Kenneth Woods- a view from the podium

If the world was a reasonable place, and our society was one that had a well-rounded sense of values, then all orchestras could rehearse Haydn to their heart’s content.

Haydn’s music is so spectacularly good, so amazingly fresh, so outrageously original, so endlessly surprising, so completely unpredictable, that when one is working on it at even a respectable level, it’s hard to imagine why you’d ever want to bother with another composer.

In fact, Haydn’s music is really almost too good to perform. In any case, it is probably too healthy to perform.

Healthy? There is nothing better for an orchestra’s playing that to rehearse a Haydn symphony (and the same is very much true for string quartets). This is so true that having to actually work toward a performance begins to get in the way. How wonderfully all the world’s orchestras would play if only our governments would pay for us to rehearse one Haydn symphony each year for as long as we felt it was productive.

We’ve been working very hard on Haydn 99 with the Surrey Mozart Players this week. The orchestra is on great form. The players came in to the first rehearsal incredibly well prepared, and read the piece brilliantly. Nonetheless, the more we work on it the more I think we wish we had ten more rehearsals instead of just two. The rest of the program consists of two of my very favourite pieces of all time, yet I’d happily cancel them both (or even cancel the entire concert) just to have the luxury of digging in to this piece as deeply as possible.

What is fascinating about this music is that the more work you put in to it, and the better you play it, the more obvious it is to everyone in the room that we could do more on it. At the first rehearsal it feels like we’ve hardly got to worry about anything with the piece- it is all idiomatic, and accessible, at the second rehearsal, I’m just sort of figuring out how far we could go with the piece with the bennefit of the score, and at the third rehearsal the whole band seems to be realizing just how much there is to work on. Just about the time you have to go onstage and perform, everyone seems to know how much work there is still to do. I’ve written before on how studying a Mahler symphony can feel like taking the best conducting lesson ever- rehearsing a Haydn symphony in detail feels like the best orchestra-ing lesson ever.

Just think- after this week, I only have 91 numbered Haydn symphonies left to perform! And I’d happily forsake performing any of them, if only the world would let me really freakin’ rehearse them.

Is it possible for some music to be too perfect to waste on an audience? Maybe we should make the audience come to the rehearsals so they can begin to know what it is they’re hearing in the concert.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

PS- When I was 19 (and completely stupid), I thought Haydn’s music was boring crap, when I was 25 I thought it was pretty great, now I think it is mind-shatteringly brilliant. How will I feel about it at 65?   

Some random pontifications taken from recent podium chats….

On Scott Joplin-
The history of 20^th Century popular culture is really the history of American popular music, and the history of American popular music is really the history of black music. The musics that dominate today’s airwaves all over the world, whether it be hip-hop, rock, pop or funk, it all springs from the same sources. Rock gave us hip-hop, and jazz gave us rock, but it was ragtime that gave us everything, and it was Scott Joplin who gave us ragtime.

Ragtime laid down once and for all the basic rhythmic vocabulary of American black music, and in the 107 years since Joplin published Maple Leaf Rag, we haven’t actually added much.

The simple fact is that Scott Joplin is the single most influential and important American composer who ever lived. What greater testimony could there be to the power of art to change the world than the simple fact that a black man, born in one of the most racist pockets of the South just a few years after the Civil War could change the entire world forever.
I challenge anyone to find a bar of any Joplin rag that could be more perfectly constructed.

Ragtime begot jazz, which begot rock n toll, which begot hip-hop. It’s enough to put you off the theory of evolution.Nevertheless, was there an American in the 20th Century who did more to change the world?

On Benjamin Britten
Britten’s “Les Illuminations” is one of those masterpieces that is just enough off the beaten path to really hammer home that there are just too may great pieces of music for any one person to get to know them all in a thousand lifetimes. Rimbaud’s poetry has its own seductive musicality- he was as fascinated with the sound of the word as he was with the meaning of the word. It’s hard to imagine that there could be a musical setting of these poems that doesn’t lose something of the magic of the texts, but Britten manages to create a series miniature musical landscapes that actually enhance the musicality of the language.How must the French feel to know that the greatest musical setting of French poetry in the 20th Century is by an Englishman?
 

