The Beijing Modern Music Festival, for those like your correspondent who had no inkling, is an annual event that, having begun 10 years ago as a chiefly domestic operation, rapidly developed into an international event combining orchestral and chamber concerts, master classes, workshops, and lectures.

It is funded both privately and by the Chinese ministries of culture and education and operates out of the facilities of the Central Conservatory of Music, whose director, Wang Cizhao, is the festival’s titular producer. The festival’s founder, composer Xiaoging Ye (who, like several other people we observed among the creative set prefers to order his name Western-style), is the artistic director. Students at the CCM and other Chinese music schools staff the festival and supplement the imported and native professional ensembles.

There have been many eminent Western ensembles who have performed at the festival, beginning in its first “international” year, 2004, with the New York New Music Ensemble and the Ensemble Zurich. This year’s complement includes Boston’s Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, the newEar Contemporary Chamber Ensemble from Kansas City, Missouri, and the Third Angle Ensemble Consort from Portland, Oregon. Many of the foreign composers whose works are featured have shown up as well, including James Mobberley and Chen Yi, both now affiliated with the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Boston’s Scott Wheeler and Yu-Hui Chang (whose surname the festival program printers have “corrected” in transliteration as Zhang), Stephen Hartke, Robert Beaser, Norbert Palej (a Pole now resident in Canada), Enjott Schneider from Germany, and Narong Prangcharoen from Thailand.

The venues for performances are spread out over downtown Beijing, from the Concert Hall of the elephantine “egg” of the National Center for Performing Arts (about which more later), to the nearby mid-sized and user-friendly Beijing Concert Hall, to the more intimate concert and recital halls of CCM.

The festival’s opening concert at the NCPA Concert Hall was an orchestral program called “At the Edge of Time” after a Schneider piece on the program. The orchestra was the China NCPA Orchestra, an internationally recruited band formed contemporaneously with the Center four years ago and conducted by Lv Jia. This dispatch does not purport to be a review but will describe what went on as an insight into creative enterprise in today’s China. Some of the physical circumstances proved enlightening in their own right.

The Concert Hall is one of four performance spaces within the vast NCPA, which carries forward the tradition of grandiosity that gave the world the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, and the Great Hall of the People’s Congress, to say nothing of the forbidding monoliths lining Financial Street, and is accessible directly from the subway (fare: 2 yuan, or 37¢). If you have your ticket, you are processed through the ubiquitous security scanner. China has them everywhere: in the subway, and even in open spaces like Tiananmen, but this one is doubly diligent: bags through the x-ray and wand searches. Not only is photography prohibited in the hall, but anyone with a camera is sternly ordered to check it. Bottled water, which everyone carries because tap water is not potable, is also verboten, and not because they sell it inside (one could refresh oneself at the bubbler, or as they charmingly call it, the “hydrant”). Of course, once in the hall, people were snapping pics left and right. Phones are not confiscated.

Another thing that might astonish those accustomed to stateside contemporary music concerts was the packed house. At a guess, the Concert Hall holds a good 1,500 seats minimum, and there were bottoms in nearly all of them. Whether the ears indirectly attached to those bottoms expected to hear what they did is another matter: applause for almost everything was, considering the size of the audience, rather wan and brief by the admittedly rather inflated US standards. The per-capita consumption of music education in China is higher than just about any place, and we suspect many teachers made a point of having their students, and the students’ parents, attend. It’s anybody’s guess how many attendees actually bought tickets.

Those of you who attend closely to matters acoustical may find it interesting that from where we sat, well forward in the orchestra section, the sound of the strings and, to a degree, even the solo piano, was rather muffled. It is possible that the acoustic design throws the sound upward (the seating is raked); nobody we knew was seated far enough back for us to compare experiences.

The event began, as so many festivals do, with a round of acknowledgments to sponsors and organizers. What we didn’t see coming was how this was done. An emcee in big hair and sequined tuxedo (and — wait for it, a sequined bow tie!) read off the necessaries, and the honorees and their official award presenters were then escorted to the stage by a bevy of lovelies in long gowns doing their best Vanna White imitations. These then handed each presenter, in uniform sequence, a dust-catcher trophy, a leather-bound certificate, and a bouquet; the presenters handed these over to the honorees in time-honored photo-op poses. This process, we were informed, is quite common in China.

