CNE Journal

Downton Abbey Wins Emmy for Original Score

Tuesday, September 25, 2012   0 comments.

The Renewal and Reflection of Eternal Echoes

By James David Jacobs   |   Monday, September 17, 2012   0 comments.

The Jewish High Holidays, beginning with Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and extending through Yom Kippur, is a time of celebration, reflection, and renewal. This year those qualities are deepened through the release of Eternal Echoes - Songs and Dances for the Soul on Sony Classical.

Three living legends came together to create Eternal Echoes: the renowned classical violinist Itzhak Perlman; Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot, who keeps the ancient cantorial tradition alive from his pulpit at Manhattan's Park East Synagogue; and Hankus Netsky, a pioneer in the revival of klezmer music. Their musical common ground finds its roots in the Ashkenazi tradition, the Jewish culture of Central and Eastern Europe.

Like Yiddish, the language common amongst the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe, the musical language of the Ashkenazi is a fusion of modern European and ancient Middle Eastern styles. It expresses the full range of human emotions, from exuberant joy to deep introspection to heart-wrenching sorrow.

Those emotions come through in the music the same way they exist in life itself, occupying the same space almost simultaneously: the harmonies switch constantly from minor to major, the rhythms from straightforward to syncopated, and a tune that starts out slow and sad is likely to end fast and happy.
As Hankus Netsky, the founder of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and the Contemporary Improvisation Chair at the New England Conservatory explains, "I liken it to the blues. When Jews prayed, they cried. We have a word, krehts, meaning to groan - like the blues have a moan or a wail. The Jews have a sobbing kind of feeling, even when they're happy. That's why this music is universal."

You’ll hear that on Eternal Echoes, which brings in yet another dimension: a tune that starts out with a solemn prayer frequently ends in a joyous dance. While many traditional cantorial melodies and klezmer dance tunes have common folk sources, the connection between them has never before been made this explicit.

Netsky, the album's musical director, freely admits that bringing together different strains of Jewish music is an "agenda" of his and is in line with his idea that klezmer is not just a re-creation of music from the past, but a "living tradition."

Join me for conversations with Itzhak Perlman and Hankus Netsky, along with excerpts from Eternal Echoes, all this week on Classical New England. See the schedule and listen on-demand above, and to purchase Eternal Echoes, visit ArkivMusic.
 

Encountering Wagner

By Brian McCreath   |   Sunday, September 9, 2012   0 comments.

Richard Wagner, one of history's most complex and confounding figures, becomes a little more understandable at his Swiss villa. But only a little.

It's hard to think of an individual who embodies more extreme contradictions than Richard Wagner. The dark side of Wagner generates a list of characteristics unleavened by their familiarity: an ego of gargantuan proportions; a flagrant home-wrecker; a financial manipulator usually one step (barely) ahead of his creditors; and, of course, an outspoken anti-Semite.
 

Hear Discovery Ensemble and conductor Courtney Lewis perform Siegfried-Idyll in our Fraser Performance Studio

The positive side starts with the music: revolutionary, seductive, majestic, overwhelming. In the context of his creations, how important is Wagner's dark side? It's the perennial question surrounding a person whose incredibly outlandish artistic vision was matched only by a series of equally outlandish life events.

My background as a trumpeter pre-disposes me to have some kind of affection for Wagner's music, I suppose; it's simply a thrill to play. But moving beyond those trumpet parts and into the operas themselves and then into the circumstances of Wagner's life has always been daunting to me. So having the chance to visit Tribschen, Wagner's Swiss home in exile, with a group of Classical New England listeners during our 2012 LearningTour was an opportunity to at least try to understand Wagner the person.

It helps - and quite a lot, in my opinion - that Tribschen is the setting for one of the more charming stories from Wagner's life. (I know. "Charming" and "Wagner" ... not easy to integrate.) It was at Tribschen in 1870 that Wagner wrote Siegfried-Idyll, a 20 minute, loving, musical birthday card to his wife Cosima, the woman he married earlier that year. (The story of their relationship takes us back to that bafflingly dark side, but let's not go there, at least for the moment...) It was apparently performed for the first time at the bottom of the stairs as Cosima's birthday morning wake-up call.
 

Since then, the Idyll has been inextricably linked to the place, and, indeed, the score in Wagner's manuscript holds pride of place in what is now a Wagner museum at the house. The Idyll even constituted the first music to be performed at the newly inaugurated Lucerne Festival in 1938 and has been programmed during the festival each year since.

Being there, at Tribschen, meant standing in the same room in which Wagner was a host for Liszt, Nietzsche, and King Ludwig II. It meant gazing across the lake to see the same view that Cosima saw from her bedroom window. Did it all make Wagner more understandable? Yes and no.

As at similar sites I've visited - St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach worked; the Budapest Opera House, where Mahler's Symphony No. 1 was premiered; Bertramka, the home where Mozart stayed while visiting Prague - I could picture Wagner's life in more detail. I could imagine him putting the finishing touches on Die Meistersinger. I was in awe of his regular treks in the nearby Alpine mountains. And that story of the premiere of the Idyll has far more specific surroundings than before.

But all those dark characteristics still seem just as dark.

There's never a necessity to relate personally to the creators of art. If the art has integrity, we relate to it, not the artist. In the case of Wagner, the picture of the creator is more detailed and colorful than ever before for me. Hearing and watching his music and operas will carry with it some meaningful added context after visiting one of his homes. Wagner remains an artist whose genius is indisputable. And he remains someone whose life, to me, is even more fascinatingly improbable than before.



 

Patriots and Heroes

Friday, April 13, 2012   0 comments.

Patriots Day is a holiday unique to Massachusetts, commemorating the first shots fired in the American Revolution. Classical New England brings you a day of programming throughout the day on April 16 to both celebrate and remember that earth-shattering event at Lexington Green.

Boston Camerata

Leila Josefowicz and Esa-Pekka Salonen at the BSO

Thursday, April 12, 2012   0 comments.

The Dual Lives of Esa-Pekka Salonen

By Brian McCreath   |   Thursday, April 12, 2012   0 comments.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, one of the rare individuals to hold world-class status as both a conductor and composer, visits Boston.

The music world has seen very few musicians who have risen to the top of the field as both composer and conductor since the days of Gustav Mahler. As one of the many superb musicians to emerge from the Sibelius Academy in Finland, he was a conducting student of Jorma Panula and a composition student of Einojuhani Rautavaara. Like many composers, he initially learned to conduct in order to have his pieces performed. But very quickly, that became the focus of his career.

As a conductor, he came to the Los Angeles Philharmonic as Music Director in 1992, transforming an already excellent major orchestra into one of the most exciting artistic vehicles of its kind in the world. He was, along the way, instrumental in spearheading the construction of Walt Disney Hall, the orchestra's spectacular concert hall.

He left that post in 2009, largely motivated by a desire to return to a more balanced existence as both composer and conductor. Now his Violin Concerto, composed as he was preparing to leave Los Angeles, has been chosen as the winner of the 2012 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

Salonen hasn't conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1988, and his return as a guest conductor with his Violin Concerto serendipitously coincides with Discovery Ensemble's scheduled performance of Mania.

To hear more about Salonen's dual existence as conductor and composer, click on "Listen" above.

Here is a performance of the Violin Concerto by Salonen in two parts:





(image of Esa-Pekka Salonen by Stefan Bremer, courtesy of the artist; photo of Walt Disney Concert Hall by Jon Sullivan, via Wikimedia Commons and pdphoto.org)

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