On Britten and Haydn
It might seem like a coincidence that we’ve programmed Britten’s Les Illuminations alongside Haydn’s Symphony No. 103. However, there is an aspect of Britten’s music that might not be obvious to the listener that links these two composers.
When one sets about preparing a performance of Les Illuminations, or any other Britten work I’ve done, you can’t help but be amazed at the extraordinary craft that has gone into each work. I can’t think of a single piece of his where there was a more elegant way to express what he wanted. So many composers, even many of the greats, are content to write the music and leave it to the performer to sort out how to bring the ideas to life. Britten always finds the simplest, most elegant, most perfect way of achieving his musical aims. There are big challenges for the performer in all his pieces, but there’s never a moment where the performer feels that he’s been left to clean up after the composer, and never a moment that is any more awkward than it has to be. Haydn is one of the few composers who share this quality, and this is all the more amazing given how prolific he was. How could someone write so much, and have each work be so polished, so perfect?
 

On Haydn
We tend to think of Haydn as a comfortable, conservative, middle-class, middle-of-the-road composer.In fact, it’s not hard to make the case that Haydn was the most innovative, most radical and most creative composer who ever lived. After all, he not only invented and defined the three most useful and widely imitated instrumental forms in classical music (the string quartet, the modern piano sonata and the symphony), but in each genre he anticipated almost every innovation later composers would come up with. We often think of Beethoven or Schumann or Tchaikovsky or Mahler as composers who greatly expanded the range of what one could do in a symphony, but Haydn did it all- they just did it louder and for longer.

In the “Drumroll” Symphony, no. 103, Haydn is toying with the same constructive device Tchaikovsky would use in his Fourth and Fifth symphonies and that Mahler would use most obviously in his Sixth- a recurring motive that returns at key moments throughout the symphony. In this case it is the horn fifths, which most obviously open the finale, but which also occur in significant spots in the first and second movements. If Stravinsky had done the same thing, critics might have called his use of the technique subversive- suggesting he was making fun of Romantic composer’s fascination with Fate motives and the like.

I can’t help but find some of that same wit in Haydn’s early use of the technique in this piece.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

UPCOMING CONCERT

Surrey Mozart Players
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Menuhin Concert Hall, Menuhin School of Music
Stoke d’Abernon, UK
7:30 PM
Mozart (arr. Triebensee)- Harmonie Suite from Don Giovanni
Mozart- Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major
            Bobby Chen, piano
Haydn- Symphony no. 99 in E-flat Major

The Surrey Mozart Players are delighted to be one of the first orchestras to appear at the brand new Concert Hall at the Menuhin School, which has been praised as one of the most significant new performance spaces to open in Britain in recent years. The hall has been written about in all the London papers, and in BBC Music Magazine and the Gramophone.

Mozart himself wrote for a ‘Harmonie’ (a group of wind instruments) in the second act finale of Don Giovanni, and Joseph Triebensee, the son of an oboe player in Emperor Joseph II’s group, arranged items from the opera for this combination.
 
Bobby Chen, a former pupil at the school, plays one of the composer’s best loved piano concertos, No. 23 in A major.  Written in early 1785, and in a radiant key, it displays hints of darker shadows and tragic depths. Chen will be performing on the hall’s brand new Fazoli piano.
 
Haydn visited London twice towards the end of his life, and Symphony No. 99 received its first performance on 10th February 1794, six days after his arrival on his second visit.  It contains one of the composer’s noblest slow movements and a vivacious finale.

Endurance sessions of comparative listening are not for everyone’s taste, but, aided by sufficient quantities of libations and good company, it can be great fun, and certainly illuminating.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of taste-testing, listening to a few cool bits of each version to see how they might stack up, but, with very few exceptions, a musical performance is not something that benefits from a quick taste before spitting out.

