It takes a lot to get Dottore Gianni out at
night. Given his increasingly poor eyesight and his inclination towards cocktail
hours, drives après dark and après drink are ill-advised. Even were he to leave
the car in the garage and walk to his destination after dark, evening strolls après
the above, particularly attempting to walk the straight and narrow, are not
always wise.
However! After a light cocktail hour and a
healthy salad last night, shortly after 7 pm out stepped Dottore Gianni into a crisp,
cold, clear evening for a short walk to the Peace Center in order to attend a
concert offered by a group called The New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO).
This ensemble was formed in the San Francisco Bay area in 1992 and since 2008
has boasted Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as its musical director and concertmaster.
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| Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg |
No one stands on a podium, baton in hand, to
guide this ensemble. Instead, like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and precious
few others, the NCCO is a conductor-less group. Instead, as its bio in the
program from last night notes: “Musical decisions are made collaboratively by
the 19-member string ensemble, resulting in an enhanced level of commitment on
the part of the musicians to concerts of remarkable precision, passion and
power.” Regarding the addition of Salerno-Sonnenberg, the bio continues in a
quote from Gramophone Magazine, has brought
“a new sense of vitality and determination as well as an audacious swagger that
is an unmistakable fingerprint of its leader.”
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| The New Century Chamber Orchestra |
I knew nothing of the orchestra before
reading that it would be part of the Peace Center’s season, and I might well
have passed the concert by except that I DID know the name of Nadja! I’m going
to pass on typing her full name each time I remark upon her. Don’t worry,
readers, you won’t be confused as she is the only Nadja noted in this post.
Whatever they were before, with the arrival of Nadja the NCCO would certainly
have gained in precision, passion and power, because that pithy and alliterative
phrase describes her perfectly, the “audacious swagger” completing the
portrait.
Dottore Gianni had only vague memories of a
prodigy who quickly became known as the “bad girl” of classical music because
of her distinctly un-classical gyrations and emotive facial expressions while
playing, which revealed a more stormily Romantic than rationally Classical
temperament. (See August Wilhelm Schlegel’s differentiation between the two
forms – he coined the term “Romanticism” – look for the difference in the music
of Chopin for example versus that of Mozart, in the paintings of Delacroix
compared to David, in the wild-eyed acting style of Edmund Kean as opposed to
the teapot-school style of John Philip Kemble, if you’d care to reach back into
musical, art and theatre history for meaning.)
Given this, and having seen
clips of her performances I decided to jump at the chance to see her in person.
Tickets went for as little as $10 but the top price, $35, seemed more than
worth paying if I could sit fairly close and see her at work. So after my brisk
stroll to the Center yesterday I found myself in the very center of row G in
the orchestra of an auditorium that seats well over 2,000. Not a bad vantage
point.
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| Kean, in a fiery Romantic pose |
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| The Neoclassical Kemble as the mosst contained Hotspur on record |
In order to further understand this unique
artist named Nadja I also watched the Academy Award nominated documentary film,
Speaking in Strings, which chronicles
her meteoric rise to fame at the same time as she struggled deeply with
depression. Now, Dottore Gianni is not generally known for depth of research in
his blog posts, but he did a bit more than usual before the concert, as the
film is handily available on Hulu Plus, and whether you ever seen Nadja in a
concert, it is well worth watching.
It depicts vividly her childhood as an
outsider, her careless approach to music lessons which turned into obsessive,
lengthy practice sessions, her acceptance to Juilliard, her insistence on
auditioning for a major international violin competition against her teacher’s
advice, and then winning it, after which she debuted as a soloist with the New
York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall to great acclaim. It continues looking at
her career as a soloist and her increasing inability to handle her fame; to a
kitchen accident which nearly caused her to lose her little finger on her
fingering hand, which would have meant the death of her career; her subsequent
suicide attempt (which obviously would have meant the death of HER); and her
triumph in the concert hall only weeks after the attempt. Nadja’s is a dramatic
life. I don’t think she’s a woman I’d love to have coffee with, but she is an
artist that, particularly after last night’s concert, I would always want to
hear play.
