The Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced yesterday that Yo-Yo Ma will assume the Judson and Joyce Green creative consultant starting next season.
Here’s a list of stories on the story:
That makes Bernard Haitink principal conductor, Pierre Boulez conductor emeritus, Riccardo Muti music director designate and Yo-Yo Ma creative consultant designate. A more illustrious leadership team is hard to imagine.
The Chicago Symphony is playing Mahler’s Fourth Symphony this week, a work I always manage to both anticipate and dread. Maybe not “dread,” especially, so much as back away from. It’s a smaller symphony than those it’s bracketed by, the Third with its women’s and children’s choirs and eight French horns, the Fifth with its four brawny movements and the lovely Adagietto. The Fourth doesn’t have a tuba or even a trombone section in it, by contrast. It can kind of get overlooked, despite being a solid hour long on its own, and having a soprano feature at the end that manages to be both tidy and expansive.
What I like about the symphony, and what makes me look forward to it—and this may not appear to have all that much to do with the symphony itself—is that it reminds me of the first time I heard it live. I drove up to Chicago in 1999, treating myself to a birthday present of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with the CSO and conducted by Riccardo Chailly. The program also included Mahler’s orchestration of Bach’s Third Orchestra Suite: a two-fer. I met up with a couple of other friends who were visiting family that weekend, and we had a time of it afterwards, at Miller’s. I think I had to pull off the road and sleep at a rest station on I-65 for a little bit as I made the three-hour drive back to Indianapolis, having set out for the return trip around 11:30. It was one of the few times I heard Bud Herseth play before he retired in 2001.
But there’s a flip side here, naturally. In 2003, I was in Bloomington, Indiana, and coming down off a day of studying, and had the radio on. It was a broadcast of the Indianapolis Symphony playing Mahler’s Fourth, with Sylvia McNair as the soprano soloist. I think it was her; I’d gone to Indianapolis to hear the concert recently, and she was singing that weekend, at any rate.
This was the spring of 2003, which was the culmination of the long buildup to the Iraq War. Speeches were being made, troop levels discussed, presentations to the UN being given, everyone was talking about WMDs and whether Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 or if the Taliban was in Iraq, and it was all a muddle, basically, because as we now know, the information we did have was twisted beyond recognition and our leaders really wanted to go into Iraq.
So, March 20, 2003, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is on the radio, and I was probably reading a book with my cat resting on my lap, the way we spent many evenings during the week. The final movement began, and I don’t remember how far the ISO, conductor Jun Markl, and McNair got into it. McNair was singing that lovely poem, giving voice to a child rhapsodizing about the wonders of Heaven.
By the standards of the American middle-class, let’s say, it’s not much of a vision of
Heaven, though. The child is basically pleased to sing about a place where there is sufficient food, itemzing plenty of meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, and bread. Everyone there also dances a lot. This isn’t Heaven where every wish is fulfilled; this is Heaven where simple subsistence and having enough are true blessings.
McNair was singing about these things, of a child’s joy in a life where his needs were met, when the music went into a fade-out and the announcer came on. “We’ve just received word that bombs have begun to drop in Iraq,” he said. In my mind’s ear, it was profundo voice of George Walker intoning those words.
In the space of a couple seconds, then, we had gone from the joyous and naive poem about Heaven’s richness to word that we had just started a war. Leaving aside how that war has progressed since, it was nevertheless made vividly clear that the delight Mahler was composing and the cheerful victory he was broadcasting at that time was incomparably far from reality. Sadness and misery were going to be the lot in life for several thousand people, on both sides of the firing lines.
Mahler is famous, of course, for the irony in his music, the sense that however happy the music is now, melancholy or resignation is rarely a page or two away. But it’s usually in the music, and not from whatever is going on in our own lives that produces that tension. However you or I feel going into a concert is going to have some bearing on how we feel after it, but, usually, for two or three hours, we leave it up to the music to provide a channel for our emotions to go through. With Mahler’s Fourth, though, the piece can never really do that, because of the very non-musical memories I have bound up in it. That might not be the ideal way to approach the symphony, but it is a symphony I’ll never miss a chance to hear.
First in a series
When I was 12 going on 13, and newly in the sixth grade at Delta Middle School, I had an English teacher by the name of Eileen Wilcox. She had the distinction of teaching Honors English (did we call it Challenge English?), and was one of those irrationally exuberant people who stick out like Roman candles in the non-explosive Midwest. Unmarried (odd enough for a teacher in that area), she insisted on being called “Miss Wilcox;” had her hair teased out several inches from her head; and enjoyed showing up to teach a group of teenagers with horMONES raGING in leather mini-skirts. “If I had legs like hers, I’d wear leather mini-skirts, too,” another teacher told me, years later. Miss Wilcox was, I should point out, a few years north of 50.
