Minneapolis Symphony 1960

The Minneapolis Symphony in 1960, the first year in which Stanislaw Skrowaczewski served as Music Director of the orchestra.

Skrowaczewski replaced Antal Dorati, who had guided the Minneapolis Symphony the previous eleven seasons.

Skrowaczewski was to remain with the orchestra until 1979. Skrowaczewski continues to make his home in the Twin Cities, more than three decades after stepping down from the orchestra, and he generally continues to conduct the orchestra for one subscription week each season.

The Minneapolis Symphony changed its name to the Minnesota Orchestra in 1968.

Conventional local wisdom is that Skrowaczewski remained on the Minnesota Orchestra podium too long—and conventional wisdom in this case may very well be correct. Depending upon the person offering an opinion, the prevailing view is that Skrowaczewski should have departed voluntarily anywhere from five to ten years prior to his forced exit.

Skrowaczewski was succeeded by Neville Marriner, who experienced an unhappy tenure in Minneapolis. The dour and unimaginative Edo de Waart was next on the Minnesota podium, followed by the peppy and flashy Eiji Oue; neither conductor was to make a mark with the orchestra or the city.

The photograph depicts the orchestra onstage at Northrop Auditorium, home of the Minneapolis Symphony/Minnesota Orchestra from 1929 until purpose-built Orchestra Hall opened in 1974.

Northrop Auditorium is currently closed while undergoing a multi-year renovation.

Orchestra Hall will close at the end of the current Minnesota Orchestra season for its own $90 million renovation.

Berlin July 1945

A rare color photograph of Berlin from July 1945, the third month of the Allied occupation.

The Wittgenstein Family, Vienna, Summer 1917

From left to right: Kurt Wittgenstein, Paul Wittgenstein, Hermine Wittgenstein, Max Salzer, Leopoldine Wittgenstein, Helene Wittgenstein Salzer and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Two Orchestral Concerts

On Friday evening, Joshua and I went to Saint Paul to hear the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in concert.

Rossen Milanov, former Resident Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra (Milanov’s official title in Philadelphia was “Associate Conductor”), was on the podium.

The concert began with a Shostakovich arrangement for winds and timpani of two keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti. Identified in the program booklet as “Pastorale And Capriccio”, the composition is more widely known by the title assigned by its publisher, “Two Pieces From Scarlatti”. One of countless miniatures Shostakovich wrote in the late 1920s, “Two Pieces From Scarlatti” is pleasing and ear-beguiling. It provided a good concert-opener.

The concert continued with Rudolf Barshai’s arrangement for string orchestra of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 (Barshai’s arrangement is known as the “Chamber Symphony For String Orchestra, Opus 110a”).

I am diffident about Shostakovich quartets. They are deeply personal utterances, a private self-portrait of a disillusioned and conflicted man, a veritable diary of the collected grievances of an occupant of a totalitarian state. Some musicologists insist that the quartets are the essence of Shostakovich, which very well may be the case—yet, by the standards of Beethoven and Bartok, the music of the Shostakovich quartets is not of high quality. Whatever the underlying narrative, the themes are third-rate, the way the themes are worked out is third-rate, and ideals of unity, internal logic and coherency are thrown out the window. In the sprawling, five-movement Eighth Quartet, the unfolding of the musical ideas is particularly weak: the over-familiar D-S-C-H theme is worked to death while the composer introduces countless quotations from earlier compositions. The appeal of the composition has always eluded me.

I have never heard the Chamber Symphony come off in live performance—I have heard even Mariss Jansons came to grief in the piece—and I was not taken by Friday’s performance, either. The only way to make the quartet work is by turning it into a vast and hypersensitive study in irony, with the music played in quotation marks. Barshai, to judge by his recordings, knew how to do this; no one else using the string-orchestra arrangement has been able to produce a satisfying performance of the work.

Music of Prokofiev was next on the program: Overture On Hebrew Themes, a piece fun to play and fun to hear. The audience gave the Prokofiev the warmest and most genuine applause of the night.