I’m reminded of one session with my sister (also a musician) many years ago when we were both working on the Enigma Variations. Over the course of several hours we listened to every recording I had, every recording she had and a couple from the library that neither of us knew.

To our credit, we listened to each complete performance, but in the comparative atmosphere, it is easy to hear only facets of each performance rather than the whole thing. It becomes instantly apparent that the woodwind intonation on recording y is not so hot, or that conductor c likes to take time for deceptive cadences or that the brass on disc z are particularly hot. You can see who does the softest opening of Nimrod, who does and doesn’t use organ in the finale and so on.

Interestingly, one disc did stand out completely from the pack. Although we had, to say the least, had spirited differences of opinion on every other recording, we quickly agreed on one thing- it was almost without “facets.” The theme was done much more simply and “straight” than any of the others, there wasn’t a huge variety of interesting colors, nothing seemed particularly interestingly shaped or moulded. It was definitely not my favourite orchestra playing. I’d say it was no nonsense in the extreme.

However, when we got to Nimrod and the first major arrival of that movement, we both felt something big, something cosmic happen, like the grim reaper himself walking right over our graves, and the same thing happened in the finale- a big, cathartic “wow” moment that no other recording had been able to deliver or even really hint at. We both came away with the impression that this was the only conductor who both knew and could put accross what the “Enigma” in the variations was.

Once we’d heardthe whole thing, we could both look back and, as musicians, see what the conductor was up to- the approach seemed so logical seen from the reverse. By downplaying the episodic quality of the piece, he was able to intensify the overall, cumulative effect of the work where it counted most. What might have seemed at first a matter-of-fact approach to phrasing was in fact an intentionally un-sentimental one, and this is a piece that benefits from a certain stoicism.

Frankly, all the other performers we’d sampled sounded like students by comparison (and there were some very distinguished recordings in this category). I’m usually quick to defend interpreters who like to take note of the trees and to smell the flowers and gild the lilies, but the evidence here was clear that there was a big price to that approach- none of the others were able to make the whole piece arrive with anything like the same degree of power.

It would have been easy to miss the point with this recording- we could have been put off early on by the not-so-super-refined orchestra playing or the slightly brusque treatment of some of the early movements. If we’d been slightly distracted at the key moments, we might have missed the point entirely. The recorded sound is not fantastic.

What’s scary about this is that two professional musicians who know the piece well might have missed out on the lesson had we not been lucky enough to follow it all the way through under the right listening conditions. If we had just sampled the performance, it would never have made either of our shortlists. We both learned something from the experience about our own listening.

It is fashionable these days to say that anyone can enjoy music, and that is true to an extent, but there is more to music than enjoyment. Listening can be an art form, and we can get better at it with help and practice. Copland even wrote a whole book on how to listen to music.

It’s a difficult subject to broach with the casual listener- nobody wants to be told they’re listening wrong, but the point is not that they’re listening “wrong,” the point is that they could be getting more out of listening to music- that they could be enjoying it more. I get the feeling that a lot of listeners who eventually give up on concerts do so because they’re frustrated at not being in on some big secret- if we can help them to develop the tools to understand why they respond to music the way they do, I think they’d be listeners for life. In fact, I’d say that once anyone learns some basic listening skills (including learning how to develop your listening skills), they’ll always have music as part of their life.

Most of all, it’s worth pointing out that unease is an important part of any artistic experience- if a performance or a piece is aggravating you or making you unsure of what’s going on, it may be a good sign, but the only way to know for sure is to keep listening and to hold off judgement until the end (maybe to the end of the fifth or sixth listen). The point is not that the performer or the composer benefits from your hard work and patience, but that you benefit from theirs.
 

I’ll be accepting guesses for which recording of the Enigma Variations I am talking about via the comment function for a few days before I reveal the winner.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

I had a moment yesterday that reminded me of why I used to volunteer to staff public radio fund drives when I was 15. A moment when you just happen to be in your car at exactly the right moment and catch a bit of music or a snippet of discussion that changes your whole outlook for the day.

