Marian Anderson, whose classic recording of Spirituals sends shivers up my spine

James McBride, jazz musician and acclaimed author of The Color of Water, once gave a reading in Philadelphia that I’ll never forget. He talked about visiting a cancer ward and realizing that “cancer doesn’t care whether you’re rich or poor. It doesn’t discriminate.”

On a more hopeful note, the same thing can be said of creativity.

Think about it: most of the great composers came from modest backgrounds. Many were downright poor. In our own country, some of our most eloquent voices were beyond poor — they didn’t even own the right to their own lives.

I’m talking about the African-Americans who, while enduring the inhumane conditions of slavery, composed the great body of work known as the Spiritual.  In researching American music history for a concert and talk I just gave at Haverford College, I was humbled to learn how these anonymous composers, whose music was passed aurally from generation to generation, were able to create, out of such unendurable conditions, music that encompasses the entire range of human emotion. These works rank, in my opinion, with the finest art songs ever composed.

What led to the creation of the Spiritual? In the 18th and 19th centuries, in rural areas in the South, whites and blacks often attended the same Sunday morning church service. Hearing the Biblical text and Christian hymns with their traditionally European harmonic settings, African-Americans would take that material and, through their belief and genius, transform both lyrics and harmony into something utterly unique. Spirituals like “Deep River,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley,” and so on — hundreds on record — express every relationship between God and man, from praise to suffering.

We can’t know how the earliest Spirituals sounded. But written accounts describe a compelling use of ensemble singing, fresh harmony, and syncopated rhythm that were clearly African-influenced.

Eventually, spirituals gave way to gospel music. The infectious blending of African rhythm and harmony with European harmonies and instrumentation gave rise to ragtime, jazz, blues, rock and roll, and are still continually evolving into an American music that has come to influence the world.

Which reminds me once again that money does not provide the breeding ground for the production of great art. Great art comes from creative intuition and freedom of expression, and the powerful exchange of cultural ideas. Nothing could be more divine.

Charles Rosen, pianist, author, keen observer

While hunting for the answer to a thorny question of Beethoven interpretation (still hunting, I hope to discuss the answer in a future post) I came across a book given to me as a gift, which I’d not yet read. This was Charles Rosen’s (1927-2012) Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist. I opened it to a random page and immediately met a sympathetic new friend.

Rosen has a style that is spare without being dry, and warm without trying too hard to win you over. In witty, dispassionate prose, he observes things about the music world that make one think: “That’s how I feel, exactly! How come I never put it like that?”

It’s a slim volume that doesn’t waste words. Here are just two potent observations, with which I heartily agree: 1. music conservatories train for contests, and contests tend to create artificial situations which don’t reward individuality; and 2. “Pianists should, in the best of all possible worlds, play only the music they love and — this should carry equal weight — to which they think they can bring an interpretation that is deeply personal.”

Mr. Rosen also addresses the practical concerns that we pianists are almost afraid to bring up, for fear of being considered nutty. One such problem: pianos that look fine from the outside but whose innards are in bad shape. I have often arrived at a venue to rehearse for a performance, to find the piano in poor regulation (meaning that the action of each key responds differently to the same touch) or with uneven voicing of the piano hammers (meaning that one key or set of keys blast out too loud, or whisper too dully, in comparison to its neighbors.)

In one instance, I was so upset by the piano’s condition — a prestige-name instrument in a well-known hall — that I insisted to the management that they call the piano technician in right away. I had a long list of things that needed to be fixed. Later, I heard through the grapevine that the management, who were not themselves musicians, decided I must be crazy because some other well-regarded pianist had just played there and didn’t complain a bit!

Here is Charles Rosen, in Piano Notes, describing my situation:

“Busoni once said that there are no bad pianos, only bad pianists. That may be true enough, but a defective piano takes away much of the delight of the performer, and for the proper functioning of the world of music, the musicians should derive as much pleasure as the public. What is more troubling for pianists to face is the fact that many of the irregularities that bother us are largely impreceptible to an audience, which does not consciously realize that one note lacks brilliance and another is too harsh. Moreover, a note in which one of the strings is slightly out of tune makes a less agreeable sound, and the audience is more apt to think that the pianist is insensible to tone quality than to understand that one of the unisons is flat.”

Next time I encounter a bad piano problem, I’ll make sure to have these comments from Piano Notes ready. No one could argue with such logic, presented in such a disarming way.

Fryderyk Chopin at 25, painted by 16-year-old Maria Wodzinska

Whenever money matters weigh you down, it might help to remember that financial constraints sometimes produce unexpected treasures. Consider Chopin. Because of his chronic pulmonary disease and lack of stamina, Chopin didn’t have the lucrative concert career that his friend Franz Liszt enjoyed. Even though the musical world of the 1830′s and 40′s acknowledged Chopin’s genius, and even though his every new composition was eagerly awaited and successfully published, their sale did not support his elegant lifestyle. But being a sought-after teacher of the talented aristocracy did.

Chopin came from a pedagogical lineage — his own father was a French teacher in Warsaw. When he wasn’t composing, Chopin devoted much of his time, especially during the winter months, to teaching private piano lessons. He was a teacher of great influence, although many of his pupils were women of the nobility and thus never allowed to appear on the concert stage; only about 20 of his students went on to have professional careers. He saw teaching as a calling, which his student Mikuli described in this way: “Chopin daily devoted his entire energies to teaching for several hours and with genuine delight…Was not the severity, not so easy to satisfy, the feverish vehemence with which he sought to raise his pupils to his own standpoint, the ceaseless repetition of a passage till it was understood, a guarantee that he had the progress of the pupil at heart? A holy artistic zeal burnt in him the, every word from his lips was stimulating and inspiring.”

And this, from his pupil Maria von Harder (no relation): “Chopin was a born teacher, expression and conception, position of the hand, touch, pedalling, nothing escaped the sharpness of his hearing and his vision; he gave every detail the keenest attention. Entirely absorbed in his task, during the lesson he would be solely a teacher, and nothing but a teacher.”

