The Black Spaniard is now available at Amazon

Unsolicited Press, an edgy publisher on the West Coast, is releasing The Black Spaniard on Nov. 17 in time for the winter holidays AND Beethoven's birthday (Dec. 16, give or take a day). Read all about it at Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/gl33bhk Orders also may be made via the button to the upper right.

Midori and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Louis Langree

My review of the November 5, 6, and 7, 2016, concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra with Louis Langree, music director of the Cincinnati Orchestra. Guest soloist Midori joined the Orchestra for the Beethoven Violin Concerto. Please follow this link:  http://bit.ly/2fQTX1O

Audiences - As highly valued as artists!

Be revolutionary: Support artists, writers, craftspeople, and photographers in your actual and virtual neighborhoods this holiday season.

"The Black Spaniard" by L.L.Holt is now available for pre-order with FREE shipping in the USA at:

 http://www.unsolicitedpress.com/store/p103/PREORDER%3A_The_Black_Spaniard_by_L.L._Holt.html 
 
Release date: Nov. 17, 2016. After that date, it also will be available at amazon.com.
 
Set in Austria in the years after the French and American Revolutions, this historical novel follows a wave of triumph, despair, and reconciliation in the life of a young genius. Less than $20 U.S. dollars, perfect for holiday giving. 

Audiences are as important to the arts as the people who write, paint, and perform. Without the support of audiences like you, the arts--the way we learn from and express our culture, ideas, and feelings--will vanish. With the arts, we can become agents for change. Thank you!

Yuja Wang glistens, but Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique enthralls: Philadelphia Orchestra September 2016

Move over, Lang Lang, there’s a new sensation in the world of classical-music-as-spectacle, and she springs onto the concert stage in a backless, silver-sequinned mini-dress and five-inch stilettos.

I know: my feminist roots scream, “Judge women by their works not their appearance!” But it’s very hard not to embrace Yuja Wang for her engaging persona and killer fashion sense as well as her considerable talent. The crowd roared as she sprang onto the stage, with a friendly smile and infectious glee at joining the Philadelphia Orchestra led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. 

Questions as to how she would navigate the pedals in those shoes quickly subsided as the orchestral introduction of Chopin’s Piano Concerto #2 in f minor receded and Wang took command of the stage with a warm, sonorous solo that soon morphed into a winning partnership with the orchestra. Yannick interprets this light-weight concerto with power and invests it with his unique ability to shape and mold sound into a tapestry that satisfies both heart and mind. Perhaps it was too majestic a Maestoso for traditional ears, but the emphasis on dramatic dynamics and expressive pacing worked well as the two young artists, both so captivating to watch, created a riveting musical journey throughout the three movements. 

This is early Chopin, a composer who is not known for his mastery of orchestration, but Yannick’s artfully carved sonorities and Wang’s masterful ability to elicit meaning from ornamental ripples and trills did justice to a work that can be weak and ephemeral in lesser hands.

After three curtain calls at the performance I attended, Wang played one of her favorite encores, the Rondo alla Turca by Mozart, in a version that splices the master’s whimsical phrases with jazz improv and bebop. A similar recent performance can be found on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jmpXFXsJdA

Good as the Chopin was, the real star of the evening was Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, a work everyone knows and no one listens to. This is a huge, monster-sized symphony, with the orchestra sprawling across the stage and skidding under the balconies. It’s one of those works, like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Beethoven’s Eroica, that changed symphonic music forever. I honestly don’t know how anyone can conduct this work and survive. Indeed our young, vigorous conductor took a couple of breaks between movements to mop his brow with a handkerchief a la Pavarotti. Imagine nine brass players plus a choir of French horns and more timpani than you can shake a stick at.

Once again, Yannick showed he is a master of sculpting sound into appealing, energizing, and reflective shapes, all leading to a unified, comprehensible whole. But let’s face it: this is one nutty symphony, even grotesque, like an overblown waltz for Tim Burton characters. Certainly, Berlioz claimed the work was inspired by sex, drugs, and the beautiful actress, Harriet Smithson. This is probably one work you can’t rehearse too often, and at the same time, it begs a certain freedom from conventional performance. There were a couple of shrill moments in the first movement, but they fit in with the macabre nature of a five-movement work that ends with death on the scaffold and dreams of a witches’ Sabbath. This is a totally fresh, if sometimes deafening approach to a work probably too expensive to perform often in public, but worthy of every music-lover’s attention, exploration, and rediscovery.

