The Laureate

L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres is not limited to citizens who respect French “civil law” and are over 30; the prestigious organization, established in 1957 and confirmed as part of the Ordre national du Merité by President Charles de Gaulle in 1963, occasionally presents awards to “foreign luminaries.” One of the principal distinctions of France, it is awarded to up to 200 persons a year.

Anne Azéma, the blond-tressed Artistic Director of Boston Camerata, was just designated one of those luminaries, a Chevalier (“Knight”), a “distinction qui rend hommage à vôtre parcours remarquable.”

Azéma, born in France, has lived in Boston for many years and became a citizen of the United States in 2004. Well known to Boston audiences for her many years as soloist with Boston Camerata (of which she became Artistic Director in 2008), she also is a distinguished scholar and researcher, leading her own musical teams on a series of original programs (concerts and recordings) of Medieval music. Among other rewards she is a co-recipient of the Grand Prix du Disque.

Boston Camerata, renowned for its performances of early music, was founded under the umbrella of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, but it was Joel Cohen who established its visibility on the Boston and international music scene after he took over as Music Director in 1968. Under the auspices of Radio France, Boston Camerata began touring Europe in 1974 and has carried on an international touring schedule ever since. Cohen is now Music Director Emeritus.

Azéma leaves this week for concerts in the south of France followed by recitals and concerts of Medieval German music in Germany. She returns in time for Boston Camerata’s first concert of the season on Sunday, October 31, at Harvard Memorial Church. The concert at 4 pm, entitled “Veni, Imeneo!”, calls on the Roman god of marriage to celebrate that institution as it was in Cinquecento Italia with songs by Monteverdi, Dufay, Josquin, and Marenzio. Perhaps BMInt readers will get a chance to see her new medal, an eight-point, silver green-enameled asterisk with the inscription “République Française.“

Bettina A. Norton, executive editor and F. Lee Eiseman, publisher

Composer Howard Frazin starts every WordSong forum by reminiscing about childhood trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he remembers entering the Monet gallery in the Impressionist wing and experiencing what he now calls, “The Implicit Conversation.” In this gallery hung seven of Monet’s Haystacks, silently arranged by the curator, and the young Frazin discovered many things about light, color, and shape from interacting with these variations on a theme. Seeing a grouping of paintings on one subject is a unique curatorial gambit that encourages viewers to make comparisons and develop a relationship to the subject itself, in all its incarnations.

Frazin, whose childhood centered on drawing, has always kept this concept close to his work, and in the last 12 years has begun to apply the Implicit Conversation directly to the concert experience. In 2009, he and composer Tom Schnauber, who chairs the Performing Arts Department at Emmanuel College, teamed up to present WordSong, a unique concert format that aims to engage audiences with new music in a meaningful way.

After my reading, Frazin and Schnauber set the stage for a lively discussion of Cummings’ iconic poem. The poem is highly charged with imagery and ambiguity, not to mention a rich history in our cultural consciousness, and the discussion was lively. The host of the concert, Evelyn Haralampu, a partner at Burns & Levinson and a major donor to WordSong, rightly noted that lawyers “have a thing for words.” Precise or vague, words are a lawyer’s primary tool, and interpreting poetry with a roomful of them was a noteworthy – if intimidating – exercise.

Near the middle of the audience sat a small group of high school students from the Boston Arts Academy. At one point, an older gentleman spoke confidently about the poet’s allusions to the Greek god Pan (the “goat-footed balloon-man”). Not long afterward, a young student from BAA, unaware of its relevance, made a similarly perceptive observation in much simpler terms. The student had a visceral reaction to the underlying tone in the poem, and the older gentleman effectively gave this reaction a context.

This spirited interaction between diverse audience types is one of the most interesting products of WordSong, Frazin pointed out. “Art gets obsessed with itself sometimes. It becomes all about being referential,” he said, but in this small interchange there was both a cultural backdrop and an intuitive emotional response. “This is what art is for!” he exclaimed gleefully.

Having plunged completely into the poem’s many layers of meaning, the WordSong forum continued directly with the presentation of four newly composed song settings for cello, marimba, and voice. Performed by percussionist Robert Schulz, cellist Raphael Popper-Keizer, and mezzo-soprano Krista River, the pieces were extraordinarily different from one another and presented various readings of the text. Pieces by Schnauber and Frazin, as well as young composers Adam Simon and Benjamin Pesetsky, were programmed in an order “curated” by the performers, and the program booklet included space for “a few words or phrases that reflect your visceral reaction to the music.”

At intermission, audience members could mingle, network, eat, and drink. What followed though, in the culminating discussion, was quite remarkable. Tom Schnauber began simply by opening up the floor for anyone to comment on how the music affected their previous reading of the poem. Did the pieces meet their expectations or did they suggest a new angle for reading the poem? Were the pieces successful? Composers are apt to discuss these and other questions with each other, but rarely do they have such conversations with their audience.

That the pieces were all quite different made for much discussion in itself. Simon’s song takes Cummings’s lively evocation of springtime and sets it as a nostalgic lament. Benjamin Pesetsky’s piece contains an animated dance-like ostinato with a touch of menace. The audience also plumbed the effectiveness of certain pieces in conveying the ambiguity of the poem, the role of each instrument in evoking the poem’s atmosphere, and how a composer treated the visual element of Cummings’ poem. Audience members also asked the composers very pointed questions about their compositional decisions. It was as if some in the audience, having “lived” with the poem for a few hours (or many years), were formulating ideas for their own compositions. Very organically, as the conversation converged on single pieces, the performers made the decision to re-play each work, providing the audience a second hearing.

