Primakov has lived in the US for some time, but his early studies in his native Moscow, first with his mother, Maria Primakova, and then with Vera Gornostaeva at the Moscow Central Special Music School, seem to have left an indelible mark on him. Although he continued his studies at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara and later with Jerome Lowenthal at Juilliard, his playing immediately calls to mind the great Russian tradition of virtuoso playing and the particular perspective on musical emotion that we associate with it. No matter how intense the feeling expressed by a Schumann, a Chopin, or a Rachmaninoff, the poise of the virtuoso focuses attention on the music, so that whatever feeling is expressed in contained within it. The strongest presence throughout is the music as the composer wrote it. By this I don’t imply any kind of literalism in Primakov’s playing, rather a strong awareness of his own position as a pianist, as a musician, and as a human being. As he plays, he is able to experience and to respond to the sounds he himself is making, and from his eloquent facial expressions, it is clear that he is responding to the musical shapes and harmonies, as well as to what they express. This is sophisticated musicianship, but in this sophistication you will never find a trace of coldness or fussiness. His robust approach to the keyboard wouldn’t allow that.

The handsome Shaker Tannery, built in 1834, where the concerts take place, exacts its price on hot days, when it absorbs all the heat and humidity there is and holds it cruelly within its walls to torture the performer and his audience. Only a noisy fan provides relief, and this goes off during the music. I understand that a few of the ticket-holders cancelled out, to be replaced quickly enough by people who might have had to be turned away. Primakov could not hide his discomfort, and there was a change of shirt during the break, but once he set into the music, his concentration was unimpaired.

Preparation is a central part of Primakov’s programming. He has put together a suite of fourteen, all arranged in a coherent sequence according to key and mood. Schubert could have strung these short dances together in different sequences to provide an interlude for dancing at one of the musical evenings the composer held for friends and patrons, or they simply could have served well at a dancing party. Here, they belonged entirely to the world of the piano recital, in which they provided an engaging curtain-raiser and prepared the audience for the serial listening demanded by the far more substantial Rachmaninoff Preludes which took up the entire second half. The sequence of the Schubert waltzes played at Tannery was made by Primakov himself. On his wonderful CD on Bridge Records, he used three dance suites to “ventilate” the Op. 90 and 142 Impromptus that make up the core of the program. Two of those were compiled by his early teacher, Vera Gornostaeva, showing that he encountered Schubert’s waltzes and developed an affection for them at an early age. As he played them, there was little of the relaxed intimacies of Viennese party music, and all of the weight and discipline of a public piano recital.

Primakov produced a full sound from the Tannery Yamaha. Rhythms were crisp and cleanly articulated and the voices carefully balanced, as if the pieces were from the scherzi of a sonata. What interests the grown-up Primakov the most are the shapes of the lovely melodies and the mood shifts guided by harmonic modulations and contrasts. One could admire his force and technique even in these simple pieces.

The Schumann Third Sonata presents another set of problems altogether. Even in its revised version, as Primakov explained, in which harmonies were simplified and the first of two scherzi abandoned, the work is seldom played. It is knotty Schumann, difficult for the pianist and the audience. Clara, Primakov believes, influenced Robert to make the revisions, but the first version clearly seems preferable. In this, the first movement is rich in dissonant harmonies, and the first scherzo supplies a symmetrical balance around the beautiful slow movement, which now occupies the core of a five-movement work. Its running figures also prepare the listener for a similar rush of notes in the finale. In itself, it has a wonderfully obsessive, even insane, quality, which Primakov understood and brought out in loving detail. The sonata as a whole, especially the even crazier finale: “Prestissimo possibile,” can sound impulsive and amorphous. Primakov, first of all, brought some order to the whole, along with a virtuosic technique that allowed him to make the lines clear and balanced. Here, as in the Rachmaninoff Preludes and even in the Schubert waltzes, Primakov showed an especially keen ear for the overall texture and the interweaving of inner lines within it. The harmonic experimentation in the first version of the first movement helped clarify it, as well as give it color and tension. His control of pace and dynamic contrasts did the rest. What emerges is a passionate, turbulent, but coherent sonata form movement which provides a foundation for the ensuing four movements. Between the two scherzi the slow movement sits in its melancholy beauty, a set of variations on a somber theme by Clara, the least eccentric of the lot. Here Primakov’s treatment of the overlapping voices in different colors worked to special advantage. The second scherzo, following the marital dialogue of the slow movement, is less mercurial than the first one, but it does serve to raise the temperature for the furious rush of the finale, which starts of in a manner suggesting the Tarantella of Schubert’s C Minor Sonata or one of Mendelssohn’s finales in a similar vein, and becomes more toccata-like as it develops. Again, the incisiveness of Primakov’s chords and the clarity of his playing let us hear Schumann’s music without sacrificing any of its mad energy.

While you can find Schubert and Schumann somewhere in the pedigree of Rachmaninoff’s preludes (In fact, you can hear some phrases in the waltzes echoed in them), their true begetter is Chopin. Beyond that, they lie within the great Russian musical tradition. When they are played, Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky periodically pass through the room. Hearing them, one has a strong sense of lineage, although it was Rachmaninoff, Skryabin, and later Prokofiev, who gave it a full pianistic voice in Russia. On this evening, it seemed as if all of Primakov’s control of color, pointing of harmonies, and virtuosity — which he in fact kept out of the limelight, until it really made sense in the return of an important theme, or in a blazing climax — was looking ahead to the twelve preludes (from Op. 3, 23, & 32) he selected from the twenty-four Rachmaninoff composed. (In fact he omitted one of them, presumably because of the heat.) If many of the preludes gave him the opportunity for impressive displays of technique and fiery bravado, he remained focused on the music throughout. Their essential qualities were contained in the moods and feelings they evoked, even in their spiritual nature. Each prelude creates a world in itself, each with its own atmosphere, scheme of chiaroscuro, and palette of colors, and Primakov understood that this came before pianistic display, although that is an essential part of them as well. Although he used extremely delicate pianissimi in the Schubert and Schumann, Rachmaninoff gave him the scope to muster a vast range of color and dynamics in these fully realized performances.

In his two encores he seemed to bring everything back home in a waltz and a mazurka by Chopin.

Primakov, unusually in this day and age, records actively—for Bridge Records. Not only are the Schubert waltzes available in a mini-recital with a group of Impromptus, a magnificent disc of twelve Rachmaninoff Preludes and the Corelli Variations was released in May (Bridge 9348). It was recorded in the superb acoustics of the Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, on a Bechstein piano in virtually audiophile sound. Need I say more?

Michael Miller, a writer and photographer based in Williamstown, MA, is editor and publisher of the Berkshire Review for the Arts, an online magazine which covers classical music, opera, theater, cinema, art, photography, architecture, travel, and food and drink, wherever they may be found.

