In the slow and careful return to live music, some of the Boston area’s long-standing summer organ recital series are leading the way.

The Methuen Memorial Music Hall (www.mmmh.org) did an admirable job of pivoting last spring to live-streaming, as the trustees of the hall were able to install suitable equipment; they racked up thousands of views on their YouTube channel. You can still watch all of last season, as well as the current one HERE.

As of July 14^th, the recitals reopened to the public. Every Wednesday at 7:30 pm, an excellent performer will preside. The details can be seen in BMInt’s “Upcoming Events.”
July 28 Stefan Donner, Vienna, Austria; August 4 Nicole Keller, Cleveland, Ohio; August 11 Caroline Robinson, Atlanta, Georgia; August 18 Rosalind Mohnsen, Malden, Massachusetts; August 25 Jennifer McPherson, Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Even before you get to hear any music, just seeing the spectacular hall is well worth the journey to the old mill town near the New Hampshire border,. MMMH is celebrating the 75^th-anniversary season [read recent BMInt feature HERE] of summer recitals this year, following the 1946 acquisition and incorporation of the organ and building. The Great Organ, originally built by the E.F. Walcker firm of Ludwigsburg, Germany, for the Boston Music Hall and dedicated in 1863, was removed to make room on the stage for the new Boston Symphony Orchestra, and was kept in storage until the Methuen hall was dedicated in 1909, thanks to local philanthropist and organ lover Edward Searles. Read more about the fascinating history of the Great Organ at mmmh.org. [continued…]

The main problem for everyone who confronts Charles Ives’s music is balancing the extraordinary quality of his art with how far it falls short of perfection. To the extent that we can appraise this aesthetic gulf, we can assess Ives as a tragic composer. But a great man he certainly was — the greatest American composer, the most essential of musical natives, and the most original in thought and studied imagination; much of his achievement will endure permanently. Arnold Schoenberg, his exact contemporary, left a much-quoted note about Ives in his files, including a pregnant sentence: “He has solved the problem of how to preserve one’s self-esteem and to learn.” Ives never stopped learning, despite his Yale education; whether he solved the problem of how to be himself is what needs to be debated. His training under Horatio Parker — who did stop learning — enabled him to write a radiant, drastic Second Symphony.

I was scolded in these pages for referring to Ives as a “Sunday composer,” but I’ll stick with that irreverent term nevertheless. (So was Mahler, as was correctly pointed out.) The implication is that he was an amateur, but without any recognition of how serious he was about his own music, and it goes without saying that he was a hard worker, even for many days each week. He didn’t regard his own music as beyond criticism, though perhaps beyond self-criticism. Ives constantly criticized his own music by writing parts of it over and over again in different ways and forms — think of the circus-band style that surges and resurges, often literally, in the “Concord” Sonata, in “Putnam’s Camp” in Three Places in New England, in the Fourth Symphony, and in some songs. [continued…]

So as not to bury my lede, let me point you HERE for the announcement of the inaugural concert of a new Boston summer orchestra.

Summer classical music festivals bring heightened expectations for something different. Maybe it’s the pressing heat, or the later-setting sun, or that unrestrained summer feeling that makes you want to jump in the ocean and have a mimosa with your mid-morning omelet. Classical musicians everywhere rejoice at the prospect of kicking back, making music with friends, and bringing a community together through the performing arts.

Though densely populated with classical ensembles from September to May, Boston features surprisingly little summer music. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, for example, migrates to Tanglewood in the Berkshires for a few months, while those of us sticking around Boston proper continue to look for that memorable summer night entertainment. The same goes for Boston’s exceptional classical music professionals, who often find themselves in a summer slump when it comes to steady employment. [continued…]

Sunday from 12 noon-10 pm, WHRB will pay tribute to David Elliott, who gave 58 years to the station and who started the July 4^th Program of American Music in 2000 and curated it for 19 years. Hearing David again, in a 25-minute excerpt from his July 4^th, 2004 broadcast, will provide an additional treat.

In building the playlist for his broadcasts, David placed an emphasis on accessible music and introduced many of us to lesser-known but very worthwhile American tonal composers such as Ernst Bacon, Nevett Bartow, Richard Rendleman, Burnet Tuthill, David Baker, Leslie Adams, and Don Gillis. The show will begin with some of David’s favorites by these and others.

