Month: October 2024

New York’s Morgan Library & Museum announces that it has discovered a previously unknown waltz by the young Frédéric Chopin, found among an assortment of memorabilia in its collection.

The piece, lasting about a minute and a quarter, was written on paper and with ink that matches those in use around 1830, when the waltz is believed to have been composed. Chopin’s name is written at the top of the score, but not in Chopin’s handwriting. Otherwise, “[t]he penmanship matches the composer’s . . . down to the unusual rendering of the bass clef symbols,” Javier C. Hernández reports in The New York Times.

“We have total confidence in our conclusion,” said Morgan curator Robinson McClellan. “Now it’s time to put it out there for the world to take a look and form its own opinions.”

Pianist Lang Lang, who finds that the little waltz is in “one of the most authentic Chopin styles that you can imagine,” plays the piece in a video attached to The Times article:

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

Stravinsky: “The Firebird” Suite
New York Philharmonic/Lorin Maazel
(Deutsche Grammophon)

Mel Bonis: “Femmes de légende” (“Legendary Women”)
Orchestre national de Metz/David Reiland
(La Dolce Volta)

Debussy: “Jeux – Poème dansé”
Cleveland Orchestra/Pierre Boulez
(Deutsche Grammophon)

Pēteris Vasks: Cello Concerto No. 2 (“Presence”)
Sol Gabetta, cello
Amsterdam Sinfonietta/Candida Thompson
(Sony Classical)

Arvo Pärt: “Tabula rasa”
Gil Shaham & Adele Anthony, violins
Erik Risberg, prepared piano
Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra/Neeme Järvi
(Deutsche Grammophon)

(I was unable to attend these concerts; the review is via the video stream posted Oct. 25.)

Valentina Peleggi conducting
with Clayton Stephenson, piano
Oct. 19-20, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center

It’s pretty rare for Igor Stravinsky’s “Le sacre du printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”) to be upstaged in a concert program. Pianist Clayton Stephenson, conductor Valentina Peleggi and the Richmond Symphony pulled off that feat in the season-opener of the orchestra’s mainstage Symphony Series.

Stephenson, the soloist in Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, balanced Jazz Age style and swagger with Chopinesque tonal sensibility, and showed an awareness that this work, especially in its central adagio, is as much a concerto for orchestra as for piano. He was as sensitive an accompanist to orchestral soloists as he was a virtuoso in the fast lanes of the outer movements.

The young, Brooklyn-born, Juilliard-schooled pianist made the concerto’s eventful first movement into a brother-from-a-different-mother of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” (Gershwin, in turn, made his Piano Concerto into a not-too-distant cousin of the Ravel.) Stephenson also caught and conveyed Ravel’s nods to other composers, from Chopin to Saint-Saëns to Stravinsky.

His pacing and voicing were arresting in the lengthy opening piano solo of the adagio, a lullaby in slow-waltz time, and his subsequent accompaniments to a succession of solo winds often sounded magical – never more so than in his exchanges with the harp. His emphatic, high-powered handling of the finale would normally cap a memorable music-making appearance. But wait, there was more.

Stephenson kicked up the energy level even higher in the first of two encores, “The Tom and Jerry Show,” a hyper-rag by the Japanese jazz pianist-composer Hiromi Uehara, then mellowed out nicely in Uehara’s “Green Tea Farm,” which filters a tune that vaguely recalls Stephen Foster through a Chopin-to-Debussy tonal prism.

Altogether, Stephenson’s performance was one that should put a return visit high on the symphony’s wish list.

Stravinsky’s “Rite” may have been upstaged, but it nevertheless packed both the punch and the exoticism that this music demands. Peleggi chose a moderate, dancers’ pace, which served to clarify the score’s intricate cross-rhythms and sectional exchanges and to give time and space for its colorful and characterful wind, brass and percussion writing to bloom.

The orchestra, although heavily augmented in its wind sections, less so in its strings, sounded sufficiently balanced except in the most brassy and percussive outbursts.

Was it the most thrilling “Rite” I’ve ever heard? No, but it was played attentively, color-sensitively and without significant mishaps. Not so long ago, such a performance would be a coup for a regional orchestra peppered with substitutes and extras, and quite likely a mind-blower for its audience. That this was neither testifies to the excellence of orchestral musicians in the US today, and to how this once-revolutionary music has become familiar after resonating for more than a century through film and television music, modern jazz and other genres.

The program opened with another feast of tone color, Claude Debussy’s “La mer.” This three-part symphonic evocation of the sea’s winds and waves is the epitome of musical impression (a label Debussy despised), a succession of now-dazzling, now-hazy tone colors in constant motion, riding swells of dynamism.

All those qualities were clearly audible, if rather hard-edged, in this performance. Woodwinds and brass were unusually prominent and the strings often sounded wiry – at least in the audio of the video stream.

The wind players were as color-sensitive in the Debussy as they would be in the Ravel and Stravinsky to follow. It was a big night for blowing through tubes. Highest honors go to bassoonist Thomas Schneider, opening the “Rite” with both warmth and spookiness, and to trumpeter Sam Huss, thriving in the spotlight, under the gun and delivering the goods, seemingly every 30 seconds throughout the concert.

The video stream of this program remains accessible through May 31, 2025. Access: $30. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); http://richmondsymphony.com

Christoph Wagner, cello
Joanne Kong, piano
Oct. 25, Modlin Arts Center, University of Richmond

The performing partnership of Christoph Wagner, a German cellist now teaching at the University of New Mexico, and Joanne Kong, the University of Richmond-based pianist and harpsichordist, has been ongoing for several years. The duo’s latest performance, before a well-filled Camp Concert Hall in UR’s Modlin Arts Center, showed both their crafting of complementary voices and their exploration of interesting byways in the cello-and-piano repertory.

The only repertory standard they played, Brahms’ Cello Sonata in F major, Op. 99, capped a program otherwise devoted to lesser-known works by Frédéric Chopin, Bohuslav Martinů and Giovanni Sollima, at least one of which, Martinů’s “Variations on a Slovak Theme,” rates as a miniature masterpiece.

The Martinů variations, completed shortly before the composer’s death in 1959, both recall his musical roots in Czechoslovakia and touch on the stylistic trends he absorbed in mid-20th century Paris, New York and elsewhere in a peripatetic life and career. The piece has been described as a summation of his musical odyssey, although it touches only lightly on the percolating, harmonically hazy qualities heard in his orchestral scores.

The Martinů shared the first half of the duo’s program with Chopin’s “Introduction and Polonaise brillante,” Op. 3, the work of a 20-year-old that echoes the florid showpieces of musicians such as violinist Niccolò Paganini and pianist Ignaz Moscheles, and one of the themes from Sollima’s score for the film “Il bell’ Antonio.”

Wagner and Kong gave a nervy account of the Chopin, emphasizing the piece’s brillante qualities if at times smearing its more note-heavy figurations. Their treatment of the Martinů focused more on its soulful melody, which comes from the same musical gene pool that produced Dvořák’s Slavonic dances and Brahms’ Hungarian dances, than on the composer’s more urbane modernist-neoclassical idiom. The duo’s interpretation of the Sollima centered on its darkish tonal palette, circular, torque-like energy and contrast of minimalist and romantic styles.

The Brahms sonata, composed around the same as his Fourth Symphony and Double Concerto for violin and cello (the cellist Robert Hausmann played in the premieres of both the sonata and the concerto) and reflecting the lean, classically rooted romanticism of Brahms’ late works, received a straightforward reading from the duo, notable for Kong’s reining in of the piano part to achieve sonic parity with the cello and for Wagner’s robust voicing and especially resonant pizzicatos.

Marie Goodman Hunter, a longtime fixture in the productions of Richmond’s theater troupes, a singer and actor in many events celebrating the city’s Black community, has died at 95.

Hunter, a mezzo-soprano, was a Virginia State University graduate who also studied at Columbia University. She taught music, speech and drama at John Marshall High School for 30 years and was music minister at Garland Avenue Baptist Church.

She played a variety of singing and speaking characters with many of Richmond’s theater companies over nearly 50 years. She was closely associated with Theatre Virginia, performing in its productions more than two dozen times, culminating in its farewell show in 2002.