Schnauber likes to tell forum audiences that the best a composer can normally expect after a concert of “new” music is, “I liked your piece. It was really…interesting.” New music composers experience collective dismay at the low expectations for audience engagement. This highlights a major issue in contemporary music that WordSong aims to address. During the 20th century, as many composers abandoned tonality for the far reaches of atonality and experimentalism, they expected audiences to come along. For the most part, they retreated and composers fled to the ivory tower. Now, it is common for composers to assume that if audiences don’t like their music, they just don’t get it; and it is equally common for audiences to feel that new music is way over their heads. Frazin and Schnauber, who wholeheartedly disavow this notion, seek out composers who are not afraid to engage in such a personal way with the audience. (Previous WordSong presentations have included composers Andy Vores, John McDonald, Dalit Warshaw, Herschel Garfein, Robert Merfeld, and Stan Charkey.)

One of the foundational objectives of WordSong  is to create a presentation format that, at its core, assumes listeners — all listeners — “get it”; that what they get is innate and not predicated on some sort of cultural sophistication. This argument finds its way into almost any discussion about WordSong with Frazin or Schnauber, but it can also lead down a bumpy philosophical road. Indeed, Frazin and Schnauber do not always see eye-to-eye on this. Frazin seems to have true faith in music as a universal language, with the emotional potential to transcend intellectual, and even cultural, barriers. Schnauber, on the other hand, disagrees with the capacity of even the most breathtaking Beethoven symphony to find relevance across cultures. “Music is no more a universal language than language is,” Schnauber says. However, when dealing within Western culture, there is agreement that even diverse audiences share a capacity to perceive emotional depth in music as well as text. This is why the first forums have focused on song settings instead of purely instrumental music. “People have strong opinions about words,” Frazin maintains, “It stimulates excellent discussion.”

It is now so commonplace to hear hype about the death of classical music that even musicians are beginning to believe it. Nearly every orchestra that is not steeped in traditional concert ritual is experimenting with new ways of attracting audiences. From multi-media presentations accompanying classic works to more Pops concerts (one orchestra even inserted bits of Coldplay into Beethoven’s Third Symphony), arts administrators are desperate. Frazin feels that the people making these decisions, not necessarily musicians themselves, are essentially saying, “Pop music is doing okay, let’s tap into that.” Frazin’s response? “We need to remind people of what the classical arts do best.” In an op-ed in The Boston Globe last year, he wrote about the arts as a cultural tool that “help[s] us imagine more fully our own sense of common humanity.”

Frazin and Schnauber have been approaching some orchestras with ideas for collaboration. Specifically, they see small forums being presented to patrons when deciding on new commissions. This would allow concertgoers and donors to experience the artistic process firsthand. Schnauber considers it a win-win situation for the orchestra, especially because the forums are inherently inexpensive. Also, by bringing musicians, composers, and audiences together in a more intimate environment, orchestras might forge a more meaningful relationship to the community.

Based on the positive response from audiences, the founders of WordSong are confident in the format’s appeal to larger arts organizations. Following the forums last Feburary, WordSong engaged both the Boston Arts Academy and the Boston Prep Charter School in outreach projects. Thanks to its uniquely multidisciplinary nature, the projects used the curriculum to expose students to composition. Additionally, WordSong took part in WGBH’s All Classical Festival in June, and presented a forum on Theodore Roethke’s My Papa’s Waltz earlier in the year. In the future, the founders see the forums moving beyond song settings and into other associative experiences, including music based on painting and different pieces as the soundtrack to a short film. In each case, the audience is provided a hook with which to penetrate the inherent abstraction of music.

Ultimately, WordSong is about “re-convincing people of the merits of intuitive musical understanding.” All performers are familiar with the energy that is in the room during a great performance. That energy is equally alive during moments of spirited audience participation. After a forum in Rockport, Frazin was discussing poetry with a retired English professor. Later he reflected, “If you can get someone like this to talk about your music from the perspective life experience, you can get some cool stuff!”

On September 17, at Emmanuel College, will be the first forum of the new season. In collaboration with The Florestan Project, Frazin and Schnauber, along with Felicia Sandler and Nick Vines, will present four new settings of Wallace Stevens’ poem Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock, performed by baritone Aaron Engebreth and pianist Alison d’Amato. More information can be found in BMInt’s Upcoming Events.

Jonah Kappraff, trumpeter, studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and Boston University.  Currently, he freelances in the Boston area as well as maintaining a busy private teaching practice.

While we are enjoying the delight of so much science and melody, and eagerly anticipating its continuance, on a sudden, like the fleeting pleasures of life, or the spirited young adventurer, who would fly from ease and comfort at home to the inhospitable shores of New Zealand or Lake Ontario, we are snatched away from such eloquent music, to crude, wild and extraneous harmonies…

This review of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony appeared in 1825, the year after the symphony was completed, in the London Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review; the review is also discussed in Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective.

While we might chuckle at the historic evaluation of a Beethovenian masterpiece as “crude,” there is certainly no question that the reviewer is engaging in the act of music criticism. The critique is an expression of his opinion — in the above example we learn, in addition to Beethoven’s Ninth, the writer is also not disposed toward the shores of New Zealand.

