For the last couple of weeks, Joshua and I have been listening to four discs of music that we thought would be appropriate for the season—although only one of the discs genuinely is a Christmas album.
“The Mozart Album”, performed by the Canadian Brass, on the Sony label
Brahms’s String Quintets, performed by The Boston Symphony Chamber Players, on the Nonesuch label
Martinu’s Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6, performed by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra under Claus Peter Flor, on the RCA label
“Christmas With Thomas Hampson”, performed by Thomas Hampson and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra under Hugh Wolff, on the Teldec label
The Canadian Brass made a number of excellent recordings. Josh and I enjoy listening to recordings featuring brass instruments (Josh was a trumpet player in high school) and we especially have enjoyed listening to Canadian Brass albums.
Hearing the Canadian Brass in concert was never much fun—the group’s concerts were devoted to shtick as much as music—but the Canadian Brass produced a substantial number of decent recordings, many of which featured serious music in serious performances. In the last couple of years, Josh and I have listened to the ensemble’s brass arrangement of Bach’s “The Art Of The Fugue”, a surprisingly successful performance in a surprisingly successful arrangement, and we have listened to the ensemble’s arrangement of music by Fats Waller, one of the group’s crossover recordings that actually is a pure delight.
“The Mozart Album” is excellent, which somewhat surprised me. Every time I hear a Canadian Brass album for the first time, I always worry that the brass timbres will become tiresome and that the brass arrangements will not work. Generally—but not always—the first audition proves my concerns unwarranted, and such was the case with “The Mozart Album”. The disc’s arrangements are imaginative and suitable for the material selected, and the order of the works on the disc makes for a very pleasurable and satisfying listening program.
Many of Mozart’s best-known works receive attention: the Adagio And Fugue In C Minor; the Ave Verum Corpus; the Alleluia from Exsultate Jubilate; the Rondo Alla Turca from Piano Sonata No. 11; the Tuba Mirum from the Requiem; “The Magic Flute” Overture; and three of Mozart’s most popular opera arias. A couple of less-known pieces are thrown in, too: a composition Mozart wrote for mechanical organ; and an excerpt from a piano duo.
It all works splendidly. It makes a festive album for December listening.
The disc of Brahms’s String Quintets offers capable performances. The Boston Symphony Chamber Players do not attempt “deep” performances of these two late Brahms masterpieces. The readings are largely objective, and somewhat dispassionate, even clinical. By no standard are these great Brahms performances. The playing also lacks tonal allure and glamour, which I find necessary in most of the chamber music of Brahms.
There is something very life-affirming about the music of Bohuslav Martinu, which is why Josh and I elected to listen to the disc of the last two Martinu symphonies. Martinu’s music has great vivacity and joyousness. It is also characterized by rhythmic vitality and propelling energy, to which is added a deeply-satisfying songful quality. Martinu was a major composer, and a major symphonist. It is regrettable that his music is so seldom programmed outside Central Europe.
All six of Martinu’s symphonies were written during his twelve-year sojourn in the United States. His first four symphonies were written during the war years. The Fifth, completed in 1946, came immediately afterward. The Sixth, titled “Fantaisies Symphoniques”, was completed in 1953, on commission from the Boston Symphony as part of that orchestra’s 75th anniversary commemoration.
Both the Symphony No. 5 and the Symphony No. 6 are major works, displaying the composer in peak form. Much incident is packed into each work’s thirty-minute duration, and yet the works are beautifully-shaped and perfectly-proportioned. These works should be far more widely-known.
The Flor performances are good ones. Recorded in 1987 and 1988, they remain among the finest versions available.
Flor is an excellent Martinu conductor. Many knowledgeable persons consider Flor to be the finest living exponent of Martinu’s music. Flor recorded a substantial quantity of Martinu’s music in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s before he lost his recording contract with RCA, and Flor’s Martinu discs, without exception, are uniformly fine. Happily, most of Flor’s RCA Martinu recordings may be tracked down, whether or not they are—technically—in the active catalog. This is no longer true, alas, for many of Flor’s other RCA recordings.
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Flor was the conductor of the future among the younger generation of German conductors. He obtained the most prestigious engagements—Berlin Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra—and appeared in the most prestigious venues all over the world.
The emergence of fellow German conductor Christian Thielemann ended Flor’s brief period of major engagements and recognition. As soon as Thielemann came onto the scene, Flor had to take a back seat to Thielemann’s popularity and prominence—and not only in Germany, but elsewhere as well.
This phenomenon—a younger conductor replacing an older compatriot conductor in the public’s affection—often happens among conductors of European nationalities. The emergence of Simon Rattle in Britain shoved Andrew Davis to the sidelines. The emergence of Valery Gergiev in Russia affected the career of Gennady Rozhdestvensky. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s rise in Finland corresponded with a decline in demand for the services of Paavo Berglund.
Flor is no longer heard frequently in major venues. This is regrettable, because he is a major talent. He needs to be heard much more widely in the United States.
As Christmas albums go, “Christmas With Thomas Hampson” is not too bad, but primarily because standards in the genre are so low.
Hampson is in very good voice—the recording was made and released in 1991—and he has the advantage of excellent support from the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Hugh Wolff.
At the same time, Hampson tends to be in love with his own voice, and this tendency sometimes comes across too blatantly in his recordings—and such is the case here. Much of the time, Hampson seems to be crooning to himself on his Christmas album, caught up in the beauty of his own sound. It can be off-putting.
Around the time this recording was released, Minnesota Public Television aired a documentary about the making of this recording. Substantial footage from the recording sessions was included in the documentary, and that footage was pretty unappealing: Hampson was having a romance with himself during the recording sessions, making goo-goo eyes to the microphone and making all sorts of ridiculous hand and arm gestures while he sang. I was only a kid at the time it was aired, but I remember that documentary vividly. While I watched it, I did not know whether to laugh or to vomit.
The purely aural results of those sessions are not quite so creepy, but nonetheless I cannot bring myself to like this album.
The traditional German Christmas songs, of which there are several on the recording, receive the finest performances. Hampson has always been a fine exponent of German lieder, and it shows here.
The more popular and more contemporary numbers are less fine. Hampson goes for “dreaminess” in the American popular numbers, and the dreaminess comes across as fake. In fact, it curdles. Hampson’s version of “White Christmas” is particularly annoying.
I did not care for the sequence of the numbers on the disc. The producer apparently was seeking maximum variety from number to number, and the end result was an unsuccessful hodgepodge. Traditional Anglican carols, German Christmas songs, French Christmas songs, popular American Christmas songs, a number from “The Messiah”: all were thrown around at random, proceeding from Handel to Irving Berlin to Gounod to “Go Tell It On The Mountain” to Praetorius without coherent order. We found the programmed sequence irritating, and had to shuffle the program after the first couple of listens.
The arrangements were the work of American composer Thomas Pasatieri. I thought Pasatieri’s orchestrations might be the best thing about the disc, but the orchestrations were completely unimaginative. This surprised me, because Pasatieri is a very skilled composer.
Perhaps his remit required him to produce orchestrations that were bland.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Unlearning Gerald Gunther's Learned Hand
When I was an undergrad, I read a collection of essays by Learned Hand. I do not recall which particular collection I read—there are several—but I do recall, vividly, Hand’s excellent essay on the four necessary sources of law.
One of those necessary sources is Natural Law, or what Hand termed “Super Source”. A law not rooted in Natural Law inevitably weakens the moral authority of the society that enacts such a law, as Hand pointedly noted. This truism—remarkably, not addressed by other noted American jurists—had never before come to my attention (I was twenty years old when I read the essay, and I had never given much thought to the field of jurisprudence). At the time, I thought Hand’s essay was profound. I shall have to seek out the essay in order to read it again soon, because I am not sure I would now accord the same profundity to anything Hand wrote.
Any change in sentiment on my part would have to be blamed, to some degree, on Gerald Gunther’s “Learned Hand: The Man And The Judge”, which I have just completed reading.
Gunther’s book was not written for a wide audience. Devoting hundreds of pages to the minutiae of life on the appellate bench as well as to Hand’s legal opinions, “Learned Hand: The Man And The Judge” is of interest primarily to lawyers, jurists, law professors and legal historians. I cannot imagine the book having appeal beyond those constituent groups.
Hand’s life was not particularly eventful. Hand was a lawyer and a judge, and seemed to enjoy few pursuits outside his chosen field of work. Nothing particularly notable happened to him in the course of a very long life. He cultivated few interests outside the law. He was not what we would consider “a cultivated man”. He lacked, grievously, the gift for friendship. He was a remote figure to his wife and daughters. He apparently was prone to pettiness. He was not good with money. He was not even a particularly successful advocate during his years in private practice, never enjoying the recognition and financial rewards that flow to those at the top of the profession.
Nonetheless, what was interesting about Hand was not the tissue of biographical event that marked his life. What was interesting about Hand was his mind. In the legal arena, Hand had a remarkable clarity of thought, and the ability to capture and set forth that clarity of thought in writing (two entirely discrete sets of skills). These skills made him famous during his lifetime. For decades, the name Learned Hand was synonymous with the concepts of probity, fairness, due process . . .and “the rare ability to clear out the underbrush in a forest of sticky legal thickets”, as one of my former law professors liked to say.
Hand’s celebrity did not long withstand his passing in 1961. He is largely forgotten now.
Today, lawyers know Hand—if they know him at all—as a name from the past, remembered above all as the most celebrated American jurist of the Twentieth Century never to obtain an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Historians associate the name Learned Hand with a widely-hailed speech Hand gave in Central Park during World War II. Persons who are not lawyers or historians know the name Learned Hand not at all.
Gunther’s book is unlikely to change this regrettable state of affairs, because only persons fiercely determined to read in depth about Hand—and prepared to wade through lengthy extracts from innumerable legal opinions—will be able to make it through Gunther’s very long and very tedious volume.
Gunther, now deceased, was a deadly writer. He was entirely incapable of crafting graceful and lucid prose in the English language (Gunther was born in Germany in 1927; he came to the U.S. at age eleven and later was to change his name from Gutenstein to Gunther). His sole lasting work was a casebook, "Constitutional Law", first published in the 1960’s and still in use more than four decades later. (Of course, "Constitutional Law" is a compendium of key legal decisions. As such, it relies upon the words of others, not upon Gunther’s own words.)
Gunther had a checkered career. He was a late convert to the law. After graduating from law school, he was one of the last law clerks of Learned Hand, who at the time had already assumed senior status and was no longer a full-time jurist.
Gunther taught at Columbia briefly, and moved to Stanford in the early 1960’s, a time at which Stanford was not yet a nationally-recognized law school. From his perch at Stanford, Gunther lobbied behind the scenes, mercilessly, for three decades, for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. No one took him seriously in these endeavors, as Gunther was not remotely qualified for a seat on the highest court in the land. Nonetheless, Gunther declared himself, publicly, to be America’s Erasmus.
Gunther was also a bit of a gadfly, quite typical for one lacking a clear-eyed view of his own abilities. Gunther had the unfortunate habit of inserting himself into public controversies having nothing to do with Stanford, the law or himself. Gunther never saw a public forum or open microphone he did not instantly love. He was an object of scorn on more than once occasion, and from more than one quarter. One of his final writings was a New York Times piece in which he offered “advice” to the U.S. Supreme Court, advice that, happily, was not heeded.
One of the strangest incidents in Gunther’s academic career was his attempt to oust the President of Stanford University in the very early 1970’s. Gunther and a colleague, unsolicited, composed a paper critical of the University President and submitted it to the Stanford Board Of Trustees. Shortly thereafter, Stanford’s President stepped down.
Learned Hand clearly had made a great impression upon Gunther, because Gunther worked on his Hand biography for over twenty years. It was the major project of the last two decades of his academic life.
Alas, Hand’s life may be summarized in five sentences—“A New Englander through and through, Learned Hand, son of a lawyer, found his calling early in life. He was appointed to the Federal Bench at age 37 and remained there until his death 52 years later. He had a remarkable talent for imposing clarity upon complicated factual and legal situations. This gift for clarity made him one of America’s best-known judges. His decisions have been cited by other jurists for decades.”—yet Gunther gave himself the task of somehow stretching out the details of Hand’s life to a mind-numbing 818 pages.
Gunther accomplishes this feat primarily with legal opinions. Portions of dozens upon dozens of Hand’s 4000 judicial opinions are reprinted in Gunther’s biography. Even the lawyer’s eye quickly glazes over.
However, Gunther attempts to impose order upon this proliferation of opinion, looking for patterns and searching for a judicial philosophy—and this is precisely where Gunther’s book falls apart. Gunther’s analysis of Hand’s legal opinions is filtered through Gunther’s own peculiar opinions and beliefs, turning the legal philosophy of Hand into hash. Indeed, the book has far more to say about Gunther’s judicial philosophy than it has to say about Hand’s.
For a start, Gunther makes no mention of Hand’s greatest contribution to American jurisprudence: Hand’s formulation of tort negligence. Hand’s analysis is still in use today, and was certainly his most insightful, original and enduring contribution to the field of American law—and yet Hand’s tort analysis is utterly ignored (aside from a passing reference in the forward). Omitting Hand’s work in the field of tort is akin to writing a biography about Samuel Morse without once mentioning Morse’s invention of Morse Code.
The reason for this omission is clear: Gunther has no use for Law And Economics analysis, and addressing Hand’s tort work would require Gunther to step into a field of legal analysis with which he holds no sympathy and about which he lacks penetrating views.
Gunther is resolutely, even ruthlessly, anti-capitalist, planting a veritable minefield of explosive devices in his text whenever he has to deal with business, economics and money: “smug”, “narrow”, “shallow” and “hardened” are Gunther’s four favorite adjectives to describe capitalists whenever he is forced to write about the intersection of law and economic policy. Gunther uses those four adjectives endlessly. The world of business, in Gunther’s mind, is patently evil and should be wiped from the face of the earth.
