Are the two outlets’ respective webcasts “duplicative services” similar to ones that audiences bemoaned after WGBH went all-talk at the end of 2009 and began to offer many of the same programs as WBUR? (See BMInt article here.) From the BSO press release, one might conclude that their announced one-year streaming protocol is a significant contrast with Classical New England’s single week offering for each event, yet CNE will also be moving to year-long availability for the streams, since both institutions are working under new rights agreements with the performers. The BSO has also disclosed its intention to stream at a fairly high bit-rate, 128 kbps, for a sound quality probably superior to current live FM broadcasts; this is something CNE already does.

“It’s incredibly thrilling to be able to share the concerts we present on a weekly basis to music lovers  from across the country and around the globe through the BSO’s new concert streaming offering at bso.org,” said BSO Managing Director Mark Volpe.  “We hope that the 7 million individuals who visit bso.org each year will enjoy this opportunity to listen to these free BSO and Pops concert streams, thanks to our partnership with WGBH.”

The BSO’s Director of Public Relations Bernadette Horgan had this to add, “We value our 60-year relationship with WGBH and continue to work closely with them in every way to help bring the music of the BSO and Pops to ever greater numbers of music lovers.”

We put some questions to Ben Roe, Director of Classical Services for CNE, as to the reasons for the duplicative offerings and where the collaboration might lead.

There will be no difference in content or availability; what visitors to the BSO Media Center will hear is exactly the same as what will be available on-demand on Classical New England.  Both are taken from the re-broadcast of the Saturday night concerts that we now air on Sunday afternoons from 1 –3…which is also the same content that is heard on our growing network of stations around New England (including WFCR in Amherst, WAMC in Albany, Vermont Public Radio, and the Maine Public Broadcasting Network).

I think it’s a terrific move for both the BSO and for WGBH.  Visitors to www.bso.org will now be able to access fresh content of the BSO doing what it does best – performing live in concert at Symphony Hall.  And for WGBH, we will effectively be able to broaden the reach of our BSO concert productions to an audience that may well be unfamiliar with our station, its services, and its broadcast schedule.

I agree wholeheartedly with Mark Volpe’s assessment that this move to one-year on-demand access of BSO concerts sets an industry standard; it’s my goal that we may increase the technical quality of the online broadcasts that they similarly mark a new standard in the orchestral world.

Even after reading the comments of Messers Volpe and Roe, one is left wondering about the longer-terms plans of the two institutions. How central are the BSO broadcasts and streams to Classical New England? Will the BSO want to take charge of producing and distributing its own performances? Methinks there will be more on these topics in the next few months. Yet the stakes are also rather low, since neither institution will be seeing any significant revenue from streaming of BSO concerts.

The BSO is justifiably quite proud of its broadcasting history. BMInt is pleased to publish a section from yesterday’s BSO announcement:

BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA BROADCASTS

The BSO’s first live concert broadcast took place on January 23, 1926, initiating a series of Boston Symphony broadcasts, privately-funded by Winfield S. Quinby, a “well-known Boston coffee merchant,” that continued through the 1927-28 season. Winfield also sponsored nine Saturday-night Boston Pops concerts in the spring of 1926, marking the first Boston Pops broadcasts. From late 1932 until 1938, BSO concerts were carried—though not always on a regular basis—by NBC. Following the Tanglewood Music Shed inaugural broadcast on August 4, 1938, the BSO, as a non-union orchestra, was barred from the air by the American Federation of Musicians. Broadcasts were resumed soon after the ratification of a union contract in December 1942, and national broadcasts of the Boston Pops began in the spring of 1943. The BSO broadcasts continued, first on NBC, then on ABC, through the 1947-48 season. No BSO concerts were broadcast from Symphony Hall during the 1948-49 season, though portions of BSO rehearsals were aired for three seasons starting in the fall of 1948 as part of the half-hour NBC series “The Boston Symphony Orchestra in Rehearsal,” bringing the first stage in the orchestra’s broadcasting history to a close.

