Benjamin Zander, guest conductor of the NEC Philharmonia, notes, “We are deeply moved by Britten’s composition and by the grace of Japan’s esteemed diplomatic representative in receiving the score 70 years after the event.”

Dear Mr Tsuji,

I received your message through your assistant, Ms Hansen and I wish to reply with great respect and affection for a new friend.

I think I have managed to unravel the story of the Britten work.

It seems clear that the British Consul in Tokyo informed Benjamin Britten that the Japanese Consulate had received the score and paid the commission, but was not willing to accept or perform the work, since it was not considered suitable for the occasion.  The committee stated ”it did not express felicitations for the 2,600th anniversary of our country.” and was “purely a religious music of a Christian nature.”

Of course, the reaction of the Japanese was perfectly understandable.  They had asked a number of prominent Western composers to submit compositions for the celebration of an important anniversary of their country.  It was  reasonable to expect that the pieces would be joyful and uplifting.  It also was tactless of Britten to use Christian titles when he was writing a piece for a country that was not Christian.

However, Britten was 26 years old, a passionate opponent  of war and a conscientious objector.  It is perhaps not surprising that he ignored the nature of the invitation and wrote a piece of music from the depths of his soul, expressing his horror of the war that had just broken out in Europe and forced his exile to America.

The unfortunate thing is that the refusal of this masterwork has put the Japanese in an unfavorable light and the issue remains something of a diplomatic embarrassment to this day, since it is invariably mentioned in books and the program notes whenever the work is written about or performed.

We could leave the matter as it is, however, I would welcome an opportunity to say something at the concert about the transformation that has taken place in the world since that time.  I believe our young people are generally ignorant about  the past and  I feel it is our role, not only to point out the relevance of the music they play to the time it was written, but also to offer our guidance in developing a healthy and open-hearted attitude to the actions of previous generations.

This is what I would propose to say at the concert, if you would grant your permission:

In 1940 Benjamin Britten was commissioned by the Japanese Government to write a piece to celebrate the 2,600th anniversary of their country.

Britten, at 26 years old and a passionate opponent of all war, perhaps not surprisingly ignored the call for a festive, celebratory work and produced instead a work that expressed his violent outrage and grief at the carnage already being perpetrated in Europe. Moreover, by giving Christian titles to each of the movements, he must have realized that the work would not find favor in a non-Christian country.

Predictably, the Japanese authorities informed Britten, through the British Consulate, that the work was unacceptable because “it did not express felicitations for the 2,600th anniversary of our country.” Also, since it used titles to each movement that were taken from the Latin Mass, it would be offensive to the Japanese people.

One year later the Japanese were at war with the Allies and the tension that this situation caused has not been resolved to this day..

We intend to resolve it tonight.

From the vantage point of our time, we can recognize that not only is the Sinfonia da Requiem a timeless masterpiece – perhaps Britten’s greatest work for orchestra – but it is also a moving plea for peace – a cause to which all Japanese people today are fervently committed.

We, in Boston, are most fortunate that our current Japanese Consul General Mr Tsuji is a man of deep sensibility and both cultural and moral awareness.  Mr Tsuji is present tonight.

At the end of the performance he will accept a copy of the score as a symbol of friendship between our nations and a recognition that, at last, wisdom and understanding prevail amongst our people.

We can feel the terrible anguish in Britten’s work – the protest and grief of the first movement; the violence and madness of the second movement and the deeply felt pleas for consolation and peace in the Finale.    The titles - Tears; Day of Judgement and Plea for Eternal Peace are no longer  seen only as Christian, but rather as universal categories of despair, pity  and hope for redemption, in which all peoples of the world can share.

We are deeply moved by Britten’s composition and by the grace of Japan’s esteemed diplomatic representative in receiving the score, seventy years after the event.

Thank you.

Warm wishes

Ben

The Bechtel auditorium is very well designed for its purpose. The audience sits in semicircles around the podium, forming a wide fan. There is ample space behind the performer, and the back of the stage is filled by a moderately sound-absorbing projection screen. The seats are upholstered with sound-absorbing fabric, and there are carpets in the aisles. The high ceiling gives an unusually large internal volume for a speech auditorium, and the extra volume increases the reverberation time sufficiently that there is a noticeable, although quiet, reverberation — under one second. Reverberation is audible, but at a low enough sound pressure that it does not obscure the music in any way. The music, even eight rows back, is as clear as if one were standing next to the performer. The net result is an exciting, highly engaging, concert experience, increasingly unusual in concert venues.

There are two major perceptions that define the quality of acoustic spaces: clarity and reverberation. Of the two, reverberation is the easier to notice. We hear it when music stops, and we can learn to hear it as the music is playing. Reverberation, if it is not excessive,  adds beauty to a musical performance, as it transforms arpeggios into harmony and adds to a sense of unity between the audience, the performers, and the hall.Reverberation blends the individual parts of a piece into a whole that some believe is more beautiful than the sum of the parts. The perception of the clarity we heard at the at the Zehetmair recital is mostly subconscious and difficult to define scientifically. Acousticians usually define clarity as the ability to understand speech – but there is more to clarity than that. If most of the syllables of speech are recognized, and many the notes in a musical performance can be heard, we tend not to notice the ones that are missing. Our ear to adapts to acoustics. After five or 10 minutes our consciousness of the clarity of the space – good or bad – disappears. The actual clarity of sound is difficult to remember. But sufficient clarity enables sound to grab and hold our attention – and makes it possible to hear every note.