Alas, having chosen to eliminate Hand’s tort work from Hand’s life, and having further chosen to pay short shrift to Hand’s pioneering work in the field of Commercial Law, Gunther has far slimmer pickings from which to chose in assembling and articulating a coherent Hand judicial philosophy—and, once again, the philosophy that emerges has far more to do with Gunther than it has to do with Hand. Indeed, to fashion Hand’s philosophy in order to parallel his own, Gunther has to rewrite history.
First, Gunther pretty much throws Hand’s philosophy of Judicial Restraint out the window. Hand’s seminal Harvard lectures on Judicial Restraint, for example, the result of a lifetime of thought and study, are ignored. Hand’s public criticism of Brown v. Board Of Education as a classic example of “judicial usurpation” is also downplayed (although Gunther is quick to inform the reader that Gunther himself wrote major portions of the Brown decision while he was a clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren). Gunther has to ignore such considerations because they do not comport with the fictional philosophy of Hand he has crafted.
Second, Gunther sets up an imaginary clash between the legal philosophies of Hand and Felix Frankfurter, comparing their written decisions on issue after issue and always finding Frankfurter to be on the losing side of the argument. Such a contrast is entirely specious. The two judges shared similar views far more often than they held opposing views and, in any case, the two judges served on different courts and heard different cases—and different TYPES of cases, no less. This use of Felix Frankfurter as a straw man is a most troubling device, coming, as it does, from a Professor Of Law who would chide first-year law students for erecting such straw-man arguments.
Third, Gunther is totally lost amid the fabric of American history. He makes a complete and unaccountable botch of the U.S. role in World War I, the causes of the worldwide Depression of the 1930’s, and the U.S. role in World War II. Gunther’s treatment of historical background material is shocking in its ignorance. Clearly, Gunther was anything but a well-read man.
Despite spending 64 years of his life in the U.S., Gunther was the rare foreigner who apparently was never able to grasp the essence of the United States Of America and its special and unique role in advancing liberty and opportunity. Instead, Gunther equates the U.S. with big business interests, and views big business as the dominant, even primal, force in American history. Gunther finds the bogeyman of big business lurking around every corner and hiding behind every bush, and at every turn he seizes upon his deep-seated need to thwart business interests with gusto. It colors every subject Gunther touches.
Because Hand did not share Gunther’s hatred of big business, Gunther has to ascribe it to him anyway. He does this by “grading” Hand’s decisions. Those decisions Gunther decides to be anti-big business are deemed “correct” and “thoughtful”. Those decisions Gunther decides to be pro-big business are the result of other factors: Hand’s reluctant acceptance of the votes of other judicial panel members, Hand not fully understanding the effects of his decision, or Hand simply having a bad day. Such nonsense is unworthy of a serious judicial biography.
Even were Gunther capable of keeping himself and his personal ideology out of the story, he was not a natural biographer. He clearly had no talent for the field. I doubt I have ever read a more poorly-written and more poorly-organized “serious” biography.
The only reason I kept going, picking the book up and putting it down over a period of six weeks, was my hope that, if I kept plugging along, things were bound to improve.
They did not.
At no time does Gunther succeed in bringing Hand to life. In Gunther’s telling, Hand is an inscrutable, one-dimensional jurisprudence machine, issuing opinions much like a factory produces parts or a meat plant produces sausages. Gunther’s Hand was industrious and diligent in churning out opinions, but otherwise without distinguishing characteristics. Gunther has no idea what motivated Hand, what gave Hand pleasure, what Hand disliked, why Hand never traveled, why Hand was unable to develop lasting friendships, and why Hand was a remote and mostly unsatisfactory husband and father.
In biography, great length is no substitute for insight. At the conclusion of 818 pages, the reader knows no more about Hand the individual than the reader knew on page one. However, by page 818, the reader knows quite a lot about Gunther, and Gunther’s legal thinking, judicial philosophy and political ideology. Given this, Gunther would have been far better off writing about his favorite subject, himself, rather than having a go at the life of someone else. Gunther’s tome will keep better authors and better thinkers away from the subject of Hand for another fifty years—and that is the genuine tragedy of Gunther’s book.
Otherwise, no damage has been done. No one outside the field will ever read the book, and those within the field will all too quickly recognize its biases and shortcomings, even assuming they persevere to the end, as I managed, stubbornly, to do.
For Gunther, it was a wasted twenty years, all in all. He would have been better off devoting those many years to another project.
It will be up to someone else at some future time to present the real story of the American Lord Mansfield. Meanwhile, Gunther’s volume will collect dust, unread, on library shelves.
One of those necessary sources is Natural Law, or what Hand termed “Super Source”. A law not rooted in Natural Law inevitably weakens the moral authority of the society that enacts such a law, as Hand pointedly noted. This truism—remarkably, not addressed by other noted American jurists—had never before come to my attention (I was twenty years old when I read the essay, and I had never given much thought to the field of jurisprudence). At the time, I thought Hand’s essay was profound. I shall have to seek out the essay in order to read it again soon, because I am not sure I would now accord the same profundity to anything Hand wrote.
Any change in sentiment on my part would have to be blamed, to some degree, on Gerald Gunther’s “Learned Hand: The Man And The Judge”, which I have just completed reading.
Gunther’s book was not written for a wide audience. Devoting hundreds of pages to the minutiae of life on the appellate bench as well as to Hand’s legal opinions, “Learned Hand: The Man And The Judge” is of interest primarily to lawyers, jurists, law professors and legal historians. I cannot imagine the book having appeal beyond those constituent groups.
Hand’s life was not particularly eventful. Hand was a lawyer and a judge, and seemed to enjoy few pursuits outside his chosen field of work. Nothing particularly notable happened to him in the course of a very long life. He cultivated few interests outside the law. He was not what we would consider “a cultivated man”. He lacked, grievously, the gift for friendship. He was a remote figure to his wife and daughters. He apparently was prone to pettiness. He was not good with money. He was not even a particularly successful advocate during his years in private practice, never enjoying the recognition and financial rewards that flow to those at the top of the profession.
Nonetheless, what was interesting about Hand was not the tissue of biographical event that marked his life. What was interesting about Hand was his mind. In the legal arena, Hand had a remarkable clarity of thought, and the ability to capture and set forth that clarity of thought in writing (two entirely discrete sets of skills). These skills made him famous during his lifetime. For decades, the name Learned Hand was synonymous with the concepts of probity, fairness, due process . . .and “the rare ability to clear out the underbrush in a forest of sticky legal thickets”, as one of my former law professors liked to say.
Hand’s celebrity did not long withstand his passing in 1961. He is largely forgotten now.
Today, lawyers know Hand—if they know him at all—as a name from the past, remembered above all as the most celebrated American jurist of the Twentieth Century never to obtain an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Historians associate the name Learned Hand with a widely-hailed speech Hand gave in Central Park during World War II. Persons who are not lawyers or historians know the name Learned Hand not at all.
Gunther’s book is unlikely to change this regrettable state of affairs, because only persons fiercely determined to read in depth about Hand—and prepared to wade through lengthy extracts from innumerable legal opinions—will be able to make it through Gunther’s very long and very tedious volume.
Gunther, now deceased, was a deadly writer. He was entirely incapable of crafting graceful and lucid prose in the English language (Gunther was born in Germany in 1927; he came to the U.S. at age eleven and later was to change his name from Gutenstein to Gunther). His sole lasting work was a casebook, "Constitutional Law", first published in the 1960’s and still in use more than four decades later. (Of course, "Constitutional Law" is a compendium of key legal decisions. As such, it relies upon the words of others, not upon Gunther’s own words.)
Gunther had a checkered career. He was a late convert to the law. After graduating from law school, he was one of the last law clerks of Learned Hand, who at the time had already assumed senior status and was no longer a full-time jurist.
Gunther taught at Columbia briefly, and moved to Stanford in the early 1960’s, a time at which Stanford was not yet a nationally-recognized law school. From his perch at Stanford, Gunther lobbied behind the scenes, mercilessly, for three decades, for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. No one took him seriously in these endeavors, as Gunther was not remotely qualified for a seat on the highest court in the land. Nonetheless, Gunther declared himself, publicly, to be America’s Erasmus.
Gunther was also a bit of a gadfly, quite typical for one lacking a clear-eyed view of his own abilities. Gunther had the unfortunate habit of inserting himself into public controversies having nothing to do with Stanford, the law or himself. Gunther never saw a public forum or open microphone he did not instantly love. He was an object of scorn on more than once occasion, and from more than one quarter. One of his final writings was a New York Times piece in which he offered “advice” to the U.S. Supreme Court, advice that, happily, was not heeded.
One of the strangest incidents in Gunther’s academic career was his attempt to oust the President of Stanford University in the very early 1970’s. Gunther and a colleague, unsolicited, composed a paper critical of the University President and submitted it to the Stanford Board Of Trustees. Shortly thereafter, Stanford’s President stepped down.
Learned Hand clearly had made a great impression upon Gunther, because Gunther worked on his Hand biography for over twenty years. It was the major project of the last two decades of his academic life.
Alas, Hand’s life may be summarized in five sentences—“A New Englander through and through, Learned Hand, son of a lawyer, found his calling early in life. He was appointed to the Federal Bench at age 37 and remained there until his death 52 years later. He had a remarkable talent for imposing clarity upon complicated factual and legal situations. This gift for clarity made him one of America’s best-known judges. His decisions have been cited by other jurists for decades.”—yet Gunther gave himself the task of somehow stretching out the details of Hand’s life to a mind-numbing 818 pages.
Gunther accomplishes this feat primarily with legal opinions. Portions of dozens upon dozens of Hand’s 4000 judicial opinions are reprinted in Gunther’s biography. Even the lawyer’s eye quickly glazes over.
However, Gunther attempts to impose order upon this proliferation of opinion, looking for patterns and searching for a judicial philosophy—and this is precisely where Gunther’s book falls apart. Gunther’s analysis of Hand’s legal opinions is filtered through Gunther’s own peculiar opinions and beliefs, turning the legal philosophy of Hand into hash. Indeed, the book has far more to say about Gunther’s judicial philosophy than it has to say about Hand’s.
For a start, Gunther makes no mention of Hand’s greatest contribution to American jurisprudence: Hand’s formulation of tort negligence. Hand’s analysis is still in use today, and was certainly his most insightful, original and enduring contribution to the field of American law—and yet Hand’s tort analysis is utterly ignored (aside from a passing reference in the forward). Omitting Hand’s work in the field of tort is akin to writing a biography about Samuel Morse without once mentioning Morse’s invention of Morse Code.
The reason for this omission is clear: Gunther has no use for Law And Economics analysis, and addressing Hand’s tort work would require Gunther to step into a field of legal analysis with which he holds no sympathy and about which he lacks penetrating views.
Gunther is resolutely, even ruthlessly, anti-capitalist, planting a veritable minefield of explosive devices in his text whenever he has to deal with business, economics and money: “smug”, “narrow”, “shallow” and “hardened” are Gunther’s four favorite adjectives to describe capitalists whenever he is forced to write about the intersection of law and economic policy. Gunther uses those four adjectives endlessly. The world of business, in Gunther’s mind, is patently evil and should be wiped from the face of the earth.
Alas, having chosen to eliminate Hand’s tort work from Hand’s life, and having further chosen to pay short shrift to Hand’s pioneering work in the field of Commercial Law, Gunther has far slimmer pickings from which to chose in assembling and articulating a coherent Hand judicial philosophy—and, once again, the philosophy that emerges has far more to do with Gunther than it has to do with Hand. Indeed, to fashion Hand’s philosophy in order to parallel his own, Gunther has to rewrite history.
First, Gunther pretty much throws Hand’s philosophy of Judicial Restraint out the window. Hand’s seminal Harvard lectures on Judicial Restraint, for example, the result of a lifetime of thought and study, are ignored. Hand’s public criticism of Brown v. Board Of Education as a classic example of “judicial usurpation” is also downplayed (although Gunther is quick to inform the reader that Gunther himself wrote major portions of the Brown decision while he was a clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren). Gunther has to ignore such considerations because they do not comport with the fictional philosophy of Hand he has crafted.
Second, Gunther sets up an imaginary clash between the legal philosophies of Hand and Felix Frankfurter, comparing their written decisions on issue after issue and always finding Frankfurter to be on the losing side of the argument. Such a contrast is entirely specious. The two judges shared similar views far more often than they held opposing views and, in any case, the two judges served on different courts and heard different cases—and different TYPES of cases, no less. This use of Felix Frankfurter as a straw man is a most troubling device, coming, as it does, from a Professor Of Law who would chide first-year law students for erecting such straw-man arguments.
Third, Gunther is totally lost amid the fabric of American history. He makes a complete and unaccountable botch of the U.S. role in World War I, the causes of the worldwide Depression of the 1930’s, and the U.S. role in World War II. Gunther’s treatment of historical background material is shocking in its ignorance. Clearly, Gunther was anything but a well-read man.
Despite spending 64 years of his life in the U.S., Gunther was the rare foreigner who apparently was never able to grasp the essence of the United States Of America and its special and unique role in advancing liberty and opportunity. Instead, Gunther equates the U.S. with big business interests, and views big business as the dominant, even primal, force in American history. Gunther finds the bogeyman of big business lurking around every corner and hiding behind every bush, and at every turn he seizes upon his deep-seated need to thwart business interests with gusto. It colors every subject Gunther touches.