On October 6, 1951, WGBH signed on the air for the first time with a live Boston Symphony broadcast, making it the longest continuous relationship between a broadcaster and symphony orchestra in the nation. From the mid- to late 1950s, NBC also carried portions of the BSO concerts, either live or on a tape-delayed basis. In the late 1950s, the Boston-area station WCRB began to carry the orchestra’s Saturday-night concerts, as did a number of other stations, including New York’s WQXR and the QXR network along the eastern seaboard. In October 1957, the Boston Symphony Transcription Trust—ultimately to become a joint venture of WGBH and WCRB—was created to produce BSO broadcast tapes for syndication throughout the country. Though syndication was discontinued for lack of funds in the early ’90s, tapes are still made for the orchestra’s archive, and live concerts from Symphony Hall and from Tanglewood, the orchestra’s summer home in western Massachusetts, continue to be aired on WGBH’s Classical New England.

BMInt: How did it come about that Bernard Haitink invited you to play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat, K. 482 with the BSO?

Till Fellner on "une barque sur l'océan" (BMInt staff photo)

Fellner: In September 2010 Maestro Haitink and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra asked me to play a series of concerts in Amsterdam and Brussels as a replacement for Maurizio Pollini, who had to cancel because of illness. I played Beethoven’s C-minor Concerto. After this unexpected and felicitous first collaboration, Maestro Haitink asked that I be his soloist in a Mozart concerto with the Boston Symphony.  I knew I was going to be on sabbatical for the calendar year 2012, so at first I hesitated. But the honor was so great and the chance to collaborate with him once more so compelling, that I decided to make an exception.  I suggested a couple of concertos and the BSO chose K. 482.

What is special about this concerto?

Let me point out three things:

It’s the first Mozart concerto that uses the clarinet, his favorite wind instrument. In general, the woodwinds have a prominent role in this piece. The orchestration is very colorful.

The main character of the second movement is not calm and contemplative, but rather excited, a concealed passion. The form is unusual too; it’s a combination of variations and rondo form. The episodes are ruled by the woodwinds, the piano pauses. The wonderful coda combines elements of the whole movement.

In the middle of the finale we find an “Andantino cantabile” section in A-flat major. Mozart had used a similar formal device in his “Jenamy” Concerto, K. 271. But the character of these two episodes is different: gracious rapture in K. 271, restrained yearning in K. 482. The latter reminds us of the “Larghetto” in the finale of the second act of Così fan tutte, where the lovers try to drown their sorrows, to forget what happened to them. But they will never forget.

Obviously you don’t think of Mozart as a delicate porcelain doll?

Mozart, to quote my teacher Alfred Brendel, is neither made of porcelain, nor of marble, nor of sugar.

So what was he actually made of?

Well, to stay with our image, I would say: A rare material of boundless qualities and possibilities.

Will you improvise your own cadenzas as BMInt’s editor, Robert Levin often does?

No, I will play cadenzas by Paul Badura-Skoda in the first movement and Johann Nepomuk Hummel in the third movement. Mozart himself was of course able to improvise a cadenza and so are a few modern pianists like Robert Levin. I am not. Fortunately, Mozart wrote down several of his cadenzas which can serve as a model. We know for example, that in his cadenzas he never leaves the main key of the movement and that he stays within the character of the piece. Having said this, one must admit that Hummels’s cadenza is not completely in style – but I still like it for its virtuosity.

What are the plans for your sabbatical?

I’m working on the second book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier again and also on some new repertoire: Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze and Symphonische Etüden, some Mozart and Haydn sonatas, and the Ravel Concerto in G.

Overall I am spending a little less time at the instrument this year because I have a lot of other things to do: take lessons in composition, read, watch films, particularly those of Luis Buñuel. I also hope to write a few essays.

Is there anything you just do for fun?

(Laughing) This might not be your idea of fun, but it’s certainly a lot of fun for me.

What are you reading?

At the moment I’m reading a lot of Robert Musil. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities) is one of my favorite books because of its irony, precision both in thinking and feeling and its attempts to describe mystical experiences without becoming irrational. I want to explore his other works.

I’ve also been immersed in William E. Caplin’s Classical Form, a book building on ideas first introduced by Schoenberg and later developed by Erwin Ratz in Einführung in die musikalische Formenlehre (Introduction to the Study of Musical Forms). By the way, he uses the first movement of K. 482 as an example to demonstrate classical “Concerto form.”

How did you celebrate your 40^th birthday?