The program opened with the Mongolian National Anthem, a fetching tune with Eastern and Western influences, in honor of the president of Mongolia, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, who attended the performance on Friday afternoon. This was followed by our own Star-spangled Banner, which the audience joined in, filling Verizon Hall with the magic of spontaneous singing and a deeply felt passion for more peace, more unity, and more harmony among all people.

The Philadelphia Orchestra

Yannick Nézet-Séguin - Conductor

Yuja Wang - Piano

Chopin – Piano Concerto #2 in F minor, op. 21

Berlioz – Symphonie Fantastique, op. 14

Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center

8 p.m. September 22, 2 p.m. September 23, and 8 p.m. September 24, 2016

Yuja Wang, file photo.

Beethoven's struggle, triumph over deafness is theme of American Repertory Ballet world premiere

But what humiliation when any one beside me heard a flute in the far distance, while I heard nothing, or when others heard a shepherd singing, and I still heard nothing! Such things brought me to the verge of desperation, and well-nigh caused me to put an end to my life.

With these words, the composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) described the agony of the early stages of losing his hearing, the embarrassment he felt when his loss became evident in the presence of others. He was the greatest composer of his generation, perhaps of all time. And yet he could not hear “a shepherd singing” in the countryside.

This haunting statement is the basis of a new ballet by Mary Barton, ballet master and resident choreographer with the American Repertory Ballet (ARB), New Jersey’s leading professional ballet repertory company. A Shepherd Singing (And I Still Heard Nothing) received its world premiere April 8, 2016, in McCarter Theatre, Princeton, N.J. The drama in movement unfolded as Michael Pratt conducted the Princeton University Orchestra in a spirited performance of three movements of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. It was the concluding work on a program titled Masters of Dance and Music at McCarter.

The story of a composer going deaf is not the easiest thing to translate into the highly visual art of ballet. We imagine the clumsy Beethoven tripping over stacks of clutter in his dark, crowded apartment, not soaring in a grand jete or gracefully lifting a ballerina toward the sky. This is where our expectations are low, and Mary Barton’s vision pierces through to the soul of Beethoven, that hidden place which gave birth to such graceful expressions as the Moonlight Sonata and the profundity of the Ninth Symphony.

Barton’s interpretation begins with the sound of a fierce thunderstorm. The curtain lifts to the scene of Beethoven’s death bed against the first movement of the Seventh Symphony. This is not a scene of gloom and despair, but of defiance and resurrection as the spirits of Fate, Silence, and Art lift the composer to a realm of eternal understanding. 

The story recedes back to the time, in his late 20s and early-to-mid 30s, when Beethoven began to detect signs of increasing deafness and at last came face to face with the realization that he would lose his hearing. This was the time when he first imagined the Sixth Symphony, which contains musical scenes such as a bubbling brook, peasant dances, and bird songs that he no longer could hear and enjoy. In his early 40s came the Seventh Symphony which provides a matchless scaffold for the display of this tale of suffering, reconciliation through art, and ultimate triumph.

As the composer at the center of this narrative, Michael Landez is a powerful force, combining grace and strength, vulnerability and resilience. If your idea of Beethoven is a grouchy troll, think again: Landez has given him the physical presence worthy of the master who composed hundreds of masterworks and set an example for fortitude and overcoming adversity. If you never dreamed of Beethoven in tights, his feet fluttering in a batterie, then dream again: the entire production is so authentic and full of fervent feeling, there is no false step, nothing awkward or off-base. 

Barton has assigned several dancers the roles of notes, and it is pure pleasure to see them expressing the music being performed live just past their feet. (This is the first time ARB has performed with a live orchestra in its more than 40 year history.) The balletic notes really do seem as though they’ve risen like steam or mist out of the orchestral pit and materialized before us on the stage. Beautiful work by the University Orchestra, by the way, with the relentless momentum so necessary to a performance of the Seventh. These may not be the most polished professional musicians on the planet, but under Pratt, they never let up, and drive the music to its frenzied, ecstatic conclusion, a phenomenon Richard Wagner once called “the apotheosis of the dance.” This performance probably sounded more like authentic performances in Beethoven's own time.