Because Hand did not share Gunther’s hatred of big business, Gunther has to ascribe it to him anyway. He does this by “grading” Hand’s decisions. Those decisions Gunther decides to be anti-big business are deemed “correct” and “thoughtful”. Those decisions Gunther decides to be pro-big business are the result of other factors: Hand’s reluctant acceptance of the votes of other judicial panel members, Hand not fully understanding the effects of his decision, or Hand simply having a bad day. Such nonsense is unworthy of a serious judicial biography.
Even were Gunther capable of keeping himself and his personal ideology out of the story, he was not a natural biographer. He clearly had no talent for the field. I doubt I have ever read a more poorly-written and more poorly-organized “serious” biography.
The only reason I kept going, picking the book up and putting it down over a period of six weeks, was my hope that, if I kept plugging along, things were bound to improve.
They did not.
At no time does Gunther succeed in bringing Hand to life. In Gunther’s telling, Hand is an inscrutable, one-dimensional jurisprudence machine, issuing opinions much like a factory produces parts or a meat plant produces sausages. Gunther’s Hand was industrious and diligent in churning out opinions, but otherwise without distinguishing characteristics. Gunther has no idea what motivated Hand, what gave Hand pleasure, what Hand disliked, why Hand never traveled, why Hand was unable to develop lasting friendships, and why Hand was a remote and mostly unsatisfactory husband and father.
In biography, great length is no substitute for insight. At the conclusion of 818 pages, the reader knows no more about Hand the individual than the reader knew on page one. However, by page 818, the reader knows quite a lot about Gunther, and Gunther’s legal thinking, judicial philosophy and political ideology. Given this, Gunther would have been far better off writing about his favorite subject, himself, rather than having a go at the life of someone else. Gunther’s tome will keep better authors and better thinkers away from the subject of Hand for another fifty years—and that is the genuine tragedy of Gunther’s book.
Otherwise, no damage has been done. No one outside the field will ever read the book, and those within the field will all too quickly recognize its biases and shortcomings, even assuming they persevere to the end, as I managed, stubbornly, to do.
For Gunther, it was a wasted twenty years, all in all. He would have been better off devoting those many years to another project.
It will be up to someone else at some future time to present the real story of the American Lord Mansfield. Meanwhile, Gunther’s volume will collect dust, unread, on library shelves.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
A Splendid Week
The baby is home from the hospital and, as far as everyone in my family is concerned, Christmas has already arrived.
Of course, she doesn’t do anything but sleep, but nonetheless everyone is completely captivated by her. She has so many admirers that everyone has to take turns holding her and feeding her and rocking her. Between her parents, her grandparents and her uncle (who goes over to my parents’ house every night to visit her), she has people lined up to care for her.
My nephew finds her fascinating. He touches her tiny hands and feet, and kisses her on her forehead, and watches closely whenever she is given a bottle or has her diapers changed. While she sleeps, he has a tendency to want to go upstairs and check on her every five minutes—and, because so many others share this same tendency, someone generally takes him upstairs to look at her every five minutes or so.
This tendency will, no doubt, wear off in another few days, at least for him. I do not think, however, that this tendency will pass quite so quickly for my parents. This will almost certainly be the last time in their lives that they will have an infant living in their home, full-time, even if only for a couple of months, and I think they want to take advantage of the situation.
My nephew was surprised the first time he saw his sister. He thought she would be much larger, and be capable of moving around, and be able to play with him. As soon as he saw her, however, he immediately realized that such notions were unrealistic.
He is full of questions—“When will she grow?” and “Why doesn’t she have hair?” and “When will she talk?”—and he is displaying unending curiosity. He is very excited about her and pleased that she has arrived at last, but I don’t think he quite knows what to make of her yet.
I wish I could be there.
The dog is behaving very well. Apparently he senses or understands that babies are very fragile. For instance, he makes no attempt to jump up on whomever is holding the baby and he makes no attempt to jump on the arm of a rocking chair whenever someone is rocking the baby. He looks at her, and he has put his nose against the legs of her infant pajamas a few times, and he has even affectionately licked her pajama legs a couple of times, but his canine instincts must tell him that she is in need of lots of human care and protection right now and, consequently, he does not unduly interfere with whomever is caring for her moment by moment. He was much the same, I recall, when my nephew was an infant three Christmases ago.
It is probably all for the best that my sister-in-law has so many persons willing and able to help her with the baby right now, and assume all other work, too. She will be able to get plenty of rest, and not have to worry about meals, laundry, and countless other things in addition to taking care of two young ones. Right now she need devote her energies to my nephew and to my niece and to herself, and to nothing else. That is good.
My parents, with the help of my brothers, selected a Christmas tree last weekend, and erected and decorated it on Sunday afternoon and evening. They waited until my nephew woke from his nap before they started to decorate the tree, knowing he would find the whole process fascinating and would want to participate. My nephew, and everyone else, had a ball—my nephew was so excited he did not even want to stop in order to eat his dinner.
I don’t believe, however, that anyone has had much opportunity to make any other Christmas preparations. The arrival of the baby, and waiting for the arrival of the baby, have been the main events of the last ten days. No doubt things will get under way on the holiday front this weekend and next.
Tomorrow will be a very important day, because it will be my older brother’s birthday. He will be 34 years old tomorrow. My mother has planned a very special birthday dinner for tomorrow night, and I know he will be pleased.
It will provide a splendid conclusion for what has been a splendid week.
Of course, she doesn’t do anything but sleep, but nonetheless everyone is completely captivated by her. She has so many admirers that everyone has to take turns holding her and feeding her and rocking her. Between her parents, her grandparents and her uncle (who goes over to my parents’ house every night to visit her), she has people lined up to care for her.
My nephew finds her fascinating. He touches her tiny hands and feet, and kisses her on her forehead, and watches closely whenever she is given a bottle or has her diapers changed. While she sleeps, he has a tendency to want to go upstairs and check on her every five minutes—and, because so many others share this same tendency, someone generally takes him upstairs to look at her every five minutes or so.
This tendency will, no doubt, wear off in another few days, at least for him. I do not think, however, that this tendency will pass quite so quickly for my parents. This will almost certainly be the last time in their lives that they will have an infant living in their home, full-time, even if only for a couple of months, and I think they want to take advantage of the situation.
My nephew was surprised the first time he saw his sister. He thought she would be much larger, and be capable of moving around, and be able to play with him. As soon as he saw her, however, he immediately realized that such notions were unrealistic.
He is full of questions—“When will she grow?” and “Why doesn’t she have hair?” and “When will she talk?”—and he is displaying unending curiosity. He is very excited about her and pleased that she has arrived at last, but I don’t think he quite knows what to make of her yet.
I wish I could be there.
The dog is behaving very well. Apparently he senses or understands that babies are very fragile. For instance, he makes no attempt to jump up on whomever is holding the baby and he makes no attempt to jump on the arm of a rocking chair whenever someone is rocking the baby. He looks at her, and he has put his nose against the legs of her infant pajamas a few times, and he has even affectionately licked her pajama legs a couple of times, but his canine instincts must tell him that she is in need of lots of human care and protection right now and, consequently, he does not unduly interfere with whomever is caring for her moment by moment. He was much the same, I recall, when my nephew was an infant three Christmases ago.
It is probably all for the best that my sister-in-law has so many persons willing and able to help her with the baby right now, and assume all other work, too. She will be able to get plenty of rest, and not have to worry about meals, laundry, and countless other things in addition to taking care of two young ones. Right now she need devote her energies to my nephew and to my niece and to herself, and to nothing else. That is good.
My parents, with the help of my brothers, selected a Christmas tree last weekend, and erected and decorated it on Sunday afternoon and evening. They waited until my nephew woke from his nap before they started to decorate the tree, knowing he would find the whole process fascinating and would want to participate. My nephew, and everyone else, had a ball—my nephew was so excited he did not even want to stop in order to eat his dinner.
I don’t believe, however, that anyone has had much opportunity to make any other Christmas preparations. The arrival of the baby, and waiting for the arrival of the baby, have been the main events of the last ten days. No doubt things will get under way on the holiday front this weekend and next.
Tomorrow will be a very important day, because it will be my older brother’s birthday. He will be 34 years old tomorrow. My mother has planned a very special birthday dinner for tomorrow night, and I know he will be pleased.
It will provide a splendid conclusion for what has been a splendid week.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Welcome To The World
A girl in the family, at last!
Helena Anna, christened after your great-grandmother, welcome to the world!
We thought perhaps you were waiting for your father’s birthday to bless us, but you chose your great-grandmother’s birthday instead!
We wish you a life of great accomplishment, purest beauty and undying love.
Helena Anna, christened after your great-grandmother, welcome to the world!
We thought perhaps you were waiting for your father’s birthday to bless us, but you chose your great-grandmother’s birthday instead!
We wish you a life of great accomplishment, purest beauty and undying love.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Monday, December 01, 2008
Thanksgiving In Minnesota
Our Thanksgiving weekend in Minnesota was too short, but it made for a wonderful break for us.
Joshua and I were halfway expecting the new baby to arrive while we were in Minnesota, but the baby was not of a mind, apparently, to arrive simply to accommodate Josh and me. However, the baby will definitely arrive soon, so we shall certainly see the new baby at Christmas.
This Thanksgiving was the opposite of the last two years’ Thanksgivings.
The last two Thanksgivings, Josh and I were living in Minnesota and it was my brothers who had to travel to Minneapolis to spend the holidays. This year, my brothers are living in Minnesota and it was Josh and I who had to travel to the Twin Cities to spend the holidays.
The last two years, it was Josh and I who helped my parents with the Thanksgiving preparations. This year, it was my brothers who helped my parents with the pre-holiday work. I am glad my brothers were there to help out.
My older brother and his family are living at my parents’ house for a couple of months until they get their own place. One of the reasons for this is the new baby—my brother did not want my sister-in-law to concern herself with establishing a new household while she was late-term.
Everything is working out. My parents’ house is large, and everyone can spread out and stay out of each other’s way whenever he or she wants to. However, trying to avoid the dog is virtually impossible, because he makes continuous rounds to see what everybody is up to. The dog prefers that everyone remain in one room—preferably, the kitchen, where food is always available—so that he can keep an eye on everyone at the same time without having to run all over the place.
My nephew is settled in, and thinks of his grandparents’ house as his own house. He has always been happy at my parents’ house, because he gets lots of attention, can spread his toys out freely and widely, and has a ready playmate in the dog. He’s happy as a lark.
He also likes having a large backyard in which he can run around. My mother and my sister-in-law bundle him up each morning and each afternoon and take him outside for fifteen or thirty minutes at a time, depending upon how cold it is. He runs around, kicking his balls and playing with the dog. On weekends, his Dad and his Granddad take him outside and play games with him. He loves it.
We stayed in all day on Thanksgiving Day and, between meals, caught up. We had a big Thanksgiving breakfast as soon as Josh and I arrived. We had a late lunch of Dutch Chowder right before my nephew’s naptime. We had traditional Thanksgiving fare for dinner.
Despite our instructions, my mother had baked a cake in honor of my birthday and Josh’s birthday, which we celebrated over Thanksgiving Dinner. I think she made the cake primarily so that my nephew could have a cake and blow out candles.
He celebrated his third birthday a month ago. He likes birthdays, and he likes cakes, and he likes blowing out candles on birthday cakes, so he got more fun out of the cake than anyone else.
He also likes birthday presents, and he received birthday presents on Thanksgiving Day, too. My mother got him a few things so that he would not feel left out when Josh and I opened our gifts. In fact, he helped us open our gifts in addition to opening his own. For him, it was just like having a second birthday celebration a few short weeks after his own birthday celebration, and he had a marvelous time.
On Friday morning, my brothers and I had to go downtown to address some business matters and to sign some documents. We got home just in time to eat lunch with everyone else. When it came time for my nephew to take his nap, my brothers and Josh and I went out to play basketball and swim.
Josh and I did something unplanned on Friday night. The Minnesota Orchestra was playing over Thanksgiving weekend this year—something the orchestra does not often do—and we decided to attend Friday night’s concert almost at the last minute.
My parents were not planning on using their tickets for Friday night’s concert because everyone was home for the holidays. However, two works Josh particularly likes—Berlioz’s Harold In Italy and Elgar’s Enigma Variations—were on the program, and Josh and I decided very late in the afternoon to attend the concert, but only if my parents attended the concert, too. My parents love the Berlioz and the Elgar, and Josh and I believed, correctly, that my parents might decide to make use of their tickets if Josh and I went to the concert with them.
I’m glad we decided to go. It was a lovely concert. Everyone at Orchestra Hall seemed to be in a relaxed, mellow mood Friday night, including the members of the orchestra, who did not force the sound and who did not overstate things, as they are sometimes prone to do, especially when Osmo Vanksa is on the podium.
The conductor was Yan Pascal Tortelier, the French conductor and son of the late cellist, Paul Tortelier. Yan Pascal Tortelier is pretty second-rate, all in all, but it did not matter Friday night. The Minnesota Orchestra can play Harold In Italy and the Enigma Variations in its sleep, and I actually found Tortelier’s music-making sort of charming. He brought a French objectivity to both scores, he was relaxed but kept tempos moving, and he did not try to score interpretative points. He also has an indefinable French “flair”, which was welcome even in the Elgar, which at no point devolved into heaviness (indeed, the Elgar was better than the Berlioz). It was a very successful concert, a perfect program for a holiday weekend, and we had a lovely time and a lovely evening.
The program also included the Overture to Mozart’s “Abduction From The Seraglio” and Delius’s “The Walk To The Paradise Garden” from “A Village Romeo And Juliet”. Neither work contributed to the concert’s success. Both works should have been omitted from the program. The Mozart sounded as if it had not even been rehearsed.
On Saturday morning, my brothers and Josh and I went out early to play basketball again.
