….and behold, the BSO Encore Series has arrived with additional opportunities to hear nine of the most popular performances (many of which BMInt reviewed enthusiastically) from Tanglewood’s Linde Center. Fifty BSO players will feature in the rebroadcasts of content including original compositions by BSO Associate Principal Horn Gus Sebring (written for alphorn and French horn) and folk arrangements by BSO violinist Bonnie Bewick; the world premiere 80 years after its composition of Sonatine for solo viola by acclaimed African-American composer Ulysses Kay; and newly commissioned works for brass ensemble by West Virginia-born composer and jazz pianist Kevin Day and trombonist and composer Chad “Sir Wick” Hughes. Other contemporary composers of color and women composers represented in the programming include Daniel Bernard Roumain, Gabriela Lena Frank, James Lee III, Valerie Coleman, Paquito D’Rivera, Marti Epstein, and Allison Loggins-Hull. Works of Bach, Beethoven, Berio, Brahms, Copland, Dvořák, Hindemith, Mozart, Poulenc, Ravel, Schubert, Schumann, and Stravinsky; traditional American, Scottish, and Irish reels, will also be offered.

Each Thursday at noon, and continuing for a month, the shows will begin with freshly recorded intros, and sometimes a Q & A session done live. [continued…]

BMInt has invited Daniel Orsen, violist and Artistic Director of Jamaica Plain Chamber Music to pen a brief promo for what seems like the first indoor, in-person chamber music concert in greater Boston for some time. Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill will present original and arranged music for string quartet on Friday at 7:30. See more and buy tickets HERE.

For the foreseeable future, in-person music making may be coming from small, local chamber music concerts in the players’ own communities. Jamaica Plain Chamber Music embraces this moment by bringing back live music as safely as possible. Though JPCM started last year with the mission of bringing together the wealth of musical talent in JP in chamber music concerts for our neighbors, the pandemic will bar us from our home at St. John’s Episcopal Church or any other venue in Jamaica Plain. Into the breach, Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill has graciously agreed to host our concerts this fall, so for the time being this will be “Jamaica Plain Chamber Music on Beacon Hill.”  Most of our performers are freelancers or grad-students who, without the institutional support of an orchestra or conservatory teaching position, have been particularly hard hit by the moratorium on concerts. And although readers might not recognize the names of the performers, the quality of the music making is phenomenal.

One often hears athletes talk about the importance of fans; it is the same for musicians. An audience energizes players, and the communication goes both ways. It’s hard to put into words, but we can hear the audience listening. I miss the communal nature and the ephemeral preciousness of a live concert even more. Those fill a spiritual need which recordings or livestreams cannot recreate. We mustn’t forget the ancient ritual: get dressed up, walk into a concert hall with hundreds of other people, dim the lights, and go on a journey together, like the crew of a boat. We are delighted to be playing music again with our friends and colleagues, but would be deeply moved and heartened by the greatest show of love and support for us and what we do, a live audience.           [continued…]

In ratifying a new contract guaranteeing their jobs through August of 2023, BSO players have agreed to pay cuts averaging 37% in a pain-sharing pact with management to mitigate a $50 million loss of ticket and rental revenue from the organization’s $100 million annual budget.

If and when monies re-materialize, the contract provides for tiered, and possibly retroactive restoration of the cuts.

Official accounts and personal reports of the negotiations portray a union generously offering givebacks for the benefit of the institution, knowing full well that most other working musicians are not so lucky to have employment guarantees.

Management has given back to players by lowering expectations from about 330 services in the outgoing contract to 167 in the first year of the new, concert-less one. (In generally understood parlance, musical services refer to performances, rehearsals, and various outreach; not practice at home, which players nevertheless need to keep up chops.) The memorandum of agreement (MoA) between the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Musicians Association local no. 9-535 of the American Federation of Musicians dated August 24^th, leaves determination of workload in years two and three for future discussion. [continued…]

Politicians have forever used and abused composers, artists and performers. In our current dystopia, with the planet beset by climate change, a pandemic, economic instabilities, and facing the possible end of the American Democratic Experiment, life often seems fictional. Into this milieu, versatile musician and author Gerald Elias, creator of a previous mystery series, has cast a thriller, The Beethoven Sequence, released this week, published by Level Best Books [HERE],  explores possible outcomes in a both amusing and cautionary tale. His quick, gripping, and disruptive read stars an unlikely Layton Stolz, a socially awkward welder turned conductor, whose ascent to head a musical cult and, finally, the Presidency of the United States, seems uncannily plausible.