Given all I’ve just written, one might wonder
how an iconoclast such as Nadja fits into a chamber music ensemble,
particularly a conductor-less ensemble. Well, I had a good hint from the film,
which showed her at Aspen at a reunion with several of her fellow Juilliard
students playing in a tiny ensemble. She seemed to get just as much joy,
admittedly of a slightly different kind, playing with them as when she stands
(and often prances and dances) as a soloist with a world-famous orchestra. She
has not stopped showing emotion and unorthodox movements while playing, but she
has toned them to fit this fine ensemble, which features a few other players
given to emotive performances as well. In fact her active nature, I would
think, makes it easier for the ensemble to take cues from her during
performances. So the incorporation of Nadja into this particular ensemble seems
a unique and beautiful fit. More practically it has also put the NCCO on the
map, which is a good thing, as they are fine group of musicians.
Another hallmark of the ensemble is, again
according to last night’s notes, “innovative programming.” I’m guessing it
might have got even more innovative after Nadja’s arrival on the scene, but
however, whenever it began, innovation was evident last night. The first piece
was the Sinfonia No. 10 in B minor by Mendelssohn, not particularly innovative,
but a perfect introduction to an all string ensemble. I have covered
Mendelssohn in an earlier post (Bloggo Orchestrale: Another Visit to the GSO 11
No 2012),
so I won’t repeat his biography, but instead will focus briefly
on the work itself, written early in his career, along with eleven others, when
he was between the ripe young ages of twelve and fourteen! It is set in just
one movement, marked in the program Adagio - Allegro, in Wikipedia Adagio –
Allegro – Piu Presto. Which is correct? Who knows? Who cares really, as long as
the music is played well, which this piece was, indubitably. And certainly it
did increase in speed (piu presto) and intensity towards the end, driven by a
seemingly possessed Nadja. A very exciting beginning to the concert.
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| Mendelssohn |
So. The audience was introduced to the
orchestra by a relatively familiar piece. The next composition was commissioned
by and specifically written for Nadja, by a contemporary composer whose name,
William Bolcolm, I know, but not his work – until now. Titled the Romanza for
solo Violin and Orchestra, you will see without having heard it that it was
written by a contemporary composer when you look at the movements:
I.
Romanza
II.
Valse
Funebre
III.
Cakewalk
This rather bizarre combination of movements
blended rather beautifully. Nadja was the soloist, this time standing at the
center of the orchestra, as would a conductor, but facing the audience head on.
If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know that I’m not a tremendous fan of
contemporary “serious” music (hard to call it classical, right?) but once again
as I have been when listening to the Greenville Symphony, I was won over by the
playing. In this piece rather than blend into the chamber ensemble Nadja was
allowed to shine, and shine she did! The mood shifts from movement to movement
made more sense to this amateur in the first two – it’s easy to go from a
romance to a funeral waltz – see Romeo and Juliet just for starters – but the
leap into the cakewalk was peculiar at best. Enjoyable, however, and the piece
ended on an upbeat and quirky note. I’m not going to race out and buy a cd (or
mp3 these days) of Bolcom’s music, but the playing of it won me over, at least
temporarily.
Born in 1938, longtime professor of
composition at Michigan State (1973-2008), Bolcom is according to Wikipedia
(and who am I to doubt it?)
a very respected American composer. While perhaps
not the prodigy that Mendelssohn or Mozart was, he began his university studies
in compostion at the University of Washington at…wait for it…the age of 11! He
continued his studies with some very famous composers, including Darius Milhaud
and Olivier Messiaen, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his 12 New Etudes for Piano in 1988 and in
2006 was awarded the National Medal of Arts. He set William Blake’s famous
poems The Songs of Innocence and of
Experience to music featuring soloists, chorus and orchestra. It was
performed in Stuttgart, London and at several American venues including the
Brooklyn Academy of Music and Carnegie Hall, and a recording of the work won
three Grammies in 2006. He composed three major operas, McTeague, A View from the
Bridge and A Wedding (the last
based on Robert Altman’s film), eight symphonies, eleven string quartets, four
violin sonatas, several piano “rags” – I could go on, but you can see that he
is a serious contemporary composer. Read Wikipedia on him if you’d like to know
more, as that’s where most of this is taken from.
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| William Bolcolm |
What’s most pertinent for this post is Bolcom
on Nadja, which says a lot about him as well as about her, so I will quote at
length:
I had
already done a piece for her in the 1990s. It was the Third Sonata for Violin
and Piano, and I think that she and I premiered it in Aspen in 1993. I’ve
always liked her playing because it’s so gutsy. The minute you hear her sound
on the radio you know it’s her. To have a unique sound is becoming a rarity
among players. Many of them nowadays have a cookie-cutter sound, and that’s a
lot different from the famous violinists of my youth. You could instantly
recognize if the sound was Mischa Ellman’s or Jascha Heifetz or Zino
Francescatti. They had different styles.