After an early lunch, we did something special Saturday afternoon: everyone but my older brother and my nephew went downtown to see The Guthrie Theater’s presentation of “Shadowlands”, William Nicholson’s mostly unremarkable play about C. S. Lewis and Joy Gresham.
The production and the performance were quite good. Simon Jones, a regular at The Guthrie (we last saw Jones at The Guthrie precisely a year ago in a Brian Friel play), portrayed C. S. Lewis. His performance alone made the trip downtown worthwhile. He is a splendid actor.
On Sunday, after church, my brothers and I took everyone to lunch at a nice restaurant in order to celebrate my parents’ wedding anniversary, which had occurred on Wednesday. We spent the remainder of the afternoon at home until it was time for Josh and me to go to the airport.
During the weekend, Josh and I decided how we shall spend our Christmas holidays. We shall fly to Oklahoma City on Christmas Eve, and remain in Oklahoma until December 28, on which day we shall fly to Minneapolis. Late in the afternoon on New Year’s Day, we shall return to Boston.
Happily, Christmas is only three weeks away!
Joshua and I were halfway expecting the new baby to arrive while we were in Minnesota, but the baby was not of a mind, apparently, to arrive simply to accommodate Josh and me. However, the baby will definitely arrive soon, so we shall certainly see the new baby at Christmas.
This Thanksgiving was the opposite of the last two years’ Thanksgivings.
The last two Thanksgivings, Josh and I were living in Minnesota and it was my brothers who had to travel to Minneapolis to spend the holidays. This year, my brothers are living in Minnesota and it was Josh and I who had to travel to the Twin Cities to spend the holidays.
The last two years, it was Josh and I who helped my parents with the Thanksgiving preparations. This year, it was my brothers who helped my parents with the pre-holiday work. I am glad my brothers were there to help out.
My older brother and his family are living at my parents’ house for a couple of months until they get their own place. One of the reasons for this is the new baby—my brother did not want my sister-in-law to concern herself with establishing a new household while she was late-term.
Everything is working out. My parents’ house is large, and everyone can spread out and stay out of each other’s way whenever he or she wants to. However, trying to avoid the dog is virtually impossible, because he makes continuous rounds to see what everybody is up to. The dog prefers that everyone remain in one room—preferably, the kitchen, where food is always available—so that he can keep an eye on everyone at the same time without having to run all over the place.
My nephew is settled in, and thinks of his grandparents’ house as his own house. He has always been happy at my parents’ house, because he gets lots of attention, can spread his toys out freely and widely, and has a ready playmate in the dog. He’s happy as a lark.
He also likes having a large backyard in which he can run around. My mother and my sister-in-law bundle him up each morning and each afternoon and take him outside for fifteen or thirty minutes at a time, depending upon how cold it is. He runs around, kicking his balls and playing with the dog. On weekends, his Dad and his Granddad take him outside and play games with him. He loves it.
We stayed in all day on Thanksgiving Day and, between meals, caught up. We had a big Thanksgiving breakfast as soon as Josh and I arrived. We had a late lunch of Dutch Chowder right before my nephew’s naptime. We had traditional Thanksgiving fare for dinner.
Despite our instructions, my mother had baked a cake in honor of my birthday and Josh’s birthday, which we celebrated over Thanksgiving Dinner. I think she made the cake primarily so that my nephew could have a cake and blow out candles.
He celebrated his third birthday a month ago. He likes birthdays, and he likes cakes, and he likes blowing out candles on birthday cakes, so he got more fun out of the cake than anyone else.
He also likes birthday presents, and he received birthday presents on Thanksgiving Day, too. My mother got him a few things so that he would not feel left out when Josh and I opened our gifts. In fact, he helped us open our gifts in addition to opening his own. For him, it was just like having a second birthday celebration a few short weeks after his own birthday celebration, and he had a marvelous time.
On Friday morning, my brothers and I had to go downtown to address some business matters and to sign some documents. We got home just in time to eat lunch with everyone else. When it came time for my nephew to take his nap, my brothers and Josh and I went out to play basketball and swim.
Josh and I did something unplanned on Friday night. The Minnesota Orchestra was playing over Thanksgiving weekend this year—something the orchestra does not often do—and we decided to attend Friday night’s concert almost at the last minute.
My parents were not planning on using their tickets for Friday night’s concert because everyone was home for the holidays. However, two works Josh particularly likes—Berlioz’s Harold In Italy and Elgar’s Enigma Variations—were on the program, and Josh and I decided very late in the afternoon to attend the concert, but only if my parents attended the concert, too. My parents love the Berlioz and the Elgar, and Josh and I believed, correctly, that my parents might decide to make use of their tickets if Josh and I went to the concert with them.
I’m glad we decided to go. It was a lovely concert. Everyone at Orchestra Hall seemed to be in a relaxed, mellow mood Friday night, including the members of the orchestra, who did not force the sound and who did not overstate things, as they are sometimes prone to do, especially when Osmo Vanksa is on the podium.
The conductor was Yan Pascal Tortelier, the French conductor and son of the late cellist, Paul Tortelier. Yan Pascal Tortelier is pretty second-rate, all in all, but it did not matter Friday night. The Minnesota Orchestra can play Harold In Italy and the Enigma Variations in its sleep, and I actually found Tortelier’s music-making sort of charming. He brought a French objectivity to both scores, he was relaxed but kept tempos moving, and he did not try to score interpretative points. He also has an indefinable French “flair”, which was welcome even in the Elgar, which at no point devolved into heaviness (indeed, the Elgar was better than the Berlioz). It was a very successful concert, a perfect program for a holiday weekend, and we had a lovely time and a lovely evening.
The program also included the Overture to Mozart’s “Abduction From The Seraglio” and Delius’s “The Walk To The Paradise Garden” from “A Village Romeo And Juliet”. Neither work contributed to the concert’s success. Both works should have been omitted from the program. The Mozart sounded as if it had not even been rehearsed.
On Saturday morning, my brothers and Josh and I went out early to play basketball again.
After an early lunch, we did something special Saturday afternoon: everyone but my older brother and my nephew went downtown to see The Guthrie Theater’s presentation of “Shadowlands”, William Nicholson’s mostly unremarkable play about C. S. Lewis and Joy Gresham.
The production and the performance were quite good. Simon Jones, a regular at The Guthrie (we last saw Jones at The Guthrie precisely a year ago in a Brian Friel play), portrayed C. S. Lewis. His performance alone made the trip downtown worthwhile. He is a splendid actor.
On Sunday, after church, my brothers and I took everyone to lunch at a nice restaurant in order to celebrate my parents’ wedding anniversary, which had occurred on Wednesday. We spent the remainder of the afternoon at home until it was time for Josh and me to go to the airport.
During the weekend, Josh and I decided how we shall spend our Christmas holidays. We shall fly to Oklahoma City on Christmas Eve, and remain in Oklahoma until December 28, on which day we shall fly to Minneapolis. Late in the afternoon on New Year’s Day, we shall return to Boston.
Happily, Christmas is only three weeks away!
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Two Concerts
Joshua and I attended two concerts this week.
On Wednesday night, on Joshua’s birthday, we attended a performance of the Dresden Staatskapelle, which appeared in Boston as part of its current American tour.
The Dresden Staatskapelle is my favorite European orchestra. It has a sound of the most extraordinary beauty and refinement, and its music-making personifies “Old World” traditions of warmth, understatement and urbaneness. Many knowledgeable persons consider the Dresden Staatskapelle to be Europe’s very finest orchestra. I have always preferred Dresden to Amsterdam, Berlin or Vienna (although the Viennese can be extraordinary when they want to be—which is not all that frequent).
I have never heard the Staatskapelle play in its own hall in Dresden, but prior to Wednesday night I had heard the orchestra play on tour on five previous occasions. I had heard the orchestra perform in Vienna, Munich, Paris, London and New York, and four of those five earlier concerts were red-letter events in my life (the New York concert was the sole disappointment).
The sound of the Dresden players is unique.
The strings carry a dark coloration, perhaps the darkest coloration among major orchestras anywhere. This specific coloration has been handed down through generations of Dresden players—it is inherently in the ears and minds of the Dresden musicians—and it may be heard on the orchestra’s recordings going back as far as the 1930’s. This highly-individual sound has never been successfully reproduced elsewhere. It may be heard in Dresden, and nowhere else.
One key to the Dresden sound is the prominence of the violas and cellos, which form the foundation of the orchestra’s string sound.
In U.S. orchestras, the sound is generally built from the first violins down through the rest of the string section. In the case of the Berlin Philharmonic, the sound is built from the basses up. In the case of the Vienna Philharmonic, the sound is built around Vienna’s golden-toned cellos.
Building Dresden’s string sound from the warmth and deep overtones of the viola and cello sections tempers any potential stridency or wiriness or glassiness from the violin section and obviates any heaviness that can result from bass-heavy orchestras such as Berlin (especially under conductors unversed in knowing how to handle that orchestra’s remarkable bass section).
Another key to the Dresden sound is that the string section produces a firm, rich sound without using the amount of vibrato common in American orchestras and in many European orchestras. Of the world’s great orchestras, Dresden uses the least amount of string vibrato, and this apparently has always been so. While other orchestras obtain a firm, rich string sound through the application of string pressure and the use of vibrato, Dresden obtains the same, if not more, firmness and richness with less string pressure and less vibrato. The result is a clean, transparent sound that never descends into thickness or gooiness, two hazards of orchestras in which string players are encouraged to lean on their strings. Indeed, the incredible transparency of the Dresden string sound, coupled with its incredible darkness, is one of the world’s most miraculous sounds, a sound that every lover of orchestras should experience at least once.
Another key to the Dresden sound is the lightness and subtlety of the orchestra’s attacks. The current international style of playing calls for orchestras to make sharp, pointed attacks. Anything less than sharp and pointed is deemed to be a demonstration of inferior ensemble. Dresden attacks demonstrate great unanimity of ensemble, to be sure, but Dresden attacks are soft, gently-articulated attacks. Such attacks always startle the listener in the early minutes of a Dresden concert, since listeners seldom hear anything so miraculous from other orchestras.
The woodwinds of the Dresden Staatskapelle also carry a dark coloration. This is especially true of the orchestra’s clarinets and oboes. The Dresden woodwind players maintain their dark colorations despite the fact that they, too, use far less vibrato than their American counterparts. That vibrato is shunned does not signify that the Dresden woodwinds lack richness of sound or insufficient color. To the contrary, Dresden has one of the world’s finest arrays of woodwinds, offering playing of great individuality and character, to which the players add bewitching timbres. No American orchestra currently maintains as fine a collection of woodwind players as Dresden.
The Dresden brass sound was surely created with the music of Anton Bruckner in mind. The Dresden brass lacks the bite and brightness cultivated among American brass players. Instead, the Dresden brass players offer a more rounded, warmer sound, a sound that almost glows with mellowness, richness and depth.
This is a glorious orchestra, with a glorious sound, and it was the sound itself that offered the chief pleasure Wednesday night.
The orchestra was not on peak form Wednesday night—grueling foreign tours surely extract a heavy toll on players—but the inherent sound of the orchestra was on display at all times even if the performance was not one for the ages.
There were two works on the program: Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Brahms’s Symphony No. 4.
The Beethoven was completely unremarkable.
The soloist, Rudolf Buchbinder, has a heavy keyboard touch, too heavy for my taste, and he is a serious pianist more than an inspired one. I have heard Buchbinder in performance many times, in recital and in concert, always in Central European repertoire, and I have never found him to be an especially interesting artist. His playing—and especially his phrasing—has always struck me as foursquare.
The conductor, Fabio Luisi, was a disappointment. Luisi is not a classicist, and he brought no insight whatsoever to Beethoven’s first great concerto (misnumbered, since Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 was actually written after the concerto labeled as No. 2). Luisi brought no style, no command of structure, and no sense of energy to the Beethoven. He supported Buchbinder, capably, but he gave Buchbinder absolutely nothing to play off or play against.
The Dresden wind players made the concerto worthwhile. It was a privilege to hear the Dresden winds play off each other in Beethoven’s wind passages, injecting a touch of life into the performance.
The Brahms was much better, which came as no surprise, since Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 has long been one of the orchestra’s prime touring pieces. For the last thirty years, the Dresden Staatskapelle has played the Brahms Fourth on tour more often than any other composition. The work shows off the blended, mellow Dresden sound to splendid effect, which may be why the orchestra uses the work as its calling card. (The kindly couple sitting next to Josh and me told us that, on its previous visit to Boston, in 2005, the Staatskapelle had also programmed the Brahms Fourth.)
Wednesday’s performance was perfectly acceptable—any music-lover would be immensely pleased to hear such a natural, instinctive performance from an American orchestra—but it was not a great performance. The sound of the orchestra again offered the chief pleasure.
Luisi is a competent Brahms conductor, but he is hardly a special one, let alone a great one. The music of Brahms was more natural to him than the music of Beethoven, but Luisi’s Brahms is not worthy to be set alongside the Brahms of Wilhelm Furtwangler, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer or Herbert Von Karajan. Indeed, I am not sure that Luisi’s Brahms measures up even to present-day conductors of Brahms such as Herbert Blomstedt, Christoph Dohnanyi, Bernard Haitink, or Kurt Masur, none of whom has ever revealed himself to be an especially notable or imaginative Brahms conductor.
The first movement was the low point of the Brahms.
Luisi mishandled the great climax of the first movement: Brahms’s grand restatement, in the coda, of the first main theme, with its powerful, organ-like sonority, achieved through immediate thematic restatement and resplendent orchestration, intended to mimic the echo effects produced by great organs in Gothic Cathedrals (Brahms had been studying, yet again, Bach scores at the time he composed this symphony). In Luisi’s hands, this powerful moment emerged as limp.
