I was sorry to hear today of the death of the great Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström. Her obituary can be found here.
I only heard her sing live once, in a performance of Der Rosenkavalier in the early 1980s. She played the Marschallin (although at various points in her career, she had also sung the other principal roles of Octavian and Sophie). The other leading ladies that night, in Cleveland’s cavernous Public Auditorium, were Frederica Von Stade and Kathleen Battle. She was a great artist, later known for her performances of Janacek’s operas, especially in the recordings for Decca conducted by Charles Mackerras.
I have to admit (in the most gudging way) that the Cleveland Orchestra’s Fridays@7 concerts appear to be a success, at least by observable standards. I attended the second of this season’s series on November 20. Virtually every seat was full and there was a sense of excitement that is normally missing with the usual gray-hair crowd that populates the regular Friday night concerts. The average age of the audience member was considerably younger, and they were well behaved and attentive.
The scheme of the Fridays@7 concerts is that there is an early start time (7:00 PM), a straight-through, without intermission concert by the Cleveland Orchestra for about 75 minutes, followed by a party in the main lobby with cash bar and informal “world” music and lots of schmoozing.
British conductor Jonathan Nott was the guest conductor this weekend. The opening set included Dvorak’s Cello Concerto with former Clevelander Alisa Weilerstein as the soloist. She gave a lovely performance. The second work on the program was Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, known most notoriously as the main theme from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, a fact which did not escape one of my fellow concert goers sitting near me; during the opening bars, in full voice he said, “That’s 2001!” There is, of course, another thirty minutes. I was reminded how many of the amazing orchestral techniques that Strauss used in Zarathustra that he later recycled in other works. (I think especially of the long passages for low strings that later play such a role in Salome.) The work has thrilling climaxes but ends inconclusively.
After the main part of the concert, those who wished (which seemed to be a large portion of the audience) adjourned to the lobby for another session of music “curated” by percussionist Jamey Haddad. It was very crowded at first, but the crowd thinned out after while to make a more comfortable setting. Ms. Weilerstein joined the ensemble for works by Astor Piazzolla, Bill Evans and others.
The evening had the feel of great novelty. It remains to be seen if the format can be sustained over time. I have doubts without someone creating very imaginative secondary programming that will continue the novelty. For now, however, the Cleveland Orchestra appears to have a hit.
This weekend Franz Welser-Möst is conducting the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in Johannes Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) with soprano Nicole Cabell and baritone Russell Braun as soloists. Robert Porco prepared the wonderful Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. Rarely have I heard this work performed with such clarity and directness, yet with the requisite boldness and tenderness. Franz is an outstanding choral conductor–a trait not always found in orchestral conductors, even those with talent for opera. The chorus is not left “on their own” to figure out what to do. I have witnessed even such notable conductors as Pierre Boulez and Christoph von Dohnanyi leave the chorus behind in the dust.
With absolutely parochial interest, I note that the Norton Memorial Organ was used in this performance, played by Joela Jones, to give an added sonic “boost” to the bass, but also supporting the vocal lines. It was mostly not audible, but it was “there,” and I’m glad they used the organ.
Russell Braun has a lovely voice, but he seemed a bit underpowered for this particular performance. (Or perhaps Franz should have shut down the orchestra a bit more.) In the single movement that the soprano soloist appears, one has gotten used to hearing light voices (think Kathleen Battle, Dawn Upshaw, or even the German Christine Schäfer). Nicole Cabell, although obviously a lyric soprano, has a darker, richer, more luscious voice. It made a nice contrast with the “classic” texture of sound in the rest of the performance.
The concert opened with a Cleveland premiere of Chor (for orchestra), a 2003-04 work by German composer Jörg Widmann, who is beginning his two season tenure as the orchestra’s Young Composer Fellow. While it is impossible to judge a complex contemporary work on one hearing, what is not in question is the Cleveland Orchestra’s brilliant performance. The work is in a broad arc with a stupendous central climax marked with ear-splitting rolls on suspended cymbals, strings at extremely high pitch, and, I believe, multiple police whistles. (It was really too loud, and I felt forced to hold my ears.) The pace is slow, with many long notes overlapping one another. An offstage solo trumpet (the orchestra’s amazing principal trumpet Michael Sachs) started the work with a dialogue with a bowed vibraphone and notes on an accordion (played by the ever-versatile Joela Jones). The texture and amplitude gradually increase until the climax, then start to dissolve again, but with “speed bumps” along the way–huge interjections by the full orchestra interrupting the quiet flow of the music. At several points there are quite tonal “chorale”-type passages of an almost of a Brahmsian nature, but always deconstructed, as if the aural equivalent of looking in a funhouse mirror. The work makes extensive use of quarter-tone playing in all the parts, and the orchestra’s pitch and clarity were quite astonishing. (After hearing Chor, I am tantalized by what the orchestra would make of Thomas Ades’s monumental and beautiful Tevot, written for Berliner Philharmoniker. The orchestra is performing Ades’s Violin Concerto later this season, and Franz has conducted more of his music in the past. Come on Franz, let’s have Tevot!)