Nadja
has her approach, which is quite bravura with intense lyricism. So I thought
that I’d keep her style in mind when I wrote Romanza. Romanzas were a common
form of music in the late 18th early 19th centuries…They are usually lyric and
not as showy as a violin concerto. The center of Romanzas is usually dramatic
and has an emotionally strong undercurrent or even overcurrent.
I love
to write for a certain performer. That helps to give my piece a focus, which
can, curiously enough, be picked up by someone else who can put his/her angle
on the piece. I don’t like to write for generic violinist X, because there’s no
focus…
In the commission that Nadja gave me, she didn’t request
a special solo piece for her. I just wanted to do it that way. I sort of
foisted it on her.
http://oregonmusicnews.com/2010/05/04/nadja-salerno-sonnenberg-and-the-new-century-chamber-orchestra-to-present-new-bolcom-work/
A very complimentary set of comments, and
rightly so, regarding Nadja, but his words exemplify a very smart as well as
talented musician in Bolcolm himself.
A short piece closed out the first part of
the concert, composed by Heitor Villa-Lobos, a musician about whom Dottore
Gianni knew nothing but his name until today. (actually he didn’t even get the
name right as he thought his first name was Hector, not Heitor.) The good
doctor will now share a little knowledge (which must, at least in this blog, go
a long way) about him.
Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) was not a Spaniard as
I had assumed, but a Brazilian. He lived in times of turmoil and change in
Brazil.
When he was one year old slavery was abolished there, and when he was
two, in 1889, the Empire of Brazil was overthrown. He grew up under the “republic,”
a dictatorial rather than a democratic republic, that replaced it. During that
time he traveled to Europe and planned to return until the Revolution of 1930
resulted in another dictatorship, that of Getulio Vargas. He was forced during
the Vargas era to remain in Brazil, and during this time Villa-Lobos became a
strong supporter of the nationalist agenda that Vargas pushed, composing music
for it. When Vargas fell from power in 1945 Villa-Lobos began again to travel
internationally and increased his reputation.
.jpg) |
| Villa-Lobos |
I know so little of the history of Brazil
that I needed that paragraph to place the composer in a historical context, and
I assume few of my readers could pass a test on Brazilian history and culture. The
passage helped a bit for me – I hope it helped as well for thee!
As a musician Villa-Lobos was largely self-taught,
and by the time he was ten he had learned the cello, the guitar and the
clarinet! In 1889 his father died, and the future composer put his skills to
work playing in cinema and theatre orchestras in Rio de Janeiro. Not long after
he also played in street bands, explored the interior of the country where he
became aware of native melodies and styles, and he became a cellist with a
grand opera company in Rio. In his early 20s he married, began conducting, and
also composing his unique style of music. This style was influenced to a point
by European composition, but more so by the native melodies he had grown to
know. He became friends with the composer Darius Milhaud (mentioned earlier in
this post) who was with the French legation to Brazil, and while he learned the
European style from Milhaud and the Ballets Russes which group visited Brazil
in 1917, Villa-Lobos also introduced Milhaud to Brazilian street music. In 1918
it was the composer’s good fortune to meet the great pianist Artur Rubinstein
who championed his music and also became a friend for life.
It was pretty clear that Brazilian music
would trump European in two early symphonic tone poems, Amazonas and Uirapurú,
which drew from native Brazilian legends and the use of "primitive"
folk material. So when Rubinstein convinced Villa-Lobos to visit Paris in 1923,
the composer decided to “exhibit his exotic sound world rather than to study”
European forms. But he became bewitched by Paris, and returned, living there
from 1027 to 1930. As noted above there was a revolution in Brazil in 1930.
Villa-Lobos was in Brazil conducting when it occurred and could not leave the
country, as the new dictator Vargas allowed no money to be taken out of Brazil.
He embraced the new regime, writing patriotic and propagandist music, but he
also composed some of his most unique works, called Bachianas-Brazileiras, that
blended the style of Bach with Villa-Lobos’s own style.
It was one of these, Bachiana-Brazileiras No.
5, that ended the first part of last night’s concert. The piece originally
called for solo soprano and eight cellos, but Nadja commissioned Clarice Assad
to arrange it for chamber orchestra, and it worked beautifully in that context.
