Discovering Weinberg in Berlin

Recently I’ve had the absolute pleasure of discovering not only a piece of music that is new to me, but also a composer I never knew before. After sight reading Weinberg’s String Trio, op. 48 (1950), relishing the forte repeated downbows and teetering on melodies with 5 or 6 leger lines, I was blown away. “Who was this guy?,” I asked. The cellist said to me with a smile, “aren’t you a musicologist?” JZ, this post is for you :)

Mieczyslaw Weinberg or Moishei Vainberg (1919-1996) was born in Poland but lived most of his life in Moscow. We noted the affinity with Shostakovich and so has everyone else, it seems: he is widely recognized as a member of a Russian triumvirate of composers along with Prokofiev and Shostakovich. In fact, Shostakovich (13 years his senior) believed in Weinberg’s great musical talent and supported him as a mentor and close friend. Weinberg was a pianist and violinist; he composed 22 symphonies, 7 operas, and numerous works of chamber music, championed by the likes of Kogan, Gilels, and Rostropovich.

Gideon Klein, Weinberg’s exact contemporary and fellow Jew, also composed a String Trio (1944) just weeks before he perished at a concentration camp. Weinberg lost most of his family in the Holocaust. What a privilege it is for us to discover and to play this piece—in Berlin, of all places.

The Japanese Catastrophe: Musicians’ Responses

In the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in my country, I have been touched to see the responses of musicians from around the world. Here are some highlights:

· Daniel Harding went ahead with a performance of Mahler’s 5^th Symphony in Tokyo on March 11 for the 50 people in the audience who managed to trek there (and took a photo with the entire audience in the foyer)

· Paolo Alberghini dedicated the Stradivari Evenings concert on March 12 to all those who lost their lives and their families

· The NHK Orchestra proceeded with their tour of Canada with Andre Previn who initially refused to comment on the events in Japan but later decided to contribute part of his fee to the Red Cross Japanese Earthquake/Tsunami Relief Fund

· Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic dedicated their performance of Takemitsu's Requiem for String Orchestra on March 17 to the Japanese people; Esa-Pekka Salonen appeared on stage alongside Gilbert to appeal for donations

· My friend Kenji Tajima has organized a benefit concert at Gizzi's Café in NYC on April 9

P.S. In the midst of all the headlines, the sad news of Yakov Kreizberg’s premature death fell threw the cracks. He was the principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra where I had one of my first trials playing Violin I & II rank&file. I still remember the incredible spirit of this orchestra, going on tour to the Concertgebouw and playing at the Proms: Mozart’s Haffner Symphony and the Korngold Violin Concerto with Gil Shaham. Kreizberg’s passing is a loss to the entire global musical community.

New York Philharmonic (March 3, 2011)

For his debut with the New York Philharmonic, Daniel Harding conducted Mahler’s Fourth Symphony—as part of a cycle of Mahler symphonies in honor of the former director of the orchestra. I fell in love with the symphony as a teenager and have listened to many recordings so I know that, for instance, conductors see how much they dare to slow down on the first three notes of the violin melody at the beginning of the first movement: D-E---F#--------…. (just think Knappertsbusch).

Daniel’s interpretation was original and inspired. He sprinted through those notes, and every time the theme came back, it was almost a Boulezian modernist account of the score, just letting the music do its job without any added schmalz. The first movement was fast. The second movement was fast. The third movement, the emotional core of the symphony, thus became the large-scale structural downbeat after two upbeats: a kind of Wagnerian stollen-stollen-abgesang writ large. Out-Bernsteining Bernstein--what a brilliant decision, bringing added expansiveness and intensity to Mahler’s gorgeous melodies, grinding dissonances, and harmonic turns (and in ten years I’ve never heard the orchestra sound better than they did here). The finale still brought the expected deus-ex-machina but instead of being the moment of maximal gravitas, it brought lightness--a transcendence that floated into E-major brightness rather than pushing up to it as it does in so many accounts (and soprano Lisa Milne sang beautifully). I’ve always thought Daniel was immensely talented—now I think he might be a genius. And he’s still only in his mid-30s. I wonder if he likes Boston….

The symphony followed a clean, no-nonsense rendition of Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with Glenn Dicterow as soloist—what a great chance for Daniel to interact closely with the orchestra’s concertmaster—with a color palette encompassing capriccioso, scherzando, con passione, dolce and avvivando (the last an unusual marking on Szymanowski’s part). Dicterow played beautifully, if on the safe side, although his egolessness even in the long cadenza written by Pawel Kochánski (1887-1934), the concerto’s dedicatee and first performer, made me wonder if I mistook natural modesty for safety. Apparently Szymanowski believed that in collaborating with Kochánski for this concerto, he had created “a new style, a new mode of expression for the violin.” According to the program annotator James M. Keller, the composer wrote in a letter to the violinist’s wife in 1920:

All works by other composers related to this style (no matter how much creative genius they revealed) came later, that is through the direct influence of Myths and the [First] Concerto, or else through direct collaboration with Pawel.

I’m curious to learn what new violinistic possibility Szymanowski thought he’d discovered with Kochánski – it could be that Harding and Dicterow know already.

IL GIARDINO ARMONICO at Zankel Hall (February 24, 2011)

Il Giardino Armonico—“The Harmonic Garden”—offers a unique kind of musical experience. Because Baroque music has a strong harmonic structure but driving teleological narratives of tonality were a later development, Vivaldi played as if it were Brahms shows up a glaring anachronism. Play Vivaldi like Vivaldi--with oodles of flair and panache—and what you get is not the large-scale harmonic movement of Romanticism but little bursting moments of florid, lush, fragrant, harmonies. A false relation here, a fermata there, a run into a cadence—each gesture with its own color and smell, putting you firmly in the sensory now, without a care for when the ritornello will arrive in the dominant.

Founded in 1985, this all-male, all-Italian group offered Baroque music performance of unparalleled vitality and stylishness, flawless ensemble, and vibrant virtuosity. In a program of Castello, Merula, Legrenzi, and Galuppi, as well as Vivaldi, the seven musicians (2 violins, viola, cello, bass, lute, and harpsichord) showed just how fresh this music could sound. They all play Baroque style; they tune to a modern A; the leader ties his violin to his neck with a long scarf. The string-players breathe together and co-ordinate bow speed and bow pressure as if telepathically, using the upper half of the bow a lot more than one might expect; vibrato is used sparingly and to great effect, especially when slowed down to a wide wobble on long notes; the dynamics ranged from a barely audible ppp to fff, sometimes one right after the after; cadences were ornamented with improvised or semi-improvised fioritura by leader Enrico Onofri and lutist Luca Pianca. Merula’s Ciaccona ended with Pianca playing the ground bass pattern solo, diminuendo, and then quoting a blues break with a similar melodic contour. Laughter and applause began spontaneously in the audience. Oozing style, Il Giardino Armonico’s live renditions are as spotless as their recordings and, if anything, exceed them in directness and excitement.

They were joined by their director Giovanni Antonini as flute/flautino soloist in three Vivaldi concertos (RV 444, 441, and 443), almost a masterclass in concerto performance: pitch-perfect and dramatized with virtuoso pizzazz and gestural freedom throughout all the passagework, runs, and cantilena. It can’t be easy to reconcile this instrument with masculinity: that Antonini imbued his performance with virility does him credit in itself.