John-Storgaards led the BSO(Hilary-Scott)

Mark Volpe and his crew deserve a medal for putting together a fine group of replacements for James Levine’s dates in only a few months. Charles Dutoit and Hans Graf are well known to Boston audiences, less so Emmanuel Krivin; and John Storgårds, who conducted on July 16, is a total newcomer. Storgårds’s background is especially interesting, given his predilection for mixing up the basic repertory with little-known symphonic works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, Walton, Korngold and Nino Rota, as well as contemporary compositions, like international premiere performances of Rautavaara’s new cello concerto with Truls Mørk and the same composer’s new percussion concerto with Colin Currie, Saariaho’s new clarinet concerto with Kari Kriikku, Gruber’s “Busking” with Håkan Hardenberger and a new concerto for orchestra by Rolf Wallin. Before studying to become a conductor, Storgårds was concertmaster of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra during Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tenure and continues to perform as a virtuoso violin soloist, a fact that has special relevance to his work in the Sibelius Violin Concerto at Tanglewood. Currently chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and artistic director of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra, Storgårds makes frequent guest appearance with major orchestras of Scandinavia, the UK, and Germany, as well as Australia, Japan, and so far in the US, the Cincinnati Orchestra, where he was immediately invited back. I shouldn’t be surprised if that happened in Boston as well. He is a conductor of authority and has a profound knowledge of the scores he conducted. In a way, it’s too bad that we didn’t get a chance to hear him in one of his trademark mixed programs, but in this one Storgård had a chance to show his personal sympathy for the music of his national composer and his own highly individual way of projecting it through an orchestra, every bit as rugged and uncompromising as the music itself.

Earlier in his career, Sibelius was idolized, but his music was soon recognized as conservative and imbued with the nationalistic sentiments of earlier generations. As his compositional activity fell off in the late 1920s, he could offer little to resist criticisms of his work and his politics as anti-progressive and passé. By the 1960s, when Mahler was being rediscovered, the controversy lapsed into indifference, but Sibelius survived to some degree in the UK, partly due to that way he fits with his British contemporaries and partly due to Colin Davis’ championship of his work, beginning in the late 1950s. For some fifty years now, Sir Colin has rehabilitated Sibelius for younger generations with performances which were highly refined in balance and color and which emphasized the coherence and flow of the symphonies to ears that were impatient towards the moody wanderings Sibelius had been known for. I certainly owe my own affection for Sibelius to Sir Colin’s representation of him.

Storgårds came with something entirely different. His method of presenting a piece to an audience is entirely in the moment. Each work is what it is for its duration, and each section of each work has its own integrity and power. He dispensed with his baton for Finlandia and Valse Triste and conducted both of them with a more or less true agogic technique, that is, guiding the shape of the phrases and rhythm with gestures of the hand and arm, rather than stroking out the beat of each measure with the stick. In these he made his approach to Sibelius clear, and although he used a baton and a more conventional technique in the concerto and the symphony, they reflected the same view of the composer as an artist who, immersed in intense emotions of his own, departed from classical form to concentrate on expression. In both of the tone poems, Storgårds led the audience into Sibelius’ progression of mental states through his arresting opening gestures, fully weighted pauses, and melodic phrases moulded for emotive weight rather than moving the listener through the whole of a well shaped composition. The strings played with great substance and warmth, as did the brass, which often entered with biting, even harsh attacks. Atmosphere and feeling justified themselves in these powerful readings, and Sibelius came across as a more daring composer than he is often given credit for. The orchestra followed Storgårds with energy and commitment, and, from their behavior during the enthusiastic applause, they clearly enjoyed playing for him.

Nikolaj Znaider, violin (Hilary-Scott photo)

Nikolaj Znaider brought a markedly different mentality to the mix. He tempered his consummate virtuosity with an aristocratic poise and restraint, using his command of tone color as an intellectual tool to probe the many different facets of Sibelius’ invention. In this, he and Storgård’s had an important trait in common, and both approached the concerto as a work of great complexity, teeming with ideas, so rich that they are almost more than its classical structure can bear. (The Violin Concerto is as close as Sibelius comes to Mahler.) For the rest, I cannot imagine more sympathetic accompaniment that what Storgårds provided. He seemed both to feel and to think his way into Znaider’s playing with a unique capability for identification, no doubt aided by his own secondary career as a violin soloist. (Znaider himself doubles as a conductor.) Their performance was a monumental reading of the work that emphasized its originality and modernity, and this made a stark contrast to the approach of many violinists, who tend to assimilate it to romanticism. Znaider produced a consistently warm, burnished sound from the 1741 Guarneri he plays (which once belonged to Fritz Kreisler), but this only proved to be the basis for the extraordinary range of coloration he brought to Sibelius’ writing — an incredibly versatile language for his analysis of the work. A few years ago, I stated some criticisms of Znaider’s impressive account of the Elgar Violin Concerto, because I felt his restraint and intellectuality got in the way of Elgar’s elegiac sensitivities. Here, in contrast, the Sibelius Concert only gained from his rigor and insight.

Using a baton with the same eloquence and precision he exercised in the Violin Concerto, Storgård brought an immense range of expression to his interpretation of the Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, presenting it, like the other works, as a highly original, modern work. In this program, as I’ve mentioned, he made each piece stand alone, as individual creations, each with its own coloristic, harmonic, and psychological palette. The buildup of dissonant chords in the last movement, just before the final section of it, was without a doubt one of the most thrilling moments I have experienced in the concert hall. I cannot remember any other conductor who went so far in bringing out the harsh wildness of this amazing passage. The Fifth, in its symphonic monumentality and singleness of purpose, did not show as many psychic nooks and crannies as the Violin Concerto, but Storgård once again produced an exploratory reading, which in turn brought out the exploratory character of Sibelius’ composition. In general these performances revealed Sibelius as a great musical adventurer, one of extraordinary bravery in creatively opening himself to terrifyingly dark states of mind, which could well lead the way to insanity. In Sibelius’ case it was chronic depression, alcoholism, and a final block to his creativity.

In John Storgårds, the BSO found a superb conductor for the Sibelius program James Levine left behind. I rather think Storgårds had more original insights into the music than Levine would have shown. In fact they may well have found something more than a superb guest conductor. Although he lacks the international “high profile” of Chailly or Nelsons, Storgård’s broad interests in music, the substance and interest of the programs he has initiated in Finland, as well as his technical skill as a conductor are enough to make him an especially appealing candidate for the empty music director’s position at the Boston Symphony. I hope the committee will give him very serious consideration.

Michael Miller, a writer and photographer based in Williamstown, MA, is editor and publisher of the Berkshire Review for the Arts, an online magazine which covers classical music, opera, theater, cinema, art, photography, architecture, travel, and food and drink, wherever they may be found.

My preview of this year’s Tanglewood season has been revised twice, due to James Levine’s cancellations of all his engagements. So there is a modicum of grumbling in this preview, which doesn’t mean that Tanglewood no longer offers a variety of superb music-making that will appeal to music-lovers of many different tastes. While the situation as it stands is not good, one can only express one’s sympathy and admiration for the administrators who have attempted to keep most of the offerings Tanglewood that have made this music festival popular with a broad audience and have sought to avoid a disaster at the box office.

However, with this season, it is beginning to be apparent that the change of scheduling — more importantly the shape of the season — at Tanglewood is intended to permanent. In the past, the Music Director and the BSO got the Festival off to a rousing start on the Fourth of July weekend with a Tchaikovsky symphony or some other grandiose work of popular appeal. (I don’t know how long the actual Fourth of July program has been a pop concert.) Beginning in 2008, that holiday weekend has been the property of James Taylor, the ever-popular singer, guitarist, and local resident. In fact the entire first week of the season will be a James Taylor festival, with performances in Ozawa Hall on June 28, 29, and 30, and in the Music Shed with the Boston Pops on July 1, followed by A Prairie Home Companion on July 2, culminating in two performances of The Essential James Taylor on July 3 and 4. In other words, the BSO concerts now begin and end a week later than in the past.