While driving to rehearsal last night, I caught the last 30 seconds of this report, when the commentator, who I assume was Joseph Horowitz (although I’m not sure of that), said that, looking back, Toscanini’s war-time concerts made in the wake of his much-publicized stand against Fascism were the high-water mark for classical music awareness, popularity and relevance in America.

This remark hit me with an almost physical impact, as it spoke directly to a concern that I have had for a long time now.

There are very sensible and sane reasons why orchestras are non-political organizations. First, it is illegal for a non-profit organization to participate in party politics. Second, orchestras don’t want to alienate anyone on political grounds. Also, our very delicate system of funding means that we need to be exceptionally careful that we never create a bad feeling between orchestra and donor, and religion and politics are the two best subjects to alienate people with.

Nevertheless, surely there is a line somewhere between politics and conscience. Surely their has always been a point at which works of art do stand for values, or do serve as a voice of conscience. Perhaps now, when classical music is less central to the social discourse of our time than ever before, it is worth re-examining the conventional wisdom about the avoidance of engagement with issues of the day?

In the war years, Toscanini was not the only classical musician deeply engaged with the human and political issues of the day. Shostakovich, Copland, Walton, Ullmann, Messiaen and many others composed music that was deeply connected to the events of the day. Murry Sidlin’s recent “Defiant Requiem” project celebrates the protest performances of Verdi’s Requiem in the Terezin internment camp.

Is classical music simply to become inoffensive sonic wallpaper? Are we going to kill ourselves with caution?

John Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls” has become just about the only recent work by a major composer to enter the repertoire that deals directly with events of our time, and yet a memorial, important though it is, is an altogether less controversial thing than a commentary. It would have been one thing for Toscanini to mourn the victims of war, and another entirely to come out and say  openly that Fascism was evil, which he did. Adams’ work is a powerful meditation on loss, and he himself describes it as “a musical space for reflection and remembrance, of meditation on an unanswerable question.”

And yet, if art can’t answer questions about the tragedies of the day, can’t we at least ask some? Shouldn’t there be areas of basic human concern where a stand on principal is a uniting, rather than a dividing action?

The Oregon East Symphony was recently approached by a local attorney who made a generous offer. He offered us a full concert sponsorship, which he was going to give in honor of Article Three of the Third Geneva Convention, which stipulates that “Noncombatants, combatants who have laid down their arms, and combatants who are hors de combat (out of the fight) due to wounds, detention, or any other cause shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, including prohibition of outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment. The passing of sentences must also be pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples. Article 3’s protections exist even if one is not classified as a prisoner of war.”

I never thought I would live to see these values become fodder of party politics.

Our board felt they could not accept his donation as a matter of law.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

Upcoming Concert
 
Lancashire Chamber Orchestra
Saturday November 11, 2006
7:30 PM
St John’s Church, Altrincham

Program-
Mozart- Overture to “Cosi fan tutte”
Britten- Les Illuminations
            Nicola-Jane Kemp, soprano
Haydn- Symphony no. 103 in E Flat Major “Drum Roll”

Biography
Nicola-Jane Kemp, mezzo-soprano 

Nicola-Jane Kemp studied piano at Chetham’s School of Music, won a Choral Scholarship at Girton College, Cambridge, and studied singing at the RCM and opera at the RSAMD with an award from the Equity Trust Fund. She has been studying with Margaret Hyde and Ludmilla Andrew.

Nicola-Jane made her concert debut at the Barbican singing incidental music from Beethoven’s ‘Egmont’ and at the Purcell Room with Bach’s Cantata 51 ‘Jauchzet Gott’. Specialising in the coloratura repertoire, she made her operatic debut at Sadlers Wells Theatre in London singing Edwige (Robinson Crusoe) for British Youth Opera. Roles which followed have included Pretty Polly (Punch and Judy) by Birtwistle for Music Theatre Wales, Oscar (Un Ballo in Maschera) for Belcanto Opera, Konstanze (Die Entführung) for The London Opera Players, Queen of the Night (Die Zauberflöte) for the Académie Européenne de Musique d’Aix-en-Provence, Music Theatre Kernow, Central Festival Opera and Garden Opera (also singing Papagena), Cinna (Lucio Silla) for Opera Anglia, Zerbinetta (Ariadne auf Naxos) at St John’s Smith Square, Lakmé for Belcanto Opera and Adele (Die Fledermaus) in concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall for Palace Opera.