Rather quietly. I didn’t consider it an important achievement.

This sounds like false modesty. So what milestones are really important to you? 

Finishing the complete cycle of the Beethoven sonatas was, for example, a much more significant chapter ending.

Then what will be the next chapter or book in your life?

After my sabbatical, the Well Tempered Clavier (Book II) again.

See BMInt’s related review here.

A very relaxed Martina Filjak decorates Easter eggs the night before her concert. (BMInt staff photo)

Zagreb’s most famous young pianist, Martina Filjak, made her Boston recital debut at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in a dramatic manner on Easter Sunday. Her previous Boston appearances as concerto soloist with the Boston Philharmonic and as recitalist at a private concert had hardly prepared this reviewer for the impact she made. Her confident entrance in a fashionable blue gown told only a small part of the story of the day. Earlier, she had employed herself as a piano mover in an attempt to find a sweet spot for the Gardner’s German Steinway. This she seems to have done; the piano was on a diagonal axis to the square room, but turned 90 degrees from where I had observed it in previous events. The result, at least where I was sitting on the floor near the piano’s tail, coupled the instrument to the floor and reinforced the bass markedly. It was toe-tingling.

In her opener, Mozart’s Sonata No. 13 in B-flat Major K. 333, Filjak produced a lapidary tone. Her use of pedaling was particularly remarkable. She was very judicious in applying the damper pedal, instead employing a finger legato, which together with her lovely rubato gave a romantic and modern pianistic interpretation. Filjack was even more restrained in her use of the una corda pedal, later telling this reviewer that she strongly felt that pianissimos should be achieved through touch alone, and that the una corda should be used only for coloristic effects. And her pianissimos were ravishing indeed. Credit should also go to the preparation by the Gardner’s piano technician, Anthony McKenna. His voicing rendered the hammers soft on the surface but powerful underneath, and Filjak exploited the resulting dynamic range achieved through his mastery.

The andante second movement of the Mozart was replete with many wistful hesitations. Its surprising harmonic shifts seemed inevitable. The allegretto grazioso third movement was about variety of touch. She evoked Glenn Gould, though without his mannerisms, in her varied palette of note connectedness: from legato to portato, through her self-described “separato” to staccato. Whenever a repeat came it was well differentiated.

Liszt’s Ballade No. 2 (1853) is, within the form, second only to Grieg’s in length and was composed in the same year as Liszt’s famous B-flat Sonata, which, though twice as long, is also no less repetitive and discursive than Ballade No. 2. Filjak managed to vary the chordal weightings of the harmonization in original ways to give the piece more apparent variety than it possesses on paper, and she delivered the Tristan quote with sly wit. The performance was quite a journey.

Troubles began after intermission, but they were not Filjak’s. She showed sovereign command and concentration in situations wherein lesser performers would have crumbled. Schumann’s Faschingsschwank aus Wien began with dramatic theatrical flourish, though it was marred for about 10 seconds by the shrieking of a building alarm. Filjak continued with the allegro first movement in a surging, impetuous manner, taking pleasure in her own velocity as well as in Schumann’s characteristic mood swings, which even encompass a bit of La Marseillaise. She also managed to employ a quite different tone than she had in the Mozart — the Steinway became a Viennese fortepiano. After the long first movement concluded, the audience erupted in applause. It seems that since the Gardner program had neglected to list the five movements of the Schumann, many in the audience thought the piece was over after the first one.

Then the situation got seriously confusing. After Filjack completed the remaining four movements of the Schumann in her strong and stylish manner, the audience applauded ecstatically but then made for the exits, many apparently believing that the subsequent four movements had constituted the Prokofiev Sonata No. 2 that was slated to follow, and therefore, that the program had concluded. So much for Music Appreciation 101! Scott Nickrenz, the Gardner’s music director, charmingly corralled the wayward in the crowd, and the actual Prokofiev began.

Filjack opened propulsively, painting vigorous yet pointillist images of Czarist armies. Her playing was variously muscular and consoling, and she clearly understood Prokofiev’s cynicism.  Then the alarm returned with a vengeance, wailing continuously through the last two minutes of the first movement. Nickrenz again stood and apologized to the audience and to Filjak, offering to excuse her from the rest of the show. She continued even though the marvelous atmosphere she had created had somewhat evaporated by then. In the three remaining movements, Filjack brought more brilliant tone painting to bear. She left us with unforgettable images of pealing bells in mountain valleys, anticipations of Lieutenant Kijé and mayhaps some foreshadowing of the Soviet Gulag.

