegant, futuristic surgical amphitheater. This is no “black box.” There are many thoughtful details which contribute to the overall sumptuous effect:  there are 45º bevels on top edges of the glass balcony fronts to prevent distracting reflections from the skylights from annoying those looking down (the panels were also installed 1º out-of-plumb to dampen acoustical reflections), suspended balconies with carefully placed cork liners where the ironwork penetrates the floor, extremely elegantly machining for the seat-back pivots — seats were supported on a long span box beams to keep their legs off the floor, expensive track lighting fixtures in great numbers, elegantly pierced plywood perimeter walls illuminated from the floor with continuous tubes of raking light. The four-sided balconies each have one row of seats, and the floor has two. There is no apparent preferred axis. On this occasion the lidless piano was placed on the diagonal and the interlocutor, ISGM director, Anne Hawley spoke from a corner.

From our perch in the second tier, it was possible to see Hawley without leaning forward, but the view of the audience members opposite me was much easier to focus upon, and I did not need to look through glass to see them. Calderwood Hall’s balconies will be the recommended venues for sightings of short-skirted patrons during warmer months. This reminded me of how Clarence H. Blackall, Boston’s most important theater architect of the first third of the 20th century, inveighed against auditoriums with parallel side balconies in which many in the audience faced each other. In this case, everyone does.

The room sounded very plush and quiet even as the audience was filing in. There was no audible air handling, and audience sounds did not resonate. When Hawley welcomed us, she used a microphone, which after our experience from earlier private tours, seemed unnecessary. Her amplified voice issued from a small hexagonal speaker array hanging in the center of the space at the level of the floor of the third tier and very much came predominantly from that source.

Detail of cork inserts and skewing of glass fronts (BMInt staff photo)

This hall has a way of focusing one’s powers of observation, since one is very much aware of how 200 other audience members are concentrating. I chose first to sit facing the tail of the piano so that I could see the performer’s face. Paavali Jumppanen, a favorite of the Gardner’s Scott Nickrenz, who has been reviewed in these pages here and here, opened the concert with a dreamy but dynamically wide-ranging account of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. The sound from the lidless Steinway concert grand was very clear and of more than adequate amplitude from my seat in the second tier, yet unless I leaned overboard, I was seeing the stage through plate glass. The sound did not penetrate the glass, of course, and was hard to localize, mostly seeming to emanate from large convex reflectors hanging from the ceiling. Yet the well-tuned and regulated piano sound was very satisfying, especially since Jumppanen seemed to employ the damper pedal a great deal to overcome the rather low reverberation period of the hall.

Jumpannen next brought his notable strengths to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 26, “Das Lebewohl,” but it wasn’t really clear just how dry the hall was until the third piece on the program, when violinist Corey Cerovsek joined Jumppanen for an account, from memory for both, of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata. This was animated and fiery in the main, but light and dance-like when appropriate. The violin sound was very satisfying and warm when bowed, but pizzicato sections revealed the room’s dryness — the sound just died away.

For this piece I had moved to the top tier and chose a seat at the keyboard end. If I sat back in the comfortable chair, my view of both performers was entirely obstructed by the balcony floor, and the sound seemed to come again from above me rather than from 30 feet down. In order to see the performers, in this case the tops of their heads, I had to lean my chin on the wooden rail provided for that purpose and look straight down. The sound was also much more direct and localizable then, but the position was untenable for an entire concert. It was interesting to watch how other audience members dealt with the hearing and sight-line issues. Erika Nickrenz, the daughter of the Gardner’s music director, Scott Nickrenz, was steady in her concentration, leaning forward and looking down at the musicians intently for 75 minutes. Others, such as a frequent concert-goer of my acquaintance, never peered over the rail, telling me later that he found the lofty perspective too vertiginous.

If direct communication with artists is important to the designers, then the hall has to be adjudged a partial failure, since the artists’ faces remain invisible to denizens of the upper tiers and those sitting behind the “stage.” In many of the locations where face-to-face contact with the artists is possible, it is only through plate glass panels.

Overall, though, I was pleased with my experience. Calderwood Hall is going to be a quirky and exciting place to hear chamber music. It will nevertheless impose tests on audience and performers alike. We look forward to attending often to see how the experience evolves. The hall is tunable to the extent that sound absorbing drapes can be deployed or retracted — they were fully retracted for this performance and for many the sound was still a bit drier than they liked. Nevertheless, this was a brave design by Renzo Piano, the architect; Yasuhisa Toyota, the acoustician; and Scott Nickrenz, Mr. Music at the Gardner.

Lee Eiseman is the publisher of the Intelligencer.

David Patterson

Concerts
BSO Chamber Players Create Gorgeous Music
Uncorked Vintage Oeuvres from Denève
BSO Apr 16 2011 Master(ful) Class in Electroacoustic Music

CDs
Olivier Messiaen 100th Anniversary Box Set- EMI Composer Boxes 217466214 discs
John Adams Son of Chamber Symphony; String Quartet  Nonesuch label
Works of Lili Boulanger Igor Markevitch, Orchestre Lamoureux Everest label

Mark DeVoto

CDs:
Marc-André Hamelin playing his own works, with special emphasis on his Twelve Etudes
The Grainger Edition, including most Percy Grainger’s works in various versions; 19 discs
Organ works by Alexis Chauvet, on two French instruments by Carolyn Shuster

Concerts:
Morlot Endorsement
BoCo’s Shoenberg

David Dominique

CDs:
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
Os Mutantes by Os Mutantes
Kurtag: Kafka Fragments by Tony Arnold

Concerts:
Jon Damian featuring Allan Chase and Bob Nieske at Outpost 186, Cambridge.
Professor Bad Trip”, by Fausto Romitelli, presented by Argento Chamber Ensemble in LA
Charles Ives: The Astonishing Pioneer, conducted by Gunther Schuller and presented by Alea III at BU.

Andrew Sammut

Concerts:
Newton Baroque with CPE Bach
L’Academie with Charpentier
MOPR’s “Winter’s Cheer”

CDs
Ricardo Kanji and Cesar Villavicencio’s recorder duos
Europa Galante’s “La Stravaganza” (Walsh’s 1728 edition
Patricia Petibon: “Rosso” Italian Baroque arias

Michael Rocha

Concerts:
Dust Blown Off Zesty Zelenka
Rock-Solid Borromeo in Rockport
Gossamer to Rugged Ravel from Thibaudet

Lee Eiseman

Concerts:
BSO in Bartok: Bluebeard’s Castle
Spectrum Singers Patriotic Program
The Lure of Hamelin

BluRay Videos:
Sunrise 1927
Metropolis
Operas on Bluray by Opus Art

David Shengold

Concerts
Opera Boston – CARDILLAC
Boston Lyric Opera AGRIPPINA
Boston Baroque -DIE SCHOEPFUNG

CDs
Porpora: Arias – Karina Gauvin: Alan Curtis (ATMA Classique)
Schubert: Three Sonatas, Impromptus – Paul Lewis (Harmonia Mundi)
Vivaldi: Farnace – Diego Fasolis (Virgin Classics)

Geoff Wieting

Concerts:
NEC’s YPO Ben Zander, playing Tchaikovsky and Mahler, June 3
Niobe, Regina di Tebe by Steffani, at the Boston Early Music Festival, June 12
Audra McDonald at Symphony Hall (Celebrity Series), October 2

Susan Miron

Concerts:
Audra McDonald- Celebrity Series
Marc-André Hamelin – Rockport Music
Philipe Jaroussky (with Apollo’s Fire) Boston Early Music Festival

CDs:
Philipe Jaroussky “Vivaldi Heroes”
Cecilia Bartoli   “Maria”
Jean-Yves Thibaudet  ”Aria: Opera without Words”

Fred Bouchard

Concerts:
BLO (Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream)
BSO (Prokofiev, Sibelius, Newhouse
Discovery (Ravel, etc., Lewis)

Most Regretted Misses:
BSO (Berlioz Requiem, Dutoit)
Alea III (Ives Concert, G. Schuller)

Tom Delbanco

Concerts:
8/20 “Fish and Fanfare…”
9/21 Denk and Miro…
10/29 Kremer and BSO…

CDs:
Schubert piano trios: Beaux Arts Trio (1967, with Guilet, Greenhouse, Pressler)
Beethoven violin sonatas: Szigeti and Arrau (1944)
Bartok:  Violin concerto # 2 (Menuhin and Dorati) (1957)

Liane Curtis

Concert:
Sofonisba by Maria Teresa Agnesi, presented by La Donna Musicale.

CDs:
Complete piano music by Luisa Adolpha le Beau
In Praise of Woman: 150 Years of English Women Composers

Vance Koven

Concerts:
BSO/Morlot, with Harbison 4, Mahler 1 and Ravel D&C 2
Don Berman and friends doing Schoenberg and Shostakovich
New England Philharmonic featuring Mahler 10 and works by Earl Kim, Donald Erb and Andy Vores.

CD:
BBC Concert Orchestra under Keith Lockhart doing the American Sketches and other orchestral works by Frederick Shepherd Converse

Cashman Kerr Prince

Concerts:
Jeremy Denk – Goldberg Variations & Ligeti Etudes, book 1 @ Gardner off-site
Serkin, Eschenbach, BSO – All-Brahms at Tanglewood
Bang on a Can All-Stars at Kresge Auditorium

CDs:
Daniel Müller-Schott & Julia Fischer, Brahms Double Concerto
Jean-Guihen Queyras, Britten Suites for Solo Cello
Bruckner, Symphony 4 – Orchestre Métropolitain, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, cond

Geoff Wieting

CDs:
All-Night Vigil (Vespers), Sergei Rachmaninoff USSR Ministry of Culture Chamber Choir
“An American Masterpiece” Thomas Murray, organ, Church of the Immaculate Conception, Boston
Daphnis et Chloe, Maurice Ravel Montreal Symphony Orchestra & Chorus/Charles Dutoit

Edward Jones (BMInt staff photo)

Bella Hristova (BMInt staff photo)

During their current season, the players in the Longwood Symphony Orchestra are observing a passing parade of six conductors for consideration as their next music director.  BMInt has already reviewed the appearance of Susan Devaney Wyner here. The most recent candidate is Edward Jones, who conducted a program of chestnuts including the Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with the excellent Bella Hristova.

Weber’s Overture to Oberon gave us a good chance to observe Mr. Jones’s technique. His right hand etched an exemplary, clear dependable beat, not hesitating to subdivide or to emphasize important upbeats. His cueing and phrasing with his left hand were quite pointed in the former and shapely in the latter. The orchestra responded with attentive observance of the hairpin turns in the short overture. The frequent changes of tempo and the several mini-crescendi and diminuendi were well telegraphed and well executed.

The Bulgarian violinist Bella Hristova followed with a riveting account of the Mendelssohn concerto. Draped in a classical white pleated gown and with a very upright bearing, Ms. Hristova could have been a caryatid at a Temple of Music. She played with a stately charisma which was animated by a bright fire. She had the sweetness of Nathan Milstein but with none of the syrup. Hristova spun a singing, shining thread of tone. Her Amati filled Jordan Hall even in her pianissimos. She was spot-on in her cadenza with all of the requisite virtuosity provided in full measure, though delivered with a real musical conviction.

And she does have her own ideas about how the piece should go. In the reception line she waxed so enthusiastic about her accompaniment from the LSO that I declare her my guest reviewer: “The conductor and players were with me and let me do what I wanted to do more than most professional orchestras I’ve played with. The big orchestras have their own ways of playing a piece as familiar as the Mendelssohn, and it isn’t always my way.” Jones led the attaca transition to the second movement convincingly and the subsequent duet between soloist and flutes was quite splendid. There weren’t many other memorable solo opportunities for the orchestra, but overall I agree with Ms. Hristova that the LSO was an admirable supporter and foil.

According to his notes, Edward Jones chose Mahler’s re-orchestration of Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 “Rhenish” in part because it is a Mahler year, and in part because that version rescues the symphony from a perceived imbalance caused by the fact that modern string sections have grown substantially from Schumann’s time, while the wind sections have not. Mahler’s retouchings were evident at the outset in the form of a noble horn call and there was clearly more to be heard from the brass and winds than in the standard orchestration.  The symphony opens with great surging tuttis — perfect for this band — and perfectly evocative of a dark surging river entering the sea. No Moldavian rivulet for an opening here! The Scherzo second movement, with an opening theme feeling almost like a sped-up barcarolle (even though it’s in four), lacked the clarity that Jones was clearly attempting to extract. And Mahler’s additions of solo opportunities for the winds and brass did not always seem comfortable for the players. There were also some uncharacteristic moments of raggedness and questionable tuning.

The third movement in outline was well shaped and noble. The entrances were always well cued even if the players (except for the excellent wind choir) were sounding a bit fatigued and in less than perfect agreement. In the feierlich fourth moment the trombones and winds opened strongly. Jones drew a very expansive reading with wonderful fugal unfolding and great drama. When the fugal subject came back in major in the final movement, we were back into the surging tuttis which the LSO can execute convincingly. The brass relished their unleashed moments and the forces in general really delivered.

Lee Eiseman is publisher of the Intelligencer

Ben Zander congratulates concertmaster Jae Young Cosmos Lee (BMInt staff photo)

Benjamin Zander is ubiquitous at his Boston Philharmonic concerts. Present in the lobby a good two hours before starting time, he is buttonholing and offering seemingly intimate asides to hundreds of his patrons in his mission to cajole audiences into engaging with him. On Sunday, November 20, at Sanders Theatre, Ben was suited up to stamp our tickets and conduct us on a ride through Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Symphony No. 4.

Though I have attended concerts in Boston since 1965, Sunday’s pre-concert lecture was my first public experience with Ben’s cult of personality and force of will. Like the “great profile” John Barrymore, Zander fully inhabited his customary role: He danced, he sang, he played the piano, he led the large lecture audience in a sing-along of the principal theme in the fourth movement of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. He even asked us to sigh collectively with him. Those susceptible to charisma, and I expect it was the majority, became votaries at Ben’s Temple of High Culture.

There was musicological content in the talk as well. Ben talked about key relationships “for those who care about such things as much as we musicians do.” He opined on the importance of rubato in Brahms. He talked about Brahms’s turbulent and frustrated life. We heard about Brahms’s love for the rhythmic figure of two against three, though surprisingly, we did not hear Ben advance the familiar theory of the symbolism of the figure: Brahms’s hope that the triangle of himself with Clara and Robert Schumann might someday resolve itself into a relationship of two — Brahms and Clara.

As is his wont, Ben also enunciated lots of superlatives. “Brahms’s Fourth Symphony is a desert island piece, one of five for me, though I won’t tell you about the other four. It’s perhaps the best constructed symphony by anyone.” About the First Concerto he said, “It represents Brahms’s most personal feelings more than any other of his works. Everything subsequent to it was classicism.” Then he went on to say, “The finale of the Fourth Symphony is the summation of Brahms’s life.” The audience nodded in assent.

Prepared for a metaphysical journey, I was disappointed at the opening of the Concerto. Even though the first movement, Maestoso, was actually played at a rather slow tempo, it felt rushed, especially the first statement from the pianist Martina Filjack, since there was really no evidence of the promised rubato. The proceedings were rather notey and careful, probably because — as one of the players later remarked to me — “We just didn’t get enough rehearsal with the pianist and had trouble keeping together in the rehearsals.”

Boston Philharmonic accepts acclaim (BMInt staff photo)

And because of the rather slow tempo in that “Maestoso” first movement, there wasn’t enough contrast with the second movement, Adagio. By the third movement, the Rondo, there was finally some fire and excitement. The orchestra, a pumped-up mix of students, amateurs, and committed professionals, was now playing just fine. There was a sheen upon the strings, and Filjack allowed herself some freedom in her cadenza. The audience demanded an encore, and she complied with Scriabin’s Prelude for the Left Hand, Op 9, No. 1. This was free and rapturous playing though somewhat limited by Sanders Theatre’s tonally stodgy Steinway.

