Italics are mine

Cleveland Orchestra and Shostakovich 4

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate to catch a performance of the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, conducted by its Music Director Franz Welser-Möst. It was a Sunday evening and (it seemed to me that) the hall was almost half empty, which was unfortunate, given the quality of the music and the renown of the conductor. The Cleveland Orchestra - which is chronicled up to 2000 in the book "The Cleveland Orchestra Story", the single best book about the rise of an orchestra that I've read to date - performed the New York premiere of let me tell you, with Barbara Hannigan (soprano), and Shostakovich's fourth symphony. The latter was of course the reason I attended.

From the program: let me tell you, by Hans Abrahamsen, "is a song cycle devised by the composer in collaboration with Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan and British writer Paul Griffiths." Griffith's novel let me tell you, published in 2008, "is an imaginary narrative as told by Ophelia using only the 481 words she is allotted in Hamlet."

Being a Shakespeare fan, I really liked the concept behind let me tell you and wanted to love it, but frankly I found it underwhelming at best. My one-word review would be: awful. I'm aware it has been widely praised by the critics, so clearly I don't pay attention to the same things critics do when they evaluate new work. The soprano sang beautifully, but the way she sang reminded me constantly of a fish under water, making bubbles that slowly rise to the surface. That is the one image I have of that work. Maybe that explains why attendance was so scarce, in spite of the Shostakovich name being usually a draw - maybe most classical music lovers knew to stay away, since on top of that Symphony No 4 is not performed nearly as often as his more popular No 5 or No 7.

But I was one of the few people that night who really, really wanted to listen to Shostakovich's 4th live. I'd never heard it performed in concert and Shostakovich had planned to premiere it in December 1936 but had to shelve it after he ran afoul of the authorities for his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk opera (I wrote about the movie version here), so for me it symbolizes Shostakovich's incredible creativity that had to be muffled in order for him to stay alive. The symphony was only premiered in December 1961 by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra with Kirill Kondrashin conducting. In addition, the symphony was discovered in the US when the Philadelphia Orchestra recorded/performed it under Eugene Ormandy's leadership, which adds a local connection since I've spent about a decade outside Philadelphia by now.  

The Cleveland Orchestra was in top form and gave a stunning performance of a long (one hour!) but mesmerizing work. The audience jumped to its feet at the end. The length of the piece also spoke in favor of live performances. If you listen to something on a recording, you can do something else or pause it if you want - you're not confronted with the stamina needed for the musicians to go through with the work without faltering from beginning to end. In a performance hall, however, you can't escape how daunting the task is and marvel at the feat happening right in front of your eyes. 

We all returned to the cold, snowy evening in New York with sheer amazement at the composer's, conductor's and musicians' remarkable genius and collective talent. I feel sorry for those who missed this. Even if that entailed being put through half an hour of music sounding like a fish making bubbles, the second half of the program made it worth it. I only wish Shostakovich's 4th was programmed more often.

If you care to hear Shostakovich 4 performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, which premiered it in the US, I recommend this recording (part of a set of Shostakovich symphonies with various orchestras, with Wyung Wung Chung conducting) and that one (Eugene Ormandy conducting the 4th and the 10th - superb!) I'm not aware of a recording by the Cleveland Orchestra.

Here is the beginning, played by the London Symphony Orchestra with Valery Gergiev conducting (Gergiev also has an excellent recording of Shostakovich 4 available for purchase, recorded with the Mariinsky Orchestra). I can never get tired of those opening bars. Enjoy, and buy one of the recordings!

Review of "Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict"

I saw Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict by Lisa Immordino Vreeland at the Lincoln Center Film Society a few weeks back. I read her bio Mistress of Modernism by Mary Dearborn some time ago so I was already familiar with her life, and I found the movie visually compelling but a little superficial, especially in the way it dealt with her last years (my recollection from Mistress of Modernism is that she didn't age particularly gracefully and drank too much alcohol) but that weakness of the movie was more due to length constraints than an error in the filmmaker's perspective. Every word in the movie's voice-over is important: if you daydream and miss one sentence, you might miss an important bit of information to understand Guggenheim's life and it's not going to come back in some other way five minutes later. But if you want to learn more about Peggy Guggenheim's life in one hour and a half, you can't go wrong with the Art Addict movie.

One thing that caught my attention was how artists seemed not to take Peggy Guggenheim very seriously. She craved to belong in that circle and they were happy to take her money but they appeared to view her as a lightweight. That brought to mind the issues donors face when they try to do the right thing and support artists but do it so obviously to fulfill their own need for significance that they lose the respect of the people who owe them most. (There is the scene in the otherwise mediocre series Flesh & Bone where the ballerinas poke fun at the donors who want to feel "touched by angels" by the proximity to the dancers when they attend the dance company's gala. The art world can get very complicated when artists resent the people that make their work possible.) She was also used by Max Ernst, it seems, whom she married in 1941 (this allowed him to escape the Nazis and move to the U.S. with her) but divorced in 1946. He left her for Dorothea Tanning (ironically, an artist in a show of 31 women artists Peggy had organized in one of her galleries, which is how Max Ernst met her) in 1946 and remained married to Dorothea until his death in 1976, or thirty years.

Digression: Dorothea Tanning only died recently, in 2012 at age 101. You can read her obituary in The New York Times here. While she was initially best known for her surrealist paintings, after reaching age 80 she wrote an autobiography and poems that were published in The New Yorker, The Yale Review and The Paris Review.  

My favorite parts of the movie focused on her galleries, both in London and New York, and her villa full of art in Venice - now a highly-visited museum. The museum also has a good professional bio of her on its website, which you can read here. The highlights of her career include the opening of her gallery Guggenheim Jeune in London in January 1938, Art of the Century in New York City in October 1942, (the gallery hosted Jackson Pollock's first show ever in 1943 and Peggy commissioned his largest painting, Mural), and her donation of her palace in Venice and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which operates her museum today.

Funnily enough, Peggy Guggenheim's insecurities were highlighted by her tendency to slightly show her tongue when she was confused or perplexed. There is a light-hearted moment in the movie where we are shown about ten excerpts of her doing just that in short succession. She was also very self-conscious because of her bulby nose, for which she got a botched operation. Later when she had moved to Venice she seemed to have enjoyed drooling over the young Italian workers who were doing construction in her villa (the only hint in the movie that she didn't age very well, with no motion of the alcohol that Dearborn writes about in her book.) The suicide of her daughter Pegeen is glossed over, but at least it is mentioned.

I admit I had forgotten about the love story with John Holms, who died during minor surgery. The movie states he was her big love, which I can't remember. The impression I had from reading her bio was that she didn't have a lot of true love in her life (her beloved father died in the Titanic, on which he was traveling with his mistress, who was saved), although she was said to be quite promiscuous in an attempt to compensate for her looks. Yet, in spite of or perhaps because of her deep loneliness, her contributions to modern art are enormous. In fact, it is hard to think of someone who impacted modern art of the 1940s-1950s more than she did. I wonder who, if anyone, will be her equivalent in the twenty-first century.  

Here is the movie trailer.

Shostakovich's "Katerina Izmailova"

This is the 1966 movie version of Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District", starring famed Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (1926-2012), who was the wife of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007). I hope that if you're reading this blog, I don't have to tell you Rostropovich was considered to be one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century. I watched the movie before Christmas and just loved it, not only because of the beautiful voices, Shostakovich's music and the Russian words I could understand (the movie also has subtitles in English), but also because of the outlandishness of the movie premises, where the actors sing throughout and with the exception of Vishnevskaya the actors are dubbed by opera singers. The singing is remarkable, the acting is great, the music is mesmerizing - a masterpiece.

You can read Vishnevskaya's obituary in the New York Times here.  I'll quote the opening paragraph: "Galina Vishnevskaya, an electrifying soprano who endured repression and exile as one of the postwar Soviet Union’s most prominent political dissidents, died on Tuesday in Moscow. She was 86." What a life summarized in those few words!