If you want to know more about the composer, just check the reliable, in this
case at least, Wikipedia, from which I’ve drawn most of the information on
Villa-Lobos. Dottore Gianni would like to tell you more, but must move on to
second half of the show, which consisted of one piece only.
That piece was written by Richard Strauss, a
composer also discussed in an earlier post (see Bloggo Sehr Schnell und Wild,
24 October 2012 for info on the composer). The Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings
is a unique piece featuring all of the players in the ensemble, scored for ten
violins, five violas, five cellos, and three double basses. (Wikipedia)
Nadja chose the piece because it is perfect
musically for her own ensemble, and as you see in the above paragraph, gives
everyone a chance to shine. She spoke about that aspect of the music, but not
the complicated reasons that caused Strauss to compose it.
If you read my earlier blog you may remember
that Strauss had a very complicated relationship with Hitler and the Third
Reich.
Metamorphosen explores this in the last days of World War II. It is
generally thought that Strauss wrote the piece in mourning of Germany’s
destruction in the war, and specifically for the bombing of Munich, in which
targets included the National Theatre. Strauss plays on themes from the funeral
march in Beethoven’s Third Symphony, called the Eroica, and very near the end
of the work quotes the march exactly. The Eroica was written to honor Napoleon,
dedicated to him, in fact, but as Beethoven grew disillusioned by the havoc
that the Emperor was wreaking throughout Europe he rejected Napoleon and
re-dedicated the symphony to “the memory of a great man.” As Beethoven had
turned away from Napoleon so Strauss turned away from Hitler, who as we know
wreaked his own share of havoc throughout the continent. What better way to
voice it than to reference and quote a composer who had made a similar error in
the past? After all, composers “speak” most clearly through their music.
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| Richard Strauss, painted by Max Liebermann |
If anyone is interested in more details, have
a look at Wikipedia, which also presents alternate theories as to why
Metaphorsen was written, and what “metamorphosis” it represents. I also found
interesting notes from a 2006 performance by the National Symphony at the
Kennedy Center:
http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/?fuseaction=composition&composition_id=3161
In fact I want to quote from these notes
extensively as they describe a complicated piece musically in a rather succinct
and clear fashion:
“The work is essentially a grand Adagio with
a dramatically contrasting middle section marked Agitato. The lower
strings initiate the sequence with a sort of germinal rumination, giving way to
two violas for a statement of the theme which is to be subjected to the various
metamorphoses—not variations in the conventional sense, but extensions and
elaborations in which the resemblance and allusions cited above are brought
into focus. When the Adagio temp returns following the Agitato episode,
the Beethoven theme, implicit from the outset, is presented boldly and
directly. Lest there be any question about his intent, Strauss headed this
section of his score “In memoriam.” It is with musings on this motif that the
work comes to rest.”
Not that Dottore Gianni could not have been
as eloquent, but he’s a lazy fellow and prefers his work done for him. And
admittedly he could never have been so concise!
William C. White’s written notes in addition
to those he gave at a pre-concert talk on the piece, played by the Chicago
Symphony in 2010, might also prove interesting, especially as he inserts audio
tracks so that you can hear the themes and the similarity to Beethoven:
http://www.willcwhite.com/2009/12/more-on-strausss-metamorphosen/
The NCCO and the excellent Nadja
Salerno-Sonnenberg rendered the Metamorphosen beautifully. I found myself
closing my eyes at times and becoming transported by the performance, looking
up at the ceiling as if to thank whatever powers assisted in the powerful music
and the wonderful performance of it.
The group received not only a standing
ovation (I’ve noted before that the Greenville audiences seem incapable of not
giving such an ovation, but in this case it was deserved), but they also played
two encores! The first was the Hungarian Dance No. 5 by Brahms, a VERY familiar
melody, offered at high speed and with a great sense of joy. Their second was
very “pops” oriented, but perfect for the occasion, as the performers are from
the Bay Area. Nadja teasingly told the audience that another audience at an
earlier tour stop didn’t know what it was, and asked if they wanted to know the
title beforehand or if they thought they could guess it. The audience was
emphatic that they could guess, and of course it was easy, as the orchestra
broke into a lush and lovely interpretation of “I Left my Heart in San
Francisco.”
What an enchanting evening! All I’d hoped for
from the star and the ensemble…and then some! A GSO concert is on my agenda for
this coming Sunday afternoon, the highlight for me a Sibelius symphony, on
which I’ll report early next week. Till then…
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