Roy Proctor, theater critic for the Richmond News Leader and Richmond Times-Dispatch, dubbed Hunter “the first lady of the Richmond stage.” In Richmond and elsewhere, she was cast in plays and musicals as diverse as “Tartuffe,” “Having our Say,” “A Christmas Carol,” “The Threepenny Opera” and “South Pacific.”

Praising Hunter’s “most outstanding performance” in a 1985 production of Lorraine Hansbury’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” in which she played Mama Younger, The New York Times theater critic Alvin Klein wrote, “The actress is not physically imposing, but her underplaying underscores the quiet affirmation in Miss Hansberry’s writing.”

Singing in recitals and performing at local civic events, Hunter was especially well-known for re-creating speeches of Maggie L. Walker, the pioneering Richmond businesswoman who founded the St. Luke Penny Bank, one of the first Black-owned financial institutions in the US, and for appearing in events commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. and recalling the Black community’s role in Richmond’s history.

Hunter’s daughter, Kelley Hunter, incapsulates her mother’s legacy as one of “love and peace and happiness” in an interview aired on WTVR:

http://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/marie-goodman-hunter-oct-22-2024

On the 150th birthday of Charles Ives, we’ll contrast his vision of American music’s future and the future anticipated by Antonín Dvořák, and works by two living American composers, Jessie Montgomery and Carlos Simon, who sound to have taken both elders’ advice.

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

Ives: “Variations on ‘America’ ”
Gerard Brooks, organ
(Priory)

Dvořák: String Quintet in E flat major, Op. 97
Pavel Haas Quartet
Pavel Nikl, viola
(Supraphon)

Jessie Montgomery: “Banner”
Catalyst Quartet
(Azica)

Ives: “The Unanswered Question”
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
(Deutsche Grammophon)

Carlos Simon: “Wake Up! (Concerto for Orchestra)”
National Symphony Orchestra/Gianandrea Noseda
(National Symphony Orchestra)

Ives: Symphony No. 2
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Michael Tilson Thomas
(Sony Classical)

Pianist Jeremy Denk, writing in The New York Times, marks the 150th birthday of Charles Ives, the American maverick composer who (in)famously told musicians and their audiences to “stand up and take your dissonance like a man.”

“He dreamed that music would evolve into ‘a language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths will be common to all mankind.’ (This didn’t pan out, unless you count Taylor Swift.) And, in the first two decades of the 20th century, he dreamed up a radically original American musical voice – an enviable triumph that came bundled with failure,” Denk writes. “It was a voice many people didn’t want to hear, and still don’t.”

In the wild ride of an Ives composition, with its recollections of old tunes in olden times colliding with futuristic harmonies and raucous humor, Denk hears “a restless search to find more in America than we thought, or even hoped, to find.”

We’ll mark the Ives’ sesquicentennial on Oct. 20 with three of his most iconic works on this week’s Letter V Classical Radio, 7-9 p.m. EDT/2300-0100 UTC/GMT on WDCE, broadcasting at 90.1 FM, streaming at http://wdce.org

Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia
Oct. 14, First Unitarian Universalist Church

The artistically venturesome and behaviorally libertine culture of Weimar Germany lasted barely 10 years before it was suppressed by the Nazis, but has had a long afterlife. Its music spread well beyond its home turf of Berlin cabarets and theaters in the 1920s and early ’30s, initially thanks to exiles such as composer Kurt Weill and his spouse, singer Lotte Lenya, and later revivalists such as singers Ute Lemper and Max Raabe; and its rise and fall is frequently evoked by artists who fear crackdowns on free expression.

The Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia’s latest offering, “Swept Away,” recalled the Weimar era’s musical heyday in songs and chamber works by Hanns Eisler, Friedrich Hollander, Franz Schreker and Arnold Schoenberg, and its tragic aftermath in “For a Look or a Touch” by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer.

Heggie’s chamber opera for actor, baritone and small instrumental ensemble, premiered in 2007, staged by the Chamber Music Society in 2016, now reprised for its 20th anniversary season, imagines the encounter between an elderly Holocaust survivor and the ghost of his lover, one of many homosexuals who died in the Nazi death camps. Scheer’s text and narrative drew inspiration from the journal of Manfred Lewin, a gay Jewish man who was murdered with the rest of his family at Auschwitz, and the testimonies of several survivors in “Paragraph 175,” a documentary by Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.

In this performance, actor Doug Schneider and baritone Paul Max Tipton were side by side, the actor seated, the singer standing; but their characters’ distance, both in time and in the survivor’s resistance to remembering their love affair and its tragic ending, was made clear by lack of physical interaction. Schneider spoke rather softly in a pained, world-weary manner; Tipton sang with a combination of dreaminess and passion.

The accompanying band – flutist Mary Boodell, clarinetist Ian Tyson, violinist Grant Houston, cellist James Wilson and pianist Carsten Schmidt – was audibly tuned to Heggie’s stylistic wavelength, a hybrid of Weimar-adjacent modernism and operatic lyricism.

Imbalances between voices and instruments were at times precarious in “For a Look or a Touch,” but less troublesome than they had been in the first half of the program, when glaring piano tone obscured the voices of Tipton and soprano Sheila Dietrich in four songs by Eisler and Hollander. Dietrich projected best, in Hollander’s cabaret standard “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fluss auf Lieben Eingestellt” (“From Head to Toe I Am Prepared for Love”), better-known in English as “Falling in Love Again (I Can’t Help It).”

The volume of the instrumental ensemble made Dietrich’s delivery of six numbers from Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” barely comprehensible. (Its German Sprechstimme, or speech-song, is tough to follow in the best of aural circumstances.) Actress-dancer Gwen Grastorf, in commedia dell’arte costume, physically complemented the words that listeners struggled to hear.

“Pierrot Lunaire,” introduced in 1912, and Schreker’s miniature tone poem “Wind,” dating from 1908-09, were pre-echoes in style and spirit to the sounds of the post-World War I Weimar musical culture – and a template for Heggie’s score, for a “Pierrot” ensemble of strings, winds and piano. Shrecker slightly altered the instrumentation, subtracting flute and adding French horn, played here by Devin Gossett.

The ensemble emphasized the angular impressionism of the Schoenberg, and realized the stylistic interplay of romanticism and modernism in Shrecker’s score.

Over the weekend, Germany’s Dresden Sinfoniker presented a concert in which the orchestra’s musicians were conducted by a robot.

The highlight of this “Robotersinfonie” program was Andreas Gundlach’s “aptly named ‘Semiconductor’s Masterpiece’ for 16 brass musicians and four percussionists playing wildly diverging time signatures,” The Guardian’s Deborah Cole reports.

The orchestra’s artistic director, Markus Rindt, “said the intention was ‘not to replace human beings’ but to perform complex music that human conductors would find impossible,” Cole writes:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/13/three-armed-robot-maira-pro-s-conductor-makes-debut-dresden

The Dresden concert, also featuring another robot-conducted work, Wieland Reissmann’s “#kreuzknoten,” can be seen and heard here:

Meanwhile in Britain, the London Standard (digital successor of the Evening Standard) is planning to run an artificial intelligence-generated “experimental review” credited to the newspaper’s longtime art critic, Brian Sewell, who died in 2015. “The London Standard is a bold and disruptive new publication,” its interim CEO, Paul Kanareck, told The Guardian’s Dan Milmo. Sewell’s “estate is delighted,” Kanareck added:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/sep/25/london-standard-art-critic-brian-sewell-journalism-artificial-intelligence

Some sort of AI capacity was added to my computer in its most recent update. I haven’t gone for it, but, who knows, it may be coming for me. I’m not dead yet, as a friend used to say (before he died), and everything you read on Letter V is produced by a human being. So far.

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

Hamish MacCunn: “The Land of the Mountain and the Flood”
Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Alexander Gibson
(Warner Classics)

Amy Beach: Piano Concerto in C sharp minor
Danny Driver, piano
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Rebecca Miller
(Hyperion)

David Matthews: “Dark Pastoral” (after Vaughan Williams)
Guy Johnston, cello
Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Martin Yates
(Dutton)

Barber: “Knoxville, Summer of 1915”
Dawn Upshaw, soprano
Orchestra of St. Luke’s/David Zinman
(Nonesuch)

Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D major
Frank Peter Zimmermann, violin
Staatskapelle Dresden/Bernard Haitink
(Hänssler)