After intermission, it didn’t take long at all for me to register that the performance of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 was at a much higher level. Zander emerged from behind the piano and with his more obvious presence willed greatness from the band and total engagement from the audience. Now I could begin to understand the maestro mystique. The first movement had shape and swing. The viola section’s big moment in the second movement worked at the rather glacial tempo because the phrases had suppleness and the dramatic line had a destination. The third movement evoked a brisk walk with an enthusiastic tour guide through a classical sculpture garden. Our friendly leader was frequently tapping us on the shoulder and telling us where to look. The fourth movement had excitement and urgency, but Zander exercised just enough restraint. He knew when to pull back and where to hesitate to set up the multiple climaxes perfectly.

Lee Eiseman is the publisher of the Intelligencer.

Poème Héroïque of French organist-composer Marcel Dupré opened the special concert. Written in 1935 to commemorate the restoration of the Verdun Cathedral after the depredations of the “War to end all wars,” it was scored for organ, brass, and field drum. Durpré presided at the dedication of the cathedral’s Theodore Jacquot instrument, which despite the 1935 date, was built in the French Romantic style. First Church’s 1972 Frobenius tracker was a poor substitute, generally inaudible. Nevertheless, brass and drums were sufficient to make Dupre’s celebration of the French victory palpable.

The principal piece of the first half, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem, was presented in an uncredited arrangement for organ, piano, and strings that was believed by John Ehrlich to have been from the composer’s hand. The excellent string orchestra under concertmaster Jesse Irons played their respective original parts, with the missing wind, brass, and percussion parts seemingly parceled out to the busy pianist, James Barkovic, who handled the job admirably.

Alternating the Latin plea for peace with poetry of Walt Whitman, words of an English parliamentarian, and Biblical selections, the work in general avoids the composer’s sometimes bland English Pastoralism.  In the opening, soprano Laura Serafino Harbert floated “Dona Nobis Pacem” over shimmering strings and was answered by an angrier version of the same words from the chorus in a recurring trope.

In Part II, Vaughan Williams set Whitman’s “Beat! beat! drums—blow! bugles! blow.” Though the accompaniment featured neither of those instruments, the effect seemed to suffer none for the loss. The entrance of the chorus was dramatic and terrifying; the words and their powerful setting evoked the hardly-changing pictures of war’s disastrous visitations on warrior and civilian.

Concertmaster Jesse Irons opened the “Reconciliation” section with a lustrous solo and set the stage for baritone Mark Andrew Cleveland’s emotional engagement with Whitman’s poetry. Cleveland handled the relatively high tessitura quite easily, though the effects of a cold were apparent in some sotto voce passages.

The thirty-three-voice chorus was effective throughout and very attentive to the text. Its dynamic range was broad, its coloring showing many hues, and its attacks were confident and simultaneous. The legato with staggered breathing was quite amazing at times. In the last section, John Ehrlich led the singers through rapid changes of mood and finally through a carefully planned crescendo to a well developed and rapturous climax.

At the opening of the second half the audience was startlingly alerted, by Dennis Sullivan’s extremely loud and powerful tympani strokes, that Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man had begun. The brass “undectet” followed in its familiar way with well-shaped vigor. John Ehrlich managed the forces well, and the effect was quite enlivening.

Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom, commissioned by the University of Virginia Glee Club to celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, is a stirring setting of the founder’s words. In its original form, it was for male chorus with piano accompaniment. Thompson adapted it for mixed chorus and then later orchestrated it. Though dismissed by critics as an occasional piece, it has remained popular with choruses and audiences and has been played on many important occasions, such as by short wave to the American troops during WWII, by the BSO at Carnegie Hall two days after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and by the National Symphony two days before the inauguration of Kennedy. It has also been featured in numerous September 11 memorials.

No strings or winds were on stage for the Thompson, since Ehrlich had chosen a 2007 arrangement by Randol Bass with accompaniment from brass, percussion, and organ. This was generally quite effective in the martial portions, though First Church Congregational’s Frobenius baroque tracker organ, even under the expert control of the excellent Heinrich Christensen, lacked the sumptuous stops needed to evoke the consoling qualities of an orchestral string section; and the tuba and bass trombone parts essentially covered the organ’s pedal part. The only really effective moment for the organ came in its well modulated duet with Paul Perfetti’s muted trumpet during the second section, “We have counted the cost of this contest…”

Throughout the Thompson, the Spectrum Singers sang with intense emotional involvement. Unlike the earlier Vaughan Williams piece in which the sinuous vocal writing tended to obscure the words, Thompson’s squarer style lined up parts and thus enabled the chorus to convey the almost spoken quality of the texts, even in the flattering reverberation of the church space.

Ultimately one did not miss the full orchestra. The chorus was the star, after all, and though it was surprising in the Peoples’ Republic of Cambridge to witness such a patriotic display, this was patriotism without nationalism or jingoism — rather patriotism of lofty ideals.

After the performance, tuba player Takatugo Hagiwara and bass trombonist Peter Cirelli were seen shaking hands, and yes, they both had an excellent and very busy evening. They said that they couldn’t remember having had more to do and enjoying it more in any other orchestral engagement. And apropos of engagements, the first trumpet Paul Perfetti deserves a salute (if that’s the right word to use after Veterans’ Day). He not only played brilliantly but also had another starring role, that of orchestra contractor. The string ensemble he assembled was bright, young, and excellent, and the brass and percussion were top drawer.

The entire unusual concert was quite moving. For Vietnam-era protesters, the Jeffersonian ideals so artfully set in the Testament of Freedom might have induced more of us to fight, if we had believed they applied to that conflict. Now the music and texts give us a satisfying welling up of pride in our foundational impulses. I hope that’s not chauvinism.

Lee Eiseman is the publisher of the Intelligencer.

Pre-show screen shot from Showcase Revere f4.5 at 1/2 second ISO 3200 (BMInt staff photo)

I learned that that Fenway may have made the decision to use a lesser projector because the DCI (“main act” digital cinema initiative projector) projectors are subsidized by the distributors and the studios and are sometimes restricted as to the content for which they can be used.

Since an average digital projector costs over $100,000 versus $20,000 for a 35-mm projector, the theaters, which are not paying for their prints, have no incentive to make the conversion without a subsidy. The distributors and studios, on the other hand, will save  $2,500 per print, multiplied by the thousands of prints required by theaters every year because digital images are presented on inexpensive, reusable hard drives rather than on film. That gives distributors and studios a substantial incentive to encourage the equipping of theaters with digital projectors through cash subsidies. In some cases those relationships also have imposed  certain restrictions on use of the DCI projectors.

Asked whether she could say what projectors Regal will be using for future Met HD broadcasts, the spokesman from its corporate office, Michelle Portillo, wrote, “Per our conversation this morning, I inquired about your projector questions and that information cannot be released.” Because of that non-disclosure policy patrons can have no way of knowing what to expect from the Regal chain.

By contrast, the Showcase Cinema Revere’s very responsive manager, explained that every one of their theaters is equipped with Sony SRX-R320 SXRDs. With 4096×2304 pixel count, these are capable of twice the resolution sent out by the Met via satellite (1900 x 1080). The  contrast rating of the Sony projector is 2000:1. In the case of Revere, there is also no issue with 3D lenses being left on projectors at inappropriate times, a practice that can cut the brightness in half, as has been exposed by a recent Boston Globe article by Ty Burr. According to the manager, screens 5 and 10, where Met broadcasts take place, are never used for 3D, though the Revere Cinema chain claims never to leave the 3D lenses in place for 2D movies on their other screens. He went on to say:

At Revere three out of 20 screens can still handle 35 mm film, though there is no advantage to it. The images from the Sony 4K projectors are better in every way, and you don’t have the aggravation of seeing dirt and scratches. We don’t have that headache any more, thank goodness. The films are delivered to us on small hard drives, so that cost of freight is miniscule compared to film, and we don’t need to splice the reels onto large platters or employ an army of projectionists. We have only one now, for twenty screens. The Met Broadcasts come to us through satellite. Though those broadcasts are only 2K, I guarantee that we will always use our DCI projectors for them.

For creature comforts there are also soft drinks and box lunches served before the movie within the auditorium. There’s also a pleasant restaurant with a full liquor license which attracts some patrons who don’t even bother to stay for a movie. We’ll probably never offer reserved seats, since that would encourage people to arrive later and not buy food and drink.  Also we have acres of free parking.

Tony Beadle, executive director Rockport Music (BMInt staff photo)

Another favorite Met HD site for BMInt readers is the Shalin Liu center in Rockport. As most of us know, this establishment is much more visually and acoustically sumptuous than a commercial cineplex. BMInt learned the following from executive director Tony Beadle.

Generally it’s safe to simply show up for one of our Met HD broadcasts, but like so much of classical music, attendance is driven by what’s on the program. In our experience, Italian opera sells very well, Wagner sells very well. For other operas we have to do a little extra work. Overall attendance has been very good and well beyond our expectations. We don’t sell every seat in the house since some of them, though excellent for a concert, have obstructed views of the screen. We sell about 280 seats out of 350.

We sell reserved seats at three different prices. This is one of our major differentiators from the presentations at conventional cinemas. We get a lot of people coming up from Boston who like to be assured that they have seats reserved for them. They don’t have to arrive two hours early and put their coats on chairs. But they can also come early and reserve a table for lunch on our third floor. We also offer pre-opera lectures. Parking is also free in Rockport after the third week in October. And yes, we do serve wine and beer on the third floor at lunch and we have great snacks at intermission.

We’re particularly proud of our image and sound quality. When we were designing Shalin Liu we knew we were going to be doing video presentations and we wanted the best. After you finish with me you ought to talk with David Shriver, our AV expert.   And we also had a recent consultation from classical sound expert Steve Colby of Evening Audio Consultants to optimize our surround sound. The surround sound comes directly from the Met feed which arrives in 5.1. We’re not creating an artificial surround. It comes from microphones in the auditorium at the Met.

David Shriver, Rockport’s technical director told BMInt more technical details about their venue.

We have a German very high end sound installation from D & B Audio Technik. The three speaker systems above the screen were supplemented by four channels of D & B speakers on tripods in our first year. This was not entirely convincing, so we hired Steve Colby to come up with a permanent surround sound system that sounds good in virtually every seat. He encouraged us to stay with D & B for the surround, but was also sensitive to the need to install speakers that were aesthetically pleasing. We did not want to alter the look of the hall [in the manner that has just been done with speakers at Symphony Hall]. We bought 6 model E-8 speakers for orchestra left and right in the front and rear, and for the balcony left and right. We also were careful to adjust the delays digitally to make sure no one was hearing arriving sound from the surrounds before hearing the sound from the mains. Every speaker is driven by a D & B MB D-6 amp. Each amp is driven from our London Sound Web DSPs (digital sound processor) which are in turn fed from our Integra decoder.

In terms of speaker placement,  because of the famous glass wall at the back of our stage, it’s not possible to install speakers directly behind the screen as is normally the case, but I believe the above-the-screen positioning of the main speakers is actually very advantageous for film. You definitely get the feeling that the dialog comes from the screen. We’ve done some clever things with the aiming and fill speakers to make sure that the sound field is consistent through the house.

Our projector is a Panasonic Pt D10000DW  three-chip DLP which produces 10,000 lumens with a 5,000:1 contrast ratio. From the beginning, since we knew that video was going to be important, we didn’t blanch at spending $40,000 on a very good projector. It isn’t in a totally soundproof booth, but we are currently working on moving the fans out of the auditorium. At this point those seated in the back couple of rows can hear the projector in very quiet moments. This will be improved very soon.”

Screen shot from Shalin Liu Center f4.5 at 1/40 sec, ISO 1600 (BMInt staff photo)

The picture at Shalin Liu is much brighter than those in cineplexes. I measured 4 stops more brightness from the screen shots I took. It’s true that the Sony 4ks in use at Fenway are 18,000 lumens compared to Rockport’s 10,000 lumens, but the screen at Revere is 4 times the size: (40 x 25 vs 20 x 12.) So the brightness advantage of Revere’s projector is dissipated over the much larger surface area of their screen. I would also observe qualitatively that Shalin Liu’s image quality benefits from the better contrast ratio of their projector.  The black level also appears deeper than at Revere.

So what’s BMInt’s recommendation? In my opinion at the best theaters, such as Rockport, the image is as good as a BluRay of a well produced opera on a top home theater system. This is less true at the larger cinemas since the same amount of information used to create the picture on one’s 50 inch home display is spread over a 40 – 50 foot image at a large theater. So if one sits too close, the image does not appear sharp. And in favor of watching at home there is also the availability of many excellent discs. Opus Arte alone has 59 operas on BluRay. And there are also many opportunities for streaming opera. Yet most individuals do not have top home theater systems. Furthermore, watching a recorded performance at home, though certainly convenient, is not a substitute for a live broadcast in a well equipped theater full of pumped-up senior citizens. Our recommendation then, is to go to Rockport if the drive is not too onerous. Otherwise we suggest Showcase Revere as the next most satisfying venue.

Unlike most composers who depend on the Byzantine web of foundation support or academic sponsorship, Tony Schemmer is that rara avis who self-produces performances of his own works in formal settings with top musicians. He studied piano and has composed since grammar school, continuing at Yale College where he majored in composition. Upon the insistence of wise parents he followed college with studies at Harvard Medical School and served as a physician until the 1990s. Perhaps, like Gibbon, he had “sighed like a lover but obeyed as a son.”

Now having shed those professional obligations and their concomitant respectability, he has boldly engaged a cadre of young talent of the so-called “emerging” variety whom he has supported and promoted in concerts often — not always — featuring works by someone named Schemmer. Those young musicians have responded with enthusiasm to his compositional “voice,” [or they won’t be invited back!] by incorporating Schemmeriana into their own studio classes and programs. According to Schemmer, his efforts along with this cohort, have emboldened a fifth column of tonality which is tweaking the academic musical establishment to the extent that they notice.

Discounting clothesline-and-sheet productions in his cousins’ basement à la “Our Gang,” Schemmer might be said to have sprung fully armed into the ranks of impresario-composer with a semi-staged production under the baton of Philip Morehead (Chicago Lyric Opera) at Sanders Theatre in April of 1980 of his opera, Phaust. In a Boston Globe review replete with reservations, a dubious Richard Dyer conceded that, “Schemmer has a lot of talent — there is more invention and skill in any 30-minute section of Phaust than in the whole score of …[a] musical like Annie.” Since then, Schemmer has not permitted himself to become discouraged. His self-presented concert at Longy last year was reviewed in these pages here. His works have also been heard in New York, Italy, Austria (Salzburg), Ukraine (Odessa), Russia (St. Petersburg), Ireland and the lower 48.

Schemmer as Faustus (Lee Eiseman photo)

BMInt asked the composer some questions:

BMInt: Don’t tell me you’re going to present another one of your Schemmeriades.

Schemmer: Thou sayest it.

Why dub it “Salon d’un refusé?”

The reference of course is to the Impressionists, who set up their own shop when juried out of the Académie’s official exhibition. Of course there is some further irony here in that the Impressionists were the avant garde and the official Salon was very conservative. My stuff is pretty damned conservative, but some people now think the return to tonality — or is it the revenge of tonality — is the new avant garde.

So your music is not the sort one would hear from academic composers? Are you less melo-phobic than they?

I write for haters of dodecaphony and minimalism. Actually, as I follow the performances of composition students at the New England Conservatory [where he serves as an overseer] and at competitions like the Underwood Commission of the American Composers Orchestra, I am struck by the flight to tonality. I mean, the kids still delight in snarled complexity, but their music now more often has a tonal centrality of some sort. My good friend the conductor Isaiah Jackson remarked to me that my things are more in fashion now than when they were written.

So what does your music sound like?

Think of my music as a digestible cocktail: Three parts Richard Strauss; two parts Prokofiev (if running low on the Prokofiev, substitute Bartok); one part Oscar Peterson; add a dash of Victor Borge. Shake until frothy.

Tell us about the musicians and the pieces which they will be playing.

Foremost is the belated premier of an extensive work for violin and piano, dating from about 1981, a work originally conceived for oboe and piano that was never performed. It languished until pianist Artem Belogurov and I were rummaging and it jumped off the shelf. He started reading through it and I thought: “Hey, not half bad.” More surprising was that Artem agreed.

Belogurov is an extremely refined pianist who has keyed into my musical style with uncanny intuition. He and a terrific violinist, Emil Altschuler, have been patiently working the violin adaptation up. The work was largely inspired by the fabulous “through-composed” jazz of Claude Bolling. It has been fun seeing how Emil, as a strict classical violinist — he went to Juilliard and Yale — has taken to the freer style of this music, doing things that would perhaps induce a cringe response from his teacher Erik Friedman.

So, while I have worked with Emil and Artem for some years, there is an even older guard. That includes pianist Constantine Finehouse and ‘cellist Sebastian Bäverstam. The superlatives grow tiresome, so just check out their sites on the web. Those two will bring back another substantial work, Romanza, which has been unheard for many years and they will also essay some trifles that continue to please crowds, Toney Tango and Divertimento. Yes, the “Toney” is a triple pun. Olga Caceànova, our exotic violinist from St. Petersburg (and a current student of Donald Weilerstein at NEC) will also premier a solo work, Etude en Rose, and we plan a diptych of Puccini arrangements called Bonbons Bohème. Then the misguided full forces conducted by Andres Lopera will conspire to play an octet extracted and arranged from a musical I wrote about Columbus.

Do you have any CDs or videos?

Funny you should ask. We just received the shipment of CDs which Bäverstam and Finehouse recorded in July of 2010 in New York. It features the Brahms e minor and some other things I don’t remember at the moment. I suppose they will be hawking them post concert. Sigh.

What do your wife and children think of your vocation?

They warn everyone: Do not attempt this at home.

Is there any good reason to stay away?

Well, I would hope not. But you know what Sol Hurok said: “If people don’t want to come, nobody can stop them.”

Note: A related review is here.

Eiseman: Ben, there’s going to be some big news on Monday. I gather we’re going to be hearing a lot less about WCRB, which will be but one of many stations carrying your content, and a lot more about a new brand.

Roe: As of Monday we become officially “Classical New England.” That is the name of our brand, really triggered by our partnership with the new Providence station [WJMF FM 88.7 in Smithfield, RI], and also because I’ve found that the website of 995allclassical-dot-org is a forgettable mouthful. We’re going to be classicalnewengland.org and Classical New England is going to be the name of our service wherever you find it or hear it. [Hereinafter CLNE]

We’re also going to be doing some major schedule changes.

Marc-André Hamelin at Performance Today session with old logo.

Laura Carlo is going to be on from 5 am to 10 am every morning. Alan McLellan will take over the midday shift from 10 to 2, and Cathy Fuller will be the new Afternoon Drive host, from 2 pm to 7pm. We’re putting “Performance Today” on Mondays through Fridays; this coming Monday will be the first, from 7 pm to 9 pm, and will contain a lot of concert performances from Boston. In fact, Fred Child, the host of the show, will be at the studio on Friday to host a special taping in our studio with Marc-André Hamelin playing an all Liszt recital, to be aired nationwide [October 22 at 6 PM with a repeat the next day] on the composer’s 200^th birthday.  James David Jacobs will be on live from 9 pm to 1 am, except on Friday, when our bilingual program Concierto airs. So the American Public Media’s C-24 syndicated programming you hear on our station will now only run from 1 am to 5 am.

We’re adding a bunch of features as well, such as Cathy’s Drive Time Live – a “commuter concert” from Fraser [Recording Studio] every Friday at 4 pm. The first one will be with Sarah Chang. This is our way of leading into the weekend. Brian McCreath will take what he does on the web and become our arts scene “culture vulture.” He’s doing a story right now on NEC’s MahlerFest, which we recorded, by the way. We’re going to have a concert called Café Europa with Allan McLellan every weekday at noon, with live performances from England and Europe not available anywhere else. BSO on Record moves to Saturday nights, which will become “deep-dive BSO night.” From 7 pm to midnight it’s BSO, with the pregame show, the live broadcast and then The BSO on Record. The Sunday BSO rebroadcasts from 1 to 3 will be edited down to two hours. So there’ll be all of the music but less talk. Sunday from 3 to 5 will be our Sunday concert, but with a live Boston and regional focus. That’s where we’ll broadcast the NEC MahlerFest or the Handel and Haydn with Bezuidenhout or the Boston Phil. And we’re adding on Sunday nights at 10 the series from our friends at Chicago’s WFMT, the Thomas Hampson series, America in Song. Pipedreams and New England Summer Festivals, which have been doing very well, will also continue.

The story that originally prompted this interview, even before I also learned of the newsworthy announcement of Classical New England, was that the station would be repeating the Saturday night BSO broadcasts on Sunday afternoon and streaming them on CLNE for 14 days. This is really exciting and may represent a stronger relationship between WGBH and the BSO. Will you also have access to BSO archival content, and so on? Please fill us in.

Our first live broadcast of the BSO this season is going to be on Thursday, October 6. As you know, the BSO doesn’t usually present concerts on Thursday nights, but because of Yom Kippur, they have modified their schedule. So that means that this concert will be the exact 60th anniversary of when WGBH first went on the air — which was with a with a live BSO broadcast!

For me this is symbolic, because we are about to have the biggest, most transformative change in our broadcast of BSO concerts in 60 years — the very fact that we can repeat them. This is the outgrowth of the longest continuous relationship between a broadcaster and an orchestra in the country. It’s really stunning to remember how far back this goes. There’s Tanglewood, Pops, television broadcasts. But in all that time, we have been looking for ways that we can take advantage of our relationship that goes beyond the live event – which is over after it’s done. That was no longer competitive in the marketplace. The new arrangements with the BSO and their players give us much more latitude for re-use.

Three very important things are going to happen, with the potential for a fourth. Every Saturday night concert will be rebroadcast on Sunday afternoon. We also have the potential to offer it on the air one more time. My goal is that not a week should go by in any season in which you won’t hear a BSO concert on the air on both Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. This is pretty remarkable. It will start on October 9. Second, on-demand streaming of the BSO concerts will then be available on classicalnewengland.org for a minimum of 14 days. The BSO players will get compensation for these additional media rights, but the details of that are between the BSO and its players. But the real important point is that the BSO and its players and WGBH are looking for ways to attract new audiences.

Point three is that we will able be able to offer the broadcasts to any station within the six New England states as well as to the Capitol region of New York. Our plan right now, since this is all quite new, is that leading up to the Tanglewood season, we will be offering concert broadcasts to all these stations. We’re having active discussions with many in the region about doing just that and hope to announce more on that subject very soon.

Right now, the Boston Symphony broadcasts will be available on demand from both our and the BSO’s website for a limited time period; but part four, and what excites me the most, is that WGBH and the BSO are in the midst of discussions about ways that we might be able to go deeper than that and surface some of the great broadcasts of the past. After all, we have a 60-year broadcast legacy that I submit is unparalleled among American orchestras!

This sounds almost like Mitchell Hasting’s Concert Network of the 1950s — WBCN, WHCN, WNCN, et cetera, brought back.

That’s right, though it’s not quite to that extent. But this is the first time that we will be able to have the BSO available in the six New England States and in upstate New York.

Another exciting possibility: We are actively exploring with the BSO ways that both of us can unlock the 60-year archival content. How can we find a way and a model to pay for making all of this amazing material available to the public and to generate some revenue for the musicians? These are all things I am anxious to do. But WGBH and the BSO are giant institutions, and we’re at this rare moment of comity, going beyond the broadcast relationship to what kind of a business relationship can we enter.

The BSO is apparently going to be making an announcement soon about major improvements to their website with new content, and so forth. Do you have any insight into what functions will be duplicative with CLNE’s offerings?

I don’t know whether you’d call them duplicative. The BSO is a big organization with many moving parts, as is WGBH. We’re taking on a pretty thorough overhaul of our classical website as well as our classical brand. And I’m sure the BSO is having similar conversations. There’s a perfect storm of opportunity between us, but at the same time we each have different mandates.

The BSO is hardly going to give CLNE exclusive use of their content, and they already have the BSO Media Center on their website, which I gather is going to be substantially expanded. But so far, the BSO is not ready to make an announcement.

Well, if you hear something let me know!

Is this new undertaking to bring BSO performances to a larger radio and internet audience something like the rebirth of the Transcription Trust? On the one hand, the BSO hires John Newton [the subject of a related interview here] to archive to the highest possible fi, the concerts which the BSO thinks most worthy, while at the same time, WCRB is recording every Saturday night concert for re-broadcast and on-line streaming.

To put it most simply, we own the broadcast production, we don’t necessarily own the music they perform, so that’s where it has been from the start, a fifty-fifty relationship. And although the Transcription Trust made sense for that time, now we’re in a different time.

Back to Thursday, October 6, are you going to air Aaron Copland’s wonderful intermission speech?

At least a piece of it.

Are you going to suppress the section where he praises WGBH’s plans to broadcast Friday and Saturday concerts to give listeners the chance to hear a new work twice?

We will be giving people a chance to hear the same piece multiple times with our Sunday re-broadcast and our 14-day streaming on demand on our website. So yes, in a modern way we are fulfilling Aaron Copland’s vision.

What about getting WGBH to simulcast the October 6 60th anniversary event, since it’s really WGBH’s anniversary?

We haven’t discussed that, though I have to say that the simulcast that we did on the Jordan Hall Concert of Remembrance on September 11 was our first ever, and I was very pleased with how it turned out.

Well, that may not have been the first simulcast. Weren’t there various experiments, first in the pre-multiplex days with stereo where WCRB broadcast one channel and WGBH the other? And also I recall some four-channel broadcasts, in which one station broadcast the front two channels and the other, the two rear channels.

Well, Lee, if you want to geek out on me, at least the first category may have been a simulcast between WGBH FM and WCRB AM. I remember sitting in my grandparents’ home in Sudbury and hearing that effect.

My last question on the BSO — and I know the answer, but I’m constantly being asked to pose it to you again. Will broadcast of Friday afternoon concerts come back any time soon?

It’s not going to happen. The simple fact of the matter is that we had to pick one, and for any variety of reasons it makes a lot more sense to record and broadcast live on Saturday nights. And it’s also a function of cost. And I am much happier offering twice as much BSO content to when people are actually in a position to hear it. Sunday afternoon is a far better time to hear a Symphony concert [than Friday afternoon].

As the population ages there will be more people at leisure on Friday afternoons.

I’ve noticed that after having experimented with a fair number of Friday night concerts, the BSO has been slowly increasing its Friday afternoon concerts – retired people prefer to go out in the daytime. I suspect Friday night concerts are becoming more problematic

Now to some general questions: CLNE has done many of the things that the Intelligencer suggested — not necessarily because we suggested them — I’m not that crazy. You’re out there recording local concerts in great numbers again, you’re streaming recordings of live concerts on your excellent website, you have a tremendous amount of new production and new content, the Tanglewood broadcast season was a big success, there are some great new shows on the weekends and starting today, on weekdays too — I’m really liking what I hear. I am hearing that from other people, too. Now it’s your chance to congratulate yourself.

Everything I have done with the classical service right now has been blindingly obvious. It has not been particularly difficult to implement what I thought were some very straightforward changes. This is not to knock anything that happened before my arrival. The new WCRB combining the two staffs was a work in progress. This is true both of financial performance and of ratings. The older WCRB’s commercial  practices were wholly different from operating a non-commercial classical station. This had not happened in Boston in decades. Figuring out how to do that has taken us a while. I’m pleased with how it’s been going, but now it really will get interesting.

WCRB is certainly livelier since you’ve arrived.

Well, it’s not about what one person can do. It’s more about trying to create an atmosphere and an ethos both for what the staff does and how we spend our time. I don’t have a bigger budget; I don’t have more personnel.

You’re apparently making your entire staff work harder and many report being scared. Maybe that’s a way to get more out of people.

You can say some are slightly scared, but I think you could also say that we’re all pulling on the same oars.

But everyone realizes that if this doesn’t work that there aren’t going to be any jobs. So they are putting in longer hours — excited and exhausted at the same time.

One of the challenges I always have as a manager is to make what I believe are the right changes in a scalable and human way. It’s easy for us all to come up with one great show, but how do you do it again and again? This is something I learned first-hand producing a daily show for NPR for more than a decade. I’ve found that it’s psychologically difficult for some people in this business to hit a home run day after day. How do I create something that is sustainable? But, yes, I probably do call on people to use more of their time than they had in the past.

I can see how this might be scary, since you entered the scene after a relatively sustained period of relationship between talent and management. You’re the new guy and you were hired to shake things up. You have to evaluate everyone’s performance. You would not be a good manager if you didn’t.

There’s shared mission and there’s shared risk. I’ve been following the Boston scene long enough to know that there are some aspects of the place that are checkered. At the same time, I’m also here to tell you that one of the miracles is that the bureaucracy of WGBH  actually encourages me to achieve things. I have found tremendous support across the board to implement the changes that I have wanted to make.

The rating numbers for WCRB have not looked good since you arrived. For August the Arbitron share for WCRB should at 1.2. That’s a third of what it was before WGBH took over and half of what it was last summer. Is this a disappointment?

I wouldn’t use the word “disappointment.” And I don’t mean to sound Pollyanna-esque about this either, but there is a national trend that we were all discussing at a convention last week. Throughout the country, classical broadcasters have experienced significant ratings drops. I saw a rather alarming slide that showed a bar graph, but I can’t really believe that three million people across the country have stopped listening to classical music in a year. But the ratings drop is belied by the membership support WCRB has been enjoying. The May and August campaigns, the first two on my watch, have exceeded their goals. The last day of our August campaign produced one the largest pledge totals in WGBH history.

But I don’t want to just blame Arbitron as the messenger. In some ways, the changes I made on the weekends might have made things a bit worse before it makes them better. And we’ve been hampered by the fact that I have not had a regular afternoon announcer since the end of January. It’s a function of radio in general and classical radio in particular that audiences grow very attached to the familiar voice that their used to hearing. It was very difficult for us to lose Ray Brown in January, and I’m thrilled that he’s back for some fill in.

My final thought on the ratings is that September looks very encouraging.

I don’t have easy access to the hour-by-hour Arbitron ratings, so could you tell me if some of your new shows are gaining traction and what market share have some of the most successful achieved?

Well our highest share now is on weekends, where during certain times periods we’ve had close to a 3 share. But you have to be careful looking at rating snapshots, because there is volatility week by week or hour by hour. Longer term, my ratings trendline is not something I have been pleased with, but I fully expect that’s going to change.

Either ratings will change or you will be changed in the next year!

That’s right, and if I don’t fix that they’ll find somebody else to do it. It’s that simple — it’s the business of radio.

By the way, were still waiting to hear your plans for the improvement of reception in Boston.

All I can say is that we’re aware of the problem.

According to last year’s form 990 there was a $45-million operating deficit for the WGBH Foundation, of which WCRB is a small component. And I gather from what I heard during fundraising that there will be another deficit this year.

I can’t speak to the form 990 and our books for this fiscal year yet, but I can say that there’s no extra money. No one’s giving me a bigger budget.

That’s why when you do a new hire it must be a replacement for someone who left or was fired….

Let me stop you right there. I didn’t fire anybody. I have changed jobs and changed positions.

Well, I have to ask you, since many people have asked me about it. What happened to Alice Abrahams? Is there anything you can say about her departure?

Just as we have talked about the change between the Transcription Trust and where we are in the 21st century, one of my jobs is to balance resources with activity. Alice had a part-time position that we eliminated because it wasn’t consistent with the urgent priorities of what we need to do now. It’s really that simple.

Is Cheryl Willoughby in some ways Alice’s replacement?

Cheryl’s is an entirely new job with new responsibilities. She is the first music director we have ever had.

Why does CLNE need a music director for a production staff of six to eight people who all know a great deal about classical music programming?

Because one of the challenges that we have is that I really inherited three different stations. There were different sounds in the morning, a certain sound in the afternoon, and another sound from C24 [automated feed from American Public Media] in the evenings. So you say you are listening to 99.5 all-classical, but which one of the three do you hear?