The concert should have concluded with yet another Russian work, but Late German Romanticism was offered instead: Korngold’s Violin Concerto. I have no idea who conceived the notion that Korngold might make a suitable companion for Shostakovich and Prokofiev—but the idea was not a good one.

I enjoy the Korngold Violin Concerto, although I readily acknowledge that the piece’s primary recommendation is that it is of brief duration. The Korngold is among the shortest concertos in the active repertory.

The concerto begins well, hitting its stride three minutes into the first movement, when the composer has the violin soar above an unexpected and extended and complicated and amazing harmonic progression that gives the listener chills for a full thirty seconds. Alas, the concerto is, for all practical purposes, over at that point, because nothing else interesting is to occur for the remainder of the work. The composer did not know, after a spectacular start, how to extend—or how to wind down—a sonata-form first movement, the composer did not know how to write a penetrating slow movement, and the composer did not know how to write an imaginative and original Rondo Finale.

The final movement of Korngold’s Violin Concerto might provide the subject of an interesting doctoral dissertation. In writing the Rondo Finale, Korngold was obviously following the models of the violin concertos of Beethoven and Brahms—yet Korngold’s main theme was second-rate, and his development of that theme even more second-rate. Korngold’s Rondo Finale is a splendid example of ersatz music: music no one would ever confuse with the real thing. Significantly, the final movement demonstrates that the composer had not developed as an artist during the previous quarter century: the materials are worked out no better than the materials in the comparable movement of the composer’s “Much Ado About Nothing” Suite, written more than twenty-five years earlier.

The Korngold Violin Concerto was largely ignored the first four decades after its premiere. In the late 1980s, however, violinists everywhere began taking up the piece; the Korngold Violin Concerto began appearing on concert programs with greater and greater frequency. Today, numerous first-rank violinists maintain the work in their repertories. In my estimation, their attentions would be better devoted to the Lars-Erik Larsson Violin Concerto, roughly contemporaneous with the Korngold but a much finer work.

The Saint Paul performance was not successful. A full orchestra is needed for the Korngold Violin Concerto to make an impact; a chamber orchestra performance is inherently destined to sound under-nourished and anemic (the elaborate—and undeniably beautiful—orchestration provides one of the few reasons to hear the piece).

The soloist was the SPCO concertmaster. Probably from necessity, he gave a very linear and one-dimensional performance of the violin part (the SPCO concertmaster lacks personality and a unique sound). At the conclusion of the concerto, the woman next to me turned to her husband and wryly noted, “He should stick to Vivaldi . . . or Stravinsky, if he wants to do something more recent”—a statement I was prepared fully to affirm.

On our way home from a very disappointing concert, Josh asked me: “Remind me again: Why did we earmark this concert?”

“Because the orchestra had originally scheduled an interesting piece by Schnittke” was my response.

I have no idea what happened to the Schnittke. Somewhere along the line, the Schnittke disappeared, to be replaced by the Prokofiev.

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On Sunday afternoon, my parents and Josh and I attended a rare Sunday matinee concert by the Minnesota Orchestra. Courtney Lewis, the orchestra’s Resident Conductor, lead the performance (Lewis’s official title is “Associate Conductor”).

Elgar’s Concert Overture, In The South (“Alassio”), began the concert.

In The South is a miraculous work, beautifully-constructed, with the widest possible range of expression—yet it is a very difficult piece to bring off, probably because it is not easy to make the various sections cohere. On disc, only Leonard Slatkin—of all persons—has managed to produce a fully-satisfactory reading.

Sunday’s Minnesota Orchestra performance was not so much a genuine performance as a rehearsed run-through. Lewis was clueless what to do with the piece, and the musicians, by themselves, were unable to create a performance without a distinguished Elgar conductor at the helm.

Schumann’s Piano Concerto followed the Elgar. The soloist was Argentine pianist Ingrid Fliter.

I am saturated by the Schumann Piano Concerto; I no longer respond to the piece.

During the last three concert seasons alone, Josh and I heard the Boston Symphony program the Schumann concerto twice: Maurizio Pollini/James Levine (a performance my parents, visiting us in Boston, had also heard); and Nelson Freire/Kurt Masur. Neither Boston performance was distinguished.

Moreover, eighteen months ago, Josh and I spent many hours listening to the fresh and intriguing Maria Joao Pires/Claudio Abbado recording of the concerto.

The result: we have had too much exposure to the work in recent years—and the Schumann Piano Concerto, a troubled if not ill-conceived work, probably does not warrant such extensive listening in the first place.

On Sunday afternoon, the musicians did not capture my full attention in the work, and I had not expected them to be able to do so. The performance merely passed by, the music going in one ear and out the other. I can state, with accuracy, that Fliter did nothing bizarre—my ears would have perked up considerably had she done so.

After intermission came Walton’s Symphony No. 1. Opportunities to hear the Walton First in the U.S. are rare, and we did not want to miss out. The Walton First is one of my favorite 20th-Century symphonies.

Going into the performance, we did not expect much—and Lewis did not deliver much. We heard precisely the sort of performance one might expect to hear from a Resident Conductor.

Lewis fatally misjudged the final movement. The climax came six minutes in, just as Walton drops the six-note fanfare theme that provides the basic material for the first half of the movement. Once the fanfare theme was tabled, Lewis was unable to maintain tension for the remaining eight or nine minutes of the symphony. The conclusion of the symphony was a dud.

The first three movements were seriously under-characterized. Anyone hearing the Walton First for the first time would have found the symphony incomparably bland. Lewis was never once in complete control of musicians or score.

The whole performance, to be frank, was not worth hearing—but I suspect that last week was Lewis’s first series of public performances of a very long and very complex and very great symphony. Allowances had to be made.

That said, the performance should have been presented in Bozeman, Montana. Lewis is not ready to be inflicted upon subscription audiences in the Twin Cities.

Julie Harris In "The Lark"

Julie Harris as Joan Of Arc in the 1955 Broadway production of Jean Anouilh’s “The Lark”.

Harris’s Joan Of Arc was considered to be one of the actress’s finest portrayals.

“The Lark”, coming after Harris’s award-winning appearances in “The Member Of The Wedding” and “I Am A Camera”, sealed Harris’s reputation as America’s leading stage actress.

L’Alouette

Only four plays by French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910-1987) maintain any currency in the English-speaking world.

Two are what I would classify as intellectual/philosophical drawing-room comedies: “Ring Round The Moon” and “Waltz Of The Toreadors”. Two others, “The Lark” and “Becket”, may be classified as history plays, although any historical content, like the historical content in Shakespeare’s history plays, is mere skeleton upon which to erect themes and arguments—and should never be accepted as factual presentation of history.

Minneapolis’s Theater In The Round recently opened a production of Anouilh’s “The Lark”, the playwright’s 1952 play about Joan Of Arc, and Joshua and I and my parents attended Saturday night’s performance.

Our decision to see “The Lark” was made more or less at the last minute. We had decided, several days earlier, to keep Saturday night open for “The Lark”—but to attend only if we found ourselves, late Saturday afternoon, in the right frame of mind to sit through a production we had been informed was very poor.

We did find ourselves in the right frame of mind late Saturday afternoon—it was the play itself we wanted to experience, not the production—and we went downtown Saturday night prepared to ignore the performance and to listen to the text.

Our stratagem was successful. We had a rewarding experience.

“The Lark” is a major work, exploring numerous matters that compel thought and reflection. Truth, morality, integrity, religion, government, politics, power: all are put under Anouilh’s microscope, and examined with cold, clinical detachment. Indeed, I am surprised that the play has not been widely staged in the U.S. the last three years, as it raises countless issues pertinent to the America of today. Anouilh, a vehement critic of Charles de Gaulle (even when de Gaulle was out of power), might as well have been directing his scorn to the current American executive, so withering is Anouilh’s treatment of hapless bread-and-circus governments courting popularity from the very basest segments of society.