The Pelléas et Mélisande now is no longer; it will be replaced by a TMC Orchestra concert, the program of which is still unannounced as of today, May 26. The other programs will proceed as scheduled, with these just-announced replacements that have conducted the BSO several times, at least. : Charles Dutoit conducting the Italian opera potpourri and the Berlioz Requiem on July 8 and 9; Emmanuel Krivine, the all-Ravel program on July 24; Hans Graf, the Mahler Symphony No. 5 and Mozart Piano Concerto No. 12 in A, K. 414, on July 29; and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and Stefan Asbury, who will take over Levine’s bits in “Tanglewood on Parade” on August 2. A newcomer, the distinguished Finnish conductor, John Storgårds, will take over the all-Sibelius program on July 16. Storgårds, chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, artistic director of the Chamber Orchestra of Lapland, and principal guest conductor of BBC Philharmonic, is known for rooting out little-known symphonic treasures of the twentieth century. Unfortunately we won’t benefit from that aspect of his talents, but the Sibelius Violin Concerto (with Nikolaj Znaider) and Fifth Symphony should give him plenty of substance to work with.

Each week gives us a taste of the various endeavors we know and treasure at Tanglewood, from Rachmaninoff to Wuorinen. Since the economic troubles of 2008 and James Levine’s health problems, which began before that, Tanglewood programming has become increasingly conservative and crowd-pleasing, and the pop stars, especially last season, have been creeping in. The sempiternal Beethoven’s Ninth is being jostled a bit by jazz and pop at the end. Is the management preparing us for a fusion Tanglewood? My knowledge of pop culture is sadly insufficient to describe the sort of middle-brow Middle Earth that is encompassed by James Taylor, Garrison Keillor, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Steely Dan, and Radio Deluxe, but I know that Lenny (Leonard Bernstein), one of the more august tutelary spirits of Tanglewood, would not have approved of easy listening for baby boomers. His vision of “pop” and “classical” was a lot more sophisticated and challenging. Then of course there was the idealistic vision of Serge Koussevitzky. It would be a crime to compromise that for the turnstile and the cash register.

While, I believe, the Tanglewood management deserves a sound rap of the knuckles for caving in to commercialism and compromising the uniqueness of Tanglewood, so that the season is dangerously similar to SPAC’s, there will be much to enjoy there this summer, and as I wrote this, I found myself looking forward more and more warmly to the Tanglewood summer. The problem is not only in the compromise of Koussevitzkian ideals, and the fact that the pop concerts cut into the time available for the TMC Orchestra and Opera. In providing these blue-chip pop performers the baby-boomers who supposedly flock to the Berkshires feel comfortable with, Tanglewood is fragmenting its audience, and this has been going on for some time. While a person who has come for the Festival of Contemporary Music may well attend a BSO concert in the Shed, just to hear the magnificent orchestra, it is a rare occurrence that a frequenter of the Shed will venture over to the CMF. Similarly, the pop concerts and the Jazz Festival have their own audience, and if a few of them happen to hear a Brahms or a Russian program, it is not enough to bring the audiences together. And I’m not saying this out of snobbishness, either. I’m very much looking forward to hearing Tyondai Braxton at the Tully Scope Festival next month, because his music belongs here and now, and it is entirely relevant to the planning of the festival, for which there is a unified audience. Attendance and money don’t solve the problem for the future.

Perspective on The Programs

The pre-season performances, previously given by distinguished soloists and chamber groups, usually a string quartet, will be replaced, like last year, by a two-day string quartet marathon in the Theatre. As usual the Mark Morris Dance Group will perform two evenings in Ozawa Hall, June 28 and 29 (with Yo-Yo Ma, no less!), but the first sign of life at Tanglewood will be a performance by the eclectic rock group, Earth, Wind, and Fire, announced several weeks after the original season schedule. Like all of Tanglewood’s ever-increasing pop offerings, this group has stood the test of time and has developed a broad appeal. As the release says, “Formed in 1969 in Chicago, Illinois, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Earth, Wind, & Fire created a new brand of pop music — one steeped in African and African-American styles including jazz and R&B but appealing to a broader cross-section of the listening public. Earth, Wind, & Fire combined high-caliber musicianship, wide-ranging musical genre eclecticism, and ’70s multicultural spiritualism.”

The Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, composed of the elite Fellows who flock to Lenox each summer to perfect their already impressive musicianship, will play its first concert on Tuesday, July 5, an as yet unannounced program under the Peruvian conductor, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Music Director of the Fort Worth Symphony. Eclectic crossover classical-pop will then return on Thursday, July 7, when the Mark O’Connor String Quartet will play a program of their favorites.

So Friday, July 8 will then be the official “Opening Night at Tanglewood.” Charles Dutoit will conduct a program of Italian snippets, overtures by Rossini and Verdi, a few Gabrieli canzoni, excerpts from Bellini’s Norma and Verdi’s I Lombardi, all concluding with Respighi’s Pines of Rome. This would seem pretty much a mindless throw-away program, if it were not an opportunity for a wider group to hear Angela Meade sing bits from Norma, in which she performed so thrillingly last summer at Caramoor, in an impeccably prepared and brilliantly executed performance under Will Crutchfield. If nothing else, it will give her and James Levine a chance to get better acquainted, as her Met career begins to advance, as it possibly may. That alone should be very much worthwhile, but if anyone thinks that any James Taylor fan who was still recovering from the previous weekend and happened to drop in might pick up a passion for Italian opera from this program, they are sadly mistaken. The program at least has the merit of conserving rehearsal time and energy for the important and challenging work scheduled for the following evening.

During his tenure at the BSO, Maestro Levine has shown a predilection for starting Tanglewood off with something serious, as well as the traditional opening night fare. This year, he will continue his commendable Berlioz initiative with the Requiem. This has been a great warhorse for Levine’s predecessors at the BSO. Charles Munch’s recording remains a classic. Levine’s sincere enthusiasm for Berlioz, the BSO’s traditional grounding in the music, and the matchless singing of John Oliver’s chorus — not to mention the vast space of the Music Shed, as a fitting transatlantic stand-in for Les Invalides — should make this one of the absolute musts of the Tanglewood season. If you stay over for the Sunday afternoon concert, you can recover on familiar Tanglewood fare, like the Bruch Scottish Fantasy with Joshua Bell and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique under the direction of Harth-Bedoya. But why not stick around for Monday night as well, when the TMC Orchestra will play an as yet unannounced program under Stefan Asbury, unfortunately the only appearance of this energetic advocate for modern and new music, unless he will be a part of the Contemporary Music Festival, which has not yet been announced in detail. He is a splendid conductor in any repertoire.

Chamber music will begin in earnest during the week with the great Emerson String Quartet playing a satisfying program of Haydn, Bartók’s Sixth, and Schubert No. 15 in G in Tuesday July 12. On Thursday July 14 Nikolaj Znaider and pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar will play violin sonatas by Beethoven, Schumann, and Franck.

The BSO concerts the following weekend will include, on Friday, July 16, Lynn Harrell playing the Dvorák Cello Concerto with Kurt Masur, who will also conduct Schumann’s First Symphony, Spring. Schumann has been a speciality of Masur’s throughout his career (and you can read BMInt’s review from last fall here). On Saturday, the all-Sibelius program under John Storgårds, with the Fifth Symphony and Nikolai Znaider playing the Violin Concerto, should provide an appropriate warm-up for the Bard Festival coming up in August, which will be devoted to the controversial Finnish master. On Sunday, Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops will take over for a program of orchestral favorites and Cole Porter show tunes.

The following week will bring the major solo event of the season. Jean-Yves Thibaudet will play Ravel’s complete works for piano on Wednesday and Thursday, July 20 and 21. On Sunday, July 24, Thibaudet will play both of Ravel’s piano concerti along with the orchestral version of Valses nobles et sentimentales. Emanuel Krivine will conduct. This Ravel mini-festival should also prove one of the highlights of the summer.

A TMC Orchestra concert will replace the previously scheduled Pelléas et Mélisande. The only other concert that week will be the rock group Steely Dan the evening after. So that will be a quiet week at Tanglewood.

Friday July 29, Hans Graf will conduct the Mahler Fifth, which Levine conducted so sensitively early last fall. This was one of Levine’s very greatest Mahler performances, broad, analytical, and extremely detailed, with a deeply moving slow movement. Leon Fleisher will begin the program with Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A, K. 414. On Saturday Christoph Eschenbach will accompany Peter Serkin in Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, followed by his Fourth Symphony, and on Sunday Eschenbach will accompany Alisa Weilerstein in Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C, before he leads the BSO in Mahler’s First Symphony.

The traditional “Tanglewood on Parade” concert will occur on July 31, complete with fireworks, to be followed by something completely different, the four-day Festival of Contemporary Music, this year devoted to the wonderful Charles Wuorinen, who will direct it. The six-program festival will feature two world premiere performances including Mr. Wuorinen’s It Happens Like This, a dramatic, semi-staged 35-minute cantata for four singers and 12 instrumentalists set to six selections from James Tate’s Return to the City of White Donkeys (2004), which will open the festival on August 3, and will be conducted by James Levine. More details later, as they are announced.

Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, a very welcome staple at Tanglewood and at Symphony Hall, will turn up on Friday, August 5, to a program of Beethoven, Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody with Yuja Wang, and Richard Strauss. Saturday, another Tanglewood staple, Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, will make its appearance under Assistant Conductor Sean Newhouse, along with the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with Sarah Chang. On Sunday Lionel Bringuier, music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León in Valladolid and associate conductor of the LA Philharmonic, will conduct a program that will include Smetana’s Die Moldau, Emanuel Ax playing Mozart’s K. 482 (one of his greatest, in my opinion), and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. As pained as those Russian gentlemen were in life, one might well call that the Painless Weekend at Tanglewood.

The following week, on Tuesday, August 9, following a concert by the rock band Train on Monday August 8, André Previn will play an intriguing program with the BSO Chamber Players: Mozart, Milhaud, Martin?, and his own work for winds, brass, and strings. The mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe will perform a popular American program on Wednesday, August 10.

On Friday, August 12, Frühbeck de Burgos will conduct an accessible Spanish program with Pepe Romero. On Sunday he will conduct the summer’s second all-Brahms program, the Nänie, the Schicksalslied, and the Alto Rhapsody, followed by the Second Symphony. Stephanie Blythe will sing. Given Frühbeck’s outstanding abilities as a choral conductor, this should be very much worthwhile. On the intervening Saturday, Christoph von Dohnányi will conduct the Brahms First Symphony and Schumann’s Cello Concerto, with Yo-Yo Ma, soloist. On Sunday evening, Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax will Beethoven’s Cello Sonata Op. 69 and Brahms’s Clarinet Trio with Anthony McGill, principal clarinetist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, among other things. As usual, Brahms will be very well served at Tanglewood. (And I haven’t mentioned everything!)

After an exciting outburst of performances by period instrument groups in 2007, mostly the doing of NL: A Season of Dutch Arts in the Berkshires, Tanglewood has settled down into a routine of a single guest group each season. This is too bad, I think, not only because historically-informed performance is one of the most important, characteristic, and stimulating aspects our musical life today, but because all of these concerts are very well attended, coming close to filling up Ozawa Hall for every concert. It is clear that there is an audience for this kind of performance here in the Berkshires, beyond what our own very distinguished early and baroque music festival, Aston Magna, can provide. However, one can’t complain about this year’s single offering, a complete opera by Handel, Orlando, with an American group, one of the most distinguished, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra of San Francisco. Founded in 1981, and conducted by Nicholas McGegan, who has been their music director since 1986, it is otherwise one of most energetic, engaging, and ubiquitous champions of historical performance in America — easily a match for James Taylor in his realm. It should be enlightening for local audiences to hear what a West Coast group can do. Besides this, it will be joined by the great Dominique Labelle, a fixture in both Boston and in the Berkshires, who is one of the most intelligent and vocally felicitous singers of both baroque and contemporary music anywhere.

This might be a fine culmination to the season, but there is more. Christoph von Dohnányi will conduct a well-balanced program with Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, Op. 1, Schumann’s Piano Concerto, played by Martin Helmchen, and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony on Friday August 19. Saturday will be Film Night with the Boston Pops. The Sunday concert will be all-Mozart with Bernard Labadie, including the magnificent Chaconne from Idomeneo, the Piano Concerto K. 456 with Benedetto Lupo, and the Jupiter Symphony. Labadie is not one of my favorite Mozartians — too tight and rococo for my taste — and he’d better do all the repeats in the Jupiter to fill up his time. In the evening there will be Radio Deluxe with John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey. I could go for that.

On Thursday, August 25, Brad Mehldau will play jazz, and from here on Tanglewood will be fusion right up ‘til the classics run out of breath with the usual Beethoven’s Ninth on Sunday, August 28, when Loren Maazel will preside. Before the classical curtain falls, however, there will be a concert performance of the Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess with the BSO under Bramwell Tovey, music director of the Vancouver Symphony, on Friday August 26. An all-Beethoven program will follow on Saturday evening, with the First and Fifth Symphonies, led by Itzhak Perlman, who will play the two Romances for Violin and Orchestra. Then comes the Ninth and then the Labor Day Jazz Weekend.

I’ve always thought that a yearly ritual of the Ninth is a mistake. A performance of the Ninth should be special. I’ve heard some very good Ninths at Tanglewood, but never a truly great one. Perhaps every three years would be better. I was wondering what had become of the ever-popular staged opera in the Theatre. Finally I found it. It seems the several performances, which nearly always sell out, have been reduced to a single evening of short operas and art song by Darius Milhaud. So the TMC Vocal Fellows will get some stage experience, but nothing like the usual performances. Both the Fellows and the audience will be deeply disappointed by this. It also would have been good to carry over some of the important Harbison symphony performances from the Symphony Hall season. Chamber music seems on the wane, just as pop music is growing. Even the “classical” programming, with concerts like Stephanie Blythe and Friends, is becoming more pop-ified than in the past.

Summary

Apart from this, 2011’s program is a bit disappointing. It is the most cautious I can remember, but a roster of some of the finest conductors working in the United States leading one of the great orchestras in a solid repertoire of Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler is not a bad thing at all, although I believe quite strongly that this kind of conservatism sends the wrong message about classical music. Still, if you have just discovered classical music and are swimming through the basic repertoire, or if you have been inspired by the vacuous series in the New York Times on the “ten top composers,” (which also sends the wrong message about classical music) what better thing could you do than to take July and August off and settle in the Berkshires to take a good bit of it in? Classical radio used to do some of this job, but it is rapidly disappearing. (Note what has happened at WGBH, WNYC, and KDFC. There are twelve articles on the subject in BMInt. Click here for a list of links.) Recordings of any kind, even the best technically or the most musically inspired are no match for live music. The Ozawa Hall and the Music Shed have really fine acoustics — but be sure to get the best seats you can afford in the Shed. And if you know your way around all the basic repertoire, you know you can stand to hear it again. That makes a classic. And for that matter, I’m looking forward to hearing many of the old war horses myself.

All of the classical concerts are listed in the BMInt “Upcoming Events.” You may also click here for a convenient complete list of all Tanglewood presentations.

Michael Miller, a writer and photographer based in Williamstown, MA, is editor and publisher of the Berkshire Review for the Arts, an online magazine which covers classical music, opera, theater, cinema, art, photography, architecture, travel, and food and drink, wherever they may be found.

Gerstein’s background, however, could not be more different — with no pedagogical connection with Gilels whatsoever. As his official biography states, he was born in 1979 in Voronezh, Russia, where he attended a special music school for gifted children and taught himself to play jazz by listening to his parents’ extensive record collection — a phenomenon typical of that period in Soviet cultural history. He came to the U.S. at 14 to continue his studies in jazz piano as the youngest student ever to attend Boston’s Berklee College of Music. However, he also continued working on the classical piano repertoire. Following his second summer at the Boston University program at Tanglewood, he decided to focus mainly on classical music and moved to New York City to attend the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Solomon Mikowsky and earned Bachelors and Masters of Music degrees. He continued his studies with Dmitri Bashkirov in Madrid and Ferenc Rados in Budapest.

Gerstein first came to the attention of Christian Steiner, the director of Tannery Pond, in 2000, when he was still a student at MSM. Mikowsky called Christian Steiner and asked him if he could photograph one of his extremely talented students who was sure to “be someone.” Steiner photographed him and also heard him play; he was duly impressed. As it happened, a performer cancelled for the Tannery series, and he asked Kirill if he could fill in. Christian recorded the concert and sent a tape to an agent in London, who immediately asked Mr. Gerstein to make a recording. That was the beginning of Kirill Gerstein’s public career.

Gerstein produces a big sound when he plays, a sound easily capable of commanding Carnegie Hall or some other grand venue. While one couldn’t describe it as excessive, it was often a bit much for the Tannery and its fine Yamaha, especially considering that three of the works on the program could be considered intimate in scale, and even Frederic Chopin’s Fantaisie in F minor, Op. 49 has been addressed intimately by some pianists.

He began with J. S. Bach’s English Suite No. 2 in A Minor, BWV 807, during which he dutifully avoided touching the pedals even once with his feet. For some years, there’s been a resurgence in playing Bach on the piano. Among the younger generation —younger than Mr. Gerstein — the excellent French pianist David Fray has created a sort of rallying point in his outstanding disc of keyboard concerti. While he remains very much his own man, it is clear that he has studied the work of his greatest predecessors closely, among them Edwin Fischer and Glenn Gould, and his playing is full of reminiscences of these masters in the spirit of an homage. Gerstein looks at the suite as an example of great pre-Romantic keyboard writing and he played it as a virtuoso. His balance of tone and of the different voices, as well as his use of color to differentiate them, were especially compelling. He produced a rich, burnished sound from the piano, especially when he was not playing loud, and he supported Bach’s counterpoint with a full, resonant bass line.

Gerstein took a grand, almost epic approach to the Frederic Chopin Fantaisie in F minor, Op. 49, taking it as one of the composer’s most ambitious display pieces, although his projection of its organization was clear and controlled. The quieter passages seemed more like calculated structural contrasts rather than real shifts in the composer’s psychic state: they never wandered far from the dominant bravura spirit of the interpretation, although they were beautifully articulated and handsome in timbre. With the Chopin year upon us, I’ve been hoping to hear his music performed in a way that truly goes beyond the notes and impresses me as idiomatic, and I haven’t come upon it yet. Peter Serkin’s Chopin last fall was a joy to hear, but he goes his own way with it. We have two all-Chopin recitals from Garrick Ohlsson coming up in late August and another as part of the Troy Chromatic Concerts at the end of September, so that should be something to look forward to. Kirill Gerstein played admirably, but he remained on the surface of the music.

The second half of the concert began with a fairly short piece by Oliver Knussen, Ophelia’s Last Dance, Op. 32 (2004/10), which was receiving its premiere in its final form. Mr. Gerstein originally premiered it a few months ago, but the composer decided afterwards to add some 40 bars of music. The melancholy waltz theme, reminiscent of early Berg or Mahler, dates as far back as 1974. Knussen decided not to use it in his Third Symphony, nor did he include it in his Ophelia Dances the following year. It kept recurring to him over the years, and after the death of his wife Sue in 2003, it acquired a nostalgic power for him. Finally in 2009/10 he combined it with other “homeless” fragments of his invention into a rondo form. The association of this thematic material may not be absolutely tight, but it is striking to hear how the more agitated phrases emerge directly from the lyrical dance melody in the transitional passages. One cannot help being affected but this bittersweet, nostalgic music, and Gerstein played it impeccably, avoiding the hints of sentimentality that lurked in the background. As it began, there was a visitation from an enormous greenish-yellow bat, which fluttered over the stage and the balcony. It made something of a ruckus, but Gerstein and the audience kept their composure, and, as the piece wound down, the bat went its way.

I found the Schumann Humoreske to be the most satisfying work on the program, although I did enjoy the Bach. Mr. Gerstein’s approach was again limited, lacking the mercurial quality of the music, which Gieseking or Russell Sherman have captured with disinvoltura, showing their immediate affinity for the essence of Schumann. Once again, Gerstein’s performance showed perfect articulation and a fine sense of how Schumann fit his fancies together into a whole, and this in itself revealed much about the music and was beautiful to hear.

Michael Miller, a writer and photographer based in Williamstown, MA, is editor and publisher of the Berkshire Review for the Arts, an online magazine which covers classical music, opera, theater, cinema, art, photography, architecture, travel, and food and drink, wherever they may be found.

Actually he performs the first 1,062 lines of the poem — the story of the slaying of Grendel, a monstrous, possibly semi-human creature who has been decimating the court of King Hrothgar. By omitting the final two sections, in which Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother and then himself dies in combat with a dragon, Bagby obtains a performable chunk of the epic without any need for disfiguring cuts. This makes for a performance of around an hour and 40 minutes, perhaps a third longer than the average Homeric book, which many think to fit into the customary length for epic entertainment among the Greeks.

The performance I heard was in Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood on July 22. As powerful and fascinating as the performance is, a distance remains, evident on a more profound level in the almost caricatural way Bagby conveys the heavy, northern Germanic sarcasm of Hrothgar’s response to Beowulf’s self-introduction. The rationale behind this comes from Bagby the performer rather than Bagby the scholar. Here exaggeration is necessary: otherwise modern audiences wouldn’t get it. By contrast the mystery and horror of Grendel’s visitations communicate directly to us. For this Bagby needs no more than the storyteller’s poise and expression, at the very least a rich and highly seasoned brew.