She has sung in two New Year Galas at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and sang ‘Jauchzet Gott’ again at the Festival International d’Aix-en-Provence. She has sung ‘Carmina Burana’ with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and made her debut at The Linbury Studio (Royal Opera House). She sang ‘A Mind of Winter’ by George Benjamin with the Orchestre Léonard de Vinci in Rouen, France and was the soloist for the Jubilee concert in 2002 at Chatsworth House, singing for an audience of 10,000. She has recently made her debut on BBC Radio 2 “Friday Night is Music Night” and will return to Chatsworth house this year by popular demand.

Other plans for 2006 include New Year Viennese concerts in Cairo and Alexandria and concerts throughout the UK.
 

In part two of my halftime show, I want to have a quick look at some of the repertoire I’ve been working on since the season got started.
                                                                                                   
Popular as a few of his works are, I can scarcely think of a composer (other than Mendelssohn) who is more under-rated than Dvorak. Unlike Mendelssohn, Dvorak had a longer career and had the opportunity to develop his voice in more ways, and to explore other genres. While they both excelled in symphonies, chamber music, concerti, overtures and choral music, Dvorak was also one of the very greatest opera composers of all time. If you want to be amazed, check out Dmitrj, which you’ve probably never heard of, let alone heard. Hard to believe that there can be so many huge, amazing works by a repertoire composer that are never produced. Anyway, late in his life, after the last symphony and the cello concerto, Dvorak turned to a new kind of symphonic poem, one inspired by Czech myth and folk poetry. These are among his most forward looking works, and in many ways anticipate many of the innovations of Janacek. Of all of them, the Noon Witch, which we did in KCYO, is the most modern, the darkest and the most rewarding- after all, what other composer could make infanticide fun?

I’ve been thinking a lot about skeletons this fall, and I don’t mean the many skeletons in the many closets of the music world. We hear the skin of music- colors, tunes, and dynamics- most readily, but there is more to music than that. Rachmaninoff’s 2^nd Symphony got me thinking, because the skin and the skeleton are so different, at least at first glance. When one encounters this piece for the first time, it is hard not to just drown in the melodies, and like the man who fell in the vat at the Guinness factory, who wants to be rescued when you’re drowning in something so good? Once one gets past the luxurious, heartbreaking tunes, you quickly discover that it is one of the most contrapuntally rich and intricate works in the repertoire- I’m always reminded of my friend’s description of the score looking like “thousands of inky spiders” were crawling over it. Perhaps this is because the piece was written for Taneyev, who was the most contrapuntal of all Russian composers?

Yet, beneath this constantly shifting, interlocking and overlapping surface, there is a skeleton, and what a beautiful set of bones it is. The scale of the work is massive, but what makes it work (and what makes any cut in it an act of musical murder) is that everything is grounded to a design. Like Bruckner, there are bass lines in this piece which extend for several minutes- giant cantus firmi that hold these massive spans together. Like Bruckner, there is an inner austerity, a relentless structural intensity and lack of sentimentality that makes the piece deeply, deeply satisfying to study and perform.

It’s a rare treat to get to do the same piece twice in close succession, especially to do a thorny work like the Nielsen Flute concerto twice in three days with different orchestras and soloists. As I’ve written elsewhere, Nielsen didn’t seem to care if the piece entertained or annoyed, so bringing it to life in a compelling way (it will never be satisfying in the way Rachmaninoff is) is a huge challenge. Working toward a solution with two such different yet equally marvelous soloists was fascinating, and both succeeded in getting this subversive piece to reach our audiences.

