Memorial Day weekend brought forth a fine festival of local talent, including composer Gregory Biss, whose ruminative, half-tonal, half-atonal String Quartet No. 2 got a very good performance by the visiting Sorelle Quartet from NEC (Jeffrey Dyrda and Ethan Wood, violins, Valentina Shohdy, viola, and Kacy Clopton, cello; despite the name, the group contains no sisters). Saturday night featured an authentic artists’ cabaret, with an exhibition of local painters, and some home-grown music. Gregory Biss played his own piano rag called Lupin and also accompanied baritone David Orrell, who sang Satie’s “La Diva de l’Empire,” a ragtime song, in English translation. Your correspondent, sporting a top-hat, made his professional debut as a solo singer in Schoenberg’s “Der genügsame Liebhaber” (1901, and entirely tonal), also in translation, as “The Contented Suitor.” Most of those who heard this didn’t realize that Schoenberg had it in him, but it was sidesplitting.

The climax, on Sunday, was Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on two pianos, played by Gregory Biss and Roberto Pace; both of these fine pianists regularly teach at Summerkeys in Lubec. The Arts Center’s theater doesn’t easily seat more than about 100, but it was full. After an intermission, they played the whole thing again, about 33 minutes. What is most remarkable about hearing this familiar masterpiece on two pianos is how much of the orchestral texture is left out in favor of a strongly rhythmic and harmonic core; this results in a special vitality, not to say textural crudity, that reinforces one’s understanding of the brilliant original. Robert Craft has mentioned that Stravinsky worked on the four-hand score at the same time as he prepared the full orchestral score that goes up to 34 staves per page. This accounts for some of the strange differences between the two scores that I have remarked elsewhere in these pages  here.

On Friday, 18 June, the Arts Center, taking advantage of the two pianos still on stage, was host to an outstanding concert by Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt, a married duo-piano team that has been playing professionally for 25 years and more. Steigerwalt is a professor of music at Mount Holyoke College and his wife has taught there also, as well as privately, while simultaneously earning a law degree (by the time this appears she will most likely have been newly sworn in as a member of the Massachusetts Bar at the State House on Beacon Hill). Their program could hardly have been more beautifully chosen or more flawlessly executed. It began with Debussy’s En blanc et noir (1915), a suite of three pieces not often heard but unquestionably one of his greatest works. The first piece, which begins with clattering anti-parallel C major harmony, is one of Debussy’s late reconsiderations of sonata form; the second, a scary war piece that depicts the Kaiser’s army with Ein’ feste Burg in distorted harmony (might it have been this that inspired Stravinsky’s comparably mangled chorale in l’Histoire du soldat of two years later?), but allows the French at least a partial triumph, marked “joyeux.” Stravinsky, himself the dedicatee of the third piece, remarked in later years how Debussy’s remarkable pianism “directed the thought of the composer,” as indeed it did; one of the striking things about En blanc et noir is how the two instruments seldom dialogue with each other but most often merge into a single enormous super-piano that isn’t even orchestral.

Only seldom does one hear Schumann’s Andante and Variations, op. 46, a work whose original version (for two pianos, two cellos, and horn) is rarely heard indeed. In this shorter version, for two pianos alone, Schumann’s self-quotation of Frauenliebe und-Leben is left out, but the amiability remains. Of Schumann’s other works in variation form, the “Abegg” Variations, op. 1, are an extreme rarity, and the often-heard Symphonic Studies in the Form of Variations, op. 13, are wonderfully pianistic but mostly stray far and wide from the theme; his recently-discovered set of variations on the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, published by Henle, are still a curiosity. These op. 46 Variations, from 1843, are especially noteworthy for their rich and complex harmony, which nevertheless keeps the original B-flat major well in hearing range even in the minore variation which allows more tonal freedom.

But one can say exactly the same thing about the Variations on a Theme of Paganini by Witold Lutoslawski, which followed on the program: the thematic basis is always perceptible. These are of surpassing pianistic brilliance, often with gritty harmony that Stravinsky might have cringed at (though Bartók would surely have loved it). Gary Steigerwalt mentioned that the Variations date from 1941 during the German occupation of Poland, when Lutoslawski and his fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik often played two pianos in cabaret-like surroundings. If Paganini might have been flattered by the success of his own 24th Caprice, Liszt and Brahms, transported to 1941, might have chuckled at the barely-concealed reminiscences of some of their own textures on the same theme — and even Rachmaninoff, whose immortal Rhapsody is probably the best-known collection of variations on Paganini’s immortal melody.

After the intermission we heard three pieces for piano four hands by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, pieces that were entirely new to me but that reassured me once again about the strength of her gifts and even more for her accomplishment. These beautiful pieces were perfectly proportioned and built with elegant melodic lines of unfailing strength. They formed fine company for Felix Mendelssohn’s Andante and Allegro assai vivace that followed. The Andante, we learned, is a recently-rediscovered introduction to the Allegro that has been known ever since its first publication in the 19th century. The piece as a whole is a somewhat sprawling sonata form with a certain pianistic kinship to the very familiar Introduction and Rondo capriccioso for solo piano, and much of the same infectious pianistic brilliance, a good workout for able four-hand enthusiasts.

Ravel’s La valse (1919) in the composer’s own two-piano transcription concluded the program. Like the orchestral original, this version has some problems of textural thickness that are hard to pin down, textures that are like an opposite pole to the outstanding delicacy — even fragility — of the Valses nobles et sentimentales of 1911. It’s a question of drama, really. La valse is a narrative form, a harsh portrait of overwrought and declining Viennese civilization, and it succeeds as well in the transcription as in the original. The Muller-Steigerwalt team played it with perfectly controlled abandon, as a fitting wrap-up to a scintillating evening.

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, music harmony.

