Category: MUSIC

About twenty five years ago during my study years, I had the opportunity to see Alfred Brendel in recital performing Beethoven. I had a vague understanding through recordings what I might hear, but I was not prepared for the possibility that I was going to be involved in a seance.  Among other pieces, Brendel performed a late Beethoven piano sonata.  It was during this piece he became simply transfixed and other worldly.  Several minutes into the central movement, a listener developed an annoying recurrent muffled cough in the hushed recital hall.  The sublimity of Brendel’s face on stage began to reveal a series of anguished contortions, as if he was being pulled from a deep dark place into blinding light.  After several moments, he stopped playing, to the astonishment of the audience, and turned to the horrified cougher with an intense expression, then said, he could not channel Beethoven and play it the way the master wanted, and the audience deserved, unless the dissonance from the audience stopped.

The coughing stopped, and the sublimity returned.

No one can play Beethoven like Alfred Brendel, and  the means to the answer was on the stage that night. Brendel plays Beethoven like a re-incarnated Beethoven, and it  may well be that he is capable of channeling the master composer’s spirit directly into his body and soul.  To hear Brendel in recital is likely the closest you will ever get to hearing Beethoven himself perform his works at the height of his prowess in Vienna in 1800.  Frankly, you probably will never know how Beethoven must sound until you hear Brendel perform Beethoven.  The perfect phrasing, the precise articulation, and the masterful but limited use of the pedal makes a Brendel interpretation of a Beethoven sonata not a performance but rather, a re-creation.

Alfred Brendel was born in 1933 in the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, born in the Czech Republic, moving to Croatia at an early age and eventually settling Graz, Austria.  He showed early musical talent,but the horror of WWII swept away any capacity for rigorous formal training.  It may well be that his self taught style in the absence of overbearing influence of piano teachers may well be the means by which Brendel has maintained the purity of the compositions in his performance.  Regardless of formal instruction, Brendel’s performance genius particularly for the classical masters of his homeland, Mozart, Schubert, and most specifically, Beethoven was evident in the years after the war and through his long career since until his performance retirement in 2008.

Interpreters of Beethoven are particularly cherished for their ability to remind every one of the unique olympian genius of Beethoven.  In the first half of the twentieth century, the ultimate interpreter was recognized to be Artur Schnabel, and there has been a need by music critics ever since to use Schnabel’s intense concentration on the Beethoven works as the standard by which to evaluate all others.  We have only the older recordings by which to judge Schnabel, but thanks to the wonders of YouTube, we have an extensive performance record of high fidelity by which to immerse ourselves in the wonders of a Brendel performance.

Two Beethoven creations of Brendel frame this performer’s mastery well.  The first is the most beautiful and elevating seven and a half minutes of music in the classical literature, Beethoven’s Adagio movement from his epic ‘Emperor’ Piano Concerto No.5. The second, Brendel’s recital performance of Beethoven Sonata No.32.  The concerto performance will make you cry a little as you feel Beethoven reaching for the essence of human beauty at a time of enveloping hearing loss, but the Sonata will leave you stunned, as you realize Brendel is reaching through time and space, and bringing Beethoven physically through his hands onto the piano, to the everlasting wonderment and joy, of us all…

Until the seventeenth century, light was accepted as a force of illumination, colorless and devoid of structure, the essential device by which God brought life from a formless void.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.  And God said Let there be Light. And there was Light. And God saw the light, that it was good. And God separated light from the darkness.                                                            Genesis 1:  1-4  

Then Isaac Newton came along, and revealed that colorless light was actually a complex spectrum of many colors, the beams made of heretofore unknown constituent particles that disassembled by the prism could be easily reassembled. The understanding of the world and its realities were forever changed.  With the microscope, the wonders of microscopic life, with the telescope, the celestial heavens comprised of so much more than the visible known.

This new understanding, that the miracle of nature and life was not for simple interpretation but for complex experience of the seen and the unseen, the heard and the sensed, inevitably established itself as a device by which the artist and musician , as interpreters of the two most visceral senses, expanded their creative forces to interact with man’s ultimate tool of expression, his imagination.

