Month: October 2023

Oct. 28, St. Luke Lutheran Church

Like father, like son?

That was the implied question in the final program of this fall’s Alexander Paley Music Festival, as the pianist played works by Johann Sebastian Bach and his most gifted son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

J.S. Bach’s compositions represent the apogee of baroque musical style. C.P.E. Bach’s, while rooted in the high baroque, broke free from its formal and expressive constraints.

J.S. was devout and spent most of his maturity as a church musician in Leipzig, writing religious works for voices. C.P.E. was primarily a secular composer, working in the Berlin court of Frederick the Great and then succeeding Georg Philipp Telemann (his godfather) as Kapellmeister of the city of Hamburg; most of his music is instrumental, a lot of it in the classical forms, such as the keyboard sonata and symphony, that were evolving into their modern forms during his lifetime.

J.S. was not without humor, but wit is subliminal in most of his music. C.P.E.’s works, especially those for solo keyboard, are full of cockeyed, startling bursts of humor.

Those differences came through in Paley’s selections of music by the two Bachs – the father’s partitas No. 3 in A minor, BWV 827, and No. 1 in B flat major, BWV 825, and Fantasia in A minor, BWV 922; the son’s rondos in A minor, H. 262, and C minor, H. 284, and an encore of one of his speedy little solfeggio exercises; but the program also reflected the son’s inheritance from his father.

Paley played his piano of choice, a Blüthner from Leipzig, a very bright-sounding instrument sounding even brighter in the acoustic of the sanctuary of St. Luke Lutheran Church. That resulted in some tonal congestion in faster, more note-heavy and highly ornamented passages of father Bach’s partitas, but also brought extra impact to the dynamism and expressive twists of C.P.E.’s rondos.

Affectus, the stylized emotiveness of baroque and early classical music, is a prominent presence in these pieces, especially in the slow dances and arias of J.S. Bach’s partitas. Here, Paley played as expressively as he would in Chopin – much as he did in keyboard suites of Jean-Philippe Rameau in a 2014 festival program. The pianist’s often whipsaw energy, meanwhile, found fertile outlets in the C.P.E. Bach rondos.

On the like-father-like-son question, Paley made J.S.’s Fantasia in A minor sound like a pre-echo of C.P.E.’s Rondo in A minor. Otherwise, the composers’ differences outweighed their kinship in these performances.

Inon Barnatan, piano
James Ehnes, violin
Alisa Weilerstein, cello
Oct. 27, Modlin Arts Center, University of Richmond

The trio of classical A-listers performing at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Arts Center were introduced by Paul Brohan, the center’s executive director, as a “supergroup,” which, to listeners of a certain age and musical background, summoned memories of extended guitar noodling and 20-minute drum solos.

Highbrow supergroups are a different breed, playing under different circumstances. Pianist Inon Barnatan, violinist James Ehnes and cellist Alisa Weilerstein are all prominent solo artists, but also spend a fair amount of their time playing chamber music, especially at music festivals and in special ventures such as “Swan Song,” this touring program of late works by Franz Schubert.

Barnatan played Schubert’s Sonata in C minor, D. 958; joined Ehnes in the Fantasy in C major, D. 934; and, with Ehnes and Weilerstein, completed the program with the Piano Trio in E flat major, D. 929 – a representative sampler of the music that Schubert wrote in the last year of his short but prolifically productive life.

Their performances showed, first of all, that Barnatan is as accomplished a listener as he is a pianist. A power player in the piano sonata, a stormy work that at times sounded like a succession of thunderclaps as heard on the Hamburg Steinway acquired in 2015 by the University of Richmond’s music department, Barnatan reined in the instrument’s tone and volume in the fantasy and trio.

The fantasy for violin and piano (cellists often adapt it, too) is one of the most challenging of the late Schubert works. Its main theme, introduced at the outset and reprised in the finale, is among the composer’s most soulful melodies, but needs to sound almost austere; the inner set of variations on a more dance-like theme is a showcase of virtuosic fiddling. The piano’s role is mostly supportive, but often requires a light, feathery tone that doesn’t come naturally to a modern concert grand.