Stolz initially presents as an oafish naïf from rural Colorado, who dreams of a life in classical music, despite virtually no training, only to be rejected by Juilliard, when he finally applies in his early 30s. But Stolz is stolid, persistent. The first half, “Utopia Raised,” explains the motivation that charts the course of Stolz’s life, only lightly foreshadowing the latter, bizarre parts of the second half, “Utopia Razed.” The early chapters let the reader understand how Stolz’s plenteous challenges growing up with a brutal father and a fawning mother set the stage for his many disappointments, odd perceptions, dysphoria and flirtations with delusion and deception. In fact, the bland first chapters subtly hook the reader, so gently that subsequent deaths, justice diverted, blackmail and chases surprise, even stun.

Without revealing the plot, let me say that the story revels in Stolz’s almost happenstance creation of a system of orchestral pursuit that conjures some aspects of El Sistema, the rascally moments of the Music Man and reverential cult-like features of the Suzuki Method. The reader watches with amazement as Stolz rolls them from an initially bumbling effort based on homage to Beethoven’s concepts of liberty, heroism and humanism to, ultimately, a slick, smooth, and secretly sinister organization obliquely founded on some of Beethoven’s most dramatic and deeply felt ideals.  [continued…]

Seiji Ozawa frequently told students: “Listen! You MUST always listen! Only playing your own music is not enough, you must listen to others. To communicate with others who are playing with you is the core of music. Making harmony and ensemble, that is music!”

Even absent today’s proclamation from Mayor Walsh in celebration of Seiji Ozawa’s 85^th birthday, we would have recognized him, to anyone who asked, as the most expressive and balletic conductor we have ever witnessed … especially in his favored repertoire.

I have known this since participating in a Dessoff Choirs Summer Sing of the Berlioz Requiem c. 1963. How could a musical high school student ever forget the two hours of preparation under a very young Ozawa before a very old Leopold Stokowski led us in a performance better-remembered for enthusiasm than for polish?

Flash-forward some decades to a post-performance tête-à-tête in the Symphony Hall green room. When I recalled the earlier inspiring moment, Ozawa, sitting on a sofa only inches away, looked into my eyes and claimed to remember. [continued…]

A BSO insider muses on plagues, players, and pay in the context of management’s recent staff reductions and Tuesday’s upcoming vote on player salary givebacks.

Like every other American symphony orchestra, the Boston Symphony is challenged to find an artistic and financial path forward through the labyrinth of the COVID-19 pandemic.

An invisible quasi-living microorganism, relentlessly infectious, spreads fear and death among vast populations. Lockdowns, self-isolation, quarantines, contact tracing, and facemasks prove controversial and only partially effective. Social dislocation, anxiety, staggering loss of life, and massive economic downturn threaten to bring a major power to its knees as it struggles to retain its international preeminence. The US in 2020? How about Venice in the 17^th century?        

The other day, I was practicing the dazzling finale of the Vivaldi Violin Sonata in F Minor, Op. 2, No. 10. Though in the score Vivaldi refers to the movement as a Giga, it has all the frenetic fever of a traditional Italian whirling tarantella. I like to think he opted to call it a Giga, a more acceptable designation than the pagan tarantella, in deference to the sensitivities of his Catholic employers at the Ospedale della Pietà, who nevertheless found reason to fire him on more than one occasion.   [continued…]

Wandering singers and dancers will re-emerge from the proscenium in a 2012 production that BMInt featured HERE.

Sixteen years after its première, at Le Havre, France, in 2004, and after more than 70 performances in Europe, North America, and Australasia, “Borrowed Light,” an ambitious music-and-dance extravaganza, based on original Shaker songs I gleaned mainly from years of original research at the Shaker Library in Sabbathday Lake Maine, and performed, each time, live by Boston Camerata soloists and dancers, has yet, despite all those  many international touring events (and a bulging pressbook with clippings from all over), to be heard and seen in Boston. And yet, we learned just the other day, in a zoom-y conversation with the production’s brilliant choreographer, Tero Saarinen, that his Helsinki-based company plans to revive it a couple of seasons forward from now. Will the show then manage, somehow, to cross the ocean and be presented, finally, in our own hometown?

Meanwhile, we revel in an upcoming streaming representation thereof. On August 20^th, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival will be streaming (HERE) a “Borrowed Light” performance from its 2012 festival, in which Camerata and the Saarinen Company had been invited for the second time to sing and dance this work at the oldest American summer dance festival, in its historic performance hall. We hope our many Boston friends and supporters (as well as music and dance lovers from everywhere) will enjoy witnessing that extraordinary  interaction among singers and dancers mingling onstage.

