In this month’s issue of Music Media Monthly, Steve Dankner reviews biographies of the great (and somewhat controversial) conductor George Szell and also of a building: Carnegie Hall. Anne Shelley offers us a variety of DVD reviews, covering a performance of the Weill/Brecht opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, an appreciation of bass-baritone George London, and a massive New York concert in commemoration of 9/11. Gene Hyde gives us a survey of websites devoted to the great jazz bandleader Count Basie, and yr. humble ed. reviews some recent recordings in the “ambient” category. Welcome and enjoy!
Books
January 10, 2012
George Szell – A Life of Music, by Michael Charry.
Biographies of major 20th century conductors appear to be proliferating these days. Within the past year I’ve reviewed three books on Leonard Bernstein, and one each on Arturo Toscanini and Dimitri Mitropoulos. This month, George Szell is in the dock, to be followed next month with a review of an autobiography by Riccardo Muti. It goes without saying that all these men were (are, in Muti’s case) venerable maestros who upheld the highest traditions of symphonic performance and brought the canonical classical masterworks to millions, as much by the sheer force of their podium personas and star power as by their uniquely legendary interpretations.
Former assistants or disciples wrote all but one of these books about “their” maestro, and so there is often an aura of veneration that the reader has to peel away to reveal an objective assessment of the conductor as man and artist. Not an easy thing to do in the case of these biographies, which becomes even more problematic for the reader, who, unlike the acolyte, was not the “fly on the wall,” able to see the real man concealed within the public legend.
In the case of George Szell (1897-1970), his accomplishment in molding the Cleveland Orchestra into perhaps America’s greatest orchestra, and certainly one of the world’s supreme ensembles will undoubtedly remain his utmost triumph, followed by his conquests as conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, his engagements with the New York Philharmonic, the NBC and Chicago Symphonies, the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Szell’s many recordings document his genius and will ensure that his great musical legacy survives.
That being said, those who have followed Szell’s illustrious career know that, due to his unfortunate personal qualities of willfulness, arrogance and vindictiveness, he created much ill will and disdain towards him personally: abusing his players, peremptorily firing them, stealing first chair players from other orchestras, and, in a notorious incident at the Metropolitan Opera, walking out on a performance of Tannhaüser in a fit of pique, angered by a mechanical breakdown in the change of scenery. Some years later, Szell, in an uncharacteristically introspective moment, averred, “I’m my own worst enemy.” Rudolf Bing, then the Met’s General Manager, who endured Szell’s insubordination, had the last word: “Not while I’m alive.”
Similar Szell anecdotes are legion among musicians. You won’t find more than a handful, though, in Michael Charry’s book. In assessing the podium tyrants Szell and Toscanini, one concludes that there is but one possible defense of their behavior: that their music making was of such a high order that it justified their dictatorial excesses (in other words, you had to take the [very] bad with the [very] good).
For the rest, which is a mostly dry chronicle of Szell’s triumphs and brilliance throughout his long career, Charry does an adequate job. What is missing is in-depth insight into the mind and persona of a great, but conflicted and possibly troubled mind. We never get to know who George Szell is – the person. The tone instead is respectful and objective. Perhaps a fearsome personality could only engender respect. Still, Szell, the anti-Mitropoulos, love him or hate him, did change the musical world, especially in the United States, by setting the highest possible standards of orchestral performance. For this, if little else, we should be grateful.
George Szell – A Life of Music, by Michael Charry. University of Illinois Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-252-03616-3. 412 pages. Hardcover.
Carnegie Hall Treasures, by Tim Page and Carnegie Hall.
This is a fun, fact-filled, coffee-table-sized tome for lovers of classical music lore and memorabilia. It’s a sort of “Antiques Roadshow” featuring facsimiles of autographed photographs of virtuoso musicians, concert programs, reminiscences, poster art, architectural sketches and much else to pore over. Readers interested in how this, the most illustrious concert hall in America (and perhaps the world), came to be built will learn the story of the coming to maturity of America’s corporate arts culture in fin de siècle New York. The chronicle begins with two chapters that define the importance of Carnegie Hall as a cultural icon: “A Concert Hall for the Ages” and “The People’s House,” its innovative construction (by an architect who had never built a concert hall,) and the landmark inaugural concerts conducted by Tchaikovsky in 1891.