Luisi also mishandled the most magical moment of the first movement: the beginning of the recapitulation, when the strings steal in, almost imperceptibly, playing only the final four bars of the eight-bar main theme in triple pianissimo. This is one of the most inspired moments in all of Brahms, and it generally gives me chills—but this moment came and went on Wednesday night with no attendant frisson.
The Andante lacked focus, and meandered. The Scherzo always comes off, and it did on Wednesday night.
The Passacaglia was the finest moment for both conductor and players, and provided a fitting summation for the great work. The musicians built the tension and drama inherent in Brahms’s series of 30 variations (plus extended coda) in subtle but exquisite fashion, achieving a satisfying, even tragic, culmination before the music drew to its unsettling conclusion. For the first time all night, Luisi got the climax of the fourth movement right.
How much of this was due to the conductor and how much was due to the musicians I cannot say, having heard the Dresdeners offer an even finer account of the Passacaglia in the past. Nonetheless, the great Passacaglia, by itself, made the evening worthwhile.
After the conclusion of the Brahms, the orchestra added a substantial bonus: Weber’s greatest overture, “Oberon”, in which the orchestra offered its most splendid, joyous playing of the evening.
Until Wednesday night, Josh had never heard the Dresden Staatskapelle. Josh immediately appreciated the quality of the orchestra’s sound. Josh said that he preferred the sound of the Dresden Staatskapelle to the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic.
Josh also appreciated the orchestra’s great subtlety. Of American orchestras, only the Cleveland Orchestra can play with the subtlety of the Dresden musicians.
Last night, on my birthday, we attended a performance of the Boston Symphony.
The only reason we had purchased tickets for the concert was to hear the finest of this year’s Boston Symphony guest conductors, Gennady Rozhdestvensky. However, on Friday, we learned that Rozhdestvensky had cancelled this week’s Boston appearances, and that the basis of his cancellation was the fact that he was offended by the orchestra’s promotional materials.
According to the Boston Globe, Rozhdestvensky rehearsed the orchestra without incident for the first three rehearsals of the week. However, on Wednesday, Rozhdestvensky apparently became incensed when he observed two of the orchestra’s marketing tools.
First, Rozhdestvensky saw a poster advertising this week’s concerts, a poster that featured a photograph only of the guest soloist, cellist Lynn Harrell, and not the guest conductor. The poster also featured Harrell’s name in large print at the top of the poster and Rozhdestvensky’s name in small print at the bottom of the poster.
Second, Rozhdestvensky came across a copy of the Boston Symphony’s season brochure, which gave great prominence to other conductors, including little-known and entirely marginal figures, but which made a single, inconspicuous reference to Rozhdestvensky, the most distinguished of all guests on this year’s roster.
Apparently this latter was the last straw, and Rozhdestvensky walked out.
This may all seem rather minor, if not rather silly, but I can see Rozhdestvensky’s point: he is an international conductor of the greatest stature, with a long and distinguished career, and the Boston Symphony’s marketing materials gave him all the attention and prominence of an unknown novice. I can’t fault Rozhdestvensky. He surely felt insulted—and he was insulted.
The Boston Globe’s story about Rozhdestvensky’s walkout was accorded front-page treatment here. The newspaper’s story about Rozhdestvensky’s departure also attracted an amazing number of reader comments, the bulk of which were anti-Rozhdestvensky.
The comments I thought were the funniest—largely because they displayed unbounded ignorance—appear below.
“Send the old goat home.”
“What an egomaniac. Do your job, you pinko.”
“Most of us could care less if Rozhdestvensky conducts the BSO for four concerts or not.”
“The future of the BSO is not with the over-70 crowd—it’s with young audiences who want to hear wonderful music. They will NOT pay, however, for a self-centered, entitled, high-strung, easily-bruised ego standing in front of an orchestra. Mr. Rozhdestvensky’s time is over.”
“It is Mr. Rozhdestvensky’s great loss that he will not be conducting what is arguably the best symphony [orchestra] in the Western Hemisphere.”
“Of the nearly 300 million people in this country, I bet there are less than 50 who could actually tell a difference between this arrogant buffoon conducting the orchestra and his replacement doing so. Please tell this pompous nutcase that he should feel honored to lead the team of fine musicians at the BSO and to have his name, even in small print, associated with them.”
Well, it cannot be said that Boston has a sophisticated musical audience!
Indeed, a few of the persons sharing their wisdom suffered under the misapprehension that Lynn Harrell is a woman—and such fact, to them, explained why Harrell and not Rozhdestvensky received the lavish photo promotion.
Josh and I had a lot of fun wading through the extraordinary number of idiotic comments on the Boston Globe’s website.
Once we learned of Rozhdestvensky’s departure, Josh and I contemplated not going to the concert, but we decided to go after all, largely because we had already spent money on the tickets.
It was the prospect of hearing Rozhdestvensky that had prompted Josh and me to buy tickets in the first place. Rozhdestvensky is probably the greatest Russian conductor who ever lived—Yevgeny Mravinsky is his only competition—and Rozhdestvensky is just about unparalleled among today’s Tchaikovsky conductors. Rozhdestvensky also happens to be a very fine Elgar conductor, having conducted Elgar in the Soviet Union long before he began making appearances in the West.
There were three works on the scheduled program: Edmund Rubbra’s orchestration of Brahms’s Variations On A Theme Of Handel, Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony.
The replacement conductor was Canadian Julian Kuerti, son of pianist Anton Kuerti. He made no substitutions in the program. He conducted the scheduled works.
The concert was about what one would have expected under the circumstances: the musicians got through the program without incident, but also without anything interesting happening. The performance was certainly not an outrage, but it was also certainly not worth attending.
Rubbra’s orchestration of Brahms’s early piano composition is clumsy and does not “sound”. I can understand why this piece is very seldom programmed.
Harrell carried the Elgar all by himself, offering an “objective” interpretation little different from the somewhat bland interpretation he provided on his old Decca recording.
The Tchaikovsky did not come off at all, but I did not expect it to. Even though Rozhdestvensky himself had been in charge of three of the four rehearsals, it was most unlikely that another conductor would be able to step in and complete Rozhdestvensky’s work. In any case, the Manfred Symphony is a very difficult work to bring off. Only old masters such as Rozhdestvensky generally have success with the score. The musicians held Kuerti together during the symphony’s hour-long duration—the playing would have been no better, and no worse, had there been no one on the podium—but this surely must have been the most boring performance of the Manfred Symphony ever offered.
As Josh likes to say, “you pay your money and you take your chances”. Well, we had paid our money, so we took our chances—and the concert turned out to be a complete waste of our time.
These things happen.
The Boston Symphony continues to have very serious attendance problems, a situation I mentioned in October. This week, the orchestra announced yet another in an ongoing series of ticket initiatives: all seats, for the remainder of the season, will cost only $20.00 for anyone under the age of forty. Josh and I would take advantage of this bargain if the orchestra’s programs were more interesting and the guest conductors of better quality.
As things stand now, the Boston Symphony is not an orchestra worth going out of one’s way to hear. The orchestra is no better—but no worse—than the Minnesota Orchestra or the Dallas Symphony. Like those ensembles, it is a fine regional orchestra, but nothing more.
The Boston Symphony has long reminded me of the five London orchestras, all of which are more or less capable but none of which is anything special and none of which remotely offers anything to write home about.
Josh and I will be going home soon. We will be spending Thanksgiving in Minneapolis, and we are very much looking forward to it.
Josh has no classes on Wednesday, and I only have to work half a day on Wednesday, but we discovered, several weeks ago, that it would be much easier (and much cheaper) for us to fly home early Thanksgiving morning rather than on Wednesday afternoon or Wednesday evening. Consequently, we will spend Wednesday afternoon and evening getting our things ready.
On Thanksgiving morning, we will rise at 3:00 a.m. in order to catch the first nonstop flight of the day from Logan to MSP. That will get us home in time for my mother’s grand Thanksgiving breakfast. My middle brother will meet our flight at the airport and take us home.
We shall have a lot to celebrate on Thanksgiving Day. We shall celebrate, on a belated basis, Josh’s birthday, my birthday, and my parents’ wedding anniversary (which falls on the day before Thanksgiving this year). I think we all have agreed to forego cakes to mark these occasions, given that we will have four different kinds of homemade pies from which to choose for dessert on Thanksgiving night: pumpkin, pumpkin-custard, Dutch apple, and sour cream-raisin. What with all the Thanksgiving desserts, it seems silly to throw cake into the proceedings, too.
It will be good to be home again, even if only for four days. We are eager to see how everyone is doing. We are eager to see how my older brother and his family are settling into Minneapolis. We are all exceedingly anxious about the baby’s arrival (it is expected in another eight-to-ten days, but it could come at any time). We want to see how the dog is doing, and we want to see how he is responding to his arthritis palliatives.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, we have some business matters to attend to, and Josh and I will have to decide how we will apportion our Christmas holidays between Oklahoma and Minnesota, and make plans (and flight arrangements) accordingly. Otherwise, we plan to kick back and enjoy lots of good food and enjoy everyone’s company.
The holiday weekend will be over before we know it.
On Wednesday night, on Joshua’s birthday, we attended a performance of the Dresden Staatskapelle, which appeared in Boston as part of its current American tour.
The Dresden Staatskapelle is my favorite European orchestra. It has a sound of the most extraordinary beauty and refinement, and its music-making personifies “Old World” traditions of warmth, understatement and urbaneness. Many knowledgeable persons consider the Dresden Staatskapelle to be Europe’s very finest orchestra. I have always preferred Dresden to Amsterdam, Berlin or Vienna (although the Viennese can be extraordinary when they want to be—which is not all that frequent).
I have never heard the Staatskapelle play in its own hall in Dresden, but prior to Wednesday night I had heard the orchestra play on tour on five previous occasions. I had heard the orchestra perform in Vienna, Munich, Paris, London and New York, and four of those five earlier concerts were red-letter events in my life (the New York concert was the sole disappointment).
The sound of the Dresden players is unique.
The strings carry a dark coloration, perhaps the darkest coloration among major orchestras anywhere. This specific coloration has been handed down through generations of Dresden players—it is inherently in the ears and minds of the Dresden musicians—and it may be heard on the orchestra’s recordings going back as far as the 1930’s. This highly-individual sound has never been successfully reproduced elsewhere. It may be heard in Dresden, and nowhere else.
One key to the Dresden sound is the prominence of the violas and cellos, which form the foundation of the orchestra’s string sound.
In U.S. orchestras, the sound is generally built from the first violins down through the rest of the string section. In the case of the Berlin Philharmonic, the sound is built from the basses up. In the case of the Vienna Philharmonic, the sound is built around Vienna’s golden-toned cellos.
Building Dresden’s string sound from the warmth and deep overtones of the viola and cello sections tempers any potential stridency or wiriness or glassiness from the violin section and obviates any heaviness that can result from bass-heavy orchestras such as Berlin (especially under conductors unversed in knowing how to handle that orchestra’s remarkable bass section).
Another key to the Dresden sound is that the string section produces a firm, rich sound without using the amount of vibrato common in American orchestras and in many European orchestras. Of the world’s great orchestras, Dresden uses the least amount of string vibrato, and this apparently has always been so. While other orchestras obtain a firm, rich string sound through the application of string pressure and the use of vibrato, Dresden obtains the same, if not more, firmness and richness with less string pressure and less vibrato. The result is a clean, transparent sound that never descends into thickness or gooiness, two hazards of orchestras in which string players are encouraged to lean on their strings. Indeed, the incredible transparency of the Dresden string sound, coupled with its incredible darkness, is one of the world’s most miraculous sounds, a sound that every lover of orchestras should experience at least once.
Another key to the Dresden sound is the lightness and subtlety of the orchestra’s attacks. The current international style of playing calls for orchestras to make sharp, pointed attacks. Anything less than sharp and pointed is deemed to be a demonstration of inferior ensemble. Dresden attacks demonstrate great unanimity of ensemble, to be sure, but Dresden attacks are soft, gently-articulated attacks. Such attacks always startle the listener in the early minutes of a Dresden concert, since listeners seldom hear anything so miraculous from other orchestras.
The woodwinds of the Dresden Staatskapelle also carry a dark coloration. This is especially true of the orchestra’s clarinets and oboes. The Dresden woodwind players maintain their dark colorations despite the fact that they, too, use far less vibrato than their American counterparts. That vibrato is shunned does not signify that the Dresden woodwinds lack richness of sound or insufficient color. To the contrary, Dresden has one of the world’s finest arrays of woodwinds, offering playing of great individuality and character, to which the players add bewitching timbres. No American orchestra currently maintains as fine a collection of woodwind players as Dresden.
The Dresden brass sound was surely created with the music of Anton Bruckner in mind. The Dresden brass lacks the bite and brightness cultivated among American brass players. Instead, the Dresden brass players offer a more rounded, warmer sound, a sound that almost glows with mellowness, richness and depth.
This is a glorious orchestra, with a glorious sound, and it was the sound itself that offered the chief pleasure Wednesday night.
The orchestra was not on peak form Wednesday night—grueling foreign tours surely extract a heavy toll on players—but the inherent sound of the orchestra was on display at all times even if the performance was not one for the ages.
There were two works on the program: Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Brahms’s Symphony No. 4.
The Beethoven was completely unremarkable.
The soloist, Rudolf Buchbinder, has a heavy keyboard touch, too heavy for my taste, and he is a serious pianist more than an inspired one. I have heard Buchbinder in performance many times, in recital and in concert, always in Central European repertoire, and I have never found him to be an especially interesting artist. His playing—and especially his phrasing—has always struck me as foursquare.
The conductor, Fabio Luisi, was a disappointment. Luisi is not a classicist, and he brought no insight whatsoever to Beethoven’s first great concerto (misnumbered, since Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 was actually written after the concerto labeled as No. 2). Luisi brought no style, no command of structure, and no sense of energy to the Beethoven. He supported Buchbinder, capably, but he gave Buchbinder absolutely nothing to play off or play against.