Thomas Zehetmair rehearses at Bechtel Auditorium (Arthur Jaffe photo)

Although clarity and reverberation are both desirable, they are usually mutually exclusive. The physics of spaces decrees that efforts to increase reverberation will usually reduce clarity. In the past, where un-amplified speech was the rule, spaces were designed, often by trial and error, to convey drama effectively to the listener. Old halls and theaters provided excellent clarity in a majority of seats. Churches were filled with banners and tapestries, as were recital salons and halls. Traditional opera houses were loaded with velvet – both on stage and in the hall. But they had very little late reverberation. (Many of these historic spaces are currently much more reverberant, as the fabric has been removed long ago.) Given the choice between a sub-conscious perception and a perception that is easily perceived, modern conductors (who perform close to the musicians) and acousticians have pushed for more reverberation.

In most modern halls reverberation reigns supreme. I have been told by prominent acousticians that with the advent of opera titles clarity is obsolete, and that”no one needs to hear the words, which are in any case probably in Italian.” Design specifications for new halls insist on a reverberation time of two seconds, regardless of the volume of the hall or the number of seats. Clarity is usually specified by “C80” a measure that assumes all reflections that arrive within 80 milliseconds of the direct sound are beneficial. It is popular to believe that an abundance of early reflections – particularly lateral reflections – are vital to the quality of a hall.

But the Zehetmair concert amply demonstrates that this is not the case. Zehetmair remarked that he has never before played to an audience that listened so intently, completely silent and absorbed by the music. Why did this occur? Surely the performance was brilliant, but Zehetmair is always brilliant. Could the unusual clarity in the auditorium contribute?

It is well known in psychology that sounds that are perceived as close to you demand attention. Distant sounds can be ignored. This fact was taken for granted in old theaters – designed for Shakespeare or Vaudeville. The importance of dramatic clarity is known to every drama and film director, who demand that theaters be dry, and that cinemas utilize highly directional loudspeakers for the reproduction of dialog. In the quest for reverberation, many modern concert halls and operas have a beautiful resonance, but it is difficult to hear inner voices over most of the seats. The audience will enjoy the performance, and there are always a few good seats if you can manage to get a ticket for them. But in the long run excess reverberation may be dangerous. Classical music recordings provide good clarity; people will not buy them if they sound too distant. I believe that if current concert hall designs delivered real clarity along with sufficient reverberation, more people would be attracted to the concert experience. Halls that achieve this balance exist, but they are rare.

There is a scientific basis for the kind of clarity that demands our attention.   At a recent concert I was sitting about 15 feet from the cellist in a string trio as he tuned his instrument.  To my surprise, I could hear the change in pitch as he adjusted the fine tuner on his D string one-quarter turn.   A few rows further back and I would not have been able to do it. Our wonderful ears use at least two methods to detect pitch and timbre, but our extraordinary abilities to hear fine details of pitch, timbre, direction, and distance of several instruments at the same time depends on the distinctness to which we can hear the direct sound from the instruments. The most sensitive mechanism for these perceptions relies on the phase coherence of tone harmonics, particularly those in the speech intelligibility bands from 1000Hz to 6000Hz. These phases get scrambled by reflections. Early reflections (which tend to be the strongest) are particularly harmful. As the harmonics lose their coherence our perception of the sound goes from “near” to “far,” our ability to hear details of intonation is lost, and inner voices become inaudible.   The sound has achieved “blend” but our attention can wander.

The physics of the phase coherence detection mechanism offers solutions to the problem of providing both clarity and reverberation at the same time. The richness and blend that reverberation provides lie chiefly in frequencies below 1000Hz, where the fundamentals of nearly all musical instruments reside. If it is possible to design a hall where the strength (and not necessarily the reverberation time) of the reverberation is reduced in the intelligibility bands, we can achieve clarity without losing richness. In addition, the neural mechanism that detects harmonic coherence is time-dependent. Our ear integrates sound energy over a time period of about 100 milliseconds. We can still hear the direct sound with clarity if there is sufficient time before reverberation overwhelms it. In a large hall, the time delay is larger than it is in a small hall. But if the delay is too great reverberation will be perceived as a disturbing echo. So hall size and shape is very important.
In the Bechtel auditorium the reflections from the wall behind the performer are softened by the projection screen, the walls and ceiling are far away, and the side walls are angled to not reflect sound directly into the audience. There are very few strong early reflections, and the clarity is magnificent. The reflections we do hear have taken their time to get to us and do not affect clarity very much. But the sound is less than ideal. The reverberation time is below one second, and the reverberant level is low.

A few days after the concert Thomas Zehetmair played in my studio as we used electronics to gradually increase the audibility of late reverberation. The clarity in the studio was very high, but with no added reverberation it was uncomfortable to play. Just a slight increase in the late energy improved the ease of playing (and the sound of the instrument). Zehetmair preferred more late reverberation than exists in the Bechtel auditorium. The small audience in my studio also appreciated more. The most successful reverberation for us was close to the natural reverberation in Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory – 1.4 seconds of reverberation time, at a relatively low level.

There are several reasons that Jordan Hall has a good reputation for chamber music. In my opinion, the near ideal balance between clarity and reverberation tops the list. Like the Bechtel auditorium, Jordan Hall can be seen as a wide fan. The audience sits relatively close to the performers, providing good clarity. But the internal volume, enhanced by the high ceiling, is much larger than the Bechtel. The reverberation time is longer, providing more late reverberation, and the level of the reverberation is low enough that clarity is not lost. Jordan includes a large enclosed stage house that can reduce clarity if the performers are not in front of the proscenium, but most small groups know this, and perform in front. Sanders Theatre at Harvard University is similar to Jordan, and lacks the deep stage house. Chamber music is wonderful in Sanders. Such halls are rare in other cities. Boston is blessed to have two.