The next chapter, “Celebrating the Composers,” documents the premiere of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila in 1892 and Antonín Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony the following year, along with premieres of major works of John Philip Sousa, Jean Sibelius, Richard Strauss, and others, through the 20th century to works of Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, and many others. This chapter, even more than the others, is filled with photographs, autographed musical manuscripts and other documentation, alongside fascinating musical commentary. As a composer, this was my favorite part. It’s through this particular panorama—as living history—that the book really comes alive.
There’s much more: chapters on the exceptional orchestras and maestros who have performed at Carnegie, and an album of great singers. Chapters on “All That Jazz,” “Pop and World Music,” “Rock and Folk Royalty” and “A Space for More Than Concerts” brings to conclusion this grand circumnavigation of Carnegie Hall’s unique and remarkable history.
“If you believe in ghosts, this would be the place to find them,” writes author/music critic Tim Page. Carnegie Hall Treasures is a wonderful book to leaf through, either in sequence or in random order, and I most highly recommended it to anyone and everyone. It’s a book worthy of its subject: a ‘treasure’ indeed. Carnegie Hall, which was saved by a group of concerned New Yorkers led by the great violinist and humanitarian Isaac Stern in 1960, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and a New York City Landmark in 1967.
Carnegie Hall Treasures, by Tim Page and Carnegie Hall, 2011. HarperCollins ISBN 978-0-06-170367-6. 221 pages. Hardcover.
– Steve Dankner
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Sound Recordings
January 10, 2012Like many people of my generation (the awkward one that comes between the Baby Boomers and the Gen-Xers), I was introduced to the concept of “ambient music” back in the 1970s when I encountered Brian Eno’s seminal album Discreet Music, a very aptly-titled disc that consisted of four long tracks: the title track, which filled up one side of the album with unbelievably soothing but somehow never cloying loops of simple piano figures, and three variations on Pachelbel‘s “Canon in D Minor,” a baroque potboiler that is rendered barely recognizable by the extension and slowing of different parts by different instruments. This music came as a revelation to me: it was easy to listen to and utterly undemanding, but at the same time rewarded close attention. As it turns out, Eno had hit on something powerful and basic, and the ideas he developed during this period (which, it’s worth pointing out, were not entirely original) have been picked up and carried further by many other composers and sound artists, especially in the world of electronic music. Having received a number of interesting releases over the past few months that come from various neighborhoods in the ambient tradition, I offer here a rundown of some of the best of them—along with suggestions as to their possible uses in everyday life.
Erik Wøllo’s Silent Currents consists of two discs, each a 50-minute performance recorded live on the radio, one in 2002 and the other in 2007. Each contains of a blend of prerecorded and improvised material. This is beatless, floating ambient music—the kind on which it is nearly impossible to focus one’s attention for very long. Texturally it resembles Robert Fripp’s “Frippertronics” tape-loop experiments of the 1970s, but is, if anything, even more formless and harmonically static, though quite lovely in the way that a particular color of wallpaper might be lovely. Compared to this, Brian Eno’s ambient music was punk rock. Suggested uses: Putting babies to sleep; meditation; lowering (to the point of somnolence) the energy level at the end of a party. Grade: B
Where Erik Wøllo’s music floats, the music of Stormloop (a.k.a. Kevin Spence) alternately throbs and shimmers. But the overall mood of Snowbound is perfectly encapsulated by the album title: this is not so much music as sound sculpture, and what the sculpture looks like is an enormous and nearly featureless snow field, punctuated only by mile-deep, echoing chasms. Here questions of “beauty” and indeed even of “music” seem rather beside the point—this is programmatic music intended to evoke a physical environment of equally balanced beauty and terror. Suggested uses: Put this on when you feel the need to be reminded how grateful you are to a) live in a civilization b) with central heating and c) other human beings. Grade: B
On Dokument .02, the latest release from the Dadavistic Orchestra, there’s not much in the way of harmonic movement, but lots of color and many pitch variations; listening to this album is kind of like watching a bunch of slow-moving clouds change into a series of interesting shapes. Among the fogbanks and drone layers will emerge sudden glistening features: a long series of arpeggios, a series of echo-laden water drips, tiny Buddhist chimes, an occasional swell of iron-bar clangor. There is a pervasive analog warmth to the Dadavistic Orchestra’s sound which should not be confused with emotional accessibility: this is music of warm, soft surfaces laid over a core of cold metal. While much of this music is attractive, it’s ultimately rather forbidding. Suggested uses: Making unwanted guests feel vaguely uncomfortable; accompanying silent horror films. Grade: B+
Flumina consists of 24 brief pieces, each of them a partially- or fully-improvised piano composition by legendary film composer and electronica artist Ryuichi Sakamoto. On each of the two discs are twelve pieces, each of them written in one of the 12 key centers available in the Western chromatic scale. Sakamoto played one of these pieces at the beginning of each of his shows on a Japanese tour; when all 24 had been recorded, he sent them to Christian Fennesz for overdubs and other manipulation using electronics, guitars, and synthesizers. The result is strange and deeply lovely. Sakamoto’s piano pieces are aimless in the best sense: there are lots of chords, but little sense of harmonic momentum; despite this, he manages to convey a mood of deep melancholy. Fennesz, for his part, counterbalances that mood with the eerie and detached electronic sounds he brings to bear on Sakamoto’s pieces. The result is a bit like listening to Debussy and Alva Noto simultaneously. Suggested uses: To accompany reading on a rainy day with a cat on your lap; looking through old high school yearbooks. Grade: A
With Ishq’s And Awake, we start getting into slightly (very slightly) more rhythmic territory, and also, interestingly, something that starts edging closer to the easy ambience and pseudo-mysticism of New Age music. The pictures of dervishes whirling on this album’s cover and inside artwork might lead you to expect music with a Middle Eastern flavor and of an explicitly mystical cast, but neither turns out to be the case; while there are touches of exotic percussion, much more prevalent are luscious washes of synthesizer chords, water sounds, and gently rocking chord changes (note in particular “Mizu,” which explicitly evokes Brian Eno’s early experiments in ambient music). Given that Ishq is a duo consisting of guitarist Matt Hillier and vocalist Jacqueline Kersley, it’s interesting that this album contains very little sonic material that comes recognizably from either a guitar or a voice. All of it, however, is sumptuously beautiful and should be welcomed both by fans of New Age music and by those for whom the New Age is anathema, but who have a taste for ambience. Suggested uses: Snuggling with a loved one; reading Persian love poetry; taking a nap. Grade: A
– Rick Anderson
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Videos
January 10, 2012
A Concert for New York. Conducted by Alan Gilbert. Accentus Music (20241), 2011. 112 minutes. $24.99.
This memorial concert given by the New York Philharmonic and the New York Choral Artists marked the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Organizers described the concert as a gift to the city, and had originally planned to use Central Park as the venue. Politics and logistics interfered, however, and the event was moved to the Philharmonic’s home, Avery Fisher Hall. Planning for the concert was so intense that then-executive director Zarin Mehta had decided to cancel the orchestra’s popular concerts in the parks over the summer. That move also saved the cash-strapped organization enough money to guarantee a continuation of the parks series into 2013.
This is a captivating and emotional performance of Mahler’s mammoth “Resurrection” Symphony, but not only for the invited first responders, survivors, and other dignitaries in the seats of Avery Fisher. A large screen and speakers set up on Lincoln Center Plaza broadcast the concert to a standing-room only crowd that filled the plaza and spilled onto adjacent walkways. The concert was also broadcast live on the radio. The 90-minute piece gives us the opportunity to watch director Alan Gilbert’s five o’clock shadow grow before our very eyes. Whether stately, furious, delicate, mysterious, or mad, Gilbert plays whatever character is required of him with confidence and grace. The ensembles, too, have lots of bite and lots of tenderness. The group manages to make the performance intensely personal, and by the end, I felt like a bonafide New Yorker. Recommended.
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado. Bel Air Classiques (BAC067), 2011. 138 minutes. $29.99.
This opera is one of several collaborations between Kurt Weill and German librettist Bertolt Brecht, and it never quite got the traction that their most highly-regarded work, Weill’s Threepenny Opera, has enjoyed around the globe. Weill based this political satire on greed, industrialization, and overindulgence in the late 1920s, and some of his points fit right in with today’s New Normal, Wall Street documentaries, and Occupy movements. The Teatro Real Madrid produced the show in English, and while the original translation is forty years old and is often performed, I found myself longing to hear Mahagonny in German. Catalan theater company La Fura dels Baus represents Mahagonny—a city where the only offense is to have no money—as a literal trash heap. Except for a couple of lengthy and haunting a cappella chorales, the orchestra plows through their discordant score almost mechanically, matching the vivid horror of the soulless actions and desolate surroundings on the stage. There are several other video recordings of Mahagonny available with more impressive casts, but the visual pull of this production is stunning, disturbing, and strong.
George London: Between Gods and Demons. A film by Marita Stocker. Arthaus Musik (101473), 2011. 155 minutes. $24.99.
American bass-baritone George London, a post-war giant of the stage, sang alongside Renata Tebaldi, Birgit Nilsson, and Maria Callas. He was the first non-Russian to sing Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi Theater, and the first American to sing the Dutchman in Bayreuth. In the video, testimonies to London’s innate talent and his work ethic are as numerous as comments about his strong vocal presence, musicianship, and his linguistic abilities. He also had his share of idiosyncrasies as a performer, as he insisted on doing his own makeup and finding the perfect wig when the one provided to him would just not do. Paralysis of the vocal cords ended London’s singing career tragically early, so in the second half of his career he focused on administration and teaching. “Every singer who has had an important career is duty-bound to pass on the artistry he has amassed,” London says in the video, in translation. The documentary shows a wealth of archival clips from productions of Otello, The Flying Dutchman, Faust, and Tosca, and there is extensive bonus footage of various opera scenes in costume, spirituals, musicals, lied, and a 1962 TV performance from the Festival of Performing Arts.
– Anne Shelley
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Web Sites
January 10, 2012Beating the Winter Blues with Count Basie
Now that the holidays are over and winter’s settling in, I often find myself seeking seasonal solace in swing music, particularly the music of William Allen “Count” Basie (1904-1984). One of jazz’s greatest bandleaders, who led one of the finest rhythm sections in the business, Basie started his career in 1935 and played for nearly half a century. This month’s column explores websites dedicated to Basie and his legacy.
For a comprehensive overview of Basie’s lengthy career, spend some time with the website ‘One More Once’: A Centennial Celebration of the Life and Music of Count Basie, compiled by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. A multi-faceted, award-winning website created in 2004 to celebrate the centennial of Basie’s birth, the Rutgers site contains biographical information, an appreciation by Albert Murray, a number of audio clips, a selected discography, and videos of live performances. The Rutgers site also contains a number of impressive photo essays from such notable jazz photographers as bassist/photographer Milt Hinton, as well as photos from the extensive collection of Frank Driggs.
Jazz critic Francis Davis wrote an excellent elegiac assessment of Count Basie’s musical impact after the Count’s death in 1984. Reprinted in The Atlantic Magazine’s online archives, Davis’s “The Loss of Count Basie” describes what made Basie’s band and sound so unique, especially in comparison to Duke Ellington’s band:
Ellington and Basie represented contrasting approaches to the jazz orchestra. For Ellington, the big band was a blank page, upon which he wrote the most enduring body of orchestral literature in jazz history. Basie functioned more as an editor, although his signature was just as plain. Even in the 1930s, when the Basie Orchestra was enjoying its first national triumph with its largely unnotated arrangements (the bulk of them credited to Basie), the leader’s piano was less pad and pencil than general-assignment desk, according to the testimony of his sidemen. “Basie would start out and vamp a little, set a tempo, and say ‘that’s it!’” the trombonist Dicky Wells remarked in his 1971 autobiography, Night People.
Wondering what albums to listen to first in Basie’s catalog? All About Jazz provides a succinct entry point to Basie’s extensive recording career . You can also wander over to the Internet Archive, which has a handful of Basie’s early 78rpm recordings available as streaming content or as downloadable audio files.
Basie’s band was typically known for its rock-steady rhythm section and its great soloists. Two websites highlight stars from each. Perhaps the best known of Basie’s sidemen was saxophonist Lester Young. NPR did a nice article on Young in 2009, and the audio file and transcript are available on the NPR website. Basie’s guitarist Freddie Green is memorialized on the website Freddie Green: Master of Rhythm Guitar. This expansive site includes a wealth of information about the guitarist, including biographical information, an extensive discography, photographs, a number of audio files, interviews, and links to the Freddie Green Papers at the University of South Carolina’s archives. For guitarists, there are dozens of transcriptions of Basie songs, lots of essays and lessons on his playing style, and tips on how to play and sound like Green. Very impressive.
– Gene Hyde
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