The 19th century was period of the most intense experimentation in these concepts, with the end of the century achieving the synthesis of this ideas in a merged artistic school known broadly as Impressionism.  The goal of the impressionists, whether in writing , art, or music was to achieve a projection of the essence of a subject, rather than a description of it.  Paintings fragmented or blended light, removed both clarity and shadows, brought an ethereal sense of place without specifically demanding accuracy from it. To look at the same haystack at three different times of day or two different seasons changed entirely the essence of it, and the feelings it emoted.  The power of this human impulse to interpret the natural world this way was most developed in France, linearly from Manet to Monet to Renoir to Van Gogh and beyond.

A parallel track was occurring in music, initiating with Berlioz and the Russian Five developing the telescopic power of the modern symphony through Wagner and his symbolic use of sound through motifs, but the back to France to join the painters and authors, through the most original stylings of a very unique genius, Claude Debussy.

Claude Debussy was born in the town of Saint Germaine in countryside near Paris in August 1862, just before Manet’s Luncheon in the Grass was revealed to Paris in an exhibition highlighting the first transitions from realism to something altogether more evocative.  Debussy’s family was driven from Paris by the crisis of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, and moved to Cannes, where his musical talents were discovered and allowed to flourish under a diverse set of colorful instructors, that appealed to his contrarian and bohemian genetics.  Artistic education for talented people propelled through France’s Academe, where the principles of classical art and music were rigorously enforced.  Debussy like all scoundrel talented youths from time immemorial had no patience for the judgements of accredited types, and sought his own muse almost immediately.  He was never a fan of the concept of Impressionism as it was then understood, but preferred the symbolic aspects devised by Wagner, while repelled by its bombastic Germanic expression.    He was drawn more to the world of the microscope than the telescope, relating to more intimate expressions and internalized emotions, consistent with other avant-garde composers like Satie.

Debussy reduced the experience of music to its essence, but he was not averse to beauty.  For him the natural world was so inherently beautiful that even discordant voices and cords could be, like the prism, used to emote a unified whole that was spiritual by his definition.  And beauty was for him the most primordial expression of the senses.  It flows like its own force from the tone poems of Images,Iberia,  and La Mer to the crystal glass intimacy of Clair du Lune, Reverie, and l’apres-midi d’un Faune.  The music soars and dives, roles and ripples, like light through leaves or wind through a screen.  It is tactile and physical, but does not exist in the conscious emotions of passions or anger.  This is  the serenity of the natural world on the floating mind, clouds between storms and waves driven by the eternal tides.  Expressing like JMW Turner, we are left to feel the boat on the ocean, or is it only a cloud, though it matters not because it is after all, the essence of the sea.

Debussy produced volumes of work that ushered in other great composers like Ravel, and contributed side by side with contemporaries like Stravinsky.  He unfortunately lived long enough to see the realities of the mechanized world destroy the intimacies of the old innocence with the brutal forces unleashed by World War I, another August anniversary of note.  The faintly discordant sonorities of Debussy were soon over taken by the cold  post industrial mathematical expressions of Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern.  The prismatic quality of Debussy was no longer capable of being reassembled as a unified expression linked by beauty.  The immense calamity of World War I and its effect on the psyches of both artist and audience alike saw to that.

But then, nobody is meditating to Schoenberg, or rocking their baby to sleep with Webern.  The innate stimulus of a special human place in the brain is Debussy’s gift to us, and like the prism, separates and re-assembles the world into a unified beautiful whole we long for in our daily lives, when the real world gets to be just a little too much.  Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the fateful declaration of war of Great Britain against Germany, exploding the conflict in the center of the continent into a world war, and changing the individual intimate world Debussy created for us forever.  The better memory will always be the gift of Debussy’s prisms of life.

And God said, let there be Light. And there was light.  And God saw the light,  that it was good.

The musical world of the 1920’s and 30’s  was taken with the influence of the bold American genre of jazz which seemed to capture the independent, self reliant and mildly undisciplined nature of the new world.  To sophisticates, however, the musical creations of American composers such as Morton and Gershwin were relegates of the music hall, not the decided seriousness of the concert hall.  American music held for them a decidedly superficial rhythm oriented character that fell short of the depth of conscience and emotion that were the province of the great European composers.  Of particular sensitivity was the concept of the middle movement of a classical piece, since Haydn’s classical construction a piece of contemplative and reflective interlude that elevated classical music from entertainment to a direct treatise on humanity itself.

The center movement was typically framed at a pace that projected at 55-65 beats per minute, or about a beat a second.  Not morbidly slow, but consistent with breathing or walking, to focus on the individual and inward direct nature of the movement.  The tempo was known as Adagio, and the great composers were noted for the Olympian heights their creativity carried this uniquely human tempo.  Wolfgang Mozart with his magnificent Adagios in the Piano Concertos No. 21 and 23, Ludwig Beethoven  with his heavenly Adagio in the Emperor Piano Concerto No.5 set the standard for the performer rising above the hushed mass of the orchestra to strike a very individual strain of beauty and contemplation.  The sound of something almost otherworldly projects from these masterpieces that always leads the listener to clear their mind, breathe slower, and consider a connection to the sublime.  The depth of soul required was felt to be confined to a European sophistication that projected from almost 2500 years of civilization.  Americans were juveniles to that tradition.

As in art, American composers were creating every bit as sophisticated a musical composition legacy as their European counterparts, but the credit was scant.  Composers such as Copland, Hanson, and Ives brought American inflections to classical compositional structure but fought for attention at the concert hall even in their own country. The American ear sought the traditional voice of the European composer as much as the European audience.

Samuel Barber (1910- 1981)  changed all that with a piece of music that connected to the soul every bit as much as the great composers, and using the sacred weapon of the Adagio. With his String Quartet Opus 11, composed at the age of 25 in 1935-6, Barber plugged deeply into the evocative tempo of the Adagio and created a composition that resonated at all levels, from the intimate sounds of the quartet to the intense layers of the orchestra.  Here was pathos, yearning, searching, and otherworldly in nine minutes of perfection.  Barber knew he had in his words a ‘knockout” of creation, and it didn’t take long for the serious performance world to agree with him as Barber created the Adagio for Strings for the concert hall.  Toscanini, who saw American music as casual and rarely performed it, recognized Barber’s masterpiece for what it was, a magisterial creation using the Adagio tempo, worthy of any European composer’s best work.

Barber, born in West Chester, Pennsylvania to a musical family, likely stands as the greatest American composer of the classical concert tradition, with his Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto and Second Symphony having a regular rotation in any international orchestra’s  armamentarium.   But the Adagio is his moment of genius, when he discovered the perfect language of humanity’s core that transcended all nationalities. Whether in Beijing or Berlin, Boston or Beirut, audiences are immediately transported to their inner depths of recognition of the soul and frail majesty that is human creation.  From the occasion of national crisis, state funeral, personal tragedy, or evoking of a simple human life, Barber’s Adagio brings everybody to the edge of intense emotions and to the verge of tears. Not for its sadness, but for its clarity of what is so human about all of us.

The Adagio for Strings has taken its place in the pantheon of great orchestrial Adagios, but I am emotionally struck but the simple beauty of Barber’s genius in the form of the quartet.  I am particularly moved by the organ like performance of the Amstel Quartet’s version below that goes through one’s chest like a great bellows, using an instrument I usually avoid for any introspective listen, the saxophone.  Barber by his death in 1981 achieved the recognition as a composer of stature, but the singular achievement of his Adagio, raised him to greatness.

     By 1874, Modest Mussorgsky was experiencing a decline all too common to the Russian story.  Once considered an icon of Russian musical compositional expression, the dual stresses of age pummeled by an all encompassing allegiance to alcohol (so vividly expressed in the ruborous proboscis highlighted in Repkin’s telling portrait of Mussorgsky) had brought progressive detachment and eventual separation from his governmental subsidy as a national composer, and the inevitable slide into obscurity.  Mussorgsky had once been secure as a member of the “Big Five”, along with Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, and Balakirev, a group of Russian composers who determined to express musically a Russian nationalist identity cloaked in Russian history linked to musical  impressionism and based on classic conservatory rules of composition. But genius is not always successfully muzzled by personal neglect, and 1874 produced a very special jewel of  Mussorgsky’s soaring creativity in the Piano suite, Pictures At An Exhibition that has outlasted many of his fellow compatriots compositions in the esteem of the musical public and the performers who bring it to life again and again.