Our Symphony Hall in Boston also provides a good balance between clarity and reverberation. Seats on the floor in front of the cross aisle are almost uniformly very good. As you move from row N to the cross aisle the only substantial change in the sound is the angle subtended by the orchestra. It is easier to separate parts from one another in the front seats, as the azimuth difference between the sections is larger than for seats further back. But the sound is definitely engaging. Behind the cross aisle instruments increasingly blur together, and fine details are lost. This happens because there are no niches in the lower walls to provide frequency dependence, and there is less time delay between the direct sound and reflections in the rear seats. The side reflections are attenuated for seats in the front of the first balcony, restoring clarity.
I believe the reasons that Boston Symphony Hall succeeds in providing both clarity and reverberation over an unusually wide range of seats lie primarily in the size of the hall, the frequency dependence provided by the rectangular niches in the walls and ceiling, and the unusually shallow and open stage house.  Smaller halls of similar shape do not work as well. They need to look more like Jordan.

In conclusion, performances in halls where fine details of pitch and azimuth of each note can be heard (in the absence of vision) grab and hold the attention of listeners.   We should strive for more halls and opera houses that can provide this form of clarity – along with adequate late reverberation. Such halls exist, and it is possible to understand why they work.

David Griesinger is a Harvard-trained physicist who is eminent in the field of sound and music. His website is here.

The interview with John Harbison:

BMInt: We recall that a former rector, the Rev. Al Kershaw, presided over Emmanuel when Craig Smith conceived the idea of the special music program.

Craig was a tenor in the choir at the time. The music director faltered, radically, and Craig took over the choir. And within a few weeks, he went to Al with the idea of doing a Bach Cantata series.

He had been coming to Cantata Singers concerts — back when I was conducting, and I had just gotten to know him because he lived across the street from me. …

He got the series going in ‘70 or ‘71. At the first performance, Rosie [Harbison's wife] and I both played. Jane Bryden sang… It was in a period when much of the time, the congregation was meeting at Lindsey [Chapel], very small-scale. Quite soon, I think the second year, Craig decided to do it every week. Al was fine with it.  Then Craig augmented the chorus quickly with some other singers.

BMInt: Do you think the Bach Cantatas have helped increase the congregation?

I think they did, I think Al thought they did, very much so.  Bach cantatas, and the Jazz ministry, were very beneficial.

BMInt: Al was a jazz musician, right?

No. He was not a player, he was a jazz historian, very knowledgeable … deeply engaged in jazz. … And that was part of his connection to Bach. He heard a lot of musical connections between Jazz and Bach. He supported it tremendously.

BMInt Staff Photo

BMInt: At that point Emmanuel Music was not a separate entity?

Oh no. It was a long time before that. ……Very early on, though Craig also started the evening concerts, and the Mozart Birthday thing started almost immediately with the Bach Cantatas.

BMInt: How does the Cantata fit into the service?

It was meant to be part of the service…

BMInt: It must have fit into the service differently in Bach’s time…

The position of the Cantata in the service changed at various times. Even with Al. Generally the present arrangement was predominant — at the end of the service.

BMInt: There was always the debate, that some people would come to the service and leave before the music, and some would come late, just for the music.

That’s much less true now. Part of the influence of Pamela Werntz has been that people are tending to be here through the service. She has made music more relevant to the service by carefully incorporating the weekly lessons with the choice of Motet and Cantata used in the service. She also is incredibly motivational. Great sermons.

She chose a motet for the installation, by James Primosch, Spiraling Ecstatically. This is a favorite of Pam’s, on an e.e. cummings poem.

I try to find a cantata that deals with the time of the year and so Cantata 163 [Nur jedem das Seine "To Each his Own"] came into my head —”Should we pay taxes to Caesar?” We are doing it in English a translation I commissioned thru the Seattle Symphony. It’s a great one to translate because people think ‘WOW! Bach wrote about that??’

The interview with the Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

BMInt: Will Emmanuel Music stay here?

They are clearly here to stay. I have been here two years as priest-in-charge.  As of Sunday, I’m also here to stay. We have been in a period of expanding our collaboration. John and Michael Beattie, assistant music director and I have worked to integrate the text of the Cantata selections with the rest of the liturgy in the way it was intended to be,…

BMInt: Is Emmanuel Music part of every service?

BMInt Staff Photo

They have summers off, and other vacations. But we have lots of musicians in the congregation, people who sing professionally in other places. Many talented musicians are drawn to this congregation because of the quality of the music. So we can assemble a talented pick-up choir.

BMInt: Do you have a musical background?

The Rev. Werntz:  I do! … I was a serious student, and I thought I would go to conservatory. I was taking organ lessons. The only composer I wanted to study was Bach, but my teacher insisted that I had to learn other music, so I quit and walked away from music… I went to a college that didn’t even have a music major. By my junior year I was bereft about the loss of music, so I learned German and took a semester in Vienna and spent the whole semester completely immersed in music. I thought that was a chapter in my life I would never use again!

The bishop asked me to come to this church because of my organizational development,  business background, that’s what they thought of…German and Bach are nowhere on my resume. What on earth, why would that matter?

BMInt: do you chant?

I do chant. I love to chant. I chant the Eucharistic prayer, the great litany, the first Sunday of Lent…For me it is important for this congregation to be fully engaged, to be empowered, to be a congregation and not an audience. Since we have been strengthening this collaboration, the number of people in this building during the worship service. has grown, say, about 25%.  The number who have come earlier and earlier during the service and stay to the end has more than doubled. People are feeling the engagement and the connection, and wanting more.

BMInt: Is it because you are making the cantata more relevant to the service?

I think so. I think it’s because, when we can connect the prayers, the concerns of the community, the sacred texts, the hymns, the Cantata, motet, whatever the choral service music, when all of those are connected, it creates a buzz that energizes the community. You feel the theme go from the opening sentences through the end of the Cantata. They all fit together. they are not all same thing, but they need to be part of the conversation, … so people leave here with more energy than when they came in. Everyone does. People who have played their hearts out, people who have sung, can carry it into whatever their week is going to look like.