David also appreciated  quirky and amusing pieces (such as the Homage aux Frères Marx by Henry Brant), which will be played throughout.

In addition, the broadcast will place David in a pantheon of American broadcasters via interesting American-music related segments from Mike Wallace, Hugh Downs, Charles Osgood, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Martin Bookspan, all alongside David’s 1977 interview with Aaron Copland. [continued…]

Frederic Rzewski (pronounced Zhefsky), who died on June 26^th at age 83, lived a long and active musical life: “politically committed composer and pianist,” read the headline in Monday’s Times. He was born in 1938 in Westfield, Massachusetts. His musical involvement in leftist causes was less well known in America than in Europe, where he made the greater part of his career — in Italy, where he lived, and Belgium, where he was a professor at the Brussels Conservatory. His avant-garde inclinations were evident even in his Harvard undergraduate years; he graduated in 1958, and his chamber music then sounded post-Schoenberg rather than post-Webern as was the fashion. After that he collected an MFA at Princeton and went to study with Dallapiccola in Europe, where he remained, occasionally returning to his native land to teach and perform. [continued…]

Three months later than usual, and after much apparent viral deliberation, the BSO sent out its prospectus for the next subscription season at Symphony Hall. BMInt’s feature [HERE] conveys the story mostly in BSO’s words. The complete calendar is HERE.  

For this writer, the most thrilling BSO 2021-2022 repertoire will be the concert performance of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, the first in Symphony Hall since Seiji Ozawa’s in spring of 1987. “Concert performance” may be only a bashful excuse, because this opera, of an almost unbearable dramatic intensity, can be performed with almost minimal staging — in 1987 they did it with a T-shaped stage erected directly above the orchestra. Berg’s Three Pieces, op. 6, which I have heard twice in Symphony Hall, most recently with an excellent performance directed by Levine (almost as excellent as the one I heard in during the Berg centenary in 1985, in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, directed by Abbado from memory) bring subscribers a second helping of the composer. I wrote the long program notes in the booklets for all of these performances, so I hope somebody reads them, especially the conductors. [continued…]

Juneteenth is our newest national holiday, signed into law yesterday by President Biden after passing the Senate. It commemorates a starting point, but nowhere near the finish line, for true equality of all Americans. Juneteenth is the first new U.S. federal holiday since the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III writes, “Juneteenth holds particular significance for our military. It marks the date in 1865 – 2+ years after the Emancipation Proclamation – when Union, led by U.S. Army Major General Granger, issued General Order No. 3, informing the people of Texas that “all slaves are free.” Massachusetts made it a state holiday last July, and the Commonwealth Museum in Dorchester has just opened an exhibit HERE displaying fourteen related documents from 164-1865. Among them are an order from the Massachusetts Adjutant General announcing the emancipation proclamation, the act by the Massachusetts Legislature ratifying the 13^th Amendment that ended slavery in America, and a letter from Frederick Douglass.

[continued…]

This morning, Boston Symphony Orchestra announces its coming season, September 30^th – April 30^th, and the reopening of Symphony Hall to concertgoers, enthusiastically welcoming audiences back for the first time since March 2020. Click HERE for the calendar.

In the opener, Nelsons shares the podium with John Williams, and the spotlight with Anne-Sophie Mutter, the soloist in Williams’s Violin Concerto no. 2, Beethoven’s Consecration of the House overture, and the BSO signature work, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra will fill out the concert.

Nelsons, the Ray And Maria Stata music director, had this to say: 

“The BSO’s 2021-’22 season at Symphony Hall will be a great celebration, marking the return to concert life and the reunion with our beloved music community. We have all been waiting for this moment for a very long time. [continued…]

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced last Friday, with many honors for Boston-based journalists and Tania León (b. in Cuba, 1943) winning the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her New York Philharmonic commission Stride.

The 15-minute orchestral showpiece premiered at David Geffen Hall on February 13, 2020; it is the second piece to be premiered from the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19, which commissions 19 women to compose works marking the centenary of the 19^th Amendment (which gave American women the right to vote). HERE. For short interviews with the composer, to see the prize-winning work in rehearsal, click HERE.

Pianist Jihye Chang, a passionate champion of new music, played Léon’s Tumbao (2005) at BoCo’s Seully Hall last year. [BMInt review HERE]

The Boston Art Song Society presented her five Atwood Songs this March, HERE, and the socially distanced NEC Philharmonia, directed by Tristan Rais-Sherman just played her Indígena (1991) in Jordan Hall last month HERE. [continued…]

Recent prospectuses from Boston Baroque [HERE] and the Celebrity Series [HERE] carry both direct salutary messages and implied depressing news for the resumption of in-person concert life next season. Yes, Anne Sofie von Otter, Brooklyn Rider, Danish String Quartet, Emanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma and like celebrities will be making welcome reappearances. And yes, Boston Baroque will bring back Handel’s Royal Fireworks and Messiah — but, in the latter case, to a recording studio rather than Jordan Hall. Covid protocols and/or covid angst remain potent; the double whammy forces some presenters to engage alternative venues.

How depressing that Jordan Hall, Sanders Theater, and Kresge Auditorium, upon orders from their parent institutions, have absented themselves from outside presenters’ concerts for another season. NEC, Harvard, and MIT apparently have concluded that their students’ health requires this. As of yesterday, MIT, for instance, continues to restrict access to campus buildings to members of their community who are “authorized to access campus using Covid Pass, with regular testing and attestation required.”  And even though these restrictions may lift before the fall, booking logistics mean many favorite halls will remain out of reach to presenters.

Beyond the various churches in which concerts sometimes take place, only Symphony Hall, Berklee Performance Center, and Longy’s Pickman Hall have chosen to welcome concerts by outside presenters.

President Karen Zorn told BMInt: “Longy has upheld its agreement for space with the Celebrity Series. They have their usual access to Pickman for the upcoming year. In fact, we even offered them additional space during the pandemic. We think that presenting organizations are an important part of the artistic ecosystem and we have worked hard to be a good partner throughout this whole pandemic ordeal. [continued…]

Just as the reopening from the pandemic begins, Boston Lyric Opera will debut perhaps the most fully realized covid-coping online production we have yet screened. The company’s eight-part miniseries desert in begins its serialization on June 3^rd via BLO’s operabox.tv through branded apps on the Apple, Google, Amazon, and Roku platforms. Seven subsequent episodes will appear throughout the month. By July the entire set can be binged.

No mere shrunken adaptation of some predictable grand opera, desert in places viewers within surrealistically louche and fashionably transgressive stories of the “romances, shamanic rituals, and a roiling spiritual world at a handsomely imagined motel.”

The co-production with Long Beach Opera looks like a clever amalgam of Menotti tv operas, MGM musicals, and Breaking Bad. Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, soprano Talise Trevigne, baritone Davone Tines, and cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond headline a diverse cast of actors and singers. Led by Pulitzer winner Ellen Reid, eight composers set interlocking stories from rising and veteran screenwriters headed by lauded playwright christopher oscar peña. A team of directors realized the visual world imagined by opera and film director James Darrah. The complete show details are HERE.

BMInt discussed the production with BLO Music Director David Angus. [continued…]

The David Elliott Memorial Orgy (1942-2020), so greatly acclaimed when first broadcast over WHRB on December 24, 2020, will repeat this Friday from 10 am to 8 pm. The Orgy commemorates the 58 years David served as voice of Harvard Radio, and weaves together iconic and beloved moments at WHRB that tell a story of the station’s longtime mentor, host, and friend. Listeners and WHRB alumni (“ghosts”) also comment throughout. The Orgy is in nine sections: Early Years, Classical Music Relations, WHRB Historian and Community Keeper, Harvard Broadcasts, Special Programs, Love of Opera, and Holiday Broadcasts. Again, the repeat broadcast of this memorial is slated for Friday, May 28 from 10 am to 8 pm on WHRB, 95.3 FM and streaming HERE.

[continued…]

Colleges and conservatories still may offer courses on Harmony (as distinguished from Counterpoint), or more likely “theory” — but music students anywhere are very lucky if they get more than one full year of written “theory” of any kind, and harmony might be a part of that. I had two full years of Harmony in college and have made a career studying it ever since; yet when, in 1978, I revised Walter Piston’s classic textbook, Harmony, after his death, my friend Arthur Komar, a Schenker theorist (he wrote a short and crystalline book, Theory of Suspensions), asked me, “Why beat a dead horse?” Well, there are a few reasons. What I offer here is that harmony involves specific entities, which actually can exist as musical quantities and not mere abstract concepts. [continued…]

The Methuen Memorial Music Hall, home of The Great Organ, America’s first concert organ, is celebrating two milestones this month. May marks the 75^th anniversary of the 1946 acquisition and incorporation of the hall as a nonprofit educational and cultural center. And on May 19^th, Michael Hey, associate Director of Music at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC, and a well-known concert organist, will play the first program in the Music Hall’s 75^th summer recital series. Recitals will be live streamed on YouTube each Wednesday evening at 7:30 PM EDT through August 25^th HERE.

Over the years, the organ and the Hall have had their ups and downs. Commissioned at the behest of members of the Harvard Musical Association for the Boston Music Hall, the organ was built by E. F. Walcker & Cie. of Ludwigsburg, Germany and inaugurated to great acclaim in 1863. Newspapers throughout the country reported its, arrival, installation, and dedication [See Dwight’s “Journal of Music” Account HERE]. But as often happens, today’s musical celebrity becomes tomorrow’s musical has-been. [continued…]

We identify with readers for whom Handel’s (then Händel’s) La Resurrezione evokes no associations. According to the Emmanuel Music publicist, the brilliant oratorio, or semi-opera, which traces the mystical events that occurred between Good Friday and Easter, premiered during the Easter season of 1708 in Rome in an elaborate staging: “The young Saxon Georg Friederich Händel dazzled with his colorful orchestration and vivid storytelling.”

On May 15^th, YouTube will begin transmitting stage director Nathan Troup’s theatrical resurrection from the dark recesses and commanding architecture of Boston’s Emmanuel Church. Read Ellen Harris’s informative essay “An Easter Extravaganza” about the work and the composer in the era before he lost his umlaut. Emmanuel Music’s YouTube link is HERE.

BMInt posed some questions for Emmanuel Music’s artistic director and conductor Ryan Turner and the staging and video director Nathan Troup.

FLE: Why did you choose this particular piece, and how did you work with Nathan Troup in coming up with a dramatic visual concept.

RT: Ten years ago Michael Beattie introduced me to this early Handel oratorio. I’ve always been enamored with Handel’s works from his time in Italy when he was in his 20s — such imagination exploration, testing the limits of his performers and creating orchestral colors unheard of. Oddly enough, with no chorus, it always seemed too modest for our audiences. In the pandemic, it feels extravagant! [continued…]

Today brought news of the death at age 94 of Martin Bookspan. Fresh out of Harvard and after three years announcing on the University’s WHRB, he became a founding announcer for a newly established classical radio station in Boston. I first heard him there in my seventh or eighth year.

For the price of a return stamp, the burgeoning WBMS would mail a tiny program listing, printed one or two weeks ahead; that’s how I learned of the broadcast of Firebird that frightened me [see my posting HERE]; I was also intrigued by a mysterious listing, something by Ravel I didn’t even know about: “Concerto for the Left Hand.” I won’t forget a piano melody that introduced Martin Bookspan’s hours on WBMS; he didn’t identify it, and it wasn’t until years later that I finally learned it was: Beethoven’s Bagatelle in E-flat Major, op. 33, no. 1. But that gentle, authoritative announcer’s voice remained in my memory for more than 70 years as a firm anchor to classical listening. Station WBMS didn’t last very  long in the competitive AM market, maybe up to about 1949 when LP records started appearing; Bookspan himself eventually went to New York, WQXR, and “Live From Lincoln Center.” In the 1990s I met him in person, at the New York Philharmonic, or at a meeting of the American Musicological Society. He smiled warmly when I recalled WBMS. Then I reminded him that my father-in-law, Wilfred Mirsky, had been his Hebrew-school teacher; he hadn’t forgotten that, either. “Brought classical music to many,” the Globe’s obit headline read, and for some, that meant the beginning of a career as well.

[continued…]

Seventeen moderate-length outdoor concerts, running from July 4-20 at historic mansions and venues in Newport, including the Breakers, Bellevue House, Castle Hill Inn, the Chanler at Cliff Walk, King Park, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center, Norman Bird Sanctuary, and Rough Point, will constitute the 53^rd season for the festival. The complete listing follows BMInt’s interview with the new executive and artistic director Gillian Friedman Fox.

FLE: Many of our readers go way back with the Newport Music Festival Concerts, for so many years dominated by the Malkovich family; it’s interesting that only now, some four years after Mark IV retired, do I see their imprint fading. Every concert used to have a cutesy title like Bach to Bach or Gesualdo Saves. I find it refreshing that you don’t seem to be going for that marketing device.

GFF: We’re looking to define the Newport Music Festival with, for want of a better word, an added level of sophistication while still being approachable. But in terms of marketing, for a really long time we were a festival for those in the know. Now we’re looking to be a lot more equitable in the way that we market and reach out.  We plan to make sure that folks from all over the greater Boston area, and indeed, all over the country are aware what we’re doing and find it interesting enough to travel for it.

There was a time, maybe 20 or 30 years ago, when the New York Times was covering Newport, in part because a lot of the concerts introduced famous Eastern European artists. There was a buzz about these discoveries. Mark Malkovich III had his coterie of fans and his cohort of artists, and he also cared a lot about unearthing unusual and forgotten repertoire.  But there were multiple audiences at Newport concerts: there were the tourists who just came to see the houses and lined up to buy tickets on the actual concert days, there were elders bused in from assisted living facilities, and there were the cognoscenti. So you had three or four completely different audiences with different expectations and different levels of sophistication.  Does that still obtain? Apparently, you are less interested in putting forward unusual repertoire and having quite so much control over programming.
[continued…]

Notwithstanding that Beethoven had mounted a successful and indeed monumental challenge to the fugal legacy of J. S. Bach, the fugue as a musical genre — we can even call it a form — was already rapidly dying off as a subject of interest for composers by 1800, except perhaps in sacred choral music, where the form remained viable (the final “Amen” in the Gloria of the Mass Ordinary, for example). Beethoven’s fugues in op. 106 (“Hammerklavier”), 110, 120 (Ninth Symphony), and 131 are all triumphal, decisively enlarging the scope of what Bach left, but they are also culminant. Nobody else dared to try very much for a while, at least, in the 19^th century. Schubert occasionally indulged — in the Mass in A-flat Major, D 678 (two versions), in the finale of the F Minor Fantasy for piano four hands, D 940, and a few isolated examples which are all rather dry and “old style,” notably in the clumsy fugato finale of the otherwise magnificent “Wanderer” Fantasy, op. 15, D 760 — an example of “a composer who has lost his way,” as Robert Bailey put it. [continued…]

Melodic variation happens all the time; it’s one of the basic necessities in music. But variation in the sense of “theme and variations” is more particular. “Variations,” plural, began with the diferencias of the 16^th-century Spanish lutenists, and grew from there to be a mainstay form of Baroque and Classical composers, fading out (with many wonderful exceptions) after Beethoven. When we hear the term “theme and variations” today we mostly are aware of variations in discrete sections, individual short pieces that have distinct starts and stops, beginnings and endings, but that come in groups. There are also so-called “continuous variations” — passacaglias and chaconnes, that imply a “ground bass” (Monteverdi: Zefiro torna) even if the repeated theme isn’t always in the bass (Bach: Passacaglia for organ in C minor). And then there are “symphonic variations” — Franck and Dvořák gave us examples with that title — in which the variation structure isn’t periodic, and the theme or themes may appear and disappear; in such cases the normal ideas of variation forms are blended with principles of thematic development. (Compare also the unique example of variation form in the first movement of Goldmark’s “Rustic Wedding” Symphony — may it become as well known again as it was a century ago — and the theme appears cyclically transformed in later movements.) [continued…]

