For Janos Starker (1924-2013)

I always found that there was far less to Janos Starker than met the eye - a perfect cello machine who never spared an opportunity to mute the expressive capability of whatever he played, and no doubt encouraged his students to do the same. Give me Rostropovich any day, hour, or minute over Starker. Rostropovich was all warmth and fire, whereas Starker was a perfectly formed icicle. Nevertheless, the technique was truly jaw-dropping, and when it came to works of great difficulty, he could put them over like the easiest thing in the world. He was not an artist to touch your heart, but he could make your hair stand up.

Kodaly Cello Sonata (it was said to be unplayable until he played it)

Bartok Romanian Folk Dances

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For Sir Colin Davis (1927-2013)

A Magic Flute that's pure joy. 

When Sir Charles Mackerras died, I was faced with an odd choice as a blogger. This was a conductor whose musicmaking simply had too much personal imprint upon my life to do a normal obituary. I'm determined not to make the same mistake with Sir Colin that I did with Sir Charles. But all the same, I can't simply give the details of Sir Colin's life without talking about the personal impact of his musicmaking on me.

Pure fire and brimstone - Mozart's "Great" C-Minor Mass

By any standard, Colin Davis was not my favorite conductor. But he was one of the conductors with whom I grew up, and one of the conductors whose best performances gave me the most joy. One of my early memories was when I was four years old, and seeing Davis conduct the New York Philharmonic in Brahms's 2nd Symphony and Beethoven's 4th piano concerto. To call me an unusual little kid would have been the century's understatement, and I had practically worn out my Bruno Walter tapes of Brahms 3rd and 4th symphonies already. But even at that age, I thrilled to my discovery of Brahms 2 the way an archaeologist would thrill to the discovery of Atlantis.

Berlioz Requiem -

Much as rhythm was the basis of Sir Charles Mackerras's music-making, sound was at the center of Sir Colin's approach - and he clearly loved making sounds as rich and full as any conductor since Leopold Stokowski. But unlike Stokowski, there was a stiff-upper-lip reserve that prevented him from exceeding the bounds of good taste. He conducted very little Mahler and claimed to loathe Mahler's 'vulgarity', yet had he let that magnificent shock of a silver mane down, he could have been a truly great Mahlerian (I grew up listening to his Mahler 1 and it was a wonderful, if unorthodox, performance), or equally great in more rough-hewn composers he generally avoided like Janacek, Bartok, and Mussorgsky. But he never could let himself go enough to get rid of his particularly English 'tastefulness'. Even in composers for whom his performances were justly world-renowned, like Berlioz and Stravinsky, his performances were full of passion, but they were passionate within an extremely constricting framework. It often felt as though Sir Colin had placed himself within an interpretive straightjacket which undercut all the momentum he worked so conscientiously to build. .

Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique (I’m not even sure a Colin Davis performance is in my top dozen choices for Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique - the piece is such an amazingly bizarre sonic kaleidoscope that most conductors know that they can cut loose in any way they like, and do so only to the music’s benefit. But Sir Colin was in such demand as a Berlioz conductor that he recorded the Symphonie Fantastique no less than four times. Most record lovers prefer his Concertgebouw recording from 1974, but while I’ve not heard his 1980’s version with the Vienna Philharmonic, I believe that his first with the London Symphony in 1963 is easily the best of the three I've heard. It can’t be denied that Davis was, in his manner, a truly great Berlioz conductor. But to me, Colin Davis’s Berlioz is overvalued. His evangelism on behalf of Berlioz cannot be overvalued, but he was able to evangelize for Berlioz because he brought out all the tasteful elegance of Berlioz, showing the world that Berlioz was no less classical than anything in Haydn - in Davis’s hands, Berlioz was a ‘normal’ composer. But the Berliozian bizarre which you get from Charles Munch or Leonard Bernstein or Pierre Monteux or John Eliot Gardiner is virtually nowhere to be found. Of the Davis SF’s, most people prefer his 1974 version with the Concertgebouw. But to me, that version is too long on elegance and too short on drama. Sadly, I’ve only heard one Davis performance of the Symphonie Fantastique that can thrill on the level of Munch’s, Bernstein’s, Dudamel’s, Gardiner’s, Monteux’s, Karajan’s, Ozawa’s, Muti’s, Celibidache’s, ... I’m sure I’ll think of more before long... and it was from long before Davis could be considered a 'mature master.')