The role of the music director is to help me create consistent programming across the board. For instance, if we do a great performance in Fraser, why can’t it air on Laura Carlo’s show? Then we might have a New England Festivals program on Saturday night excerpted on Monday morning. The station needs someone who can step back and see the whole week. It’s not that we want to program what every classical host plays on a daily basis. Cheryl’s job is to help me figure out an overall programming scheme, and that really comes down to how we think about the music that we play and what people are doing at the time we play it. There are lots of listeners with very different tastes, and I’ve got to find what we call “the secret sauce.” Every programmer has got the hubris to think his or hers is the best. But ultimately it’s the market that decides.

Are there rivalries among the announcers and producers based on whose shows have the best ratings?

People have a general idea about their ratings, but it’s as if you were to look at hit rates for your various writers, would you decide never to use someone again because of that?

A number of people, including a head of another radio station, have asked why you program your Sunday night opera program directly opposite WHRB’s.

I find this fascinating. I’m thrilled that WHRB has had its longstanding tradition of playing opera on Sunday night. I don’t program my station — which now reaches an audience of five New England states — based on what WHRB is doing. I program based on what I think satisfies my audience in five states. Particularly where I bristle a little is that in our opera programming we are producing and presenting from Glyndebourne, Vienna State Opera, Washington National Opera…  you know we just had Domingo! We’re not spinning discs! There’s great care and craft in our production. This is the best live music program in America around opera. And it’s also a forum for us to do Madame White Snake and many other local operas, and we hope to do more. It’s also my goal to record and air the local productions, and so we’re in negotiations with the opera companies. Look at what we did with the Opera Bash. For eleven years WGBH television has done it and it’s been virtually ignored on the radio, and this year we embraced it. We had Lisa Simeone, host of World of Opera, doing all of the continuity on television, and we broadcast two full-length operas on ‘CRB. We did Rameau’s Les Indes galantes and Lully’s Atys. And we did a whole weekend of “Opera Without Words,” we called it. This is not about a competition with WHRB. I think it’s terrific you have classical music choices in Boston. How many places do you have that?

It would be nice if one or both of the stations would stream the choices to offer determined individuals to hear both offerings.

Ours are already available on demand. Commercially recorded operas you can’t offer on demand because of copyright regulations. The other thing about this too, Lee, is, step back a moment. There’s a reason why we do opera on Sunday night, and probably a similar reason why WHRB does. On Saturday nights we have this thing called the Boston Symphony Orchestra. What do we do on Sunday afternoon? Well, now there’s the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and it’s also our time period to showcase Boston Philharmonic or Handel and Haydn. Who knows, perhaps Rhode Island Philharmonic, now that we have a partnership with Bryant College and a transmitter there? If I look at the weekend schedule, where is the logical place for me to put the opera show? If I put it on Saturday afternoon to compete with WHRB’s Met Opera broadcasts you’d have every right to scream.

Do you have any intention of trying to grab the Met Broadcasts?

I don’t think that’s an option, precisely because of what you say about on-demand and streaming rights. I think the Met needs to catch up in this area.

Might there be another area of streaming intended to offer something simpler — classical background music of the sort that WCRB once sent out as a sub carrier? Some excellent examples of this are out there now, such as DMX’s Sonic Tab, with endless streams of nicely programmed music in various categories and no talk. Jessica is a great programmer there. That stream is very effective at banishing teenagers from shopping malls. Will CLNE’s excellent website ever offer such channels?

You’ve noticed that we’ve recently added three online streams: The Boston Early Music Channel, a BSO Channel, a Kids Classical channel. I’d like to have three more by the end of the year. We certainly believe that online we offer a great resource, and we have great potential for reaching people across the world. We have significant numbers in Germany, the UK, and Japan already. So will it be free of talk? Possibly at some point…

Frankly I’m much more worried about the competition from Pandora and Spotify, not WBUR or WHRB. Seeing their share numbers rise, that’s what keeps me up at night. Although I think listeners will benefit from this competition, how do we compete with them in a public space where we’re not selling you anything? At the same time how do I remain relevant and in business?

Katerina Marcovic talks about Mahler's First (Andrew Hurlbut photo)

The “Mahler Unleashed” series of 19 concerts got underway at Jordan Hall last night, prompting this writer to concede that NEC President Tony Woodcock may have been guilty of understatement in his boast that “Only NEC could conceive and promote this festival.” We heard in the results evidence of an interdisciplinary approach only possible at an institution of NEC’s stature.

When Katarina Markovic, chair of the NEC Music History and Musicology Department, proposed including part of her dissertation topic, a study of the first version of Mahler’s first symphony, in a festival, Woodcock wisely got behind her and let her run with her idea. Her student Kristo Kondakci, NEC ’13, spent all summer and more transcribing every note and interpreting every smudge from Mahler’s 1889 manuscript into new orchestra parts and a new conductor’s score. He did this with guidance from his professor and from Hugh Wolff, NEC’s Stanford and Norma Jean Calderwood Director of Orchestras and Chair of Orchestral Conducting, who is a noted Mahler interpreter.

Then it was the turn of the very talented players of the NEC Philharmonia to get involved in the first performance of the original version of Mahler’s first symphonic utterance since its premiere in 1889. It must be said, and clearly the capacity audience agreed, that the NEC orchestras are playing at a very high level. A certain orchestra across the street must look enviously at the very laudable situation where there is actually a vigorous young music director engaged in his work with rigor and reliability. There is also apparently a commitment to allowing sufficient rehearsal time as well as an expectation that performances will be highly polished.

When Wolff signed on for a “fantastic journey” with Katarina Markovic, he was all aboard as an active participant. And the results in the actual performance affirmed his decision. He conducted from memory, which was no small feat, since he somehow had to forget the version of Mahler 1 he had been conducting for many years.

Professor Markovic, in the pre-performance lecture, spoke on the differences in versions of the symphony illustrated not only by images of manuscripts pages projected on a large screen but also with the orchestra on stage as sonic explicator. We knew what to listen for when the orchestra returned to the stage for the actual performance, and so it was not a surprise to see that the orchestra had shrunk from the forces employed in the opener, Strauss’s Don Juan  (also from 1889). Twelve woodwind players were not invited back.

What sounded most different about this version was the lack of divisi strings. We lost an octave of shimmering harmonics and the orchestration sounded much more Brahmsian than Straussian. Then there were assorted bumpy transitions that the young Mahler later smoothed. The most dramatic of these occurred in the last movement where, according to Professor Markovic, the pedal point in D, though it gives a wonderfully eerie quality, makes it impossible for return to the harmonically distant original theme  in f minor without resorting to some confusing dissonance and a verbatim recapitulation of the “horror fanfare.” Professor Markovic added that the need for this verbatim recapitulation particularly galled Mahler, whose preference was for a more natural continuous development.

The performance was very well played and well paced, especially amazing for the opening concert by a student orchestra. Wolff employed admirable restraint and did not anticipate his climaxes. The dramatic moments were all well earned. The lyric portions were well sung, and the out-of-kilter dances bounced authoritatively. The bombast that we associate with Mahler was nowhere in evidence. Among the performers kudos were particularly earned by trumpeter Chuan-An Hou in the Blumine and by oboist Joo Bin Yi  and horn player Clark Matthews, throughout in their many exposed passages. The entire brass section was stupendous in the finale. This was a great night for NEC.

After the concert, I asked Professor Markovic what it felt like to have her dissertation brought to sonic life. “This was, of course, a clear high point in my professional life.  To bring back to life this beautifully original work, anticipatory of all the great Mahler works to come and yet touchingly naïve from a technical and compositional point of view, was something that I feel Mahler deserved, considering the harsh and unfair criticism this work received at its premiere and later.  Certainly, the orchestra that premiered the symphony in Budapest was not on the level that we heard yesterday, so Mahler would have probably been quite satisfied with this performance.  And to participate in this event was a great honor for me, not to mention a musicologist’s dream-come-true!”

One caveat: There was a noisy intruder in Jordan Hall — an LCD projector brought in for a media-infused lecture before and between pieces in the concert that unfortunately was left running during the music. A posterized magenta and orange icon of Mahler glared down from a screen hung in front of the organ pipes. The screen was sized and placed to allow the NEC Jordan Hall sign to peek out underneath. This would merely have been crass marketing or branding if had been seen and not heard, but unfortunately the 45 -decibel cooling fan obliterated pianissimos for those within 30 feet. If projectors must be run during musical performances then they must be installed in a projection booth or swathed in a sound baffle.

And finally some logistical advice for future audiences at NEC: The word has certainly gotten out about the free concerts at NEC; quite a substantial number of would-be votaries were sent packing. And there was even a substantial buzz on the subway platform after the concert — and I don’t mean Symphony station. At the grittier Mass Ave. Orange line station riders could be heard gloating about what they had just received from NEC, and the fact that it’s free! So get there early if you want a seat.

Noa’s film adaptation of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise was dogged from its inception with threats of censorship and the destruction of theaters where it might have played. Later, the Nazi government succeeded in destroying virtually all of the prints, and for the next 75 years Nathan was regarded as one of the greatest lost films of the German silent canon. Then, in 1997, a single wrongly titled copy of the movie was discovered in the collection of Gosfilmofond in Moscow, and a duplicate print made there became the source for the subsequent digital restoration by Filmmuseum München. (Stefan Drössler’s excellent essay on the film appears here).

Although silent film actors only had their faces and gestures for expression, silent films presentations always had a “voice” — music. In big-city premiere engagements, the films were usually accompanied by large orchestras from scores written often by important composers, such as Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss. In lesser engagements, there were smaller ensembles, organs or pianos to break the silence and expand the expression of the directors’ visions.

In its premiere engagements in Munich and Berlin in 1922, Noa’s Nathan de Weise was accompanied by an orchestral score written by Willy Schmidt-Gentner, one of the most successful German composers of film music in the history of German cinema — we don’t count excellent exiled German composers, like Waxman, Korngold, Steiner and Riesenfeld. Schmidt-Gentner’s score for Nathan der Weise in 1922 was his first. At his most productive, he scored up to ten films a year, including numerous classics and masterpieces of the German and Austrian cinema. Successfully adapting and re-defining himself through the Weimar, Nazi and postwar periods, he continued as a prolific film composer through 1955, scoring 200 films. He died in Vienna in 1964, just short of his seventieth birthday. Though his music for Nathan is considered lost, one can hear excerpts of many of his other scores here.

Therefore, when Nathan der Weise, a major German silent film, was going to be shown to the German public for the first time in 75 years, and since its original score was lost, the Goethe-Institut’s Gericke-Schoenhagen was determined that the debut performances feature a new orchestral score. “I always considered Nathan the Wise as extraordinary, the theater play as well as the film,” he said. “When we included Noa’s film in the ‘Edition Filmmuseum’ and in the film library of Goethe-Institut, I asked the former German foreign minister and his office to support the composition of a new score and the performance by the Bundesjugendorchester. The response was very quick and very positive. Under the patronage of the minister of foreign affairs, a new score was written by the Lebanese composer Abou-Khalil and premiered in October 2009 in Munich.”

The performances by the Bundesjugendorchester of 60 teenage musicians under conductor Frank Strobel were “ecstatically received.”

Khalil’s  composition combines elements of Western and Eastern music and instruments. According to the Institut, Abou-Khalil “bridges the historic gap between the world’s three main religions in a musical fashion. He blends European with Arab and Jewish tradition, and his symphonic film music for large-scale orchestra incorporates the ancient wind instrument known as the serpent, the Arabian short-necked oud, as well as modern percussion instruments. The result — an extraordinarily exciting dialogue between film and music, old and new, Occident and Orient.”

The restored print was also released in DVD four years ago by Edition Filmmuseum with a piano-violin score by the late Aljoscha Zimmermann, a composer of fifty to one hundred silent film scores  (though only eleven are available) as well as a piano solo score by Joachim Bärenz, also an outstanding pianist. This DVD is only available through remainder sources but may soon be re-issued on BluRay.

Originally, Gericke-Schoenhagen hoped to invite the Bundesjugendorchester to Boston for the US premiere of the Nathan restoration. Unfortunately, the German economic crisis didn’t allow it.  So two years later, when Goethe-Institut Boston decided to present the premiere as part of a September 9, 2001 meditation on its tenth anniversary, it turned instead to Boston’s After Quartet and its composer Aaron Trant, who is also the group’s percussionist along with Nathan Wooley, trumpet and Scott Fitzsimmons, bass.

Before I get to my reactions to the music, which is after all BMInt’s main focus, I must thank the Goethe Institut Boston and the Coolidge Theatre Foundation for bringing a great film to a large and engaged audience with very high technical standards. The Edition Fimmuseum’s BluRay restoration looked very grand in the Coolidge’s main auditorium. The hall’s 1930s iconography did not clash at all with the German Expressionism on the screen. The tinting and toning were quite effective — especially in a torchlight march, for which highlights were tinted yellow while shadows were toned midnight blue. There were no digital artifacts in evidence, and the only flaw was frequent blown highlights, which we suspect were inherent in creation of the black-and-white restoration negative from the surviving colored nitrate print.

But the music is another story. I must declare my strong bias for accompaniment music that is of the period of the film, not the events depicted within the story or of the time of the film’s subsequent presentations. It’s also a credo of mine that great art is timeless and not needy of periodic updating. Nevertheless, I went to this morning’s performance ready to accept a well-intended, albeit anachronistic, accompaniment.

Composer Aaron Trant (interviewed here) comes to silent film scoring from a background in “classical, jazz, rock, contemporary and improvised music”; and in his score were elements of all of these. There was something like a swing interpretation of the vendetta duet from the third act of Rigoletto, modern jazz percussion riffs in the style of Gene Krupa, Hare Krishna bells and a Satchmo-escque version of Bye Bye, Blackbird.

What any of this had to do with a moving and deeply intellectual drama of events in the twelfth century through the lenses of Lessing in 1779 and Manfred Noa in 1922 is beyond me. Yes, the performance banished the silence from the auditorium, and yes, the positive press engendered by the singularity of the commission brought a large and appreciative audience to a great silent film and to Lessing’s immortal meditation on reconciliation and human understanding. The score underlined the rhythm of the film well in broad terms except in the Parable of the Ring sequences when something completely different, maybe even silence, was required. But to me, I’m very sorry to have to say, the anachronistic musical performance was an inadvertent act of vandalism to a profound film that celebrates humanity, rather like a vuvuzela chorus at a peace conference. The high level of production values and cultural- historical importance of  Manfred Noa’s magnum opus demand a more thoughtful, faithful and sophisticated score.

I suspect my views are very much in the minority in this morning’s audience, since I overheard the word sublime applied to the score more than once. I should also report that some of the organizers are particularly keen to update classic films for modern audiences. But I maintain that such updatings are misguided, generally weaken the films, and run strongly counter to the intentions of the directors.

As a litmus test I urge readers to listen to two radically different scores for Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis and decide for themselves which better honors the director’s intent. First navigate to Gorgio Moroder’s ‘80s rock version here. When you’ve had enough, have a look and listen to the Murnau Foundation’s restoration of the movie with the Gottfried Huppertz’s orchestral score from the premiere here. Please feel free to send your comments to BMInt.

BMInt staff photo

The distinguished music school, Kneisel Hall in Blue Hill, Maine, traces its beginnings to the arrival of the twenty-year-old Franz Kneisel, who came to the United States from Berlin in 1885, at the invitation of Henry Higginson, to become concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Concomitantly, Kneisel started his string quartet, which, along with the Flonzaley, became known as the finest in America.

By 1902 Kneisel began bringing some of his promising students to Blue Hill. According to the official history, other members of the Kneisel Quartet “began to follow, thus establishing the summer teaching tradition that thrives today at Kneisel Hall. Franz Kneisel’s distinguished summer school produced such splendid musicians as Sascha Jacobson, Samuel Gardner, Louis Kaufman, Marie Roemaet-Rosanoff, Joseph and Lillian Fuchs, William Kroll, Phyllis and Karl Kraeuter, and Carl Stern.”

