Following the post about the Shostakovich Symphony No. 11, here’s the “guided tour” to the symphony, from the perspective of conductor Hugh Wolff and some of the brilliant young NEC Philharmonia performers. I really enjoyed putting this together with Andrew Hurlbut and the NEC video folks, with invaluable help from James David Jacobs.
So what is the Symphony No. 11? Shostakovich’s most Russian/ Mussorgskian work? A piece of cinematic agit-prop? A commentary on the crushed Hungarian uprising? A deeply reflective “Requiem for a Generation,” as Shostakovich claimed, according to [Solomon] Volkov’s controversial memoir? The work of a washed-up genius who, after 20 years of suppression, has succumbed to the political juggernaut? A beautifully organized work that speaks tragically to the inevitable recurrence of despotism?
–NEC website, April 2014
I have to be honest with you: After living with this symphony for the last two months, I still can’t make up my mind. Parts of it are searingly, heartrendingly poignant; others definitely veer towards the kitsch.
What I do know is that conductor Hugh Wolff and the NEC Philharmonia certainly rose to the challenge of performing this sprawling, hour-long symphony at Boston’s Symphony Hall. Regardless of the decidedly mixed critical opinion, it strikes me as a really hard piece to play, with a huge number of forces (celeste, two harps, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, full battery of percussion) being asked to play both with tremendous, brutish force as well as precise, controlled delicacy. Not to mention those moments of extreme, naked exposure – just ask the trumpets, horns, flutes, or bassoons! Or for that matter, just check out the achingly long lines of the English horn solo in the final movement.
Above all, it strikes me as a symphony requiring enormous concentration both to conduct and to perform. The symphony clocks in at just over an hour, after all. And from a producer’s perspective, I certainly was exhausted at the end! But all in a day’s work for Hugh Wolff, who did a masterful job of keeping all the forces together, and sculpting a shape and arc out of the sprawl.
Not to mention calming the NEC student’s nerves – playing in Symphony Hall for the first time in four years. Playing a piece that I was surprised to discover had never been performed by the hall’s “house band.” (Neither Seiji Ozawa nor James Levine were fans of DSCH, but…not even any guest conductors?).
This was the biggest and hardest of the three pieces on the program, (the others being the Beethoven “Egmont” Overture and the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1), and we’re going to produce them in reverse order. It’s all part of NEC’s season-long series of thematic presentations called Truth to Power, and I had the great pleasure of directing the shoot at Symphony Hall. Today’s post contains the whole symphony; the story behind it will come next.
“People really haven’t been riveting for quite a while,” said Mary Grieco, metals control engineer for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. “It’s a learning curve for everybody. There are no specifications anymore that tell you how to rivet, so we make the best engineering judgment on how to do it.”
On the heels of the excellent Marketplace story discussing the decline of – and the attempt to, er, “kick start” – American Industrial Design, comes a fascinating story in today’s local rag explaining just why it’s going to take so long to refurbish the iconic Longfellow Bridge spanning the Charles River between Cambridge and Boston. Turns out it’s all about rivets and rocks … or to be more precise, the elusive, prized Rockport Granite – “The Granite of Character.” Worth a read!
Description of Rockport Granite, taken from Sweet’s Catalogue of Building Construction, 1915
Extraordinary. Dr. George Horner, Terezin and Auschwitz survivor, performing music he played at at the Terezin concentration camp seven decades earlier. Only this time, he’s at Symphony Hall in Boston, joined by no less a figure than Yo-Yo Ma. The 90-year old Horner says quite simply: “Without music, I wouldn’t be here.” Thanks to the Terezin Music Foundation for posting this video.
What an unexpected delight on Good Friday to see today’s excellent Deceptive Cadence blog from my old my mates at NPR devoted to a program we produced 14 years ago, as part of our ambitious Milestones of the Millennium series.
And I do mean ambitious: We attempted nothing less than to “create a picture in sound of the pivotal events, places, movements, artists and musical works of the past 1000 years” through what amounted to a weekly documentary folded into our ongoing five-day-a-week production of Performance Today. Oh yeah, and also with “build outs” on this newfangled Interwebs thingy.
But wait -there was more! We also entered into a partnership with Sony Classical to create an entire Milestones of the Millennium CD project: “The program series will be accompanied by Sony’s release of historic recordings highlighting the development of music over the past 1000 years. Each Sony Classical compact disc will contain musical choices inspired by the series, with liner notes written by the NPR commentators.”
High concept as hell, balanced by decidedly modest sales in the marketplace. Doubt anyone has the entire collection, but I was surprised to see that after being out of print for quite some time, Sony has now made a few of the titles available as MP3 downloads on Amazon and other sites. And you do see the odd CD copy for sale here and there.
