Latest — Ignat Solzhenitsyn

Johannes Brahms turns 190

Brahms at the piano

In wishing to salute Johannes Brahms, on his birthday or on any day, no words could ever match the mysterious and awe-inducing tribute of the soothsayer Schumann. I quote some of it below, with grateful appreciation for his noble attempt to articulate the ineffable phenomenon of Brahms.

“Someone would and must appear, fated to give us the ideal expression of the times, one who would not gain his mastery by gradual stages, but rather would spring fully armed like Minerva from the head of Kronion. And he has come, a young blood at whose cradle graces and heroes mounted guard. His name is Johannes Brahms, from Hamburg, where he has been creating in obscure silence… He carries all the marks of one who has received a call.”
— Robert Schumann, 28 October 1853



Ludwig Thunders Home

I’ve been asked to give a lecture on any Beethoven topic during my appearance at the Lake Champlain festival in August, and I’ve decided to talk about recapitulation in the Master’s sonata forms—in particular examining how and why he arrives home, much more often than not, in thunderous fortissimo. Just as a nice symmetrical example, here is what that looks like in his first and last symphonies:

Under the Spell of A Druid Priestess

Vincenzo Bellini

Powerful and beautiful Norma at the Met, expertly led by Maurizio Benini, with Sonya Yoncheva in the impossibly ambitious title role. I’d missed this David McVicar production when it premiered some years ago, but it was worth the wait: the atmosphere of elegance and nobility perfectly matches, for me, those vital aspects of Bellini’s magical score. And of course—of course!—what ethereal beauty in the music.

P.S. The glorious, bewitching Casta diva… was written, it turns out, in G major. The incomparable Joan Sutherland is one of the very few who (sometimes) dared sing it in that key:

Profile in American Essence

For a recent profile in American Essence magazine, go here.

““We are seemingly in the process of throwing overboard the heritage of Western culture. I would think that, when contrasted with so many unjust and vile things we’ve done as a species, culture would be seen to stand as representing the best we have done. This idea that we should toss it because it doesn’t fit the current narrative is profoundly short-sighted and may yet lead to catastrophic, irreversible results. I hope and believe, however, that will not be the case.””
— Quote Source

Numbering Schubert's Symphonies

Some months ago I received an unusual query from an orchestra librarian, in preparation for upcoming performance: to confirm which Schubert symphony I would be conducting with her orchestra, the 9th, 7th, or 8th?

It reminded me of how absurdly convoluted the numbering of Schubert’s symphonies continues to be, varying from publisher to publisher and country to country.

The symphony in question—the C major, D 944—was originally known as the 9th (since a “7th” symphony in E major, D 729 was left unfinished, as was its famous successor, the “8th” in B minor, D 759). But Brahms, as editor of the original Schubert Gesamtausgabe, omitted any number for D 729 and reversed the order of the other two, with D 944 designated as “7” and D 759 as “8”. Later, in 1908, Grove’s labeled D 944 as “10”, although in our day and age its numbering has pretty well reverted to “9”. Except in Germany, where it is known as “8”. Got all that?

I ended up just sending the librarian a scan of the first page of my score…

Who Wrote the Chopin Concerti?

For my upcoming concert in Moscow, there has been a soloist change and, as often happens in such cases, a change of concerto. Out goes Ravel G major, in comes Chopin E minor. Faced unexpectedly with the latter work, I decided to revisit and re-mark my orchestral parts for it, hoping to resolve the many ambiguities and discrepancies that seem to plague the text of this work.

It’s a tired trope that Chopin’s orchestral writing is purportedly boring, unimaginative, unbalanced, etc. I suppose one can agree or disagree. But what really struck me this time around was the realization that… Chopin did not even write these parts. Not only was he assisted (who knows to what degree?) by Dobrzyński—itself no crime, of course—but HE NEVER WROTE OUT AN ORCHESTRAL SCORE. So this is why even the Urtext scores we have today from Paderewski and now Ekier are nothing but a reconstitution of a score from the orchestral parts published at the time, and whose provenance is murky.

It takes a great deal of idealism, in light of these circumstances, to consider every discrepancy in slurs or hairpins with the same degree of seriousness as one would allot to similar problems in a Mozart or Bruckner score…

The Answer to All Your Questions is…

“TV wizard Don Ohlmeyer, a far smarter man than I, once told me, “The answer to all your questions is: Money.””
— Tony Kornheiser, Washington Post

Despite the moral dubiousness of the worldview expressed in that quote, it does have the virtue of edging dispiritingly close to the way things actually are, in all probability.

Well, in music, a field where we love to talk about feelings and moods and intangibles, an approximate analogy may hold true: The Answer to All Your Questions Is: Physics.

In rehearsing an orchestra, or teaching a conducting student, or a piano student, I often ask, Why? Why are you doing it like that? (I.e., why are you phrasing it in such a seemingly unnatural way? why are you making a “bump” in the line? why are you stressing a weak beat and glossing over the stronger beat? etc.) Usually, the “guilty party” replies, “I don’t know why… it’s just how I do it.”

But I know why, or at least I think I do. 99 times out of 100, it’s not because the person is somehow unmusical, or thoughtless, or unorganized, but because physics are getting in his way: he is running out of breath (winds), or fudging a troublesome string-crossing (strings), or placing the thumb on a black key in a scale passage (piano). The lack of thought is not about music, it’s about the body, about how to execute a musical passage with the imperfect anatomy given us by God and nature.

““You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.””
— Leon Trotsky

This is why I like to remind students, paraphrasing the horrid Trotsky, that “you may not be interested in technique, but technique is interested in you”. The moment we cross from simply contemplating music to the craft of playing it, we have no choice but to confront—and conform to, and align with, and master—the physical obstacles that inhibit us from playing music in that perfect, ideal way that we hear in our heads.

Ready for Rachmaninoff

I’d been asked several times over the years to play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Trio No. 2 in D minor, Op. 9, but never felt it was a piece I wanted to play. Sometimes that kind of feeling never changes, but in this case, on track with my ever-increasing appreciation and re-thinking of Rachmaninoff, when asked by Salt Bay Chamberfest Music Director (and dear friend) Wilhelmina Smith, I felt ready and jumped at the chance.

What an experience it has been to study this collosal work, and to attempt to reconcile its inner workings and contradictions. Here below is the first movement from last week’s performance at Salt Bay, with fabulous colleagues Sean Lee and Yeesun Kim. (The complete audio is here.) How moody, this funereal opening in the piano, and how poignantly mournful the string theme that grows above it.