Lee Eiseman is the publisher of the Intelligencer.

As the result of the merger, Longy may be surrendering its independence, but in return it will be gaining access to students from all over the country and also will be able to make more of its advanced-degree programs. Longy’s former trustees now constitute a board of governors, two of whom will also sit on the Bard  board. Karen Zorn, who continues as Longy president, has gained a new title as Bard vice president.

One of the first post-merger pronouncements is of the inauguration of a partnership with Boston‘s Celebrity Series: A Debut Series for Emerging Artists at Longy’s Pickman Hall.

Karen Zorn recently had this to say to BMInt:

Garry Dunning, the head of the Celebrity Series, and I had a brainstorming lunch about getting Longy students to think about what they were going to do after graduation and what would come  next. What developed from the discussions was a unique partnership between the Celebrity Series of Boston and Longy. The Debut Artist Series will annually present five “emerging” artists on our stage at Pickman Hall. In exchange for their concert appearances these artists will offer master classes, discussions, and other mentoring with our students. I feel that performers who are just one step beyond the current students will be well positioned to be credible mentors.

The five artists participating will be pianist Daniil Trifonov, Pacifica Quartet with clarinetist Anthony McGill, violinist Vilde Frang, guitarist Miloš Karadaglic, and soprano Susanna Phillips with tenor Joseph Kaiser. Celebrity Series subscribers will probably not have heard of most the performers scheduled for next season, since they are at early stages in their careers, but the well-known Pacifica Quartet is the exception. We invited them because of their longstanding connections with Longy.

I’m excited about this partnership. Having the Celebrity Series expertise in marketing and promotion is a real benefit all around. There really aren’t a lot of performing opportunities for these artists on the way up, and the Celebrity Series knows how to make sure they’re seen and heard.

One can make the case that these “emerging artists” are already well on the way to established careers, though most have yet to perform in Boston. The first concert of the series will be Pianist Daniil Trifonov, making his Boston debut on Friday October 5, 2012. He recently won medals at three of the most prestigious competitions in the music world: the Chopin Competition in Warsaw (Bronze Medal), the Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv (First Prize) and the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow (Gold Medal). In the 2011-12 season, he is making debuts with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Mariinsky Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic and Russian National Orchestra.

The Pacifica Quartet will be joined by clarinetist Anthony McGill on Wednesday October 24, 2012. Making its Celebrity Series of Boston debut, the Pacifica Quartet has won chamber music’s top competitions, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award, Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award, and the appointment to Lincoln Center’s CMS Two. McGill, winner of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, currently serves as principal clarinet of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang is making her Boston debut on January 23, 2013. Highlights among her recent and upcoming engagements include performances with Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Kremerata Baltica, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Russian National Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, and the NHK Symphony in Tokyo.

Making his Boston debut on Wednesday, February 13, guitarist Miloš Karadaglic was awarded a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music where, after graduating with First Class Honors, he completed a Masters degree in Performance and was subsequently made a Meaker Junior Fellow – the first guitarist to be given this accolade at the Academy. In 2010 he signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon, and his first recording, The Guitar, was released last spring.

Vocalists Susanna Phillips and Joseph Kaiser are performing on May 1. Phillips, recipient of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010 Beverly Sills Artist Award, returns to the Met this season as Musetta in La bohème. Other engagements in her 2011-12 season include appearances in the title role of Lucia di Lammermoor with Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Minnesota Opera; as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte at the Gran Teatro del Liceu Barcelona; and as the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro with the Grand Théatre de Bordeaux. Kaiser has performed at the Metropolitan Opera in an array of roles: Grimoaldo in Händel’s Rodelinda, the title role of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Tamino in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, and Narraboth in Strauss’s Salome.

Subscriptions for the entire five-concert debut series are on sale starting today, at www.celebrityseries.org. Tickets for individual concerts will also be offered as part of the Celebrity Series 2012-13 “mix-and-match” offering when subscriptions for the regular 2012-2013 performance season go on sale on April 13, 2012 at 9:00 a.m.

As recognition of the importance of their continuing relationship, NEC has commissioned a 10-minute work from NEC Composition Chair Michael Gandolfi. It is for youth orchestra, incorporating quotations from Dr. Abreu. President Woodcock, announcing the commission at the ceremony, presented Dr. Abreu with a video in which Gandolfi spoke warmly about the importance of music for social development as well as of his own eagerness to write the new work.

Each year 10 gifted young musicians from NEC are given the grounding in organizational management, pedagogy, fundraising, communications, and other skills needed to operate an El Sistema-style community music center. The Sistema Fellows program (formerly Abreu Fellows Program) has become a major international enterprise; a number of its graduates direct several of the independent nucleos. Other major institutional supporters of the  program in the United States are the LA Philharmonic (led by El Sistema graduate Gustavo Dudamel), the League of American Orchestras (based in New York City), and the joint initiative of Longy School and Bard College, in partnership with the LA Phil.

El Sistema was founded 38 years ago in Venezuela by Dr. Abreu. His vision that highly valued, intensive music programs based on ensemble playing, and his belief in the potential of every child to excel, have led to an impressive model of arts education for transformational social change. The over 350,000 children and youth currently in Venezuela’s El Sistema mark the greatest success ever seen in this type of endeavor. Many musical leaders cite it as the world’s most important program involving the young in classical music.

The El Sistema movement in the US comprises a group of over 50 independent programs (most often referred to as “nucleos,” as in Venezuela) that define themselves as “El Sistema-inspired.” The major “nucleo” here in Boston is at the Conservatory Lab Charter School in Brighton, a charter school that serves 153 students in grades pre-kindergarten and k-5, where all students participate in an El Sistema-modeled program that involves over 15 hours of weekly music instruction and practice. Another program is about to launch in Somerville, and several other organizations are working to establish similar initiatives.

New England Conservatory has had a warm association with El Sistema for over 12 years, spearheaded and guided until recently by NEC Dean Emeritus Mark Churchill. Dr. Churchill co-founded the Youth Orchestra of the Americas with NEC and El Sistema in 2001 and has since fostered ongoing relations though the YOA; two tours to Venezuela by the NEC Youth Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Benjamin Zander in 2001 and 2005; numerous faculty and student exchanges; the hosting of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in Boston in 2007; the creation of the Abreu Fellows Program with the support of Dr. Abreu and the TED organization in 2009; and the establishment of El Sistema USA, a networking, advocacy, and resource support system for the El Sistema movement in the US, also in 2009.

Dr. Abreu was awarded an honorary doctorate from NEC in 2002, and the first friendship agreement was signed by NEC President Daniel Steiner and Dr. Abreu in 2005. A full account of NEC’s and Boston history with El Sistema can be found in the recently published Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the Transformative Power of Music by Tricia Tunstall (Norton, 2012)

According to NEC’s Ellen Pfeiffer, the recent signing “serves as an official declaration of the continued collaboration between El Sistema and NEC with the goal of fostering programs and projects that benefit the students, staff, faculty, and other constituents of both. Among the goals cited in the agreement are continuation of the Sistema Fellowship in its current form through 2014, a commitment to broadly share the work of the Sistema Fellowship throughout the United States and the world,” exchanges and residencies between students and faculty, and “joint advocacy in support of music as a catalyst for social change.”

Most of the Fellows in NEC’s third class (this year’s) already have job offers. Previous graduates are already deeply involved in the U.S. El Sistema network from Atlanta to Juneau, Los Angeles to Boston, to Durham. The Class of 2012-13, will be named in May.

Originating from Denmark, Australia, Italy and France, the players, violinists Julie Eskar and Sarita Kwok, violist Ettore Causa, and cellist Alexandre Lecarme, formed a veritable United Nations as well as a string quartet. But it was not until the last item on the program, Bedrich Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1 in E minor “From My Life”, that we heard them together.

In that piece the quartet played with freedom, drive, and risk-taking that were quite astonishing in a debut performance. The viola, getting the big tune in the opening, was quite powerful in the resonant confines of the 100-seat Gordon Chapel. Causa was no shrinking violist! The second movement’s galumphing and accelerating Polka was an apotheosis of the Dance. A weeping solo by BSO cellist Lacarme opened the Largo third movement. The four players felt no shame at their over-the-top depictions of the composer’s emotional states. This was, after all, his life. The luftpausen were taken with complete unanimity, the senza vibrato moments showed perfect tuning, and the sections with vibrato were actually synchronized. These are technical accomplishments which one expects only from an experienced quartet. The Vivace fourth movement was quite fast indeed but at the same time was quite juicily inflected and technically immaculate.

Though there are already plenty of fine quartets before the public, I nevertheless encourage this quartet sine nomine to get a name and a performing life.

Three of the four players had chances to show off their individual chops in duos which preceded the Smetana. Mozart’s familiar String Duo no. 1 in G Major for Violin and Viola, KV 423, was dispatched by Eskar and Causa. The sound was almost orchestral in volume in the small space, especially since Causa, standing opposite his partner, did not face her. Rather, he turned away to allow his instrument to point toward the audience. His power and beauty of tone were admirable, and both he and partner Eskar really caught fire. The familiar and jaunty Rondeau was lively and virtuosic with absolute unity of interpretive intent. This was not porcelain Mozart playing, nor was it afflicted with any early-music cant. The players were deferential to each other when it was clear who had the melodic spotlight, but never any less than intense in their interactions.

Seven of Bartok’s 44 Duos for Two Violins followed. This time Eskar played opposite Kwok. In the secundo position (though the parts were entirely equal in their demands and rewards) Eskar, facing her partner, allowed her violin to point aft. This gave a contrast to the sonorities which one could hear quite plainly. The playing was impassioned with pyrotechnics and pathos, though one heard few sly slides until #21, “New Year’s Greeting,” which alternated straight reflective moments with gypsyetical abandon.

Causa returned to the stage with Kwok for a duo transcription by Johan Halvorsen(1864-1935) of Handel’s “Passacaglia” from his Suite No. 7 in G minor, for harpsichord. That transformation and elaboration of Handel might have been the work of Kreisler, so virtuosic and romantic were both the writing and execution. There was an “Anything you can do, I can do better” quality to the interaction of the two supremely gifted players which brought down the house.

Lee Eiseman is the publisher of the Intelligencer.

Cecile Licad accepts applause. (BMInt staff photo)

Filipina pianist Cecile Licad burst onto the international scene with her Leventritt Piano Competition Gold Medal in 1981. Somewhat of a stranger to Boston audiences, she has had an important career as soloist, chamber musician and recitalist. Scott Nickrenz, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s music director, scored a programming coup by inviting Licad to the inaugural season at the new Calderwood Hall where, on February 19^th, she performed two works: Liszt’s Sonata in B minor and Chopin’s Twelve Etudes, op. 25.

With no introductory piece to warm up her audience, and after but a short, dramatic pause of poetic contemplation, Licad got right to work with one of the major pieces of the piano literature. Her impassive face was no mirror to her soul, though her silent mouthing of cross-rhythms and attacks certainly revealed her deep involvement.

Great performances of Liszt’s B minor Sonata in part rely on powerful tones in climactic moments to produce an ominousness which ought to frighten and shock.  But those qualities were lacking, through no fault of Licad. Indeed her keyboard weight and musculature were sufficient to cause some of the bass strings of the Calderwood Hall Steinway to strike one another. But because the piano was lidless, the sonorities did not reach satisfyingly visceral levels for this reviewer seated on the auditorium’s floor. Perhaps the balcony gods may have found the sound more immersive. Licad effectively compensated for the hall’s dryness with generous use of the damper pedal, though without indulging so extravagantly as to blur the harmonies.

From mf on down, her tone evinced a beauty and evenness reminiscent of the grand manner virtuosi such as Shura Cherkassky as well as Licad’s own teacher, Mieczyslaw Horszowski (Her playing did not so clearly evoke her other two Curtis teachers, Rudolf Serkin and Seymour Lipkin.) She displayed many techniques of a more belle époque such as prestissimo-pianissimo runs referred to as “string(s) of pearls.” Her rhythmic freedom was considerable, but controlled. The longer line was never broken.

She began the fugal section of the Liszt Sonata faster than I have ever before heard in a performance — then she accelerated! Overall I would characterize the interpretation as a Schubertian take — reminiscent of the Wanderer Fantasy, one of the work’s clear influences. Yet her performance was also very much her own.