Pictures At An Exhibition  was created by Mussorgsky as an inspired interpretation of his experiences viewing a St. Petersberg exhibition of paintings  by his friend, artist Viktor Hartmann, who had died suddenly from an aneurysm in 1873.  Both artist and composer were devout adherents to the concept of a Russian identity in art, and Hoffman’s death effected Mussorgsky deeply.  The musical concept came to Mussorgsky rapidly, the idea of a ‘promenade’ of musical motifs reflecting the viewer’s walk down a promenade of paintings, rising and falling in a perfect blending of colors and mood, as the viewer left one painting and came upon another.

The suite lent itself to a number of interpretations, but came to maximum fruition when it came upon another musical genius 50 years later, Maurice Ravel, who determined to bring his gifts of orchestral scoring to Mussorgsky’s masterpiece.   Ravel, a master of orchestral color, blew out the limitations of the piano to inflect nuances, shades, spectacle and ominous emotional power to each painting, with the orchestra becoming the vibrant color and expression of each scene and painting character.

Pictures At An Exhibition is as a result very much a work of art that allows musical artists to bring the elements of creation of art to the forefront, and our collective  awe as an audience to what music is capable of stimulating within our brains.  The best expression of this phenomena, is what is created when a genius composition is interpreted by a master colorist, and performed by a master conductor and orchestra at the height of their powers.  From the early 1970’s to Sir George Solti’s death in 1997, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was felt to be the world champion of musical virtuosity and blunt orchestral power, led by Solti’s intense and dazzling vision of what was meant by being known as the greatest assembled group in classical music.  A very special gift is available to us on the the internet that ties this all together, in a Chicago Symphony performance of Pictures in which the incredible preparation of the orchestra and Solti are lovingly reproduced, followed by the dazzling performance. Worth every second of viewing, it is the perfect vehicle into the artist’s mind, and the magnificent creative impulses that humans are capable of, in creating greatness for which we all are immeasurably benefited.

An eternal sign of the base value of the Christmas tome, the birth of Jesus, and the feelings it emotes, are the varied and universal efforts to reflect it in song and lyric through the ages.  From the direct expressions of the Christian hymnal such as Away, in the Manger to more obtuse, secular expressions, like White Christmas, the expressions of the zen of the moment, the family collected, the sense of peace and contentment, the rejection of conflict and the superficial, and the miracle of the Message, ring true through the centuries.  The uniqueness of Christianity through its story of origin, a moment of supreme peace and love, communicates a universal truth through all cultures.  No matter what our beliefs, we resonate with the feelings expressed by the one holiday celebrating ultimate goodness we are capable of as human.

The Great American Songbook has so many beautiful expressions of the intertwined beauty and sanctity of Christmas. As noted above, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas reflected his need to express an ideal hallmark image of Christmas through snow on treetops and sleigh bells – completely foreign to a Jewish songwriter living in Beverly Hills, California. Yet, an instantaneous solemnity pours over the listener when the simple cardboard images are linked to the perfect musical overlay.  Hugh Martin’s edgy classic, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, speaks to the need to find release from the pressures and chaos of a modern society to drive separation in the family, to try and capture the innocence and relief of the Christmas moment. ” Let your heart be light/ from now on/ our troubles will be out of sight” and “Faithful friends who are dear to us/ gather near to us, once more” suggest the obstacles we face are not permanent if we hold to our core strengths.  Hugh Regney’s 1962 beautiful tome, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” directly appeals to the Gospel’s good news of the birth as it resonates from the night wind to the lamb to the shepard boy and finally king, the good news universally understood by all, regardless of their position in creation, or in life.  Edward Pola in his 1963 hit for Andy Williams returned to the concept of gathering in “Its the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”  where “there’ll be much mistletoeing and heart’s will be glowing when loved one’s are near.”

All these wonderful songs, both classic and contemporary, bring to mind the innate need to return and celebrate the simple goodness of the Christmas story with loved ones.  Through the many years, I have cherished the event of Christmas, in the years where I have succeeded on getting home and those like this one where I have not, the songs and their crafted lyrics continue to bring meaning and good feeling.  The homecoming expressed by the nameless military family in the picture above, was precisely what Kim Gannon had in mind when he wrote his 1943 classic “I’ll be Home for Christmas” . The song was an instant success for Bing Crosby and has received many beautiful treatments over the years, but I like the stripped down version performed by  modern Canadian pop singer, Michael Buble’, who gets the yearning and the want just right.  To each of you who can be home, for those of us who can’t, and to the thousands of service men and women who are separated from their families by conflict and obligation and selflessly represent us all – a very heartfelt Christmas wish from Kim Gannon, Michael Buble’ – and myself.

The Tommy Dorsey Band was one of the epic forces in American popular music in the 1940’s setting a standard for sophisticated big band sound. Lush arrangements were highlighted by band singers that would accentuate the interaction between voice and instrument creating an American Sound that would dominate the era. Most famous of the singers propelling out of the Dorsey ensemble was the thin Italian kid from Hoboken, Frank Sinatra. His big talent soon proved too much for the multi-voice ensemble known as the Pied Pipers that provided the harmonies for the band, and he struck out on his own to eventual legendary solo status. The Pied Pipers however had another gem in the harmonic mix, and though not as well known as her male counterpart Sinatra, Jo Stafford had a terrific way with song lyrics and a voice that was effortless and perfect in pitch. The girls all wanted to meet Frank Sinatra, but the boys all wanted to marry beautiful Jo Stafford. Her voice was characterized by Johnny Mercer, the great songwriter, as honey smooth, and it was all that and more.

Jo Stafford grew up in California at a time when the state was truly the paradise of possibility.  A voice as sunny warm as the climate, she soon was recognized as the lead voice by her sisters that had formed one of the many family ensembles popular in the era. Jo liked the way her voice blend as a mid register clarity and soon became part of the Pied Pipers, initially a eight member group creating an orchestral sound.  Paul Weston, a member and arranger for Tommy Dorsey, heard the Pipers and offered to arrange for them, bring them into the sight line of the premier band leader of the day, Tommy Dorsey.  Dorsey struggled with the concept of such a big ensemble, finally convincing them to reduce to four voices with Stafford in the lead, and a new projection of the band was born.  Sinatra was the hired singer, and the Pied Pipers were accompaniment, but when Sinatra left, the talents of Stafford started to project, and she became a recognizable star in her own right.  In the video below, Stafford’s voice seamlessly blends with her male counterparts, but the honey smooth delivery sparkles like sun on morning dew:

As World War II drew to a close, Jo Stafford left the Pied Pipers and became a noted solo artist.  Understated and a balladeer, she was moderately successful economically but to the artists and song writers in the business, she was considered royalty. Extremely popular with the millions of soldiers created by the WWII cauldron for her tireless work in troop support, she held a special place in the hearts of servicemen and had a permanent place on their record players and her popularity grew and grew.  Both she and Sinatra became recording artists for Capitol records, where she had success, but when her now husband Weston moved her to Columbia Records she flourished in the 1950’s, becoming the first Columbia artist to sell 25 million records, epitomized by her 1957 number one hit, You Belong to Me:

Now a big star, Stafford had the universal recognition that led to both movie and TV opportunities, including her own TV show.  At the height of her popularity in the early sixties, she determined to retire and raise her family, and despite pressures by many in the industry, essentially kept her word.  Perhaps she saw the trends that music was taking away from melodious sound into the more jarring energy of the sixties.  The extended retirement is probably one of the reasons Stafford’s beautiful voice is time trapped in our memories as a big band singer, but she could evoke deep emotion and understood lyrics in the manner of the best interpreters of the American Songbook.  Jo Stafford died in 2008, as a snapshot of a time, but Johnny Mercer’s summation of Stafford’s talent as honey smooth remains definitive.  We finish with a period piece of music, the 19th century Shenandoah, made epically timeless by Jo Stafford’s beautiful way with great music.