The actual concert that followed happened in pretty much the normal way. The program featured Chen’s Blue, Blue Sky, Prangcharoen’s Illuminations, and the aforementioned Schneider work, At the Edge of Time, before the intermission; then Zou Hang’s The Color of Beijing and Beaser’s Piano Concerto afterwards, the latter with British soloist Christopher Janwong McKiggan (that middle name bespeaking an ethnic Chinese Thai mother). Anyone who has heard Chen’s music would know what to expect: milky sonorities balancing Chinese tradition with Western craft. To a Chinese audience this was not new news. The Prangcharoen was something else, a statement that high modernism still lives in an Asian wrapper. Schneider’s piece quotes from and stitches together fragments from Mozart’s Requiem and had been part of the quarter-millennium Mozart celebrations of 2006. In sharp contrast to these somewhat cerebral and ethereal exercises, the two post-intermission works were unabashedly populist. Zou has been active as a composer of film and TV scores in addition to standard classical genres, and his piece on the program, though written without a specific event in mind, is somewhat in the spirit of John Williams, especially with its fanfare opening; although sonically, with its patriotic-folkloric affect and quartal harmonies it conveys a sense of — how shall we say? — Chinese Copland. (Fanfare for the Common Cadre, anyone?) The concluding work was the Beaser, written originally for the Louisville Orchestra in the days of Leonard Slatkin. Its mash-up of Gershwin, Bernstein, Copland, Barber and — in its opening central motif — Vaughan Willliams over a Rachmaninovian piano texture was the work that brought the hitherto reserved audience to exuberant life.

In future days we hope to bring you some more vignettes of the festival and other musical events here (hoping to get tickets for Un Ballo in Maschera). Stay tuned.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

For all its flaws, the Metropolitan’s “Enchanted Island,” as seen locally on WGBH-TV last Friday, provided us with some interesting insights into the profound nature and meaning of that oddest of human enterprises, opera.

It was a great A&R idea to have commissioned this pastiche of eighteenth century music, with a new, ad-hoc scenario for the Met. The inspiration for such an enterprise is the baroque music revival in Europe, where national opera houses and festivals are able to lavish major resources on seventeenth and eighteenth century operas, featuring adequately funded, historically informed performances in tandem with the indispensable, opulent theatrical values (“historical” or modernized, whatever) that make for a satisfying all-in-one experience.

For all kinds of reasons,  mainly our American private-market system of funding the arts, it is very, very difficult to make such things come about successfully here at home.  Our best taste of these kinds of productions are probably obtained via the French-government-subsidized appearances of Les Arts Florissants in New York.

The Metropolitan Opera has,  perhaps uniquely in the U.S.A.,  the deep pockets necessary to produce genuinely spectacular spectacles. But the size and scale of the Met’s room make “real” baroque opera almost impossible to realize there.  The culture of New York City loud singing is just too inimical to the musical/literary values of early opera to permit success (one can argue, listening over the air to some of the Met’s “mainstream” productions, that such strictures are also relevant to more recent operatic repertoire; but that’s another essay).

The other problem with many baroque operas is, let’s be honest, that the plots can be boring to modern audiences.  We have different expectations from the crowd back then.   We go to a concert or opera to listen/view, whereas the eighteenth century leisure classes who frequented their theater boxes five nights a week had plenty else on their minds besides the show onstage: food, card games, gossip, family/clan business, sexual intrigue and activity.  An opera house was the social media platform,  long before Facebook went public. People linked up and hooked up, and they paid attention  to those long, long spectacles onstage when they felt like it.

What pleased me about this televised broadcast was precisely the silliness and superficiality of the presentation. Viewing the three hour long show on the tube was not totally dissimilar from taking in a Neapolitan opera from one’s own box at the theater.  During a slow bit on the screen one could move about, discurse to one’s neighbor, run to the fridge for a snack…now that’s a “historically informed” experience!

Another historical verity made evident again via the telecast is the relatively less-important role of the compositional ingredient in the whole operatic enchilada.  When “Ercole Amante,” with music by Cavalli, was given at Versailles to celebrate the marriage of Louis XIV,  contemporary accounts apparently neglected to mention Cavalli’s specially-commissioned music. What got commented on at the time were the impurgated ballet sequences by court composer Lully (as I recall,  Cavalli, disgusted, went home to Venice,  never to return)

Similarly, during Ms. Voigt’s very, very brief introduction to the telecast, we were told that the music was by Handel, Rameau, and Vivaldi, but nothing more. That’s all folks.  The score is indeed a kludge,  the Handelian preponderance notwithstanding (and yes, there was  an impurgated ballet to French music by Rameau and whomever), and the stylistic contrasts and frequently awkward/ poorly   managed transitions  were jarring at times, assuming one was listening intently. There is apparently a list of pieces and their authors online. I did not look it up.  Did you?   In the true spirit of 18^th century opera, the authorship of the music was treated as a matter of fairly little importance.  Another “historical” moment….