Caution is in order; the case must not be overstated. “The Lark” is not pure Anouilh; it is a 1955 English-language “adaptation” of the original French text by Lillian Hellman.

Having not read Anouilh’s original French text, I have no idea what Hellman omitted and what Hellman changed—and Hellman very well may have contorted Anouilh to suit her own ends, something for which Hellman was notorious (most American observers in the 1950s believed that Hellman possessed an anti-McCarthy motive in “adapting” Anouilh).

When my mother was in college, she had studied Anouilh’s original French text—but, my mother says, too much time has passed to allow her to remember much about the original text, and to have noted accurately what was Anouilh’s and what was Hellman’s. (On Sunday, my mother located of her old copy of Anouilh’s original. My mother intends to reread it carefully this week, and to tell us how Hellman’s “adaptation” differed from Anouilh’s original.)

I can say, having heard Hellman’s text uttered by actors, that the Hellman version is prosaic—stilted and awkward in some places, too blandly American in others.

In other English-speaking countries, the Christopher Fry translation is the standard English-language version of the Anouilh play. The Fry has never gained currency in the United States, just as the Hellman has never gained currency outside the United States.

If I did not have to work for a living, and had endless free time on my hands, I would enjoy making a detailed comparison of Anouilh, Fry and Hellman. However, that not being the case, I am pleased that I have, at the very least, now encountered a fully-staged production of one version of the play. “The Lark” is an important and thought-provoking work, more spoken-of than performed or studied. It deserves its exalted reputation. In an excellent production, “The Lark” would prove overwhelming.

Theater In The Round did not do well by the material. The company had assembled a large and mostly-capable cast of fifteen players, but the production was more earnest than admirable—and, at its center, was a vacuum.

The young actress in the central role was not good. The young woman had recently relocated to the Twin Cities specifically because there are so many good acting jobs available in Minneapolis and Saint Paul—and, within months of her arrival, she had landed a plum role in a very important play.

The young woman’s amazing stroke of luck did not hold. Her Minneapolis debut was not a triumph.

In fact, her Joan Of Arc was a mistake—a mistake that should not have been inflicted upon a theater-going public, and a mistake that should not have been inflicted upon the young woman herself.

I have been told, rightly or wrongly, that the young actress was almost replaced numerous times during rehearsals, including as late as one week before the first preview performance.

I have also been told, rightly or wrongly, that area newspapers sent reviewers to “The Lark”—and that such reviewers decided it would be cruel to subject the production to public critical assessment.

Such decisions, if made, were probably the right ones. Productions as weak as Theater In The Round’s “The Lark” should, as a general rule, be permitted to pass unnoticed—and unrecorded in annals.

Moreover, any appearance of negative reviews might have killed an already-weak box office for “The Lark”. The production has been playing to very small audiences. Had local reviewers offered honest appraisals of the production, there might have been no audience members at all for what is an important and seldom-produced work.

Who Were The Idiots That Approved This Cover?

Sitters

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process was going on.

British Novelist Anthony Powell

Memo To Nikolaj Znaider

Please rethink the lipstick and rouge.

Hilary Hahn and Julia Fischer wear less makeup.

Europe’s Answer To Hilary Hahn

In recent days, Joshua and I attended three concerts.

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On Wednesday evening, we (along with my parents) went to Saint Paul to hear Munich-born and –based violinist Julia Fischer in recital.

Fischer was, by and large, disappointing. Fischer is a serious musician and a fine instrumentalist, but she has not yet become interesting. Her playing exhibits little personality and character, and she has a limited color palette.

Fischer is only in her late twenties—yet, in their late twenties, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Maxim Vengerov and Nikolaj Znaider (to cite only three examples) were fully-formed artists, with commanding personalities and unique individual voices. My instinct tells me that Fischer will never acquire the one-of-a-kind, larger-than-life qualities necessary to place her in the front rank of violinists.