How fortunate for us Chopin devotees that Chopin had so many devoted disciples. As a true artist, he never got around to committing his teaching method to paper in some dry and dusty text (despite all good intentions, he preferred to compose the Fantasie-Impromptu instead.) It is mainly through his pupils’ and contemporaries’ letters, remembrances, writings, diaries and even the scores annotated by Chopin himself, that we know important facts about the way he played his own compositions and how he preferred them to be played.

An absolutely indispensable reference for Chopin interpretation can be found in a single book, which I’ve used as a pianistic Bible for many years. This is Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger’s Chopin: pianist and teacher as seen by his pupils, published by Cambridge University Press. In one streamlined volume, Eigeldinger painstakingly compiles these primary sources and presents them in a clear and readable form. He shows, through the pupils’ words and their annotated scores of specific compositions, how Chopin approached fingering (of paramount importance to him,) pedalling, phrasing, other aspects of technique, timing, and overall musical style. Originally published in 1970 in French, no other book has come along to supplant Eigeldinger’s work, and probably never will. This volume is one that should never go out of print.

Had Chopin not been sickly, had he made a fortune giving concerts like Liszt or any of his other virtuoso contemporaries, he likely would not have taught so much during his short life. His students would not have passed on his pedagogical pearls of wisdom to future generations. But he did teach, and we are enriched immeasurably by these pearls. That, to me, is a silver-lining playbook of the most priceless kind.

Mary Todd Lincoln comforts a dying soldier in A Civil War Christmas

Behind a plain door on a narrow street in Greenwich Village, far from the glitter of Steven Speilberg’s Hollywood, my family and I watched Paula Vogel’s imaginative and lyrical play A Civil War Christmas unfold on a bare-bones stage. I sat down to enjoy a drama. I did not expect to be almost immediately moved to tears. What got me going, I realized, was the play’s masterful use of music.

The story is set on Christmas Eve, 1864, a few weeks before Lincoln’s second inauguration. The multiple story lines follow the lives of some pretty interesting characters in and around a turbulent and frost-bitten Washington, D.C. — fictional and historical, children and grown-ups, black and white, Jews and Christians, and even a couple of animals. (The talented cast of 11 play multiple roles.)

Their concerns are both lofty and simple: Abraham Lincoln wants to finalize a war and heal a shattered nation, and at the same time personally retrieve a forgotten Christmas present for his wife. Mary Todd Lincoln visits the wounded soldiers and tries to forget her own torments, and also wants to make the White House more festive with a Christmas tree, not an easily procured item in war-besieged D.C. A slave wants to get her child to safety and freedom. Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who has bought her own freedom through her sewing and design talent, wants to overcome the guilt she feels over her son’s death in battle. A Confederate boy wants glory. A dying Jewish soldier wants to see his mentor Walt Whitman once more. Perhaps the most powerful character, a black Union sergeant called Bronson, wants to revenge the abduction of his wife by Confederate soldiers. He vows to “take no prisoners.”

What binds these disparate stories together is the interjection of traditional carols, hymns, spirituals and popular song of the time, in arrangements by Daryl Waters and keenly directed from the keyboard by Andrew Resnick. Sometimes dancing, sometimes accompanying themselves on the banjo, accordion and fiddle, the actors harmonize”God Rest Ye Merry Gentelemn,” “Silent Night,” “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” “Oh, Christmas Tree.”   The spirituals “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” “Ain’t That a Rocking,” and “Children, Go Where I Send Thee” are powerfully delivered.

At the play’s climax, when Bronson spares the life of a Confederate child-soldier in an ingenious way, the melodious Longfellow carol, “I heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” with its message of “peace on earth, good will toward men” takes on new meaning. In light of the slaughter of young innocents in Connecticut just a week earlier, it was especially haunting.

A Civil War Christmas may never receive the publicity or audience numbers of Spielberg’s highly touted Lincoln, but it deserves to. I would like to see it performed every holiday season like The Nutcracker or Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a part of our cultural tradition and dialogue, its drama and music passed with care from one generation to the next.

Audrey Luna's Ariel, spirit and singer extraordinaire

Despite distant warnings about a hurricane coming our way, Tom and I went ahead with our plans to celebrate our 27th — yes, 27th! — wedding anniversary in New York City. One of the highlights of our trip was taking in a new production put on by the Metropolitan Opera, The Tempest, composed and conducted by Brit Thomas Adès.

What we experienced was a visual treat, with sets, special effects, and costumes that borrow cleverly from pop culture. To depict the tempest at sea, a large gold chandelier descends from the ceiling, inexorably spinning. Hanging upside-down, Ariel, clad in a skin-tight sparkly leotard, twines around the chandelier like an acrobat from Cirque du Soleil. Harry Potter-like effects appear in the form of moving portraits (depicting Prospero’s traitorous brother and henchmen) and video images effectively show the wilderness that the shipwrecked passengers must wander through. The costumes, designed by Kym Barrett, are some of the most luscious I have ever seen, and flatter even the heftiest sopranos and tenors of the chorus.

Thomas Adès score, however, borrows not one eighth note from pop culture. It is angular and dissonant, with propulsive, square rhythms and no particularly hummable melody. Still, the orchestration and vocal balance he achieves is always effective. Some of the singing, in particular colaratura Audrey Luna’s Ariel and mezzo Isabel Leonard’s Miranda, is astounding.

What drives the work forward to its satisfying conclusion is Adès and librettist Meredith Oakes’ understanding of Shakespeare’s final play. They elucidate the Bard’s themes portrayed in his complex protagonist Prospero: the oppressed becoming the oppressor, the destructive nature of revenge, the power of love to transform and unite, the ultimate power of forgiveness. Modern production values and videography aside, relying on good old Shakesperare to provide the framework for a new work that will last — it’s a smart bet.