The Dresden wind players made the concerto worthwhile. It was a privilege to hear the Dresden winds play off each other in Beethoven’s wind passages, injecting a touch of life into the performance.
The Brahms was much better, which came as no surprise, since Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 has long been one of the orchestra’s prime touring pieces. For the last thirty years, the Dresden Staatskapelle has played the Brahms Fourth on tour more often than any other composition. The work shows off the blended, mellow Dresden sound to splendid effect, which may be why the orchestra uses the work as its calling card. (The kindly couple sitting next to Josh and me told us that, on its previous visit to Boston, in 2005, the Staatskapelle had also programmed the Brahms Fourth.)
Wednesday’s performance was perfectly acceptable—any music-lover would be immensely pleased to hear such a natural, instinctive performance from an American orchestra—but it was not a great performance. The sound of the orchestra again offered the chief pleasure.
Luisi is a competent Brahms conductor, but he is hardly a special one, let alone a great one. The music of Brahms was more natural to him than the music of Beethoven, but Luisi’s Brahms is not worthy to be set alongside the Brahms of Wilhelm Furtwangler, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer or Herbert Von Karajan. Indeed, I am not sure that Luisi’s Brahms measures up even to present-day conductors of Brahms such as Herbert Blomstedt, Christoph Dohnanyi, Bernard Haitink, or Kurt Masur, none of whom has ever revealed himself to be an especially notable or imaginative Brahms conductor.
The first movement was the low point of the Brahms.
Luisi mishandled the great climax of the first movement: Brahms’s grand restatement, in the coda, of the first main theme, with its powerful, organ-like sonority, achieved through immediate thematic restatement and resplendent orchestration, intended to mimic the echo effects produced by great organs in Gothic Cathedrals (Brahms had been studying, yet again, Bach scores at the time he composed this symphony). In Luisi’s hands, this powerful moment emerged as limp.
Luisi also mishandled the most magical moment of the first movement: the beginning of the recapitulation, when the strings steal in, almost imperceptibly, playing only the final four bars of the eight-bar main theme in triple pianissimo. This is one of the most inspired moments in all of Brahms, and it generally gives me chills—but this moment came and went on Wednesday night with no attendant frisson.
The Andante lacked focus, and meandered. The Scherzo always comes off, and it did on Wednesday night.
The Passacaglia was the finest moment for both conductor and players, and provided a fitting summation for the great work. The musicians built the tension and drama inherent in Brahms’s series of 30 variations (plus extended coda) in subtle but exquisite fashion, achieving a satisfying, even tragic, culmination before the music drew to its unsettling conclusion. For the first time all night, Luisi got the climax of the fourth movement right.
How much of this was due to the conductor and how much was due to the musicians I cannot say, having heard the Dresdeners offer an even finer account of the Passacaglia in the past. Nonetheless, the great Passacaglia, by itself, made the evening worthwhile.
After the conclusion of the Brahms, the orchestra added a substantial bonus: Weber’s greatest overture, “Oberon”, in which the orchestra offered its most splendid, joyous playing of the evening.
Until Wednesday night, Josh had never heard the Dresden Staatskapelle. Josh immediately appreciated the quality of the orchestra’s sound. Josh said that he preferred the sound of the Dresden Staatskapelle to the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic.
Josh also appreciated the orchestra’s great subtlety. Of American orchestras, only the Cleveland Orchestra can play with the subtlety of the Dresden musicians.
Last night, on my birthday, we attended a performance of the Boston Symphony.
The only reason we had purchased tickets for the concert was to hear the finest of this year’s Boston Symphony guest conductors, Gennady Rozhdestvensky. However, on Friday, we learned that Rozhdestvensky had cancelled this week’s Boston appearances, and that the basis of his cancellation was the fact that he was offended by the orchestra’s promotional materials.
According to the Boston Globe, Rozhdestvensky rehearsed the orchestra without incident for the first three rehearsals of the week. However, on Wednesday, Rozhdestvensky apparently became incensed when he observed two of the orchestra’s marketing tools.
First, Rozhdestvensky saw a poster advertising this week’s concerts, a poster that featured a photograph only of the guest soloist, cellist Lynn Harrell, and not the guest conductor. The poster also featured Harrell’s name in large print at the top of the poster and Rozhdestvensky’s name in small print at the bottom of the poster.
Second, Rozhdestvensky came across a copy of the Boston Symphony’s season brochure, which gave great prominence to other conductors, including little-known and entirely marginal figures, but which made a single, inconspicuous reference to Rozhdestvensky, the most distinguished of all guests on this year’s roster.
Apparently this latter was the last straw, and Rozhdestvensky walked out.
This may all seem rather minor, if not rather silly, but I can see Rozhdestvensky’s point: he is an international conductor of the greatest stature, with a long and distinguished career, and the Boston Symphony’s marketing materials gave him all the attention and prominence of an unknown novice. I can’t fault Rozhdestvensky. He surely felt insulted—and he was insulted.
The Boston Globe’s story about Rozhdestvensky’s walkout was accorded front-page treatment here. The newspaper’s story about Rozhdestvensky’s departure also attracted an amazing number of reader comments, the bulk of which were anti-Rozhdestvensky.
The comments I thought were the funniest—largely because they displayed unbounded ignorance—appear below.
“Send the old goat home.”
“What an egomaniac. Do your job, you pinko.”
“Most of us could care less if Rozhdestvensky conducts the BSO for four concerts or not.”
“The future of the BSO is not with the over-70 crowd—it’s with young audiences who want to hear wonderful music. They will NOT pay, however, for a self-centered, entitled, high-strung, easily-bruised ego standing in front of an orchestra. Mr. Rozhdestvensky’s time is over.”
“It is Mr. Rozhdestvensky’s great loss that he will not be conducting what is arguably the best symphony [orchestra] in the Western Hemisphere.”
“Of the nearly 300 million people in this country, I bet there are less than 50 who could actually tell a difference between this arrogant buffoon conducting the orchestra and his replacement doing so. Please tell this pompous nutcase that he should feel honored to lead the team of fine musicians at the BSO and to have his name, even in small print, associated with them.”
Well, it cannot be said that Boston has a sophisticated musical audience!
Indeed, a few of the persons sharing their wisdom suffered under the misapprehension that Lynn Harrell is a woman—and such fact, to them, explained why Harrell and not Rozhdestvensky received the lavish photo promotion.
Josh and I had a lot of fun wading through the extraordinary number of idiotic comments on the Boston Globe’s website.
Once we learned of Rozhdestvensky’s departure, Josh and I contemplated not going to the concert, but we decided to go after all, largely because we had already spent money on the tickets.
It was the prospect of hearing Rozhdestvensky that had prompted Josh and me to buy tickets in the first place. Rozhdestvensky is probably the greatest Russian conductor who ever lived—Yevgeny Mravinsky is his only competition—and Rozhdestvensky is just about unparalleled among today’s Tchaikovsky conductors. Rozhdestvensky also happens to be a very fine Elgar conductor, having conducted Elgar in the Soviet Union long before he began making appearances in the West.
There were three works on the scheduled program: Edmund Rubbra’s orchestration of Brahms’s Variations On A Theme Of Handel, Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony.
The replacement conductor was Canadian Julian Kuerti, son of pianist Anton Kuerti. He made no substitutions in the program. He conducted the scheduled works.
The concert was about what one would have expected under the circumstances: the musicians got through the program without incident, but also without anything interesting happening. The performance was certainly not an outrage, but it was also certainly not worth attending.
Rubbra’s orchestration of Brahms’s early piano composition is clumsy and does not “sound”. I can understand why this piece is very seldom programmed.
Harrell carried the Elgar all by himself, offering an “objective” interpretation little different from the somewhat bland interpretation he provided on his old Decca recording.
The Tchaikovsky did not come off at all, but I did not expect it to. Even though Rozhdestvensky himself had been in charge of three of the four rehearsals, it was most unlikely that another conductor would be able to step in and complete Rozhdestvensky’s work. In any case, the Manfred Symphony is a very difficult work to bring off. Only old masters such as Rozhdestvensky generally have success with the score. The musicians held Kuerti together during the symphony’s hour-long duration—the playing would have been no better, and no worse, had there been no one on the podium—but this surely must have been the most boring performance of the Manfred Symphony ever offered.
As Josh likes to say, “you pay your money and you take your chances”. Well, we had paid our money, so we took our chances—and the concert turned out to be a complete waste of our time.
These things happen.
The Boston Symphony continues to have very serious attendance problems, a situation I mentioned in October. This week, the orchestra announced yet another in an ongoing series of ticket initiatives: all seats, for the remainder of the season, will cost only $20.00 for anyone under the age of forty. Josh and I would take advantage of this bargain if the orchestra’s programs were more interesting and the guest conductors of better quality.
As things stand now, the Boston Symphony is not an orchestra worth going out of one’s way to hear. The orchestra is no better—but no worse—than the Minnesota Orchestra or the Dallas Symphony. Like those ensembles, it is a fine regional orchestra, but nothing more.
The Boston Symphony has long reminded me of the five London orchestras, all of which are more or less capable but none of which is anything special and none of which remotely offers anything to write home about.
Josh and I will be going home soon. We will be spending Thanksgiving in Minneapolis, and we are very much looking forward to it.
Josh has no classes on Wednesday, and I only have to work half a day on Wednesday, but we discovered, several weeks ago, that it would be much easier (and much cheaper) for us to fly home early Thanksgiving morning rather than on Wednesday afternoon or Wednesday evening. Consequently, we will spend Wednesday afternoon and evening getting our things ready.
On Thanksgiving morning, we will rise at 3:00 a.m. in order to catch the first nonstop flight of the day from Logan to MSP. That will get us home in time for my mother’s grand Thanksgiving breakfast. My middle brother will meet our flight at the airport and take us home.
We shall have a lot to celebrate on Thanksgiving Day. We shall celebrate, on a belated basis, Josh’s birthday, my birthday, and my parents’ wedding anniversary (which falls on the day before Thanksgiving this year). I think we all have agreed to forego cakes to mark these occasions, given that we will have four different kinds of homemade pies from which to choose for dessert on Thanksgiving night: pumpkin, pumpkin-custard, Dutch apple, and sour cream-raisin. What with all the Thanksgiving desserts, it seems silly to throw cake into the proceedings, too.
It will be good to be home again, even if only for four days. We are eager to see how everyone is doing. We are eager to see how my older brother and his family are settling into Minneapolis. We are all exceedingly anxious about the baby’s arrival (it is expected in another eight-to-ten days, but it could come at any time). We want to see how the dog is doing, and we want to see how he is responding to his arthritis palliatives.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, we have some business matters to attend to, and Josh and I will have to decide how we will apportion our Christmas holidays between Oklahoma and Minnesota, and make plans (and flight arrangements) accordingly. Otherwise, we plan to kick back and enjoy lots of good food and enjoy everyone’s company.
The holiday weekend will be over before we know it.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Zitronjette, The Hummel And Klaus Stortebeker
Throughout the center of the city of Hamburg, lifelike statues of human beings proliferate—often placed right in the middle of sidewalks. Such statues are everywhere.
Some of these statues commemorate historic persons, some statues commemorate fictional characters, and some statues commemorate archetypes.
The statues are generally not crafted from marble or stone. The statues are occasionally made from bronze, but more often they are made from lightweight metals and even plastics. Many of these statues look cheap and out of place in such a handsome city.
Three of the statues were of some interest to us.
One is the statue of Zitronenjette.
This bronze statue very near Saint-Michaelis-Kirche depicts a small woman holding a basket on her right arm while offering spectators a lemon with her left hand. The statue was erected in 1986.
This is Zitronenjette (“Lemon Jettie”), one of Hamburg’s genuine and unique and original characters. Henriette Johanne Marie Muller (1841-1916) sold lemons during the day at Hamburg Harbor and in the evening she walked from one inn to another, shouting “Zitroon, Zitroon”. Lemons were not widely available in Hamburg at the time.
Zitronenjette was attacked on the streets several times, and became insane. In 1894 she was consigned to a hospital and during her final days she was looked after in a nursing home at public expense.
In 1900, the first play about her life was staged, while she was still living, and a popular operetta followed in 1920, after her death. The operetta is still staged in Hamburg, and the role of Lemon Jettie in the operetta is customarily played by a male actor.
Persons passing the monument generally touch Zitronenjette’s finger for luck. As a result, that particular finger now has a brassy shine.
The Hummel Statue, only a few blocks from Zitronenjette, commemorates the water carriers of Hamburg, a fixture of the city before Hamburg established a city water utility.
The Hummel Statue was erected in 1938 and pays tribute to a genuine original Hamburg character known as The Hummel.
The Hummel was a water carrier, and the specific Hummel honored by The Hummel Statue was Johann Wilhelm Bentz (1787-1854), the last of Hamburg’s water carriers. Bentz is portrayed walking the streets of Hamburg with two water buckets over his shoulders.
Today, in addition to the 1938 original, there are many statues throughout Hamburg’s city center paying tribute to The Hummel. In fact, there are now over 100 different Hummel statues in Hamburg, created by many different artists, of men carrying buckets of water.
Klaus Stortebeker is a part mythical, part historic figure associated with the history of the city of Hamburg.
This bronze statue, erected in 1982, portrays the famous pirate Klaus Stortebeker (1370-1401) near Hamburg Harbor. The statue shows Stortebeker, hands tied, looking towards the Speicherstadt, the canal-laden warehouse district of Hamburg, where he was executed in 1401.
The name “Stortebeker” is only a nickname, meaning “Down The Hatch” in Old German, and refers to Stortebeker’s supposed ability to empty a four-liter mug of beer in one gulp. Like most of the pirates of his day, Stortebeker used to hide on Helgoland, an island North of Germany. Helgoland pirates captured merchant vessels for their livelihood, and caused great damage to Hamburg’s commerce.
In 1401, a Hamburg fleet captured Stortebeker and 72 of his men, and they were brought to Hamburg and tried. All were found guilty and sentenced to death by beheading. Their heads were tarred on one of the Speicherstadt’s streets before they were taken to their place of execution near the site of this statue.
According to legend, Stortebeker saved several of his men by walking along his lined-up crew after being decapitated. The men he passed were allegedly reprieved.
Some of these statues commemorate historic persons, some statues commemorate fictional characters, and some statues commemorate archetypes.
The statues are generally not crafted from marble or stone. The statues are occasionally made from bronze, but more often they are made from lightweight metals and even plastics. Many of these statues look cheap and out of place in such a handsome city.
Three of the statues were of some interest to us.
One is the statue of Zitronenjette.
This bronze statue very near Saint-Michaelis-Kirche depicts a small woman holding a basket on her right arm while offering spectators a lemon with her left hand. The statue was erected in 1986.
This is Zitronenjette (“Lemon Jettie”), one of Hamburg’s genuine and unique and original characters. Henriette Johanne Marie Muller (1841-1916) sold lemons during the day at Hamburg Harbor and in the evening she walked from one inn to another, shouting “Zitroon, Zitroon”. Lemons were not widely available in Hamburg at the time.
Zitronenjette was attacked on the streets several times, and became insane. In 1894 she was consigned to a hospital and during her final days she was looked after in a nursing home at public expense.
In 1900, the first play about her life was staged, while she was still living, and a popular operetta followed in 1920, after her death. The operetta is still staged in Hamburg, and the role of Lemon Jettie in the operetta is customarily played by a male actor.
Persons passing the monument generally touch Zitronenjette’s finger for luck. As a result, that particular finger now has a brassy shine.
The Hummel Statue, only a few blocks from Zitronenjette, commemorates the water carriers of Hamburg, a fixture of the city before Hamburg established a city water utility.
The Hummel Statue was erected in 1938 and pays tribute to a genuine original Hamburg character known as The Hummel.
The Hummel was a water carrier, and the specific Hummel honored by The Hummel Statue was Johann Wilhelm Bentz (1787-1854), the last of Hamburg’s water carriers. Bentz is portrayed walking the streets of Hamburg with two water buckets over his shoulders.
Today, in addition to the 1938 original, there are many statues throughout Hamburg’s city center paying tribute to The Hummel. In fact, there are now over 100 different Hummel statues in Hamburg, created by many different artists, of men carrying buckets of water.
Klaus Stortebeker is a part mythical, part historic figure associated with the history of the city of Hamburg.
This bronze statue, erected in 1982, portrays the famous pirate Klaus Stortebeker (1370-1401) near Hamburg Harbor. The statue shows Stortebeker, hands tied, looking towards the Speicherstadt, the canal-laden warehouse district of Hamburg, where he was executed in 1401.
The name “Stortebeker” is only a nickname, meaning “Down The Hatch” in Old German, and refers to Stortebeker’s supposed ability to empty a four-liter mug of beer in one gulp. Like most of the pirates of his day, Stortebeker used to hide on Helgoland, an island North of Germany. Helgoland pirates captured merchant vessels for their livelihood, and caused great damage to Hamburg’s commerce.
In 1401, a Hamburg fleet captured Stortebeker and 72 of his men, and they were brought to Hamburg and tried. All were found guilty and sentenced to death by beheading. Their heads were tarred on one of the Speicherstadt’s streets before they were taken to their place of execution near the site of this statue.
According to legend, Stortebeker saved several of his men by walking along his lined-up crew after being decapitated. The men he passed were allegedly reprieved.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Four More Hamburg Churches
Between the two of us, Joshua and I have already written about eleven important and historic churches we visited in the center of Hamburg.
There are four additional historic churches of importance in the center of the city, and we visited those churches, too.
Most prominent of them was Saint-Marien-Kirche, also known both as the Domkirche and the Mariendom. Saint-Marien-Kirche is the seat of The Bishop Of Hamburg of The Roman Catholic Diocese Of Hamburg.
The city of Hamburg did not permit Roman Catholic worship within city precincts from the time of The Reformation until 1842. One effect of The Reformation in Northern Germany was the dissolution of The Bishopric Of Hamburg and the closure of all Roman Catholic houses of worship in the city. For three centuries, Hamburg’s Catholics had to worship outside city walls. During this period, Catholicism in Hamburg was under the jurisdiction of The Bishop Of Bremen.
Once freedom of religion in Hamburg was again granted midway through the 19th Century, the Roman Catholic Church set in motion plans for a new main church in the center of the city. The result was Saint-Marien-Kirche, the first Roman Catholic place of worship to be built in Hamburg in more than five centuries.
The Neo-Romanesque church was completed in 1893. The building is marked by two great spires, with a front façade that mimics the façade of The Cathedral Of Bremen, the church that held authority over Catholicism in Hamburg at the time Saint-Marien-Kirche was planned and erected.
The Roman Catholic Diocese Of Hamburg was re-established in 1995, and in that year Saint-Marien-Kirche was designated as a Cathedral Church, seat of The Bishop Of Hamburg, Silesia-Holstein And Mecklenburg. As a result, the church may now be referred to as the Domkirche or the Mariendom.
The interior is Neo-Byzantine, entirely reminiscent of the contemporaneous Neo-Byzantine Westminster Cathedral in London.
Within the last decade, the church has been entirely refurbished, and looks brand-new inside and out.
The nearby Dreieinigkeitkirche (“Holy Trinity Church”) was constructed in the Baroque style from 1743 to 1747. It occupies a site on which used to be located The Chapel Of Saint George’s Hospital, upgraded to a parish church in 1627. It is from that ancient hospital that this particular neighborhood of Hamburg, one of the city’s most fashionable, acquired its name: Saint George.
Only the 65-meter church spire survived the damage caused by World War II. The remainder of the church was rebuilt pursuant to a new design and erected between 1954 and 1957.
Not far from Hamburg’s Laeiszhalle is Gnadenkirch (“Church Of Mercy”), a beautiful Neo-Romanesque ecclesiastical structure set in the middle of a network of road junctions, designed to be admired on all sides and from all approaches.
A church of remarkable beauty and architectural distinction, the Gnadenkirche was erected in 1906 and 1907. The church features a high central steeple, topped by a diamond-shaped roof, which is surrounded by smaller steeples. The building is a splendid example of Reform Architecture, a school of design that dominated Protestant religious architecture around the year 1900.
The interior of the church was designed in a manner similar to a theater—everything is focused on the altar and the pulpit.
In 2004, The Lutheran Diocese Of Hamburg turned the church over to The Russian Orthodox Church. The Lutheran church no longer had a sizeable congregation in the immediate area—after World War I, this area of Hamburg saw commercial and government properties replace residential properties—and did not want to continue to spend significant sums of money maintaining the great church structure.
Not wanting to abandon or demolish such a prominent and beautiful building, The Lutheran Diocese gave the building to Hamburg’s large Russian émigré community (there are 12,000 recent Russian immigrants in Central Hamburg alone).
Saint-Joseph-Kirche is a Roman Catholic Church situated smack in the middle of the red-light district of Hamburg.
The church looks out of place. Any church would look out of place in a red-light district, but a heavily-decorated Roman Catholic Church especially looks out of place in Protestant Hamburg.
The church was built on land outside the city’s old boundaries, where there was freedom of worship. The ground on which the church is situated was for centuries administered by the Danish crown, and Denmark long granted the privilege of free worship in Hamburg’s outlying districts. In fact, the Danish crown specifically granted this particular parcel of land to the Roman Catholic Church in order to build the church.
The facade of the brick building is decorated with Baroque sandstone ornaments and a portal with the figures of Joseph and Jesus Christ. On top of the gable there is a cross with angels on either side.
The church was designed by Melchior Tatz, a noted Austrian ecclesiastical architect, and constructed between 1718 and 1723.
During World War II, the church was heavily damaged. Only the front façade remained standing. Between 1953 and 1955, the church was rebuilt in the Baroque style, although only the street façade remained faithful to the actual original design. Everything else, including the interior, is entirely new, although consistent with Baroque style.
Today the church serves Hamburg’s Polish community.
There are four additional historic churches of importance in the center of the city, and we visited those churches, too.
Most prominent of them was Saint-Marien-Kirche, also known both as the Domkirche and the Mariendom. Saint-Marien-Kirche is the seat of The Bishop Of Hamburg of The Roman Catholic Diocese Of Hamburg.
The city of Hamburg did not permit Roman Catholic worship within city precincts from the time of The Reformation until 1842. One effect of The Reformation in Northern Germany was the dissolution of The Bishopric Of Hamburg and the closure of all Roman Catholic houses of worship in the city. For three centuries, Hamburg’s Catholics had to worship outside city walls. During this period, Catholicism in Hamburg was under the jurisdiction of The Bishop Of Bremen.
Once freedom of religion in Hamburg was again granted midway through the 19th Century, the Roman Catholic Church set in motion plans for a new main church in the center of the city. The result was Saint-Marien-Kirche, the first Roman Catholic place of worship to be built in Hamburg in more than five centuries.
The Neo-Romanesque church was completed in 1893. The building is marked by two great spires, with a front façade that mimics the façade of The Cathedral Of Bremen, the church that held authority over Catholicism in Hamburg at the time Saint-Marien-Kirche was planned and erected.
The Roman Catholic Diocese Of Hamburg was re-established in 1995, and in that year Saint-Marien-Kirche was designated as a Cathedral Church, seat of The Bishop Of Hamburg, Silesia-Holstein And Mecklenburg. As a result, the church may now be referred to as the Domkirche or the Mariendom.
The interior is Neo-Byzantine, entirely reminiscent of the contemporaneous Neo-Byzantine Westminster Cathedral in London.
Within the last decade, the church has been entirely refurbished, and looks brand-new inside and out.
The nearby Dreieinigkeitkirche (“Holy Trinity Church”) was constructed in the Baroque style from 1743 to 1747. It occupies a site on which used to be located The Chapel Of Saint George’s Hospital, upgraded to a parish church in 1627. It is from that ancient hospital that this particular neighborhood of Hamburg, one of the city’s most fashionable, acquired its name: Saint George.
Only the 65-meter church spire survived the damage caused by World War II. The remainder of the church was rebuilt pursuant to a new design and erected between 1954 and 1957.
Not far from Hamburg’s Laeiszhalle is Gnadenkirch (“Church Of Mercy”), a beautiful Neo-Romanesque ecclesiastical structure set in the middle of a network of road junctions, designed to be admired on all sides and from all approaches.
A church of remarkable beauty and architectural distinction, the Gnadenkirche was erected in 1906 and 1907. The church features a high central steeple, topped by a diamond-shaped roof, which is surrounded by smaller steeples. The building is a splendid example of Reform Architecture, a school of design that dominated Protestant religious architecture around the year 1900.
The interior of the church was designed in a manner similar to a theater—everything is focused on the altar and the pulpit.
In 2004, The Lutheran Diocese Of Hamburg turned the church over to The Russian Orthodox Church. The Lutheran church no longer had a sizeable congregation in the immediate area—after World War I, this area of Hamburg saw commercial and government properties replace residential properties—and did not want to continue to spend significant sums of money maintaining the great church structure.
Not wanting to abandon or demolish such a prominent and beautiful building, The Lutheran Diocese gave the building to Hamburg’s large Russian émigré community (there are 12,000 recent Russian immigrants in Central Hamburg alone).
Saint-Joseph-Kirche is a Roman Catholic Church situated smack in the middle of the red-light district of Hamburg.
The church looks out of place. Any church would look out of place in a red-light district, but a heavily-decorated Roman Catholic Church especially looks out of place in Protestant Hamburg.
The church was built on land outside the city’s old boundaries, where there was freedom of worship. The ground on which the church is situated was for centuries administered by the Danish crown, and Denmark long granted the privilege of free worship in Hamburg’s outlying districts. In fact, the Danish crown specifically granted this particular parcel of land to the Roman Catholic Church in order to build the church.
The facade of the brick building is decorated with Baroque sandstone ornaments and a portal with the figures of Joseph and Jesus Christ. On top of the gable there is a cross with angels on either side.
The church was designed by Melchior Tatz, a noted Austrian ecclesiastical architect, and constructed between 1718 and 1723.
During World War II, the church was heavily damaged. Only the front façade remained standing. Between 1953 and 1955, the church was rebuilt in the Baroque style, although only the street façade remained faithful to the actual original design. Everything else, including the interior, is entirely new, although consistent with Baroque style.
Today the church serves Hamburg’s Polish community.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Bach-Haydn-Brahms-Copland
For the last couple of weeks, Joshua and I have been listening to four discs of music that have given us some degree of pleasure, and provided us with a largely rewarding listening experience.
Bach Organ Music, performed by Daniel Chorzempa, on the Philips label
Haydn’s Symphonies Nos. 100 and 103, performed by The Orchestra Of Saint Luke’s under Charles Mackerras, on the Telarc label
Brahms’s Sonatas For Cello And Piano, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, on the RCA label
Orchestral music of Copland, performed by the Baltimore Symphony under David Zinman, on the Argo label
Josh’s favorite composer is Bach, and we brought several Bach discs to Boston. We brought the Daniel Chorzempa disc because it contains so many of Bach’s very greatest compositions for organ: BWV 532, 543, 552, 565 and 582.
Four of the five works on this disc come from Chorzempa’s very first Philips recording, made in 1970 on the organ of Grote Kerk in Breda in The Netherlands. The fifth work on the disc, BWV 552, the great “Saint Anne” Prelude And Fugue, one of Bach’s most magnificent creations, comes from a 1982 Philips issue, recorded on the organ of Bovenkerk in Kampen in The Netherlands.
These are fine performances, beautifully recorded. The disc is magnificent because the music is magnificent.
Chorzempa is a scholarly musician more than he is a performing artist, and his interpretations tend more toward the correct than the sublime. Nevertheless, his work gives much pleasure.
This particular disc is from the Philips Concert Classics line issued during the 1990’s. That series was long ago discontinued, and Chorzempa’s Bach performances are available now only in a multi-disc set.
Chorzempa is mostly unknown today, but he was a major recording artist in the 1970’s and 1980’s. He still continues to teach and play. His most recent series of recitals, a couple of weeks ago, was in Spain.
Chorzempa was born and raised in Minneapolis. He is the son of émigrés from Austria, who fled Central Europe in the 1930’s. He studied at the University Of Minnesota for many years, and he has varied interests—he obtained advanced degrees in music, architecture and history while studying at the University Of Minnesota.
Since his mid-20’s, Chorzempa has lived in Europe, spending most of his time in Germany and Austria. His visits to the U.S. are now infrequent. I would like to hear him in person one day.
The disc of Haydn symphonies, issued in 1991, is one of three Haydn symphony discs Charles Mackerras recorded for Telarc with The Orchestra Of Saint Luke’s before the project was discontinued.
It is easy to understand why this project was short-lived. These performances are not very good.
First, the orchestra is not very good. Although the musicians are fully professional, The Orchestra Of Saint Luke’s is not an orchestra that plays together fulltime under an array of top-flight conductors. It remains, resolutely, a pickup ensemble, and the tip-off, as always, is the generic nature of the sound and the stiff, impersonal phrasing. The musicians strive for correctness, nothing more, and this is because they have never had the time and opportunity to proceed beyond correctness.
Second, the conductor is not very good. Unlike Thomas Beecham or George Szell or Colin Davis, Mackerras has never been a satisfactory Haydn conductor. His Haydn is neat and brisk, but devoid of the imagination and wit and personality necessary to bring Haydn’s music fully to life.
There is a large assortment of failures in Mackerras’s Haydn. For a start, the introductions account for nothing. There is no sense of anticipation or event in Mackerras’s introductions—his introductions are simple warm-ups, nothing more. First and last movements never reach any genuine climax or culmination or resolution—instead, the movements merely end. Slow movements lack expression and emotion and gravitas. The Allegretto of the “Military” Symphony and the Andante of the “Drumroll” Symphony, in Mackerras’s hands, are mere contrasting episodes rather than the emotional cores of the respective works. The Menuets are bizarrely fast, laughably so, played so quickly that no one—conductor or musicians—even makes the attempt to phrase.
Finally, there is no grandeur in these performances. These are among Haydn’s last and very greatest symphonies, each containing a world of drama and imagination, but one would never know it from these performances.
Never have I heard such boring Haydn readings. I’m not surprised my father allowed Josh and me to borrow this disc.
The RCA disc of Brahms’s Sonatas For Cello And Piano, from 1984, was the earlier of the two versions of these works Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax recorded (the Sony remake appeared less than a decade later). These performances are note-perfect, serious and devoted to a fault, but totally lacking penetration and personality. Fundamentally, the music-making is dull as dust. The sound engineering is excellent, capturing a natural acoustic and a good balance between cello and piano.
The Copland disc is a lot of fun, and contains one great performance. We brought several Copland discs to Boston because Josh wanted to hear more Copland, and we both enjoyed this disc immensely.
The first work on the disc is the complete score to the Agnes DeMille ballet, “Rodeo”, and this performance is the one disappointment on the disc. The Baltimore Symphony plays the score beautifully, but the reading lacks the pizzazz Leonard Bernstein brought to “Four Dance Episodes”, the standard concert extracts from the complete score.
David Zinman’s tempi are a little slower than is customary in “Rodeo”, and he uses this to his advantage by highlighting many subtleties of scoring that other conductors pass over. This is the most sophisticated and detailed orchestral presentation and execution of the score on disc, by far—in fact, it puts the efforts of Bernstein, Eduardo Mata, Leonard Slatkin and Michael Tilson Thomas to shame. It comes at a price, however, because the energy level is low and the rhythms do not “snap” as they do in Bernstein’s hands.
The “Danzon Cubano” and “El Salon Mexico” that follow are one-idea pieces, fun but insubstantial. Both pieces may be accused of being exercises in orchestration. The performances here are very well-played. Once again, Zinman emphasizes interesting orchestral detail.
The great performance on this disc is the final work, the complete score to the Eugene Loring ballet, “Billy The Kid”. “Billy The Kid” is a great score, far finer and far richer than “Rodeo”. It may be finer even than “Appalachian Spring”.
The complete score contains almost twice as much music as the suite Copland fashioned for concert performance, and not a bar of the music is filler. This is a masterly score, musically and dramatically, and it has a far wider range of emotion than the standard suite.
Zinman does something in this score that no other conductor has managed to do: reveal it as a coherent, integrated musical composition rather than a loose sequence of cowboy tunes. He accomplishes this by playing up atmosphere and characterization, which makes the numerous transitions between episodes appear to be seamless.
Zinman’s is an amazingly sophisticated performance. Once again, his tempi are more leisurely than those of other conductors, but this allows him to invest the music with more drama and expression. For instance, the elegiac tone of the beginning and ending of the ballet is unusually powerful and deeply affecting. Zinman has more fun with the cowboy tunes than other conductors, but the serious episodes carry a potency and weight and concentration I never before thought to be contained in the score. For the first time, I thought Billy’s capture and death to be gripping and emotionally true. In other hands, including Bernstein’s, the music for Billy’s capture and death is not convincing—the music almost passes by as an afterthought as the listener waits for the next cowboy tune to emerge. Here, Billy’s capture and death are the heart of the score.
The playing of the Baltimore Symphony is superb. The musicians, unmistakably, were convinced by Zinman of the seriousness of this music. Their playing carries a commitment and fervor not often associated with Copland’s populist scores, too well-known and too often played to command musicians’s full attention and respect. Baltimore’s first-desk personnel offer the kind of imaginative work formerly associated with Boston and Philadelphia first-desk players under Charles Munch and Eugene Ormandy.
This disc is a fine tribute to the excellent state of the Baltimore Symphony during Zinman’s tenure with the orchestra. It is one of the orchestra’s, and one of Zinman’s, finest discs.
I am surprised this recording is not better known.
Bach Organ Music, performed by Daniel Chorzempa, on the Philips label
Haydn’s Symphonies Nos. 100 and 103, performed by The Orchestra Of Saint Luke’s under Charles Mackerras, on the Telarc label
Brahms’s Sonatas For Cello And Piano, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, on the RCA label
Orchestral music of Copland, performed by the Baltimore Symphony under David Zinman, on the Argo label
Josh’s favorite composer is Bach, and we brought several Bach discs to Boston. We brought the Daniel Chorzempa disc because it contains so many of Bach’s very greatest compositions for organ: BWV 532, 543, 552, 565 and 582.
Four of the five works on this disc come from Chorzempa’s very first Philips recording, made in 1970 on the organ of Grote Kerk in Breda in The Netherlands. The fifth work on the disc, BWV 552, the great “Saint Anne” Prelude And Fugue, one of Bach’s most magnificent creations, comes from a 1982 Philips issue, recorded on the organ of Bovenkerk in Kampen in The Netherlands.
These are fine performances, beautifully recorded. The disc is magnificent because the music is magnificent.
Chorzempa is a scholarly musician more than he is a performing artist, and his interpretations tend more toward the correct than the sublime. Nevertheless, his work gives much pleasure.
This particular disc is from the Philips Concert Classics line issued during the 1990’s. That series was long ago discontinued, and Chorzempa’s Bach performances are available now only in a multi-disc set.
Chorzempa is mostly unknown today, but he was a major recording artist in the 1970’s and 1980’s. He still continues to teach and play. His most recent series of recitals, a couple of weeks ago, was in Spain.
Chorzempa was born and raised in Minneapolis. He is the son of émigrés from Austria, who fled Central Europe in the 1930’s. He studied at the University Of Minnesota for many years, and he has varied interests—he obtained advanced degrees in music, architecture and history while studying at the University Of Minnesota.
Since his mid-20’s, Chorzempa has lived in Europe, spending most of his time in Germany and Austria. His visits to the U.S. are now infrequent. I would like to hear him in person one day.
The disc of Haydn symphonies, issued in 1991, is one of three Haydn symphony discs Charles Mackerras recorded for Telarc with The Orchestra Of Saint Luke’s before the project was discontinued.
It is easy to understand why this project was short-lived. These performances are not very good.
First, the orchestra is not very good. Although the musicians are fully professional, The Orchestra Of Saint Luke’s is not an orchestra that plays together fulltime under an array of top-flight conductors. It remains, resolutely, a pickup ensemble, and the tip-off, as always, is the generic nature of the sound and the stiff, impersonal phrasing. The musicians strive for correctness, nothing more, and this is because they have never had the time and opportunity to proceed beyond correctness.
Second, the conductor is not very good. Unlike Thomas Beecham or George Szell or Colin Davis, Mackerras has never been a satisfactory Haydn conductor. His Haydn is neat and brisk, but devoid of the imagination and wit and personality necessary to bring Haydn’s music fully to life.
There is a large assortment of failures in Mackerras’s Haydn. For a start, the introductions account for nothing. There is no sense of anticipation or event in Mackerras’s introductions—his introductions are simple warm-ups, nothing more. First and last movements never reach any genuine climax or culmination or resolution—instead, the movements merely end. Slow movements lack expression and emotion and gravitas. The Allegretto of the “Military” Symphony and the Andante of the “Drumroll” Symphony, in Mackerras’s hands, are mere contrasting episodes rather than the emotional cores of the respective works. The Menuets are bizarrely fast, laughably so, played so quickly that no one—conductor or musicians—even makes the attempt to phrase.
Finally, there is no grandeur in these performances. These are among Haydn’s last and very greatest symphonies, each containing a world of drama and imagination, but one would never know it from these performances.
Never have I heard such boring Haydn readings. I’m not surprised my father allowed Josh and me to borrow this disc.
The RCA disc of Brahms’s Sonatas For Cello And Piano, from 1984, was the earlier of the two versions of these works Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax recorded (the Sony remake appeared less than a decade later). These performances are note-perfect, serious and devoted to a fault, but totally lacking penetration and personality. Fundamentally, the music-making is dull as dust. The sound engineering is excellent, capturing a natural acoustic and a good balance between cello and piano.
The Copland disc is a lot of fun, and contains one great performance. We brought several Copland discs to Boston because Josh wanted to hear more Copland, and we both enjoyed this disc immensely.
The first work on the disc is the complete score to the Agnes DeMille ballet, “Rodeo”, and this performance is the one disappointment on the disc. The Baltimore Symphony plays the score beautifully, but the reading lacks the pizzazz Leonard Bernstein brought to “Four Dance Episodes”, the standard concert extracts from the complete score.
David Zinman’s tempi are a little slower than is customary in “Rodeo”, and he uses this to his advantage by highlighting many subtleties of scoring that other conductors pass over. This is the most sophisticated and detailed orchestral presentation and execution of the score on disc, by far—in fact, it puts the efforts of Bernstein, Eduardo Mata, Leonard Slatkin and Michael Tilson Thomas to shame. It comes at a price, however, because the energy level is low and the rhythms do not “snap” as they do in Bernstein’s hands.
The “Danzon Cubano” and “El Salon Mexico” that follow are one-idea pieces, fun but insubstantial. Both pieces may be accused of being exercises in orchestration. The performances here are very well-played. Once again, Zinman emphasizes interesting orchestral detail.
The great performance on this disc is the final work, the complete score to the Eugene Loring ballet, “Billy The Kid”. “Billy The Kid” is a great score, far finer and far richer than “Rodeo”. It may be finer even than “Appalachian Spring”.
The complete score contains almost twice as much music as the suite Copland fashioned for concert performance, and not a bar of the music is filler. This is a masterly score, musically and dramatically, and it has a far wider range of emotion than the standard suite.
Zinman does something in this score that no other conductor has managed to do: reveal it as a coherent, integrated musical composition rather than a loose sequence of cowboy tunes. He accomplishes this by playing up atmosphere and characterization, which makes the numerous transitions between episodes appear to be seamless.
Zinman’s is an amazingly sophisticated performance. Once again, his tempi are more leisurely than those of other conductors, but this allows him to invest the music with more drama and expression. For instance, the elegiac tone of the beginning and ending of the ballet is unusually powerful and deeply affecting. Zinman has more fun with the cowboy tunes than other conductors, but the serious episodes carry a potency and weight and concentration I never before thought to be contained in the score. For the first time, I thought Billy’s capture and death to be gripping and emotionally true. In other hands, including Bernstein’s, the music for Billy’s capture and death is not convincing—the music almost passes by as an afterthought as the listener waits for the next cowboy tune to emerge. Here, Billy’s capture and death are the heart of the score.
The playing of the Baltimore Symphony is superb. The musicians, unmistakably, were convinced by Zinman of the seriousness of this music. Their playing carries a commitment and fervor not often associated with Copland’s populist scores, too well-known and too often played to command musicians’s full attention and respect. Baltimore’s first-desk personnel offer the kind of imaginative work formerly associated with Boston and Philadelphia first-desk players under Charles Munch and Eugene Ormandy.
This disc is a fine tribute to the excellent state of the Baltimore Symphony during Zinman’s tenure with the orchestra. It is one of the orchestra’s, and one of Zinman’s, finest discs.
I am surprised this recording is not better known.