Concerning the performance, much has been written already by other hands. I found one of the best things to be the work from the pit. We know how fine Metropolitan orchestra is from hearing the “straight” productions,  but lo and behold, here,  on modern instruments, was a very pleasant and plausible similacrum of a baroque band, with attacks, phrasing, tempi and other such matters skillfully shaped by William Christie.  Right on, orchestra. The singing was by and large OK of its kind, with only the turn, as Neptune, by tenor-turned-baritone Placido Domingo, in full park-and-bark mode, leaving us truly disappointed. The most moving theatrical moment, in a show not especially aiming to plumb the depths of the human soul, came from Luca Pisaroni as a despairing,  deceived-in-love Caliban.  The real stars of the evening were the stage designer and special-effects mavens.  Everything in that department was utterly charming and seductive….once again, an unhistorical production ends up being “historically informed” on a deeper level.  More naked mermaids, please.

My only consistent frustration was with the English-language verses/lyrics. Yes, they moved the plot along,  and yes, there were clever moments, but how much of it rang flat, unmusical, and tone-deaf! Rumor has it that Metastasio, in heaven, was watching Friday on an old analog TV set, and that he was shaking his head. Same goes for Ira Gershwin.  Consonant, by the way, with the singers’ need to produce a “big” sound in a modern opera house, quite a bit of the text would have been unintelligible without the mercifully-supplied subtitles.

I’ve witnessed,  and enjoyed/learned from, baroque opera productions with the “right” instruments, the “right” costumes and sets, the “right” gestures, et cetera.  This particular pseudo-opera, however, managed to get us back in touch with some of the genuine show-business values of those dear, dead days.  I’m willing to watch it again, if it gets re-broadcast.

Joel Cohen is Artistic Director of Camerata Mediterranea, a nonprofit association incorporated in France, and Music Director Emeritus of The Boston Camerata. He has been a producer and assistant station manager for Radio France in Paris. With WCRB, he produced a syndicated radio series around the Boston Camerata’s music. He has been host of Morning Pro Musica at WGBH and a frequent interviewee on radio stations throughout the US, Europe, and South America.

Creation Image by Joss Sessions

Chorus pro Musica with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra will be offering a very unusual performance of Haydn’s Creation on June 2 in Jordan Hall  featuring synchronized projections designed by English videographer Joss Session. Some thoughts and conversations on the work and the presentation follow.

Human imagination gives us an amazing wealth of stories on the origin of the world. To the Chinese, the Yang and the Yin were One and when separated, the tension of their opposite qualities produced the world and all things in it. The Japanese say that Chaos reigned until the Three Creating Deities formed heaven and earth and all things in it. Hindu belief tells us that God and the universe are essentially one, and God manifests Himself as the world and all things in it. One African myth tells us that a god named Bumba created the sun and moon along with various creatures and finally, man.

The story of origins from the Jews in the Old Testament of the Bible now finds familiarity throughout the West; its two versions in the Genesis chapter have God in the beginning creating all things in six days and resting on the seventh. The Judaic version of this story for Haydn’s composition, The Creation, was embellished by the Book of Psalms and enhanced with the Genesis portion of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

When Joseph Haydn left London in 1795, he was given a poem titled The Creation of the World, which has a murky past on authorship and translation but was ultimately set by the composer after Baron van Swieten gave him a version in German (Die Schöpfung) — because Haydn lacked sufficient fluency in English. The libretto was then translated back to English. So the libretto has some awkward syntax, according to Betsy Burleigh, music director and conductor of Chorus pro Musica, whom I talked to recently about the upcoming performance.

She decided to add visual aspects to the performance through lighting and projections. “It came out of a series of discussions at CpM,” she explained, “about what we were trying to accomplish in terms of bringing new people into our audiences, people who might not normally walk in the door of a classical music concert. It’s the younger people, especially, we are trying to entice, and the visual component is an important one.”

Burleigh did not know the English videographer Joss Sessions, but a member of the CpM board knew he was quite creative had quite a bit of experience with combining visual elements to music. So he has been engaged to accompany The Creation with light and visual projections. He will also be performing, he told me, because of the multiple selections he has at his disposal that will be selected spontaneously as the music unfolds.

The oratorio is about a cosmically momentous beginning of the world, whose story was then set to music by the elderly Haydn. Having received its premiere on April 29, 1798 at Vienna’s Palais Schwarzenberg in an invitation only performance, Die Schöpfung was without doubt an instant success. The first public performance in Vienna’s Burgtheater on March 19, 1799 sold out far in advance and was given numerous times during the oratorio’s first year. A year later, the translated work, as The Creation, was performed at Covent Garden Theatre to great acclaim. Haydn could not have had any greater success than the number of times the work was performed in his lifetime. His last hearing was in 1808, one year before his death.

