Berkshire Summer Music Overview: Part Two
Super OTW!!!
By: Michael Miller - Oct 09, 2006
My friend, who grew up in Warsaw, never had the benefit of Seymour DeKoven's radio broadcasts, in which that New York fixture expounded the glories of "Barococo" music, during the time music from Schütz to early Mozart was becoming more familiar to general audiences, thanks to scholarship and the lp. As one fast movement after another from works by Vivaldi, Tartini, C. P. E. or W. F. Bach, to name a few, snapped into silence, DeKoven's whitish voice would interject with his pronounced Brooklyn accent, "Now wasn't that simply otw!" or even "super otw!" I don't think I need to gloss DeKoven's phrase or to observe how expressions like that speak for us all, when we've just heard a performance which has truly satisfied our musical cravings, and there's nothing left to say. Contrarily I see this retrospective of the 2006 summer season as an opportunity to cool down and examine my premises, not without a few mea culpas for opportunities missed.
The problem is that within the somewhat extended view I take of the Berkshires the quantity and quality of what is offered is such that a relatively gentle selective process will lead the listener to great music. A reviewer's criteria will be somewhat less self-protective. I'd say the about half the concerts I review involve composers or musicians I personally want to hear; another quarter will be performances I think are typical of a popular local venue; the rest involve music I believe people should be hearing, or issues people should know about. For example, we need more historically informed performance on period instruments, a gap the newly founded Williamstown Early Music will help fill. If I find something to pick at, it will usually fall into the middle category. I deliberately sought out some events which I thought would be typical of an average evening or afternoon at Tanglewood, and they were indeed average. The BSO seemed more irritated than inspired by David Runnicles' emphatic direction, and Pinchas Steinberg, replacing the great Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, gave Peter Serkin a rather off-the-shelf accompaniment in Brahms' Second Piano Concerto, as well as a lyrical, but ultimately uninteresting Second Symphony—which the audience received with wild ovations: super otw. What's more, Steinberg required the first and second violins to sit together at the orchestra's right, conjuring up dire memories of pre-Levine days and producing some rather strident string sonorities and mushy textures. In any case, it demonstrated how much the BSO has benefitted in clarity and tone from the change to split violins.
Before I discuss Tanglewood any further, I'd like to express my regrets for a number of serious omissions in my coverage during our first summer online. It proved impossible for me to attend performances at several important venues, including the Berkshire Opera and Aston Magna. The chamber music festivals in northwestern Connecticut at Music Mountain and Norfolk should also be on everyone's list. It may well not be appropriate to review performances which include students, but I regretted missing the Marlboro Festival. There is also Tannery Pond just over the New York border in New Lebanon, and Yellow Barn along the Connecticut River.
I attended two memorable concerts at the Clark Art Institute, which my schedule unfortunately did not permit me to review at the time. The Williamstown Chamber Concerts usually include performances by non-traditional and younger, less familiar groups. This year the latter appeared to be the Euclid String Quartet, although they have been playing together since 1998, and their playing showed remarkable assurance and sophistication. The members founded the quartet in Cleveland, and they took the name of the great avenue which connects downtown with University Circle, once lined with the homes of the city's wealthiest citizens. The Euclid Quartet easily lived up to the distinguished example of the Cleveland Quartet, which was also founded there. What appealed to me most about their playing was its relaxed, undemonstrative quality. They have cultivated a marked independence as individual players, avoiding sharp attacks and other gestures showing off their discipline as an ensemble, which is by no means deficient in any way. This aspect of their style proved particularly effective in the late Mozart quartet (in B flat, K. 589) on the program, which also included a tango by Piazzolla and an attractive piece by American composer Dan Welcher, which took its relaxed structure from the topography of Sydney Harbor. The Debussy String Quartet gave the musicians a chance to show their virtuosic command of sonority. The popular Meridian Arts Ensemble also played to a packed house. These musicians are not only a virtuoso brass and percussion ensemble, specializing in their own brand of jazz-classical fusion, they are brilliant arrangers, composers, and perhaps the most authoritative interpreters of Frank Zappa's music we have today. Their program concluded with a suite of several of his pieces. Piazzolla and other South American composers dominated the program, which also included percussionist John Ferrari's "Baqrz Duzn" and Brian McWhorter's arrangement of music from Sesame Street, which belied its name with its sophisticated harmonies and tone colors. The members supported their performances with introductory commentaries, which were particularly welcome in light of the inept program notes, which were riddled with errors and contradictions. The Meridian's music was great fun, although its postmodern archness led me occasionally to wonder whether it was spinach disguised as chocolate or chocolate disguised as spinach. Either way, disguise there was.
Intimate series like the Williamstown Chamber Concerts, which fill up the acoustically excellent lecture hall at the Clark with local publicity and regulars contribute just as much to the the summer music season in the Berkshires as internationally renowned festivals like Tanglewood. As rich and varied as this is, I cannot restrain myself from encouraging Berkshire music lovers from venturing farther afield. I've already discussed Summerscape at Bard College. The Monadnock Festival in Peterborough, New Hampshire is another personal favorite.
I began making the two hour drive from Williamstown a few years ago to hear the annual recital of the distinguished pianist Russell Sherman, which he plays in the Peterborough Town House. I have since learned that the Festival is by no means restricted to this hub. It offers concerts in sixteen other meeting houses and churches throughout the Monadnock region, most of them free of charge, unlike the Peterborough concerts. I have also been an admirer of the director of the Festival, James Bolle, who conducts the excellent Festival orchestra in performances of a wide range of music, interpreted as only a composer can. The Festival organizers are proud of the architectural distinction of their intimate and informal venues, where committed musicians of the highest caliber congregate from around the world to play a wide, occasionally unusual repertory, for a varied, musically alert audience, made of mostly of regular summer folk from the area, as well as residents of the nearby MacDowell Colony. This past summer, the fortieth anniversary of the Festival, there were over thirty concerts offered, of which over half were free, making the Festival's sophisticated repertory available to a broad community. One of this year's themes was the music of Elliott Carter, and I regretted not being able to attend any of them. Next year I hope to take even fuller advantage of Monadnock Music, and I'm looking forward to whatever surprises Mr. Bolle will have in store for us.
At Monadnock, music is most definitely at the center of the the enterprise, and it is mercifully free from the influences of marketing and other commercial taints. By contrast, Tanglewood, which is most definitely the core of musical life in the Berkshires, has been criticized for just that, in addition to whatever else a whole variety of self-appointed critics can think of. The Festival offers something for everybody—mainstream orchestral repertoire, chamber music, solo recitals, a contemporary festival within a festival, middlebrow jazz, wine and food tastings, tee-shirts, souvenirs, overpriced wine and beer; hence there is something for everyone to complain about. I heard from a friend who volunteers at the Festival that a significant contingent of regulars were bitterly disappointed at the absence of Rachmaninoff in any of the concerts this year—which is a point that, frankly, hadn't occurred to me. However, because of its long-established fame and the vast numbers of people who can be accommodated in the Music Shed and the surrounding lawn, the Festival is regarded as a keystone of the local economy, and local motel owners, restaurateurs, and shop-keepers anxiously watch attendance figures, which in the classical music world never seem to be enough, even when the house is full. According to various newspaper articles I've read here and there, classical music is going through a soft period right now. The Metropolitan Opera and other organizations around the country are getting worried. Audiences are not growing, perhaps even shrinking, as they continue to age apace. At Tanglewood, as the summer progressed and busloads of people from local retirement communities appeared, the audience seemed to age by decades within the space of a fortnight. The same friend who criticized my enthusiasm thinks we are all dying out, and among his students at a highly regarded liberal arts college he sees few young people likely to replace us as we drop off.