Many have danced to the Seventh, but not like this. Thank you, ARB, artistic director Douglas Martin, and the many other brilliant dancers who helped tell the story of a great composer who triumphed over affliction. Beethoven’s music may be remembered as his legacy to the human race, but his life and struggles, too, as memorialized in this ballet, show us a path of salvation through art. 

Reflections on other ballets in the April 8th program will be featured in a future column.

                                                                                                 –Linda  Brown Holt

Cast photo after world premiere of Mary Barton's A Shepherd Singing (And I Still Heard Nothing). Photo by ARB dancer Lily Saito

 

An "Infomentary"...and a Revelation: Simon Rattle, Berlin Phil, & You!

My condolences to all who did not see the screening of The Beethoven Project in movie theaters around the country March 19, 2016. It was phenomenal, with great “monster orchestra”-sized playing by the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle.

The program started with a documentary about recording the entire Beethoven symphony cycle, then, after an intermission (“interval” in Euro-speak), performances of Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh. This was more of an infomercial for the Berlin Philharmonic than an objective documentary, but did provide some insights into the orchestra and its surprisingly compatible relationship with the wild-haired conductor from Liverpool.

Rattle's reading of the Fourth was bigger and badder than it deserves to be, still first-rate. But the Seventh was appropriately right on the cusp of frenzy. Decades ago, who would have dreamed that the BP would become a league of head-bangers, but I’m not complaining. There was non-stop physical action for the eye and, for the ear, the “apotheosis of the dance,” as Wagner called it, has never been more bacchanalian. I wanted to stand up and cheer, but that’s not the sort of things you do in a movie theater with only 25 other guests present. (I wonder whether video concerts in Europe are similarly under-attended. The theater in question is located just eight miles from Princeton, known for its plethora of  classical music lovers.)

The infomentary, to coin a term for this painlessly edifying marketing tool, contained a few memorable bon mots by the maestro. Early on, the affable Rattle tells the interviewer that one of the great dangers of interpreting Beethoven is making his music too elegant and polished, that it always needs a bit of roughness to let Beethoven speak. He called conducting his music “looking at yourself through an uncomfortable mirror. He asks of you more than you can give,” which is why Rattle said he appreciates the “superhuman energy” of the BP.

Rattle then sat at the keyboard to show how Beethoven was doing things in his own way right from the start with the First Symphony. Rattle stated what the 18th century audience’s expectation would have been at the opening, then proceeded to shatter those expectations no less than seven times in a few minutes. (I may be a little off on the numbers, but you know what I mean.) Beethoven still follows the models of his teachers, Rattle says, but in the last movement, it’s “Haydn and Mozart go to the gym.”
Skipping past the Second, Rattle spends some time explicating the Third. Beethoven not only was the first composer to put politics into a symphony, he said (even if deep down it is really about a personal crisis), but it’s also almost as though he is composing himself out of suicide. (Well put!)

Rattle described the room where the Eroica was first performed in Vienna, not much larger than the BP’s stage. "It must have been like hearing Vesuvius erupt,” he said breathlessly.

Other words of note pertained to the Sixth, the Pastoral, to which he ascribed the theme, Fragility. “That storm…it’s actually terror, psychic terror,” he said, and then the camera cut to a bit of the performance, much more over the top than what we are used to hearing. “It makes the final thanksgiving that much more affecting,” he said. “It is a thanksgiving that all of us have survived.”

There was a very interesting bit of dialogue about an instrumental part of the last movement of the Ninth. One of the scholars following one of the earliest extent copies of the score discovered something truly remarkable and brought it to Rattle's attention.

There is a point where there are a series of F#s repeated up and down in octave, followed by three rising notes in the French horns (B major, then B minor? I’m writing this from memory). This is repeated two more times. It turns out that the original score calls for the French horns notes to be different, not an exact repeat, in fact, to falter in the second and third repeat, before the glorious reentry of the chorus.

The effect is a little like that staggering, stuttering conclusion to the second movement of the Eroica, a sign of helplessness and despair. However, in the Ninth, it is swept away by the most famous chorus in all music.