BMInt: that’s what Bach was trying to do…

That’s exactly what Bach was trying to do!

See related review here.

So I was nonplussed to discover that this presentation was hardly au courant; it originally was seen at Théatre Royale de la Monnaie in Brussels under artistic director Bernard Foccroule in 1998, followed with a performance at the festival in Aix-en-Provence. Nonetheless, as it turns out when we returned to Boston and asked more than a dozen local music lovers (so far), almost no one even knew of it. Quelle domâge.

The unity of music and visual presentation, despite being a more “modern” production, is spectacular (as in “denoting a spectacle,” which undoubtedly was true of the first performance in 1607 and the goal of many revivals since), surreal (as in heightened, intensely believable), and stylish (as in comfortable and elegant). I could not help comparing this superb performance to the—dare I say?—disastrous staging of this opera at Glimmerglass a few seasons ago, which was pure punk, Orfeo with his shirt hanging out of his low-hanging dungarees, Euridice chained to the wall in a sado-masochistic, prurient scene, and all.

Every single one of the voices in this Jacobs/Brown presentation is beautiful—mellifluous, with point-on accuracy and clear diction. But astounding to me is that the singers participate fully in the intricate choreographed movements, contributing to the wholeness of the production — that is every member of the cast, including lead singers.

The approach of the choreography was to create highly stylized slicing or running gestures following the dictates of the music: staccato to swagger to rushing, a fast-moving frame of still images. The tone is set immediately by the shepherds, moving in interlacing lines and patterns, snapping or swooping their arms, in an astonishingly sympathetic interpretation of Monteverdi’s score.

Costumes for the chorus are tunic-like, loose white suits with black shirts. The singers’ blackened eye sockets blend into diaphanously whitened faces. Orfeo is in essentially the same outfit, but set apart by its mustard color and Indian-style tunic. Creatures from Hell are in black. Bright solid color is provided by Euridice’s and La Messageria’s gowns and the glittering fanciful costumes of Plutone and Proserpina; however, their appearances are brief enough to keep the overall tone the contrast of black and white. Apollo, who appears at the end to claim his son (the Monteverdi revised ending) is in something resembling a yellow sleeping bag flattened on the surface of the huge round sun.

Orfeo is the mellifluous, dramatic Simon Keenlyside; Juanita Lascarro is Euridice (who appears briefly), but also the stellar singing role of La Musica and the smaller role of Eco. A coveted  role is that of La Messageria; albeit one of the most dramatic moments in the opera, it is nonetheless profoundly, affectedly delivered by Graciela Oddone. Tómas Tómasson is Plutone, Martina Dike is Proserpina (and a nymph), and Paul Gérimon, Caronte (also a shepherd and a spirit). The opera opens with a flying La Musica (the singer in the pit).

This article had been held up in a frustrating attempt to credit the two wonderful shepherds who are so prominent in the first scene; the complete singing cast is not to be found in the website of either the producer, the conductor, the choreographer, or even the purveyors of the DVDs I found. Leave it to Robert Kirsinger, of the Publications Department of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to direct me to the listing— in the film archive of IFDb. (Bookmark it, all ye fans of culture.) These superb singers, setting the tone of the whole production from the start, were (I believe) tenors Yann Beuron and Rene Linnenbank, although one may be John Bowen.

It was a bit of a tilt listening to the Italian and trying to follow it in French subtitles, amidst a full house of early music afficionados. Ending a day at the Louvre with an event such as this, then to proceed to a dinner somewhere in the 5th or 6th Arrondissement at a civilized hour, is indeed close to heaven. One could wish the same for Orfeo.

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

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

WGBH’s spokesman, John Voci may be unintentionally right according to a BMInt commenter. The future for classical music broadcasting may be on the internet rather than from 100,000 watt radio towers, which, because of their cost of operation, require lowest common denominator programming. Richard Buell, a former Boston Globe critic, has a comprehensive website on streaming classical music here. His comment, which follows, is part of a lively discussion at the end of an earlier article .

Have you ever wondered what can classical music radio be like far, far away from dear provincial little Boston? If you’ll give me your attention …

Across the Channel from France Musique — which Joel Cohen rightly praises — you hear such offerings as BBC Radio 3’s CD Review, whose regular Building a Library feature amounts to a vivid critical discography in sound. Whose recording, say, of Schumann’s Kerner Lieder is THE one to have? One Saturday morning a few months back that wonderful writer Hilary Finch (of Gramophone and the Times) was on hand (and for an hour!) to go through the whole lot of available recordings.

There is nothing remotely like this on U.S. radio stations, and to the best of my knowledge there never has been. I’m streaming the latest program as I write, and at the top of the screen I see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00qn1lr. This week it’s David Nice and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Stop press — Kitaenko has been caught out using a corrupt Soviet text!

My point is that WGBH, WCRB, and the rest are all wedded to a dying technology — blub blub down they go — and that we shouldn’t be sad about this. Thanks to audio streaming, we’re no longer reduced to having to be grateful for small favors.

VERY small favors if you ask me. Don’t get me going on the “presentation” by local “personalities” — the quotation marks are essential — who can’t hear themselves, are often unprepared, and have an infuriating way of getting in the way of the music. I make exceptions for Cathy Fuller and Doug Briscoe. (Whatever happened to him?) As to the rest, the dunking stool would be too good for them.

When the old WGBH was busy documenting Boston’s busy concert life — the very events you read about in the Boston Musical Intelligencer — they had me on their side, faults and all. Ditto for the live BSO broadcasts on WCRB, which I gather have been taking place over their corporate dead body but so what. WHRB is a story in itself and quite apart from the WGBH/WCRB market forces kerfuffle. For this, endless praise is due David Elliott, their resident eminence grise, but for whom I wouldn’t always be coming across something I haven’t heard before, or don’t know as well as I should, and otherwise filling up gaps in my education. The station is — can I say this? — fun. And that’s about it.

At the Old South meeting it was pointed out — from the floor I think — that it’s only a matter of time before — patience everyone — the future arrives and streaming at last becomes a portable thing. [editor’s note: the future is already here for those with cellular broadband]

As to what’s out there right now — see http://www.publicradiofan.com/cgibin/statsearch.pl?format=classical&lang=, and http://www.operacast.com/opstations.htm, http://theairthisweek.blogspot.com/

As the Globe and BMint have observed, Collage New Music’s concert last Monday was no end enlivening, especially the Steven Mackey. Now why couldn’t we be hearing THAT on the radio? After all, this is not Podunk. Or is it?

[ Editor’s note: for the tech-averse or those who wish to listen without their computers on, these sites for reviews of table-top internet radio receivers(which require home network access either by WiFi or Ethernet) should be of interest: http://www.wifiradioreview.com/, http://reviews.cnet.com/best-wifi-radios/,  http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9938479-1.html]

This was the question running through Trobador’s mind as he, along with a certain number of other European spectators, tuned in to an unusual television program last Friday on the Franco-German channel Arte. It transmitted the “première” of a legendary film, Metropolis (1927) of director Fritz Lang, restored to its original two-and-a-half hours. This was shown before a live audience, with a full, well-rehearsed orchestra performing from the original Gottfried Huppertz (1887-1937) score, edited by the German conductor-musicologist, Bernd Heller. Given the short run of the original film with its original score, in 1927,  more people have probably heard the music this week than at any time since its composition (although I am told on good authority that the score can be heard on two-year-old DVD produced by the Murnau Stifftung.)

The much-awaited projection of the restored Lang film was, to this correspondent, at least as important for its music-historical significance as for its cinematic impact. For, if all the histories of film will tell you that, during the glory days of the “silents,” entire orchestras would be engaged to perform for major showings of important films, the opportunities to actually witness such a thing are virtually nonexistent nowadays. What happened on February 12 in Berlin was, therefore, unique in our own time and, in its own way, thrilling.

Fascinating and exciting and informative the event certainly was. However, while your writer would like to report that he witnessed the resurrection of a lost treasure, he cannot. To begin with the score, practically continuous with the film, with only a few seconds of silence here and there, is anything but an independent masterpiece. Resolutely tonal in a 19th century Teutonic way, with only a few allusions here and there to “modernist” sensibility (the foxtrots of the cabaret scenes, oddly evocative of Kurt Weill), Huppertz’ score manages to evoke Mendelssohn, Weber, Brahms, and other Romantic luminaries without ever making an independent statement of its own.  This dependence on musical vocabulary developed by others is, of course, hardly remarkable in the history of movie music. In fact, it’s par for the course. Think, for instance, of how John Williams pastiches and paraphrases the techniques of early to mid 20th century composers in his wildly successful Hollywood scores.

On the other hand, the Huppertz score is of real interest because of its symbiotic relationship with Metropolis-the-film, and, along with the recently restored portions of the original filmography, because of the light it sheds on the whole..According to an online biography of Gottfried Huppertz (http://www.fimumu.com/huppertz/), the composer was an intimate friend of Lang and Lang’s then-wife and scenarist, Thea von Harbou. The musical score was conceived alongside the film scenario, and

this close collaboration continued during the filming of Metropolis where Huppertz was constantly on the set, a thing very unusual for the time. Huppertz used to play the piano during filming, as one of the things Lang liked was to time the action of the actors using numbers, and the background music was to be used as tempo.

Furthermore, Huppertz’ neo-Romantic music, experienced simultaneously with the film, inflects the viewer’s understanding of  what Metropolis actually is. Longtime considered as a seminal work of the modernist ethos, the movie is, actually, a product of decadent, kitschy German postromanticism, its justly celebrated “futuristic” aspects notwithstanding. It is, perhaps, the most important bad movie ever made. There is about a half-hour of iconic, unforgettable imagery and movement in the film—the futuristic city, the inhuman machines, the hordes of oppressed,  robotized workers in their underground tunnels, the human sacrifices to evil gods—in fact,  many of the bits many of us already know from the various recompositions and re-edits of the original—along with lots that is much less good: crepuscular, neo-Wagnerian slog, pseudo-religiosity, and offensive,  paternalistic political ideology. No wonder that H. G. Wells, in a 1927 review for the New York Times, called it a “dreary series of strained events.” No wonder it was a commercial flop, and no wonder that it was shortened and re-edited to the point of near-incoherence soon after its initial release. Even Lang himself, in a late-life interview shown on Arte Friday evening after the Festival screening, said he hadn’t liked the final result. Only now, with a restored print and the original score, do we get an adequate understanding of the original:  flashes of genius, inane scenario, and all. Given the cult status and the influence of Metropolis—its brilliant parts, at any rate—the restoration project was a noble enterprise, despite the limitations of the underlying work.

But hey, music and film, what a great idea! No wonder, post-Lang/Huppertz, that Prokofiev and Eisentein took the idea to extraordinary heights (Alexander Nevsky,  Ivan the Terrible). No wonder Phil Glass, more recently, attempted a posthumous collaboration with Jean Cocteau (La Belle et la Bête). Who is going to be next?

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies spoke first to the 8 O’clock String Training Orchestra, which played his Six Sanday Tunes directed by Peter Jarvis. These are easy folksong arrangements in simple keys and moderate registers, and it was a pleasure to hear them played with such obvious enthusiasm and in good tune, by players who in many cases aren’t even 10 years old. Some decades ago, Max (as all his friends call Sir Peter) spent several years directing music for young people at the Cirencester Grammar School, and he is as well experienced in meeting the needs of gifted beginners as of the best professionals in Europe. The same genial expertise and elegance was evident in the four short pieces that followed called Start Point, played by the Junior Repertory Orchestra conducted by Adam Grossman. The well-disciplined and enthusiastic NEC Children’s Chorus, directed by Jamie Kirsch, then sang five Songs of Hoy, named for the island off the west coast of Scotland where Maxwell Davies lives. Two of the songs included charming animal dances by costumed children from the Eurythmics class, ably arranged and directed by Ginny Latts.

The program continued with one movement of a symphony-in-progress by Jeremiah Klarman, 17 years old, who studies at NEC and Gann Academy; his music has already been performed by half a dozen local orchestras as well as chamber and choral groups. As performed by the NEC Youth Symphony, the fourth movement of his Symphony no. 1 in C minor shows a lot of skill and imagination, and a good feeling for orchestral sound, and one wanted to hear more of this promising piece. Steven Karidoyanes conducted what was a second performance; the premiere had been heard last November. The well-wrought orchestral texture of this inspired piece was a good testimony to what NEC can do to nurture growing talent, and it was also a tribute to Klarman’s teacher, Rodney Lister, one of the prime movers and tireless organizers behind the entire busy two-day festival.

Last on the program was Maxwell Davies’s An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, already familiar to many of us in Boston: it was commissioned by the Boston Pops Orchestra and premiered in Symphony Hall in 1985. The Youth Symphony did this piece proud, with all of its tipsy programmatic detail and improvised but well-controlled gestures; the bagpipe that appeared at the end was probably not a regular member of the orchestra, but he was well received. The composer was obviously pleased.

Max hardly had time to grab a bite of lunch before he went to an adjacent building to supervise a master class that included one of his theater songs, a Lullaby for violin and cello (written, he said, in half an hour as a birthday offering), and a larger work, a cello sonata, to be performed the next day. I wasn’t able to hear all of this but what especially struck me was the seriousness and commitment of advanced students to complex and unfamiliar new music.

At 3 o’clock, in the Keller Room in Jordan Hall, the Piano Seminar Classes, coordinated by Angel Ramón Rivera, brought together an accomplished assortment of intermediate pianists. Ten younger players were featured in some easier pieces by Maxwell Davies, including Stevie’s Ferry to Hoy, Snow Cloud Over Lochan, Six Secret Songs, Farewell to Stromness (a political piece), and Yasnaby Ground. Later we heard Five Little Pieces, which represent Maxwell Davies in a pointillistic atonal idiom, with brief and sometimes explosive gestures; they were expressively played by Chi Wei Lo. Also on the program, with many participants, were 10 selections from The Wall Calendar, op. 84, by Vladimir Ryabov, and three premieres: a well-named Restless Sleep by Katherina Balch (Eric Lu, pianist), Pastel Sketch, op. 191, by Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee, and Contempo: 10 Contemporary Duets, op. 94, by Larry Thomas Bell. Only nine of the ten were played, but the team of 18 young pianists had a good time coping with such amusements as “Angry Tango,” “Wistful Waltz,” and my own favorite, “Southern Serenade.” Larry Bell privately confessed to me his admiration, in these amiable pieces, for Broadway musicals of the 1950s. Dianne Rahbee’s short piece shows an increasingly chromatic direction in her work; it was well played by Yoo Min Lee.

I was unable to hear the composition master class that Maxwell Davies held during the morning with 11 students (one of them just 10 years old), nor could I remain for the Improvisation and Composition Recital during the late afternoon (12 improvisers; eight composers). I couldn’t attend the festival on Sunday but I would have given much to hear all of the events, which included concerts at 10, 1, 2:30, and 4, all in Brown Hall, with no less than 17 works by the guest of honor, plus ensembles and chamber pieces by two dozen young composers. I hope I will hear all of them next year. It is a great reassurance to have such abundant and affirmative evidence of the survival of serious music among our youngest generations.

Good Evening. I am like those at the table, a director of a Boston cultural non-profit. In my case it’s the Harvard Musical Association, where I have been director-at-large for twenty years and the chairman of the program committee for all of that time. So I can speak with authority on matters of classical music programming as well as fiduciary responsibility connected with a board seat.

I am also the publisher of the Boston Musical Intelligencer, an electronic journal of the Greater Boston classical music scene which I founded with Harvard’s distinguished Professor Robert Levin and Bettina Norton. We have been on line for 16 months and have reached a level of over one thousand daily visits and 8,000 daily hits. When we launched our coverage of the WGBH-WCRB transitions, our comment rate went up 10-fold. So I know what the classical music public is thinking on the subject, and they are not happy.

I have also seen some of the feedback from WGBH listeners, and I wonder if this body has also seen them. In a matter of a few weeks, the responses numbered in the thousands. I would guess that conservatively the comments ran 6 to 1 negative.  So my educated surmise for the total would be something like 5,000 negative and 900 favorable. I understand from former WGBH staff members that the trend has continued in January, and I strongly urge the members of this board to ask for copies and analysis.

In short, your listeners, as defined by your reports and the BMInt comments, are very unhappy with what WGBH has done. What we hear most are four main complaints— dumbing-down of content (including the use of the American Public Media syndicated classical music feed), diminished signal coverage, the loss of Friday BSO broadcasts, and irritation over WGBH’s attempt to duplicate the highly successful all-news format of WBUR in order to reach a larger, younger audience.