Schubert composed his Gesänge zur Feier des heiligen Opfers der Messe, D 872, better known in English as his “German Mass,” in late summer or fall 1827, at the behest of the poet, Johann Philipp Neumann, who paid him 100 florins to create a work for congregational singing as an adjunct to the spoken Latin Mass in Catholic liturgy. Schubert wrote it for SATB chorus with accompaniment of a wind orchestra. The fourth movement, an Offertory just one page long, offers a neat microcosm of elementary tonality very like the “familiar style” of Protestant hymns later in the century. The text of the first stanza translates thus: [continued…]

BMInt alerted readers HERE a couple of weeks ago to the salutary fact that Tanglewood is planning to operate this summer, albeit for half its usual run. Now we’re pleased to go straight to the lede: Click HERE for the just-released calendar in easy-to-read form.

Once again BMInt’s resident curmudgeon rants on rep. But first comes Andris Nelsons’s edited welcome. [continued…]

The Brandeis Music Department has sent a statement which BMInt reprints here.

Martin Boykan, a world-renowned composer, inspirational teacher, published author and prodigious performer, died peacefully at his home on March 6^th at the age of 89, leaving his wife, Susan Schwalb, and his niece Ina Pour El and her family. His funeral took place in New York City on March 8, 2021.

Born in 1931, Boykan studied composition with Walter Piston, Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith, and piano with Eduard Steuermann. He received a BA from Harvard University, 1951, and an MM from Yale University, 1953. In 1953–55 he was in Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship, and upon his return founded the Brandeis Chamber Ensemble whose other members included Robert Koff (Juilliard Quartet), Nancy Cirillo (Wellesley), Eugene Lehner (Kolisch Quartet) and Madeline Foley (Marlborough Festival). This ensemble performed widely with a repertory divided equally between contemporary music and the tradition. At the same time Boykan appeared regularly as a pianist with soloists such as Joseph Silverstein and Jan de Gaetani. In 1964–65, he was the pianist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. [continued…]

BMInt: We gather that you have been depositing rediscoveries from your moldy archives onto YouTube to share of some interesting material that might not otherwise emerge from obscurity…undeserved, from what we have heard in the case of your mastertape of a cassette-only release from 1978.

FLE: The foundational story to my production of “Harmonium and Company” goes back several decades to my moderate case of arrested-development-organ-nut syndrome. After a very brief stint with organ builder Charles Fisk, I began to accumulate organ parts, including at least one, complete 35-rank instrument; and I almost took a misguided first step to lease a very large disused power plant as my private concert hall.

What stopped you?

Somehow, I came to my senses before dipping into principal. That meant selling and/or abandoning tons of useless accumulated paraphernalia…save for a four-stop partially self-built baroque positive set up in my livingroom.

I bet that sounded pretty bad. [continued…]

To assist readers in profiting from this short essay in the form of a harmony lesson, we have embedded the printed score with a borrowed LDS accompaniment on an inexpressive e-piano. (If you feel the need, take 120 seconds to review “Holiday Harmony Assignment” of December 31^st last.) [continued…]

We won’t have to make do with a virtual shed and lawn this summer! After enduring a 16-month interregnum of hermetic distancing while making do with the virtuous virtual along with their subscribers, the BSO Trustees voted unanimously yesterday to reopen Americas’ preeminent summer music festival to living, breathing, if distanced outdoor or semi-outdoor crowds. Though we will have to wait until April 8^th for program details, we take pleasure in management’s revelation that the six weeks between July 9^th and August 16^th will include a Saturday-evening and Sunday-afternoon Boston Symphony Orchestra series; a Friday-evening series featuring recitals, special guest artists and ensembles, and the Boston Pops; and a Monday-evening Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra series. The Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, the BSO’s acclaimed summer music academy, will be featured in chamber music performances on Sunday mornings and Monday afternoons. The Tanglewood Learning Institute—launched in summer 2019—will also offer a variety of programs in summer 2021. In addition, Tanglewood will present family, community, and education programs, as well as maintain many of its free and reduced-price ticket programs for the upcoming season. Live video performance streams will be available throughout the summer on BSO NOW. And touchless ticketing starts on May 17^th. [continued…]