And yet, there was a second side to Davis. Even in his genial old age, this conductor who appeared the personification of avuncularity could suddenly seem inflamed with the fire of a thousand angels and demons, and cause orchestras to play with the kind of fire which their training is supposed to drain out of them. Davis belonged to a line of conductors - like Bruno Walter and Carlo Maria Giulini and James Levine - who began their careers in blazes of fire and were known for giving performances of scorched earth intensity. But as age mellowed them and the fires cooled, they began to 'savor' the music and linger on every beautiful passage to milk it for maximum expressive potential. Sometimes the results were absolutely beautiful, sometimes the results were boring and maudlin. Nevertheless, in each of these cases, these conductors could occasionally summon the fire of old and stun their audiences with a blazing excitement which no 80 year old should ever be able to summon. In Sir Colin's case, he was able to summon the old passion seemingly on command in his beloved Berlioz and Britten and Sibelius even in his final years. But there was no better example of how the fire would return than in his recordings of the Nielsen symphonies. Sir Colin had never conducted these works that are known still to strike terror in the hearts of orchestral players for their difficulty until his 80's. With one exception, the results seem marginally a success with some awkward errors. But in Nielsen 4, still one of the most difficult pieces of music ever written for orchestra, Sir Colin and the London Symphony recorded perhaps the most scorched earth performance ever made of this terror written by lightening which takes the unambiguous heroism and necessity of visceral playing which one can only find elsewhere in Beethoven, and allies it to musical techniques that are fully of the twentieth century. Sir Colin's performance of Nielsen 4 with the London Symphony is a miracle.

Stravinsky - Oedipus Rex (Good as the linked version from Munich is, it’s still not as good as the scorched earth that inevitably resulted from Colin Davis’s Stravinsky from a quarter-century earlier. Colin Davis was an angry young man, and perhaps his performances of Oedipus at Stadler Wells (no the English Naitonal Opera) did more to establish him as a force with which to be reckoned than any other single accomplishment of his early years. Most conductors, not least Stravinsky himself, are unwilling to go with Stravinsky’s writing to the primal power of his dissonances to make them as ugly as possible. But Davis plunged as fully in as his 'English' reserve would ever allow. Davis is perhaps not up there with Pierre Monteux, Ernest Ansermet, Antal Dorati, Leonard Bernstein, Valery Gergiev, and Esa-Pekka Salonen as one of the very greatest of all Stravinsky conductors, but he's damn close.)

Many of the recordings of works he recorded with that amazing fire are nowhere to be found on youtube: Benvenuto Cellini, Dvorak 7, Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements. But there is one work above all others for which he will probably always be best known. Les Troyens, Berlioz's magnum opus, the crowning glory of his grandiosely glorious career, his Grand-with-a-capital-G rendering of Virgil's Aeneid, lay unheard by most music lovers, and rarely heard by even the most passionate classical music fans, who would have to travel halfway across the world for a revival, which seemed only to happen once every five years in a single city. But by now, Les Troyens is nearly as much a repertory item as The Ring Cycle, produced everywhere in spite of its expense. We could, if we like, pretend that it's due to the efforts of other musicians. But no, it is because of Colin Davis's tireless promotion that Les Troyens is no longer a rare item, and not just his promotion of Les Troyens, (though I believe his second recording sold 100,000 copies, a number which even Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma rarely equal). It is because of his ceaseless, tireless, championing of Berlioz throughout his fifty-year career. When Sir Colin began to undertake his holy cause of performing Berlioz throughout the world, Berlioz was still an under-regarded composer for a full century after his death. For championship like that, who cares if there were Berlioz conductors who made better performances?