The next day, we decided to forego our reservation at Becco, one of our favorite restaurants. This real-life tempest was really going to happen, it seemed. Three hours later, the city closed its trains and subways. Eight hours later, Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on New York and New Jersey, and us too, and unlike Shakespeare, we could conjure up no Ariel to clean up the mess.

But today, finally, the sun is shining. The storm of election battles is over. I wouldn’t mind singing about that.

Ginny Fry, Poet, Painter and Beloved Friend

Over the years, friends have asked me to play for their weddings, birthday celebrations, at Christmas parties and New Year’s. A few weeks ago, one of my dearest friends made a request that I didn’t want to hear.

“Would you play at my funeral?” she asked. “Because there will be a funeral.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, yet cheerful, as if she found the prospect of dying mildly absurd. She added, sounding almost bemused, “My daughter insists there be a service, to honor her mother.”

Up until that point, we had all been denying that a funeral was anywhere in the works. But eventually Stage 4 breast cancer wears one down. Even though I wasn’t ready to accept her acceptance of the inevitable, I said, “Of course I’ll play, you don’t even need to ask.”

“Oh, thank you,” she said, obviously relieved. ”Because if you don’t, there’s just bound to be hymns and a Presbyterian choir group.”

Much as I wanted to disbelieve she was giving up the fight, I know now that with that request she was preparing me. Ginny passed away two weeks ago, on a glorious September morning, at home, with her children by her side.

Yes, she was a soprano in the church choir, and sang all the hymns, but she’d grown up in the Twin Cities, in the 40’s, listening to her accomplished amateur pianist mother practice for hours. Ginny was a painter and a poet. Hymns alone wouldn’t do.

In choosing what to play for her service tomorrow, I’ve decided on late Beethoven (the Opus 109 Sonata – which is a miracle of profundity and grace.) Two Etudes –the Aeolian Harp by Chopin and “Un sospiro” by Liszt, which Ginny would have likely heard her mother play. The brilliant, melodious runs that soar and cascade through both pieces make me think of what Ginny said was her great joy as a child, which was to strap on ice skates and fly across the frozen Minnesota lakes ”like the wind.”

Finally, before the organist begins his Prelude, I will play Debussy’s “Clair de lune.” It is not funereal. It is a romantic, wistful piece, which evokes all the colors and lyricism that Ginny loved to create in her own art. It is tender, too, like her unconditional love for so many people.

My father told me that his father was the lead funeral singer in their village, when the area around Seoul, Korea, was still a rural, agragrian place, long before the Korean War, when whole villages came out to mourn the passing of a member of the community. Tomorrow I will be carrying on the tradition of my grandfather. To comfort the grieving and light the memory of a loved one – I can think of no greater honor that music serves.

I’ll have the tissues ready, though Ginny would want us to hug, sing and laugh.

Ward Marston, jazz pianist and re-masterer extraordinaire

One of the joys of bopping around the music world is meeting extraordinary people who tend to wander into your life, quite by accident. Last week, I attended a surprise party for Vera Wilson, the dynamic founder and president of Astral Artists, to celebrate her 70^th birthday. During the preliminary half-hour that guests milled and chatted, waiting for the guest of honor to appear, my ear was drawn to the music emanating from the far end of the room. A tall man in a powder blue blazer sat at a small old grand piano and played lush, full, and complex solo jazz. Without the benefit of a bass player or drummer, this pianist made his arrangements sound complete. It was a glorious way to start the party.

When Vera arrived, she was happily surprised, and a chamber music concert (trios performed to honor her, played by Alex Moutouzkine, piano, Benjamin Beilman, violin, and Clancy Newman, cello) was sublime. Afterward, I sought out the pianist in powder blue, who, I now noticed, lacked the faculty of eyesight.

“That was super playing,” I said. “How did you learn to play jazz like that?”

“I never took a jazz lesson in my life,” he said, smiling and turning toward me. “I listened to records of all the greats -– Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson. That’s how I learned.”

When I inquired if he played in clubs anywhere in the area, hoping I could hear him sometime, he said that his career for the past several years had taken a new direction.

“I’ve collected about 30,000 historical 78 rp.m vinyl records and I remaster them – mostly operatic singers and pianists.”

He added, matter-of-factly, “I won a Grammy for re-mastering the complete Rachmaninov recordings, for BMG.”

I was floored. “That recording is like my Bible.”

It turned out this was Ward Marston of Marston Records, whose mission it is to digitally re-master rare recordings of great musicians, long dead, in order to preserve their interpretation, the details of their technique, their sound, their timing, their voice. Being able to listen and study recordings like these is like having a link to an era of pianists who may have known or worked with the legendary composers themselves. It is like having a key to the door of a past, precious world.

At home, I perused the Marston Record catalog online and have decided that my first purchase will be a 2-CD set of a pianist called Raoul von Koczalski. I had never heard of Koczalski, but he was a student of Karl Mikuli, who was himself a student of Chopin’s. Mikuli’s edition of the complete piano works of Chopin is still published by G. Schirmer, and was the edition that my own teacher, Earl Wild, preferred.

Will hearing Koczalski give me insight into the way Chopin himself may have played or taught? I’m sure it will. I’m sure it will inspire me. I can’t wait to be happily surprised.

Li'l Ed and the Blues Imperials

The tony Charles Hotel at Harvard Square is not where you might expect to clap your hands and shake your hips to a fantastic blues band, but that’s exactly what happened last Saturday night when Chicago-based Li’L Ed and the Blues Imperials played the swanky Regattabar at the Charles. This gal who loves J.S. Bach was there and loved it.

Yes, Li’l Ed is on the short side, but there is nothing diminutive about the way he plays the slide guitar. Dressed in long puffed sleeves and a pink-and-blue fez, which added several inches to his height, Li’l Ed’s guitar solos smoked – not so much with speed, but with expressive vibrato and slide effects that any violinist would envy. He was backed up by his tall, white-haired counterpart Michael Garret, whose own electric guitar playing alternated between wild, loose-wristed strumming to fast finger-picking solos. They were expertly supported by the expansive James “Pookie” Young on bass and drummer Kelly Littleton. The guys all sang in-tune and perfectly in sync. Another effect much appreciated by my tender ears: the Regattabar’s sound engineer amplified the music so that it was dynamic and clearly present but never distorted.