Coming back to the same piece is great. Immersing yourself in a single composer, especially if it is Sibelius, is heaven. Doing four quite substantial Sibelius pieces (Spring Song, Finlandia and the 3^rd and 5^th Symphonies) in quick succession was great, especially sitting at my desk going back and forth between the 5th symphony and the 3^rd .  For those of you who know and love the 5^th, but don’t know the original version, I can’t tell you how interesting it is to hear how the piece evolved with the revision. Revisions are messy work- Bruckner sometimes would have been well-advised to leave his original scores alone, and Stravinsky’s revisions were mainly intended to keep this works under copyright. Mahler only revised orchestration, never (with few exceptions) changing the music. To improve a work is not easy, and often performers return to original versions as being more natural and daring, but the revision of the 5th is a huge advance over the original.

Having studied the Rachmaninoff at the same time, it was doubly interesting to see what different solutions Sibelius was finding for building a symphony at almost the same moment in history. When one finally gets a window into how he finally reached the final form of his pieces by studying the different versions of the 5^th, you can see that the process was not easy- he didn’t know the structure of the piece when he started working with the ideas. When you listen to the piece, you get the opposite impression, which is that, from the first note, the ideas grow and develop organically in the only way they possibly could. Where Rachmaninoff seems to have built the entire inner structure of a building and then covered that inner frame with a beautiful and fascinating surface, Sibelius gives you the sense that he’s planted a seed and let it grow, or set in motion a series of events and let them unfold. Perhaps he’s taken you to some remote spot and said- here, there will be a storm, wait and see what happens. The music unfolds as a long string of cause and effect, and only at the very end do you see that he always knew where he wanted to take, or, in the case of the 5^th, that, after incredible struggle over 5 years, he figured out where the music wanted to take him.

I’ve also written elsewhere about Gershwin’s American in Paris. Also on that concert was what I can now admit is one of my least favorite pieces- Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s more that I don’t really respect it, because there’s not a whole lot of music in it. On the other hand, I had a blast doing it- are we allowed just to do a piece and have fun without it touching us deeply as human beings?  

As the conductor who brought Hindemith to the rodeo capital of America, I think some people might thing I have exceptionally serious tastes, but both this year and last, I’ve tried to start the year off a the OES with a lighter concert, and it has been fun. Light music is not easy to play well- Strauss waltzes or Suppe overtures can show an orchestra’s limitations in a very unforgiving way. Likewise, accompanying a piece like Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen can be a huge challenge- the orchestra has to be incredibly flexible and stylish, and, unlike Hindemith, everyone knows when the tiniest thing goes awry. If I have choice between doing a silly concerto like Paganini or a Sarasate showpiece or doing a silly orchestra piece like the Rimsky, the concerto will always win out because the challenge of coping with the soloist is such a blast.

It was no challenge to cope with Daniel de Borah in the Prokofiev 2^nd Piano Concerto, challenging as that piece is on every level. It never ceases to amaze me that there can be pieces like that which even few musicians know. What a juggernaught of a piece, and pianist.

It’s been a great run, and I’ve enjoyed every bit of it, but while rehearsing Finlandia the other day with the loudest (but very good) tuba player I’ve ever heard, I thought, wow, I might be getting noise fatigue. I’ve hardly done anything this year that wasn’t on a huge scale.

Fortunately, recalling my friend Michael Steinberg’s words on Sibelius, I’ve been called to a leaner life. In November, I conduct two Mozart concerti (the fourth violin concerto and the great A Major piano concerto), two of Mendelssohn’s best works (the 5^th Symphony and the Melusina Overture), and two Haydn symphonies (the 99^th and 103^rd). Am I expecting a flood, programming two-by-two? In any case, I’ve loved the rich sauces of Rachmaninov and the intense flavors of Sibelius and the spice of Gershwin, but now I’m up for musical steamed fish and broccoli for a few weeks.

Plus, there’s nothing more modern than Haydn….

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods