There have been several studies recently on the affect of music on the psyche, particularly in regard to warding off depression or chasing away the blues. (Depression is of course much worse than “the blues” and music’s healing powers go back to scripture). Close to home, exceptional work on this has been done by OSU’s own David Huron, including his latest book, Sweet Anticipation (MIT Press) of which more anon.
I asked people what music they use to cheer themselves up. This writer included votes for pizza and chocolate (looking at me, you’d think I was chronically depressed-not so) and here are some responses. It ain’t zoloft and it ain’t food, except for the soul.
Christopher: Monteverdi Vespro della beate virgine (1610)
Linda: Anything by John Rutter (healing), and Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations (inspiring)…and lots by Rachmaninoff, Mozart Gershwin and Sondheim…and even some McCartney!
Rutter: Praise Ye the Lord (Turtle Creek Chorale/Timothy Seelig)
R. Schumann: Carnaval: Pierrot, Arlequin (Evgeny Kissin)
Akira: Zerbinetta’s aria from R. Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos in the original version sung by Edita Gruberova
Gerald: Some good piano and violin concertos. Also Beethoven and Brahms symphonies
Christine: Beethoven piano concertos…Bach…Oh, and I like the way Dawn Upshaw sings Gorecki
Gorecki: Symphony 3 I. exc. (Dawn Upshaw, London Sinf/Zinman)
Betsy: Bach’s b minor mass, for starters
William: Birgit Nilsson’s Songs of Scandanavia album
Debra: Chris, I know you think I’d rather go shopping at Saks to chase away my blues, but I’d rather play Chopin!
Jeff: The opening movement of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony; From the trio to the end of Der Rosenkavalier; and Dame Joan Sutherland singing My Hero from The Chocolate Soldier
Prokofiev: Symphony 1 “Classical” I. Allegro (Montreal Sym/Dutoit)
Tim: Strauss-Feierlicher Einzug…What a Feeling from Footloose
Amy: For me, it’s still that (presumably hot) record album I bought at Blakey’s circa 1970, Taj Mahal’s Giant Step/De Ole Folks at Home…from the world of bel canto, it’s Monterrat Caballe’s Casta Diva
Bellini: Norma-Casta diva(Montserrat Caballe)
Jay: Gilbert and Sullivan
G&S: HMS Pinafore, Never mind the why and wherefore (Jean Hindmarsh, John Reed, Jeffrey Skitch; D’Oyly Carte Opera Co./Nash)
Jeanne: A good dose of Vivaldi, just about anything usually helps; also a California guitarist Nocy. Am listening also to an Icelandic guy named Jonsi, weird and kinda wonderful! And I just woke up to the fact one of the arrangers on the Jonsi CD is Nico Muhly!
Christopher: Brahms Haydn Variaitons
Brahms: Haydn Variations I. St. Antoni Chorale (Cincinatti Sym/Lopez-Cobos)
Christopher: (again, but it’s my show, what the hell) R. Strauss Der Rosenkavalier, opening of Act II
Let’s keep updating this so let us know what works for you!
–Christopher Purdy
PS
Because I can’t bear to leave off Der Rosenkavalier, here is the exquisite Presentation of the Rose scene from ActII. Enjoy.
Renee Fleming fills concert halls wherever she goes. She is one of those musicians whose reputation and name recognition extends far beyond the opera world where her reputation was established.
But just as professional golfers change their swing and pitchers learn new pitches, Renee Fleming is completely altering how she sings…forgetting everything she was taught…grabbing a hand mike and fronting a band.
WHAT?
Before you panic, Fleming is doing what others before her have done…she has begun to explore music beyond her comfort zone on her recording Dark Hope. Think Yo Yo Ma learning to improvise with Bobby McFerrin or Pavarotti singing with numerous singers from pop and jazz.
Her two teenage daughters have offered guidance and constructive criticism, lest they be embarrassed by Mom. She must have met their standards, because they appear in the video Endlessly, along with Renee’s sister Rachelle.
She spoke recently with Anthony Mason of CBS about stepping into a different musical world. –Boyce Lancaster
Music that tastes good and is good for you! It’s that time of summer when gardens are in full bloom and vegetables are everywhere, even on stage in concert halls! I saw a video that gives a whole new meaning to the expression “playing with your food.”
The music by the Vegetable Orchestra may not be to everyone’s taste, but the musicians’ zeal with zucchinis and percussive pumpkins can be edifying in a musicologically gastronomical sort of way. While its not uplifting music in the manner of Bach, Mozart or Scarlatti, or may not inspire you to heights of poetic fancy, its down-to-earth substantiality may make you want to have a salad.
No, I’m not advocating setting your Steinway ablaze. Rather, I’m cautioning you against inviting Tony Monaco to play any keyboard in your home…piano, midi, or especially a Hammond B-3, if you have one sitting around. Once his fingers hit the keys, anything flammable is in immediate danger.
A Columbus, Ohio native, Tony can be heard regularly around town preaching the gospel of jazz. Though he spent many years in the restaurant and food service business, (yes THAT Monaco’s Palace), his first love was music. Eventually, the call of jazz became too loud to ignore.
It was a midnight call that then 13-year-old Tony received from Jimmy Smith, already a jazz legend himself, that really caused Tony’s “jazz-gene” to fire.
Jimmy Smith
Tony had sent some recordings of himself to Smith’s California jazz club, prompting the call. Apparently, Jimmy heard something in Tony’s playing that he just had to encourage.
Labor Day weekend will find Tony Monaco at the Vail Jazz Festival in Colorado, supporting the next generation of jazz players and lovers through the Vail Jazz Foundation. If you see his name on a marquee, drop what you’re doing and go inside…just make sure to take a fire extinguisher. — Boyce Lancaster
WOSU's classical music staff: Jennifer Hambrick, Beverley Ervine, John Rittmeyer, Christopher Purdy and Boyce Lancaster
What do you do when you’re blue? Maybe you curl up with a good book. Maybe you take a bubble bath. Or maybe you put on some music, sit down in your old overstuffed easy chair and just let the good sounds wash over you.
If you do find yourself occasionally seeking musical solace, what tunes do you reach for most? Do you brood with Beethoven, or cry with Corelli? Do you lament with Liszt, grieve with Grieg, or wail with Wagner? (I know that last example was a stretch. Just go with it.)
I asked my colleagues on WOSU’s classical music staff all of these questions (minus the alliteration) recently, and they were generous enough to let me record their responses. Truthfully, I made things a bit difficult for my co-workers in asking them to tell us about only the top three pieces of music that would see them through their dark days. They all looked at me like I had three heads. In fact, Boyce Lancaster full-out heckled me about this - on tape, I might add - right at the beginning of our conversation:
So I share the results of our recent chatfest with you here. Our selections were rather wide ranging, encompassing some works you might well imagine on a “dark days” list and others that might surprise you. And some of our lists included not just classical music, but also music in other genres.
But mainly our chatfest revealed bits and pieces about who each of us really is. I now suspect Boyce Lancaster has tasted tomato martinis, and I now know that Virginia hill music is in Beverley Ervine’s blood and that John Rittmeyer sees Boyce’s Beethoven’s Fifth and raises him a Ninth. About me? Well, my zucchini plants make an appearance in our conversation (yes, there is a musical connection) and, in a WOSU exclusive, I tell all about my Brandenburg Concerto obsession. So listen, enjoy and write in about the pieces and recordings you listen to on your dark days!
I’ll tell you, youtube is a great invention. Here’s a clip the original of which I well remember seeing live on the Ed Sullivan show in April of 1970. A few days after the broadcast these two ladies sang Norma in Boston on the Metropolitan Opera tour. (April 22, 1970–I looked it up). It was in the not lamented John B. Hynes Civic Auditorium on Boylston Street, where the boat show would load out on Sunday night and the Met would open on Monday. I have never forgotten this Ed Sullivan show performance, nor the live event in Boston a few days later. The cheap seats were five dollars! A fortune in 1970 for a thirteen year old.
I had written Joan Sutherland (not yet Dame Joan) a fan letter. I told her I was coming to the Boston performance and asked if I could come backstage and meet her. Back came a letter from a secretary (named Mrs. Trench!) saying yes! Came the great night I heard the performance and made my way to her dressing room. No security except one sleepy cop who I’m sure wished he was at a Bruins game. The door opened and there she was. I wasn’t an especially tall kid but she was a big lady. I came chest high to her. She was lovely and gracious and kind and patient. And she wore a low cut dress and I never heard word she said to me because all I could think was “I am looking right at Joan Sutherland’s boobs and they are humongous.” (Was that a word in 1970? )
It was a great night and I bless her for it forty years later. This wonderful clip brought back lovely memories and remains impeccable music making. Enjoy.
Do you know the Ginger or Mary Ann game? It’s the game in which pubescent and adolescent boys try to discern their preference between the Gilligan’s Island characters Ginger, the sex pot movie star, and the naïve, corn-fed all-American beauty Mary Ann. In a way, the game raises the whole Madonna/whore question: which gives greater pleasure - glamor, beauty and (forgive me) generosity, or goodness, simplicity and continence?
Without selling too much of our souls to Sigmund Freud, we can explore the same terrain among classical music genres, specifically opera and the song cycle. Opera is like Ginger. It’s glitzy, over the top, exciting, glamorous, dangerous, larger than life and - sometimes literally - full figured. The song cycle, on the other hand, is more like Mary Ann, slender in performing forces, unobtrusively ladylike and beautiful in its subtlety of expression. In opera big, fat scenes replete with choruses, orchestras and egos burst on stage in hours of brazen emotional corpulence. But the song cycle, a modest, sylph-like happening for voice and piano, saves itself for the sacralized intimacy of the salon or recital hall.
So for a moment, imagine that Ginger is from Las Vegas and Mary Ann is from Mayberry. What would happen if our girl Ginger visited Mayberry? Would her womanly abundance overwhelm the wholesome mythical town, or would her electric presence generate just enough seismic activity to expose the flesh beneath Mayberry’s cassocks?
As unlikely as it may seem, the two most recent recordings of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin raise, for me at least, these questions. In my post on the earlier of these recordings, I wrote of being intrigued by tenor Jonas Kaufmann’s dynamic performance. On first hearing, I found Kaufmann’s Wagnerian voice too big and worldly wise to portray the cycle’s naïve and lovesick protagonist. But ultimately, how Kaufmann used his protean voice to convey the vissicitudes of his character’s emotional landscape won me over. Kaufmann creates a different sound for each of our protagonist’s nerve endings; we therefore feel each twist or turn in the mill hand’s emotional journey, much the same way an opera bares to all the senses the events of its characters’ pained inner lives.
A more recent new recording of Die schöne Müllerinhas caused me to reflect on the nature of the song cycle and what listeners can reasonably desire in performances of the genre. The new recording is that of tenor Mark Padmore and pianist Paul Lewis, a formidable pair about whom I rhapsodized in my post on their recording of Schubert’s Winterreise. As one might expect of such great talents, Padmore and Lewis simply lay it down in Die schöne Müllerin. And given the nature of Padmore’s voice - light and youthful-sounding enough to be a convincing emobdiment of our unstable protagonist - the song cycle should rightfully be Padmore’s domain. His classic lieder voice neither caricatures the emotional depths of the song texts, nor imposes upon the ear and psyche of the listener. Perhaps needless to say, Paul Lewis’ playing is beautifully sculpted at all times. So Padmore and Lewis begin their Müllerin project with raw materials one could imagine special ordering for the job. Those raw materials allowed them to render an interpretation of the cycle that falls squarely in line with traditional art song performance, in which songs are treated more like little pearls to be shaped, polished and displayed at rest around an alabaster neck, and less like the linkage of intense and tiny dramas their texts betray.
When it comes to singing art song cycles, giving satisfying shape and dimension to a cycle’s overarching dramatic narrative is the ultimate interpretive challenge. In Müllerin, in which over the course of twenty songs the protagonist reveals bit by bit his obsession with the cycle’s title character, it is the performers’ specific job to take us on what the song texts tell us is a wild ride, a trip through the craggy inner landscapeof our unstable portagonist, from the highest mountain of elation to the ultimate depths of despair. If the performers have done their jobs, then we feel the protagonist’s joy in infatuation, his hope for reciprocation, his longing for his beloved’s attention, his jealous desire to guard her (as though she ever really were “his”) against the threat of an interloper; we understand why he imagines and truly believes the miller-maid has given him flowers; we sink with him into despair when he realizes she will never love him; we at once lament that the brook sings him to eternal sleep and rejoice that our mill hand has found repose from his fruitless striving. If at the end of all that we do not feel just a wee bit wrung out, we must ask why.
So as perfect as Padmore’s voice is for lieder and as perfectly matched in musical temperament as Padmore and Lewis seem to be, I had to ask why I still prefer the Wagnerian Kaufmann’s interpretation of Die schöne Müllerin. To be sure, I’m working with an embarrassment of riches, as miraculous as both recordings are. Padmore and Lewis’ aristocratic tastes for this repertory have yielded a recording of Müllerin that does everything right; on the other hand, in recording Die schöne Müllerin, Kaufmann has left the Vegas-like world of opera and moved to Mayberry and, conversely, taken the song cycle out of the salon and into the opera house. In other words, Ginger came to Mayberry, and sparks flew in spectacular ways. Let’s take a listen to some passages from both recordings.
We’ll start with the fifith song in the cycle, Am Feierabend. At the close of the workday,our anti-hero wishes he could impress the miller-maid with feats of superhuman strength. Alas, he cannot, and we imagine it is a barely post-adolescent scrawniness that keeps him from being singled out for her special attention among his mates. Padmore portrays the mill hand in all his inescapable youth:
But the character here yearns to be older, more masculine and more accomplished than he actually is. Kaufmann’s heavier voice gains us access to this level of interpretation, a wish our protagonist dare not put in words:
A few songs later, we come to Morgengruβ, in which our mill hand sings a morning “serenade” beneath his beloved’s window. It takes either a healthy ego or abject cluelessness for a man to try to win a woman over by waking her up with his singing. Padmore accesses the protagonist’s naïveté with his light, clear voice, but across all four strophes there’s only subtle variaton in vocal timbre and text declamation:
Kaufmann’s recording, on the other hand, suggests Schubert’s mill hand is second cousins with Wagner’s naïvely fearless Siegfried. His reading of the song’s text enables us to feel the protagonist’s struggle in connecting with the miller-maid: he bursts forth in song in the first strophe, lightens his voice as he uses a pet name (”little blonde head”) to lure her to the window, (in the musical example below) all but whispers in remarking on the miller-maid’s sleep-heavy eyes and again calls for her to “shake off the bloom of dreams,” greet the day and accept his love:
Later, we come to Mein!, a happy-sounding ditty, but possibly the most pathetic song in the cycle. The mill hand thinks he’s captured the miller-maid’s heart, and he sings his unbridled joy to the brook, the birds, the spring flowers and the mighty sun itself. The song is beautiful and elegant in Padmore’s hands:
But in Kaufmann’s interpretation, the protagonist can barely contain the nervous energy of new (what he thinks is) true love:
The penny drops for our poor mill hand in Die liebe Farbe, where all hope that the miller-maid might love him fades away. He now understands the color green - the color of springtime newness and new love - as the color of death, which he now seeks. He’s now just like the hunter who, we are to believe, stole his beloved, only our protagonist hunts not fierce creatures but the passivity of death. Padmore’s work is, again, beautiful in a traditional way. His voice accesses the anti-hero’s fragility:
But Kaufmann allows us to feel the confusion the mill hand feels as he reinterprets past desires in the face of dejection.Here Kaufmann’s voice puts on a strong face but, on a dime, turns dark and reflective:
Of course, it all comes down to personal preference and, in the case of such phenomenal artistry, hair-splitting - both recordings have made already history because they’re so darn good. One could argue that Padmore and Lewis’ Die schöne Müllerin does all the right things. One could also argue that Kaufmann’s recording is outside the box (and a bit brazenly so) because the tenor’svoice is better suited for opera than lieder. On both counts, one would be right. But Kaufmann’s Wagnerian voice reveals to us all the fluctuations of our protagonist’s heart, which, in my book, pretty much equals a successful interpretation of the cycle’s dramatic texts. So, Ginger or Mary Ann? There will always be a venerable place in the world for Mary Ann’s orthodoxy, but, I am told, Ginger makes the heart beat faster.
Leonard Bernstein loved to dance. Whether or not he COULD dance, I don’t know, but dance he did, night after night in front of orchestras the world over. His conducting style became known by many as the “Lenny dance.” One never knew where he might wind up with a big finish.
One of his mentors, Fritz Reiner, was Bernstein’s polar opposite. He used an economy of motion and eye contact that could communicate volumes to the musicians.
His eyes could also burn a hole in you if you missed an entrance. (I trust he wouldn’t go as far as this guy.)
That was an April Fools joke played on his students, but I’m certain there are times conductors would have loved to do that very thing!
Cathy Berberian could sing anything. And did. She was born in North
Cathy Berberian (1925-1983)
Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1925. By 1950 she was a Fulbright Scholar in Italy and had married composer Luciano Berio. She became Europe’s leading exponent of new vocal music Her curiosity about music all music, seemed to be insatiable. As a child she had studied Armenian folk music and dance. Her career and her life in music were all about variety.
It’s hard to categorize Cathy Berberian. I suspect that was her intent. She had a lovely mezzo soprano voice, but in the era of Callas and Tebaldi it was not a voice to stand out on its own. Berberianwas perfectly capable in Bach and Mozart. Her Montevedi was sublime. Listen to the simple beauty of tone mixed with drama in the great Lamento d’Arianna, which she recorded with Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Berberian was a chamber music and an actress. She was a personality who sang. Her voice lacked the amplitude to ride over a large operatic orchestra, but as a recitalist. a chamber musician, a saloniste she had no peers. Her collaboration with Berio was fantastic and survived their 1964 divorce. Berberian was his muse, for a time his wife and the mother of his daughter Cristina. On stages and in studios throughout the world Cathy Berberian was a lot more than a composer’s wife. She recorded Monteverdi operas and Bach cantatas. She wrote her own theater pieces. Stripsody uses onomatopoeia and reflects her love of comic books. Her recital programs embraced Purcell, Stravinsky, Villa-Lobos, you name it. (Elegy for JFK was written for her). She loved spectacle, costumes, jewelry and all things theatrical. Here she is with a fearless performance of Xango by Villa-Lobos
Cathy Berberian died suddenly of a massive heart attack in her hotel room in Rome in 1983. She was preparing for a concert honoring the memory of Karl Marx! (How’s that for variety!) For twenty years in Europe as vocalists go there was Cathy Berberian and there was everybody else. Her artistic heirs would be Massillon Ohio’s Jan di Gaetani who was a close contemporary (1933-1989) and today, Dawn Upshaw. But really there was nobody like Cathy Berberian.
If you’d like to know more, here’s part of a documentary called Music is the Air I Breathe. This clip features interviews with Berio, Harnoncourt, the Swiss tenor Eric Tappy, Cathy’s daughter Cristina, and the lady herself
The Ninth Symphony of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was expected the be a big celebratory piece with a large orchestra, soloists, and chorus, a hymn to victory at the end of the Second World War. When it was premiered in November of 1945, what the audience got was something else. Instead of the ode to the triumph of the Soviet army over Nazi Germany, full of patriotic fervor, they heard a light-hearted piece with wit and perhaps, irony.
Shostakovich had written two wartime symphonies earlier, the bombastic Seventh Symphony, “Leningrad” from 1941, the real “victory” symphony, since it portrays a positive outcome for the Soviet Union, and the utterly devastating Eighth Symphony from 1943, which is an unvarnished expression of the horrors of war. The Ninth (just consider the symbolic resonance of that number with Beethoven) was going to be the completion of a “War Trilogy,” but no one expected this, a Haydnesque musical romp. Was it expressing relief that the war was finally over, or was it a direct snub aimed at Joseph Stalin?
Shostakovich had been in trouble before with the Soviet censors, and would be again. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, had earned him official condemnation in 1936 for its “modernist tendancies,” and it was his popular Symphony No. 5 the following year that returned him to favor. It is thought Joseph Stalin himself was involved in that censure. Not toeing the ideological party line was very dangerous in those times. People would disappear in the middle of the night.
The Ninth Symphony was initially received warmly enough by many, even if some were puzzled by its “non serious” nature. But in a second pogrom against creativity in 1948 led by Andrey Zhdanov, the composer was again in the hot seat. Shostakovich survived this as well, and it’s said that the second movement of the Tenth Symphony, which was first performed after Stalin’s death, is a musical portrait of the dictator. Its a brutal scherzo, music of a wild and crazed nature.
It’s up to the listener to decide if the Ninth Symphony is a satirical piece or a serious ending for a “War Trilogy.” This evening on Symphony at 7, you can hear a complete performance of this work, but here is a sample with Sir Georg Solti conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony:
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And for good measure, here is the scherzo from the Tenth Symphony performed by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel:
psyche, particularly in regard to warding off depression or chasing away the blues. (Depression is of course much worse than “the blues” and music’s healing powers go back to scripture). Close to home, exceptional work on this has been done by OSU’s own David Huron, including his latest book, Sweet Anticipation (MIT Press) of which more anon.
Blakey’s circa 1970, Taj Mahal’s Giant Step/De Ole Folks at Home…from the world of bel canto, it’s Monterrat Caballe’s Casta Diva
Renee Fleming fills concert halls wherever she goes. She is one of those musicians whose reputation and name recognition extends far beyond the opera world where her reputation was established.
Do you know the Ginger or Mary Ann game? It’s the game in which pubescent and adolescent boys try to discern their preference between the Gilligan’s Island characters Ginger, the sex pot movie star, and the naïve, corn-fed all-American beauty Mary Ann. In a way, the game raises the whole Madonna/whore question: which gives greater pleasure - glamor, beauty and (forgive me) generosity, or goodness, simplicity and continence?