“The Creation,” Burleigh explained, “is such a wonderful work.  Everything Haydn did, even though he was advanced in age, was  inventive, useful, and energetic. These late Haydn works are so musically rich and effervescent, that I have a great enthusiasm for this music.”

The work is a compendium of several different aesthetic styles, beginning with the orchestral parts that synthesize the contemporary writing; yet the work remains distinctly the work of an old master. The fugal style in the choral numbers is from an experienced ear for vocal capabilities and expression. For example, Number 19, “The Lord is great, and great His might,” displays this keen sense of counterpoint in the chorus, and when florid writing for three vocal soloists is added, the effect is stunning.

The oratorio is in three major parts. Part I begins the extraordinary tale of the creation of the world narrated by three soloists, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel. Divided by recitative and aria, supported by a mixed chorus, the 13 numbers comprise a wide variety of forms ranging from solo recitative and aria to three narrators and chorus in highly complex textures. The latter is illustrated with great effect in the close of Part I with the famous and highly effective “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” Part II, culminating in Uriel’s recitative (number 23), reveals the creation of man “in his [God’s] own image, male and female created he him.” A beautifully lyrical aria follows, Uriel singing fervently of this new and wondrous creature in the image of God. This new creature needs companionship so God gives man “a woman fair and graceful spouse.” After creating the earth and heavens, the birds of the air, all the fish of the sea, the flowers and plants, and humankind in six days he surely needs the seventh day to rest from these taxing labors.

Part III describes the Garden of Eden with its two lovely new inhabitants side by side joyfully passing the “golden hours.” Humanity now ensconced in paradise, Adam and Eve as the embodiment of God’s grace, express their gratitude. They give thanks to God for their lives and their carefree existence in the plentitude and fullness of flowers in bloom, sweet fruit on the trees, and morning dew quickening all. The Lord is great! Amen!

This is the first classical work in which Sessions has participated, and he finds it fascinating to lend his hand to something that offers such broad possibilities in a different vein than he is used to. Burleigh reinforced the idea of going beyond the usual concert presentation. A well-known feature of the overture is that it begins in C minor, representing chaos and the primordial ooze, and ends with a crashingly loud C-major chord. What will be a surprise is what Joss will do with that momentous event. In fact, the audience will be in for an experience not usually attended to a classical work like Haydn’s The Creation.

Asked about how Jordan Hall would be used, Burleigh responded, “To me, this is one of the most interesting things about this project. We are not going to be projecting on a screen [but rather] Joss will take advantage of the architectural features with their historical interest. We’ve spent a fair amount of time together face to face. He’s been to the United States twice, and since this project was born, we’ve Skyped. We’ve had a lot of discussions on the types of images, how do we coordinate the images with the music, in terms of the impact on the audience, how do we deal with the soloists and the chorus, all of these kinds of decisions that have to be made. It’s taken a lot of time but it has been stimulating; it has been exciting and we feel like we are doing something new and how often do you get to say that?”

Will the addition of Sessions’s lighting and visuals add to the performance? Probably, but to realize the maximum effect, one must enter Jordan Hall with an open mind and allow one’s senses to embrace whatever comes. Reflection is for later; being immersed in the moment is for now. That is what art of any medium asks us to do, does it not?

Anthony J. Palmer, presently a Visiting Scholar at Boston University, has a BA in vocal/choral studies and MA in composition from California State University, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. from UCLA. He retired from college teaching in 1998.

I was listening to a young pianist playing Bach, and I couldn’t hear anything interesting in the performance at all. Nervous, I glanced at the notes of the person sitting next to me. He had written, “Labored.” I was relieved. He didn’t like it either, and he knew more than I did.
I was a juror at the 2001 Yakov Flier Piano Competition, part of the PianoSummer festival organized by Vladimir Feltsman at SUNY New Paltz. Now in its 18th year, the competition is named for Feltsman’s piano teacher.

Feltsman had invited me to sit as a ringer on this jury, which is otherwise made up of established pianists who teach and perform at the festival. The competitors are all students, and their prizes are modest, but the level of competition is often surprisingly high. (There are many more competitors now than there were in 2001.) It was my third year as a juror, but I still had not gotten over the insecurity of being the only amateur on the panel. The other five judges were all professional pianists and piano teachers, all of them with international reputations. And I am just a critic.

The opinions of critics are read far more often than those of professional musicians. Yet all it takes is a few minutes at any master class for me to realize how much more detailed and acute than mine is the musicians’ hearing. Feltsman, who gives fascinating master classes, frequently showed the students important points in the music which they have missed in their performances. Often I’ve missed them also in my hearing. But as one of the other jurors pointed out during our deliberations, a critic is more representative of the way audiences hear music than a musician is. In that way I sometimes felt useful on this panel.

The Flier Competition is small potatoes compared with such internationally famous contests as the Tchaikovsky in Moscow or the Van Cliburn in Texas, but the Flier Competition prizes are opportunities to perform. The first-prize winner plays with the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, a fine professional orchestra, conducted by Feltsman at the end of the PianoSummer, and second and third prizes share a recital. The first-prize winner in 2000 had been brought back to play a full-length recital of her own.

There are other reasons for competing. As Feltsman mentioned during his introductory talk, this contest can be useful practice for the constant rounds of competitions which are necessary these days for most aspiring recitalists. Winning the contest brings the player to the attention of all of these pianists and teachers who have influence throughout the small world of classical music. And the small concerts provide a useful bridge to the community, since most of them, like the competition itself, are open to the public at no charge.

We were first told that there would be a dozen contestants, but by the time the contest started half of them had dropped out. I wondered if it were because they had heard the others play and decided they didn’t have a chance, but Feltsman told us that most of the dropouts didn’t realize they would have to be ready to play an entire concerto if they won first prize, for which they weren’t prepared. By contest time we were down to five. It opened at 4 p.m. on a brutally hot Tuesday afternoon, in the Shepard Recital Hall at the college. There was an air conditioner in the room, but it made so much noise that Feltsman decided to use it only before and between performances.

By the time the first pianist was halfway through her brief program, the room had become uncomfortably hot, and it just got worse. Her opening Bach (all contestants must begin with a Bach Prelude and Fugue) was rather messy and rather too loud. She also played the first movement of a Schumann Sonata too loudly, then created some shading for the slow movement. But in her concerto, Prokofiev’s first, she was merely efficient, banging out her big cadenza rather brutally. I could tell by the expressions on the other jurors’ faces that nobody else thought much of her either; one of them mimicked hammering nails into a wall, and that while she was playing quietly. Her orchestral accompaniment was played in a piano arrangement by one of the jurors, Eteri Andjaparidze (she and Feltsman shared the accompanying duties), and there was much more nuance in the “orchestra” than in the solo.

After a brief pause for the air conditioner to cool the room off a bit, the second pianist began. His Bach seemed bland to me. He played a piece of Liszt that I normally can’t stand, the Sonata after Reading Dante, but he minimized the music’s bombast and built climaxes well. He was also quite accurate with some difficult music. I wished he had varied his tonal color more, but overall he was convincing. At this point, one juror complained about the heat and asked if we could open the door to the outside. “You can,” says Feltsman, “but it’s 98 degrees out there.”
The contestant then played the first movement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. While he was playing, Feltsman walked over to the complaining juror with a fan, waving it at his head. Although a contestant was playing, we all laughed. The pianist played Grieg earnestly, but he sometimes overstressed the music and used quite a bit too much pedal.

During dinner we talked mostly about other things than the contest, but there seemed to be a consensus that we had not yet heard a first-prize winner.

On Wednesday after a brief conversation, we decided to leave the air conditioner on, and I quipped that the day’s players would have an unfair advantage, since their lack of nuance would be harder to hear. But the first player’s Bach came through with plenty thereof, and I very much liked the way he played it. He then played a fearsome showpiece, Scarbo from Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit.

This performance was going to prove controversial. I didn’t think he had the right idea of what this music is about; he played it for show value and missed the sinister quality that was the most important part of the music. But aside from his impressive technique (impressive to me, at least, although the jurors could all play just as well themselves) he did have a lot of color and impulse in his playing. At least something was happening.

His Liszt First Concerto also proved controversial. He played with color and variety, generating some excitement, and I particularly liked the dance-like quality he brought out in the scherzo section. But he wasn’t a disciplined player, and in the final section he let things get somewhat out of control; he sounded as if he were following his fast fingers instead of leading them.

The next player gave us what I thought was genuinely bad Bach, sentimentalized with romantic dynamics and severe ritards at the end of the Prelude and the Fugue that seem to me highly inappropriate. He did a little better with Chopin’s Fourth Ballade, but his tone was not colorful and his climaxes were inhibited. His playing of the first movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto was well organized enough but similarly uneventful.

More controversy with the final contestant. Her Bach was rather mechanical. She played a wild piece by Scriabin, Vers la Flamme, with some color, and I was impressed by her offbeat selection of this item. Eventually I wound up feeling she had failed to capture the wildness in the music. But there was plenty of wildness in the way she played the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. She started out by playing much too loudly, drowning out the “orchestra” (Feltsman) that she is supposed to be accompanying. She also used too much pedal, blurring the music. Some of the soft passages were lovely, but when she got to the big moments, her fingers went wild and she started bashing, leaving my ears ringing. I felt her explosions ruled her out of contention.

Deliberations began. It turned out that I was the only one who really liked the pianist, Milan Miladinovic, who played the Liszt Concerto. The others felt he was undisciplined to a fault and — here they had an advantage over me — that he didn’t respond to teachers’ suggestions. He already had a budding concert career in Yugoslavia, where he came from, and they don’t think he is really interested in changing what he does. I said that the contest was supposed to judge what the pianists do at the contest, not what they had done in classes. But they did have a point.
The first consensus was that none of the other judges felt any of the contestants should receive first prize. I wouldn’t have minded hearing Miladinovic play that Liszt Concerto again with a full orchestra, but I was a minority of one, although a couple of the jurors said that I was probably right as far as the audience was concerned. All of the others had given lessons to the second performer, George Oakley, and they felt that he did respond very well to suggestion, and that his playing has improved noticeably in the few weeks since he had arrived in New Paltz. I was vehemently opposed to giving any prize to the last performer, Inga Kashakashvilli, simply on the grounds that someone who hurt our ears the way she did in her Tchaikovsky shouldn’t be encouraged. But some of the others found a lot of promise in her playing.

In the end, after some fairly heated arguments, Oakley got second prize, while Miladinovic and Kashakashvilli split third. They all would get to play in recitals, and the other two received diplomas of participation.
After Feltsman announced the results, the contestants all looked disappointed. I saw him take each one aside and talk with them, and from the little I overheard he spoke frankly about his and the other jurors’ reactions to their playing. This seemed likely to be useful.

Three hours after we started, we were finally done. This time went to a brew pub where the former Soviet jurors (half of them) drank tequila shots with beer chasers and we Americans drank very nice beer while eating fried calamari, pizza, and salad and telling endless jokes. (My best: What do you call a beautiful woman on the arm of a trombonist? A tattoo.) Some of our deliberations got pretty heated, but we are all friends now.

The 2012 PianoSummer Festival, running from July 14 to August 8 at SUNY New Paltz, will include Saturday night concerts by several faculty members: Alexander Melnikov, and Jeremy Denk. The Flier Competition events take place on July 23 and 25. The first prize winner will perform with the Hudson Valley Philharmonic conducted by Feltsman on August 3.

Leslie Gerber lives in Woodstock, New York. He has been reviewing professionally since 1966, for such venues as Performance Today, Fanfare, and Amazon.com. He also publishes the Parnassus Records label.

The opening concert on May 20^th is to be a staged production of Tchaikovsky’s opera, Iolanta, the subject of an earlier article here. The remaining events present a large and varied roster of artists and ensembles, culminating in a Jordan Hall finale with three Russian choruses, a German youth orchestra, The Festival Orchestra, Juventas New Music Ensemble, pianist Vassily Primakov and numerous impressive vocalists.  “Two years ago we brought a men’s choir, “Blagovest,” from Moscow, said Artistic Director Irina Shachneva. “The response was overwhelming and we couldn’t find seats for everyone. That’s why we’re having our finale in Jordan Hall this year.We’ve planned to host two guest choirs from Moscow and one from St. Petersburg. We’ve also invited vocal and instrumental soloists from Germany and Russia, such as the great pianist Vassily Primakov, who will not only offer a solo recital but will also be accompanying some of the singers. We’re also very proud to have one of this year’s winners of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, Andrey Nemzer as soloist. Since first I heard him as a soloist of “Blagovest” two years ago, I knew he had a great future.”

Shachneva conceived the idea of organizing the festival in 2009, with close friends. “We wanted to bring the best singers from Orthodox churches around America, uniting all generations of Russian émigrés, to present a high quality of choral singing in the Slavic tradition. The idea then spread wildly beyond just a choir. The Boston Russian Choir, which I had led for years, grew into the Festival Choir, which then organized the current festival itself.

“It’s my firm belief that Russian music should be important part of American culture. The connection is very strong — consider the popularity of Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky — but  I also hope to introduce audiences to other composers, such as Ledkovsky and Shvedov, lesser-known but perhaps just as important. The audience for our 2010 festival finale was about half Russian and half a general audience. We hope that this year’s program will bring inspire even more of the concert-going public to share our love of Russian music.”

The Festival’s website is bursting with riches here.

Dina Kuznetsova, the Iolanta

The Second International Rachmaninoff Russian Music Festival opens on May 20^th with a rarity, a staged performance of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta produced by the Boston Vocal Arts Studio. “Our tightly-knit Russian community is rich in cultural events,” explained BVAS’s Executive Director Olga Lisovskaya, “so it was logical for our Artistic Director Alexander Prokhorov to team up with International Rachmaninoff Russian Music Festival’s titulaire, Irina Shachneva. They have been colleagues and friends for many years and are both living their lives for the music.

 “Iolanta is BVAS’s first major production of a full-length (1.5 hours) opera. It’s fully staged and costumed with great soloists. [Details are here.] We’re very fortunate that this project came together, rather magically, I would say, with the Rachmaninoff  Festival. We have some wonderful international stars in the cast including the Russian-American Met Opera soprano Dina Kuznetsova in the title role (on May 20^th.) Count Vaudémont will be played by Met tenor Adam Klein. He does not have the advantage of Russian as his mother tongue but has benefited enormously from our talented language coaches and will sing like a native. Probably half of our soloists are Russian speakers, though!”

The production of Iolanta will be taking place in Makor Concert Hall, 1845 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. A synagogue that seats about 800 people and has a very large stage, it was built, according to Lisovskaya, “with the intention of making the un-amplified human voice intelligible with both liveness and crispness. It has the required wing-space and dressing rooms for an opera company, though it’s not up to the Metropolitan Opera standard. We can’t fly scenery or make significant scene changes, so we have to be creative in how we use it.”  The setting is a castle garden in Mediaeval France, “a simple arrangement that allows the emphasis to remain on the costumes and the passionate story.”

Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest wrote the libretto, which Lisovskaya called “surprisingly good.” Lisovskaya also commissioned an arrangement of the score from Moshe Shulman to allow for fewer winds. The 20-piece orchestra will be seated to the side of the singers but off the stage. There will be supertitles with both English and Russian texts. (The performance is in the original Russian.)

Boston Vocal Arts Studio was founded by Russian emigrés in 2006 and at first did mainly scenes and excerpts except for a full production of Mozart and Salieri by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In 2010 the company began mounting complete one-act operas such as La serva Padrone by Pergolesi, which was reprised several times. Since there are so many opera companies in Boston offering the standard repertoire, BVAS decided to stand out from the beginning by concentrating on Russian operas. “One might have seen a production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin or Snow Maiden in recent years, but since 1970 there have been no more than five Russian operas staged in Boston by local companies. I was in the recent Snow Maiden production by Harvard’s Lowell House, and four of six performances were sold out. So there does seem to be an appetite from the mostly American audience. … Boston Vocal Arts Studio will continue to focus mainly on Russian music as our niche. But certainly you can expect some Ukranian offerings and the occasional rarities like Pergolesi’s La serva Padrone or Mozart and Salieri byNikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Our long-term goal,” Lisovskaya stresses, “is to become a folk-opera company like ones that exist in Europe, ones using a company of equals with a few stars.”

Gil Rose told BMInt that his intention was very much to explore American opera. “It’s a wider area than a lot of people think, both in this century and the one we just got through. I am hopeful that it will work for us. Everything will be on the table. I want to identify the opera community up there and see what happens. This is a test case,” he added, “and a pretty good one, too, I think.”

Chapman added, “We are not trying to be Glimmerglass or Santa Fe, but chamber opera is something we can do in the Monadnock region. Frankly, given the resources available at this time, we weren’t going to attempt Antony and Cleopatra! We will always try to keep the range that Bolle envisioned, but we also want to have an American focus.”

But vocal music will not be limited to opera; Sanford Sylvan, whose career began in Boston but has blossomed into world-wide performances and a Grammy Award, will venture north for Schubert’s Winterreise on Aug. 4 at the Peterborough Town House.

Chapman was asked how he managed to snag Rose. (They both worked for seven years with Opera Boston.) “Gil got in touch with me. I would say, he was curious, and the more we talked, the more we thought it might be a fit. And it certainly fit into his schedule, that is, as it was last year. No one had any inkling, of course, that Opera Boston would go away, but [joining us] would complement things he could do neither at BMOP nor at Opera Boston. Gil has a wide range of interests and talents. Jim Bolle is a tough act to follow, but I think Gil can do it.” Not insignificant is that the strategic assessment undertaken by the board in 2010 — before Chapman was hired —“identified opera as something people missed,” he said. And at the retreat, held after he was hired, “more of that came up.”

Some announced players for the upcoming season are very familiar names, longtime performers at Monadnock, like Rafael Popper-Keiser, Maddalena, Gabriela Diaz… so Chapman was ask how many are old-timers, how many new. He replied that the Monadnock Quartet, which will make its debut, is made up of Popper-Keiser and Diaz with two newcomers, Charles Dimmick and Wenting Kang. “Between the fact that James Maddalena lives here and Frank Kelley spends time at Apple Hill, it is a natural. We have some other musicians who have been with Monadnock who will be returning,” Chapman added, “to be part of the Monadnock Players. We will populate our website as those contracts come in. We want to keep a nice mixture of some of the wonderful artists we have had in the past and to bring in some new artists so there’s always a freshness to [our programs].”

The focus on American music starts the season on Friday, July 6, at the Peterborough Town House, when the Monadnock Sinfonietta performs music commissioned by Martha Graham: Norman Dello Joio’s Diversion of Angels, Paul Hindemith’s Herodiad, Huang Ro’s Chamber Concerto No. 4, “Confluence,” and the complete original ballet of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

Many of the most intriguing concerts are those that are free and take place in the local community churches, a tradition Monadnock Music is committed to continue. The concert on July 8, in the historic town of Harrisville, includes three compositions by Thomson, Portraits for Violin Alone, In a Bird Cage for Solo Cello, and Sonata for Flute Alone, along with String Trio No. 2 by Max Reger and Persian Folk Songs Set #9 by Reza Vali. On Sunday, July 22, at the Francestown Old Meeting House in the center of its bucolic town green, Monadnock Players will offer pieces by Boston’s Michael Gandolfi, Gunther Schuller, and John Harbison, along with Mozart, Villa-Lobos, and Barber. Irina Muresanu, well known to Boston-area audiences, will play at the Deering Community Church on July 11, with her regular accompanist Rob Auler. Another concert of note is that of the Monadnock Players on July 15 at the Wilton Center Unitarian Church, to include besides the Beethoven Sonata in F Major for Horn and Piano, music of Arnold Bax, George Antheil, and Stjepan Sulek. Hardly average fare.

There are fewer ticketed concerts at the Peterborough Town House than in former years. Asked why the season ending is so early when it used to run to mid- to late-August, Chapman answered, “We normally would end later, but Gil has a conducting engagement out West, and we have a housing arrangement that ends on August 12. The season is still six weeks,” he pointed out, “which is what we have done from the first. There are fewer concerts,” he admitted, “but we are investing more in each concert.”

The odyssey from the Boston area up Rt. 119 to West Townsend, then up Rts. 124 and 123 to Peterborough, to an evening concert and back again in mostly pitch black night, is always an adventure. But this writer also is looking forward to an old Sunday-afternoon ritual in the Monadnock region: arriving in one of these small towns in time to enjoy a picnic before (or after) one of the Sunday concerts, eating beside the old mills, or in front of the 19th-century long row of wooden stalls for parking carriages, or in the center of a town green on a hill, to enjoy a concert in such bucolic settings.

On his 100^th birthday celebration at Symphony Hall, he still displayed, according to conductor David Hoose, “…the personal qualities that made him such an endearing presence in our musical and educational community — mischievously twinkling, irrepressibly generous, and brilliantly noble.”

“I am a little self-conscious about it,” Totenberg told the Intelligencer [here]. But he was also delighted at those who attended, including one of his former violin students in Krakow, composer and violinist Marcin Markowicz, now with the Krakow Symphony and Krakow String Quartet.

Born in Poland in 1911, Totenberg was a child prodigy, appearing as soloist with the Warsaw Philharmonic when he was 11. He spent his early years in Russia, Poland, and France before emigrating to New York City just before the start of World War II. “Musical life there was very active there,” he said. Most memorable were chamber concerts with the New Friends of Music. He toured South America with Arthur Rubinstein and gave joint recitals with Szymanowski. Acclaimed for interpretations of both classical and contemporary music, he has introduced audiences to the Darius Milhaud Violin Concerto No. 2, the William Schuman Violin Concerto, and the Penderecki Capriccio for Violin and Orchestra. Totenberg also premiered the Hindemith Violin Sonata in E, the Barber Violin Concerto (new version), and a Martinů Sonata, as well as giving the American premiere of the Honegger Sonata for Solo Violin. Among his awards are the Wieniawski and Ysaÿe Medals of Poland and Belgium, the Mendelssohn Prize (Berlin Academy), and BU’s prestigious Metcalf Cup and Prize in 1996; and in 1981 he was named Artist Teacher of the Year by the American String Teachers Association.

Robert K. Dodson, recently named Director of the BU School of Music, recounted that soon after he arrived, a young man stopped by his office. He had been a student at Lawrence University when Dean Dodson was there. “He was so excited,” Dodson recalled, “because he had just had a lesson with Mr. Totenberg.” And Totenberg was 98 at the time.

Roman Totenberg’s family is planning a memorial in September.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA BROADCASTS

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

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

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

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

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

What is special about this concerto?

Let me point out three things:

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

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

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

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

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

So what was he actually made of?

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

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

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

What are the plans for your sabbatical?

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

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

Is there anything you just do for fun?

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

What are you reading?

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

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

How did you celebrate your 40^th birthday?

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

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

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

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

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

See BMInt’s related review here.