Elgar 2 - A work he did better than any conductor since the composer himself. 

Colin Davis was a bit of a walking (conducting?) contradiction. A voracious reader, he was among the most intellectual men to pick up a baton, and yet few if any conductors seemed more guided by their gut instincts. And yet he would leave his gut instincts at the edge of the cliff, and rarely if ever dived off of it if it meant giving interpretations that were too controversial. He was stubbornly, resolutely old-fashioned in 'classics' from Handel down to Mendelssohn, with sometimes stunning and just as often extremely boring results. And yet he publicly accused his friend John Eliot Gardiner in the press of being insufferably dogmatic, when Gardiner's sole crime was to be the mirror image of Davis's own dogma. There should be no doubt that he was a great conductor, but he could have, and should have, been still greater. 

Sibelius 3 - I grew up with his London Symphony version. I never understood why people found this a dry work, until I heard every other performance.

Handel: Messiah

Verdi: Falstaff

Michael Tippett - A Knot Garden - a work he premiered

The Legendary Peter Grimes Performance

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Playlist For Eric Ericson (1918-2013)

There's no other description for Eric Ericson that suffices except to say that he was, bar none, the greatest choral conductor of the twentieth century. In 1945, he formed the a cappella Eric Ericson Chamber Choir in Stockholm, and led it until 2003. He lead the Swedish Radio Choir from 1951 to 1982, and the all-male choir Orphei Drangar from 1951 until 1991, and there was not a single important professional choir which he did not guest conduct. Sergiu Celibidache, a conductor as frugal with his praise as he was with fast tempos, called him 'the grand chief of choir of our time' (it probably sounded more idiomatic in French...). 

Ericson, more even than Robert Shaw, is responsible for the international blend of sound which most choirs today have - creating a middle ground between the perfectly straight-toned blend of the English church choir and the full-throated operatic chant of the Russian Orthodox church. His repertoire spanned the entire era of written music, from the earliest pre-polyphony to countless world premieres of choral works from composers as well known as Henze, Penderecki, Dallapiccola, Nono and Ligeti (whose Requiem Ericson premiered and who dedicated his Drei Chorphantasien to Ericson) to dozens if not hundreds of Scandinavian composers. 

Richard Strauss: Der Abend

An Album of Swedish Choir Jazz (probably closer to gospel..)

Francis Poulenc: Tout puissant, tres Saint

Bela Bartok: Four Hungarian Folk Songs

Dimitri Shostakovich: The Ninth of January

Arnold Schoenberg: Friede auf Erden

Einojuhani Rautavaara: Sommarnatten

Conducting as an Old Man

Richard Strauss: Deutsche Motette

Zoltan Kodaly: Jesus and the Traders

Johann Sebastien Bach: Gratias Agimus Tibi

Henry Purcell: Hear My Prayer O Lord

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Playlist: For Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013)

He was a fixture on the international music scene for more than fifty years, and in all that time he never got enough credit. Wolfgang Sawallisch was a German conductor who was roughly contemporary with both Herbert von Karajan and Carlos Kleiber, and of the dozens of phlegmatic German kappellmeisters to appear before the world's great orchestras from their generation, Sawallisch was the only contemporary of theirs from a German-speaking land who clearly had the ability to match those two giants.

Not that you could tell from appearances. Karajan and Kleiber had charisma to match their extraordinary talent. But in an era when conductors are measured as much by their aesthetic appearance as any musical acumen, Sawallisch success seemed rather unlikely. While The Guardian's obituary called him suave, it would be difficult for any young American to think of him that way. His reputation in America was always more than a little unfair. In later years his comb-over and aviator glasses made him look more less like a conductor and more like a retired banker sitting on the orchestra board. And towards the end of his career gathered a reputation for musical arch-conservatism that was entirely undeserved considering all the more contemporary German composers he championed when he was head of the Bavarian State Opera. By the time he became music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra in his 70's, he was perhaps the textbook example of the geriatric foreign music director - a 'name conductor' (and not a huge name at that) brought to an American city because of past accomplishments in Europe. If he succeeded surprisingly well during his ten years in Philadelphia, it's because his musicmaking was nowhere near as dull or characterless as he seemed. Not eveybody agrees with that assessment, but the musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra certainly do.