The program was not chosen to reveal Fischer at her best. Fischer is known for her restraint, purity of line, and concentration in music of repose and contemplation—making her, above all, a Bach player. However, Fischer offered Twin Cities audiences not Bach but music of Mozart, Schubert, Debussy and Saint-Saens—and Fischer had nothing specific to say about any of those composers.

I had looked forward to hearing Fischer in Mozart’s Sonata In B Flat Major, K. 454, but it became immediately apparent that Fischer is not a Mozart musician: she could not keep more than one emotion going at a time. Fischer gave an indifferent performance, causing me to question why she had elected to perform this particular work.

Josh and I had most recently heard K. 454 fifteen months ago, when Pinchas Zukerman and Yefim Bronfman had played the work at a Boston recital. More than five years ago, all of us had heard Mutter and Lambert Orkis play K. 454 in Saint Paul. Both Zukerman’s and Mutter’s renditions of Mozart’s finest sonata for violin and keyboard had been vastly superior to what Fischer offered.

Fischer was at her best in Schubert’s seldom-performed Rondo Brilliant In B Minor, which concluded the first half of the program. Fischer obviously liked the piece, and she played it as serious music (and not as an empty virtuoso showpiece, which is how Christian Tetzlaff and Leif Ove Andsnes had treated the work three years ago, when Josh and I heard Tetzlaff and Andsnes play the Schubert Rondo in Boston). Nonetheless, the Schubert Rondo is not a work around which to build a recital program.

The best music of the evening came immediately after intermission: Debussy’s Sonata In G Minor, one of Debussy’s most striking and most original compositions. Fischer held my attention in the Debussy—any competent violinist will hold the listener’s attention in the work—but the performance was unremarkable and unmemorable, the kind of performance regularly heard on Saturday mornings on Radio Luxembourg.

The Saint-Saens Sonata No. 1 In D Minor—pleasant and virtuosic—that concluded the program was unobjectionable, yet I am surprised that violinists would ever choose such an empty work to conclude a recital (Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk had done the same four years ago in the same hall).

Fischer is not, I believe, a master of French music—but her accompanist, Ukrainian pianist Milana Chernyavska, certainly was. Chernyavska, dutiful in the Mozart and Schubert, came alive in the Debussy and Saint-Saens, revealing herself to be a fine pianist in French repertory, where color and flair are at a premium.

We live in an age of great violinists. There are probably close to twenty active violinists on the world’s musical stages that, without any exaggeration, may be called great. (In comparison, one may count today’s great pianists on the fingers of one hand.) In fact, there are so many great violinists today that the second tier of artists is bound to get lost in the shuffle.

Fischer is destined, I suspect, always to be in that second tier.

Josh summed up the conundrum nicely after Fischer’s recital: “I don’t know what Mutter has—but, whatever Mutter has, Fischer certainly hasn’t got it.”

My father had a more acidic comment to make about Fischer after the recital: “Julia Fischer is Europe’s answer to Hilary Hahn.”

My mother’s rejoinder: “Wait! I thought she [Julia Fischer] WAS Hilary Hahn!”

My response: “You mean there’s a difference?”

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On Friday evening, Josh and I (and my parents, who have the Minnesota Orchestra Friday night subscription) heard another violinist at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. That night, Russian-born Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman joined the Minnesota Orchestra for a performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2.

To the best of my recollection, I had never heard Gluzman before—but I very well may have forgotten, because Gluzman, too, is not a memorable musician. Gluzman offered a reading of Prokofiev’s finest concertante work that was very much rote and by-the-book, as if his interpretation, phrasings and bowings had been dictated to him by Dorothy DeLay (once Gluzman’s teacher).

In his defense, Gluzman may have been required simply to survive his Minnesota Orchestra engagement.