The Blues Imperials are masters of programming – switching from up-tempo, swing, rhythm and blues numbers to down and dirty Chicago Blues, with interesting key relationships between the numbers.  They played full-out for over an hour-and-a half without a break, but every moment was fully engaged and engaging. People drank, danced in the aisles, felt free to get up to go to the bathroom, tapped their toes, and had a good old time. Nobody sat still or fell asleep.

Hmm, we classical cats could learn a thing or two.

Silence is what we want sometimes. Silence is musical.

A few weeks ago Tom and I and our friends Ulf and Cole attended the July 4 fireworks celebration in nearby Narberth Park. As darkness fell, thousands of people crowded the park and Windsor Avenue. Teenagers love to hang out in Narberth, so there was a lot of youthful shouting, sweat, and laughter. Pop music blared, loudly yet un-clearly, over the amplifiers with an insistent beat.

A trained operatic tenor sang the national anthem to enthusiastic applause, and then the show began. A tremendous burst of gold, followed by white, followed by purple and red, lit the night sky. The borough spared no expense in providing a generous pyrotechnic show.

But as the dazzling spectacle filled the air, as each crackle and cannon-like boom of the next shell faded, darn if that distorted P.A. system didn’t continue to natter out tunes, never turning off, pumping away on its own track, completely oblivious to the majestic visual display, and out of sync with the music of the fireworks explosions. To me, there is a wonderful sense of anticipation in the silence that separates each shell before it is set off. But we never got that suspenseful silence, that restful moment for our ears before the next crackle, whine and explosion. It was as if the celebration that marked the birth of our nation was playing second fiddle to the familiar strains one hears in a T-shirt store.

Next year, the borough fathers and mothers ought to orchestrate their fireworks show so that the P.A. system is turned off during the pyrotechnic display. They can trust that the music of silence will accompany the music of fireworks to perfection.

I have mixed feelings about competitions. When asked to judge them, I usually decline. After all, a musical performance shouldn’t be an athletic event, with points to be won or lost, winner take all. Yo-Yo Ma, in Harvard Magazine, has declared, “Are you kidding? I lost every competition, except once when I was five. Today, I won’t even be a judge. I’m against them.”

That said, when the Tri-County Concert Association asked me to help judge their latest competition, I agreed, because I feel that Tri-County, through their long-standing concert series, does try to help serious young artists in a meaningful way. I asked to judge the “junior” or middle-school division as the timing of that category fit into my schedule, even though I assumed the repertoire would be less interesting than that played by the senior division the week before.

I arrived on a Saturday morning in April at the charming venue of Eastern University. The competition was held in the office of the chairman of the music department, in a stone mansion with windows that overlook ancient trees and manicured lawns. One by one the thirty or so contestants, all in grades 6 through 8, entered right on time (the competition is extremely well-organized,) sat at the old piano in the corner and performed their selected seven-minute piece from memory.

There indeed was an early Haydn sonata, and a few pieces which one would think of as “intermediate” repertoire, but most of what I heard could have easily belonged on a serious recital program in a professional concert hall: several Chopin Scherzi, Liszt Etudes, a middle Beethoven Sonata. At the end of a long day of judging, my co-judge Ken Borrmann and I agreed that four of the young pianists deserved honors, and that the top two were nearly tied. The two winners we chose performed Prokofiev’s Third Sonata and Liszt’s Tarantella from Venezia e Napoli, respectively.

Both winners demonstrated extremely clean playing of brilliant, highly demanding technical passages, tonal control through chord balance and dynamics, excellent sense of tempo and pacing, and overall conviction of performance – in short, these young musicians played with authority.

That is not to say that the two honorable mentions and a number of the other contestants did not also play beautifully and with conviction. Some of them may have even demonstrated a greater musical understanding or depth of expression than the chosen winners. It’s just that at that particular time, with a single piece on the line, the winners sounded most polished, and made the strongest statement.

I hope that just because they did not win first or second prize, none of the other pianists felt they were lesser musicians or were discouraged in any way. I hope that our positive critiques on their judging sheets were enough to dispel any feeling of disappointment at not winning.

Competitions are limited in their ability to rank talent, and are certainly limited in predicting the longevity of musical careers. As long as they are put in perspective by students (and by their parents!) they can be useful tools for polishing and performing a piece in a high-pressure situation. They should be viewed as a learning opportunity, not a final judgment.

During one of our breaks, I was chatting with my co-judge, and learned that Ken, besides being a professor of music, is also an expert rose grower. He told me to what great lengths he must go to produce champion specimens, and how carefully he must transport a prized blossom to a rosarian event. He has won top honors in regional rose shows, and at the national level as well, and has even gotten his young sons involved in helping him grow and present these horticultural winners.

As he told me with a quiet smile, “I’m competitive.”

Lunch with Christoph Wolff, renowned Bach scholar

One of the most endearing things about my father is that, at age 82, he remains a culture hound, just like me. Having retired to Orlando, Florida, he still sniffs out interesting cultural events within driving distance, and sets out to explore. When I visited him and my mom in February, we took in the HD simulcast of Gustavo Dudamel conducting a tremendous performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony with the L.A. Phil and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra in Venezuela. We also met, quite unexpectedly, one of my heroes of modern musical scholarship, Christoph Wolff.

Wolff’s tome on the life and work of J.S. Bach, Bach: The Learned Musician, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 and one of the best books on classical music ever written. Impeccably researched, it reveals a portrait of Bach the teacher, the performer, the father, and husband that complete our understanding of Bach the genius. I have read passages from Wolff’s book aloud to my own husband that I knew would interest him, such as the fact that Bach’s salary often included kegs of beer.