I have the impression, which I shall have to leave entirely undocumented here, that epic poetry and Beowulf in particular has a larger popular audience today than when it was an indispensable part of the prep school/college curriculum. Although there have been some other similarly imperfect but excellent translations in the past, Robert Fagles’ translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey struck a chord with contemporary readers and sparked off an enthusiasm for Homer, which may still be alive. Similarly, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, much to the disgust of the scholarly community, has attracted a wide following, seemingly including many people who might not have thought of reading Beowulf before. This is all apart from the indirect popularity the Beowulf scholar J. R. R. Tolkien created for the poem through his trilogy of novels, The Lord of the Rings, which eventually became an even more popular series of films. Enough said. Poor Tolkien has suffered enough. This latter audience probably overlaps only slightly with Benjamin Bagby’s literate audiences in New York and now here at Tanglewood. Even the Draculesque young man with the beginnings of a Rasputin beard who floated over the lawn in his long black cape gave the impression of an eccentric Medievalist than a fan of pop-culture epic, cinematic or otherwise.

Likewise, I’d wager that Heaney’s and Bagby’s audiences do not entirely overlap. One appeals to general readers of accessible modern poetry, and the other to Medievalists and enthusiasts of the early music movement. In this world, it is easier for the scholar to reach out to the public as a performer. In fact Benjamin Bagby’s bailiwick at the Sorbonne, where he has a teaching position, is defined in the course catalogue as “Master Professionnel Pratique de la musique médiévale,” that is, within a practical division at a university rather than a conservatory. He has long researched and lectured on performance practice, and there is a reason behind everything he does on stage. He is fully aware of the limitations of what we know and understand about how medieval epic was performed, and his working methods are thoroughly tempered with a modest agnosticism. As he said in his article “Beowulf, the Edda, and the performance of medieval epic: Notes from the workshop of a reconstructed ‘singer of tales’” (Performing Medieval Narrative, Birge Vitz, Evelyn, Nancy Freeman Regalado and Marilyn Lawrence, eds., St Edmundsbury Press, 2005)

We can never know if our performances precisely duplicate the art of a particular medieval bard, in Iceland or elsewhere; nor can we ever rediscover the “original melody” to which any epics were sung in the early Middle Ages, since the original melody certainly never existed for any one narrative or story. In each local tradition, in each language and dialect there were varieties of originals being passed along in their own oral traditions. However, I am convinced that by making careful use of specific information and techniques, as described here, coupled with an intuitive spirit based on a working knowledge of both medieval song and the essence of sung oral poetry, it is possible to reconstruct highly plausible performance models which allow our venerable ancestral stories to live again.

To get to this point, not only for the Icelandic Eddas, the Nibelungenlied, and other medieval narrative works he has performed, Bagby has pursued painstaking research into all the available evidence: the texts, of course (which is usually all that survives), musical notation (if there is any), historical tradition about the original singers and their social context (an excellent example of this, occurs in Beowulf, in the account of the scop — traditional topos of epic, which we find in the Odyssey as well), and finally what we know about the musical instruments used by the bards. For Beowulf and the Eddas, he plays a 6-string harp built by Rainer Thurau of Wiesbaden, based on the remains of an instrument excavated from a 7th-century Alemannic nobleman’s grave in Oberflacht (south of Stuttgart). From its construction, Bagby deduces the greater part of the tuning method he uses and his playing style. A lot is resting on very little here, but Bagby’s aim is to perform, and to perform stirringly, to bring the poems to life for non-specialist audiences.

In calling himself “a reconstructed ‘singer of tales’” Bagby asserts his belief that Beowulf is for the most part an oral poem, that is, a work from a pre-literate poetic tradition which was handed down without the aid of written texts through the assimilation of a body of oral formulae, segments of verse which could be strung together to create the poem as it is being performed. The formulae, the meter, and knowledge of the story line come together to aid the bard as he sings.

As a “singer of tales” Bagby also associates himself with one of the last surviving oral traditions, in which the Harvard classicist, Milman Parry, was able to record on disc during two expeditions in 1933 and 1934 to towns, mostly Muslim, extending from the north to the south of the former Yugoslavia. By careful linguistic analysis of Homer, above all the Iliad, Parry came to the conclusion that the texts were based on an oral tradition. Hence, when he came to Yugoslavia to document this living oral tradition through recorded interviews and performances, he was careful to establish the illiteracy of the singers, as he interviewed them about their training and methods. It is still possible to find some oral singers today, mostly in Central Asia, especially Kirghizistan and Uzbekistan, but these traditions are somewhat less pure than the South Slavic, which itself was not entirely pure. Beowulf, in any case, is something of a mixture, more akin to the Odyssey, which incorporates some refinements of textual literature) than the Iliad in this respect, although many would agree with Benjamin Bagby that the voice of the illiterate bard is still alive in it, and so would I.

Bagby also takes approach to the meter of Beowulf. As he said in the essay quoted above:

When I approached the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf for the first time, with the intention of reconstructing a performance, I listened to all of the available recordings of experts reading the original text. I was struck by what I perceived as an exaggerated emphasis on the pure mechanics of metrics; the metrical patterns of various lines, which for an oral “singer of tales” would normally function on a deeper structural level, had broken the surface of the text (and the story), becoming obvious and heavy in the mouth of the reciter, and intrusive in the ear of the listener. The musician (and storyteller) in me imagined a subtler role for these delightfully vivid and supple metrical patterns, and I resolved to work on the text of Beowulf… in such a way that the metrical structures are servants of the performance and not its master. Through long hours of practical work, I searched for ways to give the metrics a powerful yet less superficial function in support of the text, so that the story would be free to emerge as an aural experience, held together from within by an almost imperceptible array of interlocking sounds and impulses.

As a performer of metrically structured texts, I do not have the role of teaching metrical theory to my listeners, but of telling a story. This does not mean, however, that the metrical structures are being neglected. On a very deep level I do experience the metrics as I sing and speak the story; they are influencing and shaping my use of voice, instrumental accompaniment, timing, speed, and rhetorical gesture, in short, all of the variables of performance. … My goal is to allow the metrical structures their important place in the text, so that they function, but subtly, creatively, almost subconsciously. All elements of measured time must be free to help shape the story: from the smallest unit of the individual syllable to the single, long pulse of an entire performance.

It is most likely in this that Mr. Bagby’s performance will raise the hackles of specialists. The regularities of rhythm that he finds objectionable, but which are learned by every student of Old English poetry, is not always detectable. In any case, this meter encompasses many variables, and Bagby’s unlocking of their expressive power is a wonder to hear. I think, however, that a listener who understands the meter and retains an open mind will get more out of the performance.

If not every student of Beowulf has found this primal voice, Bagby certainly has, and, as an artist, he is able to re-create it with his voice and fingers, not to mention other parts of his body, like his feet, which he taps and stamps on occasion. The enormity of sound produced in the famous opening word of the poem, Hwaet! (Listen!), always a strong word whenever it recurs, lets us know that this will be a performance on a very large scale, true to the concept of epic. Bagby shapes each meaningful narrative unit, whether it is a basic half-line, or two or three. This expressive attention to detail makes the verse — and the story — intensely vivid to all but the least interested in the audience, even if they don’t know the poem at all and are struggling along with the supertitles — or at least I imagine so. He combines this with a fine sense of timing and narrative shape, so that the narrative succeeds in musical and dramatic terms as well. And then there is his robust and infectious sense of humor!

From the uproarious applause of the audience, I imagine that many of its members will come back to hear Benjamin Bagby sing Beowulf again. I have already acquired the DVD of his performance together with some invaluable interviews and discussions. His performance is overwhelmingly captivating, but I do recommend a little preparation for full access to its wonders. If, for example, you get hold of an introductory book, like Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), also available online as The Electronic Introduction to Old English, and learn to pronounce Old English and come to understand the meter so that you can read a few lines aloud, it will open up even more of the pleasures contained in the performance. Benjamin Bagby will take care of the rest.

Michael Miller, a writer and photographer based in Williamstown, MA, is editor and publisher of the Berkshire Review for the Arts, an online magazine which covers classical music, opera, theater, cinema, art, photography, architecture, travel, and food and drink, wherever they may be found.

Jeremy Denk and Christian Steiner (Michael Miller photo)

Your reviewer was not the only member of the Tannery Pond audience on July 3 who has been following pianist Jeremy Denk’s career with some avidity. He played there a few years ago, accompanying Paula Robison (who preceded Denk this summer) with quite a different group of colleagues. This particular gentleman I spoke with, however, had heard him elsewhere in his general concert-going, and, like me, instantly beame a Denkist — or perhaps we should call ourselves Denkonians, to avoid confusion with that particularly odious and venal branch of the medical profession.

My entry into the fold occurred at the Liszt Festival at Bard College in 2006, when I heard Denk perform the Liszt B minor Sonata. (He teaches there.) This seemed to me at the time, although I’ve heard some important pianists perform the work, including some great Lisztian intellectuals like Kentner and Brendel, to be a supreme statement of the work. (Yes, somehow — most likely due to Liszt’s own exceptional intelligence and the literary culture he had acquired — at least some of his music is intellectual music, although he worked very hard at developing quite a different persona in his earlier career.) The Liszt Sonata has two overarching structures: that of a three-movement sonata enclosed within a single sonata movement. Hence the exposition is identified with the first movement, the second with the development, and the third with the recapitulation. This multi-dimensional treatment of sonata form became a model for Scriabin, Schoenberg, Berg, and others in the twentieth century. The B minor Sonata was as prophetic a work as Wagner’s operas, Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, and Bruckner’s mature symphonies, not to mention Liszt’s “Faust” Symphony and his better tone poems.

Very few have done as well as Denk in opening up and pulling together the many strands of this important work. It was the best Liszt B minor — the most probing and the most coherent  —  I’ve ever heard, and I’ve been a Denkonian ever since, following him through some of the most rewarding musical experiences I can remember: programs like his amazing one of Ives’ “Concord” Sonata and Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” (Op. 106), which I heard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. And what a great “Concord” Sonata that was! My companion on that occasion, Jan Swafford, the Ives biographer, was thrilled by it.

If you know that Denk will make a program of Ives’ “Concord” Sonata and the “Hammerklavier,” you may conclude that whatever he puts together in a program has reason for being there — even more than that. The program will have an argument, not just the thoughtful concatenation we associate with “curated” programming, but a metaphysical exploration of music through affinities which are basically true on a musical level, i.e. a level far above that of the average program annotator, a species not especially loved by Denk. Some of the rationale behind this emerged in his brief observations to the audience. He cut them short on purpose, to cajole the audience into understanding the connections between the pieces through their listening.

While the “Fantasia quasi Sonata” Après une Lecture de Dante, a work of Liszt quite different from the B minor Sonata, stood at the center of the program at Tannery Pond on July 3, Denk’s maiden voyage with the work before an audience, the germ of the program was set in motion by two toccatas of J. S. Bach, Toccata in D major, BWV 912 and Toccata in F-sharp minor, BWV 910. Before addressing them at the keyboard, he explained just what a toccata consists of: a succession of improvisations and formal sections, fantasie, dances, airs, and fugues — a loose improvisatory concoction, but an ordered one, as Denk made absolutely clear in his performances. This order, however, was not of the obvious sort; it was rather an organic form which emerged from the pianist’s understanding of every aspect of the works and their interrelationships. This sort of understanding comes not only from his deep analysis of the composition, but from his total indentification with the melodic lines, harmonies, and counterpoint — that is, Bach’s compositional processes, the activity of his musical imagination. In the case of these toccatas, it goes back to Bach’s legendary improvisations. As Denk explained, these pieces show a side of Bach that is less often recognized today, that of the virtuoso, who in all self-assurance relished displaying his unique abilities before an audience. The two toccatas Denk played are rich, multi-faceted works, in which Bach developed quite different solutions to his desire to impress and amaze an audience of strangers — mostly likely a roomful of noble amateurs.

Denk played these with intensity and total concentration, recreating for himself and the audience Bach’s own experience of bravura improvisation and performance. These were uncompromising and ambitious interpretations, equal to the dimensions of Bach’s invention. They also brought Denk and his audience into an improvisatory spirit which served well throughout the program, from Liszt’s “Fantasia quasi Sonata,” to György Ligeti’s meticulously thought-out Études, Livre I, which nonetheless demand an impression of spontaneity in the tradition of Chopin and Liszt, and Beethoven’s contrasting pair of movements, one tempestuous and earth-bound, the other a transcendent spiritual ascent. In his spoken introductions Denk hinted at another element shared by all the works in the program, the diabolical, a quality traditionally associated with musical virtuosity, not that witchcraft wasn’t a visible part of Bach’s world.

In his commentary on Liszt’s, Denk brought up the story of Liszt’s early life as a sinner, when the itinerant virtuoso “slept his way through Europe”… virtuosically. Later he became a priest and supposedly put all that behind him. (In fact he was received into the lower orders, in which there was no vow of celibacy, and he specifically stated that he had no desire to live as a monk.) His point is that the music of the sinners on their way to Hell seems more deeply felt than the hymns of the righteous on their way to heaven. He played these themes, when they return late in the work, sounding against one another, with poignant nostalgia for the joys of earthly life.

Denk brought the same awareness of shape and structure to Liszt’s Fantasia that he had earlier used most fruitfully in the B minor Sonata. However, this is a very different sort of work. While it has something of the symmetry of a sonata (hence Liszt’s title), it is first and foremost a poesia, intended to be presented to the audience as a quasi-improvisation, as if memories of his reading of Dante were floating through the composer-virtuoso’s mind as he played. Denk is a passionate and sensitive reader himself, and no musician could identify more closely with Liszt’s experience. He played the Fantasia on a very grand scale, extracting every last bit of sound from the Tannery’s excellent Yamaha concert grand, as well as pouring himself into the most delicate pianissimi. As in the Bach and all the other works on the program, Denk succeeded in identifying himself totally with the composer and his thought processes, both as inventor and performer. His ability to make himself one with the music is what sets him apart from the vast majority of pianists. Après une Lecture de Dante is a great work of the imagination, but only for those who can grasp it. Otherwise it is no more than empty posturing and display.

The Ligeti Études, Désordre (Disorder), Cordes à vide (Exhausted Chords), Touches bloquées (Blocked Keys),  Fanfares, and Automne à Varsovie (Autumn in Warsaw), as brief as they are, are almost insanely intricate elaborations of traditional technical problems for the keyboard, and they are dense. Yet they are surprisingly accessible, at least as Denk plays them. As in the études of his predecessors, Chopin, Liszt, and Bartók, each contains a poetic world, as redolent of moods and dreaming as any work of Debussy. In addition to his ability to capture the melody, feelings, and colors of these works, Denk did not disguise his impressive technical capacities. Christian Steiner, who served as “celebrity page-turner” in two of the études, remarked on the complexity of the scores: his job wasn’t an easy one. Denk, by the way, decided to omit No. 5, “Arc-en-ciel.” The diabolical was present in ample measure, not only in Ligeti’s fanatical invention, but in some of the strange states of mind suggested by them, and what is more devilish than disorder?