Virtual Farm Boy is constantly complaining about too many standing ovations at concerts in Cleveland, but this is a case where the ovation was richly deserved. The orchestra is off for a few weeks on European tour and a residency in Vienna. We’ll look forward to their return in mid-November.
[thanks to my sister-in-law, Cheryl Robson]
A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller. He can see from her nameplate that her name is Patricia Whack.
‘Miss Whack, I’d like to get a $30,000 loan to take a holiday.’
Patty looks at the frog in disbelief and asks his name. The frog says his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it’s okay, he knows the bank manager.
Patty explains that he will need to secure the loan with some collateral.
The frog says, ‘Sure. I have this,’ and produces a tiny porcelain elephant, about an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly formed.
Very confused , Patty explains that she’ll have to consult with the bank manager and disappears into a back office.
She finds the manager and says, ‘There’s a frog called Kermit Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000, and he wants to use this as collateral.’
She holds up the tiny pink elephant. ‘I mean, what in the world is this?’
(prepare to groan at this point…..)
The bank manager looks back at her and says…
‘It’s a knickknack, Patty Whack. Give the frog a loan, His old man’s a Rolling Stone.’
Today on NPR’s Fresh Air Terry Gross interviewed the great scholar of world religions, Karen Armstrong. Armstrong has written numerous books, including a history of Islam, biographies of Buddha, Mohammed, among others. Her latest book, The Case for God, is about religion as practice, of learning about the transcendence of God—however God is defined by the individual—and how religion teaches people how to develop a sense of compassion towards others. She points out that The Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”) is found in all of the great religions of the world, and especially in the three faiths descended from Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
As usual when I hear Karen Armstrong interviewed, or when I read her works, I am left in awe of her intellect and scholarship. It seems that she knows everything about religion; almost nothing is too obscure for her. Interestingly enough, she is not herself an observer of organized religion. In the ’60s she spent seven years in a convent preparing to take holy orders, but she had a crisis of faith and left the convent. Her study of the world’s religions has become her religion. She is the Pope of her chosen field.
Today I–like many other people of a certain age around the world–have been remembering the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon on July 20, 1969. I was in between my junior and senior year of high school. It was a hot summer day in Iowa, and we were putting up hay on the family farm, but even my hardworking dad let us take a break to come into the house to watch the first steps the Neil Armstrong took on the moon. But then it was back to work. When the sun shines in the summer in Iowa, and there is hay to be baled and loaded into the barn, you do it.
Last night I received a really ugly private email message from someone about my most recent post, which commented on Maureen Dowd’s op-ed piece in the New York Times regarding the Sotomayor confirmation hearings. I would not normally make note of such things, but in this particular case, I think there needs to be a bit of explanation. In the headline to my post, I quoted Dowd’s use of the phrase “Sonia Legree” which she used as a satirical metaphor to characterize Judge Sotomayor’s ongoing efforts to distance herself from any kind of “empathy” (a vague and vastly overused term in this set of hearings). The judge has made it appear that she would put her own mother in jail if the law said it should happen. “The law is the law.” On NPR this morning Nina Totenberg characterized the judge as “sphinxlike” in her blandness. (Thank God for Senator Al Franken asking about Perry Mason yesterday.)
My correspondent last night clearly did not read the Dowd piece (or if she did, she totally mis-read it), and she addressed her diatribe to Ms. Dowd, not to Virtual Farm Boy. Unfortunately, I don’t have a direct line to Ms. Dowd, so I can’t pass it along.
I still think the whole confirmation hearing process is dysfunctional, and in this particular case there are strong and disturbing undertones of sexism and racism that have permeated this display of Grand Political Theatre.
Maureen Dowd, in today’s New York Times, gets it just right about the ongoing confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become a Justice on the United States Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor has learned her coached lessons well: that is, don’t say anything; be as bland as possible; don’t let the old white guys get under your skin. Listening to the re-caps of yesterday’s hearing, it was astonishing to witness the patronizing and condescending behavior of the senators toward the judge. The most outrageous was when Senator Lindsey Graham asked about her judicial “temperament,” and said that it was reported that she was “nasty” and “a bully.” This is a classic case of gender bias: a male in a similar situation would be called “aggressive”; a female is “a bitch.” Today’s hearing appears to be more of same. These hearings take on the aspect of an old-fashioned college fraternity hazing: something horrifying to endure in order to become a member of the club. It is an unseemly spectacle.
My house looks even more surrealistically messy than usual. I’m having new bathroom floors installed, so I have one toilet sitting next to my pipe organ, another sitting next to my large screen TV. I’m hoping that things will be put back later today. (The ungrouted ceramic tile looks very nice.)