He wasn't 100% consistent in his ability to get extraordinary performances (who is?), but Sawallisch had a particular combination of forces that worked a kind of miracle. He could draw the most stupefyingly viscral sound from orchestras, yet simultaneously shape it (Georg Solti could have learned a thing or two by watching him). He was not a conductor who went for the sort of individualized interpretations one finds in Furtwangler or Eugen Jochum, he was a thoroughgoing traditionalist who made the best case of any German conductor from his era to keep tradition going.

One look at Sawallisch's baton technique on video is all it takes to realize that this was a conductor with a technique that could hold its own with the greatest stick technicians in music history. But unlike Lorin Maazel or Seiji Ozawa, that stick technique was unfailingly used to shape phrases imaginatively. There's no doubt that Sawallisch could be uncomfortable when he wasn't feeling the music, but in the German masters he knew so well, he was among the greatest there has ever been. Sawallisch was a conductor of the anonymous school whom if he could would always hide behind the music, and yet when the music sounded as well as he made it, why not? He was a kappellmeister, but in very highest sense of the term.

Schumann: Requiem

Strauss: Four Last Songs

Wagner: Siegfried's Funeral March

Strauss: Capriccio

Schumann: Symphony no 4

Britten: War Requiem - Libera Me

Schubert: Symphony no 9 "Great"

Wagner: Siegfried's Rhine Journey

Wagner: Overture and Venusberg Music to Tannhauser

Find Sawallisch's Ring Cycle in this Playlist

Mendelssohn: Elias/Elijah (excerpt - in German)

Beethoven: Ah! Perfido,

Beethoven: Symphony no 6 "Pastoral" (The Storm)

Beethoven: Piano Concerto no. 5 "Emperor"

Beethoven: Symphony no 7 (finale)  (as a very old man, all he needs is a few fingers...)

Mozart: Symphony no 38 "Prague" 

Mozart: Piano Concerto no. 22

Mozart: Piano Concerto no. 21 "Elvira Madigan" 

Mozart: The Magic Flute

Brahms: Fourth Symphony

Brahms: First Symphony

Brahms: Piano Concerto no. 2

Bruckner: Sixth Symphony

Schubert: Complete Symphonies

Strauss: Don Quixote

Strauss: Symphonia Domestica

Rehearsing Till Eulenspiegel

Rehearsing the Three Boys in The Magic Flute

Conducting Edda Moser as Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute

Dvorak: Stabat Mater

Dvorak: Slavonic Dances

Britten: War Requiem - Dies Irae

Tchaikovsky: Symphony no 5 (finale)

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For the Five Great Musicians Who Died This Week Part 1

Heaven clearly needed a benefit concert this week, so no less than five musicians of world importance died. There’s simply too much to write about all important musical figures who died this week. So rather than try, I’ll write a paragraph for each and let the music do the talking:

For Dave Brubeck (1920-2012): First of all, let me point out Le Malon’s wonderful guest post that he did last week to commemorate the old legend. But let me also add one thing, one which Le Malon will no doubt remember quite well. For me, as I suppose is true for many tens of thousands of others, memories of Dave Brubeck involves after-parties galore. The cheap beer and boxed wine would be accompanied by whatever indy music White Stripes white noise was fashionable between the years of 2001 and 2009, but the afterparty was where the good stuff was brought out, and usually that meant scotch and jazz. Short of Coltrane, I don’t think any musician was more featured on those playlists than Brubeck – at least not in my life soundtrack.