A spectrum of moods ranges through the five pieces, first with a vibrant chorus (”Rintrah roars & shakes his fires”) in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The Argument,” beginning with low strings and percussion and a steady 7/8 beat. “And on the barren heath / Sing the honey bees” brought forth a chromatic buzz of sul ponticello strings, and of course we were reminded of “And there came all manner of flies” in Handel’s Israel in Egypt. “Then the perilous path was planted” returned to the strong rhythms of the beginning, first in 8/8, then back to 7/8 again, heading for the ending when strings, drums, and glockenspiel are all in rhythmic unison.

In the second movement, “Fragment,” the vocal quartet, one line at a time solo by solo, introduces “the lineaments of gratified desire” in dialogue with a solo string quartet. A drone on open-string G and D establishes a refrain that recurs in later movements of the cantata, as well as a nominal tonic key for the whole work. This appears more strongly in the elegant G major chorus, “The Birds,” that follows, with men and women in alternating quatrains, until the fifth verse, “Come, on wings of joy we’ll fly,” with men and women together. The vielle-like drone on G and D then battles with scary tam-tam rolls in “Auguries of Innocence,” with tenor solo, nicely sung by Sudeep Agarwala; after the last line, “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour,” the drone supports the warm sound of glockenspiel and vibraphone together. One senses the approach of more bell-like sounds, and in the final chorus, a robust fugue that even the composer refers to as “Handelian,” tubular bells support the sound of rejoicing: “For everything that lives is Holy.” This peroration isn’t the last word, however; a solo string quartet, G major with carefully-placed interior dissonances, confirms the drone and the key of the whole work.

The strange compulsions of the mystic Blake texts kept reminding me of another powerful Blake composer, William Bolcom, whose Eighth Symphony, with chorus, was premiered in Boston last year. Child’s new work is transparent and proportioned where Bolcom’s is massive and difficult to penetrate psychologically. Even so, I felt that Song of Liberty was a bit too short; I wanted to hear more, and thought that it might profit by the addition of three or four minutes of music that would make further use of the solo voices. But whether the composer decides to add more or not, I will still recommend this handsome work as a challenge to choruses anywhere, as a bracing and inspired setting of inspiring texts, and one that is not excessively difficult or impractical to perform.

After the intermission came a longer work, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis pacem, a significant and well-known antiwar elegy composed in 1935 mostly on texts from Walt Whitman, Psalms, Old Testament prophets, and the Ordinary of the Mass. I came to this big piece with major prejudices. I have always liked Vaughan Williams’s songs and hymns and organ music but not much else by him; I find his symphonies ponderous and stuffy, and above all he suffers from a poor structural sense of harmonic progression, with a tendency to stick close to tonic triads and sevenths too much of the time. As long as I’m airing my prejudices, I may as well admit that I find the Greensleeves Fantasia amiable, the Tallis Fantasia a terrible bore, and The Lark Ascending almost as silly as Vivaldi’s Seasons. Hearing Dona nobis pacem for the second or third time on Sunday, I found a few of these prejudices fortified. And yet I was genuinely moved by moments that had not struck me before: Part 4, the “Dirge for Two Veterans” (text from Whitman’s Drum Taps) which seems to echo Mahler’s “Revelge,” had a subtle and penetrating ostinato that really works well, with drumbeats I felt more strongly than in Part 2 that really talks about drums. The harmony of the Dirge is subtle, too: A minor and C major in afree dialogue occasionally with D major harmony overlapping both, and again one thought of Mahler who would hardly have been an influence on Vaughan Williams. I think, too, that the really first-rate quality of the performance persuaded me that I should learn to appreciate this work more, although afterward a friend suggested that it would be even more compelling in Royal Albert Hall with a chorus of two hundred. I was also glad to see four pages of helpful program notes by Ahmed E. Ismail. Dona nobis pacem is a period piece and was already somewhat faded seventeen years after the Great War, while Britten’s War Requiem (1962) is a piece more of our own time. But as long as the message is needed — and it certainly is needed still — we should hear such music.

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, music harmony.

Stravinsky’s Sonata for two pianos (1944) is of smaller proportions than the Concerto for two pianos soli (1931-35) that Stravinsky played frequently on tour during the 1930s with his son Soulima. The Sonata is simultaneously lyrical and austere, with a spare diatonic tonality much of the time, and elaborate counterpoint at other times. The sonata-form first movement begins with a widely-spaced harmony of dominant seventh in the upper parts and tonic triad in the lower, with a strange but characteristically Stravinskyan sound. The second movement, a theme with four variations very divergent in style, sometimes clattering, sometimes chorale-like, includes a boom-chick ostinato pattern much like what Stravinsky had written 22 years earlier in his short opera Mavra. The third movement, Allegretto, is like a foretaste of Copland’s Appalachian Spring, composed at almost the same time, not to mention Poulenc’s Sonata on this same program — more about that below.

Rachmaninoff, one of the greatest pianists of all time, is slowly being reexamined for the depth of his achievement as a composer, after a century of destructive popularity of his Second Concerto and other works whose originality, in their own time, has always been obscured by the abundance of backward-looking romanticism — he was one of the greatest of Chopin players and was steeped in Tchaikovsky like no other composer. But the Second Suite for two pianos is a good illustration of Rachmaninoff’s strong formal architecture, enriched by a harmonic mastery that any of his contemporaries might have envied (and some certainly did). Like others of his works, the large formal scale in this Suite sometimes sprawls, but the textural thickness and abundance of rapidly-noodling inner parts are a more serious problem. These are more than compensated by the melodic freedom, which soars and sings, and by the well-wrought tonal scheme which adds an element of drama in the fast movements and lyrical expressiveness in the slow. From where I was sitting, it was hard to hear all of these at once, when the muddied middle-register sound seemed to overpower both the upper and lower. I couldn’t fault the players, but I would have been happy to hear this big piece played less forcefully and in a smaller, more intimate hall. Nevertheless, the Presto waltz and the Presto tarantella were sweeping and incisive, and the Andantino romance was poignant.

Before the intermission we heard Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini — the same theme as in variations by Schumann, Liszt, Brahms. and Rachmaninoff in the immortal Rhapsody. Lutoslawski’s witty piece combines the strong A-minor harmony of Paganini’s original with melodic snatches from Liszt’s variations (and probably Rachmaninoff’s too) and splendidly acerbic, crunchy dissonances splattered here and there like snowballs, all over a strongly rhythmic background. I have heard this piece played successfully at slower tempo, but the momentum and zing of this performance were infectious.

Poulenc’s early Sonata for piano four hands (1918) is a delightful example of his rowdy enfant terrible style when Les Six were first discovering each other’s music. The Sonata for two pianos is much more serious; it dates from 1953, when Les Six had all gone their separate and distinctive ways, and Poulenc was already an old master. The first movement is marked by a clangorous and sometimes atonal harmony that gradually stabilizes into a ripe tonal lyricism like the Poulenc of the 1920s and 30s or his later chamber music — a characteristic harmonic language sometimes like neoclassical Stravinsky and Prokofiev together and leavened with Mozart, but with an upper melodic line that is unmistakably Chopin-like in its sweep. It is in the third movement, Andante lirico: lentement, that this kind of music develops into an eloquent and even amorous song; it was good to hear it at reduced dynamic where the texture was full but every note sounded clearly. The fourth movement, Allegro giocoso, reminded this listener of the stark C-minor sound of Stravinsky’s Concerto for piano and winds, and one wonders if Poulenc had heard Stravinsky’s later two-piano music as well. (Poulenc did play two pianos in concert from time to time, including his own Concerto in D minor of 1932, one of his best works.)

Diamond Watch: Double Play is a double-punning title, for Harbison’s new piece honoring Professor Peter Diamond of the Department of Economics at MIT. Diamond is a passionate fan of the Boston Red Sox, and the program booklet noted that he threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park only 10 days earlier. In brief remarks at the beginning of the concert, the composer mentioned wryly that his new piece was the third example of variation form to be heard on the program. The twelve variations, which were “played without substantial pauses,” included major-minor ninths and tenths in various wide registers (”Low and inside,” “High and outside”), a waltz with wonderfully smeared parallel thirds in both pianos, and an ostinato with a steady jazz beat, with snatches of “Take me out to the ball game” constantly fading in and out. This happy work is a valuable contribution to the not-very-large two-piano literature and one foresees for it a wide popularity, alongside Vittorio Rieti’s Second Avenue Waltzes and Milhaud’s Le bal martiniquais, and even Harbison’s own brief David’s Fascinating Rhythm Method (after Gershwin), which wrapped up the program.

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, music harmony.

The program on April 10 began with Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1950), which are late-middle Copland, the composer exploring a lean, spare style with thin, widely-spaced piano textures in some of the songs and a thicker, more Romantic sound in others; they have always been ranked among his most admired works written after Appalachian Spring. The texts are sensitive but very far from delicate. Some keys, like E-flat major, return from time to time, from the first song, “Nature, the gentlest mother,” to “The world feels dusty” which is almost a sarabande, and “Heart, we will forget him.” All kinds of remarkable, subtle sounds are found in these transparent settings, like the G and A five octaves apart at the end of “Dear March, come in!” I was struck, too, by what is likely a chance connection in “There came a wind like a bugle.” My friend George Perle, who died last year, composed a memorably scary setting of this same text in 1978, much more violent than Copland’s, and I noticed that both composers wrote middle-register trills, chasing away the “green chill upon the heat.” Sarah Pelletier had a rich, strong sound throughout; Lois Shapiro’s accompaniment was always precise and clear, as vigorous or discreet as need be but never subdued.

The full trio and Pelletier gave a good first account of Simple Grace, with text by Joan of Arc as cited by Mark Twain, part of an oratorio-in-progress by Howard Frazin. Joan is giving testimony before the ecclesiastical court. Whole-tone harmony in “I came from God; I have nothing more to do here” yields to upper-register parallel triads, a state of purity rather like Satie’s Socrate, in “If I be not in a state of Grace.” This short and attractive excerpt makes this listener look forward to the complete work — perhaps in a staged version?

Charles Ives’s Trio (1904-1911) is the chamber-music counterpart of his First Sonata for piano, with flashes of blazing inspiration side by side with episodes of internal contradiction. The first movement is short, with long stretches of C pedal points in the piano and thickly dissonant harmony above. It is followed by a second movement, TSIAJ (This Scherzo Is A Joke), in which everything seems to be slung together: “Jingle Bells,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” football songs that I couldn’t recognize, snatches (maybe) from the “Hawthorne” movement of Ives’s “Concord” Sonata, whole-tone thirds from the echo ensemble in the Fourth Symphony, and (more definitely) ostinati from his Over the Pavements. I’ve heard this movement played much faster, and was grateful to hear it this way, when I could discern more of what was going on. It is in the long (nearly 14 minutes), slow third movement that Ives’s most eloquent and essential voice comes out most effectively. The program notes describe it as a “lyrical rondo,” and the recurring themes included melodies with successive and stacked fifths, wildly dissonant but surreptitiously Brahms-like chordal textures, echoes of the E-flat major harmony in “The Alcotts” of the “Concord” Sonata, and bell-like major-minor triads spaced in the high and middle registers. At the end, cello and violin alternate in a soaring dialogue with Thomas Hastings’s famous “Rock of ages, cleft for me” (1831), and this is one of the finest moments Ives ever wrote. I remember when this was played in 1974, at the American Musicological Society’s annual meeting during the Ives centennial year, and the audience of my fellow musicologists laughed; they should have known better.

Paul Schoenfield’s Café Music (1987), a boisterous escapade in three movements, in which a klezmer band is reborn without its wind instruments, concluded the concert. I had expected to hear William Bolcom’s Second Violin Sonata, a personal favorite of mine, but the Schoenfield was certainly an acceptable trade, and the audience loved it.

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, music harmony.

Mira Wang, Jan Vogler, John Harbison, Carlos Kalmar and Martha Babcock (Michael J. Lutch photo)

Harbison’s new concerto begins with a dialogue between major and minor thirds played against each other in the solo instruments. Such cross-relations — chromatic differences, like between C and Csharp, across or between different parts — are “unnecessarily pejorative in implication — they are often beautiful,” as the composer’s program note reads. (I couldn’t agree more, and anyone who has questions should listen to British church music from Tallis to Purcell, or look at m. 14 of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion.) The dialogue of major versus minor becomes insistent from time to time as the broadly sweeping solo instruments move over wide melodic areas. But the effect of these cross-relational “misunderstandings” is to reinforce the tonal stability of the triads to which they belong. I remembered how Debussy does the same kind of thing in his Etude no. 4 (Sixths), and even William Walton, as a basic structural element of his Viola Concerto. Both soli kept up a busy back-and-forth concertante, like a vigorous argument while they smiled at each other.

Before the concert, Harbison spoke of the “liking of a chord and wanting to make it normative,” and part of his search included the “blue third” that “isn’t on the keyboard but it’s the common ground of folk music” around the world. He remembered the blue third, with mixed major and minor, as a basic ingredient of his youthful experience as a jazz pianist; of late he has been practicing to recover some of those long-dormant skills and remarked about the “thickened melodic line, fanned out to six lines” from a single voice — “It’s fun to write because one can color every chord.” This texture may have been elusive in the second movement of the concerto, an expressive Notturno with a certain Schoenbergian lilt and a generally discreet accompaniment, but it was certainly apparent in the bright finale. The brightest part of the tonality was the open-string sound of plenty of A minor, as in Brahms’s Double Concerto, and the wide-ranging melodic lines in both soli that also had the spirit of 19th-century Viennese Lieder. But at the end, when the two soli play the same melody together, two octaves apart, the sound was like Ravel’s String Quartet and its double-octave second theme in A minor. A delicate burst of percussion in the final measures was followed by col legno strokes — with the wooden part of the bow — in both the solo instruments. Col legno usually doesn’t work in solo strings, and one needs a full string section to get good sound; but here the gesture was a salute, and just right.

The front of the Symphony Hall stage had been extended with extra platform space to accommodate the Mahler Seventh Symphony, which was the second half of the program. The Harbison orchestra seemed diminished by the extra space around it. Still, some of the time the orchestra seemed too large for the soloists, and I found myself wondering whether the composer might at some point have thought it advantageous to cut down the number of strings; I remember the last work of Walter Piston (Harbison’s teacher and mine), a Concerto for string quartet, winds and percussion, where the instrumental balance and contrast were both at a maximum.

Carlos Kalmar, visiting from Oregon, had to learn Harbison’s score in a hurry when he took over from an ailing James Levine, and he can be congratulated for his good work. Kalmar’s conducting is precise and elegant; a large gesture got a large response, his small gestures were carefully followed, his left hand was fully independent, and his accents were clean every time. Like most younger conductors, he bends his knees too much, but this is a small complaint; I have seen too many guests at the BSO relying on histrionics far more egregious than this. But at further performances he should make sure the trumpet doesn’t play so loud — the brass in general needs to save their muscles for the Mahler.

As for Mahler’s Seventh, it is one of his most refractory symphonies; in my opinion only the Eighth is more difficult, and only the Third is longer (the Seventh weighs in at about 78 minutes). It seems at once a jumble of Mahler’s own previous styles; the first movement, a gigantic march, is a mixture of Kondukt (dead march) like the beginning of the Fifth Symphony, and with faster march themes very close to the first movements of the Second and Sixth Symphonies. One feels as though one has heard this before, and yet… There are extraordinary sounds, dominated by the imperious and imperial Tenorhorn, with its massive, round, heavy sound in the high register. I couldn’t see from where I was sitting, and I wanted to know whether the instrument was a euphonium (tenor tuba), which is played with a cup mouthpiece, or a Wagner tuba (Waldhorntuba), which uses a horn mouthpiece. The solo was full of a vibrato that was not quite French, but amply frightening. For the rest of the very long movement, especially in the faster sections, Mahler’s counterpoint becomes dissonant to the point of grotesque; but this is one of his outstanding characteristics even from his First Symphony, and nearly to the point of atonality in Das Lied von der Erde where it is even sensuous.

The three middle movements of the Seventh are the most appealing and the most successful. The second and fourth movements are night pieces, Nachtmusik as Mahler called them, featuring dialogues of horns (minor third echoing major third) in the second movement and quasi-serenade dialogues of oboe, horn, mandolin and guitar in the fourth. (The mandolin appears again even more effectively as a Chinese instrument in Der Abschied, the final song in Das Lied von der Erde.) The calm F major of the fourth movement has aural images from the famous Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony, and also from the similar sections in the same key in the second movement of the Fourth Symphony; these are songlike in the spirit of Schubert, but they also, typical for Mahler, seem to have an appoggiatura on nearly every downbeat. Both the second and fourth movements are shorter than the first and fifth but still they are quite long; the third movement, a scherzo marked Schattenhaft (ghostly), is shorter still, and nicht schnell but very fleet, with plenty of triplet eighths in 3/4.

To those not well acquainted with Mahler’s other works, the Rondo finale of the Seventh must seem close to madness. Not even the Burleske movement of the Ninth has such a wild assortment of seemingly inconsistent orchestral styles. There are two main rondo themes, a brass chorale like the one in the rondo of the Fifth Symphony (and similar to the beginning of the first scene in Wagner’s Meistersinger), and a 3/2 passage of two half notes and four eighths. But Mahler’s tempi change so continuously, hardly pausing for breath, and the tonality jumps from key to key just as frequently, that the voyage is of extreme storminess throughout. After so many years I am still not used to these violent changes of mood and shifts in continuity, but after last night’s performance of the Seventh, and especially after its finale, I have a better idea of some of Berg’s influences in the equally frenzied Marsch of his Three Pieces for orchestra, op. 6. (To be fair, in Mahler’s 590 measures there are 80 different tempo indications, as opposed to 75 in Berg’s 174 measures.) Carlos Kalmar made a point of exaggerating the differences in tempo, which is the more problematic because Mahler never left metronome indications for a guide.

One needs to hear this music many times before it can fully make sense. But whatever the perceptual difficulty, there was no doubt about the fine playing by the Boston Symphony, and Carlos Kalmar was an outstanding guide along a treacherous emotional pathway. I can remember when the BSO played Mahler’s Third Symphony for the first time in 1962, directed by Richard Burgin (Charles Munch was not at home in much of Mahler’s music), and how baffled were so many of the audience. With Mahler and the BSO, things turned around in 1966, when Erich Leinsdorf recorded the Sixth Symphony, a really outstanding performance. Last night’s performance of the Seventh, no matter how psychically disturbing, is another trophy on that distinguished shelf.

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, music harmony.

The replacement was in fact two works, and they were a serious surprise: Sibelius’s Finlandia and Valse triste. Finlandia is one of the most popular, indeed shameless, pieces of concert bombast of all time; I remember when Roger Sessions, hearing it on a program at Princeton in 1961, called it “the price of admission.” I was astounded to learn, from Robert Kirzinger’s pre-concert talk, that it had not been played by the Boston Symphony in 60 years. The Valse triste, a strangely subtle and lovely piece, was last played by the BSO in 1912 — just eight years after it was composed. Jayce Ogren led these pieces for all they were worth, indeed, holding back the soft strings in the Valse triste to the point of pppp quasi niente when his stick didn’t move at all, and this was effectively contrasted against the Mahler-like Ländler G major spirit of the faster sections. Four solo violins glowed pianissimo at the end. The Valse triste is certainly deserving of occasional revival, but I for one will be happy to wait another 60 years to hear Finlandia in Symphony Hall again.

Many in the audience would have remembered the premiere five years ago of Peter Lieberson’s beautiful Neruda Songs when they were sung by his wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, only a year before her death. Last night’s premiere of a sequel, five Songs of Love and Sorrow, also on texts by Neruda, was a moving tribute to the memory of the love they shared. The text setting is crystalline throughout, the declamation wide-ranging but always comprehensible, the accompaniment richly supportive and never overpowering.

Baritone Gerald Finley and conductor Jayce Ogren (Michael J. Lutch photo).

Gerald Finley, baritone, was an ideal communicator, with an obvious and full understanding of the expressive text. What is most moving about the whole cycle is the fine sensitivity of the chromatic tonal harmony, reminiscent of Austro-German Impressionism (yes, there was such a thing, though it was influenced by the French variety) by composers that are mostly forgotten today — I thought particularly of Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony that inspired Alban Berg, and the operas of Franz Schreker. The beginning of the first Neruda song, “Des las estrellas que admiré…” featured Martha Babcock’s solo cello oscillating back and forth, much like the D minor oscillating fifths in Mahler’s second song, “Autumn loneliness,” in Das Lied von der Erde, and if I’m not mistaken, a variant of this beginning reappeared at the front of Lieberson’s fourth song, “Tal vez no ser es ser sin que tú seas…” — a fine cyclic connection. The oscillating fourths or fifths actually seemed like a leitmotif in the whole cycle, in which the divided strings (sometimes with harp) often predominate in the texture — indeed, I felt that from time to time there was rather too much doubling, and that a more differentiated wind sound would have been welcome. Sometimes there was a wind gesture that stood out, like the clarinets’ parallel thirds, mariachi-style, in the second song, or the horn thirds in the fourth song. The end of the last song, on G, with piano, flute, English horn, and octaves in the strings, was especially effective, reminding one of how tonality, like love, is all-powerful and unifying no matter how varied and chromatically intense. It’s true that a friend of mine, a fellow composer and a very good one, expressed some disappointment in these songs, because he had long admired the gritty atonal environment of Lieberson’s first Piano Concerto, premiered by the Boston Symphony nearly 30 years ago. But the fact is that many of us today are at home in different idioms, tonal and atonal and a spectrum in between, when the individual compositional personality remains consistent. I hope to hear these songs recorded on the same CD as their handsome predecessor. Orchestral songs on Spanish texts are rare enough — Granados’s tonadillas and de Falla’s El amor brujo are good examples — and these very different new songs are splendid additions to that repertory.

After the intermission came Schubert’s “Great” Symphony in C major, D 944, of 1825, composed when he was 28 years old, and the one symphony of his full maturity that he completed (the famous B minor symphony in two movements, D 759, is only the best of half a dozen unfinished Schubert symphonies). The very first Boston Symphony concert I ever attended, in 1954, had this work on the program (conducted by Charles Munch), and it changed my life. Jayce Ogren did his best with it last night, and there’s no doubt that the orchestra brought it off well, but on their own terms and not the conductor’s. Most of the time the players weren’t watching him — even though they undoubtedly knew the music well, they had many thousands of high-speed notes to keep track of. Ogren did succeed in a few manneristic moments, including a long, disturbing ritardando before the first-movement recapitulation and an accelerando before the Più vivo in the coda — neither of which is called for in the score. The second movement, Andante con moto, generally went extremely well, with beautiful expression, especially in the solo winds — though I object to the slower tempo, a habit of almost every conductor, in the Neapolitan section right after the fff climax. The Scherzo also was handled with all the requisite brightness and brisk tempo, including the Ländler that forms the expansive Trio section. But in the finale Ogren failed to override the orchestra’s comfortable Allegro moderato, which is what it sounded like — he certainly tried to push the tempo in the codetta of the exposition and again before the coda, but the orchestra refused to follow. Schumann, who rescued the manuscript of this symphony from oblivion, dubbed it the “Symphony of Heavenly Length,” and nowhere does that appellation apply more forcefully than in the brilliant finale, which Schubert marked Allegro vivace; it is 1154 bars long (1538 bars long if you take the exposition repeat, which nobody ever does). It is absolutely essential to maintain a breakneck speed in this movement, and one conductor who succeeded was George Szell in the older Cleveland recording, made at a time when the Cleveland Orchestra was the best in the world; at a metronome marking of 108-112 to the measure, Szell’s finale weighs in at about ten and a half minutes of amazing energy. Last night’s performance was at a sedate Toscanini-like tempo, more like thirteen minutes. The fortissimo was there, but not the fire and fury.

I would suggest that Jayce Ogren’s conducting style can be blamed for what I missed in the Schubert. He puts forth an unseemly amount of what I think of as a midwestern technique of beating time, with too much mirroring with the left hand, too much conducting with the head, too much knee-bending and moving from side to side, one foot to the other. This makes for a kind of dance on the podium, though it often looks like vertical swimming; there’s no question that audiences like this visual display and expect to see it. But I think it interferes with good communication to the orchestra, detracting from independent motion of the hands, and especially that the large beat makes it difficult to keep precise time in very fast tempo. To Ogren’s credit, I liked when he sometimes beat time with his left hand, using the baton for a different kind of visual control on the right of the orchestra; but when the beat is so high, wide, and handsome, and mirrored left and right, everything looks like a downbeat. (It was said of Fritz Reiner that a fly could sit on the end of his baton for an entire concert and not be shaken off; that is an extreme of another kind, of course.) I also give Ogren top credit for keeping his gestural exaggeration very much in the background in the Lieberson songs; he was admirably concentrated on providing the right kind of support for the singer and on closely observing every detail of a complex score that he had had to learn very quickly.

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, music harmony.

Lukas met with us occasionally for individual lessons, but the heart and soul of his teaching was in the class with all of us. From the first, he was dissatisfied with our knowledge of the classical repertory and continually prodded us to know and analyze the masterworks. He insisted that whenever possible we should follow the score as we listened, and I have followed that injunction faithfully in all the years since. Thus it was that I got to hear for the first time some of the late Mozart and Beethoven quartets, the Hammerklavier Sonata, Stravinsky’s Mass and Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (Lukas inscribed my copy of the score: “Merry Christmas, Mark, and good luck to you and your music”), and much else. He was particularly interested in the idea of different kinds of music going on at the same time, and he chose some memorable examples: the three on-stage orchestras in Don Giovanni, the shattering choral interruptions in the Saint Matthew Passion; the organ grinder versus the music box in Petrushka. He had us compose exercises for class in which two different kinds of melodies would duel against each other. I remember writing a piece in 4/4 overlapping with 6/8 in unequal barlines, played by the available instruments in class: flute (Lita Dubman), oboe (Jacques Hétu), violin (Bob Baksa), and trombone (Michael Horvit); about the best that could be said for this miscellaneous piece was that it satisfied the conditions of the assignment.

The first weekend of the Tanglewood season was a Bach festival conducted by Charles Munch. This was when I got to hear Lukas’s superb piano playing for the first time. On Saturday evening, he played five Bach concerti, an unforgettably sparkling occasion, especially the great D minor and the Fifth Brandenburg, as well as the D minor Concerto for three pianos (the other pianists were Seymour Lipkin and Ralph Berkowitz).

One Saturday morning, there was an open rehearsal of Copland’s newly-arranged orchestral suite from The Tender Land, Copland conducting. Lukas borrowed Copland’s autograph score — not a photocopy — for us to look at during the rehearsal, and led all seven of us in front of the roped-off section in the Shed so that we could be close to the orchestra. I have a vivid memory of watching the score carefully during the square-dance music, and I saw that the off-beats in the snare drum part were being heavily accented. I pointed out that the accents weren’t indicated in the score, whereupon to my shocked amazement Lukas took out his red ballpoint pen and wrote the accents into Copland’s autograph. I mention this for the benefit of documentary experts who may be puzzled to find an alien hand in the composer’s manuscript, though every musicologist knows that such things happen all the time.

Lukas himself conducted the Boston Symphony at one concert, with his own recently-completed Symphony of Chorales, a piece I liked but have never heard since; I don’t know even if it has been published or recorded. He also talked about a piece he was working on, a concerto for improvising instruments and orchestra; I don’t know if he finished it, but he had a group that he founded in California, the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble (clarinet, cello, piano and percussion), and this group eventually created the improvised interludes in Time Cycle as well as the partly aleatoric Echoi for which Lukas wrote precisely-notated but freely-assembled fragments.

In December of that year Lukas played first piano (the other three were played by Copland, Samuel Barber, and Roger Sessions) in a performance at Town Hall of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, with Stravinsky conducting. Several of us Tanglewood alumni were there, and I had a fourth-row seat. Afterwards we hurried backstage to greet our master. (Standing on the narrow platform outside the green room, I almost knocked someone off the stairs; only years later did I realize that the tall gentleman had been Rudolf Serkin.) A recording appeared later; Lukas, playing first, was clearly the best pianist. This was brought home even more in the 1977 recording of Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety, in which Lukas’s vivid performance with the Israel Philharmonic is faithfully captured.

I saw him only once or twice until he returned to Boston once a week to teach at Boston University, and then we spoke more often. We talked about old friends, and at one point I served on a panel at Boston University honoring his 80th birthday in 2002. Over the decades I didn’t hear nearly as much of Lukas’s music as I wanted to, but I have been very reassured by the number of new recordings that have appeared just recently, including Griffelkin which I heard in Jordan Hall in concert performance. [See the BMInt review here.] (I remembered all the way back to 1959 when Lukas casually remarked that he had included a quote from his earlier opera, The Jumping Frog, in this larger piece. I saw a performance of The Jumping Frog, too, at the Boston University Theater.) I was essentially unsympathetic to the improvisational premises of Echoi even while I admired the performance, knowing how deeply Lukas was involved in improvisation. (I can’t explain this prejudice, especially when I love jazz improvisation.) Echoi is exciting but I still tend to think of it as over-the-top, and too rapt with avant-garde tendencies when this listener, at least, is so resolutely conservative. I felt the same way about Phorion (Greek, “stolen goods”; 1967) although I was delighted with Lukas’s description of it as resulting from a vision, or a dream, in which the notes of Bach’s E-major Partita for solo violin were being continually “washed ashore.”

Where I never had any doubts at all about the direction, and the success, of Lukas’s art was in Time Cycle in 1961, four songs for soprano and orchestra on texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, with improvised interludes by the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble. This work was justly recognized even at the time as a first-rate achievement. I heard Lukas conduct Time Cycle with the BSO in Symphony Hall and a year later at Tanglewood, with Adele Addison, who commissioned it. The orchestral proportions were perfect, the vocal writing both graceful and grateful, and the overall imagination of the highest order. There were some technical devices that were radical enough in 1961: notes fingered by a full section of strings but neither plucked nor bowed (virtually inaudible when just one player does it, but clear enough and subtly quiet within an entire section); pressure accents in tied notes for the woodwinds; and most startling, the striking of the hours, from one to midnight, whispered aloud by members of the orchestra in the final song (from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; Mahler uses the same text in the fourth movement of his Third Symphony, but without the announcement of the hours). In that deeply expressive song, two flutes and two solo violins are situated far back on stage, in the corners, playing an ineffably sad refrain, until, simultaneous with the 12th and final hour, the widely-spaced strings strike and sustain a dominant seventh chord to the end, an amazing sound in this apocalyptic context. Time Cycle is a genuine international masterpiece, as fine a musical work as the second half of the 20th century has produced. It was honored with a New York Critics Circle Award in 1961. My copy of the re-mastered recording on CD of Time Cycle has 158 portrait photographs of Leonard Bernstein, who conducted the premiere, but no pictures of Lukas.

See related review here.

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, music harmony.

Daniel Stepner, baroque violin, Eliot Fisk, guitar, and John Gibbons, harpsichord, were the artists in this amiable program, which sounded well in the moderate-sized Remis Auditorium at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The ensemble had a well-formed intimacy of sound but also a reassuring informality as the performers talked about the music they played rather than relying on printed program notes. The chamber setting also was appropriate to instrumentation flexibility, entirely in keeping with Baroque practice, where music written for one instrument might be easily and effectively played on another.

The performers explained that although only one of the five composers was a native Spaniard, two of the others lived and worked in Spain. Another, J. S. Bach, was represented by his famous “Ciaconna” from the D minor Partita for solo violin (BWV 1004 — that number got left off the program somehow), in Eliot Fisk’s powerful transcription for guitar; the chaconne form, it was pointed out, derived from a fast dance that originated in Spanish America and was transplanted back to Europe, where it was widely adopted at a slower tempo. This was the third Bach Chaconne I had heard in less than a year, after Brahms’s arrangement for piano, left hand alone, played by Leon Fleisher in New York last June, and Thomas Zehetmair’s performance of the original violin version at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on Washington’s birthday; all of these were strong reminders that the instrumentation hardly mattered in bringing off the enormous and amazing architecture of the piece.

The Fandango that began the concert was by Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), who spent more than 20 years at the court in Madrid; but it had a startling resemblance to a more famous Fandango for harpsichord by Antonio Soler (1729-1783). Both works are long, repetitive ostinato pieces relentlessly and irresistibly emphasizing D-minor tonic and dominant harmony, over and over, with very occasional diversions into the relative major. Even though Boccherini’s was an arrangement, there was plenty of opportunity for virtuosic improvisation, with wide skips in the violin over and across the strings (the baroque violin uses a shorter and de-curved bow), and a big cadenza for solo guitar.

The Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), a contemporary of Bach, wrote prolifically in many genres, including opera and sacred music, but remains best known today for his more than 500 one-movement sonatas for harpsichord and other solo keyboard instruments, works which gave stability and renown to the bipartite sonata form. We heard a short Sonata for violin and harpsichord in G major, in four movements, and after the intermission, four of the most famous harpsichord sonatas, from Scarlatti’s first publication of Essercizi per il gravicembalo, published in 1738 (in London of all places). Scarlatti’s exploration of the short sonata form pushed significant boundaries in the days before Haydn and Mozart expanded it and took it into the orchestra, and Scarlatti certainly approached Bach in his imaginative roving tonality and chromatic harmony. These sonatas were remarkable also for their athletic technique, requiring frequent crossing of the left hand over the right for single notes, and back again. There was a moment of delightful camaraderie with the audience when John Gibbons explained how he had first learned the D major Sonata on the piano decades ago, and decided to re-learn it with Scarlatti’s specific instructions for crossed hands on the harpsichord, a difficult proposition when playing parallel thirds because even on the separate manuals the two hands are closely positioned one above the other. In the end he decided not to finish playing this one, lest his fingers entirely confuse each other, and I was reminded of the place in Schumann’s C major Fantasy for piano where the crossed hands, on collision course in opposite directions, actually are notated to play four notes in succession with both hands (LH 1234 and RH 5432). Gibbons concluded with the famous Sonata in G minor, known as the “Cat’s Fugue,” so called because, according to legend, Scarlatti’s cat walked along the keyboard, striking the rising notes G, B flat, E flat, F sharp, B flat and C sharp.

Antonio Soler, a monk at the Escorial, was not quite as prolific a composer as Scarlatti (who in fact was his teacher), though he wrote 120 sonatas in addition to the famous Fandango; his principal output was in sacred music, including 28 settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah for Holy Week (other composers who used these texts include Thomas Tallis, François Couperin, and Igor Stravinsky). One of these settings, dating from 1763 and originally for soprano, violin, and fortepiano, was effectively arranged by our group; sometimes the violin, and at other times the guitar, took over the soprano line. This expressive piece was in F minor, an unusually somber key for guitar or for violin.

The Roman Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713), the oldest composer represented on the program, never got to Spain but was happy to write a celebrated set of variations on “La Folia,” a famous Spanish ground-bass melody widely adopted for dancing. (Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli, for piano, refer to this work.) Corelli’s variations, originally for violin and continuo, here were effectively adapted to the trio ensemble. Some of the variations were without the violin, others involved a stichomythy of violin and guitar alternating one bar at a time. Mostly the variations were in 3/4 meter, the traditional pace of the dance, while some broadened out expressively to 4/4. As in the Fandango that began the concert, there was a lot of opportunity for bursts of virtuosity, including some rasgueado strumming that reminded one of flamenco style. I lost count of how many variations there were, but in the excitement of the ensemble, that didn’t matter.

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, music harmony.

The program began with For Toru, for flute and string quintet (including double bass), written in 1997 in memory of Toru Takemitsu, Japan’s most distinguished composer of 20th century. This elegiac piece featured some dense but colorful chordal harmony, episodes of a steady pulse, and a lot of bent pitches such as a shakuhachi player would have relished. There were glissandi and microtones in the strings, too, and it was interesting to watch the players as they coped with slow vibrato in a microtonal context. The flute solo, beautifully played by Kathleen Boyd, included a motif of three upward whole steps — almost a tribute to the chorale in Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, and that too might honor Takemitsu.

Two movements from Foss’s Echoi, a 12-minute excerpt of a much larger work in four movements (1964), followed. I had last heard this piece live in Oregon in 1967, when I also heard him lecture about it. He wrote it for his own Improvisation Chamber Ensemble (piano, clarinet, cello, and percussion) with a view to exploiting their instrumental skills to the full and even beyond, and it is an exciting adventure when heard in its entirety. The closest that these movements came to actual improvisation was in the choice of different fragments indicated in the score and separately cued as required by the conductor. Director Theodore Antoniou cued with his right hand, while clutching his baton around its shaft with his left; there was no mistaking those careful gestures.

The Elegy for Anne Frank (1989) for piano and small group — solo strings, horn, trombone, and percussion — was a deeply gripping piece. It consisted of several episodes separated by recitation from Anne Frank’s diary. The episodes were alternately lyrically tonal and dramatically graphic, expressing Anne’s hope for a better world even while the Nazis goose-stepped outside the secret Annexe. At one moment one heard upper-register piano like a stylized music-box; at another, whole-tone harmony and harsh dissonances in string clusters (some of the players simultaneously singing), low-register brass, a threatening beat on the bass drum. The dramatic reading was well executed by Carly Waldman.

Following the intermission, the Boston University Chamber Singers, directed by Ann Howard Jones, presented (with piano accompaniment) two movements, from the original nine, of Foss’s earliest large-scale work, The Prairie, first performed in 1944. This cantata, on an expansive text by Carl Sandburg, reveals influence from Aaron Copland’s open-spaces style, but well assimilated with a good deal of original color. It was a pity not to hear the entire piece, but the interested listener can find a recent CD by the Providence Singers and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Andrew Clark, the first complete recording of The Prairie in many years. Introducing the next work on the program, Ann Jones said that Foss’s Behold, I build an house had been commissioned for and presented by Boston University in connection with the opening of the Marsh Chapel in 1952. The chorus handled the complex harmony of this piece with expert precision and clarity.

It was hard to keep track of nineteen different short Epigrams played in rapid succession, but one was aware of a striking diversity of styles and spirit, some seriously somber, some irrepressibly gay, some dense and percussive, some spare and linear, and all making the most of a simultaneously solemn and optimistic occasion. (Yes, of course I heard the Scarlatti quotes, and bits of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto — a favorite of Foss’s.) It was apparent, too, from the composers’ individual comments on their Epigrams that Lukas Foss had made a powerful impress on their studies and on their lives. The performances may have had a few problems, especially in quickly shifting gears from piece to piece, but there was no doubt about the former students’ abilities and their commitment, and their pleasure in honoring the memory of a friend. The 19 composers, in order, were John H. Wallace, Panagiotis Liaropoulos, Ronald G. Vigue, Po-Chun Wang, Gon Hwang, Michalis Economou, Mauricio Pauly, Julian Wachner, Margaret McAllister, Jakov Jakoulov, Apostolos Paraskevas, Ramon P. Castillo, Ivana Lisak, Jeremy Van Buskirk, Paul Vash, Pedro Malpic, Jorge Grossmann, Matt Van Brink, and Mark Berger.

See related article here.

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, music harmony.

Chopin’s style was influenced by those he adored most — Bach and Mozart — and by Polish folk music, but in every sense is uniquely his own,  Its classical refinement resulted in a higher proportion of excellence and a lower proportion of inferior work than in the case of any other great composer.  Though he could not match them in output, Chopin had a melodic gift as great as Mozart’s or Schubert’s.  Of all the major composers his arena was the most limited: except for 6 solos with orchestra, some chamber music and some songs, his entire corpus consists of about 250 pieces for solo piano.  These works form the core of the Romantic piano repertory and include much of the most poetically subtle music of all time.  The unparalleled originality of Chopin’s harmonic language influenced a centuryful of composers from Schumann and Wagner to Rachmaninoff and Debussy and continues to be felt today.

Chopin said that he didn’t understand Beethoven, but on the evidence of his successful struggles with the sonata form, he understood enough.  The process of “symphonic” development by relentless application of repeated motives suited the Austro-German tradition, but it didn’t suit Chopin.  It sufficed him to devise his own approach to narrative structure that is perfectly original, idiosyncratic, and valid.  He achieved triumphs in the larger genres fully as well as in the miniatures for which he was most famous in his own time.  The vivid pianism of his youthful concertos (he wrote both at age 19) completely overcomes their orchestral weaknesses.  The improvisatory qualities of the scherzos and ballades define a visionary world that no later composer could approximate; the sui generis forms of the F minor Fantasy, the Barcarolle, and the Polonaise-Fantaisie, mighty monuments from Chopin’s last years, show that he was at the height of his powers when he died of tuberculosis at 39.  We are still learning from his example, singing his nocturnes, and dancing with his 56 mazurkas.  Happy 200th Birthday, Fryderyk Chopin, beloved master and greatest of composers for the piano.