Licad came back from intermission with Chopin’s Twelve Etudes, op. 25. Demonstrating absolute security, she nailed all of the technical challenges, freeing herself to reveal and contrast the moods and characteristics of the studies as if they were tone paintings. My notes include words such as “soulful,” “scary,” “galloping,” “consolation,” “a dotted trot,” “impossibly perfect double chromatic scales,” “pellucid,” etc. Her execution was transcendental, as Liszt would have called it — also evocative of Godowsky — though without Godowsky’s  astonishing and at times vulgar additions and embellishments.

For her encore Licad charmed and danced her way through Pasquinade, op. 59 of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829 – 1869), sending us bounding out with broad smiles.

Lee Eiseman is the publisher of the Intelligencer.

*    *    *

The following appendix would have been included in the intended review of Mark DeVoto had he not begged off because of illness.

Of the great triumvirate of composers for the big mid-century Romantic piano — Chopin (1810-1849), Schumann (1810-1856), and Liszt (1811-1886)  —  Liszt was the greatest pianist, the longest-lived, and the most prolific, the most dazzling, the most admired.  There was a lot of mutual admiration, too; Chopin dedicated his first set of Etudes, op. 10, to Liszt, and his second Ballade, op. 38, to Schumann; Schumann dedicated his Kreisleriana, op. 16, to Chopin, and his Phantasie, op. 17, to Liszt; and Liszt dedicated his great Sonata to Schumann (whose wife Clara, one of the great pianists of the century, disliked Liszt personally but occasionally played his music).  During his long lifetime and during his extended career as a virtuoso, Liszt wrote a enormous amount of music for his instrument, much of it intended as crowd-pleasing but often of considerable intellectual depth.  His Sonata is universally recognized as one of his best works, certainly because of originality of its conception  —  a single movement whose large-scale sectional structure can be regarded as a complete cyclic sonata of three-movements-in-one.  Three of the main motives of the sonata are announced on the first page of the score; the fourth main motive is a grandiose D major fff, which appears a little more than a minute later.  Everything else in the sonata is development, except for a cantabile “slow movement” theme that reappears near the end of the work.  Liszt completed this Sonata in 1853, during the time of his closest personal association with Wagner, who just a few years later heard Liszt’s Faust Symphony and admired it enough to lift its main melody and barely disguise it in Act II of Die Walküre.

Chopin’s second set of Etudes, op. 25, were dedicated to Marie, Countess d’Agoult, who was Liszt’s mistress and the mother of his three children.  As pure music, like the Opus 10 set, those of op. 25 are flawless masterpieces, with not a weak note among them.  Some pianists think that as a group they are less technically difficult than the Opus 10 set; others, that they are harder.  It’s probably a tossup.  Many students of intermediate level play no. 1, the so-called “Aeolian Harp,” or no. 9, the very short “Butterfly.”  It was said of Paderewski that he would warm up before a concert by playing several times through the furiously difficult no. 8, known as the “Etude in Sixths,” and No. 6, the “Etude in Thirds,” and no. 11, called “Winter Wind.” These have always been considered among the most challenging for any pianist, notwithstanding that the “Winter Wind” was the obvious inspiration for the popular song, “Autumn Leaves.”  The set ends with a magnificent monster of arpeggios, nicknamed the “Ocean Wave.” Did Chopin know he was writing for a huge, resonant instrument that would not arrive for another 25 years?

One regrets that after 1834, Chopin didn’t write another dozen etudes (though the lovely Trois nouvelles Etudes of 1839, written for Moscheles’s piano method, suggests that he might have wanted to write even more); and that Liszt, after his twelve Transcendental Etudes of 1851, didn’t compose his projected second set that would have completed the cycle of keys. Instead of etudes, other composers, like Moscheles, Busoni, Hummel, Alkan, Chopin and Shostakovitch followed Bach’s example and wrote preludes, sometimes with fugues, in all the keys. Robert Levin famously performed a concert combining the preludes of Busoni, Moscheles and Alkan in Alkan’s idiosyncratic key ordering at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and in Stuttgart in the 1990s.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony.

Caught in the green room. (BMInt staff photo)

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