In Your Own Sweet Way

Strange Meadowlark

Koto Song

St. Louis Blues

Three to Get Ready

Fujiyama

A Full Live TV Studio Concert  in 1961

For Charles Rosen (1927-2012) - Everything about Charles Rosen bespoke the ultimate refinement. The ease with which he unraveled the most complicated technical problems on the piano, the dazzling manner in which he unraveled the thorniest problems of music theory in prose just simple enough to be understood and just dense enough to remind you how extremely learned he is; the plush Upper-East Side accent of his superbly articulate interviews, the (apparent) excellence of his French cooking; the eternal-seeming index of subjects ad nauseum which he wrote about for the New York Review of Books, and the honor roll of piano, language, and poetry students he taught both privately and at schools as venerated as MIT, Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Oxford. Charles Rosen was the pie in the collective face of every person who despairs (often rightly) that musicians are uncurious idiots outside of their chosen métier. There was not a single vulgar bone in Charles Rosen’s body, and while he was a pianist of towering strengths, it was also his greatest (and perhaps sole) limitation. His playing was startlingly intelligent with effects seemingly executed with the same ease by which we laymen put on a CD. He was the model of good taste and the perfect pianist for connoisseurs of his generation, a Schnabel-like classics specialist just vulgar enough to be a superb Chopin and Liszt pianist (um gottes willen!) but not vulgar enough to play Rachmaninov or Prokofiev. This refusal to indulge in any mannerism which smacked of the masses was not a virtue and should not be celebrated as such. It was an excuse to renounce the better part of a musician’s individuality, and as a result, Rosen’s playing sounded like the ivory ideal heard in your own head – the realization of a dream, but telling you little you didn’t know already.

Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata – Final Movement

Selection’s from Bach’s  Art of the Fugue

An arrangement of Chopin’s Minute Waltzwith an extra line of thirds for greater virtuoso display – by Rosen’s equally legendary teacher in his era, Moritz Rosenthal.  Would that we had more from him like this and a few fewer Hammerklaviers. Here is some more unadulterated Chopin.

Liszt’s Don Juan Fantasy – called by some the hardest piano piece in the standard repertoire, and apparently recorded when he was eighty-three!

Mozart on the pianoforte – Rosen was twenty-eight when he made this recording. He later became quite disparaging of trends towards historical performance practice.

Scarlatti on the pianoforte

NightFantasies – written for him by his good friend, Elliott Carter – the equally upper-east side patrician composer of atonal music who lived to be 103 and died merely a month before him.  

The awesomely articulate Rosen in a radio interview.

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800 Words: For DFD (1925-2012)

(Schubert: Death and the Maiden)

If you really wanted to take in the scope of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s achievement, you would have to resort to hyperbole long before you did it justice. When you hear the epoch-making Schubert, Bach, Brahms, Mahler, Schumann, and Wolf lieder and compare them to any other singer of the early stereo era, you realize that this is the greatest lieder singer of his generation. When you hear his Verdi, Mozart, and Wagner – you may first bristle at the diction or the wrongness of the timbre, but then you hear the intelligence and thought he puts into each word and you realize that to rely on brains in such well-known operatic repertoire for which so many empty-headed singers coast on beautiful sounds makes him also the bravest singer of his time. And then you hear all the unfamiliar new composers he championed: Britten, Shostakovich, Hindemith, Berg, Barber, Henze, Hartmann, Krenek, Lutoslawski, Reger, Matthus, Zillig, Von Einem, Reimann, and Busoni – and you then realize he was also the most responsible singer of his day. It’s only then that you begin to realize that DFD was something above a mere generational figure – he was a once-in-a-lifetime gift to vocal music who can neither be replaced nor equalled.

(Bach: Ich habe genug)

I remember once that Professor Berard played us recordings from a couple songs of Schubert’s Die Schoene Mullerin cycle: one was of Sanford Sylvan, the other DFD. The tempos were virtually the same, but after the unaffected naturalness of a fine American singer, the professor put Fischer-Dieskau on, and every note, every word, even every vowel seemed to have its own interpretation. It seemed so mannered, so over-controlled that it was almost funny. Yet that too was a part of Fischer-Dieskau’s greatness – in the Age of Rock when anyone when anyone with a fine natural voice can be considered a great singer, Fischer-Dieskau might seem utterly mannered. But in the 1950’s and 60’s, when singers were recording thousands of unfamiliar lieder as though they were issued from a factory, DFD put the same incredible interpretive mind to the service of all that music he sung and compelled his listeners to listen all the more closely to the meaning of every song he recorded. No singer of the recorded era has ever made music mean more.

(Schubert: Du Bist der Ruh - stunning)

It couldn’t have been done without that voice – that voice! It wasn’t huge, at least it wasn’t until DFD completely overwhelmed my speakers with a passage of stentorian, Hotterian power. The range was baritone, but it had all the sharp overtones of a tenor and all the resonance of a bass. It had the kind of breath control that seemed to sing without a noticeable breath for minutes on end, and it seemed to achieve infinite dynamic gradations with no noticeable strain. In its way, it was as much a miracle as Pavarotti or Boris Christoff. What did he have to do to make it work like that? Is there a single singer today who can do with their voice what Fischer-Dieskau did with his?

(Richard Strauss: Morgen - just as beautiful)

And then there’s his influence. It’s thanks to DFD that the lieder recital itself still exists. Even in the age of the single and the album, it’s still possible in the world’s capitals for a great singer and a piano to sell out a big concert hall – just try and tell me that’s not utterly improbable; or that it couldn’t have been done without a truly great singer to remind music lovers what could still be achieved in the recital hall. Thanks to DFD, great classical singing is still not confined to the opera house. And just look at how many great baritones we have today: Terfel, Goerne, Hampson, Hrovotovsky, Leiferkus, Keenlyside, Finley, Gilfrey, and Quasthoff until recently– just to name those I can think of in the first 30 seconds. Today’s world doesn’t have many great Mezzos, or Tenors, or Basses, but Baritones it seems to have in infinite supply. Fischer Dieskau initiated a golden age for Baritones, all of whom are as influenced by him as they are different – each trying to carve their own individual path as distinct from DFD’s shadow as possible. No baritone (maybe Hampson…) dares over-interpret in Fischer-Dieskau’s manner anymore – in an age when music is more instinctive than intellectual, I suppose that’s appropriate, but I still can’t help thinking that something terrible’s been lost. It’s not appropriate to beat up today’s singers with yesterday’s, but one can’t help looking at it that way.

(Mahler: Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen)

So many of today’s opera singers sing on instinct, with barely a thought in their heads as to how they interpret. This might be forgivable if the average opera star’s technique were anywhere near the technical prowess of earlier eras. But so many of today’s opera singers have neither the technique nor the brains it takes to sing well – no wonder opera’s no longer popular with the public. Instead of singers acting with their voices as opera singers have been required to do for hundreds of years, opera in today’s world is controlled by theater directors who ostensibly do the singers’ interpretations for them. But why add the naturalism of the theater world when opera is already at the disadvantage of taking place in a universe where people sing rather than speak? Why add the spectacle of the movies when the opera stage is limited by how many times a set can change? Classical singing is what it is, and will lose to the other arts every time people try to make it more like another art. What opera and lieder has to offer the public is singers who, after years of constant toil, can draw the audience into a meaningful and unique synthesis of music, theater, and literature in which music always takes precedence – a synthesis that’s seems utterly pathetic when theater is given the biggest spotlight.

(Schumann: Ich Grolle Nicht)

Since his retirement, Fischer-Dieskau’s stock has fallen precipitously. To many singers today, he seems like a warning about the dangers of over-intellectualizing and over-interpretation. But no artist as great as DFD can remain forgot for long. Music lovers, true music lovers, will rediscover him. What remains unique about Fischer-Dieskau is not the amazing technique – it’s the aspirations to which he made that technique serve.  No singer, not even Callas or Schwarzkopf, wanted music to mean more than DFD did. And thanks to him, many people love Schubert, and Wolf, and Schumann, and Brahms, and hundreds of other composers, more than they would have had they never heard him.


(Brahms: O Tod, wie bitter bist du)

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