All this is my opening salvo to, what I hope, is a springboard for further discussion and dialogue surrounding the Donald Rosenberg case. Here is a quick snapshot of the particulars, which have been covered extensively elsewhere: In September 2008, music critic Donald Rosenberg of the Cleveland Plain Dealer was asked to step down from his position as primary staff music reviewer but was kept on staff as a general arts reviewer. This decision, according to Rosenberg, came about as the result of pressure from the Cleveland Orchestra to demote him for overwhelmingly negative” reviews of the orchestra and its artistic director, Franz Welser-Möst. Rosenberg filed a formal suit alleging age discrimination against the Plain Dealer and its editor, Susan Goldberg, and of interference and defamation against the Musical Arts Association, the governing organization of the Cleveland Orchestra.

This past Friday, the jury dismissed all of Mr. Rosenberg’s claims for lack of evidence to support age discrimination or an infringement of contract. The case has set off a firestorm of commentary in the major newspapers throughout the United States and the blogosphere. In an engaging and all-too-brief TweetChat recently, Peter Friedman (law professor at Case Western Reserve) commented on the frivolity of the lawsuit from a legal standpoint.³ The chat, conducted on the social networking site Twitter, formally featured Friedman, Tim Smith (classical music critic at the Baltimore Sun), and Janice Harayda (novelist and editor of the blog, One-Minute Book Reviews). Several other “tweeps,” including this writer, also chimed in. The discussion can be tracked on Twitter using the hashtag #DonR.

The ramifications of this (and other similar cases) are frightening in an age where arts criticism is being cut from publications at an alarming rate. While Mr. Rosenberg was found not to have legal grounds to file suit against the Cleveland Orchestra and Plain Dealer, I do think the larger issue bears examination by anyone interested in arts criticism, either from the reader’s perspective, the writer’s perspective, or that of a performing organization. Mr. Rosenberg does indeed have the “right” to criticize Maestro Franz Welser-Möst’s conducting. The Cleveland Orchestra also has the “right” not to like it. No one questions the “right” to have opinions, or at least, I hope not. But what happens when your occupation is defined by your ability to give your opinion?

Let’s remove the sense of “art” from criticism and look at it as a bare-bones employment issue. We pay critics to do the “job” of musical criticism, but evidently that occupation is heavily defined by parameters lying well outside what musical criticism should be. Is the measure of a good critic his or her ability to provide criticism, or is it the positive/negative qualities of that criticism?  If the former, it really isn’t clear why Rosenberg was “re-assigned”/”demoted.” Is the success of a critic based solely on giving good reviews? “Of course not” is the obvious answer.

Certainly, if a critic seems to have an axe to grind with a specific performer or organization, it might then be best to divide the criticism responsibilities, as Tim Smith suggested in the TweetChat: “I hate to second-guess an editor, but SG [Susan Goldberg] could have gone all Solomon and divvied up Franz reviews between Don and Zack [Lewis].” Barry Johnson offered another suggestion: “You could even [arrange] live encounters (Ali v. Frazier) and [employ] recordings of various versions of the music,” implying that even negative criticism can provide an opportunity to enlarge engagement with the arts.

One point that did not get addressed in the chat was the fact that the publisher of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer sits on the Board of the Cleveland Orchestra. This brings us to the next wrinkle: conflict of interest. Most of us in the Boston music scene (and elsewhere) are “connected” to multiple organizations, mine being two conservatories, a chorus, and a handful of others in a less direct way. I am sensitive to the conflict-of-interest issue, and I decline opportunities to review certain concerts because of it. However, the Boston-Musical Intelligencer, for which I write, and which has received initial support from the Harvard Musical Association, is ostensibly far more “connected” to myriad music organizations in the greater Boston area. I would venture less than six degrees of separation between most of the large organizations and our editor Robert Levin, publisher Lee Eiseman, and executive editor Bettina A. Norton. Does this mean we should avoid negative reviews of these organizations? Should we not review them at all? The Intelligencer’s goal, as stated on the website, is “to review as many [concerts] as possible, especially those deemed most important and unjustly neglected by our editors. Our reviewers are to be drawn from Boston’s most distinguished musicians and musical academics under the leadership of Robert Levin.” As with most journalistic publications, the editors make the decisions about what should be covered— no surprises there. That is the right of the publication. But does a publication or organization have the right to control the nature of the reviews? While the reviewers at the Intelligencer are not paid per se, we do receive free tickets to the events we cover (as is standard practice). This, however, as I’m sure most arts organizations would agree, is not a guarantee of a positive review, as that would constitute paid-for promotional advertising rather than genuine music criticism.

And what of validating one’s opinions? Don Rosenberg was not alone in his dislike of Franz Welser-Möst’s musical leadership. Two letters to the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer supported Rosenberg’s general assessment of Welser-Möst; one claimed “When he conducts, the performances are below dull and boring on the classical music scale of excellence” and the other, “[Welser-Möst] gave Debussy’s “Iberia” an uninteresting, perfunctory, metronomic performance. He’s out of synch when conducting the music of Debussy and Ravel.”⁴ Rosenberg’s criticism, to be sure, was unflinching in its dislike of Welser-Möst’s “non-interventionist” approach in a review of a 2007 performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony: “When [Welser-Möst] wasn’t pressing the orchestra toward ear-shattering harshness, [he] dropped dynamics to a whisper that sapped the music of all character. Even the serenity of the second movement was compromised as the ensemble toiled to maintain rhythmic unity. The third-movement Scherzo held no terror, and it was treated so rigidly that the marvelous trumpets had little space to sing.”⁵ I fail to see unsubstantiated invective in this particular review, although I do admit I am not a regular reader of Mr. Rosenberg’s work. It does lack any sugar-coating, that is for certain, but Rosenberg has also made sure to make his own expectations clear: “serenity” in the second movement and “terror” in the third.