This production is related to the BP’s Digital Concert Hall https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/ sponsored by Deutsche Bank. If you see any more programs like this in a movie theater near you, seize the moment!

Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand

You have never experienced music like this! Yannick Nezet-Seguin and more than 400 singers and musicians at the top of their game ripped the ceiling off the Kimmel Center and probably damaged a few eardrums this weekend with Mahler’s monumental 8^th Symphony in E flat, the “Symphony of a Thousand.” This Philadelphia Orchestra performance needs to be measured in G-force, an emotional and intellectual roller coaster that teeters on a tightrope between ecstasy and hysteria, but always contained just enough by Mahler’s commanding intelligence to keep from slipping into madness.
 
There is no describing the power, sensitivity, range, and spiritual oomph of this soaring, staggering, whispering, cajoling, and ultimately triumphant symphony. Yannick opted for an intermission between the work’s two very different movements, the first a “Veni creator spiritus,” in Latin, a hymn to the creative spirit of the universe, followed by the closing scene from Goethe’s Faust in which corrupt man is redeemed through the love of woman. One of my religion professors at Drew University once said that there is no force to equal religion mixed with sex. He could have added music to the mix.

The Kimmel Center, that beautiful, magnificent venue, showcasing performers on the stage as the precious jewels they are, was the perfect venue for this massive experience. Against the soaring organ pipes, the text of each movement appeared in translation, offering insight and a tie to safety, like that steel tether that keeps Matt Damon from flying out into space in The Martian.

Because of my last-minute decision to attend, I had the choice of three tickets, and chose one in the middle of Row D. It turned out that Row D for this performance was the first row because the orchestra appropriated Rows A through C plus half the balconies behind the stage for its expanded forces. As a result, I nestled under Yannick’s left elbow, a few feet from the man himself, throughout the 90-minute performance, and had an up-close-and-personal view of Concertmaster David Kim’s impeccable violin technique in several ethereal solos. Sitting virtually in the orchestra has its advantages, though I felt I missed a good visual grasp of the massive forces beyond the conductor, invisible to those of us in “the pit.”  

I have to say, though, that the sheer volume of sound was something I have not experienced since hearing Jon Leifs’ Hekla with the Bose turned way up, some I do not recommend for the faint of hearing. Knowing what to expect, having once sat briefly beside a Kimmel organ pipe, I stopped at the CVS behind the Kimmel Center and bought a pair of Earplanes (plugs) which helped avert an otherwise unavoidable case of tinnitus. 

How can such beauty exist? In between gasps of delight by myself and, yes, others in proximity, I was able to scrawl a few notes for this blog. Mahler’s masterful skill as a composer is evident in tremendous vocal and instrumental writing in this work. For just one example, after the almost painfully loud “Drive the enemy far from us” section, there is a complex instrumental fugue about 25 minutes into the first movement, short but intense. Another note: the slow opening of the second movement, which suggests a mysterious garden, plays pizzicato celli against shimmering violins, soon crowned by a halo of woodwinds, a subtle and beguiling effect much needed given the fireworks to come. 

The text from Goethe is a bit archaic, I’m sorry to say, not only for modern audiences but even for a 20^th century man like Mahler, but anyone used to Goethe-speak and the archetypal language of classic Catholic theology shouldn’t be put off by it.  There’s a great German-English PDF of the second movement text at www.naxos.com which is worth reading through.  But let’s not get bogged down in textual analysis. This is music. It’s about redemption. It is redemption.

The Symphony of a Thousand swells to an inexorably ecstatic conclusion, making many listeners, I am sure, recall the great Resurrection Symphony, Mahler’s Second, an impressive redemption “two-fer” by one of Austria’s greatest Jewish composers. (Interesting letter to the editor on Mahler’s religion: http://tinyurl.com/jcabldn )

I was blown away by Nezet-Seguin’s interpretation and, let’s face it, sheer physical stamina, and the great work of the Westminster Symphonic Choir, Choral Arts Society of Washington, American Boychoir, and half dozen top-flight vocal soloists with unerring technique and passion..
 
To twist the words of Dylan Thomas, “Rave, rave, for the shining of the light,” the light of music illuminating the dark dusty corners of our hearts and releasing our souls. Great concert, Philadelphia Orchestra, March 13, 2016.

(Etching of Gustav Mahler by Emil Orlik)