Much has been said about the aging of the classical music audience. Yes, many are over 60, but they are often well-off and generous, as they generally are out of the child-rearing years. Furthermore, it has ever been thus. In 1900 the average age in ticket lines for the BSO Friday afternoon concerts was 60.  But those 60-year-olds were once 25… and today’s 25 year olds will someday become the prominent classical music demographic. And I should add in this context that there is a tremendous institutional overlap on board, staff and supporter levels between the Symphony and WGBH. And many at the BSO on all three of those levels are extremely displeased.

I also encourage this board to ask John Voci to explain statements that are puzzling to many people: how he claims to have increased classical music broadcasts in Boston despite having cut 50 hours per week overall. Does he include the Boston Pops, which many classical-music lovers would not consider serious music? Does he include recorded BSO concerts which are no substitute for live broadcasts? And does he include additional talk about the BSO by WCRB announcers? And why does he cite duplicative service as the reason for having cut Friday BSO broadcasts even though for many years WGBH has duplicated WBUR’s NPR programs. Both statements are truly Orwellian.

When confronted with the apparent in-defensibility of his justification for cutting BSO broadcasts he later cited costs of $25,000 to $30,000, misunderstood by most of the people in attendance at our recent panel discussion as reflecting per broadcast costs and not the entire season— a fact, I hasten to add, that, as it is becoming known, is further infuriating contributors who already feel cheated. Here are my calculations based on private discussions with former WGBH staff:  First, the BSO charges NOTHING. The marginal cost for a hypothetical Friday BSO broadcast includes only two costs —an engineer, and an announcer. The total amounts to roughly $200 per hour. If the broadcasts cost $400 each, and there are 20 each season, then the true additional cost for a year is $8,000. That would be .06% (six one hundredths of one percent) of the $13,000,000 radio budget. A rational person is unlikely to cite accept cost as a reason for the dropping of Friday broadcasts. It’s got to be a marketing-driven decision. Is it because on Friday afternoons Mr. Voci wants shorter musical stretches in his playlists to allow the placement of more infomercials? If it’s really a matter of the $8,000, then Boston Musical Intelligencer will offer to raise the funds. I could even be persuaded to write a personal check here and now if I were assured of the return of Friday broadcasts to WGBH.

I do believe John Voci’s statement that WGBH switched to the all-talk format because management was unhappy with the station’s ratings. For a 100,000-watt clear channel to be 23^rd in the Boston Arbitron© ratings (used by permission) is indeed proof that something was amiss. Here are some relevant comparisons showing average daily listeners and market ranking for the month ending Dec. 9 (before the changes took place):

WQXR= 306,000, rank 23 in NYC (17.1 million market)
KUSC= 300,000, rank 19 in LA (12.1 million market)
WETA= 230,000 rank 7 in DC (4.7 million market)
WBUR= 195,000, rank 9 in Boston (4.3 million market)
WCRB= 123,000, rank 16 in Boston
WGBH= 38,700, rank 23 in Boston

However, what should be of particular interest to you is WETA in Washington, DC which rose to a rank of 7 in DC (5% of the market) after shifting its format to all classical. Their listenership doubled and listener support rose by 48% as a result of that change. And they didn’t have to borrow $15 million or hire an expensive new staff to make that happen. After ineffectually going all-talk for 18 months, WETA allowed the single DC classical music station to be sold, and without spending any appreciable amount of money, exploited the situation with some cleverness. They decided that as the only classical music station in DC they would be appreciated by a large public. They were content to let their NPR rival present news and talk. They now have the third highest number of listeners of any non-commercial station in the country.

So I encourage this board to ask some tough questions of management.

Will WCRB’s 123,000 listeners become WGBH contributors?

Will the formerly loyal WGBH classical listeners continue to make contributions?

Is it financially responsible to hire expensive additional staff simply to duplicate the successful WBUR format?

Was it a breach of your fiduciary duties to allow WGBH to deplete its $15 million dollar line of credit to buy WCRB when any additional contributions which may accrue from WCRB’s listeners won’t even come close to paying the debt service?

Let’s be realistic: the former WCRB listeners are not used to being asked for contributions and many of the former WGBH classical listeners either can’t receive WCRB, don’t like its style, or both. The result is likely to be diminished listener support. This is the clear import of the Audience Service Reports.

After forsaking its mission to provide unique content to an underserved public, which was the basis of the FCC giving the station its 100,000 watt clear channel, can WGBH survive its next license renewal hearings unscathed?

So whither WGBH? May I predict that it will wither if it continues with its current plans? The latest Arbitron reports, the first to reflect a full month of the changed format, shows that WGBH is exactly where it was in October, while WCRB has slipped 14% in the same period. WBUR has also slipped by about 15%. One plausible conclusion is that WGBH did attract some of WBUR’s listeners, but not enough to compensate for those who migrated to WCRB or left the WGBH-WCRB enterprise altogether. One could also reasonably assume that WCRB’s lost status was clearly the result of more loss of their former listeners than gain from the previous WGBH classical listeners.

Please consider learning from WETA’s lesson, but don’t take 18 months to figure it out. Admit your mistakes; sell WCRB and make WGBH radio the crown jewel that it ought to be. And let WBUR continue in its successful mission without misguided competition.

Thank you for the opportunity to address you, and thank you for listening.

Sincerely,

F. Lee Eiseman, publisher
Boston Musical Intelligencer

Rumor has it that they are a hardbitten bunch,  the players in the orchestra pit of the Paris Opera.  And Trobador can vouch,  from his couple of seasons of gigging  around in France with Paris-Conservatory-trained instrumentalists, that the men and women of that milieu are a no-nonsense crowd. They like things on the job to go quickly and efficiently,  and according to Hoyle.