Now, it wasn’t like any of us had pictures of Miss Wilcox in our locker doors. No one talked about her as if she was going to be on 90210 any day now, or could do a cameo on Saved by the Bell. Still, looking back on it, it seems odd, somehow, that a teacher would waltz into class wearing a skirt that pretty much any female under her gaze would’ve considered for a moment, and then decided against wearing because it was too slutty.
The leather skirts weren’t the only example of recherche behavior on Miss Wilcox’s part, only the most blatantly consistent. She had a close relationship with Mr. Kennedy, a math teacher – no one really knew how close – and Mr. Kennedy was an avid amateur photographer. (He was also a bit of a fading folkie, and brought his guitar to class one afternoon to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and other songs. Likewise unmarried, he died alone in his house several years ago, aged about 43. Another interesting character.) The two were never seen together acting anything other than professional, but middle school being middle school, and kids being underhanded and nefarious as they are, word got around. (And without texts or cell phones! omg!)
I still don’t know who found the contact sheet, or who managed to get it into school, but Miss Wilcox and Mr. Kennedy apparently thought it would be fun to do a little bit of “glamour” photography. This sheet, filled with pictures about 1″ X 1″, showed Miss Wilcox in a bikini. Not content to stop there, the ante was upped by having Miss Wilcox, in a bikini, drape herself across a convertible. I think it was a Corvette; the pictures were tiny. I don’t know whose Corvette it was, or what space had been commandeered for this “Woman of Delta Middle School” photo shoot. The pictures were small, but the nimbus of Miss Wilcox’s blonde-dyed hair could be viewed easily across a distance of several cornfields, and we therefore had no doubt as to who was in the pictures.
I don’t remember a single thing she taught me. The books we read in that class, the sentences we diagrammed before we grew tired of diagramming sentences, it’s a total blur. Maybe The Cay, that woefully simplistic, and, now that I think about it, maybe a little racist, story about a simple black man who sacrifices his life for a white boy? Could we have gone into Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea? It seems possible. Still, whatever knowledge this woman had about English literature and writing hasn’t been retained by me. Or, if it has, it’s been subsumed and rewritten by so many subsequent lessons as to be wholly incorporated.
I think Miss Wilcox remarried while I was in high school, took her new husband’s last name, and then moved away. Google her and nothing shows up, at least, and there’s no way I’m going Googling for those bikini-convertible pictures. She’s lucky, I think, that her devil-may-care attitude was on display when it was, and before 13-year olds came to school armed to the teeth with cell phones and digital cameras, before the school was hooked up to the Internet. Parents would’ve been appalled as soon as they saw that contact sheet, and if the more industrious among them thought to investigate Mikey’s cell phone, they would’ve found all sorts of surreptitiously shot pictures of leather mini-skirts. Miss Wilcox would’ve been hounded from her post for corrupting the morals of the nation’s youth, sent forth to find work where leather mini-skirts were more the norm than the exception. Which would’ve been sad, because unlike her dull counterparts, you really did pay attention to her as she taught. You just didn’t bother listening to her.
The Ring Cycle as Imagined by Felix Mendelssohn:
“My best thanks also for your last letter. Do you know, I think your suggestion as to the Nibelungen most luminous? It has been constantly in my head ever since, and I mean to employ my first leisure day in reading over the poem, for I have forgotten the details and can only recall the general colouring and outlines which seem to me gloriously dramatic. Will you kindly communicate to me your specific ideas on this subject? The poem is evidently more present to your memory than to mine. I scarcely remember what your allusion means as to the sinking into the Rhine. Can you point out to me the various passages which struck you as particularly dramatic when the idea first occurred to you ? and, above all, say something more definite on the subject, as the whole tone and colouring, and characteristics, take my fancy strongly; therefore I beg of you to do so, and soon, too; it will be an essential service to me. Refer entirely to the poem itself, for before your letter can I shall certainly have read it, though I shall not less eagerly expect your opinion Accept my for this happy thought as for all else.”—Felix Mendelssohn in letter to Fanny Hensel, 1840
And….we’re back. Team DecSimp moved from the South Side to the Near Northwest Side, ran the Chicago Marathon, and is now engaged in keeping a classical record label moving forward, because, much in the manner of a shark, if it isn’t moving forward, it is dead and the carcass is spending money for no good reason.
Riccardo Muti laid out The Plan (PDF) yesterday for when the new era commences next fall, with plans to bring music to juvenile offenders and at-risk youth, naming Mason Bates and Anna Clyne as the new CSO composers-in-residence, and creating the Sir Georg Solti Conducting Competition and Apprenticeship (SGGCCA). Fun trivia: Bates and Clyne’s combined age (61) is less than Muti’s (68).
How it will all shake out is going to be nothing less than interesting, and could very well end up as mind-blowing. Each of the new music directors who’ve taken up music directorships recently have singled out outreach as a key priority for their organizations. Alan Gilbert with the New York Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, and now Riccardo Muti in Chicago are aware that their organizations have a role to play in their communities that goes beyond concerts at the highest level and that something extra is needed.
How they’ll go about that task is going to stem directly from their own individual temperaments and how they go about solving problems, and the solutions they devise with the orchestras’ staffs will end up bearing their imprints as well as their own communities’. Heady stuff, and no one really knows what success is or how to define it (at least, I don’t), but the important thing is trying, and showing what this music means to us, and what it could mean to others. Four to five years from now, the combined efforts of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago (the three largest cities in the US, after all) could not only show ways to integrate the arts into the lives of young people from all backgrounds, but point a way for orchestras of all sizes to reach into their communities. Ways of approaching outside community leaders to get their buy-ins, the best way(s) to utilize staff, and other details could very well be ironed out in the coming seasons. The staffing question is key, says this staffer, since oftentimes the most important question is simply knowing who is to do what.
There’s never going to be a one-size-fits-all model; this country is too big and too diverse for that. But if some methods can be found and commonalities discovered from situations as diverse as New York, LA, and Chicago find themselves in today, there ought to be some applicability for others to learn from. readysetgo
Photo: Guido Harari
Danielle de Niese’s new Mozart album is out now, and received a big plug from the New York Times Magazine today, and therefore needs no further boost from me. But, it’s a splendid album of opera and concert arias, and you get to hear her with Bryn Terfel and the authoritative Sir Charles Mackerras and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. (Age of Enlightenment Orchestra? Enlightenment Orchestra? No, we need two prepositional clauses, surely.)
An added bonus are the liner notes by Chicago Opera Theater general director Brian Dickie, who brought de Niese to COT and Chicago in 2004 for Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, which she smoldered all the way through. I think the reason for the Harris Theater’s blackened interior is because she burned the paint off it. She’s since returned for Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2005 and then Handel’s Giulio Cesare at Lyric Opera, and will be back in the spring for Le nozze di Figaro. We knew here when…
I reviewed the Britten here, and previewed Lyric Opera’s Giulio Cesare with de Niese here and reviewed the DVD of the Glyndebourne Opera’s production here. There was also a preview of the production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, but Time Out Chicago’s servers seem to have swallowed it whole.
Photo: Decca – Lorenzo Aguis
Names exist, partially, to remove doubt. We put them on things to eliminate what they are not as much as to say what they are. “What is [this]?” “It is [that].” Names also create attachments between the person, or people, who did the naming and the thing that’s been named; if you find a stray animal, the last thing you should do if you have no intention of keeping it is to give it a name. A name is a tie that binds.
Once that attachment is in place, and we agree on what a thing is named, the name begins to settle in and take root, becoming nice and comfortable and part of the mental furniture and clutter that we carry around with us. But what happens when everyone doesn’t agree on the idea behind a name? What if I say that’s a comic book, and you say, no, it’s a graphic novel? More pointedly, what if we don’t agree on what to name a war?
Many skirmishes and upheavals take their names from the undeniable facts of their histories: The 30 Years War (its length), the Franco-Prussian War (the combatants), or the War of 1812 (when it was fought). But the wars that the US has fought and waged most recently take a different route, one that absolves much of the blame that could land on the US: They’re named after where they were fought, which ends up being about who we fought against.
The Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War—none of these says who the other side of the fighting was done by. The Gulf War at least fits some historical precedent by being named for where it was fought, and, to be fair, doesn’t name Iraq or the US. But I think that by taking the US out of the equation, our country is shrinking back into the shadows somewhat, even as we address these wars—in the media, in other nations’ media, and with our armed forces—on a daily basis. It’s as if we want to fight them (why else would we be there?), but would prefer that a quick reading of history not take note of our presence, thanks.
H.L. Mencken mocked the seeming cowardice of Americans in this direction in 1923, writing that we only ever entered wars we thought we could win. (Technically, Mencken was deriding the Anglo-Saxons, but we’ll extrapolate out to all of America for convenience’s sake.) The American empire was “built up by butchering and swindling unarmed savages, and after that by robbing weak and friendless nations.” And as we now know, the Powell doctrine suggests that the US will only enter into war with overwhelming force, and even when we entered Iraq in 2001, despite the suggestions that it would be a “cakewalk,” we embraced “shock and awe.”
Maybe the prerogative of naming is one that falls to the victor—much like writing the history. (Although, we have Niall Ferguson to remind us that the winner of a war is the one who ends up paying for it.) So, wouldn’t the gallant, honorable thing to do be to at least nod in the direction of admitting some blame? “The Iraq War”—doesn’t this sound somewhat as if Iraq is to blame for this war, and not actually the country that got invaded, without making any threatening gestures in our general direction?
This also holds for the War in Afghanistan. We aren’t fighting the government or army of Afghanistan; if anything, we’re helping to prop up their leader, Hamid Karzai. But “War in Afghanistan” seems so muted, somehow, so distant. “Did you hear about the War in Afghanistan?” “No, did you?”
I understand that both are part of the “Global War on Terror,” but there, too, exists a misnomer. “War on Terrorism” could’ve worked better, maybe even “World War on Terrorism” if we wanted to rope in our allies a little more firmly. I would’ve preferred “Terror War,” but that admittedly opens up all kinds of last-book-of-the-Bible-esque associations, which probably wouldn’t help when you’re fighting a group of people who do want to watch the world burn.
The names we put on conflicts matter. Southerners know this instinctively, or almost instinctively, having been raised being told that the Civil War was the War of Northern Aggression. I kind of like the honesty of that, frankly, as dishonorable as some of the South was during that time. Call it the Civil War, and all of a sudden everyone’s on equal footing, showing an equal willingness to fight. But if was the Northerners who sailed and marched down there to fight, and not the Southerners storming the great factories above the Mason-Dixon line who tried to lay waste to, say, Watervliet, New York.
What to call these events will always be ambiguous, given the sensitivities and points of view involved. Everything can’t always be a World War. Rivalries stretching back centuries make the task difficult and muddy up what could be reasonably clear waters—or maybe even make them easier; after all, everyone knows who the Hatfields hated. But when there are two parties, and one of them happens to be one of the world’s superpowers, is it asking too much to drop their name into the title?
Nominally part of the Back the Bid program for Chicago 2016, the Chicago Symphony’s offer of three free downloads also makes for a thoughtful 9/11 memorial. From this page, you can download recordings of the CSO playing The Star-Spangled Banner and Stars & Stripes Forever, as well as the Olympic Anthem. The first two are led by Sir Georg Solti and pack a mighty, terrorist-and-Nazi-and-Commie-defying wallop; the third is from concerts led by Leonard Slatkin.
The downloads will only be up through Sunday, so act now. And for those who care about such things, they’re at a high-quality 320kbps bit rate.
“The Deeds campaign sent out a fundraising appeal with the thesis as its main focus. The state Democratic Party produced a video, “Bob McDonnell’s Secret Blueprint for Virginia,” setting a news report about the document to driving, apocalyptic classical music.”—Amy Gardner, Rosalind S. Helderman and Anita Kumar, writing about Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell’s graduate-school thesis. The thesis criticized working women, homosexuals and “fornicators.”
Awesome! Yes! You’re the Virginia Democratic Party, you’ve just been given the gift of a Republican who told his academic advisors that women shouldn’t work outside the home and that the gays are all sorts of problems, and what music do you pick to frame this? The last movement of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony (the so-called “Apocalypse”)? Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony (at 2:45)? Ride of the Valkyries? Or do you go with something more in the mixture-of-Gustav Holst-Bernard Hermann-minor-key-John Williams mode?
Yeah, I think we all know the answer to that, especially when you have all of 1:30 to make your point. Bring on the snare-drummed 16th notes and thudding chords!! The horror!
Photo: Christina Burton, courtesy The Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc.
Leonard Bernstein would have been 91 today, and while there were many celebrations last year, this year DecSimp is starting a bandwagon of one, and gives you the Bernstein-honoring Playlist for the 91st birthday.
Bach Magnificat in D Major Schola Cantorum, New York Philharmonic (Sony Classical). This is one of the great pre-historically informed-practice recordings, with soloists (including soprano Jennie Tourel) and chorus whose vibrato really doesn’t vibrate so much as shake violently, and a big ol’ symphony orchestra with strings with long, silken bow strokes.
Bach Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D minor Glenn Gould, piano; Columbia Symphony Orchestra (Sony Classical). Counterpoint becomes armed warfare when the strings are under Bernstein’s command and the piano is under Gould’s in this aggressive, bracing performance.
Copland Quiet City / Symphony No. 3 Thomas Stacy, English horn; Philip Smith, trumpet; New York Philharmonic (DGG). Two impossibly clean takes on two American classics. Stacy and Smith are tops.
Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue / An American in Paris – Ferde Grofé Grand Canyon Suite Bernstein, piano; New York Philharmonic and Columbia Symphony Orchestra (Sony Classical). For sheer fun, Bernstein’s never been beaten in Rhapsody in Blue. I’m pretty sure I paid more than the $7.99 Amazon lists it for, too.
Mahler Symphony No. 5 New York Philharmonic (Sony Classical). Notable for being the first classical CD I ever bought.
Bach Violin Concertos 1 & 2 Isaac Stern, violin; New York Philharmonic (Sony Classical). More Bach in the grand style, and what a style it was.