But, back to Bach: Of the entire two years’ worth of productions, this program on Bach’s St. Matthew Passion was one of the very best, hosted by NPR’s Lynn Neary and produced by Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr. It’s a “guided tour” through Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, with commentary from such luminaries as noated Bach scholars Christoph Wolff and MIchael Marissen, tenor Ian Bostridge, conductors Joshua Rifkin,Ton Koopman, and Kenneth Slowik, as well as soprano Ann Monoyios. Take a listen here.
Incidentally, Bach was the subject of the very first MIlestones of Millennium program, which aired January 1, 1999, was Johann Sebastian Bach: The Brook and the Wellspring, a commentary by the Boston Conservatory’s Jan Swafford: “Using the metaphor suggested by the composer’s name (“Bach” is German for “brook”), Swafford explains how Bach emerged from a family of musicians to become perhaps the greatest master and innovator of all time.”
Rummaging around in the proverbial shoebox of old photos from an old Euro vacation, i ran across a Throwback Thursday-worthy shot of me tickling the ivories on Antonín Dvořák’s own ivory-colored piano.
Did Dvorak actually own this gilded white grand?
The photo was taken at the Dvorak Museum in a leafy section of Prague, in a restored Baroque mansion called – and, no, I’m not making this up – “Villa Amerika” – appropriate for the composer who became so famous in the New World, I suppose! I recall it was in a different location when I visited there in the late ’90s, but today, the white piano now gets pride of place in a small concert hall on the second floor, perched below an ornate frescoed ceiling.
But it got me to wondering about the Museum and more still about its Liberace-esque gilded white grand. Did Dvorak really live there? Did he actually play that instrument? And what kind of a piano was it, exactly?
Villa Amerika – the Dvorak Museum in Prague
The White Piano at home
The answers: 1) No, Dvorak actually lived in a small place not far away, on Zitna street. But the Museum holds a lot of his various artifacts, including his viola.
2) Doubtful. Since I visited, the Museum has subsequently acquired Dvorak’s actual piano, a beautiful mahogany 1879 Bösendorfer, built in Vienna.
3) The piano, it turns out, is a Petrof, the storied family-owned Czech manufacturer run by a fifth-generation descendent of founder Antonin Petrof, born just two years before Dvorak. And therein lies a tale!
It turns out that the company went into business in 1864 in the central Czech town of Hradec Králové, about two hours east of Prague, after young Antonin returned from an apprenticeship in Vienna and persuaded his father to turn their cabinet-making business into a piano factory. And the apogee of success happened for both “Tonys” at about the same time: Just as Dvorak was returning from “Amerika” and about to take up the directorship of the Prague Conservatory, Antonín Petrof is appointed by the Emperor as the court piano-builder for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
But after that the story becomes a tale of booms, busts, war, and then the advent of the Iron Curtain. In 1948, the Petrof factory was nationalized, and became a state-run factory of a profoundly diminished reputation until the Petrof family got their company back in 1993. And if you do the math, that means that the Petrof company is 150 years old this year!
Read more about the Petrof Piano Saga here: “an amazing story of courage, determination, and a family’s extraordinary commitment to exemplary piano building tradition...and check out this video visit to the Petrof Piano factory below, replete with the roll call (with a few hilarious misspellings) of Petrof piano artists,including Ray Charles (who even had one in his home), Count Basie, Bill Evans, Mal Waldron, Lynne Arriale, Richard Clayderman (!), and Jacques Loussier.
Ray Charles’ favorite piano brand?
Further research reveals that the Petrof pianos have long been the house-supplied instruments in the storied Rudolfinum in Prague, where their rather heavy action and even regulation was preferred by such luminaries as Rudolf Firkusny, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and Ivan Moravec. (One of Moravec’s great recordings: a 1963 disc of pieces by Chopin, Mozart, and Beethoven, was recorded on a Petrof.)
Then there’s the Petrof on display in the glittering concert hall in Prague Castle. Check out this video of violinist Josef Suk and pianist Jan Panenka playing Dvorak, natch:
But I was still curious to hear what that gilded white Petrof in the Dvorak museum sounded like. So, after a lot of interet scouring, I did come up with a grainy video containing Dvorak Romance for violin and piano, Op. 11, as well as Chopin’s Ballade No. 3. Incomplete performances, sadly, but complete enough to reveal that Dvorak’s white Petrov looks far better than it sounds…
Look no further than yesterday’s speech by Obama for proof of the long-lasting global impact of “The War to End All Wars,” which started 100 years ago. Enough that some former colleagues from NPR have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund terrific, important, and ambitious concept for a radio series. And it needs your help to become reality:
Beginning in June 2014, we will tell the stories of The Great War through radio documentaries and in shorter radio pieces, all of which will air on public radio stations nationwide and will be available in podcasts.
Our goal is not to tell the definitive history of the war and all its battles. Instead, we will present many important and interesting stories from the war: those of soldiers and civilians, the military technology, the tactics, the poetry, the politics, the societal consequences.
We will present the vast tapestry of World War One and thereby help all of us understand what happened during that time and how that now-forgotten war helped create – for better or worse – the world we live in today.
Check out the video below, and consider making a donation today – the sand is literally running out of the hourglass.
Astonishing post in the San Francisco Classical Voice about a 1924 letter that blind, deaf, and mute Helen Keller wrote to the New York Symphony (the rival of the New York Philharmonic before they eventually merged in 1928), recounting the experience of tuning in to a broadcast of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on the radio:
Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony someone suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm.
What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibration, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roil of the drums, deep-toned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voices leaped up thrilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flame-like, until my heart almost stood still.
Really? Congrats to San Francisco Classical Voice Writer Janos Gereben for this bit of sleuthing – the letter was apparently in the Helen Keller Archives of the American Federation of the Blind. But I’m rather surprised that this story has never come up before – and the skeptic in me wonders is Ms. Keller did not indulge in a bit of a creative flight of fancy. I don’t tend to think of a 1920s-era radio as capable of “surround sound,” but it sure is fascinating notion to imagine that someone who was doubtless as hypersensitive to vibrations as Helen Keller could actually pick out and detect a symphony that way. Can anyone corroborate this?
Seeing Belafonte @ Berklee yesterday couldn’t help but make me think back to the time when he came to our NPR studios in 2001 to record a couple of programs around a project that was near and dear to him….but took nearly 4 decades to produce!
Harry Belafonte at NPR in October 2001 (Photo: David Banks, NPR)
It was called “The Long Road to Freedom,” and aspired to be nothing less than an authoritative anthology of black music in America…from the earliest war crys, work songs and shouts, imported from Africa, to Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man,” and a musical setting of a speech by MLK called “I’ll Never Turn Back No Mo.” Once completed, it contained no fewer than 80 tracks across 5 CDs, as well as a beautifully-produced 140-page hardbound book of photos, essays, and commentary about the black musical experience in America.
It was an amazing, lavishly packaged, and carefully produced set, which Belafonte had undertaken at the height of his popularity in the early 1960’s. Belafonte had the run of RCA’s thoroughly “modern” studio facility, and as a Music Director the legendary (and now shamefully forgotten) arranger and choral director Leonard De Paur, famed at the time for his work with the pioneering De Paur Infantry Chorus, an all-male black chorus that became a top-drawing attraction for Columbia Artists in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Leonard De Paur, Joe Williams, and Harry Belafonte reviewing a take, C. 1961
And, at the start, Belafonte and De Paur had a budget big enough to bring in some big names to the exercise into chronicling what the singer called “African-matrixed music,” Bessie Jones, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Joe Williams.
And Belafonte was deeply invested in the project: “We in America know very little about the history of our nation, especially as applied to the black experience,” he said in an interview. “So I always felt that my mission was to use music as a way in which to impart ideas and thoughts that would awaken curiosity.”
But whether is was for reasons of budget, time, or interest, the journey of the Long Road project got a lot longer. The sessions came to a halt around 1971, and the entire project languished in the vaults of RCA – and its ever-evolving corporate ownership – without a single note from any of the sessions making its way to the public. My guess is that at some point, the bean-counters at RCA decided that the ROI would never be realized; the project got put on the shelf, and then institutional amnesia took over.
But, miraculously, three decades later, The Long Road to Freedom materialized in much the form that Belafonte and De Paur imagined it — if not more so. (Ironically, the set was released on Sept. 11, 2001, which may help to explain why it did not get more attention when it was released…). So after a lot of back-and-forth negotiations, one crisp autumn day Harry Belafonte was at NPR, recording a Morning Edition interview with Bob Edwards, cutting tracks for a long documentary special I was producing around the anthology, posing for photos with practically everyone in the building, and sitting down for one of the most extraordinary lunches I’ve ever had in my lifetime.
It actually started the moment we left the building on Massachusetts Ave. for our half-block-walk to the restaurant. Harry Belafonte does not blend in to the crowd; the man oozes charisma. Truck drivers, pedestrians, and even bike messengers all had to say hello to The King of Calypso, which meant that our half-block walk took about 40 minutes. As for the meal itself: the food was profoundly unmemorable, but the the conversation anything but. There is no such thing as “idle chatter” with Harry Belafonte. It wasn’t just the fact that Belafonte has been an eyewitness to history – he had a way of describing his arguments with JFK, or his bailing MLK out of jail, or visits to Africa that were both sharply etched in a journalistic sence, but also deeply philosophical. And he wasn’t content to just tell war stories; like many people of real greatness, he asked as much as he answered. And when Harry Belafonte leans into you and asks you a probing question, you don’t dare give a dishonest response! For all of his struggles for racial equality, you could tell the Belafonte remains a curious and optimistic student of the human condition. Reminds me of how he quoted from Paul Robeson in his acceptance speech at Berklee:
“It’s a wonderful path to be in the arts, because artists are the gatekeepers of truth. Art is the radical voice of civilization.’ From that time until now, I always knew that I would have a life in the arts. My pursuit was to do what Robeson said, take advantage of this gift of art and to develop myself, and to apply it the way other people needed to be inspired.”
Back to the Long Road for a moment: Over time, this collection has become an invaluable resource for schools, critics researchers, documentarians, and, yes, a radio producer or two….though the early-sixties aesthetic of the recordings and arrangements is very much a product of its era. Some of it can sound a little quaint to our ears, but other parts are breathaking, like hearing Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers singing Kneebone Bend, or Belafonte himself doing Boll Weevil You can listen to the interview Harry did with Bob Edwards here.
(Aviso: it’s from 2001, back when NPR was using RealAudio, and it may not play on your fancy smartphone….)
Not that it really matters to anyone outside of the milestone-crazed classical music world, but thought I’d pass on this release from my old colleague Frederick Slutsky of the Chopin Project trying to clear up the confusion about Chopin’s birthday. Some say it’s today; others maintain it falls on March 1. How come?
“In 1810, Fryderyk Chopin was born to a French father and Polish mother in Zelazowa Wola, west of the Polish capital Warsaw. The child was named after Fryderyk Skarbek, the eldest son of a Count who had formerly employed his father. They had to seek the Count’s approval to call him Fryderyk so the christening had to wait two months – until April 23 – a delay which, I believe, caused the confusion.”
“Discovered 43 years after Chopin’s death, his baptism register clearly states the composer was born on February 22 and is the strongest evidence cited by those believing this to be the correct date. It is compelling and was an important document in its day but, like many others, I believe it is wrong, containing a simple error, compounded over time.”
“Chopin’s parents always celebrated his birthday on March 1. When accepting membership of the Polish Literary Society of Paris in 1833, Chopin himself gave March 1 as his birthday. Not only that but a letter to him in Paris in 1837, from his mother in Warsaw, began: ‘Dear Fryderyk, the 1st and 5th of March (Saint Fryderyk’s day), are approaching and I am prevented from embracing you.’ That’s good enough for me”.
And according to USC’s Polish Music Newsletter, the debate over the two different dates was good enough for the organizers of the Chopin Bicentennial to make a little publicity hay in the composer’s home country:
“The Longest Birthday” [Najdluzsze Urodziny] celebrated Chopin’s birthday with a continuous concert starting on February 22 and ending on March 1 in Warsaw. This marathon concert was organized by a group of Chopin enthusiasts and was free and open to the public in the Dom Polonii of Wspólnota Polska on Krakowskie Przedmieście.
According to reviewer Gulliver Cragg, “despite the many Chopin events happening around Warsaw and the world:…for Varsovians, the real delight was the 170-hour musical marathon. An estimated 25,000 people attended – to the astonishment of the organisers – what was originally seen as a fringe event…. You could have heard jazz star Grazyna Auguscik as she improvised over Chopin melodies, or an unknown young pianist playing nocturnes at 3am to curled-up couples and solitary night-owls. Nearly 300 musicians signed up to play at ‘The Longest Birthday’, the idea for which came from the doubt surrounding the composer’s actual date of birth.”
Regardless of the date, here’s a peek inside Chopin’s birthplace, featuring pianist Jan Lisiecki in a very nice reading of the Waltz in C-sharp Minor, Op. 64, No. 2, recorded on New Year’s Day 2010.
PS – the Steinway, as you might imagine, does not date from Chopin’s time. In fact, Chopin never played a Steinway…the company didn’t even go into business until 1853…four years after his death.
PPS – The Radio Chopin series introduced me to a fascinating “tone poem” about Chopin’s birthplace by the little-known Russian composer Sergei Lyapunov.
Listen below to the story of how his Zhelazova Vola (Żelazowa Wola), Op. 37, came to be:
Lyapunov said he wished to conjure up the “folk and musical atmosphere, surrounding the great musician in his childhood, perceiving his native land’s image in its purity and simplicity.”
Radio Chopin 100: Zelazowa Wola, Chopin’s Birthplace
Chopin’s Birthplace: Zelezowa Wola, Poland
Roedeo Productions 
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