The evening concluded with a truly great reading of one of Beethoven’s supreme expressions, the Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Opus 111. It was by this point no surprise that the infernal qualities just mentioned appeared among the unstable mood swings of the first movement. These violent oscillations come to rest in the simple, three-note falling motif of the Arietta, which contains the germ of the heaven-bound variations which follow, leading to “the most powerful return in music,” if I quote Denk more or less correctly. As much, or even more, than in the other music, his preliminary analysis, leading to a total identification with the music and its construction by a process which must have much in common with meditation, gave him access to the heart of Beethoven’s composition. In his performance every detail of Beethoven’s writing was clearly represented, while Denk engulfed us in the spiritual path of the music. He played the variations all’attacca, so that each one developed organically out or the one that preceded it, giving the movement an intellectual argument as well as a constant flow as spiritual progression.

To those of us who have been following Jeremy Denk’s work over the past few years, it is clear that he is growing musically and spiritually, and so are we, as this unique musician teaches us to be more conscious listeners.

Michael Miller, a writer and photographer based in Williamstown, MA, is editor and publisher of the Berkshire Review for the Arts, an online magazine which covers classical music, opera, theater, cinema, art, photography, architecture, travel, and food and drink, wherever they may be found.

Paula Robison and Cyro Baptista (Michael Miller photo)

Music that is somehow outside the accepted parameters of classical music appears at the Tannery Pond Concerts once or twice every season. For example, in 2008, soprano Amy Burton and pianist John Musto presented a program of show tunes from Broadway and the Grands Boulevards. Or mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux, whose singing of Vivaldi, Handel, and Rossini is so highly regarded in Europe and America, combined German Lieder with zarzuela numbers, an enthusiasm she acquired from her Mexican-born mother. Now, for Tannery’s 20th anniversary season, Artistic Director Christian Steiner has asked Paula Robison and her colleagues, Romero Lubambo and Cyro Baptista (both Brazilians who have settled in the United States) to return after a 10-year absence to play the Brazilian music which has attracted a warmly enthusiastic following since the early 90’s when they first began playing together. The concert was Saturday, June 19.

The music includes elements of folk and African traditions and jazz as well as dance rhythms you’ll hear in bars and on the streets in cities like Rio or Fortaleza. Some of these are regional, and others are relatively familiar to North Americans through movies and recordings. The music itself is irresistible, but what made it unique was the combination of these three highly virtuosic players and the particular mutual understanding and interplay they’ve developed over years of happy musicmaking. (And for the most part, the music itself is happy — extroverted tunes full of lively, sometimes flowing, sometimes shifting dance rhythms. Sad feelings were more as mock-sadness, as in the rapidly passing minor passages expressing the moods of a little white bird.) Lubambo and Baptista are capable of great rhythmic precision and flexibility, and Lubambo’s phrasing and expression are the equal of any classical musician. Baptista also appears to be able to produce any sound recognizable through human ears with his vast assortment of percussion instruments, most of them of his own design and manufacture. (He told me that they all have names, which is in itself no mean feat.) Both of them tell good jokes, and Baptista is a master of movement. He and Robison were especially inclined to dance — it’s not hard to understand why she loves to play with them.

As if to transport us from the Tannery in this Upstate Shaker village-cum-boarding school to the streets of Rio, Cyro Baptista performed shoeless, and that was not the only striking thing in his performance. His totally unexpected procession down the aisle, playing the berimbau, a traditional Brazilian single-stringed instrument with a gourd for a sounding-box, is unforgettable, not least for the strange music and the strange appearance and sound of the instrument. Other oddities were products of Cyro’s imagination: an array of plastic pipes, which he played with flip-flops — in his hands. He must be very proud of this, since he has called it “cyrimba.” There was also the “chavisco,” which consists of scores of keys attached to a ping-pong paddle.

The Brazilian tunes are delightful, but they are raised to an altogether higher level by the trio’s subtle treatment of rhythm and gamut of intense colors. Paula Robison’s tone, both on her flute (which was making its maiden voyage with a new head joint) and on the piccolo, (which she used in the latter part of the program) is robust and full of contrast, supporting her fine phrasing and expression; and her precise articulation enabled her to match her Brazilians in the vigor and control of her rhythms. The music called for some bright, cutting sounds as well as a soft, whispering tone in its more intimate, vulnerable moods, and Robison was able to encompass them and many other tonal variants, throwing herself into the spirit of the music with abandon, but without losing control. Romero Lubambo produced a rich, golden sound from his acoustic guitar, which, like the others, he played through the portable sound system they had set up for the occasion.

This was the first time I’d heard amplification in the Tannery — one of very few occasions on which it is appropriate there. It sounded perfectly fine, and its visible and audible presence functioned more as a signifier of the fact that the music that was being played is not the music of the recital hall, but the music of bars, nightclubs, and the street. Did I mention that there was Bach on the program as well, also played through the sound system? Robison played a movement from one of the solo flute partitas, as well as the Air on the G-String, both in appropriately Brazilian arrangements. She also played Debussy’s Syrinx —without Brazilian color.

My only disappointment in the concert (apart from the neglect of the vuvuzuela, although one of the songs was actually about a football match), in fact, concerned the latter. Robison played the first section of the Bach straight, then Baptista joined in with discreet and subtle rhythms produced on one of his store-bought drums with a soft device of his own. My expectation was that this chaste beginning would build into a set of progressively wilder variations, but the treatment remained tasteful and restrained to the end. My stereotyped assumptions are entirely to blame, of course, and not the musicians. Soon enough, however, my ears were open to Baptista’s sophisticated rhythmic effects, and Robison’s playing was as noble as one might expect.

Romero Lubambo and Paula Robison (Michael Miller photo)

This is of course not the first time the music of J. S. Bach has been imported to Brazil. Neither is it an accident that a distinguished classical flutist has taken up Brazilian popular music. The flute (with guitar accompaniment) is a traditional instrument among Brazilian street musicians, especially in the choro (or chorinho), the grandfather of Brazilian popular music, which was very much in evidence on the program, including a number of very famous ones, for example Ernesto Nazareth’s “Brejeiro,” Waldir Azevedo’s “Brasileirinho,” and Pixinguinha’s “Carinhoso” and “Um a zero,” and, most famous of all, Zequinha de Abreu’s “Tico-Tico no Fubá,” Although the word choro means lament, these are usually quick, cheerful pieces. There were also a couple of examples of the frevo, a dance from northeastern Brazil. Some of the songs imitated natural sounds. A song about rain required audience participation, and a set of three bird songs inspired Cyro to bring out an instrument made of rubber tubes and resembling some exotic jellyfish, which produced rain-forest sounds. To this accompaniment he played a whistle specifically designed to mimic the bird’s call.

This program was not at all what the Tannery Pond audience is used to, but everybody loved it and thanked the musicians with deafening applause and enthusiastic shouts. Apart from a single audience member who left during the interval in disgust, the only complaints were that the seats weren’t removed to make a dance floor. The only thing missing for me was Nikolai the Sealyham terrier, who usually puts in an appearance before the concerts. Presumably the great mess of instruments that surrounded Cyro Baptista would have proven too much of a temptation for the animal.

Michael Miller, a writer and photographer based in Williamstown, MA, is editor and publisher of the Berkshire Review for the Arts, an online magazine which covers classical music, opera, theater, cinema, art, photography, architecture, travel, and food and drink, wherever they may be found.