My own favorite complaint regards the audience. I really wish people would learn not to applaud between movements. Very little of the music played at Tanglewood is not dependent on some continuity or contrast of mood, or, more concretely, key, between the individual movements, and this mindless applause is most distracting. I could understand the gesture if it were a spontaneous response to a performance of the kind of intensity and quality one hears perhaps once in a year, or even less often. Blomstedt's Bruckner may have been on that level, but, or Frühbeck de Burgos' Beethoven, but it doesn't take exceptional perception to understand that it does no one a service, least of all the musicians, to break the mood in this way. Of course applause is good for business, and neither musicians nor administrators are too inclined to discourage it. After all it is a sign of life! (See Emanuel Ax's Web site for a different opinion.) Even worse is the rush for the exits during the final movements—a custom I remember particularly ruefully from my years in New York. The exiting traffic in the parking lots is well-managed and manageable, and Lenox boasts few taxis and no late-night subways...so what's the rush?
All this notwithstanding, I heard some very great music at Tanglewood this summer, music of all kinds: Garrick Ohlsson's Beethoven piano sonatas, Levine's Mozart, Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, Turnage's "Blood on the Floor," brilliant newcomers Eva Ollikainen and Gustavo Dudamel, Blomstedt's unforgettable Bruckner Seventh, and Frühbeck de Burgos's magnificent Beethoven Seventh, and that wasn't all. It would be perverse to complain about such music.
Apart from the economy, much of the cloud of negativity surrounding Tanglewood may be a residue of the years before the arrival of James Levine and of the unreasonable expectation that he would work miracles overnight. I've been disappointed by some of his Boston performances, and I went to Tanglewood wondering just where he and the orchestra would be following his period of recuperation. Unfortunately I missed "Gurrelieder" and his earlier concerts. Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Requiem showed an alert and lively freedom of execution which I haven't heard very often from the BSO in recent years. Levine's approach to "Don Giovanni" seemed notably different—less obviously Viennese—from my reminiscences of his Metropolitan Opera performances, and the orchestra seemed well on their way to developing their own style in this composer, who hasn't been anywhere close to the center of their repertoire in quite some time. Levine has a reputation for energy and discipline, and many people both in the orchestra and the audience have been puzzled by what is said to be a lack of specificity in his direction.
Another, more optimistic friend offered me some enlightenment. At some point during the Requiem I noticed a familiar head among the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. It was a friend from high school I've seen all too seldom in recent years, and a recent addition to the chorus. We talked after the concert. He mentioned that there is quite a lot of discussion about "just what Jimmy wants from us." An answer slowly developed over the past couple of years by one of the long-term members of the group was that "he simply wants every one of us to play or or sing at his or her absolute best." In view of the flexible support and freedom he gave both his vocal and instrumental soloists this remark made sense to me, and I left the Mozart weekend admiring James Levine more than ever.
The BSO played responsively for a variety of different conductors, sounding quite different with each, in spite of their limited rehearsal time for the Tanglewood Concerts. The final weekend was a case in point, with the twenty-eight-year-old Gustavo Dudamel's triumphant debut followed by Blomstedt and Frühbeck de Burgos. Concerning the latter two, who are quite different in technique and interpretation, I can imagine that both have been subjected to that overused comparison to "Otto Klemperer in his prime." In any case all three concerts were at the very top of musical achievement. In Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto I won't forget the fascinating tension between Yefim Bronfman's poetry and Frühbeck de Burgos' noble directness.
My jaded friend was present for those last two evenings, and he liked them...more than liked them. Perhaps if I were writing a poem, I could come close to his enthusiastic gestures and exclamations, but that's not my speciality. I decided against sharing DeKoven's immortal phrase with him, for his own sake. Some things are best forgotten, and they are often the hardest to forget. "Nie z tego ?wiata," in any case, does not mean quite the same thing as "out of this world." In the break, carried away by his enthusiasm, he decided to go backstage to compliment Emanuel Ax on his Beethoven Second Piano Concerto, and to test his Polish.