I’d like, also, to express a large measure of personal satisfaction from this announced reprise by Jacob’s Pillow. The festival’s Becket, Massachusetts venue is situated only a few miles from the most important historic Shaker settlements. There is a rightness to performing their songs in their part of the world, just as there was a rightness to the many hours of archival library work Anne Azéma and I did at the Sabbathday Lake community in the 1990’s, bring forgotten songs written down in Shaker letteral notation back into today’s world.  In these current days of confusion and turmoil, we all want to choose “something like a star/To stay our minds on and be staid” (Robert Frost). [continued…]

We all heard, and still remember, his early recordings. Nobody played the Brahms D-minor Concerto more mightily or expressively, nor with more persuasive understanding of the music. I first heard him live at Tanglewood in summer 1959 or 1960, playing the Beethoven Third Concerto. Two years later he played in Princeton and I was drafted to turn pages when he played Leon Kirchner’s Sonata. Backstage I mentioned that I had heard him playing the Beethoven at Tanglewood a couple of years before, and he groaned, as if remembering that he hadn’t played so well then, and maybe that was true. “You’re not going to hear me play so well tonight, either,” he said. But he was wrong; if he was tired, it never showed. The Kirchner Sonata came forth with total strength and conviction, as did Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, a superb performance. As a page-turner I had a vivid sense of what Schoenberg had once said to Berg: “If you ever have the opportunity to see the way Mahler ties his necktie, you can learn more counterpoint from this than in two years at the conservatory.”

It was only a few years later that Fleisher’s career became cruelly vitiated by the dystonia that crippled his right hand, again as we all know. But we also know how well he carried on, bringing new energy and interest to the Paul Wittgenstein lefthand repertory, and making LH recordings. Eventually a good part of his RH capability returned; I remember reading about a performance of Franck’s Variations symphoniques that marked his return to the two-handed stage. My last view of him was at George Perle’s memorial in 2009, when he played Bach’s Chaconne in Brahms’s lefthand arrangement. [continued…]

The Boston Symphony Orchestra announced the unprecedented cancellation of next season’s concerts from September to the end of November because of Covid’s continuing spread. This goes far beyond the two-week season-opening delay occasioned by the flu pandemic of 102 years ago [see BMInt’s story HERE]; the Second World War, though, brought about shortened and eliminated Tanglewood seasons.

Management will announce decisions about the winter and spring periods by the year’s end. Patrons and subscribers will be contacted in September about refunds, credits, and donations. The BSO expects to lose $30M for the fiscal year ending in August.

In September, the Orchestra will announce online content for the season, following the apparent success since the end of March of the BSO at Home and ongoing Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival offerings. [continued…]

An invitation to present a research paper at the International Alban Berg Symposion led to my first-ever trip to the European continent in May 1980. The symposium proved especially fortunate because Berg’s papers, formerly stored at his apartment at Trauttmansdorffgasse 27 in Vienna under the supervision of his widow Helene, had been transferred to the Nationalbibliothek downtown, and had only just then, four years after Helene Berg’s death and 45 years after Berg’s, been opened to scholars. The well-funded Symposion took place over a period of two weeks during the Wiener Festwochen, with presentations lasting up to 45 minutes. Researchers from Germany, England, and the USA, including several younger workers like me, met each other and schmoozed. One of the big-shot attendees was Carl Dahlhaus (1928-89), a hugely prolific and wide-ranging scholar, though not widely known for work on Berg; I did discover when this veteran managed to get any sleep — during other scholars’ presentations. One whom everybody liked was Erich Alban Berg, nephew of the composer, then 75 years old and very convivial (for those who like me had only a very limited command of German, he was especially helpful; he had been an interpreter for the British occupation forces after WWII and spoke excellent English).

During those two weeks I found myself in the music collection at the Nationalbibliothek during most of its open hours. Berg’s papers, musical and otherwise, were a mess, but a librarian’s efforts had sorted them into at least a temporary classification, in folders which had been preliminarily catalogued. I was fascinated to see music by Berg that almost no one else had looked at for nearly 80 years. I found a single page of a Waltz in A Minor: “Mein erster Walzer. Meiner lieben Mama gewidmet.” If you know the A minor waltz (op. 12, no. 2) in Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, you can imagine this little piece by the 15-year-old Berg; today, it is published, and you can smile at the fff in the seventh bar. [continued…]

This summer Boston Landmarks Orchestra moves from the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade to the (e)splendid confines of the Futura Studio in Roslindale to record and stream two small-ensemble concerts dedicated to reminding us of its social and aesthetic missions while also giving us license to tap our toes while watching on our phones, tablets, and computers.

Under the direction of music director Christopher Wilkins and co-executive directors Mary Deissler and Arthur Rishi, socially distanced and masked players will begin with Simple Gifts on July 15^th at 7pm ⁽¹⁾, while Dances and Delights follows on July 29^{th (2)} at 7pm with Castle of our Skins. “While we will certainly miss the Esplanade, everyone will have a front row seat for these streamed concerts, and we won’t need to worry about the weather or the sound of passing motorcycles.”

FLE: Streaming a chamber music concert from an exclusive and inaccessible former Masonic Temple seems to distance you from the goals of embracing a large and varied audience. How will your internet broadcasts differentiate themselves from the content that’s already on the web, and how satisfying will they be to you and your colleagues? 

CW: It’s a great question. Normally we’re all about finding ways to include as much community as possible, with layers of collaboration and partnerships, kids from camps, working with other Boston institutions — the Gardner Museum, the Aquarium or Museum of Science — but none of that is possible now. Maybe down the road.

We can do some things that we don’t normally do, such as making video content that right now is the coin of the realm. Landmarks hasn’t developed a whole lot of video over the years, so that will be good to have. And people will also have a look at us in a more intimate way than usual. They’ll get to see the musicmaking in lots of detail, something that isn’t possible on the Esplanade because of its enormous size. [continued…]

What do musicologists do during the Lockdown? Well, some of them write memoirs. A friend of mine, a composer, told me that whenever he talked with strangers in northern Minnesota and mentioned that he was a musician by profession, they would say to him, “You’re a musician? I wonder if you could tell me what to do for my sore throat?” My friend thus learned that in Fargo-Moorhead, “musician” means “singer.” Around New England, when people ask me what is my profession, I say “music professor,” although now retired. Sometimes I say “musician.” “What kind of musician?” “Professor of music.” “Oh.”

But because of my know-it-all personality, which often radiates smartass, I’ve been called “professor” ever since I was ten. Within my own trade I am known as a musicologist, supposedly a specialist in Musikwissenschaft, musical science. There are various kinds of musicologists. I’ve been a member of the American Musicological Society since 1964, when the society was essentially an academic society for historical musicologists. My graduate training included historical musicology, music theory, and composition, all areas in which I taught at the college level for 36 years. I claim to be principally an analytical musicologist, in an area which sometimes dips into music theory and history of musical style. Another area in which I have worked extensively is documentary musicology, in which I have had little training but a lot of experience, and this is what I want to discuss today.

In 1955, at age 15, I spent a summer taking piano lessons with an excellent teacher, Gregory Tucker, a well-known pianist in the Boston area who taught at the Longy School and Bennington College, and later was a professor at MIT. I last saw him in 1962 when, recognizing me among those assembled for a memorial, he drafted me to turn pages for him in the concert that followed the ceremony. In 1983, when I was teaching at Tufts University, one of my colleagues asked me if I could help one of her friends, a piano teacher, in examining several large cartons of papers that she had been given by Tucker’s children, who after his death didn’t know what to do with them. I said I’d be happy to look over the papers. These included a batch of books and printed music but also a number of musical autographs. [continued…]

It’s July 4^th weekend… are you missing the fireworks over the Charles and the sounds of the Boston Pops over the Esplanade?

Here are a ten links and suggestions to help you get your patriotic musical “fix” in early July:

The 2020 Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular broadcast, under the direction Keith Lockhart, will present A Boston Pops Salute to Our Heroes, featuring both new content (the fantastic newly released video of John Williams’ Summon the Heroes) and favorites from past celebrations, including (in order) Broadway legend Brian Stokes Mitchell singing “America the Beautiful” and “Wheels of a Dream”; Amanda Mena, America’s Got Talent semi-finalist from Lynn, MA, sings Pink’s What About US and the national anthem with the U.S. Navy Sea Chanters; Melissa Etheridge (“I Wanna Come Over”); Amanda Gorman, first-ever Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, performs a new take on the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” entitled “Believer’s Hymn for the Republic,” Broadway star Leslie Odom, Jr, singing “Sarah” from The Civil War, and “Without You” from Rent; Rhiannon Giddens (“Pretty Little Girl” and “She’s Got You”); Rita Moreno narrating excerpts from Ellis Island: The Dream of America; Arlo Guthrie & The Texas Tenors singing “This Land Is Your Land;” Queen Latifah,  (“Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”); Andy Grammer (“Give Love”); and The U.S. Army Field Band and Soldiers’ Chorus and the Middlesex County Volunteers Fifes & Drum (Lexington, MA) joining the Pops for Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” [continued…]

Music and poetry can be means of resistance, and they also play a role in uniting diverse groups. Boston’s early heritage of African American scholars, writers, and musicians make the city an interesting subject for artistic and historical inquiry in these challenging times.

THE LEGACY OF PHYLLIS WHEATLEY

The first Africans arrived in Boston in 1638, and the city became very active in the slave trade. By 1700 there were more than 400 enslaved African Americans in Boston, with the beginnings of a free Black community in the North End. At mid-century, the British mainland American colonies had a population of approximately 1.5 million. Each year 3,500 captives arrived from Africa and the Caribbean, so nearly one in five Americans, or 300,000 people, were enslaved.

Lucy Terry Prince (c1730-1821) was a gifted speaker and the first recorded African American author of a poem (“Bars Fight,” see the full poem HERE), describing the last Indian massacre in Deerfield, MA in 1746, where she worked as a household slave in from 1735-1756. The poem became part of local oral tradition and was finally published in 1855 in Josiah Gilbert Holland’s History of Western Massachusetts. Prince later moved to Vermont, where she became the first woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court (winning a land dispute); two of her sons enlisted in the Continental army in Massachusetts, and the Vermont Heritage Songbook includes a children’s song about her life. [continued…]

Toward the new post-normal: A baby step for audiences, a leap for performance.

Who misses live music more than the audiences? Musicians, that’s who.

Now that summer has arrived, the chamber organization Mistral Music will be joined, this Saturday at 6pm in Brookline’s Knyvet Square, by three BSO players to play the Ravel Duo, the Schubert Rosamunde Quartet, and a Beethoven String Trio.

North of the city, as part of its Summer Music on the Hill series, the Church of St. Andrew in Marblehead presents “On the Street Where You Live,” an outdoor concert featuring area star vocalists Holly Cameron and Matt Arnold accompanied by church music director Mary Jodice, on Sunday July 12, at 7pm. The rain date is July 18.

[continued…]

Four years ago, Liane Curtis, President of Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, wrote a review for BMInt entitled “Black Composers Matter,”  highlighting the work of Boston’s concert and educational series Castle of Our Skins, named for a line from celebrated poet Nikki Giovanni’s Poem (for Nina). You can hear the original, read by the author, HERE.

After this month’s tragic events, peaceful protest, riots, and renewed calls for unity, Giovanni’s words ring loudly in my ears (“for we spirit to spirit will embrace this world”). Castle of Our Skins has begun to present community-based, multi-disciplinary projects (Ain’t I a Woman?) [reviewed HERE],  “I Am a Man,” 2019), and concerts featuring the works of local African American composers such as Trevor Weston, [reviewed HERE], but they make me want to hear more, to listen more deeply, and to explore Boston’s rich, local heritage of African American music.

Anthony R. Green, the director of Boston’s Castle of Our Skins, has presented new works in Boston almost every year since 2004: he has been commissioned by Make Music Boston, Celebrity Series Boston, and the Landmarks Orchestra. Excerpts of nine of his works can be heard HERE. His recent arrangement of Chouconne – Haitian Folk Song (for string quartet and orchestra) premiered at the Hatch Shell on Boston’s Esplanade in August 2019, and his recent youth orchestra commission Catto’s Courage premiered online in April 2020. Green’s prescient article on representation in the New Music community is available at NewMusicBox HERE. [continued…]

Tanglewood announces what’s up and what’s new:

Last fall, before the time of plague, we published the upcoming Tanglewood season announcement, and then a month ago followed up with the BSO’s new plans for the online Tanglewood festival, called a Summer Tradition Transformed. Now, management has announced program details for the upcoming summer’s content both free and paid, the latter going on sale Monday, June 15^th, through www.tanglewood.org. The audio and video streams will include material newly created and recorded at Tanglewood’s Linde Center this month and next, featuring artists and programs of the announced season. In addition to the free offerings, online programs range from $5 to $12 for a single stream to $15 to $90 for multiple-stream packages.

New content includes Saturday evening great performers in recital — video streams recorded at the Linde Center — spotlighting some who were to appear in the Shed as well as additional guests: Gil Shaham (7/3); Emanuel Ax (7/11); Pinchas Zukerman, Amanda Forsyth, and Bryan Wagorn (7/18); Augustin Hadelich and Orion Weiss (7/25); Yo-Yo Ma (8/1); Daniil Trifonov (8/8); Conrad Tao (8/15); and Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk (8/22).

BSO musicians in recital features 40 orchestra members in a Friday evening online series of new programs programs to be recorded at the Linde Center starting next week through July 11^th.

But wait, there’s more. [continued…]

Juventas New Music Ensemble’s 15^th-anniversary season “Emergence” will conclude with a livestreamed concert that will safely bring ensemble musicians back together for the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ensemble bills its YouTube appearance in Alone Together [HERE] as, “…one of the first concerts of its kind in America.”

While social distancing live at Futura Productions in Roslindale, Julia Carey, piano; Minjin Chung, cello; Wolcott Humphrey, clarinet; Kelley Hollis, soprano; and Olga Patramanska-Bell, violin; will essay audience favorites by Emma Wine, Michael Gandolfi and Wei-Chieh Hu, plus Aaron Copland’s “Laurie’s Song” and the world premiere of Juventas Artistic Director Oliver Caplan’s Alone Together. An interactive pre-concert Composer Conversation moderated by horn player Anne Howarth begins at 7:00pm on Zoom [HERE].

Caplan wrote the program’s title piece Alone during the Massachusetts stay home advisory this spring. It reflects on the paradox of caring for each other by staying apart, and offers a hopeful vision of the day “the sun will shine again… somewhere beyond the bend.” [continued…]

As everybody, including musicologists, begin celebrating the 250^th anniversary of Beethoven’s  birth, I throw in few observations on Fidelio, which I heard for the first time only in graduate school; it certainly opened my understanding to all of the rest of his work.

It is said by some that the technique of the leitmotive (my preferred English spelling, without italics, which would imply actual German: Leitmotiv, singular, or Leitmotive, plural) in opera originated with the 18^th-century melodrama — instrumental accompaniment to interspersed or overlaid spoken dialogue. A 19^th-century melodrama illustrates the type: the second scene of Act II of Fidelio, immediately after Florestan, chained to the dungeon wall, has heroically exerted himself in a hallucinatory aria and collapsed in utter exhaustion. Leonore (still disguised as the boy Fidelio) and Rocco, the jailer, descend into the dungeon and exchange spoken dialogue in whispers between short bursts of indistinct orchestration. [continued…]

On June 25, 2020, the musical world will take note of the 110^th anniversary of the premiere in Paris of Igor Stravinsky’s Zhar-ptitsa (Firebird), an event which launched an extraordinary career in Western music that continued through two world wars and three citizenships, lasted 61 years, and left a legacy of greatness that endures undiminished today.

Stravinsky had just celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday when the Firebird ballet burst on a Parisian public that had only recently learned to embrace Debussy and Ravel as the flagbearers of ultra-modernism. French Impressionism, in the visual arts, was already well established before its counterpart in music caught up with it. Debussy had been nationally recognized as the leading French composer only since Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and La mer (1905), and only Ravel could match him on the same ground with works like Rapsodie espagnole (1908); all of these were considered the ne plus ultra of orchestral vigor and splendor on the one hand and emotional subtlety on the other.

Then with amazing suddenness Stravinsky arrived on the scene, challenging the French moderns with a violent brilliance of a Russian Impressionism that hardly anyone had even imagined. It was more than orchestral color and a strange new harmonic vocabulary — it was oriental exoticism, “For Russian Export,” as Stravinsky, weary of his Firebird achievement and its excessive popularity, later derided it. Fokine’s choreography was Russian-conventional but expertly planned, and Tamara Karsavina as the Firebird (gliding onto the stage on a wire) was both beautiful and astonishing throughout the evening, but it was the music that continues to amaze audiences today. (Odd footnote: Karsavina was succeeded in the post-season by a neophyte dancer, Lydia Lopokova, who later married John Maynard Keynes.) Debussy and Ravel, both then at the height of their careers, became Stravinsky’s close friends, “en toute sympathie artistique,” as Debussy wrote on a photograph. [continued…]

Even as our communities slowly unlock, and however tentatively the tumblers are turning, we’ve already become accustomed to the replacement of our cherished communal musical events with figurative and literal flickers reaching us via our computers, smart TVs, and mobile devices. Every once in a while, though, something may go amiss: a performance from someone’s living room, empty concert hall or patchwork ensemble winks out, sometimes entirely, sometimes for an extended period. Was that some technical glitch of recording or transmission, something in our internet connection, or an inept engineer or what? In many cases, it seems, the gremlin in the works may have been put there deliberately, and it may have had assistance of counsel.

An article recently published in the Washington Post (it’s here, but be forewarned of WaPo’s paywall) has called out the impact of recording companies’ copyright enforcement bots (software that patrols the Interwebs) seeking illicit posting or streaming of music for which the labels claim rights. While this form of artificial intelligence has a decent record of accuracy when it comes to pop and rock, where performance styles and the musical elements of performance vary considerably among recordings, it doesn’t work nearly as well with classical music, where not only is the bulk of the repertoire in the public domain, but the differences between particular performances are much more subtle. Nevertheless the principal platforms over which these streamed performances reach us, like Facebook or Google-owned YouTube, rely on these bots to tell them if a copyright claim has been asserted against a performance, leading the platform to shoot (i.e., take it down) first and let the performer ask questions later. As the WaPo article observes, and I have confirmed, the platforms offer means by which an aggrieved performer or producer can seek redress for an unjustified take-down, the process, which requires human staff to review the recordings for similarity and provenance, the process can take days or even weeks to complete, which isn’t much of a live stream, is it? [continued…]

What do composers mean with dedications to their scores? Compare the situation when an author adds a dedicatory page right after the title page of his book, as in Melville’s dedication of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, thus: “In token of my admiration for his genius this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne.” One great writer to another.

Beethoven and Chopin peppered their piano compositions with dedications, chiefly to persons of the nobility or at least locally noteworthy, many of whom sponsored them financially. Many composers have dedicated their compositions to their own students: Mozart and his piano concertos, Beethoven and several sonatas, Chopin his Scherzo no. 3 to Adolf Gutmann (whose strength was such that he “could knock a hole in the table”, according to Huneker, who pointed to a big chord in bar 6).

A surprising number of composers offered dedications to their fellow composers, and this in itself is revealing. Beethoven dedicated his three piano sonatas, op. 2, to Haydn, his friend who to an extent was also his teacher. Schubert, at the very end of his life, dedicated his last three piano sonatas to Johann Nepomuk Hummel; but by the time these were published, in 1839, eleven years after Schubert’s death, Hummel himself had been dead for two years. Schubert’s composed his Sonata for piano four hands, D 812 (“Grand Duo”) in 1824, though not until 1837 did it see publication, and then with the publisher Diabelli’s dedication to the 18-year-old pianist Clara Wieck, three years before she married Schumann. Possibly Schubert, could he have but known, would have approved of this. Ravel dedicated his Jeux d’eau and String Quartet, mature masterpieces, to his “cher maître” Gabriel Fauré while still a student at the Conservatoire. Debussy dedicated his own “First String Quartet [there was never another] in G minor, op. 10 [his only opus number]” to Ernest Chausson, who had nominated him for membership in the Société nationale, and as a man of means may have helped him financially as well. Alban Berg, who worshiped his teacher Schoenberg, dedicated three of his largest compositions to him; but he dedicated Wozzeck to Alma Mahler, who paid for the engraving of the piano score. Another connection with Alma Mahler was an expression of love and grief: Berg’s last work, the Violin Concerto, was dedicated “to the memory of an angel,” her daughter Manon Gropius, who died of polio at age 19. [continued…]

The esteemed musicologist, who died on May 18^th from cancer, was one of the Boston Musical Intelligencer’s most prolific and informative writers. She submitted her first review, of Boston Baroque’s performance of Michael Haydn’s Requiem Mass in 2009. Her last one reported on Capella Clausura’s take on the visionary-inspired music of Hildegard von Bingen’s on Feb 23^rd. In 159 reviews she covered such groups as Capella Clausura, Blue Heron, the Borromeo Quartet, the Lydian Quartet, Emmanuel Music, Concerts at the Gardner, Cantata Singers, Boston Baroque, Back Bay Chorale, Cambridge Society for Early Music, the Newport Music Festival, Rockport Music, Odyssey Opera, NEC, Shakespearean Concerts, Tallis Scholars, and the Boston Chamber Music Society.

But she penned her greatest number of reviews for concerts put on by the Boston Early Music Festival, both for its biennial music orgies and for its performances during its regular seasons. Kathy Fay, executive director of BEMF, wrote today, “On behalf of the board of directors, artists, staff, and patrons of the Boston Early Music Festival, I am deeply saddened by the news. Her delightful and gentle spirit, thoughtful and illuminating reviews of our concerts, operas, and our biennial Festivals, and generous support of our programs and global work, will be sorely missed. Thanks to Virginia’s profound grasp of the classical repertoire—particularly music from centuries past and especially medieval music—we devoured her concert reviews and always emerged with a much deeper understanding of performances we attended.” 

Publisher F. Lee Eiseman noted that “she always brought tremendous seriousness of purpose and scrupulousness of research and observation to her work.” Indeed. Virginia continually educated our readers with historically accurate information. A few of examples of the wonderful cadence she brought to her reviews: of the performance by the BSO at Tanglewood on July 24, 2009: “After the opening outburst of Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, we were treated to one of the composer’s beautifully flexible Andante melodies:  an English horn solo ably played by the BSO’s Robert Sheena and then heard in canon for winds and strings with rustling wind and percussion accompaniment. “She wrote of fortepianist Christian Bezuidenhout’s debut as conductor in a concert with the Handel & Haydn Society, in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Symphony in C Major, Wq. 182/3, “Beginning in a sunny and energetic C Major in forthright unison, sudden interjections on A flat and F sharp lent an air of sudden darkness to the drama.” [continued…]

Yo-Yo Ma will broadcast Bach’s immortal Six Suites for Solo Cello as a memorial to the 100,000 who have died in our ongoing plague and as a tribute to the resilience of the survivors. During the 2.5-hour tour of this monumental edifice, Ma’s only companions will be Bach himself and the station’s remote-controlled cameras and receptive microphones, though he will also surely direct his attention to our ears and eyes. The broadcast from isolation will issue forth from the WGBH Fraser Studio in Brighton this Sunday at 3 PM over a significant number of media outlets: WGBH channel 2 in Boston, and on public radio airwaves, stations across the country through the good offices of PRX, and streaming live on Yo-Yo Ma’s YouTube channel and at ClassicalWCRB.org.

Ma’s performance comes in the midst of the interrupted final segment of his “Bach Project,” in which he had intended  to bring the six suites to 36 communities on six continents, as his personal contribution to “build the world we want.”

“In times of challenge, we’ve often come together in shared experiences,” said Jon Abbott, president and CEO of WGBH. “Yo-Yo Ma has a generosity of spirit, a solemnity that the moment deserves, and a warmth that reminds us of togetherness even as we feel alone. It is the strength we draw from each other that will help move us forward, and we are honored to host and produce this memorial event at WGBH and share it with the world through our public media network.” [continued…]

Because its beloved summer festival draws approximately 350,000 people and brings more than $100 million in economic activity annually to the Berkshires region, it is with tremendous regret that the BSO has announced cessation of in-person events at Tanglewood for this plagued summer of 2020. Not since 1945 have listeners had to do almost entirely without this essential business. [According to BSO historian Brian Bell, that year, though, the orchestra managed to cut its first RCA Victor recordings on the grounds, and while the shed was dark, six rather impressive concerts took place at the Theater Concert Hall.]

Instead, the BSO will connect performers—both BSO musicians and guest artists—with audiences through the debuting “Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival,” which will disgorge both newly recorded and encoring performances. While it’s doubtful that electronic facsimiles will reach and give pleasure to the third of a million music-lovers who might otherwise have attended, BSO webcasts have attracted tens of thousands over the last few years.

We can’t get specific marketing information on the free BSO live streams, but recent YouTube concert recordings have garnered 292–4000 views, though a highly promoted show, such as the “Concert for Our City” has played to 24,293 virtual viewers so far. Individual concerts available on YouTube for six or more years record up to 51,495 views. It will be very interesting to learn whether viewers will respond to the appointment streaming opportunities, some behind moderate paywalls, that will constitute the Tanglewood experience for this summer. The BSO marketing department reports over 7mm engagements overall since BSO At Home launched, and have had over 1mm engagements specifically with audio (206,000) and video (941,000) media. [Note: Engagements or impressions refer more to server hits or opportunities to be seen, while “views” and refer to real interactions with viewers]

At press time we have not been able to get answers as to what WCRB and other broadcasters will be offering and the extent of overlap with the BSO’s own productions for the Tanglewood season. WCRB will be broadcasting six Boston Pops performances throughout the spring and early summer [continued…]