Ehnes captured both the yearning emotion and propulsive energy of the piece – all that high-speed double-stopping, in tempo and in tune, in the variations – realizing the fantasy’s contrasts and working them into a persuasive musical narrative. Barnatan’s accompaniment was both rhythmically pointed and sensitive to the tonal atmospherics of his part.

The E flat is the more compact of Schubert’s two piano trios, but still an example of the “heavenly length” that characterizes much of the composer’s late work. Its first and last movements develop their themes at length, at times obsessively and repetitively; a successful performance of the trio must turn recurrent themes and developmental busyness into a coherent musical flow. Barnatan, Ehnes and Weilerstein did so quite nicely. Weilerstein’s subtle changes of inflection and tonal weight in the final movement were especially gratifying.

A pre-Halloween show featuring favorite spooky classics, from Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” to Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique.” (French composers, you’ll notice, seem to dote on horrific weirdness.)

7-9 p.m. EDT
2300-0100 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

Mussorgsky: “Night on Bald Mountain”
(original version)
London Symphony Orchestra/Claudio Abbado
(RCA)

Bernard Herrmann: “Psycho: a Narrative for Orchestra”
London Philharmonic/Bernard Hermann
(Decca)

Giuseppe Tartini: Violin Sonata in G minor (“The Devil’s Trill”)
Gil Shaham, violin
Jonathan Feldman, piano
(Deutsche Grammophon)

André Caplet: “Conte fantastique”
Lockenhaus Festival Ensemble
(ECM)

Saint-Saëns: “Danse macabre”
Maya Iwabuchi, violin
Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Neeme Järvi
(Chandos)

Berlioz: “Symphonie fantastique”
Boston Symphony Orchestra/Charles Munch
(RCA)

I am medically advised to be cautious about attending crowded public events, including Richmond Symphony concerts. The orchestra is making video streams of its mainstage Symphony Series performances available to ticket-holders. The stream of this program became accessible on Oct. 25.

Valentina Peleggi conducting
with Paul Neubauer, viola
Oct. 21-22, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center

Nearly 80 years after his death, Béla Bartók still gives more than a few classical concertgoers a case of pre-emptive willies, thanks to his music’s tendencies toward the gnarly, with a harmonic language that sounds at times acidic, at times spacey, and rhythms that seem to go sideways or backward as often as forward.

Few if any of those descriptors apply to Bartók’s last compositions, notably his Concerto for Orchestra of 1943 and his Viola Concerto. When Bartók died of leukemia in 1945, he left the Viola Concerto in sketch form; a fully orchestrated performing version was produced by Tibor Serly, a close associate of the composer, in 1949, and several subsequent revisions have been made.

One of those revisions was produced in 1995 by Bartók’s son, Peter, and the violist Paul Neubauer, who was the soloist in the concerto with the Richmond Symphony in its latest mainstage concerts.

Neubauer, a mainstay of the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center and one of the leading US solo violists, showed his mastery of the Bartók concerto from the start, delivering a persuasive blend of fast-fingered pyrotechnics and the distinctive variety of lyricism that the composer developed from Hungarian and Roma folk music.

Neubauer’s treatment of the concerto was especially rewarding in its big central movement, which swings between a largo and scherzo, and in the work’s Hungarian-dance finale. The violist took every opportunity to lean into the work’s lyricism, as well as its demands for virtuosic fiddling.

Valentina Peleggi, the symphony’s music director, crafted supportive and nicely detailed accompaniment in the concerto. Her attention to details, and the orchestra’s realization of them, also could be heard in the program’s opening work, Richard Strauss’ tone poem “Don Juan,” and in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor (“Pathétique”).

In both the Strauss and Tchaikovsky, illumination of the details of orchestration were the result not just of the conductor’s attention but of the orchestra’s balance of forces. With the symphony’s usual complement of strings playing alongside enlarged woodwind and brass sections, wind solos and ensembles sounded with greater than usual prominence.

Oboist Victoria Chung, flutist Jennifer Debiec Lawson, clarinetist David Lemelin, bassoonist Thomas Schneider and violinist Adrian Pintea, the orchestra’s associate concertmaster, exploited their high exposure with fine technique and sensitive mood-setting.

In the Tchaikovsky, the low strings projected with the needed combination of darkness and warmth, as did the orchestra’s French horn and trombone choirs.

The result was not the kind of lushly textured, overtly heart-on-sleeve “Pathétique” listeners may hear on their stereos; but expressiveness without excess pathos serves this music quite well.

The stream of this program remains accessible until June 30. Access: $30. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); http://richmondsymphony.com

Writing for Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc blog, the veteran music critic Lawrence Vittes reviews “The Music Critic,” a play with music by Aleksey Igudesman, violinist of the classical comedy duo Igudesman and Joo. The show stars John Malkovich as a “lean and angry critic” experiencing “the transfiguring torments and ecstasies that come with the job.”

Not unlike the Schadenfreude summoned by reading Nicolas Slonimsky’s classic “Lectionary of Musical Invective,” a compendium of negative critiques of music subsequently recognized as great, “[t]here’s a peculiar satisfaction in witnessing the redemption of public humiliation at the expense of another’s perpetual shame, particularly when that person is a music critic,” Vittes writes.

He advises: “[I]f you fancy reading the critics who are most likely to miss the mark on masterpieces of the future, simply follow the publications that publish my work.”

Taking down the music critic

Reviewing a performance of “The Music Critic” at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, Vittes notes that the audience was “was rich in the kind of hip, young demographics orchestras aspire to engage; their comfort level with classical music was accompanied by an unbridled desire to revel in the fun.”

The crowd’s comfort level might have been enhanced by exposure to classical-music criticism in the major California newspapers. In much of the rest of the US, you won’t find classical reviews in the papers; so the hip and young – or the aging and average, for that matter – might not get the joke.

(Thinking back on the torments and ecstasies of my career as a critic, what comes first to mind was the time I had to review a production of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” in six column inches on a 15-minute deadline. To which the hip and young would say, “What’s a column inch?”)

Oct. 15, Singleton Arts Center, Virginia Commonwealth University

The Isidore Quartet, a young ensemble (formed in 2019) with an already impressive résumé – winning the 2022 Banff International String Quartet Competition, receiving a 2023 Avery Fisher Career Grant – made a memorable local debut in the latest installment of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Rennolds Chamber Concerts series.

The foursome – violinists Adrian Steele and Phoenix Avalon, violist Devin Moore and cellist Joshua McClendon – bracketed a 2012 string quartet by Billy Childs with two milestones of music’s classical period, Haydn’s Quartet in C major, Op. 20, No. 2, and Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, in performances marked by intense concentration, clarity of instrumental textures and storytelling-in-sound sensibility.

Childs, best-known as a jazz pianist, is also an estimable classical composer. His Quartet No. 2 (“Awakening”) was inspired by the trauma of his wife’s hospitalization with a pulmonary embolism. The quartet evokes the panic that Childs experienced when he learned of the diagnosis and the bleak fear he endured at her bedside, concluding in what Moore calls an “ode to recovery and rediscovery” as the couple healed physically and spiritually.

The Isidore’s performance of Childs’ quartet conveyed the raw emotionality of the piece with playing of tight tonal focus, unerring timing – silences have rarely sounded as tensely pregnant – and vivid realization of internal drama bursting outward. This music could not have a more compelling interpretation than these musicians delivered.

Haydn’s six Op. 20 quartets mark the birth of the string quartet as a prime vehicle for composers, a proving ground for musical structure, harmonic exploration, expressive range and the interweaving of audibly discrete voices. Among Haydn’s many musical inventions – he also sired the piano sonata, piano trio and symphony as we know them – these quartets may be the most inventive and influential.

The Isidore’s reading of the Haydn acknowledged its musical-historical resonance without sounding didactic or over-awed by its stature. The musicians played with spontaneity, balancing quizzical playfulness with Sturm und Drang intensity, consistently giving listeners a sound-picture of one of music’s supreme innovators at his most creative.

Violinists Steele and Avalon and violist Moore adhered to the modern “historically informed” practice of playing with minimal vibrato, staying gratifyingly in tune as they did, producing unusual transparency in voicing and texture. Moore and cellist McClendon enhanced that transparency with strongly projected bass lines.

A comparably well-delineated performance of the Beethoven usefully dispelled the common notion that Beethoven blew off the periwigged classicism of “Papa Haydn,” his former teacher. In fact, the teacher’s influence was always present in Beethoven’s music, never more so than in his late string quartets.

The Isidore’s phrasing, voicing and timing in Beethoven’s Op. 132 was Haydnesque in its textural transparency and explorative quality, even as it was unmistakably Beethovenian in its potency and expressive scope.

In a neat display of context in program-making, the “Heilige Dankgesang” (“Holy Song of Thanksgiving”), the aural memoir of illness and recovery that forms the centerpiece of the Beethoven quartet, came across as a pre-echo of the resolution of Childs’ “Awakening.”

My grandfather used to say, “All wars are fought over greed or religion.” Two wars rage today: In Ukraine, over Vladimir Putin’s greed for the land of the old Russian/Soviet empire; and now in Israel, over the very existence of the Jewish state. In this program, music reflecting today’s dark Zeitgeist and evoking the civilizations that genocidal aggressors seek, and must fail, to destroy.

7-9 p.m. EDT
2300-0100 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

Mendelssohn: Quartet in F minor, Op. 80
Artemis Quartet
(Erato)

Ewelina Nowicka: “Kaddish 1944”
Ewelina Nowicka, violin
Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio/Agnieszka Duczmal
(cpo)

Prokofiev: Sonata No. 7 in B flat major, Op. 83
Boris Giltburg, piano
(Orchid Classics)

Mahler: “Kindertotenlieder”
Alice Coote, mezzo-soprano
Netherlands Philharmonic/Marc Albrecht
(Pentatone)

Ernest Bloch: “Schelomo, a Hebrew Rhapsody”
Mischa Maisky, cello
Israel Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein
(Deutsche Grammophon)

Valentyn Silvestrov: “Hymn”
Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra/Thomas Sanderling
(Grand Piano)

Organist Bruce Stevens’ inaugural performance on the Juget-Sinclair choir organ installed last year at Richmond’s Cathedral of the Sacred Heart will be featured on the public-radio series “Pipe Dreams” on Oct. 15.

Stevens will be heard playing Josef Rheinberger’s Organ Sonata No. 3 in G major (“Pastoral”), the allegretto from Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Seven Improvisations” and Johann Gottfried Walther’s Partita on “Jesu meine Freude.”

“Pipe Dreams” airs locally from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT on Sundays on VPM Music, 107.3 and 93.1 FM. The segment with Stevens is expected to run in the last half-hour of the Oct. 15 program.

Episodes of “Pipe Dreams” are archived here:

http://www.pipedreams.org/episode/2023/10/09/concert-clippings

7-9 p.m. EDT
2300-0100 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

Rimsky-Korsakov: “Capriccio espagnol”
London Symphony Orchestra/Igor Markevitch
(Decca/Eloquence)

Henriette Renié: “Ballade fantastique”
Emmanuel Ceysson, harp
(Aparté)

Bohuslav Martinů: Piano Concerto No. 3
Olli Mustonen, piano
Lahti Symphony Orchestra/Dalia Stasevska
(BIS)

Brahms: “Variations on a Theme by Haydn”
Berlin Philharmonic/Claudio Abbado
(Deutsche Grammophon)

Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra
Helsinki Philharmonic/Susanna Mälkki
(Ondine)

The North Carolina radio station that had planned not to air Metropolitan Opera broadcasts of seven contemporary operas because of their provocative subjects has backed off the decision.

The manager of WCPE, based in Wake Forest, NC, and broadcasting in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, had justified the ban because the operas “are written in a non-classical music style [and] have adult themes and language.”

Reversing the ban “was a very hard decision,” Emily Moss, the station’s music director, told The New York Times: