Exactly one month before Election Day, October 6, 2012, I witnessed another periodic rite that dates back to the beginning of the republic: the Induction Ceremony of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The collective brilliance of the population of Sanders that day was truly staggering.

Forget about childhood fears like the thing in the closet and the seemingly endless expanse of darkness beneath the bed, “scary” can take on a whole different dimension with the perspective of an adult.

Conductor Harry Christophers and The Sixteen have just released a recording of Handel's oratorio Saul.

The soloists include sopranos Elizabeth Atherton and Joélle Harvey, mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, tenors Jeremy Budd, Mark Dobell, Robert Murray, and Tom Raskin, and basses Ben Davies, Eamonn Dougan, Christopher Purves, and Stuart Young.

Saul was Handel's fourth English oratorio, but it was the first one he wrote after he had given up once and for all on Italian opera. He wrote it at the age of 53, having made a full recovery following a debilitating illness he suffered the year before that affected his playing and his mental health. Saul also marked Handel's first collaboration with librettist Charles Jennens, with whom he would later collaborate on several other oratorios, including Israel in Egypt and Messiah. In many ways, then, Saul marks a new beginning for Handel, the start of his greatest creative period.

How appropriate, then, that this oratorio is concerned with events that take place during the Feast of the New Moon, the beginning of the Jewish New Year. It's a story of death and renewal: the Lear-like fall of Saul, a once-great king who succumbs to feelings of murderous jealousy of the young David, who at the beginning of the oratorio is fresh from his victory over Goliath and at the end is crowned king, an important figure in all the Abrahamic religions. Handel treats this story as a true epic, calling for the largest cast and richest orchestration of any of his oratorios.

This week we'll be hearing a brand-new recording of the work by The Sixteen conducted by Harry Christophers, who is also the director of Boston's own Handel and Haydn Society. One of the notable features of the recording is the casting of the role of David, usually sung by a countertenor, as a female mezzo-soprano, which apparently was Handel's original intention. On this recording the role is sung by Sarah Connolly; in an Opera Today review of her performance of this role at the Barbican, Connolly is said to have "demonstrated that in the right hands, the richness, depth and flexibility of a female mezzo-soprano voice can work wonders in the role...here she gave a finely moulded, intelligent performance of great beauty."

This recording will be heard in four installments, during the 9pm hour on Monday and during the 10pm hour Tuesday through Thursday, in celebration of Rosh Hashanah.

See a libretto

Harry Christophers will conduct another Handel oratorio in Boston during the 2012-2013 season. The concluding concert of the coming season of the Handel and Haydn Society features Handel's Jeptha, and will feature two of the soloists heard in The Sixteen's Saul, including Joélle Harvey and Robert Murray.

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.
 

Gustav Leonhardt, a revered pioneer in the revitalization of Baroque music, died on Jan. 16 in Amsterdam. His performances and teaching influenced countless musicians, but Classical New England host James David Jacobs also encountered his more personal side.

“Excuse me – do you know of a place near here where one could get chocolate?”

That was not the question I expected to hear at that moment, especially considering its source. It came from Gustav Leonhardt, who was to soon be performing his American debut as a conductor. I was singing that night with the University of California Collegium Musicum Chamber Chorus, but the eminent early music pioneer’s question came at an awkward moment. I was in the process of quickly leaving in embarrassment from a place deep within St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, where the concert was set to take place.

I had gone to this familiar, remote corner of the church, a location I considered my own secret place, in order to get my voice warmed up, never thinking that anyone else even knew about it. It was only when the world’s greatest harpsichordist and foremost expert in Baroque performance practice emerged in an unbuttoned shirt and hanging suspenders that I realized I had invaded the space designated as Gustav Leonhardt’s private dressing room.

I immediately apologized and began to slink away, though he did not seem disturbed at all. Then, in his polite, soft, and somewhat patrician manner, he asked me if I knew where to get some chocolate. I did, in fact, and a few minutes later an expedition was organized, with several choir members and Gustav Leonhardt, to a nearby candy store named Sweet Dreams. Leonhardt very politely, but without a hint of embarrassment, picked out several pieces of candy, which he ate out his paper bag on the way back to the church, bestowing a kind of dignity and gravitas to the act of candy-eating that I’ve tried and failed to emulate ever since.

That night, Leonhardt conducted in very exact gestures. There was no baton in his hands, but he was not at all vague. It was very evident that he knew this music and exactly how he wanted it to sound. Despite his own grim, forceful physical style, the resulting music was flowing and lyrical and free, eliciting some of the most beautiful music-making I have ever heard.

Everyone, even those in the choir and the string section, felt their individual contribution to the total sound. Leonhardt, despite his taciturn manner, created an atmosphere of glowing warmth. It was certainly one the greatest musical experiences of my life.

The principal oboist for that concert was the late Bruce Haynes, and I remember him telling me the story of going to an orchestra rehearsal in Amsterdam the day after Leonhardt had conducted a concert on Dutch television. The concert was notable for employing a particular style of inégal playing, a type of rhythmic emphasis that is not notated in the score, in one of the pieces on the program.

Bruce said that, at the rehearsal, no one said a word or talked about the concert, but it was obvious everyone had watched it because when they started playing everyone employed that exact kind of inégal that Leonhardt used in the broadcast. No one had played like that at the previous rehearsal, but such was the influence and respect commanded by Gustav Leonhardt that his televised performance changed everything.

Leonhardt played the role of Johann Sebastian Bach in the black-and-white 1968 film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. It was a brilliant bit of casting, because it required no acting at all. Leonhardt, looking perfectly comfortable in 18th-century costume, played harpsichord and organ, very occasionally said something when there was something important to say, and then went back to playing.

That is exactly how I imagine the real Bach was, and it is absolutely how Leonhardt was, someone very seriously dedicated to the work of creating (and consuming) beauty and pleasure.

(image of Gustav Leonhardt via Wikimedia Commons)

More on Gustav Leonhardt, including remembrances by Boston Baroque's Martin Pearlman, can be found at PRI's The World.

Video from The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach:

Oct. 3

Tonight I'm very happy to take on a new role at Classical New England as your late-night host. I hope you’ll join me from 9pm until 1am, Monday-Thursday, for a chance to hear a wide variety of music, from classic orchestral and chamber works to off-the-beaten track surprises from our own time and centuries before.

We’ll begin with a favorite of mine whenever inaugurating a new show: Mozart's Horn Concerto No. 1, K. 412, in the classic recording by Dennis Brain with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.

One small caveat: It's not really a concerto. It's two concerto movements, written several years apart, and many scholars think that the second movement was completed from Mozart's sketches by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, the same man who completed Mozart's Requiem. I've always loved this movement, which contains a bit of a Gregorian Easter Hymn and has contrapuntal passages that remind me of the Clarinet Concerto, also a product of Mozart's last year; I have a hard time believing it's not authentic, but I'd think it was great music no matter who wrote it.

The show will continue with Brahms's Symphony No. 1. My cello teacher, Millie Rosner, declared the first ten measures of the piece to constitute the longest phrase ever composed. When it's performed correctly, you shouldn't be able to breathe during those measures. Let's see how Bernard Haitink and the Boston Symphony Orchestra affects your respiratory system.

A more intimate sound takes over in the 10pm. After Radu Lupu plays the Schubert Impromptu in A-flat, we’ll hear a string quartet by the 74-year-old Leos Janacek inspired by his fervent love for the much younger Kamila Stosslova. Janacek himself named the quartet "Intimate Letters," intended to reflect the character of their relationship that was never consummated physically, but thrived through the over 700 passionate letters they exchanged.

11pm is when we’ll turn to works of more recent vintage, and I can't think of a better way to begin than by celebrating the 75th birthday of Steve Reich, born in New York City on October 3, 1936.

To call Steve Reich the greatest of the Minimalists is to, well, minimize him; what is so extraordinary about his work is that, no matter how high-concept one of his pieces is, you come away from it feeling that you have experienced a piece of MUSIC. This is certainly reflected in the three works we will hear tonight.

Cello Counterpoint, from 2003, is the latest of his four "Counterpoint" pieces, each of which features one live performer accompanied by a tape of multiple tracks of that same performer. Reich says of this work that it is "the freest in structure of any I have written." (Some moments of it sound a little like Janacek!)

After this comes a performance you can only hear on Classical New England, in its first-ever broadcast. In November 2007, New England Conservatory presented a series of all-Reich concerts in Jordan Hall. From that series we'll hear members of NEC Wind Ensemble perform City Life, a 1995 composition which incorporates snippets of recorded sounds and speech, operated manually on sampling keyboards, into what is essentially a work for chamber orchestra. Among the recorded sounds are car horns, air brakes, door slams, and, in an eerie foreshadowing of his his most recent composition, actual field communications of the New York City Fire Department on February 26, 1993, the day the World Trade Center was bombed the first time. In its transformation of speech patterns into music the work is reminiscent of his early tape-loop pieces, It's Gonna Rain and Come Out.

The final work in our Reich celebration is a celebratory work indeed, Tehillim, a setting of texts from Psalms, 18, 19, 34 and 150. An exuberant work, it’s also widely acknowledged to be one of Reich's masterpieces, and a very appropriate one for the Jewish High Holy Days. K. Robert Schwarz said of this work that "Its tricky, syncopated, toe-tapping rhythms could only have come from the pen of a man who loves bebop and Stravinsky in equal measure."

As we enter the wee hours of Tuesday our new show will turn to two works about creation, the beginning of all things. Shortly after midnight is Jean-Fery Rebel’s ballet Les Elemens, a French Baroque ballet whose first note sounds as bracingly modern as Reich: all seven notes of the D minor scale sounded simultaneously, representing Chaos. Cosmos soon reigns, however, with a series of charming dance movements, rooted in the popular music of the time.

We then jump ahead nearly two centuries to end with another French ballet about the beginning of the world that combines bracing modernism with earthy populism: Milhaud's 1923 ballet La Creation du Monde. In the 1920s several classical composers incorporated jazz, or rather jazz-like elements, into their work. Leonard Bernstein said of this work: "I take the liberty of calling this work a masterpiece because it has the one real requisite of a masterpiece — durability. Among all of those experiments with jazz that Europe flirted with in this period, only The Creation of the World emerges complete, not as a flirtation but as a real love affair with jazz."

I hope you'll join me for our nightly love affair with music on Classical New England!

(image of Boston skyline:  By Luciof (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

As a child, Ives’s father, a marching band director, would amuse young Charles by dividing his band in two and having them enter the field from opposite directions, playing two different tunes in two different keys. Ives later incorporated this kind of juxtaposition into his compositions, frequently for the purpose of illustrating a scene from a New England village during a holiday. In one work, however, he uses the technique to illustrate a scene that eerily foreshadows the atmosphere in New York ten years ago.

On Friday, May 7, 1915, at 9:30 AM EST, German U-boats torpedoed the ocean liner Lusitania, killing some 1,200 people and pulling the United States into World War I. Thanks to radio and wire services, most Americans knew about the tragedy by the time of their evening commute home from work. Charles Ives was one of them. His insurance firm, Ives & Myrick, had its offices at 38 Nassau Street (just a few blocks from what would become the World Trade Center site).

The full title of third movement of Ives’s Second Orchestral Set is "From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose." Ives considered this one of his best works, and wrote the following about it:
 

We were living in an apartment at 27 West 11th Street. The morning paper on the breakfast table gave the news of the sinking of the Lusitania. I remember, going downtown to business, the people on the streets and on the elevated train had something in their faces that was not the usual something. Everybody who came into the office, whether they spoke about the disaster or not, showed a realization of seriously experiencing something. (That it meant war is what the faces said, if the tongues didn't.) Leaving the office and going uptown about 6 o'clock, I took the Third Avenue "L" at the Hanover Square Station [Stone and Pearl Streets, just south of Wall Street]. As I came on the platform, there was quite a crowd waiting for the trains, which had been blocked lower down, and while waiting there, a hand-organ, or hurdy gurdy was playing on a street below. Some workmen sitting on the side of the tracks began to whistle the tune, and others began to sing or hum the refrain. A workman with a shovel over his shoulder came on the platform and joined in the chorus, and the next man, a Wall Street banker with white spats and a cane, joined in it, and finally it seemed to me that everybody was singing this tune, and they didn't seem to be singing for fun, but as a natural outlet for what their feelings had been going through all day long. There was a feeling of dignity all through this. The hand-organ man seemed to sense this and wheeled the organ nearer the platform and kept it up fortissimo (and the chorus sounded out as though every man in New York must be joining in it). Then the first train came and everybody crowded in, and the song eventually died out, but the effect on the crowd still showed. Almost nobody talked-the people acted as though they might be coming out of a church service. In going uptown, occasionally little groups of would start singing or humming the tune.

Now what was the tune? It wasn't a Broadway hit, it wasn't a musical comedy air, it wasn't a waltz tune or a dance tune or an opera tune or a classical tune, or a tune that all of them probably knew. It was(only)the refrain of an old Gospel Hymn that had stirred many people of past generations. It was nothing but -'In the Sweet Bye and Bye.' It wasn't a tune written to be sold, or written by a professor of music - but by a man who was but giving out an experience.

This third movement is based on this, fundamentally, and comes from that ‘L’ station. It has secondary themes and rhythms, but widely related, and its general makeup would reflect the sense of many people living, working, and occasionally going through the same deep experience, together.

It's a piece of music that speaks to the human spirit as we remember the tragic events of ten years ago.
 

Following Yuzo Toyama’s retirement in 2006, the Sendai Phil resumed a troika system of leadership with French conductor Pascal Verrot (left) as their musical director, Kazufumi Yamashita as Resident Conductor, and Kazuhiro Koizumi as Principal Guest Conductor. While Verrot does not make his residence in Sendai, many people, both within the orchestra and from the audience perspective, apparently feel that the “freshness” of music-making that occurs when he conducts in Sendai makes up for the challenges in logistics and communication.

Verrot will be in Sendai to conduct a June 24th “Revival Subscription Concert.” All of the Sendai Philharmonic players and administrative personnel survived the March 11th disasters (unfortunately, the same cannot be said for some of their instruments). The March 11th earthquake damaged all of the major performance halls in Sendai, so the orchestra had to cancel all of its scheduled concerts through June.

Despite the lack of functional performance spaces in town, the Sendai Phil has been playing an astounding number of reconstruction concerts both locally and around Japan. In Sendai, orchestra members have been taking turns playing chamber concerts in the lobbies of hotels and office buildings such as AER building and the Sendai Trust Tower.

The orchestra has traveled to Tokyo and Kanazawa to collaborate with other Japanese musicians in fundraising concerts directed by Junichi Hirokami, one of the SPO’s long-time favorite guest conductors. In Hirokami’s words, the orchestra has also “delivered music and courage” to many refugees still living in shelters in Kesennuma, Ishinomaki, and Watari.

One concert was in an elementary school gymnasium in the little beach town of Shichigahama, where my family spent several summers staying in a cabin, swimming in the ocean by day and playing cards and doing “summer vacation homework” (welcome to Japanese schools) by night.

And speaking of night, former concertmaster Yumiko Shibuya described how dark it was in Tokyo (due to the city’s power-saving efforts) when she arrived for a rehearsal for a recent benefit recital. She remarked that it almost seemed a foreshadowing of Japan’s dark days ahead.

In reading and hearing about the orchestra members’ many performances since March 11, I have been struck by the rather matter-of-fact, unglamorous coverage that these concerts seem to be receiving in Japan. For in Japan, using music as a solution, as a solace in the wake of disaster, or as a source of comfort, hope, and encouragement is nothing out of the ordinary.

This is a society educated in music from a very early age. It is a country of citizens for whom singing together is a mandatory part of their daily classroom routine during some crucial, formative years. It is a collection of concert-goers who do not bat an eye at $100 tickets because Dvorak’s "New World" or Beethoven’s Ninth is common knowledge to them, like the times tables or the subway terminals.

What a fascinating but bittersweet experience it was to meander through the beautiful JFK Museum and Library in Boston. Indeed, it was not that long ago that our leaders, too, had music and the arts high up on their priority list for the country.

In our world of urgency and immediacy, a long-term cultural and social investment like music may seem increasingly daunting and financially unbeneficial. But how do we measure the cultivation of the human spirit?

I noticed that several media sources commented on the lack of “looting” in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami. Considering how highly the Japanese people value music and the arts, i.e. the collective efforts to create and enjoy something beautiful, is it that surprising to see their strength, integrity, and courage in the face of such horror and devastation?

It has been my pride and pleasure to share with you this month tidbits of the Sendai Philharmonic’s past and present with the generous assistance of James Jacobs and WGBH. I hope you have enjoyed the orchestra’s story and recordings, and I pray that we can learn from Japan’s cultivation and utilization of music as a tool that is both powerful and peaceful.

- Maureen Murchie

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Once she's back in Boston, she'll be joining me for more conversation, along with a performance from the Steinway in our Fraser Performance Studio, which you can hear next Saturday.

(photo:  Krista Guenin)

The news of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s bankruptcy has struck me as especially relevant in looking at the journey of the Sendai Philharmonic Orchestra. SPO founder Yoshikazu Katoaka was correct in his theory that the first necessary component to building an orchestra was money; he believed that if he came up with the money, the musicians would come to him. He was right.

Thanks in large part to substantial financial assistance from donors such as Sendai department store owner Saburosuke Fujisaki (left), Kataoka managed to pay two players (first oboe and first clarinet, both of whom are still in the orchestra today) an official “salary” (Suzuki’s was the highest at 11,000 yen, just over $500!) for the 1978 season.

Once the assembled personnel started to resemble the skeletal structure of a professional orchestra, and word got out that salaries - however meager - were in the picture, performing invitations increased, as did public and private funding, higher quality players, and consequently the overall operational web of the orchestra. The story of the orchestra’s prodigious growth over just a couple decades involves a couple of key figures.

In addition to giving the orchestra its name in 1989, Yasushi Akutagawa brought the Sendai Phil a well-known conductor, Yuzo Toyama (right), who served the orchestra for fifteen years. Toyama in his prime was known as having some of the best ears of any Japanese conductor. Orchestra members reported that during his “golden years” (the 1990's) with the SPO, his rehearsals were both meticulous and efficient - a rare and precious combination of skills in an orchestra trainer.

The Toyama years saw the addition of a second night for each subscription concert, the execution of the standard audition procedures that involve the entire orchestra voting on the auditioner, the experimentation with open rehearsals (250 people showed up for the first open rehearsal in September 2003), and the commencement of lasting gems such as the Sendai Youth Orchestra and the Sendai International Music Competition. Toyama conducted the orchestra on its first and only international concert tour to Austria and Italy in 2000. His tenure also spanned the orchestra’s most dire period of financial struggle after Japan’s economic collapse in the early nineties, and the tragically short-lived plan to build the SPO its very own hall.

The completion of Sendai’s Youth Culture Center (YCC) in 1990 was one of the most important pivotal points in the orchestra’s history, although this hall was not originally built solely for the SPO. It was intended as a venue for school band concerts, competitions, theater productions, and the like. Even though the stage of the 804-seat concert hall is on the small side and limits programming to some degree, the players reveled in the luxury of rehearsing and performing in the same space.

Schools could now come to the YCC, enabling more frequent educational concerts. Undeterred by limited parking space and inconvenient transportation options to and from the hall, SPO used the space so often that the city started receiving complaints that the Center was not serving its original purpose. Perhaps this served as the catalyst for Mayor Toru Ishii’s plan to build a hall devoted specifically to the performing, research, and outreach activities of Sendai’s own professional orchestra.

Ishii, mayor of Sendai from 1984 to 1993, was famous for his love of classical music and his tremendous support of the arts. He rarely missed a Sendai Phil concert and would often accompany the orchestra on the bullet train to attend their concerts in Tokyo or Osaka. While he was in office, he secured an arrangement for half of the orchestra’s budget to come from the city of Sendai, thus making SPO members, in a sense, city employees.

Ishii ’s arrest and resignation from office as a result of a bid-rigging scandal was one of the most devastating points in Sendai Phil history. When Ishii left office, the plot for the projected Sendai Music Hall had been bought and the land leveled. The plans were far enough along that concertmaster Yumiko Shibuya had seen drawings and was familiar with the smallest details, down to the size of lockers and the location of electrical outlets underneath the stage (to enable microphones or Don Quixote wind machines).

Ishii’s hall was never completed and the Sendai Phil still uses Asahigaoka’s Youth Culture Center as its home hall. The bad news was that the dreams of many musicians and audience members for a Berlin or New York-style “night at the Symphony” environment would not be realized. The good news, perhaps, was that there was money left over for projects like the Sendai International Music Competition, which has probably brought much more world-wide focus on Sendai than a new orchestra hall might have.

In hindsight, I wonder if and how the hall, had it been completed, would have survived the quake and tsunami of March 11th, as the projected space for it was not in downtown Sendai but rather closer to Wakabayashi-Ward where much was recently washed away.

- Maureen Murchie

Next time:  an update on current conditions in Sendai and its orchestra

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Following the Meiji Restoration, Japan exhibited an all-inclusive welcoming of Western influences in the areas of medicine, military, and government. Some have suggested that this type of complete, “blanket” approach in order to achieve true healing stems from the Shinto tradition. In short, since Japan hoped to achieve the type of multi-faceted success that they perceived in the operations of Western countries, they decided that indiscriminately taking in any and all Western influences was the best place to start.

In true Japanese fashion, i.e. in a society united in the values of patience, perseverance, and productivity, the attempts to incorporate Western music were highly successful—so much so, in fact, that in modern-day Japan, a work by a Japanese composer on an orchestra concert is somewhat of a novelty item, and concerts involving traditional Japanese instruments are even more rare.

Less than 50 years after the 1926 founding of Tokyo’s NHK Symphony (Japan’s first professional orchestra), another orchestra was founded in Sendai, the largest city in Japan’s northeastern (Tohoku) region and the capital of Miyagi prefecture. In 1973, Sendai’s rather bleak musical scene consisted of a mere handful of concerts each month by local musicians.

Despite Sendai’s relatively close (226 miles/365 kilometers) proximity to Tokyo, few performers were interested in leaving the bustling city life of Tokyo to come play concerts in the “boonies” of Tohoku. The orchestra began as the Miyagi Philharmonic Orchestra, founded by Yoshikazu Kataoka (left), a Sendai native who had returned home after several years of schooling in Buddhism and music composition. (His actual home is a 300+ year-old temple near Sendai Station where I had the pleasure of visiting him for an interview in 2005.) Kataoka held a personal philosophy that the four criteria for a healthy major city were a subway, a professional baseball franchise, a sumo pavilion, and an orchestra. The orchestra would be his project.

Kataoka’s early partners in this endeavor included a couple of members of the Sendai Broadcast Orchestra (a pseudo-brass band that collaborated with university string players and choirs for sporadic performances of well-known works like Handel’s Messiah) and a pianist friend and colleague at Sendai’s Tokiwagi High School.

For the first subscription concert in October 1974, Kataoka hired a few ringers to fill out the orchestra, but most of the string players were local students or amateurs, some of whom reportedly even had trouble reading music. Violinist Katsuyuki Senoue (left, with his family) was kind enough to share with me many detailed and often humorous anecdotes from the orchestra’s early years, including an account of one concert during which he used his bow to wake up a sleeping stand partner.

During the early years, Kataoka struggled to find players, instruments, and performing engagements. Many of the gigs were school concerts which still make up a significant portion of the orchestra’s performing schedule today. Though he was far from unsuccessful in his rather mind-boggling role as recruiter, manager, composer/arranger, fundraiser, and conductor, Kataoka was savvy enough to realize his own limitations and eventually enlisted other conductors to take the orchestra to greater heights.

Hoichi Fukumura ruled the podium for a couple years as a strict disciplinarian who, while not well-liked by many of the orchestra players, still managed to help the orchestra take a large leap toward professional status by demanding higher quality playing, programming more difficult repertoire, and implementing official auditions. As one might expect, the orchestra’s growing pains included an increasing chasm between disgruntled amateurs who were there to have fun and the more serious players who wanted to strive for professional quality.

Of the early conductors, Yasushi Akutagawa (right), made the deepest and most lasting imprint on the orchestra’s history. Akutagawa was the son of the well-known author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, whose short stories are still studied in Japanese classrooms today. (I remember that "The Spider’s Thread" left an impression on me in elementary school, but Western audiences may be more familiar with "Rashomon," thanks to the 1950 Kurosawa film adaptation.)

Alongside Kataoka, Yasushi Akutagawa had the vision and creativity that the orchestra needed in order to grow. He possessed not only the musical skills and integrity that made him respected by the musicians, but also the charisma, connections, and public presence that made him loved by audiences and thus invaluable as a fundraiser. Kataoka could hardly have picked a better leader for the young, burgeoning orchestra.

Akutagawa is also the one who proposed changing the orchestra’s name to the Sendai Philharmonic in 1989. The Sendai Phil’s Tokyo debut concert in 1991 was Akutagawa’s brainchild but it also turned out to be his memorial concert.

Akutagawa insisted that the orchestra would be most successful if it kept its roots local but its “face” turned outward, for “that is how the world will know Sendai.” I am reminded of Akutagawa’s wise and prescient advice when I see recent scenes of Sendai Phil members, offering the healing power of music for earthquake victims (left;  photo credit: AP).

For indeed, even in the face of devastating loss, destruction, and fear for what lies ahead, the orchestra remains strongly rooted at home but also facing outward to offer people hope and consolation through music. I believe Akutagawa-sensei would be proud.

- Maureen Murchie

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Sendai, Japan is my hometown.

Though I was born in Newark, New Jersey, to American parents, we moved to Japan when I was nine years old. I attended Japanese schools from fifth grade all the way through high school and was the only non-Japanese student in my graduating class of 300 girls. Thanks to my height and my blonde hair, I always stood out in the crowd. The home video of my high school graduation shows one “yellow sun” (as the Japanese often described the back of my head) amidst the broad, dark sea of our navy uniforms and the black hair of all my colleagues.

As I was growing up, I studied violin with the concertmaster of the Sendai Philharmonic Orchestra, Yumiko Shibuya (that's her in the center of the photo at left, with my sister on the left and myself on the right), and I attended many a Sendai Phil concert with my father, who is also a violinist. My parents still live and work in Sendai, their home for over 25 years.
 
It is no secret that the Japanese today love classical music. The history of Western music in general and the role of a western-style symphony orchestra in Japan is a complex issue and one that has been dealt with extensively by other historians. It involves some key events such as a battle in 1862 when Japanese soldiers, freshly defeated by the British, first heard the strains of triumphant Western military music and decided that perhaps the music was one key to military success.

Shortly thereafter came the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Japan opened itself up to foreign influences after a couple centuries of strict, isolationist “foreign policies.” The story of Western music in Japan has a strong connection to Boston, through some key figures such as Shuji Isawa (below), a Japanese exchange student in Boston, and Luther Whiting Mason, a Boston schoolteacher who traveled to Japan and wrote Japanese children’s songs that incorporated those strange, exotic tonic and dominant chords.
 
Fast-forward a couple hundred years and you will find city firemen playing annual summer concerts in parks all over Japan. You will witness a strong commitment to fine arts and music education in Japanese public schools, where elementary school children sing pieces in two and three part harmony at the beginning and end of every school day. You may be surprised to learn that Tokyo has more symphony orchestras than any city in the world. You might hear arpeggios and trills as part of the “next-station” announcement on the bullet trains.

In Japan, music is treated as a necessity, not a mere cultural nicety that all too often becomes the first victim of the budgetary scalpel. Perhaps this view of music is not unrelated to the touching, organized civility of Japan that seems to shine through, penetrating even the horrors of natural disasters and the opaque labyrinth of international media.

Following the events on and since the March 11th disasters, Sendai and its recovery have remained a constant presence for me.  The tragedy there is unimaginable in a way, but I hope this short snapshot brings you a closer connection to the people there, the struggle they're enduring, and the hope that classical music brings them.  I am truly grateful to James David Jacobs and WGBH for the opportunity to share my experiences with you.

I'll have more next week about one of Sendai's cultural jewels, the Sendai Philharmonic, whose 40-year history was the topic of my recently completed doctoral dissertation.

And in the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy hearing the orchestra on Sunday mornings during May.

- Maureen Murchie

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Some fifteen years ago I was requested by a canon of Cádiz to compose instrumental music on the seven last words of Our Savior on the Cross. It was customary at the Cathedral of Cádiz to produce an oratorio every year during Lent, the effect of the performance being not a little enhanced by the following circumstances. The walls, windows, and pillars of the church were hung with black cloth, and only one large lamp hanging from the center of the roof broke the solemn darkness. At midday, the doors were closed and the ceremony began. After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced the first of the seven words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse thereon. This ended, he left the pulpit and fell to his knees before the altar. The interval was filled by music. The bishop then in like manner pronounced the second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra following on the conclusion of each discourse. My composition was subject to these conditions, and it was no easy task to compose seven adagios lasting ten minutes each, and to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners; indeed, I found it quite impossible to confine myself to the appointed limits.

Haydn did indeed rise to this daunting challenge, and in a very unique way. The initial melody of each one of these adagios is a setting of the Latin version of each one of the words, not meant to be sung or heard by the audience directly, but to be felt by the performers (who see the text underlay in their parts) and transmitted subliminally to the listener. He also made the stamina issue even more challenging by composing an introduction, raising the number of adagios to eight. While he certainly used his masterful orchestration to full effect in this work, creating sonorities unique even in Haydn's wildly varied and prolific output, the proof that he did not rely on dazzling tone color to keep from "fatiguing the listeners" is the overwhelming popularity of the arrangement for string quartet that was published at the same time as the orchestral version.

It must be said, however, that the main reason for the quartet version's dominance is that string quartets love playing this piece. Colin Hampton, the cellist of the Griller Quartet, likened it to Bach's St. Matthew Passion; it's unique in the quartet repertoire, a large-scale classical work with spiritual overtones that can be adapted to a variety of performance situations. Many quartets find some way to create a simulacrum of a church service by having speakers say a few words pertaining to the particular word before each movement.

I have seen and heard several performances of this sort. The Vermeer Quartet won a Grammy for their 1988 recording of the work, which included recorded sermons by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Billy Graham, and an introduction by Jason Robards. A couple of particularly memorable moments during live performances I've seen include hearing a member of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission speak to "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" and hearing a graphic description of how waterboarding works before "My God why hast thou forsaken me?"

I myself have taken part in such a performance, and I have included the text I wrote for it below.

But the piece doesn't really need to have extra-musical elements to make it work. The Vienna Philharmonic came to New York in early 2002 and performed it for free, without a conductor, as a memorial concert for the victims of 9/11; no one spoke and no one needed to. Haydn took care of everything.

The orchestral version is the only one that is 100% Haydn. The versions for quartet and for solo piano were done in collaboration with anonymous arrangers. The quartet version is almost literally taken from the orchestral string parts, which mean that many melodic details are missing. The piano version is actually more complete, and in my opinion more interesting, and earned special praise by Haydn himself, but because we know that Haydn himself did not do the arranging it has never been published in a modern edition and has been rarely performed.

This leaves the oratorio version. While traveling in 1794 Haydn stopped in Passau, where he heard an oratorio version of the work arranged by Joseph Frieberth. This inspired Haydn to do his own version, but he used Frieberth's arrangement as a starting point, so it could really be considered to be something of a collaboration. As the conductor Laurence Equilbey points out, the relationship of the voices to the instruments in this work is the reverse of the colla parte technique common in the eighteenth century, in which instruments double and reinforce the vocal lines; here the voices double and reinforce the instrumental lines. As a result, they neither get in the way nor add much of interest, the exceptions being the deliberately archaic, early-Baroque style a capella introductions to each movement, and the completely independent (and mostly unison!) choral part in the final movement, the earthquake, creating a rhythmic and dramatic tension that seems to makes the work complete, as we hear the voices cry out in anguish (the first instance of the use of the triple-forte marking, or fortississimo, in musical history.)

The most remarkable additions to the score of the oratorio version are, oddly enough, in the orchestra, not the voices. Haydn expands the orchestra to include clarinets, trombones, and, for the first time in any of his work, a contrabassoon. Near the end of his life Haydn said “Only in my old age have I learned how to use the wind-instruments.” He certainly knows how to use them in this work. In the oratorio version, Haydn is audacious enough to add yet another adagio, between the fourth and fifth words, effectively dividing the work into two parts. This piece, which during his lifetime was called "among the most accomplished things Haydn has ever produced," is a solemn prelude for twelve wind instruments that is positively other-wordly, an amazing piece that always comes as a revelation to those who only know the work in its version for quartet.

The quartet version is neither the ideal representation of this work nor of Haydn's writing for string quartet, which usually has an interplay amongst the instruments that is missing here. But the version fills a need, not only for quartets wanting to take on a work of this depth, but for listeners who want a more intimate connection with this material. Therefore, it seems that the only solution is to get a taste of all four versions, which you can hear on Sunday morning.

The seven words are:

I. Pater, dimitte illis, quia nesciunt, quid faciunt - Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34)
II. Hodie mecum eris in Paradiso - Today you will be with me in Paradise (Luke 23:43)
III. Mulier, ecce filius tuus - Mother, behold thy son (John 19:26)
IV. Deus meus, Deus meus, utquid dereliquisti me - My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15:34)
V. Sitio - I thirst (John 19:28)
VI. Consummatum est - It is finished (John 19:30)
VII. In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum - Father, into your hands I commend my spirit (Luke 23:46)
 

The following is the spoken introduction I gave to the seventh and final word by a performance by the Momenta Quartet in Brooklyn, NY, in 2008. Obviously this was well before the recent events in Japan, but I think the thoughts about earthquakes still hold.

"Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit"

Did you notice how happy-sounding that music was just now? The word was "It is finished" and it starts out very somber and defeatist-sounding, but by the end it sounds like something out of opera buffa, as if Susanna, Figaro and Jesus are all happily living together and having a great old time. Obviously Haydn was making a statement with that major key ending--trying to tell us that maybe it isn't finished after all-- not really. Haydn was a deeply religious man, a true believer, but, far from being pious or reticent, he was a man of the world who sought pleasure and liked having fun and that is reflected in most of his music. Haydn once wrote in a letter: "When I think upon my God, my heart is so full of joy that the notes dance and leap from my pen; and since God has given me a cheerful heart, it will be pardoned me that I serve him with a cheerful spirit." Of course, much of the music we have heard tonight has not sounded particularly cheerful, as Haydn endeavored to reflect the journey Jesus went through from being the enlightened minister that forgives his oppressors to the lonely mortal that feels betrayed, regressing to the most primal child-like urge of all, crying out of thirst, and finally retreating into his plight and his dying body so much that he feels that with his death is the death of all things. But we notice the ultimate irony here: that the words "it is finished" do not come at the end. Just at the real end, just before his actual death, he remembers himself, comes back to his original idea that his father is a merciful entity that will accept all souls, and that his spirit is a seperate entity from his body.

In the course of my radio career, I have often pre-recorded my shows. Frequently I'm asleep or doing something completely unrelated to radio when my voice goes out over the airwaves to thousands of listeners. I could be dead for all anybody knows, but there's my voice, making lame jokes and mispronouncing singers' names and making my pithy observations for all the world to hear, thousands of people getting a little sample of my spirit while I'm somewhere else. One day, while hearing my own voice coming out of a radio in a cab, it hit me: this is what they mean when they say that your spirit will live on after you die. I remember once playing for a memorial service for a highly beloved doctor who died in an accident and his son, who was fifteen, goes up to speak and he says that his relationship with his father will continue to grow as he, the boy, matures and gains a deeper understanding of the things his father said to him.

Another quote from Haydn: "Often when contending with obstacles of every sort that interfered with my work, often when my powers both of body and mind were failing and I felt it a hard matter to persevere on the course I had entered on, a secret feeling within me whispered: 'There are but few contented and happy men here below; grief and care prevail everywhere; perhaps your labors may one day be the source from which the weary and worn, or the man burdened with affairs, may derive a few moments' rest and refreshment.' What a powerful motive for pressing onward!" Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut put it another way when he said, "artists are the only people who leave the world better than they found it."

But of course, we're talking about people here and their effects. What about the world itself? What does nature think about any human's claim that all is finished, or even that our spirits have a power that transcends nature? As someone who grew up in California and experienced a 7.2 earthquake firsthand, I can vouch for Nature's claim that the earth will have the last word. Matthew chapter 28, verse 2: "And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it." After over an hour of these fairly serene, soft adagios including the one we're about to hear, Haydn lets loose with three minutes of the loudest, most violent music he ever composed. In the original orchestral version of this work, his dynamic marking for the final bars is fff--triple forte, fortississimo -- the first time in musical history any composer put that in a score. I think it's somewhat telling that at the very same time Haydn wrote this work, in the early months of 1787, Mozart was busy composing Don Giovanni, which ends with the most violent music HE ever composed as the statue of the Commendatore drags Don Giovanni down to hell. I'm not sure what was in the air in 1787 to inspire thoughts of apocalyptic divine retribution in Europe's two greatest composers.

I'm reminded of a quote from a survivor of Hurricane Katrina: "Gravity and water just sucked everything down into the earth and it just didn't care who or what was in its path." Nature doesn't care. Since the final image we take away is one of chaos in which the actions of humans played no role, we are left pondering the relationship between our existence, our legacy to our fellow humans, the potential of the human spirit to transform and transcend even death itself, and the cold, hard fact that even that power plays a small role in the great expanse of nature and the universe in its inexorable power towards its own goals that we will never master nor comprehend. And it is this awareness of the finite nature of human's role in the cosmos that makes us realize just how precious and special it is that, for this blink of an eye, we are given the gift of another person's spirit.

Pater! In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum.

Here are four versions of the beginning of the second movement of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, illustrating just how a conductor can affect a performance. The first two clips feature the same orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. Both were live recordings in the same hall recorded four years apart. However, the two conductors (Leonard Bernstein and Nikolaus Harnoncourt) almost make it sound like two different orchestras playing two different pieces:
 

Here are two more versions of the same excerpt, both performed by orchestras using period instruments and historically informed performance practice. But the two conductors, Sir Charles Mackerras and Sir Roger Norrington, demonstrate that even conductors striving for authenticity can have radically different conceptions of the music:
 

Eleven years ago, there were a lot of end-of-century debates and panel discussions aiming to answer the question of who was the most important and influential musician of the 20th century. (Sorry, Brian Bell - while great musicians may be more likely to actually devour each other than the masterpieces they create are, the exclusionary tone of this sort of discussion can be just as destructive. But I digress.) The names that kept popping up were Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Britten, Bernstein, Ellington. One name I never heard mentioned was a name that is mentioned in just about every biography of any twentieth-century composer: Nadia Boulanger. In honor of Women’s History Month we’ll feature on Sunday mornings in March the work and legacy of this woman who did indeed make history, as we listen to works by Nadia Boulanger and her students.

A very long (partial!) list of her American students can be found here. There are quite a few names here of composers who went on to become giants in the realm of classical music, including Aaron Copland, Elliot Carter, Walter Piston, Virgil Thomson. Surprisingly, there are also a few names here of composers of a later generation, some of whom went far afield of classical music: Philip Glass, Quincy Jones, Charles Strouse (composer of Bye Bye Birdie and Annie) and Joe Raposo (composer of the theme songs for "Sesame Street" and "Three's Company")*.

It's hard to think of ANY sort of music produced in America in the twentieth century that was untouched by Nadia Boulanger. As Virgil Thomson put it, "She was a one-woman graduate school, so powerful and so permeating that legend credits every United States town with two things: a five-and-dime and a Boulanger pupil." Ned Rorem was less acerbic in his praise, comparing her to Socrates and declaring in 1979 that "So far as musical pedagogy is concerned —and by extension of musical creation —Nadia Boulanger is the most influential person who ever lived."

Nadia Boulanger studied with Gabriel Fauré, served as his assistant in his position as organist for the Eglise de la Madeleine, and is the person most responsible for the popularity of his Requiem in English-speaking countries, having conducted the local premieres of the work in several British and American cities in the 1930s. The Boston Symphony Orchestra's first performances of the Fauré Requiem took place under her direction on February 18 and 19, 1938, marking the first time the orchestra was led by a woman. (On the first half of the program Boulanger played the organ in Saint-Saëns's Third Symphony, presumably with Koussevitsky on the podium.)

The program booklet for those concerts included an essay by Boulanger about Fauré's music; here are some excerpts:

"Inner gifts, exceptional ones, determined the career of Gabriel Fauré - the balance between sensibility and reason has made its beauty....His music is inwardly moving: without pose, vain exclamations or outcry, it ponders, loves, and suffers...He seems to have conceived religion rather in the manner of St. John or St. Francis of Assisi than St. Bernard, or Bousset. He looks for and finds in it a source of love and not of fear. This must be accepted if he is to be understood...The Requiem is not only one of the greatest works of Gabriel Fauré, but also one of those which do most honor to music and thought. Nothing has been written which is purer, clearer in definition... Certainly his musical web, his architecture, his reason and order, are the essential causes of his sovereign beauty, as one could demonstrate with a joy, a pride, and a respect for all the minutiae of his workmanship. But it is where these attributes end, admirable as they are, that the real Requiem begins. No exterior effect alters its sober and rather severe expression of grief, no restlessness troubles its deep meditation, no doubt stains its spotless faith, its gentle confidence, its tender and tranquil expectancy. All is truly captivating and marked with the hand of a master. Everything is usual; but with an alteration, a passing note, some special inflection of which he has the secret. Gabriel Fauré gives a new and inimitable character to all that he touches. The end with its linked chords, descending in double measures, strangely recalls an adorable Agnus Dei in G major, by Claudio Monteverdi. 'The artist must love life, and show us that it is beautiful.' All that Gabriel Fauré has touched he has sensitized and made cherishable. If anything could truly mitigate for us the thought of death, it would be the image of hope, of serenity which he has made for us."

Speaking of Monteverdi, another one of Boulanger's many accomplishments is her leading, in 1937, an ensemble of singers and instrumentalists in the first recording ever made of his music, a collection of madrigals. We'll hear a couple of selections from that recording, as well as her legendary recording that same year of Brahms waltzes for piano duet with Dinu Lipatti. (Stravinsky's "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto, the premiere of which was conducted by Boulanger, can be heard in a dynamic performance by the Discovery Ensemble here.) And we'll hear Fauré's Requiem, written by a man but known the world over thanks to the efforts of an extraordinary woman, one whose efforts brought so much music to life.


*When Raposo left her class after eighteen months, Mme. Boulanger urged him to stay for "five more years of counterpoint." She begged him not to go popular, warning "what happened to Gershwin will happen to you." Raposo replied, "I certainly hope so."