Listening to music is such an extraordinary endeavor precisely because it can be such a contrasting experience for two different listeners. Music criticism, whether it is an art or a task, is not objective. If that were the case, the world would only need one über-critic to meet all our needs, and that would be that. A good review isn’t one with which you necessarily agree, but one that presents both an opinion and the subjective background for that opinion. In the case of a professional music critic, the critic’s credentials testify to their own subjective background as well as their qualifications for the job. But the critic cannot give voice to the same sorts of artistic evaluation that so freely flows in letters to the editors, blog posts and comments, if he/she is going to be subject to “re-assignment” (or worse) over negative reviews. That is, in effect, impeding the ability of the critic to do his/her job.

So, we must decide for ourselves, and as a supposedly “cultured” society, whether or not arts criticism is a valuable endeavor and component of the arts. The over-arching problem of politicization of the arts is a topic too large for this article, but I am aware that it lurks in the background, threatening to squash all my ideological naiveté. If, as I wrote in the TweetChat, all we expect are “pandering, fluffy reviews,” then I think we are headed to a sorry place in our cultural history, where music performance and appreciation thereof will become the work of automatons whose ears receive musical input that is merely thrust back out, bypassing the heart and soul completely.

Author’s Note: for further reading, consult the following:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/arts/music/07critic.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Friedman blog: http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/tag/donald-rosenberg/

Letters by William Farragher and Roger Gilruth at http://blog.cleveland.com/letters/2007/11/rosenberg_is_right_about_cleve.html

Donald Rosenberg’s “Review of Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall,” October 11, 2007. (Posted 12 October 2007). http://blog.cleveland.com/reviews/2007/10/cleveland_orchestra_welsermost.html

Ed. Note: An earlier version of this article appears on Rebecca Marchand’s personal blog, Musically Miscellaneous Mayhem

Rebecca Marchand holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and serves on the faculties of Longy School of Music and Boston Conservatory.

Second, adding an historical perspective to the TCMF and TMC program aids the latter’s educational mission by exposing the Fellows to styles and composers quite different, not only from standard repertoire but from the new-music currents of today. Harbison recounted that several of the Fellows to whom he had assigned works, by such formerly prominent composers as Messiaen and Dallapiccola, had never heard, much less performed, a note of their music. As a further aside, Harbison pointed out that some of the  “older” music associated with TMC, such as the Copland Third Symphony, which relatively speaking might come as a stylistic breather for audiences, is actually very difficult to perform. “Some of these older works,” he said, “push the limits of the performers…. The perspective of the violinist behind the stand is very different from that of the audience.” This being a phone interview, we couldn’t see him smiling when he said that, but we heard it.

We asked about how the three curators (the other two are Gunther Schuller and Oliver Knussen) worked to come up with the programs and the music to be played. Interestingly, the three did not sit down together to work things out. There were composers and works each of them wanted to see on the program, but once that part was settled, and their lists amalgamated, the decisions what would be performed when and by whom were largely in the hands of administrative programming staff, who set things up based to a great degree on prosaic considerations like instrumental compatibility, workload and scheduling of performers. Thus, Harbison emphasized that no single program could be ascribed to one or another of the curators.

While the TCMF often comes across to audiences as being fundamentally about composers, and while the TMC always has its complement of composition students eagerly absorbing all this unfamiliar music (more for expanding consciousness rather than for experimental imitation, Harbison averred), one gets the feeling that the organizers consider it, and the broader TMC, as mostly for the performers. It is, Harbison said, the place where performers who go on to professional careers get to play more contemporary music than they are likely to do at any other time in their professional lives. By the Tanglewood season’s end, there will have been over 100 works played in fulfillment of this year’s theme, exposing performers and audiences to an extraordinarily broad spectrum of musical thought and idiom, to which observation Harbison appended, with another invisible grin, “for better and for worse.”

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.

“The temporary loss of Pickman Hall has allowed us an opportunity to explore a new performance venue that is increasingly popular with theater, jazz, and chamber music audiences,” explained Artistic Director and violist Marcus Thompson.

The Arsenal theater has amenities that some more well known concert sites might envy: it is air-conditioned and boasts the intimacy and unobstructed views of raked seating, with very close free parking. (It is also on the route of the #70 bus from Central Square in Cambridge.) Located near the Arsenal Mall, the theater is surrounded by a number of tasty neighborhood restaurants — some with outdoor seating for pre-concert dining.

BCMS’s Hamel Summer Series has always offered the chance to hear a greater number of celebrated guests along with its members and regulars. In the August 8 concert, violinist Jennifer Koh, winner of the 1994 Tchaikovsky Competition and recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, will appear with frequent guest cellist Wilhelmina Smith. Pianist Benjamin Hochman will perform Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Etude No. 11 in D-flat major. (He will return in December for BCMS’s Beethoven Op. 95, 96, 97 concerts.)

