Jonas Kaufmann

I've been wanting to hear Jonas Kaufmann for ages. His recordings of Schubert Lieder and Carmen, arias with Abbado, etc. had piqued my interest. Tonight he sang at the Berlin Philharmonie with the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Staatsopernchor: Liszt's »Der 13. Psalm«
für Tenor, Chor und Orchester. I was way up in the nose-bleeds but even there I could hear 2 things. A magnificent voice, even more thrilling live than in recordings (just as I'd hoped). And a terrible piece! Wow, was Liszt hit/miss as a composer or what?

But back to the voice: it is rich. It penetrates. It carries. It has colors. All of this I had expected, and I was not disappointed. But the overriding impression I was left with was that Kaufmann's voice is an instrument and behind it is an intelligent musician. High praise for, like, a singer!

He got 5 curtain calls. It was clear the audience (a full house) had shown up especially to see him. I'll bet Kaufmann was glad to leave a Berlin stage without injury (this summer at the Waldbühne he was bitten by Anna Netrebko after an impassioned duet).

Janine Wildhage & Christophe Landon Rare Violins Exhibition

Janine Wildhage and Christophe Landon have a violin workshop in Berlin Mitte where they make violins and sell old Italian instruments. At last night's "Einweihungsfeier und Ausstellung," they threw a party to inaugurate their new exhibition of beautiful violins, old and new. Armenian virtuoso Mikhail Simonyan showed off his Landon Guarneri copy with a performance of "Armenian Prayer" and Ysaye No. 3. It had a gorgeous sound and a vast range of colors, which Simonyan brought out with a bow so spongy it could have been a bass bow. Having played another of Landon's Guarneri copies the day after he finished it back in New York, I could hear that Simonyan's years-long relationship with his had deepened and ripened its sound. His playing was confident and polished with lots of nice interpretive details and an unusual degree of bow control at the point.

After a few glasses of wine some of the people gathered started to pick violins up off the tables and play a few bars of Bach or Tchaikovsky. There were members of the Berlin Philharmonic there -- earlier in the day they had rehearsed with Nikolaj Znaider, who had, coincidentally, also visited Landon at the workshop that same day. Znaider is due to play Sibelius with the Berlin Philharmonic later this week (review to follow).

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra / Daniel Barenboim. Beethoven Symphonies Nos. 8 & 9 at the Berlin Waldbühne (21 August 2011)

1. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra rocks. The string sections have a totally distinctive, aurally identifiable character that is not American, not European, but… well, Israeli-Palestinian, I suppose. As a side-note: it’s unusual these days to see any orchestra, anywhere, without any Asians

2. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Beethoven’s 9^th: an orchestra and a symphony that were made for each other.

3. How cool is Daniel Barenboim? More on his “Mahlerian” approach to Beethoven to come in my review for Strings Magazine. It’s like he’s like a wave and the musicians can ride on his energy. At the climax of the 9^th slow movement you could hear him grunting.

4. I’ve never seen an outdoor summer concert audience as well-behaved as these 20,000 Berliners (including President Christian Wulff)

5. The “Ode to Joy” comes over the loudspeaker-system as the Nazi architecture of the Olympia Stadion towers nearby.

Geigengeschichten...

There are not that many published stories about the origins and mystery of old violins: Albert Berr's _Geigengeschichten_ is one of them. Prof. Otterstedt at the Musikinstrumentmuseum put me onto it. It's the kind of book that makes me wish my German was better. It is full of storieslike the time Carl Flesch's Strad was stolen, or about the powers of a Tarantelgeiger who could cure spider bites by playing. The paucity of violin literature is not an accurate reflection of the degree of fascination that the topic holds. It is one aspect of classical music culture that regularly makes it into the headlines (Strads left in cabs or train stations) and was even turned into a film ("The Red Violin"). My current research topic being the "aura" of Cremonese instruments, I have been especially interested to follow the case of the fraudulent Geigenbauer Dietmar Machold. The "Madoff of the violin" has made a career swindling banks (and people) of millions of euros under the pretence of dealing in genuine Strads. He used his knowledge and skill to buy a castle and a yellow sports car. I, on the other hand, just write articles about Strads.

The Machold case gives me pause for thought. Here's a guy who took advantage of rarified knowledge -- few people in the world have the expertise to authenticate Stradivaris -- and he would have gotten away with it were it not for honest members of that small circle coming forward. Cheating the banks is one thing but he cheated countless musicians out of their life savings as well.

I'm gonna stick to writing the articles. And playing the Strads too, of course!

Gertrude Clarke Whittall

Gertrude Clarke Whittall (1867-1965): I only came across her name because the Paganini collection at the Library of Congress Music Section is named after her. Her name is all over my footnotes and references, yet I never knew who she was or even what she looked like. Recently when I was going through Boris Schwarz's books, I came across a book by William Dana Orcutt called. The Stradivari Memorial at Washington, the National Capital (NY: Da Capo Press, 1977). Opposite p. 20, who should I find but Gertrude Clarke Whittall, pictured in 1907. Who was this mysterious benefactress and what was her role in getting all those priceless Paganini materials to Washington, D.C.?

Boris Schwarz, Patricia Schwarz

Boris Schwarz was my kind of musicologist. More specifically, he was a violinist. He knew Menuhin, Flesch, and Stern. His father was Leopold Auer's pianist. Schwarz's book _Great Masters of the Violin_ (1983) remains *the* go-to book for information about the greatest violinists from Vivaldi to Perlman. When Schwarz died, shortly after the book's publication, the world lost its greatest authority on violinists and violin playing.
Recently I had the unexpected pleasure of meeting Patricia Schwarz, his widow, in midtown Manhattan. She is a lovely woman who is still active in bringing young Israeli musicians to the U.S. (among them Gil Shaham) and takes an interest in talented Chinese musicians (e.g. Jian Wang). She let me loose in her late husband's personal library. In a score of Beethoven Sonatas presented to the young Boris, I found the following inscription:

"Our greatest violinist, Joseph Joachim,
recently made the following statement:
If I do not practise one day, I notice it,
if I miss three days of practice, my friends notice it,
but if I miss eight practice days, the public notices.
Heed these words, little Boba, and you will surely achieve something worthwhile one day in
the realm of art."

[With thanks to my friend Thomas S. for help with the translation.]

The inscription is signed "Grunewald 1914" by a Julius Sennet or Seunet -- a violinist, I would guess. I'm still trying to figure out who he was while I work my way through the bibliographic minefield I found in Professor Schwarz's collection.

PatKop, Fazil Say, and multi-kulti Berlin

I took down my last post, on violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, because I ended up using some of it for my review on the Strings Magazine website:

http://smtemp.mugo.ca/Reviews/Performances/The-Crazy-Genius-of-Violinist-Patricia-Kopatchinskaja

(The title is my editor's, not mine!)

I wanted to pick up though on another strand of thought that emerged from my reviewing this performance, which was, after all, only part of an entire musical evening devoted to celebrating the incredible talent of Fazil Say.

A Turkish musician. In Berlin. An audience dominated by the bourgeois crème of the Berlin Turkish population. Not your usual Philharmonie crowd, nor the folks you see ambling down Kottbusser Damm.

So my thoughts are already turning idly to what it must mean for a musician like Say to be playing in Berlin for this audience (before PatKop comes out and, like, alters my violin-reality).

It’s not until Say, Kopatchinskaja, and percussionist Burhan Öçal play Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca -- in a wacky, jazzy arrangement (by Say) -- that it hits me: they are reappropriating Hapsburg “Turca” as modern-day “Turkei” for the hip Berliner.

Say, speaking in heavily accented German, poked gentle fun at Öçal, an actor from Turkey famous for playing gangsters in mafia movies (that figures, with his dark looks) as introductory banter before they went on to play a funked up improvisation on Turkish folk music in 10/8 meter that would probably have let those Silk Road Project guys drooling.

Now, I’m no identity-politics-musicologist, and even if were, I’d probably still struggle to form a coherent sentence out of the following keywords: postmodern Mozart -- Turkey – Globalization – Musical Identity – Islam -- Post-Race-World.

I mean, here’s a guy who has reclaimed Scheherazade with his “1,001 Nights in the Harem” Violin Concerto: turning the exoticization element of Orientalism on its head.

This point will probably be lost on Americans who may not know that “Orientalisch” in Berlin can describe anything from chow mein to bellydance.

What’s most admirable about Say though is that he is only unwittingly contributing to the “music & politics” debate. His relaxed demeanor and humor said it all: after a program of seriously wacky music, he introduced the encore as “ein ganz normales stück … von Beethoven” [“a totally normal piece… by Beethoven”], then proceeded to play Für Elise. For a few measures, that is, before Kopatchinskaja, and Öçal joined in and all hell broke loose.