Under the current artistic director, pianist Seymour Lipkin, Kneisel Hall continues the master’s tradition. In addition to coaching performers, Kneisel Hall offers a distinguished concert series performed by staff, guests, and illustrious alumns, including, this time, two members of the ensemble, whom this wandering correspondent heard on August 21 at the festival’s charming summer camp-style music hall, a sonorous 35-ft. square-ish space covered entirely with beaded tongue-in- groove fir and dominated at one end by a glowering moosehead and at the other by a fieldstone fireplace. The acoustic was warm for those inside as well as for the overflow crowd on the enclosed wrap-around porch.

BMInt staff photo

The Escher String Quartet  — violinists Adam Barnett-Hart and Wu Jie, violist Pierre Lapointe, and cellist Dane Johansen  presented a shapely program. Mendelssohn’s op 13, entitled “Ist es wahr? (Is it True? , based on a Mendelssohn ditty rather than a cosmic question)  is often paired with a late Beethoven quartet, op. 95 or op. 135, “Muss es sein?” (Must it Be? —certainly  an existential inquiry), usually relegating Mendelssohn to a warm-up role. In this performance, the convincing programming decision was made to pair the Mendelssohn with the early Beethoven Quartet, op. 18 no. 2. That resulted in placing the early Beethoven in the position of the program opener with the Mendelssohn as the closer.

After some brief warm-up roughness, the members got on track for a lively and user-friendly account of op. 18, no. 2. For the rest of the afternoon the Escher displayed all the requisite wares of a great ensemble: a  gritty yet warm tone, unanimity of ensemble, deep emotional involvement, attention to balance, and spot-on intonation. Within the second piece, Bartok’s String Quartet no. 5, the Escher effectively delineated a universe of contrasting qualities: savagery, lyricism, irony, whimsy, and well-plotted drama. The players neither stinted on velocity nor shied from poetically slow tempi when one or the other was wanted. Altogether a great account, though I, for one, could have done without the introductory talk comparing Bartok’s use of canon to “Row, row, row your boat,…”

With the Mendelssohn op.13, no.2 (actually Mendelssohn’s first string quartet) as the closer — and no invidious comparison with the late Beethoven implied, audience and performers alike could revel in the eighteen-year-old composer’s unbridled emotions: no classical restraint here. The adagio opening was boldly stated and the fugato section (repeated in the second movement) was well spun, even though I unfortunately could not get that nursery rhyme out of my head. The fairy scherzo is one of Mendelssohn’s best, and it was a frothy number, for sure. And at the end we return where we began, with an even more dramatic though harmonically less far-reaching restatement of the opening theme. The Escher was armed for bear and bagged same. We very much look forward to hearing the group again.

Two concerts remain in the Kneisel Festival, A Far Cry on August 26 and 28 and the N-E-W Trio on September 24.

Lee Eiseman, publisher of the Boston Musical Intelligencer, has been making musical things happen in Boston for close to forty years.

Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos conducts Yuja Wang (Hilary Scott photo)

With the Eighth Symphony of Beethoven, the first half of the Tanglewood BSO concert on August 5 seemed to commence rather abruptly since the symphony does not even begin with an introductory section, but rather gets going almost as emphatically as does the Fifth. The second movement with its repeated woodwind chords is regularly associated with Nepomuk Mälzel, the inventor of the metronome. Elsewhere relentless rhythmic figures are also very much in evidence. Nevertheless, the best performances, and this was one, manage to convey the lilt and wit that Beethoven also intended in perhaps his most genial and bucolic expression in the symphonic idiom.

Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, the BSO’s most frequent guest conductor over the last few years, presided over the gemütlich proceedings (perhaps agradables in Spanish) with a technique that was very interesting to watch. At times he kept time with broad deliberate motions, only to appear to stop conducting altogether until important downbeats needed to be telegraphed by large gestures. But perhaps most interesting was how he often subdivided his beat apparently in 16th-note intervals in the allegretto scherzando second movement. The result was an unerring pulse over which lyric expressions alternated with dramatic outbursts. The orchestra responded with great enthusiasm and Beethoven was very well served by this performance.

We had chosen to come to this concert in large part to hear the twenty-four-year-old Chinese pianist, Yuja Wang. She is something of a phenom. Her appearances on YouTube (especially the Chinese site) are legion, and she has the distinction, with 1.6 million hits, of offering the fastest and most accurate performance on YouTube of The Flight of the Bumblebee. That she is also a poet of the keyboard is evidenced by many other examples.

TFotBB, by the way, is a study unto itself on YouTube. I first experienced it under the tutelage of Viennese pianist Till Fellner who had very definite ideas about which performer should receive a gold star. He also found performances by some famous pianists to be lamentably laughable. When we later moved on to a certain famous c-sharp minor prelude, Till remarked, “Life is too short to play Rachmaninov or to drink bad wine.” But Fellner enjoys hearing Rachmaninov and would probably have cheered Yuja Wang’s performance of the romantic master’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

What was most remarkable was how Wang was able to embody the variations with appropriately varied techniques. She did not demand unusually fast tempi overall, though her rapid passagework had velocity and lapidary perfection indeed. In the famous inverted variation (XVIII) she certainly out-romanticized the composer who was, after all, somewhat buttoned down as a performer. In her louder utterances she actually levitated from her bench, bringing the weight of her entire body to bear on the keyboard. The result was a large tone that also had great beauty. When speed alone is relied upon to produce fff dynamics, tone can become harsh; only the combination of weight and velocity can succeed, as it did here. She was abetted by the skillful accompaniment of Frühbeck de Burgos, though one would have preferred if he had called for a bit more restraint from the band at times. The musical joke at the end lost much of its intended effect when the bathetic last notes from the piano were covered by the orchestra.

Richard Strauss described his most beloved opera, Rosenkavalier, as his tribute to Mozart. With a fine orchestra in the pit and undoubted stars on the stage, the effect can almost match the lightness, wit lyricism and emotional understanding of the earlier master. But in the orchestral suite, much of the delicacy is lost. With a large orchestra exposed on the stage instead of lavish sets framing Elizabeth Schwarzkopf or some other beauty, one faces a bombastic Strauss tone poem more than an effervescent-though-knowingly-ironic mirror to human foibles. The orchestral suite is Schlag compared to the opera’s Champagne.

Certainly the suite got the performance it deserved. Frühbeck de Burgos, while unable to find much incredible lightness or subtlety, nevertheless made sure that the audience got its money’s worth. He got the ritardandi and accelerandi in the “Ohne mich” waltz just right and succeeded in setting up all of the instrumental solos with a good ear for balances. The audience loved the rowdy, frenzied conclusion.

St. Paul's Aeolian Skinner (BMInt staff photo)

Though it is the normal practice of BMInt to review and discuss only events relating to classical music, we occasionally venture afield — in this case with an appreciative account of an improvised organ accompaniment to a silent movie. On July 21 a large screen was set up in the chancel of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul (Episcopal) on Tremont St. for an audience of the participants in and friends of Pipe Organ Encounters, a gathering organized by Christian Lane including several days of workshops, concerts, and other events centered on the organ. Peter Krasinski was at the console of the 1950 Æolian-Skinner, a visually unprepossessing instrument meant to be hidden behind a façade, for Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman. This classic is one of the glories of the last flowering of silent cinema one year before the widespread adoption of sound.

To evoke memories of movie palaces Krasinki began with an overture, Bernstein’s Candide, in a bravura though not immaculate performance. Then the show began with a pitiable tintype vendor (Buster Keaton) falling in love with the unattainable beauty. Buster eventually wins her love by capturing a gang war on film, and further by having by his organ-grinder monkey crank the camera and thus document the brave Buster’s rescue of the drowning damosel.

Large screen at St. Paul's (BMInt staff photo)

It was all great fun. The audience was totally on board for this timeless comedy, and Krasinski was very effective as an accompanist. While some theater organists assign memorable themes to each character and develop and intertwine them over the course of the film, Krasinki was more of the school of highlighting action and emotion with effective though not memorable music, thereby serving more as an excellent supporting actor than as a star.

His playing had a convincing period feel with no added anachronistic elements. By using thoughtful and evocative registrations, he even got the “American Classic” Æolian Skinner to sound like a Wurlitzer theater organ. He made good use of a throbbing Vox Humana stop and contrasted reeds and flutes colorfully.  This was a great marriage of movie and music and was received with enthusiasm.

Kransinski concluded the evening with a performance of our National Anthem.  His modulation  in the last stanza was an amusing surprise.

In closing one cannot help but observe that through the performance of Peter Krasinski, the grand sounding Æolian Skinner organ met the spiritual needs of this congregation most movingly.

F.  Lee Eiseman is the publisher of The Boston Musical Intelligencer

BMInt’s extensive POE interview with Christian Lane is here.

Michael Lutch photo

On his best nights Russell Sherman’s performances are more than recitals — they are conjuring acts. From the mere notes on the page Sherman creates sounds that are of his own world. He has never met a chordal inner voice that he did not want to reveal, nor a meter that he did not wish to stretch. His is a style of personal music-making, therefore, that can be ravishing or maddening. Indeed, Sherman’s freedom can seem to be license to conductors and chamber music partners. But when the stars are in the proper alignment, as they were at Rockport’s Shalin Liu Center on Sunday July 17th, Sherman can work his magic, and it does not seem like a parlor trick. The 81-year-old pianist has been making this enchantment happen most often with music of Schumann and Liszt, composers who have what Sherman refers to as “a certain kind of madness.”

In Robert Schumann’s Arabeske, Op. 18 and his Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17, which this listener has heard from Sherman on several occasions, the episodic and fantastic qualities were certainly not stinted. The audience even added to the rapture of Schumann’s fractured psyche by interrupting frequently with applause.

The second half of the program opened with Sherman’s dramatic but poetic take on Liszt’s Sonetto del Petrarca No. 104. For many doubters in the audience, this performance swept away any lingering reservations about Sherman’s prowess or genius. Liszt’s Sonata in b minor was the concluding work on the program. And for this writer it was much more than a routine journey; it was nothing less than a depiction of a life in a short yet timeless thirty-minute span. The standing O brought us a decidedly non-neurotic and Debussy-esque Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este of Liszt.

During a few of the pauses in the program Sherman appeared to be adjusting his hearing aids. As it turns out, they are not hearing aids, but rather ear plugs. Sherman later explained to this writer: “The outer sound of a concert grand can disturb my inner voices and my inner prayer. I don’t want to have the external sounds wash over me. I do a lot of subtle voicing and I want to hear the inner music. The earplugs purify; they permit a truce between the inner and outer voices.”

F. Lee Eiseman is publisher of BMInt.

For an interesting discussion of what makes a performance expressive and to test your skills differentiating human from machine playing have a look at the interactive NY Times article here.

Casino Theatre (BMInt staff photo)

In its forty-three seasons, the Newport Music Festival has never failed to intrigue. This season, the first under the management of Mark Malkovich IV, son of the late, long-time artistic director, Mark Malkovich III, is no exception. In addition to the attractions of stellar artists from the world over and the chance to hear music in some of Newport’s fabulous cottages, this year on July 13,offered an unusual first: the chance to experience a concert of chamber music in the recently restored Casino Theater, a jewel box designed by Stanford White in 1897. Having a visually pleasing amalgam of classicism, basket weave and Stick Style, the auditorium supported the projection of a warm and satisfying sound from the ensembles on stage.

The concert consisted of a Malkovich miscellany of sixteen works by ten composers connected by the thematic rubric “Notturno, an Evening of Rare and Unusual Nocturnes.” That some of the works must have looked better on paper than they sounded to our ears is one of the risks inherent in musical dredging from the past. Sometimes there is good reason for neglect.

The nine performers delivered fast-moving samples of the Festival’s charms and limitations. At an important venue one doesn’t expect to hear familiar Chopin nocturnes played rather straightforwardly from the scores, and one is glad that some lesser Liszt went by quickly. But because of the musical chairs format, one did not have to wait long for some real pleasures. Parenthetically, the only chair that stayed put was the one belonging to the overqualified page turner, Elmer Booze. For thirty-eight years, beginning before the reign of Mark Malkovich III, Dr. Booze has held the very important position of the Festival’s research librarian as well as its proofreader. Once senses a bemused Beckmesser at the side of the piano bench.

Casino Theatre rear view (BMInt staff photo)

Of the sixteen works on the program twelve were for solo piano, and there were five pianists. The sentimental audience favorite seemed to be John Bayless, who was returning after a debilitating stroke had forced him to take up the left-hand repertoire. He offered two improvisations — one combining the Brahms Lullaby with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and the other built on Sondheim — A Little Night Music and Send in the Clowns.

The other pianist who impressed as a soloist was the nineteen-year-year old Claire Huangci. She managed better the four other pianists to coax colors from the rather monochromatic, though well tuned and regulated, seven-foot Yamaha. Her performance (from memory) of Chopin’s Nocturne in c-sharp minor op post. was quite free and poetic, as was her Clair du Lune —  perhaps an inevitable piece in a concert of night music.

Four individuals positively shone in the night setting:

Eric Ruske’s noble French horn sensitively negotiated three demanding and virtuosic pieces (by Franz Strauss, Reinhold Glière and Prospre van Eechaute) with nary a clam.

Cellist Sergey Antonov, the winner of the 2007 Tchaikovsky competition, was soulful and emotive in Pablo Casals’ El Can Dels Oscells with pianist Kevin Fitz-Gerald. This was a show- stopper. Antonov also took part in a spirited performance of Ernest Bloch’s Nocturne for Cello and Piano (Tempestuoso) with Nai-Yun Hu, violin and Kevin Fitz-Gerald.

The evening concluded with Nocturne and Tarentella, op. 28 of Karol Szymanowski. Violinist Jennifer Frautschi and pianist Daniel del Pino opened the piece with the appropriate reflective sinuousness and absolutely nailed the tarantella finale, utterly clearing the moist night air with their musical lightning.

James Morris, Roberto De Biasio, Angela Meade and Charles Dutoit (BMInt staff photo)

We felt a bit of cognitive dissonance at seeing more than 200 musicians on stage for a Bellini opera, and though we know that Wagner admired Bellini, what was Wotan, in the person of James Morris, doing there? Well, what they were all doing was providing nothing less than high drama for the 6,000 opening night gala attendees in the Koussevitzky Shed—gala and generous the performances were!

James Levine “proposed” and Charles Dutoit “disposed” the overture and first act of Bellini’s Norma for the entire first half of the concert. The amazing Tanglewood Festival chorus was on hand for something like its 900th BSO engagement. Performing from memory as is their wont, they were hair-raising when in full cry, to the extent that they covered the opening utterances of James Morris. But their introduction of Norma’s “Casta diva” was masterful, and soprano Angela Meade was able to soar above the combined forces of chorus and orchestra with ease. Her singing in fact banished recollections of Joan Sutherland or just about any other diva in the role.

Even more ardent was the Pollione, Sicilian tenor Roberto De Biasio. His was real bel canto singing, but with power and deep dramatic involvement, and he sounded like a young José Carreras. One would like to see De Biasio on stage. The polished contribution of the dramatic mezzo Kristine Jepson as Adalgisa was wrenching.

Rossini’s Overture to William Tell is a chestnut that the BSO has been trumpeting  since its second season in 1883. Jules Eskin made the most of the solo cello introduction, even though the audience was taken a bit by surprise by his quiet eloquence. Perhaps a better signal for the audience from the conductor was needed here. By the time cellist Martha Babcock joined him for their bel canto duet, decorum was restored.  But when the trumpet intoned the familiar da-da-dum  da-da-dum, da-da-dum-dum-dum theme, there were many elbows, titters and guffaws in the audience —though one assumes those were from New Yorkers, not sophisticated Bostonians! Dutoit even permitted himself some knowing smirks.

The trio from Act III of Verdi’s I Lombardi also begins with quiet subtlety — this time from concertmaster Malcolm Lowe. His opening extended solo was brilliant and carried convincingly in the shed. The orchestra played just fine for Dutoit, but Verdi’s “big guitar” accompaniment was provided as a mere courtesy to the excellent trio of vocalists. This time we could hear James Morris as Pagano quite well. We are happy to declare that he can still stand and deliver sonorous and dramatic tones over a wide range. The years have been very kind to his instrument. The other soloists, soprano Angela Mead as Giselda and tenor Roberto De Biasio, as Oronte, in their second appearances of the evening gave something extra — dramatic impersonation of character and engagement with each other.

The evening ended with a rousing yet well detailed performance of Respighi’s Pines of Rome. The acoustics of the shed are known to be remarkable. Pianissimos of soloists carry clearly and bloom wonderfully in the two seconds of reverberation. The chirping of birds and other coloristic effects also made their desired effects, and the piece proceeded with Bolero-esq inevitability. The ending was properly enormous, though one regretted being unable to hear the organ that James David Christie was mightily stoking. Its loss of power is perhaps a casualty of its placement behind the otherwise successful Bolt, Beranek and Newman “cloud” shell from 1959.

BMInt Staff Photo

The evening had begun at 6 pm in Seiji Ozawa Hall with one of Tanglewood’s trademark Prelude Concerts, which the BSO provides gratis before every evening Symphony performance to anyone with a lawn pass or shed ticket. This represents both good PR and good crowd control, inasmuch as it encourages some of the audience to arrive early enough to avoid delays in parking and admission. In last night’s concert there were certainly some real pleasures.

For me, in fact, the highlight of the entire evening’s opening festivities was Schubert’s heavenly Quintet  in C for two violins, viola and two cellos op D.956, dispatched with sovereign command by Alexander Velinzon, violin; Tatiana Dimitriades, violin; Steven Ansell, viola; Jonathan Miller, cello; and Owen Young, cello. While it some ways the piece is a concerto for first violin and string quartet, on another level it requires a tremendous discipline of ensemble to bring off. It has all the best of Schubert, from poignant melancholic musings to lively German dances. And this performance had performers of the highest caliber who were well rehearsed yet who permitted themselves great freedom of expression and who took obvious delight in the proceedings.

The Schubert was preceded by a performance of Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello — his modernist attempt to meet Debussy halfway. Cellist Jonathan Miller and violinist Tatiana Dimitriades tossed it off with comparative ease, though with some tuning issues probably related to humid, summer festival, conditions.

D. Lydia Redding, Katie Schlaikjer, John Largess, Marka Gustavsson and Julie Rosenfeld (BMInt staff photo)

Classical Music presentations may dwindle for Boston residents during the summer, but New England is alive with concerts that BMInt readers may enjoy. Within a three-hour drive of Boston there are 378 listed in our “Upcoming Events” for the period between now and the end of August. The names of the presenters include Apple Hill, Aston Magna Festival, Bay Chamber Concerts, Boston Chamber Music Society, Boston Landmarks Orchestra, Boston Midsummer Opera, Boston Opera Collaborative, Bowdoin Festival, Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, Frederick Collection, Heifetz International Institute Summer Festival, Kneisel Chamber Music Festival , Maverick Concerts, Mohawk Trail Concerts, Monadnock Music, Mt. Desert Festival, Music Mountain,Music at Eden’s Edge, New Hampshire Music Festival, Portland Chamber Music Festival, Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Salt Bay Chamberfest, Tanglewood, Tannery Pond Concerts, VentiCordi, and Yellow Barn Festival.

Last night, June 25, this reviewer attended his first concert at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. The Colorado String Quartet (Julie Rosenfeld and D. Lydia Redding, violins; Marka Gustavsson, viola; and Katie Schlaikjer cello) appeared for their twenty-first season under the aegis of Soundfest, an apprenticeship program the quartet runs in Falmouth each year for about sixty students from age ten to undergraduate. And one could tell from the audience, which included the most rapt collection of kids I have ever seen (even in the Bartok), that one, there is a future for classical music and two, Soundfest works.

The Lillie Auditorium at MBL is a low-ceilinged, fan-shaped lecture hall with a carpeted stage, revealing a blackboard and office doors on its back wall. It is not a place where the sound of a string quartet blooms, yet it projects a clear and powerful enough sound for the music to be enjoyed.

The quartet offered a thematic program based on Hungarian gypsy music consisting of a work each by Haydn, Bartok and Brahms. First violinist, Julie Rosenfeld led the opener, Haydn’s Quartet in G major op. 76 no. 2 (Quinten) with an athleticism that her partners and the audience found infectious. This was not snuff-box playing; the Colorado is a solid ensemble and their reading was energetic, well tuned and taut.

Before the Bartok Quartet #3, second violinist, D. Lydia Redding gave a charming talk about the program’s theme. We were delighted to learn, for instance, that second violinists are usually more fun at parties than firsts. We also learned that the rhythms in the Bartok were going to be toe- tapping, as long as one had legs of dissimilar lengths! Redding sold the piece as a collection of gypsy tunes combined by Bartok in a manner that encouraged the meeting of East and West in a European ‘tween-war era.

There was, in fact, quite a lot of sandal and flip-flop tapping on the Lillie Auditorium stage. Though the piece was perhaps oversold as an accessible compilation of hummable tunes, the actual performance had a rhythmic drive and visceral excitement that made converts of the audience.

The foursome was joined by John Largess, the violist from the Miró Quartet, for the Brahms Quintet in G major, op. 111. Though the opening Allegro was marred by some iffy tuning, the group extensively re-tuned before the following Adagio which was offered with a splendid prayerful intensity — perfectly tuned sections sans vibrato alternating with vibrated passages. If the last two movements did not rise to Olympian heights, it was more because of the deficiencies of room than the skill of the performers. In a Brahms quintet the competing claims of sonority and transparency can only co-exist in a space that enhances the development of the full harmonic spectrum of the instruments. And at the Lillie there was brightness denied, though there was clearly excitement which was rewarded by a standing O.

The remaining concert in this series takes place on Thursday, June 30, 7:30 p.m. at the Falmouth Academy.

BMInt publisher, Lee Eiseman, occasionally opines in this column.

Michael Lutch photo

Like every great artist Marc-André Hamelin is sui generis. His personal muse has led him on a very circuitous career pathway beginning with a great many works that no one else could play as well as a few that no one else wanted to play. Hamelin’s early fame as a cognoscenti’s pianist came from his performances and recordings of the daunting works of the French-Jewish mystic Charles Valentin Alkan. And that recognition included a contract from Hyperion Records to record anything and everything that Hamelin wished to leave to posterity. The resulting discography is simply astonishing as much for what it contains as what it does not contain — any sonatas of Beethoven or Schubert, for instance. That lapse will no doubt be remedied in time as Hamelin, now in the middle of what one hopes will be a very long career, begins to approach the standard repertoire from his very special perspective.

That he has much to add in this vein is evident from performances I have heard. One of the two most poignant and unforgettably performances of the slow movement from the Schubert B-flat Sonata in my considerable experience was one of his encores at Sanders Theatre in 1999. Hamelin’s former teacher, Russell Sherman, confided to this reviewer that he was deeply moved.

Hamelin brought his singular coloristic genius to a varied program at Rockport’s Shalin Liu Center on June 17. The opener, Haydn’s Sonata no. 53 in e minor showcased both the composer’s wit and the performer’s panache. This was very definitely Haydn on a modern piano, but played with a lightness and fortepiano-like range of dynamics.

Stockhausesn’s Klavierstück IX was premiered in 1962 by the famous pianist-composer Frederic  Rzewski. (The latter’s work for solo piano, The People United will never be Defeated, can be heard in a fine performance by Hamelin for Hyperion). That it is based on some arcane mathematical principals did not really interest this listener. Rather, I allowed myself to be absorbed in the chimerical world of colors and subtle shifts of voicings.

It was a testament to Hamelin’s prodigious powers of concentration that he was able to produce gorgeous pianissimos (which only a hall with as quiet a noise floor as Shalin Liu can allow) and dramatic, interpretive moments of silences only to have the spells he created shattered by a veritable small ensemble of buzzing hearing devices (the arrival of the elevator in the balcony during Haydn didn’t help, either).  One wondered, after his lucid and transparent reading of the Haydn sonata, if the high-pitched squeals would be noticeable or as distracting in Stockhausen.  After all, he was on the cusp of venturing into electronic music.  Alas, even here, Stockhausen’s composition left Hamelin exposed to the electronic sounds emanating from the audience.

Please, a plea to RCM audiences and audiences everywhere: if your neighbor is squealing, ask him during the next interval to turn down his hearing device. This is not only a courtesy to the audience but also a courtesy to the performer.  Attentive audiences and performers shouldn’t have to suffer through a concert in anxious anticipation of the next buzz, cough, or squeaking of chairs.

Hamelin was born to play Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. His mastery and originality were striking and his performance, even though it was imagined through a more intellectual prism than one is used to in this work, brought down the house.  The perfectionistic craft of Ravel’s composition complemented Hamelin’s often understated style. Because of the restraint he evinced at the opening of “Ondine,” one could almost imagine connections with the preceding Stockhausen. Thus the program order seemed almost inevitable.  In “Le gibet,” one’s sense of time completely evaporated because of Hamelin’s ability to remain expressive while keeping an endlessly repeating rhythmic figure perfectly in tempo.  In “Scarbo,” he didn’t settle for the empty bravura to which many pianists succumb. Instead, his understanding of texture allowed him to emphasize, in a sea of colors, only the notes and passages that he considered most important.

The regular program concluded with works of the two Liszts: Liszt the Religious and Contemplative—Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude and Liszt the Bombast — Réminiscences de ‘Norma.

Marc-André Hamelin made the most of both.

The encore, Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, was introduced by Hamelin as his first public rendition thereof. He needn’t have waited so long. We heard an astonishing performance which sent us into the night feeling quite rewarded.

Lee Eiseman, the Publisher of BMInt opines on rare occasions.

While the benefits from this very important announcement will be salutary indeed for Providence, reception deficits will remain in some of the area formerly served by classical services from the powerful WGBH 89.7.

This BMInt map shows the prime coverage area of WCRB, Lowell in grey-green and the expanded signal from WJMF, Somerset, RI, in magenta

Bryant University will begin the transition by turning on its new 1200-watt transmitter, greatly enhancing its reach as compared with their current 250-watt signal. An enthusiastic President Ronald K. Machtley says, “I am thrilled that this collaboration returns classical music broadcasts to Rhode Island while providing our students hands-on opportunities to master leading-edge technologies…”

While details of the deal were not fully disclosed, WGBH took pains in its press release to state that the carriage arrangement was costing the WGBH Foundation nothing. WGBH Chief Operating Officer Ben Godley also said “We’re delighted to be working with Bryant University and its students as they move from over-the-air broadcast to new and emerging digital audio services for their listeners” —though what that seems to mean in part is that the Bryant students will no longer have the experience of programming a conventional FM radio station.

The obvious remaining gaps in coverage prompted BMInt to ask Roe about whether WGBH would be having future announcements of additional transmitter sites. He was mum, but the GBH press release did conclude with a tantalizing and encouraging statement: “In the coming months WGBH will be evaluating call letter options as it considers the new reach of the classical service throughout New England.”

In the interview that follows he talks enthusiastically about his vision and good naturedly takes a bit of heat as well. BMInt’s executive editor, Bettina A. Norton and publisher, Lee Eiseman, spoke with Ben Roe over lunch on Thursday, May 19.

BMInt: It has been only four months since you became manager of classical services for WCRB and this is your first interview with BMInt. It’s very refreshing that you believe that is your role to interact with the press. The fact that you are breaking bread with us is testimony to our mutual trust. BMInt doesn’t expect miracles in four months, but we would like to hear your self-appraisal. How are you doing? Tell us how things are changing on your guard.

Ben Roe: Well first of all I would like to say that it hasn’t been four months. I’ve been officially on the watch at WGBH and WCRB for about two and a half months. I have to say that coming back to Boston has been something like Terry Francona managing the Red Sox, a lot of people are convinced that they can do the job better than you and they may be right. But seriously, I’m having a great time and there’s a great deal of joy in my work, and there’s also a great deal of work to do. And I’ve been spending a lot of time learning the ropes, discovering a bit of the recent history. You know, I left town twenty-five years ago, so my hard drive was in serious need of an upgrade in terms of what all the institutional roles and stakeholders have been. But to give you a really short answer, I’ve learned a lot and I think we’re beginning to make some strides on the air and I’m thrilled at the possibilities, and I think the programming changes that we’re making over the next couple of weeks are a good indicator of where I think we are going.

So that means more local content, more live content?

Well, to add to that, more local content, more live content and more of what I call creating value. One of the great assets we have at both WCRB and WGBH are our hours of original recordings. We’re working hard to bring them back to life, trying to find a rational, orderly way to digitize our live performance collection, because that constitutes unique value.

Let’s talk about programming. I grew up in Boston, and there used to be many good programs that had a lot of interest, like Piano Personalities, The Art of Song, and the various different orchestras across the country — they were thematic. And I would hope that you could do this sort of thing with some of the programs.

Let me speak to that. We have this incredible relationship with the Boston Symphony, Next year will be sixty years of broadcasts on a weekly basis — what an incredible — our very first broadcast was of the BSO with Aaron Copland as the live intermission guest. I’m a student of history too, and I think this is incredible. But right now, this and a lot of the programs you described are also tied up in copyright and other performance issues that need to be untangled.

The BSO performances can only be broadcast live. WGBH has no rights to broadcast the recordings.

Exactly, so one of the things I’m actively exploring with the BSO and others is what ways can we work together so that we can bring this great material to our listeners. Wouldn’t you like to hear a Leinsdorf recording from the ‘60s or Charles Munch… But without getting into the weeds, many of the programs you mention, Bettina, have got rights issues associated with them. We’re not going to bring back Singers’ World with Wayne Hayes which was done by WHYY and is long out of print, but we’re starting our own program called Arias and Barcarolles with Cathy Fuller, and that program will be leading into our opera program. Here we have NEC pumping out incredible voices and have this incredible art song tradition here — I just did a lengthy interview with Dawn Upshaw — so we’re looking both for a lead-in to our opera program as well as to have a place to showcase a vocal recital. And we have a lot more in the garage which we hope to roll out soon.

Can you tell us how much of the WCRB programming is now supplied through American Public Media’s C24 feed? (That’s Classical 24, a nationally syndicated classical music service offering classical music programming 24 hours a day, seven days a week.)

Those programs are mostly heard after 8:00 pm, but we’re cutting our weekly C24 hours by 22 hours. I’m adding other programs from American Public Media such as Weekend Performance Today which is going to be for two hours after the BSO or Tanglewood broadcasts and also Pipe Dreams.

These aren’t additional hours of local content, but they must add something you think this market wants.

This gets to the heart of my philosophy. Performance Today is a great show. It take you to the Musik Verein, or Disney Hall, or the private studio of Wu Han and David Finckel. I think that’s important for our audience to hear. I think one of the things we haven’t done is shared what’s happening in the outside world with what’s happening in Boston. Michael Barrone does a fantastic job with Pipe Dreams and I am amazed that it has never been on the air here… If NPR does it well, I’m not opposed to bringing in outside productions. NPR’s World of Opera is the best program out there. I’m proud that we’re going to be carrying it.

Can you tell us about your plans for Tanglewood this summer?

I can’t tell you about that until our press release comes out in a few weeks, but I can say, “Don’t worry, we’ll be there.”

Is there any hope for the resumption of Friday afternoon BSO broadcasts?

I don’t think so, at least not for the foreseeable future.

Is that a marketing or an economic decision?

From my perspective it’s very much an economic decision, but I would add that at this point in the transition of the Symphony, it bears watching. This is a story we intend to be following and actively covering in as many ways as we can, such as topic pages on our website.

But to get back to the point: there will be no BSO Friday afternoon broadcasts next season?

Right.

But why? There are some people who can’t listen on Saturday night and I think the BSO would like it if people could hear the Friday broadcast, and if they liked it, could go to Symphony Hall on Saturday night?

Here’s what I propose… let me give you an analogy: Prairie Home Companion is on live on Saturday night, but their bigger audience is on Sunday afternoons when they re-broadcast. I’d like to play the BSO more than once a week, but I’d like to offer the people who missed it on Saturday night to hear it [the same program] on Sunday afternoon.

Why not broadcast two live performances instead?

Part of this is an economic question. It costs the station a great deal of funds to invest in production, engineering and other resources for one broadcast.

So is the nut just the $20,000 per year in production costs for the twenty-two Friday concerts, which John Voci cited at our BMInt forum in January 2009?

I think it’s significantly more than that. Here’s one of the unfair brushes. You have to remember that WGBH was carrying classical music for six hours per day when it acquired WCRB, and so you suddenly had to have an infrastructure and staff to go from six hours to twenty-four hours a day.

Does that mean that you had to add to staff when you acquired WCRB’s?

Right now I have some plans on the drawing board and I’m looking at how we staff the station. I will say that everything we are doing with our recently announced changes is going to be budget neutral.

So you’re not expecting management to increase your budget.

You know what, Lee, it’s not about increasing my budget. Since I’ve arrived here my job is not to defend or discuss any of the decisions made before my arrival on March 2. My job is to create the best radio station I can, and I think I can make the existing service better with my current budget. Part of this will be proven out by the success we have with audiences and with our on-air fundraisers.

I gather that WCRB has been very happy with the level of listener contributions.

The fund raising has not been bad, but frankly I think we are under-performing with our audience.

Is audience share [as defined by ratings] a metric that you care about? It looked for a while like ratings had been improving for WCRB. In the recent holiday period your share had risen to a 3.

[The April Arbitron numbers for the Boston market came out on May 18, and while WGBH radio can take some comfort, WCRB cannot. Pre-purchase by WGBH, WCRB had a solid 3 % share of the Boston market which had declined to 2 % a year after the takeover. That’s a decline from 129,000 listeners to 90,000. There was an encouraging rebound to 2.9 % in the holiday ratings, but as of April the station is back down to 2 % of a slightly smaller market: 81,000 average daily listeners — a 37% decline.]

But more recently it has dropped back down to 2%; that’s got to be frustrating.

Of course it’s frustrating. Of course I pay attention to our audience ratings.

It seems to me that you have the problem of keeping the old WCRB audience which was a 3 share year after year when it was a classical easy-listening station. So how do you balance the wishes of those people who want classical wallpaper with those who want more esoteric and challenging programming? And do you want to get it back up to 3 % and even higher?

I’ve had this discussion with my staff too, and I think it’s the wrong way to frame the debate. And I believe this very pointedly. How much shelf space are we in the classical music business getting compared to movies, dance, films, theater and everything else? We are all in this together, and what I am frustrated by is this whole thing about whether it’s dumbed-down, too smart, too esoteric. Do you love classical music? Do you care about it at all? Do we have something for you that will give you a satisfying experience? Increasingly people have more choices, so for them to choose me I have to believe that we have enough to satisfy a casual listener as well as somebody who wants a deeper experience.

I want WCRB to be the best classical station in America, bar none. We really want to move the needle about classical music, but it’s not just about whether we have a 2 or 3 share. You know what? We’re going to go around and cover every festival in the New England from now until whenever. And this is not window dressing.

What about the role of the announcer in getting listeners on board for a deeper experience?

The most important thing a classical music announcer is, is a trusted companion. A college president I was recently conversing with told me how he had enjoyed waking up with Laura Carlo for fifteen years. There is a sense of intimacy, reliability, and companionship that the best radio hosts provide. Then there’s a chance for a Cathy Fuller to say, “Walk down this road with me. You’re going to like it.”

Are you going to continue to program according to a schedule where, for instance, drive time has shorter segments, and I will be able to know at what time of day I want to tune in for my kind of music? What times are for wallpaper and what times are for challenges?

I’m going to challenge you every time you say the word wallpaper. I’m not going to buy it. I can tell you that you won’t hear Xenakis at 11:00 in the morning.

How many times a month will I hear a single movement from the Vivaldi Seasons?

How many times have you hear them now? I invite you to calculate.

Okay, let me ask how many works will be in regular rotation at drive time?

That’s not knowable.

What about some more specific questions about programming again. How about movie music?

Let’s talk about movie music for a second. I’m not interested in a movie music program per se. I’d rather ask, for instance, “Are there great movie scores by Tan Dun, or Bright Sheng, or John Williams that should be part of our rotation as well?” Should you hear these on Cathy Fuller’s shift or with Brian McCreath? We just had in our studio a world premiere recording of a piano reduction of the John William’s Oboe Concerto which is set to premiere this weekend. We will be airing our reduced version after the Pops broadcast.

Too bad I can’t hear your station on Beacon Hill. What are you doing to increase the signal strength in Boston and points south? Do you hope to buy any additional stations?

We will continue actively to pursue opportunities for increasing our broadcast strength. Certainly I’m not, nor do I know anyone at WGBH who is satisfied with our signal strength.

We all understand that because of FCC rules you can’t just turn up the power. You have to buy other stations to enhance coverage.

Right, nothing further can be gained from 99.5.

Isn’t it important to have a station that is reachable by people where your high-income market is?

Of course it is! We have a translator in Beacon Hill on 96.3. Tune it in, you can listen to it all the way to Logan Airport! I can also tell you that one of the problems we have even in maximizing the coverage of 99.5 is interference from a pirate station at 99.7 in Mattapan [note: Datz Hits Radio operates quite flagrantly broadcasting locally themed gospel, hip-hop, and Caribbean music from 99.7. Their website is here]. The way the interference works is not just that you can’t hear us in Mattapan, but in other areas like Cambridge and Brookline our signal is degraded. The coverage that 99.5 should have legally is not maximized.

If Datz Hits Radio were eliminated could I then receive 99.5 in my car within Rt. 128?

Oh, yeah, …I get it in my car pretty well now.

Where does the FCC stand on this?

The FCC, like a lot of Federal agencies, is over-taxed and under-resourced. But this is something we are pursuing very aggressively with our attorneys. But I should also add that there are other ways to receive WCRB. For instance our HD-2 is one of the most listened-to signals in the entire country.

But that signal doesn’t even come close to a .1 share- it’s still vanishingly small compared to a regular broadcast signal.

That’s true, but we also see enormous potential for growth in our internet stream. I suspect that it already exceeds WHRB. Also, we find it very interesting that most of our online listeners are outside the footprint of our transmitter.

The problem with the internet is, for example, how can one listen when working in the garden?

[Whipping out his smart phone, Ben Roe demonstrates as he responds] So the idea is, it’s that simple. We have a WGBH app and when you go to the WGBH app, the top button is classical music and you can choose all the different streams that we have.

We know, and Richard Buell can remind us, that there is a tremendous universe of internet streaming of classical music, but there is a rather large monthly cost associated with listening to this from a cell phone, web book, or tablet. Eventually, when data plans become cheap enough, I believe streaming will become the preferred way to receive classical music, and 50,000 watt transmitters will become obsolete.

That is also correct, which is one reason why we’re devoting more time into having… We’re going to have, for instance, a Boston Early Music Channel. We’re going to be the first folks in the country to have a dedicated one.

Have you got Joel Cohen on board?

I’ve talked with Joel about this. And Tom Kelly is going to be doing things for us …

Yes, early music is big in Boston. But so is contemporary music. Can you do the same thing for it?

That’s one of the things on the drawing board. I look at what WQXR is doing with Q-2. Very impressive service. It makes me want to do something similar here. I think there is as much energy around contemporary music here as there is in New York.

Why do you think Concierto, a classical music program presented in Spanish and English, is important?

This show was an idea of mine. I feel very firmly about it. When I surveyed this country and learned that there are 46,000,000 people of Latino extraction, and then I see that there are 838 Spanish language radio stations and not a single one plays classical music. The population of greater Boston is now 15% Hispanic. And are we saying, as I have heard some listeners say, that there is no need to play classical music in Spanish for those people?

But how are you going to get that audience?

This is for me a tremendous opportunity. Look at what someone like Alondra de la Parra, Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, have done. The time has come for looking South of the Border. When I was talking with people at NEC recently, they told me about their Latin American Orchestra, something I hadn’t known about. This isn’t just about creating a gateway into classical music for those people who might be working on construction sites, it is about promoting and servicing an entire culture and showing that you are being truly representative of your community. I discovered when I worked in Charlotte was that this opened bridges for an entire middle class of educated people of Hispanic origin who never had anybody make the effort to talk to them before. Will this be an instant ratings success? I don’t think so. But I promise you the programming mix you will find on Concierto will be very interesting. You’ll hear more Ernesto Lecuona and perhaps Ernesto Nazareth or Montoya or perhaps Barrios [Mangoré] and that’s a different narrative, but that’s not to say that the programming is exclusively Hispanic. You’ll also hear Nigel Kennedy, and the programming will feature de la Parra or de Burgos. We did this whole series, “Mexico at 200” last year with music from the conquistadors to Chavez and Mexican musicians of their golden age.

Are you getting enough funding from management to get the talent to do all the things you want to do?

I’m going to make a gentle suggestion with you to share with your readers: I think we’re doing a lot of amazing, great stuff on the air right now. I expect that a lot of your readers are not actually listening to the station. I’ll give you another example: We’ve been doing this great series on the last four Saturdays on the Sendai Philharmonic with James David Jacobs. We’re the only station in the country to have these recordings from this topical area of Japan. Our getting these was enterprise work on the part of my staff, so then we get calls from all these national producers asking about it. This is back to my topic of creating value.

You’re doing more with as much … you need better PR.

You’re right. Well, give me a chance. I’m only now beginning to put my stamp on the programming into what you hear and what we do. It’s like when you appoint a new music director of an orchestra — you have to live with the programming of his predecessor for a while. But I’m also really excited by our upcoming coverage of the Boston Early Music Festival. Some of it, like our recorded coverage of Niobe dovetails very well with NPR World of Opera, that, or Madame White Snake which won the Pulitzer prize, we now have a vehicle…

I have only one programming suggestion: It’s your spots. You don’t need to tell the people who are already listening how great classical music is over and over again. We already know that or we wouldn’t be tuned in. Those geeky spots about “Why I love classical music” were really annoying.

Actually one of the problems we have is that we don’t spend much time talking about what we do. We spend more times talking about what our television station is doing. But if you had been listening lately, you would not have heard any of the spots you refer to.

And I intend to have more spots for some of the things we are doing like our Kids show. And then we got no credit for doing (as participants in a network including WQXR and American Public Media) four live concerts from Carnegie Hall. I’m a firm believer that if you play the game you have to suit up.

Has this interview been comfortable for you?

Quite seriously, if there has been any take away, I welcome the discussion and the debate.  One of the reasons I’m in Boston is it matters so much to people.

My last question for you then is, “Do you think the Intelligencer has been a positive force in this discussion?”

I have been a journalist. You know, my mom is a journalist, my grandparents were journalists. They taught me something very important: The editor always has the last word. There’s one thing about getting into a battle with any publication. they’re always going to have the last word.

That’s not entirely fair. BMInt gave WGBH’s communication honcho, Jeanne Hopkins the last word in our last article on the union negotiations. …

That’s terrific.

Do you think we have an agenda that’s gets in the way of our reporting?

Absolutely no….

Is there there’s something about reporting of the WGBH/WCRB story in general that really aggravates you or your colleagues?

If some philanthropic angel had swooped in at the last minute and donated $14 million and saved a full time classical music service on the air, they would be hailed, they would be front page news. I think that’s been totally lost in the WGBH-WBUR news battle is that WGBH reached into its own pocket and spent $14 million.

I have to say that to a certain extent WGBH was exercising self interest, because if you had simply dropped classical music like WBUR did twenty years ago, and left Boston with nothing, I think there would have been a massive exodus of listeners and contributors from WGBH. I think that would have been a PR nightmare.

Quite possibly, but in a terrible economic situation it was a huge sacrifice.

But the irony is, if I can believe my sources, WCRB is producing more listener contributions than WGBH radio, and it was expected to be the other way around. WCRB is not the weak link.

Oh, no, it’s not the weak link, but at the same time, as I said on the record, my job is to see that we perform better. I think we are under-performing.

So you would like to be back to a 3 market share if that’s an appropriate metric.

Sure it is an acceptable metric. But I don’t think you have to get there by playing wallpaper either.

But you can get there by increasing signal coverage and employing more announcers that people are loyal to, so that they automatically tune into week after week.

And to your earlier remark, I think we need better marketing and PR. Let me give you an anecdote: I was at a fundraising gala seated at a table with two long-time WGBH and WCRB listeners. One gives to From the Top and Back Bay Chorale among other things. And he asks, “How does your fundraising thing work?” Well, guess what? he was a WCRB listener and the “listener supporter” part he’s not heard. Another guy said, “I’m an old friend of Jon Abbot [WGBH President and CEO]. I wish you’d play more music during the day.” And I said, well, we’re actually now doing 24 hours of music. Brand new information. We may be in a bubble talking about these things, but how I get from a two to a three share? I think there’s a real need for us to re-introduce ourselves.

F. Lee Eiseman, the publisher of BMInt, interviewed Zander on April 17.

BMInt: Ben, BMInt has a mission to get people thinking and writing about classical music in a constructive forum in the post-newspaper era. You seem to be on a mission as well. One that’s possibly harder to summarize, but please try.

BMInt staff photo

BZ: Well, my mission is based on a very clear notion that all human beings love classical music, but most of them haven’t found out about it. I don’t make any distinction between the people who’ve been brought up listening to classical music and who know about it and studied it and taken courses, et cetera, and those who come “off the street” as it were. My mission is to make sure that I create an environment for them as well as for others where they can come in, feel safe, don’t feel threatened, don’t feel ill at ease, where they’re helped to understand the music. Where programs make some sense, so the program is journey, it’s not just random pieces of music. Where I use my desire to communicate actually in the concert, either before it or during the concert in the Discovery Series, to keep them up-to-date with what’s happening.

I use the best analogy I can think of; when I came here I had no idea what American football was about. It was complete nonsense for me, I had no idea. Somebody took me aside and explained. ‘This is what’s happening, these are the rules’. I now love to watch American football. Without that information I was swimming, so, like BMInt, I believe that the word is the best access. The spoken or written word is a way of getting people inside something they otherwise would not know about. Most of the people in your organization are insiders, but my hope is that through more explanations at concerts that more people from the outside who don’t know about it will be drawn to the conversation and say “Oh, that’s what all these classical music people are getting excited about!”

BMInt: So you realize that by developing somewhat of a cult of personality and talking to your audience and making them feel, you are, if not an oracle, then at least some sort of a guide.

BZ: There’s nothing grander than that. It turns out that not only the relatively untutored people who’ve never studied music or don’t know anything about it come to concerts, but also the real music lovers come. We had over 500 people come an hour before the concert for the talk at the last concert in Jordan Hall. That’s a staggering number of people who are taking the trouble to come an hour and one half early. This is not some professor giving background information, this is me telling from my heart what this music is about, so that they have something to think about all the way through the piece. Of course, what it does, it changes the appearance of playing the music, because then the players know that the audience is listening for those things because they were at the pre-concert talk on the Thursday night.  For the Discovery Series [ed: this time on Monday night, May 2], every time I make a comment about the music they can hear it because I have the orchestra on stage to demonstrate.

BMInt: Do you feel like Leopold Stokowsky with Mickey Mouse in Fantasia?

BZ: Fantasia is more of imaginative connections. It’s not explained, and they’re random …

BMInt: I meant in the sense that Stokowsky really is addressing the audience in a way that conductors don’t, in most of their concerts.

BZ: It’s more in the tradition of Bernstein. He felt exactly the same way I do. Music is for everybody. Mahler didn’t write a symphony for a few Mahler lovers, he wrote it for everybody. It’s about everybody and for everybody, and that’s so true of all this music. Take the example of this concert:  Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet Everybody knows the story of Romeo and Juliet and it’s amazing how few stories there are that are in the culture. Everybody knows the story, every child. This audience is going to be packed with kids because all the kids in the neighborhood are reading Romeo and Juliet. The interesting thing about Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet is that it’s a ballet, therefore it’s very long. It’s a huge ballet and it’s very rarely played. We’re not doing the entire piece, because it is three hours. Usually in the theatre it’s the ballet — there are lots of dances and extra things, and then there are the three suites. Two of them are the main ones that are done all the time.

The trouble with the suites is that although they are full of gorgeous music, but they don’t make any sense. There’s not a story; it’s just a lump of music. So I’ve taken all the elements of the three suites that tell the story from the beginning to the end. All the way through until Juliet’s death, it’s all there. With this concert form, it’s the only way that you can hear one of the three or four greatest works of the twentieth century. I’ve done it before and it’s immensely effective. By the end, it’s devastating because it ends in C Major, the most tender C Major imaginable. I usually say it’s the saddest C Major in music history, that moment, because you’ve been through this incredible drama.

The beauty is that I will have told the kids in the hall all the things to listen for, so that when they get to the end, they will have gone through the experience – Juliet was 13 and Romeo was around 17 –the age of many of the kids in the audience, and so their access to music, for me, is so thrilling. It’s got everything that you could possibly want — sex, love, death, fighting, the works. That’s why it’s the most romantic story. It’s caught the imagination of everybody. A lot of people have set the story, but the Prokofiev is far and away the greatest. The beauty of hearing it in the concert hall rather than the ballet is that most ballets are about movement, about dancing, and this is about music. Prokoviev wrote the music first and the dance was added later: The ballet is actually incidental. There are lots of different versions. There’s no set version of Romeo and Juliet, unlike the great Russian ballets by Tchaikovsky where the music is there for the dancing. You need to hear the music on the stage, for instance, to know that when the saxophone comes in for the first time, it’s an intruder. Romeo is an intruder into that Capulet dance. If they don’t know that than how are they going to know? But if I tell them that, they’re going to say “Oh, there’s Romeo coming into the Capulet dance!”

BMInt: There are many composers whose works you’ve never programmed. Can you tell us why you connect with only certain pieces or certain composers?

BZ: Well everybody only connects with certain composers. If they don’t, they’re not really connecting. You can only connect with the things you feel passionate about. I feel passionate about the entire German tradition and the entire Russian tradition.

BMInt: Going back to Bach?

BZ: Absolutely. I teach Bach every week. It’s one of my main obsessions, but you don’t do Bach with the Boston Philharmonic.  The orchestra is huge, so you play music that is written for huge orchestras.

BMInt: So it’s not a matter of your personal taste, it’s just what is appropriate to those forces.

BZ: I have three orchestras that I conduct regularly in town. They’re all huge and they all want to play as much as possible. The Conservatory, the Youth Symphony Orchestra, and the Philharmonic… Incidentally, for a long time I didn’t program French music because it’s so refined and so demanding of an orchestra. But now we’re over that. We did [Debussy’s] La mer this last year and it was an exquisite performance.

BMInt: Was that because you felt that the orchestra needed to get to a certain level first?

BZ: Exactly. It’s really a world-class orchestra, it’s become an extraordinary instrument, so now there really isn’t any limitation.

BMInt: Do you take the role of humor in music seriously?

BZ: It seems to me there is a lot of humor in music. In the Prokofiev it’s mostly sardonic humor. It’s sarcastic or ironic. The belly laugh is rare. Haydn is the master of the belly laugh and he does it because of expectation. He understands exactly what our expectations are.

BMInt: Does every piece you play have to be an existential journey?

BZ: No. I love pieces that are light. I love all music. I just did An American in Paris at the beginning of the year with La mer. We started with An American in Paris and then we did the Ravel Piano Concerto, and then we did the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms, and then we did La mer. The stories that were going around about these composers, arriving in Paris, and connecting with each other, Gershwin asking Ravel for lessons, Stravinsky and Ravel knowing each other. … I love that stuff.

BMInt: That’s not a concert that you would have done twenty years ago.

BZ: Certainly La mer is an extraordinarily demanding piece of music, and you know, this is a town with the greatest French orchestra of the world. The tradition of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, it’s the greatest French symphony in the world.  For a long time I said that’s not repertoire we should be handling because we don’t have that kind of finesse. Now, you listen to La mer, and it’s just flawless and thrilling. Now we can go anywhere. There are two very great traditions in our music, in our concert halls. One is the German/Austrian tradition, in which I am steeped, right from the beginning to the end, from Bruckner and Mahler and Strauss, and the other one is the Russian tradition. I’m equally happy and at home there.

A very interesting thing I was thinking about today was, what is so special about this concert? Because that’s what we’re talking about here. In the German tradition, it’s the composers who dominate throughout. There are very few individual performers who are crucial to the development of that tradition. In Russia, it’s very different because we have been taught this music by a great line of Russian golden age performers: Richter, Rostropovich, Heifetz, Oistrakh. We heard this music through their ears. Natalia Gutman is the last of that golden era. There are many people out there who play this music, but when you hear her play Shostakovich, for instance – she knew Shostakovich, she studied with Richter and Rostropovich — she’s deeply immersed in that world. When she draws her bow across the string, the only world she knew was the world in which Prokofiev wrote. That was the world she was born into. She didn’t know anything else, she’d never been anywhere else. So for us as performers, we hear the music. When we did the Sinfonia Concertante last year with the Prokofiev, it was incredible, and I’ve heard many people do it. But that authentic Russian voice is something that you can’t find in many places now.

BMInt: Is she challenging to follow as an accompanist?

BZ: She is. She is challenging to follow. I love following her. I’ll go anywhere with Natalia Gutman because it’s so imaginative. But it’s unpredictable.

BMInt: Is she as mercurial as Russell Sherman?

BZ: No. She is solid as a rock. It’s like being in communion with the steppes of Russia. All the string players just look at her and say, “How does she do that?” She just draws this rich sound. There are a lot of other people who play that music extraordinarily well, but with Natalia you just say, “So that’s how the piece goes.” That’s why I keep having her back. This is the fourth time we’ve had her. When she plays Shostakovich, the second concerto … Nobody’s heard the second concerto. Everybody knows the first concerto; it’s a great piece from beginning to end. But the second concerto is right at the end of his life. That esoteric style of the fifteenth symphony and the fifteenth quartet and the viola sonata, the last thing he wrote, it’s weird, it’s so sparse, so spare, and so without middle, often just two voices. It’s kind of depressing in a funny way, but it’s an important work, and people don’t know it. I want people to hear it.

The beauty is to juxtapose it with the most lavishly rich peopled world of the Romeo and Juliet which is full of dances, and full of people and full of color, character and vitality, and then this sparse piece. Those are two sides of the Russian soul. They are two essential parts. That’s what I feel my job is, to bring these stories forward so that people can broaden their experience. It’s not just about hearing somebody play the cello. It’s about absorbing a culture, about understanding more about life by hearing how they saw the world. The best people to do it are those people who lived it.

The twenty players mustered all of the gestural urgency and inflective unanimity of a great chamber ensemble, while providing the power and compelling grandeur of a string orchestra as well as some rapt and astonishing pianissimos. This was the ideal way to hear Verklärte Nacht: the give and take of a fine string quartet, but writ large.

The evening opened with a quietly rapturous and ruminative account of Dvorák’s Nocturne in B major for String Orchestra, op. 40. The Far Cry players offered a wonderfully digestible portion of almost Wagnerian expression that surged and swelled with a well observed crescendo and left one with a pleasing feeling of satiety for the premiere that followed, In Digestion by Shiori Usui.

Crier violist Jason Fisher charmingly introduced the new piece, which he was at pains to make sure the audience understood had a two-word title, not “indigestion.” Usei’s rumination on digestion derived from sounds she heard in her own alimentary processes, including teeth grinding, stomach gurgling, growling and less specific noises. That she added to the expressive vocabulary of string writing is certain, though at times her motives were more redolent of Bernard Hermann’s slashing shower scene from Psycho or John Williams’s shark attack from Jaws. The players dispatched In Digestion lightly and amusingly so that none of the products of digestion other than replenishment of energy were in evidence. The composer told us afterwards that one of her next scores would develop from a spectral analysis of her own snoring.

The other large piece on the program was a recent arrangement of Schumann’s Cello Concerto for violin and string orchestra. The hot-shot English violinist, Anthony Marwood, who was reviewed here in his BSO debut last week, commissioned the arrangement from composer Orlando Jopling. Once one got past the exchange of the cello’s soulful anthropomorphisms for the violin’s speed and accuracy, one missed nothing of Schumann’s blocky orchestration. The sections were in divisi mode so often that all of the complexity of the score was well rendered by what sounded like an ensemble of sixteen soloists. It was only in this piece, though, that one felt the occasional want of a conductor to reign in the group, when ppp was called for. One felt that Marwood whose virtuosity is undoubted, would have had greater opportunity to smell the roses if more rubati and pianissimi had been dared.

It is always a treat to hear A Far Cry in Jordan Hall. Their next area concert will be in Rockport’s Shalin Liu center on June 12.

The publisher of the Boston Musical Intelligencer on rare occasions opines in this column.

The March 4 concert at Longy’s Pickman Hall presented 2009 Pro Musicis International Award winner, violinist Erin Keefe, with her impressive partner, pianist Anna Polonsky, in a recital of familiar works spanning 150 years. From the opening notes of Schubert’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major, op. 162 (D. 574), it was clear that Keefe was going to give us ardent playing in the grand manner with big, luscious, shapely, phrases and impeccable tone, intonation and projection. From Polonsky, we were hearing a somewhat different sound world in the allegro moderato first movement; not the most interesting in the Schubert canon, it sounded a bit austere and deferential from the very attentive pianist.

But by the scherzo second movement the roles were somewhat reversed, with the piano having the more interesting part. Polonsky remained an attentive partner while at the same time seeming to take a more dramatic approach. Yet, even with the lid open, she never overweighed the violin.

This reviewer really enjoyed watching the pianist’s face in the intensely lyrical andantino third movement. She showed great alertness to the mercurial changes of harmony and mood — telegraphing her emotions to the audience as if by semaphore. She should not play poker with such an expressive visage. Keefe, by contrast, was a bit score-bound.

The allegro vivace fourth movement evinced a wonderful sense of interplay among artists and composer. The repeats of the thematic material from the scherzo where wonderfully differentiated and there was no holding back from either player in their display of power or poignancy. By the end, one felt that there was a fine partnership.

In the Janacek Sonata Keefe’s tonal approach did not differ dramatically from her affect in the Schubert: big boned, lyrical, and ardent. By contrast, Polonsky employed a much broader palette than she had in the Schubert. Using virtuosic pedal technique with varied depth of damper pedal and subtle shifts of the una corda, she evoked a wide world of color. The duo conveyed Janacek’s contrasts between almost savage outburst and romantic longing with most effective partnership and unanimity.

In Bach’s Violin Sonata no. 4, Polonsky discovered yet another new world of sound while Keefe stuck with her romantic “grand manner” approach. Consequently, in this piece their styles did not always jell, even though the ensemble was quite perfect. Polonsky found a semi-legato tone quality and used step dynamics, reminding one of Wanda Landowska on a massive Pleyel harpsichord. Keefe’s most impressive movement was the operatic adagio, where her dramatic tone soared over Polonsky’s almost Piranesi-like counterpoint. One did get a bit tired of Keefe’s mannerism, starting almost every extended note with a straight tone before morphing into a throbbing vibrato. This reminded one of pop singers. The Bach concluded with an allegro that absolutely danced, although at times a bit too fast for clarity in the reverberant space.

For the last two pieces of the evening, a very different Erin Keefe emerged. She dispensed with her scores and frequently turned to engage her audience. She gave a singing account of the Beethoven Romance no. 2 for violin and piano with beautiful tone and spot-on production. But she reached her performing heights in the last piece — a sort of programmed encore — Sarasate’s famous Zigeunerweisen. Supported by Polonsky’s four-square “oom-pa-pa” accompaniments, Keefe became a matinee idol and an aristocrat. In this one piece she displayed more variety of tone and technical effects than she had in the rest of the evening. A screaming audience acknowledged her spectacular star turn.

Lee Eiseman is the publisher of the Intelligencer. He occasionally opines in the left column.

WGBH management has imposed certain of the terms of its final and best offer which the AEEF-CWA Local 1300 union had rejected. That offer may be read here.

Update as of March 14

Regarding recent developments in the six-month-old labor dispute, Jordan Weinstein, president of AEEF-CWA Local 1300 sent a press release which BMInt excerpts: “ … [on March 13] members of AEEF-CWA Local 1300 voted overwhelmingly to reject WGBH’s final offer for a new collective bargaining agreement (97% of all eligible voters in AEEF’s membership participated in the ratification vote. Of all eligible votes cast, 93% rejected management’s final offer.

“Today our members sent a clear signal to WGBH that this final offer is absolutely unacceptable,” said Weinstein. “The next steps will be to notify the federal mediator of our vote results, and to ask WGBH management to abandon implementing the terms of their final offer.  Our goal now is to return to the bargaining table and continue negotiating fair working conditions as part of a mutually acceptable contract.”

Jeanne Hopkins, vice president for communications and government relations for WGBH, responded, “It’s unfortunate that the union has voted not to accept WGBH’s offer, which maintains wage increases, offers employees flexibility to grow, and [gives] generous benefits at a difficult economic time. What is clear is that this is far from an overwhelming decision, as close to half of the union members did not vote against the WGBH proposal — 188 out of nearly 300 union members.”

Asked for an explanation for their differing interpretations of the voting numbers, Hopkins noted, “There are close to 300 members of this union, but they have said only 203 voted. So while 188 of the 203 votes cast gives them that percent, it leaves out the fact that there remains close to 100 union members who were not eligible or did not vote.”

From Weinstein comes this follow-up: “There are 280 members of the union of whom 210 are in good standing, that is, current in their dues payment. Seventy members were unqualified to vote because they were in arrears. The main reason that one-third of the union members were not current was that WGBH stopped collecting dues as a payroll deduction.”

Jeanne Hopkins adds in rebuttal or clarification, “Union members were not prevented from paying their dues and had opportunity to do so, if they chose to.”

BMInt will continue to follow this story —whether negotiations will resume or WGBH will impose its final offer.

The six-month-old labor dispute between the WGBH Foundation and the 280 workers of AEEF/CWA Local 1300 (the station’s largest union representing the production and service group staff ) is coming to a climax. On February 25, the Foundation’s negotiating team presented its “last, best and final proposal” for a new collective bargaining agreement. Management negotiators then departed from the table and gave the union until March 15 to accept or reject the contract. If the union rejects the contract management has said it will declare an impasse and unilaterally impose the terms of their final offer.

The concessions which management is requesting are draconian according to union spokesmen. BMInt believes that our most productive role in this unhappy story is the publication of four important documents which will allow our readers to make their own unfiltered evaluations of the opposing cases’ merits. The final offer from management with considerable detail on salaries and policy is here; the cover letter from management to the members of the union is here.  The  union’s official response is here, and a fact sheet summarizing the union’s interpretation of the issues is here.

WGBH spokesman, Jeanne Hopkins would not return BMInt’s call. But we certainly understand that the WGBH Foundation does not have unlimited coffers and that it must balance its desires to compensate its employees against the limitations of its fiscal realities. From our reading, though, the issue of compensation is far from the most contested.

While BMInt is not offering an opinion of the merits of the opposing briefs, we were particularly struck by some of the language in the WGBH letter to the union members.  The final offer document seems to require considerable sacrifices from the members of the union, including the forfeiture of the right to express grievances publicly. Furthermore, according to union spokesman, Jordan Weinstein, management is asking for the right to outsource any of the union’s work and to be permitted to terminate any on-air or production employee without cause.

That management asks the union members to accept this contract as an, “… an investment…” sounds truly Orwellian, unless management is accurate in its implication that without the implementation all of their requested concessions, no jobs would exist at WGBH because the entire enterprise could collapse—especially if this dispute is viewed through the prism of  recent history which has lead to the bankruptcy of  General Motors  and the cancellation of the Detroit Symphony season.