Performances by BCMS pianist Mihae Lee of Chopin’s Ballade in G minor and Ballade in A-flat major will open the second and third concerts. In the first of these, on August 14, she will be joined by Sheryl Staples and Rebecca Young, each leading members of the New York Philharmonic, and by cellist Julie Albers, in the Schumann Piano Quartet in E-flat major. On August 21, Mihae Lee will be joined by violinist Erin Keefe and BCMS co-founder and cellist Ronald Thomas in a performance of the Schumann Trio in G minor.

The final concert of the 2010 Hamel Summer Series on August 28 opens with the Chopin Introduction and Polonaise Brillante, Op. 3, performed by Ronald Thomas and guest pianist Rieko Aizawa; the Beethoven Violin and Piano Sonata in A Major by Steven Copes, Concertmaster of the famed St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Schumann Piano Trio in F major, Op. 80.

Thomas will perform the Chopin Sonata for Cello and Piano that opens the BCMS November concerts at Rockport Music’s new Shalin Liu Performance Center on Saturday, November 11 and again in Cambridge at Sanders Theater on Sunday, November 12.

Fiddleheads from PCMF brochure

It’s difficult not to love every bit of the Maine coastline, but Portland holds a special niche. Recently named the number one place in the country to raise children and in the top 10 “perfect places to live in America,” the city experienced a rejuvenation of its downtown waterfront area, with its superb but previously neglected brick mercantile buildings, in the late 1970s. Twenty years later, a summer classical performance series appeared. The Old Port waterfront restaurants, once limited, are now plentiful and in many cases, superb. In toto, it is a delightful place to spend a summer weekend.

The Portland Chamber Music Festival was founded in 1994 by its Executive Director and Artistic-Co director Jennifer Elowitch and Artistic Co-Director Dena Levine. Elowitch, who taught at New England Conservatory Preparatory School (and is still officially still on the faculty) has lived in Maine, her home state, since 2004. But she continues to be involved with the classical music scene in Boston; she is assistant principal second violin with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra and often subs for the BSO, serves as a faculty member at Longy School of Music and at the Composers’ Conference at Wellesley, and plays with numerous other chamber music groups.

A recent newspaper article said that she has “slowed down” of late, but how a woman with twins, aged two, slows down is a mystery to this grandmother septuagenarian. And her concertizing is still impressive, with the Portland Festival leading the list.

“It has become such an essential part of what I do now,” she said, “and we now are doing things throughout the year.”

Ellowitch and Levine have done an admirable job involving local media, cultural organizations, and businesses in the work of the group. The Festival has been heard on National Public Radio and on WGBH in Boston, and twice it has been awarded an Aaron Copland grant for performance of American contemporary music.

The renowned Boston-area organist and harpsichordist Peter Sykes has been a regular performer over the years. This year’s roster includes current and former members of the Vermeer, Arditti, and FLUX String Quartets; the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Orpheus Ensemble; and faculty members at the New England Conservatory, the Eastman School of Music, and other renowned institutions.

Festival concerts are held on two Thursdays and Saturdays in mid August. Ibert, Sonenberg, Ravel and Schumann, are on the first program, Thursday, August 12, with pieces featuring flute and harp; Whistlesparks for Flute and Harp, by Daniel Sonenberg, a professor at University of Southern Maine, is the recent work. Mozart, Chen Yi and Dvorak compositions for strings, flute, clarinet, and piano, are on the program for Saturday, August 14; Grammy Award-winning Chinese composer Chen Yi, the first woman in China to receive a Masters Degree in composition, is the recipient of numerous awards. Dohnanyi’s Piano Quintet in C minor, Six Bagatelles for String Trio by Andrew List, the winning work of PCMF’s 5th Composers Competition, and the Mozart Clarinet Quintet in A Major with Todd Palmer make up the program for August 19;  and Peggy Pearson will be in the program on August 21, with her transcription of Mozart’s Divertimento in D Major, Loeffler’s Two rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola, and Piano, and Prokofiev’s Quintet in G minor for Violin, viola, Oboe, Clarinet, and Bass.

PCMF’s summer concerts are held at the Abromson Center at the University of Southern Maine’s Portland Campus, an easily accessible, modern, air-conditioned venue close to downtown Portland.

Like Nanki-poo’s catalogue, that of the TCMF this year is long, “through every passion ranging.” There are eight official TCMF concerts from August 12 through 16, but the underlying historical theme of the festival also has permeated the overall Tanglewood programming: concerts throughout July and up to August 8 have incorporated the illustrious TMC affiliates.

The Festival proper kicks off with a program in Ozawa Hall conducted by Knussen, featuring the BSO’s Principal Double Bass Edwin Barker, in Theodore Antoniou’s Concertino for Double Bass and String Orchestra along with works of George Perle, Gunther Schuller, Bruno Maderna and Paul Hindemith, all former TMC faculty. Subsequent programs in Ozawa Hall include works by Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, Lukas Foss, Hans Werner Henze, Andrew McPherson (a former Harbison student at MIT who double-majored in music and electrical engineering), Betsy Jolas, Steve Mackey, Bright Sheng, Yehudi Wyner, Irving Fine, Alexander Goehr, Luciano Berio, Helen Grime, Michael Gandolfi, Olivier Messiaen, Jacob Druckman, Colin Matthews, and Copland, whose epic Third Symphony was largely written at Tanglewood.

The BSO itself gets into the act with a program on August 13 under the baton of Miguel Harth-Bedoya featuring Osvaldo Golijov’s Mariel for cello and orchestra, with Alisa Weilerstein as soloist, along with other works from Latin American composers including Daniel Alomía Robles and Gabriela Lena Frank, whose Illapa features BSO Principal Flute Elizabeth Rowe.

The annual Fromm Concert on August 15 features an operatic double bill, Harbison’s Full Moon in March and Knussen’s collaboration with Maurice Sendak in Where the Wild Things Are. On the afternoon of August 15 (a busy day for those of you who want to hear it all! — there are morning, afternoon and evening programs) the BSO includes Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee and Bernstein’s Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, with Thomas Martin, clarinet soloist, in a program also featuring Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Piano Concerto in F (an amazing masterpiece whose subtlety has never been truly appreciated by the supposed cognoscenti) with Jean-Yves Thibaudet, all conducted by Robert Spano. Gershwin, alas, died before the founding of TMC, so we’ll never know if he would have been welcomed or snubbed.

Among the works on the TCMF program that most tickle our fancy and curiosity are George Perle’s 1979 Concertino for Piano, Winds and Tympani, on the opening program (soloists not announced) on August 12; the Golijov on August 13; Steve Mackey’s Gaggle and Flock and Yehudi Wyner’s Passage, both on August 14; the revival of Berio’s circles (so au courant in the ’60s) on the morning program on the 15th, the two operas on that evening’s program and the Matthews and Copland on the final one. Copland’s attempt to write the Great American Symphony, as self-conscious and freighted as it was, nevertheless was not the dud many have assessed it to be. Next to the Ives Fourth, it ranks up there with the best you can think of —the Harris Third, the Thomson First, the Chadwick Second, the Barber First — and for sheer cleverness it has a distinct touch: all the themes are based on the Fanfare for the Common Man that crowns the finale. Robert Spano, who will conduct the TMC orchestra in the Copland and the BSO in the Gershwin concerto (which also uses a motto theme to which all the others are related) is in a position to reclaim, in different ways, two great American classics.

For the 2009 season, after a few years of narrowly chosen programming, it seemed that the TCMF was getting back to its roots with an eclectic menu. This year, it’s ahead to the past with an inward focus on TMC’s history. Why this year, with the 75th anniversary just a few years away, we don’t know, and why the particular works were chosen no one will be able to tell until after hearing them. We hope there is a tie-in to the ongoing teaching work of TMC, and that the audience will be able to take away, after it’s all over, a sense of whether and how the TMC has affected or been affected by the musical and personal influences of its leaders.

Consult the listings here on BMInt, or at www.tanglewood.org for fuller details on each program in the festival.

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.

Felix Mendelssohn’s father Abraham, son of the Enlightment philosopher and Jewish sage, Moses Mendelssohn, converted to Lutheranism and added the hyphenation of Bartholdy, the name of a piece of land purchased by his brother-in-law to buffer his Jewish surname.  He angrily rebuked his son for calling himself “Felix Mendelssohn” in concert programs in the 1820s:

A name is like a garment; it has to be appropriate for the time, the use, and the rank, if it is not to become a hindrance and a laughing-stock. … There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius.  If Mendelssohn is your name, you are ipso facto a Jew.

Felix Mendelssohn, who had been baptized a Christian in 1816, did not cease to call himself such, because he admired the legacy of his grandfather, but out of respect to his father had his calling cards printed with the Bartholdy hyphenation. (2)

In the recently-translated, fourth volume of his magnum opus on Mahler, the magnificent Gustav Mahler:  A New Life Cut Short (1907-1911), Henry-Louis de La Grange sheds light on both Felix Mendelssohn’s respect for the legacy of Moses Mendelssohn and the influence of his grandfather, both on Mahler’s own father and the life of the village of Iglau in Moravia, near the Czech border, where Mahler grew up.  The author notes that “The Czech provinces were the place of origin of many of the more sophisticated Jewish immigrants in Vienna, just as they had also been the home of a ‘Reform Catholicism’.  Here ‘Jews could experience at first hand a tolerant, human, humanist attitude, even from the Catholic church.’” (p. 471) (2, 3) “Iglau’s Jewish community .   . . witnessed the birth and rise of a new trend in Judaism, the Haskalah, which in the 1760s and 1770s was one of the many consequences of the ‘Enlightenment’ movement and its philosophy of religious tolerance.  The main leader and inspirer of the Haskalah was the great Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who was admired throughout Germany as a ‘wise man’, a ‘sage’, and a humanist.  He was referred to as ‘the German Socrates . . . and praised to the skies by his followers for ‘having inaugurated an era of light after one of darkness’, and for having ‘brought the Jewish people from folly to wisdom, fostered the Hebrew language, fought Talmudic casuistry and acted as a messenger of ‘Providence’.” (p. 472)

This intriguing link in the background of Felix Mendelssohn’s and Gustav Mahler’s struggles with and against their Jewish identity is explored in detail by de La Grange.  He notes that after Moses Mendelssohn’s death,  he was mourned by a huge following of both Jews and non-Jews.  Included in the sage’s vision was a departure from the traditional linkages of Jewish religion and learning toward a secularization that the Haskalah movement characterized as “an ideal synthesis of loyalty to Judaism and involvement in general culture and society.” (p. 472)  This separation from Jewish tradition was embraced by Mahler’s father, Bernhard, who, in de la Grange’s telling, decided to raise his whole family in accord with the Mendelssohnian principle of Haskalah.

Notwithstanding this optimism, subsequent historical events dashed Mahler’s and many other artists’, professionals’, scientists’, and philosphers’ hopes for integration as Jews in Germanic society.  The 1885 General Election in Austria brought to power a popular demagogue, Karl Lueger, an ally of Georg von Schonerer,  the author of racial clauses in the socialist “Linz Program.”   This victory, de la Grange asserts, “sounded the death knell for Austrian liberalism, and thereby served to end any hope of true assimilation that many Jews may still have harboured. . .Although many Jews had unconsciously yearned to become part of the Christian world, the general feeling now was ‘Once a Jew, always a Jew,’ and Jewish integration into the ‘Aryan’ world seemed impossible.  Espousal of Protestantism was the frequently preferred solution, and it was the option chosen by Viktor Adler . . .Arnold Schoenberg, Bruno Walter, and Arnold Rose, amongst many others.  The legal status of Christianity was thereby conferred without any recourse to Catholicism, and in the event of marriage there was no need for a religious ceremony to take place.” (p. 484)

Mahler, who married  Alma Schindler in a Roman Catholic service, made only one known statement about his conversion.

Do you know what particularly offends and annoys me?  The fact that it was impossible to occupy an official post without being baptized.  This is something I have never been prepared to accept.  Of course it is untrue to say that I was baptized only when the opportunity arose for my engagement in Vienna – I was baptized years before.  In fact it was my longing to escape from the hell of Hamburg under Pollini that prompted me to contemplate the idea of leaving the Jewish community.  That is the humiliating part of it.  I do not deny that it cost me a great effort, indeed one could say it was an instinct for self-survival that prompted me to such an action.  Inwardly I was not averse to the idea at all. (p.484)

Henry-Louis de La Grange appends to this quotation the following revealing footnote that speaks to the personal and moral conflicts Mahler was forced to endure to sustain his conducting career:  “For understandable reasons, Mahler wrongly claimed to have converted ‘years before’ his Vienna appointment.  He was in fact baptized in Hamburg on 23 Feb. 1896, and appointed Kapellmeister at the Hofoper on 8 April.  Further, his aim in struggling to be appointed in Vienna was not only to escape from Pollini’s ‘hell’.” (pp. 484-485)

The reception of Mahler’s Third Symphony was generally very positive, but on April 15, 1910, one influential French critic, Georges Humbert, editor of La Vie Musicale, ascribed its ‘enigmatic originality’ to the manner in which “these clichés mingle and collide,” that represent, he asserts, “an accurate reflection of his Jewishness:”  (p. 528)

Not that he is a unique member of this powerful, fecund, and marvelously talented race, with a will which senses when it is opportune to be supple.  He is an artist who is primarily concerned to assimilate, in spite of being obstinate and inflexible.  Here his is sweetly Italianate.  There he is the clever director of a chaos on which he projects a very bright light.  He resembles both Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, and often reveals that he has a similar temperament, even though he lives in a different age, and uses different means. (p. 529)

Now in 2010, your present reviewer, whose grandparents fled the violent anti-Semitism of Austria-Hungary and Russia in the interval between Mahler’s conversion and the premiere of his Third Symphony, would pose two questions:  “What’s a Roman Catholic lantzman to do?”  and “What’s the relevance to the music?”  (note:  Lantzman means “fellow countryman” or “fellow Jew” in the Yiddish spoken in these provinces.)

To the first question, there can be no answer, and surely no condemnation of the exigent accommodations that Mendelssohn and Mahler made to prevailing anti-Semitism, except perhaps to express gratitude that one’s forbears took leave of this mishigas (craziness).  The world is a harsh place if you’re not a bona fide member of the favored ethnic majority or minority, and no one could have foreseen the destructive energies unleashed by racial “science” later in the 20^th century in these very countries.

To the second question, the answer must be:  nothing, and everything.  Music is ephemeral, disappearing into the ether once the sounds are heard.  What we interpret as musical narrative is our own.  We can never know what anyone else hears and how they make meaning of it.  Neither can we know how external attributions affect our, and others’, listening experiences.  If you never knew that Wagner was a notorious anti-Semite, you might enjoy his wonderful music only on the basis of how it sounds.  Leonard Bernstein, to whom this annual concert by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra is dedicated, once was asked how he could love Wagner.  He replied:  “I hate Wagner – on my knees.”

See related review here.

Eli Newberger studied music theory and reviewed classical music for the Yale Daily News. Performing music, he wrote in “Medicine of the Tuba” in Doctors Afield (Yale University Press, 1999), helps him to care. That chapter and other writings on music and medicine may be found on his website, here.

Footnotes:

1.     D.S. Hertz: How Jews became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 189

2.     H.-L. de La Grange: Gustav Mahler: A New Life Cut Short, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

3.     W.M. Johnston: The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848-1938, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, p. 278, quoted by de La Grange supra.

The group was organized in Chicago where the address of their first practice venue gave the quartet its name; since 2002 they have been in residence at the Caine School for the Arts at Utah State University in Logan. However, they have local roots, and even roots in the Cape. First violinist William Fedkenheuer is familiar to Bostonians from his tenure as second violin with the Borromeo Quartet, and the Fry Street Quartet has over the past two years made pilgrimages to Wellfleet on the Cape to have coaching with celebrated cellist Bernard Greenhouse. I spoke with Fedkenheuer, a native of Calgary and a former Canadian fiddling champion, about the upcoming concert.

Boston Musical Intelligencer: You were a fiddling champion in Canada; how does that relate to your career as a classical musician?

William Fedkenheuer: I began the violin at age four and was not as excited about the instrument as most loving parents would hope! However, I had a very special teacher who started me on fiddle tunes, and this turned into one of the greatest gifts I’ve received as a violinist. I loved fiddling, and so a deal was struck that I could fiddle as long as I wanted, but the classical building and technical exercises had to be completed first.

Fry Street Quartet with William Fedkenheuer on left (stock photo)

Fiddling gave me so much as a young musician; foremost it gave me the experience of performing — stressing the importance of having fun on stage, and being who you are. I performed and travelled around the world, sparking my interest in both activities, and I was also meeting and engaging people from all walks of life. By the time I was 15, classical music started to gain more traction, and I continued to invest more time and energy in my studies. All of the hours building to that moment began to come together, and, combined with a pivotal string quartet experience under the tutelage of Paul Katz, my fate was sealed!

I still carry around hundreds of fiddle tunes in my head and am currently in the process of bringing some of them to the quartet with arrangements I’ve done myself. It’s quite a role reversal, taking the techniques I’ve learned from classical music and applying them now to fiddle tunes, but it brings back so many memories and allows me to share something I love with the audiences we now have the opportunity to play for.

BMInt: Your previous gig was as second violin in the Borromeo Quartet. How do the jobs of the first and second violinists in a quartet differ?

WF: It’s a fascinating difference that only a handful of violinists in professional string quartets experience, and I feel very privileged to part of that group. Of course, the roles are much more diverse and complex than what we have time to explain here, but in short the difference may not be what most people expect!

I found myself as second violinist extremely busy ‘fixing’ things like intonation, timing, blending, etc… The part is usually doubling (in harmony or unison) another instrument in the quartet and this creates the ability to feel the pulse of the quartet and to mold the quartet to where the theme is leading. As a first violinist, you are often the bearer of that theme, although it is the quartet that opens and closes different window to its possibilities. The role itself is to present the theme in such a way that it both follows what has been suggested, but in itself suggests to the quartet where it would be best to go next, although the ultimate decision often lies within another part in the quartet. In the end, a first violinist has to be happy to go absolutely anywhere with the theme, knowing that the entire quartet is supporting wherever this journey leads.

BMInt.: Who are your string quartet “heroes”?

W.F.: There are so many possibilities to list here, as with each composer, piece, and sometimes movements, different quartets make the ‘hero’ list! Every quartet that has been fortunate enough to have a career has a special essence that has set them apart. Two that stand out in my experiences are the Cleveland and Amadeus Quartets. I have been greatly influenced over the years by the playing and teaching of the Cleveland Quartet, having had opportunities to both study and perform with many of the members. And, a pivotal experience for me was hearing the Amadeus Quartet perform a Haydn Quartet that stopped life in its tracks and steered my passion towards this life in string quartets. I have heroes that include all of the great string quartets, too many to name! A few other favorites include the Vegh, Budapest and Tokyo quartets.

BMInt: You have a history in Wellfleet, where the quartet has had coaching sessions with Bernard Greenhouse. What was that like?

W.F.: Our sessions have always created pivotal changes within the quartet that can only come from spending time with Mr. Greenhouse. He is the one of the few bearers of a way of feeling and playing music that was passed directly from Casals to him, and which he now shares with us. He has this ability to grant permission for each of us to be who we are as artists, to embrace what the music is asking us to do, and then to share that with an audience and bring them to places that neither artist nor audience member could have dreamed on their own.  Each moment with him is a special treasure for the quartet and we are all looking forward to having time with him in August.

BMInt: It is a bit of a surprise to see a string trio on the program of a string quartet. How did that happen?

W.F.: There were two major ideas behind the decision to program the Dohnanyi Serenade for our summer season. The first came from the fact that my wife and I welcomed our first son, Max, into the world on February 15th, 2010. In our planning for this summer, we knew that none of us could predict what this would be like for my family, as well as for the family of the quartet. The string trio idea formed as a way of creating a small amount of space for me to keep up with the demands of both a professional string quartet and a newborn son!

The second came from wanting to strengthen and stretch the relationships between the other three players in the quartet. We each strive to have different experiences (as soloists and/or other performances) outside of the quartet to keep pushing ourselves and our colleagues in the continuous exploration that is a string quartet. With the trio, each instrument adapts its role to make up for the ‘missing’ part, and in doing so the players have to explore further the decisions they’ve made in their roles as members of the quartet. For me, it has created another level of understanding of how the quartet works, both seeing and hearing the trio without me involved brings alive different voices that we are now trying to integrate into the quartet. It’s been fascinating to see how each of us has changed and how it’s developing the quartet even further. Besides all of this, the Dohnanyi is a fantastic composition that we wanted to share with our audiences, and its balance between the Beethoven and the Mendelssohn creates an exciting musical journey for the program.

The Fry Street Quartet: William Fedkenheuer and Rebecca McFaul, violins; Bradley Ottesen, viola; Anne Francis, cello; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, Monday, August 9, 2010, 8 PM; and again at the Dennis Union Church, Dennis, on Thursday, August 12, 2010, 8 P.M.. Music of Beethoven (Op 18 No 3), Dohnanyi, (Serenade for String Trio Op 10), and Mendelssohn (F minor Op 80). For tickets call the box office at 508-247-9400 or visit the website here.

Jeffrey S. Berman is Professor of Medicine at Boston University. He is also a clarinetist in the Longwood Symphony Orchestra and a member of several music boards in the Boston area.