The orchestra devoted only two days of rehearsal to the program we heard, squeezing four full rehearsals into a single 48-hour period. Further, the orchestra was offering Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 (“Leningrad”) on the same program—and it was the Shostakovich that had received the bulk of the rehearsal time.

Under such circumstances, it was probably unreasonable to have expected Gluzman to deliver something memorable.

The Minnesota Orchestra, guided by guest conductor Andrew Litton, provided very fine playing in the Shostakovich. The musicians gave an excellent account of themselves.

Litton programmed lots of Shostakovich when he was Music Director of the Dallas Symphony, and he is widely regarded as a fine conductor of Shostakovich. However, as one who used to hear Yuri Temirkanov lead the music of Shostakovich with the Baltimore Symphony, I find Litton to be no more than competent in Shostakovich.

Friday night’s Minnesota Orchestra performance of the Leningrad Symphony was very much an American affair. The sound of the orchestra was far too bright, there was too little soul and too little irony in the music-making, and Litton varied his tempi too little as well as phrased with too little specificity. What we heard, in essence, was a very glib performance of what is supposed to be an epic if not tragic work.

I am not a fan of the Shostakovich Seventh. The musical materials are not inherently interesting, the composer stretched those musical materials to the breaking point, and the work has no structural integrity. However, the Leningrad Symphony CAN be made to work, as Temirkanov (if no one else) has demonstrated.

Temirkanov’s RCA recording with the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic is a miracle. By constantly altering tempi, by inserting pauses, by frequent use of rubato and by demanding very specific phrasing from the musicians, Temirkanov somehow made the sprawling work cohere. Temirkanov’s was a work of alchemy, akin to what Furtwängler used to do in Bruckner symphonies.

None of Temirkanov’s magic got passed down to Litton. Litton was more or less in command of the Technicolor aspects of the score, but the stark grimness beneath the surface was never realized in a convincing fashion.

Opportunities to hear the Leningrad Symphony are not frequent. We were pleased that the Minnesota Orchestra gave the work a rare performance—and we were disappointed that the performance was fundamentally vapid.

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On Saturday evening, Josh and I (by ourselves) returned to Saint Paul to hear the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra under guest conductor Ludovic Morlot.

Mozart’s Symphony No. 31 (“Paris”) began the concert, and it provided the highlight of the evening. The SPCO is a very good Mozart orchestra, and the musicians played the Paris Symphony beautifully.

The concert continued with Debussy’s Le Livre de Baudelaire in the orchestral version by John Adams. Soprano Dawn Upshaw was soloist.

I thought Upshaw was unsatisfactory. If Le Livre de Baudelaire does not come across as magical, there is no point in performing the work—and Upshaw was anything but magical. Upshaw’s voice is now dry—whatever gleam was once there is now gone—and she did nothing to color the music or text. The performance was uninspired, even pedestrian. We might as well have been attending a faculty recital at Macalester College.

Upshaw returned after intermission to sing Ravel’s Five Greek Folk Songs. Upshaw was better in the Ravel than in the Debussy, perhaps because the Ravel songs are easier to sing. However, once again, it was impossible not to note the lack of opulence in the voice, and the restricted color choices available to the artist.

We last heard Upshaw four years ago, when she had appeared with the SPCO in music of Schoenberg and Berio. Upshaw’s vocal state has deteriorated significantly over the intervening four years. Whether or not her vocal decline is health-related, it is time for Upshaw to contemplate retiring from the concert stage. The basic instrument is going, and Upshaw is not the type of singer that can get by on “artistry” alone.

The concert concluded with Ravel’s “Mother Goose” Suite. A chamber-orchestra reduction of the Ravel is hardly the most advantageous way to hear one of Ravel’s most voluptuously-orchestrated works. As if to compensate for the lack of a full orchestra, Morlot emphasized clarity in the performance—and, as such, his reading was fully satisfactory.

Oddly, across town, the Minnesota Orchestra was also playing Ravel’s “Mother Goose” Suite the very same evening.