A native of Heidelburg, Christoph Wolff is a professor at Harvard and director of the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, Germany. That I met him while visiting the Land of the Mouse is due entirely to my father’s interest in the Bach Festival held at Winter Park, Florida at Rollins College each year. For the Bach Festival Society’s 75^th anniversary, Christoph Wolff was visiting scholar and guest of honor, and it so happened that the opening weekend of the festival coincided with my visit to Central Florida.

My parents and I set off for Rollins College to attend the festival’s Sunday morning service at the campus chapel. I was charmed to see that Professor Wolff, who commented on the Bach Cantata that the college choir sang (“Was Gott tut is wohlgetan” — “What God does is well done”) was unpretentiously dressed, in rumpled khakis and navy blazer.  Later, at the informal Lunch and Learn session, he kindly acceded to sitting with this boisterous fan (me) and talked about his work —  he likes to take care of office matters, e-mails, and correspondence in the morning, and then settles down to write, often late into the night. The book he just finished is about Mozart’s last years, and discusses how the increasing complexity of Mozart’s work was abruptly cut short by his untimely death.

Following lunch, Wolff answered questions off-the-cuff in a panel discussion, joined by John Sinclair, artistic director of the festival, and emceed by the eloquent Terry Teachout, playwright, critic, biographer, and blogger. A more congenial group of three discussing a more fabled musician cannot be imagined. (A full transcript I made of their talk may be posted later on this blog.)

In the meantime, here are a few details from their conversation that taught me new things about Bach:

• Contrary to his reputation nowadays as being somewhat resistant to newer styles, Bach was well-versed in the latest instrument technology of his day — the modern organ, the early pianoforte. His close friend and colleague at the St. Thomas School, Johann Winckler, was involved with electrical experiments. Bach felt that understanding technology and science helped him to understand God.

• He did like to show off at the keyboard. For instance, the harpsichord cadenza of the 5^th Brandenburg Concerto is way out-of-proportion to the rest of the piece. It’s a 72-measure cadenza! (A normal long cadenza would have been 15 measures.)

• Out of Bach’s 20 chldren, only 9 survived. (Women had 1 child a year back then: Mozart’s wife had 6 children, and only 2 survived.) Child mortality was great, and people experienced the heights of joy juxtaposed with sorrow all the time. Bach knew sorrow early on (he lost his own parents when he was 10.) He was one of the few who could translate this deep feeling into great art.

• Bach’s work contains lots of dark points, but they’re always balanced. Modern listeners may only hear the “burial” at the end of the St. John and St. Matthew Passions, forgetting that in Bach’s day they were followed on Easter morning with the sound of trumpets announcing the Resurrection.

Mom and Dad and I left Rollins College that afternoon enlightened and happy. We were reminded of the morning’s message at the college chapel, given by the lovely Dean Powers, who said that great art “should not simply envelop us, but reach inside and transform us.”

Amen.

My dad with Professor Wolff

The secret to their success...

These past few weeks I’ve had the pure pleasure of collaborating with other musicians, young and older, in repertoire ranging from Mozart to Phillip Glass. As exhilarating as solo work can be, accompanying and playing with other musicians is for me the absolute best. Of course, whenever two or more minds are working out the same piece of music, there are bound to be disagreements, and how you handle them is something I’d like to talk about in this post.

One group that’s successfully finessed the fine art of rehearsing with care and diplomacy is the renowned Ying Quartet, which came to Bryn Mawr College last month for a sold-out Friday night concert, followed by a masterclass Saturday morning. Plenty of technical issues were covered in the masterclass. Violinist Ayano Ninomiya suggested that students practice “hands alone,” (something one hears more often with piano practice.) For violinists, that means working on difficult technical passages with:1. Either the right hand or bow arm practicing on open strings or 2. Just the left hand on the fingerboard without the bow. Both methods reveal holes in the technique.

Another technical pearl came from violinist Janet Ying, who demanded consistency of tone throughout an arpeggio and absolute steadiness in tempo.

In terms of rehearsal technique, all the members of the quartet, including violist Phillip Ying and cellist David Ying, had some important advice.

“The way you say something during a rehearsal makes all the difference. For instance, let’s say you think somebody in the group is playing too slowly and bogging down the tempo. Instead of saying, ‘you’re dragging,’ say ‘maybe we could flow more at measure so-and-so.’”

Another important idea: “Stay flexible. Don’t become ‘wedded’ to a single way of how to play something. Suppress your ego for the good of the group.

Be open to trying different things. Play it one person’s preferred way at one concert, and do it the other person’s way at the next.”

This advice helped me during my own rehearsals when I caught myself feeling testy over a colleague’s demands for a certain tempo, sound or phrasing idea that differed from my own. I’ll admit, the soloist in me has the tendency to bristle when being told what to do. But this time, remembering the Yings, I relaxed and went with the flow.

After all, as David Ying said, “that’s the beauty of live performance. It’s never the same way twice.”

Like life itself.

Just too tempting to turn off

Remember the good old days when the worst thing interrupting a live performance would be somebody’s digital watch going “peep-peep” at the top of the hour? That seems almost quaint compared to today’s smart phone transgressions, most notably the one occurring at the New York Philharmonic’s recent performance of Mahler’s Ninth, when a patron’s iPhone alarm played a cheerful marimba for agonizing minutes on end.

Hearing about this reminded me of sitting with my husband at the Philadelphia Opera a few months ago, during Don Jose’s and Micaela’s sublime final duet in the last act of Carmen.  As the soprano and tenor lines twined and ascended in lush, sweet harmony, a cell phone’s banal ringtone began tootling somewhere nearby. A few rows ahead of us, a woman began fumbling in her handbag. After awhile, she picked up her cell phone but instead of shutting it off, answered with a loud “hello?” and started to carry on a conversation.

The rest of us gasped. One man angrily leaned forward and tapped her arm. When she finally ended her conversation, I was torn between wanting to do her bodily harm and trying my best to concentrate on the rest of the show.

The woman had exquisite timing. Just as Don Jose was pulling his knife in the last moments of the opera, ready to kill his beloved Carmen, the woman rose from her seat, blocking everyone’s view, and without haste, exited the hall.

I don’t believe cell phones belong at the dinner table, during religious ceremonies, live performances, or any of life’s important daily moments. But everyone is tethered to their mobile phones nowadays as if to a lifeline. Can’t somebody write an app that would automatically sense when a cell phone interruption would be inappropriate, and keep the darn thing silent?

Lest anyone think I am on my high horse about cell phones, I confess my own boo-boo. During one of my own solo performances, I heard a cell phone go off, and realized it was my own, ringing backstage!

Until somebody writes that app, perhaps we ought to have a cell phone anthem before concerts, similar to the National Anthem being sung before a ball game. It could go something like this:

Turn off your cell phone

Ring tone

And alarm.

Take it out,

Turn it off,

Put away,

And LISTEN.

Pete Dorwart with Bob Sutherland in the library of the Metropolitan Opera

This holiday season I had the good fortune of peeking behind the scenes of the Metropolitan Opera as the guest of Pete Dorwart — scientist, master woodworker, amateur cellist, professional music editor/publisher, and good friend of the Met.

Here’s the story: About ten years ago, the chief librarian at the Metropolitan Opera heard through his contacts at the Philadelphia Orchestra that Pete, using up-to-date music notation software, had created a new edition of Franz Lehar’s operetta The Merry Widow, which the Met was about to put on. The old Kalmus edition in general use at the time was hard to read and full of errors. Pete offered the Met his corrected, visually appealing, intelligently edited score and parts of The Merry Widow at a reasonable price, and a lifelong friendship was born.

“Many people would see that kind of opportunity and only hear ‘cha-ching’ but not Pete,” Bob Sutherland, the chief librarian, told me. “We’re grateful to him and his work.” Pete’s been invited to the Met library’s annual holiday party ever since.

Pete and I began our day at the opera by attending a final dress rehearsal of Hansel and Gretel, along with selected donors and several hundred lucky schoolchildren. Everything about the production, with its full set, costumes, and cast, appeared as it would on opening night, but with the addition of a large bank of cameras in front of the stage manned by press photographers, and several lighted tables scattered around the house for the assistant conductors and directors who were making their final notes for the production.

For me, the highlight of the 2-hour rehearsal was hearing the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in Humperdinck’s lush, Wagnerian score. They are simply one of the world’s warmest, best balanced, and virtuosically precise orchestras, and what a pleasure it was to hear them again.

After the curtain calls, Pete and I made our way to the party. The backstage area of the glamorous opera house is a warren of functional, low-ceilinged hallways, stairways, and cubbyholes, cluttered with electrical equipment, harp cases, and the diverse belongings of an enormous theatrical organization. Staff members wearing headsets hurried here and there. The opera house’s library occupies a lower, windowless floor, and is crowded with orderly shelves and bookcases. High up against a wall sit packages wrapped in brown kraft paper, with the titles of Verdi operas labeled in black marker.

“Those are the original Simrock editions of the operas when the Met premiered them back in the 1800’s,” Robert Willoughby Jones, one of the librarians told me. “We can never get rid of them.”

It made me feel better to know that the Met stores their historical scores in much the same way as I store our family photos.

Four full-time librarians provide the music to all the conductors, directors, orchestral instrumentalists, coaches, rehearsal pianists, soloists, and chorus members of the Met, as well as the subtitle and HD production departments -– a huge undertaking for a huge organization that puts on 28 fully staged operas a season. Even as we were about to enjoy librarian Rosemary Summer’s deliciously prepared appetizers and desserts, a singer rushed in needing a score to practice from.

Guests filtered in — reps from publishing houses and staff members of other libraries, from the New York Philharmonic, the Juilliard School, the New York Public Library.  I found them all to be a genteel, kindly, happy, and learned bunch.

Besides The Merry Widow, Pete has created and published new editions of nearly all the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, Johann Strauss Jr’s Die Fledermaus, Victor Herbert’s operetta Naughty Marietta, and other works. He is currently working on Cyrano de Bergerac for the Victor Herbert foundation. After we left the party and were crossing Broadway to the Subway station, I asked Pete if he’d ever been to the Volksoper in Vienna, which is, after all, the epicenter of operetta.

“I’d like to go to Vienna,” he said, “But I’m six feet ten and a trans-Atlantic flight isn’t appealing to me.”

No matter. To make a positive contribution to an entity as remarkable as the Metropolitan Opera -– well, it doesn’t get any better than that.

For more information about Pete Dorwart’s publishing company, click on

http://members.bellatlantic.net/~dorwart/

Press cameras ready for action

The Doctor with the Hero's Voice

One of the astonishing things about art is how you can discover it in the most unexpected places. This happened to me when I was 18-years-old, and my then-new-boyfriend Tom brought me to visit his home in Appalachia. There, one evening, I accompanied on the piano an excellent baritone who introduced me to the incredible songs of Franz Schubert.

This singer had been nicknamed “Crow” by his medical school classmates in Goettingen, Germany, because he sang “Die Kraehe” (“The Crow”) from Schubert’s great song cycle “Die Winterreise” so often. This singer had once auditioned for a European opera impresario, who declared that he could become a sensation, not only because of the quality of his voice, but because of his personality, which exudes the force and light of a solar system. Sig turned down the opportunity to develop a singing career because he believed his destiny was to “serve” (which, incidentally, was Beethoven’s philosophy about his own life.) To that end, my father-in-law spent over forty years working as a general internist in Appalachia, serving the rural population of Southeastern Ohio, where he and my mother-in-law live to this day.

Be that as it may, sometimes I cannot help but think how he would have benefited from the cultural riches we have here in Philadelphia. Last night I wished he could have heard the program Austrian mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchslager and pianist Warren Jones gave for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Rather than offer up familiar, tuneful songs, they chose to perform complex, rarely heard lieder of Brahms, Wolf and Hahn, and selections from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

How Sig would have enjoyed hearing Ms. Kirchschlager’s burnished, nuanced mezzo, and her penetrating interpretations. He would have been enchanted by her dramatic flair and the sometimes mischievous quality that make her appear a down-to-earth diva just inviting the family over to hear her sing.

My father-in-law would have admired, as I did, Mr. Jones’ gorgeous, virtuosic accompaniment that contained not one square edge.

Listening to this evening of lieder was especially poignant knowing that the following morning Sig, a doctor nearly all his adult life, would become a patient on an operating table in Columbus, Ohio, undergoing coronary bypass and replacement of an aortic valve that has been failing for some time.

Somehow the profundity of a great Lied, which deals with life or death as its subject matter, feels even more relevant when a procedure of this magnitude is facing someone you love.

Fortunately, all that singing has provided Sig with tremendous lung capacity, and as I write this, he has survived the operation and is recovering in the I.C.U. As soon as he makes it safely out of the hospital and into rehab, I will make sure he hears one of Angelika’s CD’s. I know he will appreciate it.

This week I’ll be giving a recital that’s a departure from my usual kind of program: I’ll be playing the work of a single composer (Beethoven,) from only one opus (an early one, Nr. 10,) and I’ll be talking a great deal about the music. The talking portion has involved quite a bit of research, and I want to share some of it with you, because it’s fascinating.

It’s hard not to view everything Beethoven did and wrote from the context of the monumental Ninth Symphony, the middle and late Sonatas and String Quartets, and from the viewpoint of his tragic deafness. But before Beethoven became “Beethoven,” he was just a young buck amid a horde of other talented young musicians competing for attention in Vienna. He’d moved there from his hometown of Bonn at the age of 22, ostensibly to study with Haydn and others, and with the intention of returning to Bonn where he had a close circle of friends and a good job waiting for him. But the opportunity, freedom, and creative stimulation he found in Vienna proved to be the right environment for him, and he never went home again.

One of the most important things Beethoven could find in Vienna that he couldn’t find at home was an abundance of wealthy people who were crazy about music, and for whom patronizing important young artists was a way of increasing their social status. Within a short time of his arrival, Beethoven became inundated with gifts of money, horses, clothes, and offers to live and dine, indefinitely, for free, in the mansions of the wealthy.

Later, he would chafe at the sense of obligation this patronage would impose on him, but the support of the nobility was significant, because it allowed Beethoven the freedom to compose, and it created lots of buzz around his name. His father had died of alcoholism and his mother of tuberculosis, and he had to provide for his younger siblings at the time. Accepting the patronage of the nobility allowed him not to have to take a fulltime teaching job, as Bach and Chopin had to do — a good thing too, because by all accounts, Beethoven abhorred teaching.

What endeared him to these patrons? At first, it was not black notes printed on white paper – that is, not his compositions. It was his playing, and especially his improvising. Here is a quote by Czerny about Beethoven’s playing:

“In rapidity of scale passages, trills, leaps, etc., no one equaled him. But Beethoven’s playing in adagios and legato, in the sustained style, made an almost magical impression on every hearer, and, so far as I know, has never been surpassed.”

That he used his own ingenious piano compositions to showcase his playing, and that he could improvise with an abundance of astonishing musical ideas which seemed to just pour from him, only increased his “wow” factor. By 1800, about five different publishing houses were bidding on the rights to publish his work.

A portrait of Beethoven by Christian Horneman, painted when the composer was 33, shows an intelligent young man with a stylish haircut, sideburns, and a rather open, engaging expression.

Of course, they had their own version of Photoshop at the time. It’s known that Beethoven had had smallpox, but no pocks appear on his face. And paintings and photos don’t tell all – already Beethoven was beginning to experience a loss of hearing in the higher frequencies and an abnormal ringing, rushing sound in his ears. Already he’d written his heartbreaking Heiligenstadt Testament. But I like to think that the portrait shows the kind of man Beethoven always strove to be – an optimist and a humanist. His guiding light was art, in the service of mankind.

As he wrote in 1817:

“Continue to translate yourself to the heaven of art; there is no more undisturbed, unmixed, purer happiness than may thus be attained.”

I couldn’t agree more.

The moon rising above the Mann Music Center, Philadelphia

Growing up, my summer weekends were often spent listening to the Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom Music Center, their outdoor home. My friends and I would join a festive line of cars snaking down a wooded lane, directed by parking attendants with flares and brown vests, to the graveled parking lots. We’d arrive early and wait with the crowds until the cedar gates opened. People would spread out blankets and picnic dinners on the immense sloping lawn to the concert pavilion –- the aroma of pate, cold roast chicken, and Chardonnay would scent the air. Under the stars and in the deepening twilight, the music sounded especially sublime.

Here in Philly, our hometown orchestra is away for most of the summer, but we do have the Mann Center, in Fairmount Park, where they play concerts in June, and where another Pennsylvania orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, made a rare guest appearance this season. I’d been riveted by radio broadcasts of the Pittsburgh Symphony of late, so I got tickets and dragged my husband and friends along.

The Mann Center does not allow civilized noshing of one’s own gourmet items on the lawn – rather, one has to buy food purchased on the premises, like at a ballgame. So my friend Susan found a restaurant nearby which looked promising, though the surrounding neighborhood is rough. The Cochon Noir, we discovered, is a new jazz club which features ribs and Southern accompaniments. The owner, an elegant man in a three-piece suit, personally demonstrated how the properly cooked St. Louis-style barbecued rib should be chewy enough that one must “tug” the meat off the bone.  Susan’s husband Ulf declared with some disappointment that, in his opinion, the ribs were tough. They were also mammoth. We put most of the ribs in a to-go container and made our way to the concert.

Which was sublime. The Pittsburgh Symphony, directed by guest conductor Arild Remmereit, performed an all-Beethoven program, beginning with the Egmont Overture and ending with the Third Symphony. There is an intensity and energy at the core of Pittsburgh’s sound which is electrifying. Aside from some problems in the French horns (perhaps due to outdoor humidity) the winds produced a full, textured choir with gorgeous intonation.

Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto featured teen pianist Teo Gheorghiu, a Swiss-Canadian of Romanian descent. Gheorghiu is an actor too, and played opposite Bruno Ganz in the movie Vitus, which is about, not surprisingly, a piano prodigy. Listening to him was like hearing a pianist of the old school with creamy tone, flawless phrasing and technique. His encore, Rachmaninoff’s transcription of Kreisler’s Liesbesleid, displayed an approach that was mature, without pretense, and beautiful.

At home the next day, we put the ribs in the slow cooker and let them bubble away for hours. They came out perfectly soft and edible, and at last, the food matched our satisfaction with the music.

While you’re at it, click on the highlighted link below and let your ears be cajoled by the exquisite cello playing of Efe Baltacigil in the opening moments of Brahms’ Quartet in C minor, third movement.

11 Brahms 4tet Op 60-Andante trim

February 27, 2011 - Concert with David Kim, violin; Sarah Adams, viola; and Efe Baltacigil, cello. Photos courtesy Jonathan Yu

The captivating art of Micah Chambers-Goldberg

When my daughters were little, we loved reading together. We read all sorts of books — about clueless Papa Bears, and skunks who learned to eat their dinners. Our favorite books were not just entertaining, but powerful works of art which Mom could appreciate, and didn’t mind reading over and over.

The same is true of music. Like a great children’s book, a great children’s concert has the power to move everyone in the audience, whether young or old. One such concert, which I urge you to see the next time it comes around, is called “Who Stole the Mona Lisa?”

Produced by Astral Artists as part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, the April 9 show at the Perelman Theater featured several of Astral’s young musicians dressed in their own cheerful caps, T-shirts, and jeans. The stellar musical team included violinist Kristin Lee, cellist Clancy Newman, bassoonist Natalia Rose Vrbsky, trumpeter Stanford Thompson, clarinetist Benito Meza, and pianist Alexandre Moutouzkine.

During Martinu’s deftly played La Revue de Cuisine, a troupe of young actors/dancers, portraying pieces of cutlery and an art thief, cavorted alongside the musicians. For Poulenc’s The Story of Babar, the engaging storyteller Charlotte Blake Alston read aloud Jean deBrunhoff’s classic tale to the sensitive accompaniment of Poulenc’s incidental piano music, played by Alexandre Moutouzkine.

Everyone familiar with the story knows that Babar’s mother is killed by a “wicked hunter” early on in the book. As Ms. Alston intoned, “In the great forest a little elephant is born,” a 3-year-old in the audience, anticipating the worst, called out, “Uh-oh. UH-OH.” Talk about audience participation!

A young audience member, inspired to dance after the performance. (Photo, courtesy Steve Cohen.)

Conceived by Astral’s artistic director Julian Rodescu, and created by the visual artist Micah Chambers-Goldberg, this wordless animated film is set to Alexandre Moutouzkine’s transcription of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. The score was played live, with flawless timing and brilliance, by Moutouzkine himself. The film, a stylish fantasy reminiscent of Edward Gorey, contains moments of humor, whimsy, and wonder that are fresh and surprising. (The Cubist depiction of Picasso, with his nose to the left of his eyes, and one eye lower than the other, got plenty of laughs.) The story line loosely follows an actual historical incident, when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, but, as in all good stories, returned home again.

I can’t remember an instance when music so enhanced a piece of visual art, and vice versa.

I think Astral Artists is on to something new that is both engaging and meaningful. The kid in me can’t wait to see and hear what they come up with next.

Playwright/actress/barrier-breaker Anna Deavere Smith

I knew that Ms. Smith had done a huge amount of research for this play, interviewing over three-hundred people from around the world, then distilling these interviews to just twenty to portray onstage. Accompanied by music, stylish lighting, occasional props (mostly food and drink,) moving from table to comfy couch, she conveys the essence of each real-life character, from theologian to writer, to celebrity athlete, politician, physician, and patient — even a bullrider, and a Buddhist monk.

Ms. Smith hilariously embodies former Texas governor Ann Richards, as she was fighting esophageal cancer, and explaining why she couldn’t keep as many apppointments and do as many meet-and-greets as she used to: “I’ve got to protect my chi.” Lance Armstrong’s fierce description of his triumph against testicular cancer is followed by the sportswriter Sally Jenkins’ astute observations of the behavior of top-level athletes – that they don’t conserve anything, they want to go all out, want to be all used up -– they are going to compete to win, whether it’s a bicycle race or a boxing match, or death. Ms. Smith’s depiction of Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, the physician stranded with her impoverished patients at the doomed Charity Hospital of New Orleans, made me cry, as did her portrayal of Trudy Howell, who cares for AIDS orphans in South Africa.

But most moving to me was the scene with Susan Youens, a musicologist from Notre Dame. To the strains of the Adagio from Schubert’s string quintet, Ms. Youens explains that Franz Schubert contracted syphilis at the age of 25, and knew he was going to die. All his compositions from that point forward are tinged, Ms. Youens says, with poignancy, with brief rages against death, with acceptance, and occasionally the sounding of funerary “passing bells.” By the time he died, before his 32nd birthday, Schubert had left the world with a thousand incredible songs, sonatas, and symphonies.

“If I met Schubert, would I like him?” Ms. Youens says. “No, I would not like Schubert.
I would love Schubert.”

“Let Me Down Easy” is not about the health care system. “Let Me Down Easy” is about mortality, and its counterpart, living life. “Let Me Down Easy” expresses one philosophy as memorably as Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town:” that each moment we have on earth is precious, and we should therefore live each moment as if it were a treasured gift.