Nonetheless there was an element of surprise in the news, first made public January 18,  that Emmanuelle Haim, a rising star in the French baroque music scene,  had walked away from the Paris Opera’s production of Mozart’s Idomeneo,  for which she had been engaged as musical director,  to be replaced for the final rehearsals and the public run by the little-known Philippe Hui.

There is currently, in the Paris press,  a war of dueling communiqués as to how this state of affairs came about. Ms. Haim, who performs  and records with her own ensemble,  Le Concert d’Astrée, put the blame on a recalcitrant, establishmentarian institution: “The attempt to lead the [modern-instruments] orchestra towards another [early-music] aesthetic has failed,” her press release ran. “ The challenge was great, but the orchestra did not wish to  undergo this experience.”

The response/rebuttal from the orchestra committee was made public four days later, on January 22. Their indictment of the conductor on professional grounds was severe: “With Madame Haim, the disappointment was great, before a lack  of precision both in musical concept and [conducting] gesture.”

Disaccord between an orchestra and its leader is nothing new in the annals of modern performance; at home, one is reminded of more than one such conflict in the recent history of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as well as in some smaller local ensembles. Perhaps there is something in the very concept, hierarchical and authoritarian,  of the 19^th century orchestra that encourages or tends towards conflict in our time. And then, as baroquenik conductors are invited to direct modern instrument ensembles,  one has to deal with the potential quarrel of the ancients and the moderns,  with those in the early music camp generally defending different notions of line, phrasing,  bowing, articulation, and tone than those taught and practiced in the modern orchestra milieu.  Still, early-instrument conductors like Nicholas Harnoncourt,   Mark Minkowski,  Ton Koopman and others, have managed to put their stamp on modern bands with a reasonable degree of success and little blood shed.

So what’s going on here? Trobador’s last encounter with Ms. Haim’s musicianship dates at least a dozen years back,  when she was the flamboyant continuo player for Minkowski’s Les Musiciens du Louvre.  Motivated to learn more about the quarrel,  he has attempted to play catchup with her career,  to a certain degree,  via video clips on Youtube.

What he finds on those videos is evidence of a strong yet eccentric talent. Ms. Haim has  a vision of how she wants her music to sound, and she has succeeded in surrounding herself, with Le Concert d’Astrée, with a young and highly motivated ensemble that willingly follows her intentions. In the parallel-to-mainstream world of nonstandard music ensembles, the leader’s ability to gather a good group of players and/or singers together, around the leader’s personality and ideas,  is key to success.

The very youth of Le Concert d’Astrée is a big plus; the members of the band are visibly interested in the music and the project at hand,  and wish to make an artistic statement.  This was the overall tone of the early music movement a generation ago, but also of other nonstandard enterprises such as Boston’s Emmanuel Music under the late Craig Smith.  The sense of routine that invades many larger institutions, and also the psyches of many individually gifted musicians as they approach middle age, is an obstacle to real distinction.  Genuine, this-is-really-important motivation has a great deal to do,  arguments about “authenticity” aside,  with the success of the early music movement in finding audiences.

Furthermore Ms. Haim, for her opera and oratorio recordings, has been offered by her recording company (Virgin) the luxury of working with highpriced,  mainstream singers such as Nathalie Dessay and Ian Bostridge. Whatever one may think of the result of these collaborations on artistic grounds (and,  frankly, judging from what he hears in the clips, Trobador is not much of a fan), the vocal soloists seem to enjoy their experience,  and respond with intensity and commitment to their director’s coaching.

Now come the “howevers.” The private code that can grow up within these nonstandard ensembles can be a hindrance when one moves to the outside.  Ms. Haim has a very personal way of communicating her wishes. Her body language is passionate, she moves her hands and her torso,  her face exteriorizes the affects she wishes the music to convey.  Thanks to her personal engagement, a  sense of great intensity reigns over the rehearsals and recording takes.  The singers, too, respond with ample gesture and movement,  even excessively so, as I read the comments of some Youtube viewers. These visual elements translate well onto film and digital tape – an important consideration in our day. It is no hindrance, from a marketing perspective,  that Ms. Haim is attractive, that she frequently conducts in sleeveless dresses,  and that she has great hair.

But, marketing and fashion considerations aside,  Ms. Haim is unquestionably a strong leader.  She has succeeded in communicating her wishes to her own circle/community of musicians. Where the rubber hits the road is when this unconventional personality needs to confront the conventions of the symphonic world.  Watching her videos, Trobador attempts to position himself,  in imagination,  as a working stiff within the orchestra,  and he becomes troubled.  She’s not like most conductors he has played under,  and does not seem to follow the usual rules. He has a terrible time responding to Ms. Haim’s beat.  Conductors are supposed to prepare the next musical event. But with Ms. Haim,  almost  everything in her gestural language seems to come a microsecond late, and appears to happen just after the music has already sounded.  WTF is going on?  he asks of his imaginary stand mate. I’m getting a headache. Was that a cadence that just went by? When is the next break?

Along these lines, I hereby translate the comment of a blogger (on operaforum.pro.fr) who, while stating his admiration for Ms. Haim’s talent,  characterizes the orchestra’s rebellion as “healthy”:

“[Her] ambitions go beyond the ability of this very good musician, whose gestural language as a conductor is limited to expressing the pleasure she undergoes while miming a musical phrase, rather than her capacity to do what is necessary to obtain the result.”

Would the Paris Orchestra pit band have been more docile,  and changed its bowings,  more easily with a different baroquenik than Ms. Haim? The question is open. Meanwhile, the scandal has at least partially passed, orchestra manager John Cohen (no relation to other Cohens who may or may not be in the room) has declared that there will be no further comment from that quarter, and the production of  Idomeneo has opened at the Paris Opera, running until February 13, with several cast changes, and minus its previously-announced conductor, to generalized yawns.

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