I had not taken anything like a “vacation” since 2012 when, in January, I plunked down some serious (or, more to the point, seriously scarce) digi-dollars on a round-trip flight to Minnesota, a couple tickets to see the Minnesota Orchestra, and four nights in a hotel.
I have to move out of the trumpf-ass south (I can not dignify either with a capital letter) and have thought Minnesota might be my best bet. My initial thought was to move to Ilhan Omar’s district in Minneapolis, and I still may, but the state more broadly has the longest run of any in terms of voting for democrats in presidential elections without a miss. I despise the democratic party for many reasons, but republicans are worse. (I can not dignify either with a capital letter.) The christian (ditto) fascist wing – more like the whole vulture at this point – egged on by the super-rich, is trying to jumpstart Armageddon. They are. They say so. Why can’t we just be open about what is obviously true? They want to take 30 million people’s health insurance away and replace it with nothing. They want to take away women’s right to choose their futures. F republicans and the southern and midwestern states that enable them.
I digress.
Checking out neighborhoods in a city 800 miles away (or so) is not easy when you’re poor. I needed a substantial carrot to poke me out of inertia, and thought perhaps the Minnesota Orchestra might provide one. When I checked their 2019-20 concert slate online last September, sure enough, I was presented with one:
March 5 & 6, 2020
Kiril Karabits, conductor, & Christian Tetzlaff, violin
Franghiz Ali-Zadeh: Nagillar (Fairy Tales)
Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 2 in C-sharp minor, Op. 129
Intermission
Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100
Tetzlaff, a contemporary superstar, at least in the classical music sense of the term, playing the infrequently-programmed Shostakovich 2nd violin concerto from 1967 under Karabits, a Ukrainian rising star, along with an unfamiliar Ali-Zadeh piece, would make a March trip worth it, I thought, but by the time the “holidays” rolled around I was feeling broke and had just about talked myself out of it… until I saw the docket for the same weekend’s Saturday night all-Russian program, which somehow I’d missed. The bill for that show was as follows:
March 7, 2020
Mussorgsky (orch. Ravel): Three selections from Pictures at an Exhibition
Kabalevsky: Overture to Colas Breugnon, Op. 24
Gliere: Introduction from The Zaporozhy Cossacks
Ustvolskaya: Symphonic Poem No. 2
Shostakovich: Two Pieces for String Octet, Op. 11
Intermission
Shostakovich: Allegro from Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93
Prokofiev: Allegro from Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100
Gubaidulina: Movement VI from Stimmen… versummen
Lera Auerbach: Icarus
Polina Nazaykinskaya: My Soul Craves for the Sky
This program was to be conducted by the orchestra’s assistant conductor, Sarah Hicks.
More Shostakovich was cool enough, but Ustvolskaya, Gubaidulina and Auerbach are three composers whom I love – I have devoted entire radio shows to each of the three – but whose works I never thought I’d hear live. I bought tickets to both shows immediately, before I could change my mind.
What follows is an account of those two concerts, along with a little context. The attached mixtape is some of the music I heard, though by different orchestras…
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March 5, 2020
I’d arrived the night before and hoofed the six blocks, head down, in a cold rain. In the morning’s grey light, Minneapolis is as clean and open-feeling as any city I’ve been to in Europe or the United States. The newer architecture is for the most part compelling and artful, in stark contrast to other U.S. cities that did a crapload of building in the ’90s and aughts like, oh, Columbus, Charlotte, Houston, Nashville, Houston… and wound up with a crapload of aura-free mega-tombstones.
As I neared Orchestra Hall, I saw Christian Tetzlaff walking down the sidewalk. One of the many – almost infinite – things I like about classical music vis-a-vis other genres is the scale. A veritable superstar walking alone – no limo, no assistant, let alone an entourage – to the hall. It’s kind of like bluegrass in that sense. I’m a fan – his recording of Bartok violin concertos for Ondine was phenomenal (it won Grammophone magazine’s album of the year in 2018) – and so that necessitated the blurt and the ensuing awkward exchange, though once he realized I was a fan and not a homeless guy (at least not yet), it was cool. (I have found, in general, classical musicians are not really used to the rock and roll enthusiasm thing, but don’t mind it once they’re clear it’s not malevolent or deranged…)
Minneapolis’s Orchestra Hall was built in 1974 (and given an overhaul in the meantime), and it is sharp. Constructivist in a glass-and-steel way, it epitomizes the best architecture of the time. Which is to say it looks Scandinavian. Inside, the hall is long and very tall, with the balconies high along the walls like ledges over a chasm. Acoustically it is magnificent (to my blown-out eardrums, at any rate), with huge prismatic protuberances emerging from the high wall behind the orchestra and suspended from the ceiling that probably serve to direct the sound but also look cool as hell (in a ’74 way), lit (most often) in pastel shades of purple and orange. It felt good in there.
A quick leaf through the program before the lights dimmed revealed no less than 13 programs in the Minnesota Orchestra’s 2019-2020 season I would have attended had I lived there. Lead conducter Osmo Vänskä, who has helmed the orchestra for years and will be retiring after next season, regularly programs fellow Finns Einojuhani Rautavaara and Kaija Saariaho, along with plenty of other 20th C. composers.
I am a fan of the Azerbaijani composer Ali-Zadeh and have played her works on my radio show many times, but the piece on this program was fifteen minutes long and did little, it seemed to me, beyond establishing a sound cloud, peppered with flecks of melody that never went anywhere, for a long time. It hovered. The sounds were exotic-y: a vibraphone, glass chimes, all sorts of bells, a piano with a glass-beaded necklace laid over its strings. It came together in the final two minutes in a beautiful sort of crescendo, with a fully-drawn melody – a corker, it was – for an old jackass to hang his cap on. There was but faint (if any) suggestion of the Caspian Sea in the piece that I could detect, which surprised me. The stuff of hers I’d heard going in – including her work with the Kronos Quartet, with whom she played piano for a brilliant quintet called “Aspheron” – is based around mugam – South Asian folk, in other words – forms. Many composers, starting with Bartok, have internalized their region’s ancient musics and created new kinds of music with them; Ali-Zadeh is one such. So maybe a little disappointing, but fine… Again, it was 11:00 in the morning – who knows how I’d have regarded it at 10:00 p.m. Not to mention the fact that it was a first hearing. To be honest, I am reluctant to comment on any piece I’ve heard only once. Many, perhaps most, of my favorite compositions didn’t do a whole lot for me the first time around. So…
Tetzlaff was up next. I only have a couple recordings of Shostakovich’s second violin concerto, but the one I always play is of David Oistrakh with the Moscow Philharmonic under Gennady Rozhdestvensky. Oistrakh was, like Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, a part of Shostakovich’s circle in the Soviet ’50s and ’60s; Shostakovich wrote the piece for Oistrakh’s 60th birthday (even though he was off by a year – Shostakovich gave him a violin sonata the next year for his actual 60th). Tetzlaff himself recorded a version in 2014 for the Finnish Ondine label that I hadn’t heard (I have since; it is included on the accompanying mixtape). The second concerto is rarely performed because it is quite difficult, even for virtuosos. It’s difficult for audiences as well – it is at times relentlessly brutal and at others relentlessly bleak. NOT music to snuggle to, let’s say. It is also profoundly beautiful in its way, among the greatest works of Shostakovich’s staggeringly fruitful life.
It begins with a murmur of strings, then the violin intones that theme Shostakovich employed often, except that it won’t resolve, creating a vague, immediate tension. The overall vibe of the piece, it develops, is one of tension. Snare shots pop like gunshots throughout a jostling first movement, while giddy – ironic, undoubtedly – themes are taken up and but then trip over their laces and fall, while the soloist contributes some hard – Bartok-hard – pizzicato *thwapping*. Time and again, the violin re-ups the familiar opening theme, but it starts warping out of shape. About five minutes in, the listener begins to suspect – correctly – that the theme WON’T be resolved. And then… the first movement just cuts off. Boof. Like a plug pulled on a radio. Like an old man having an aneurysm in a crosswalk.
Concertos are my favorite form of orchestral composition because they portray the individual’s relationship with and struggle against the much more powerful forces that have the final say, and no composer explored the existential aspect of the form like Shostakovich. There is a lot of direct conversing between the soloist and the orchestra in the second and third movements (which flow together to the extent I actually thought it was a two-movement piece until I saw it written down…) I suspect it’s no coincidence that Shostakovich wrote his stunning soundtrack for the Soviet version of Hamlet (1966, d. Grigori Kozintsev) in the same time frame. As in the play, the violinist is given a soliloquy very near the end that is pure strife and insanely difficult, and Tetzlaff leaned into it, dazzling the crowd.
I recently read review of a Tetzlaff recording – I can’t remember of what – that, by way of praise, described his playing as “creamy.” That is not a word I’d use in a positive context, but I see what the writer was getting at. Maybe “Germanic.” Tetzlaff is a German and you can tell. He strives for beauty over angst. Here, he rounded the edges somewhat, sacrificing a bit of anguish. But as with his take on the Bartok 2nd concerto, he presents a dimension to the piece I hadn’t considered before. My guess is Shostakovich, who revered Mahler, would have liked it as much as I, and the audience, liked it.
Tetzlaff gets a Standing-O
Prokofiev’s 5th symphony is considered by most the best of his seven. It’s definitely the most meaning-laden. It was written in a single month in 1944 while the Nazis fought frantically for a toehold in their 3-year and 3-pronged attack on the USSR, and it was first performed in Moscow on the very night heavy Russian guns – audible inside the hall to the extent that Prokofiev, who was conducting, paused the performance – signaled the turn of the war: the Nazis were in panicked retreat from Moscow, with the Soviets, hellbent on revenge, hot on their heels. That is some serious coincidental drama right there. It is a great symphony that doesn’t do all that much for me. (I dig some Prokofiev immensely but, unfortunately for him, he did not outlive Stalin, and this symphony is not unlike the Shostakovich symphonies (nos. 5-9) written in the Stalin years – booming and brash but not challenging or, more to the point, honest.) I thoroughly enjoyed watching the orchestra perform it, however. I think I am ready to start going to concerts of music I don’t necessarily like all that much ahead of time. Live classical music is like a great magic act to me. I feel disbelief when I watch 80 or 90 intent and deeply-skilled humans in perfect synchronicity translating a composer’s abstract notation into sound and – with the right conductor – meaning. For someone who grew up with electric guitar music, the fact that the instruments are acoustic, fashioned by hand from wood and metal, is something I’m always conscious of. It’s like I’m like a caveman ogling an obelisk from 1 million years in the future. Or past. It’s a good feeling. It’s called awe.
************************************************************March 7, 2020
The Russian program on Saturday night was pretty much what I hope the afterlife is like.
Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis
The first mind-blowing aspect of the evening hit me the moment I entered the lobby.* It was the crowd itself. The matinee I attended two days before played to a sea of white and grey heads. But this Saturday night audience was so diverse it was disorienting. TONS of people in their twenties and thirties. And forties and fifties. And teens. High school kids on dates. And not only that: there was a diversity I never imagined in a 21st century concert hall. There were black people, Arabic people, Asians all over… whole families with kids…
Once in the hall, I regretted leaving my phone in the hotel; the back wall was lit in a brilliant, CCCP-flag red…
The Sam and Sarah programs the MO does are kind of “edutainment” – about 20% educational and 80% music, I gather. The hosts introduce the pieces and the context in 2-5 minute talks. Both Mr. Bergman (a violist in the orchestra) and Ms. Hicks are very agreeable presenters – natural, good-humored, rehearsed – and their intros were insightful and tight. Though they were introducing pieces by composers who are rarely heard in U.S. concert halls, there was no coaxing or condescension towards the audience. I suppose that’s what living in a city where there’s an actual audience for classical music is like. People who don’t need to be told who Kabalevsky is, e.g.
The program, as was apparent at first glance, was designed to tell the story of Russian music in the modern era, an undertaking that requires some thought. Apart from no Schnittke, I have to comend Sam and Sarah for their choices.
Mussorgsky was one of the “Mighty Five” composers in the late 19th C. who, more than their contemporary Tchaikovsky, established a distinctly Russian brand of of classical music. He was Shostakovich’s favorite Russian composer of the 19th C. The two excerpts from his “Pictures at an Exhibition” – or, rather, from Ravel’s 50 years post-facto orchestrated version – did not include that familiar hallway theme forever soiled by Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Moog-synthesized schmaltz. They were cool, but over before I had really settled in, and I’m really only familiar with the original solo piano version.
Kabalevsky and Gliere, up next, are two composers I avoid – especially Kabalevsky, who worked as a sort of censor on behalf of Stalin’s vision of “socialist realism” – but the pieces chosen for this evening were actually a lot of fun, and forceful, to an extent undercutting Mr. Bergman’s point that the two composers were toe-the-line hacks… Which set up his intro to the next piece, by an iconoclast who created music so weird that it must’ve confounded the censors…
I felt tears well up in my left eye during Bergman’s Ustvolskaya intro. To hear her praised for the genius she was, before an attentive crowd that would roar its approval twelve minutes later..? Never thought I’d live to see it. Ustvolskaya’s best music is too harsh for even me to listen to all the time, but it’s there when I need it, and I need it often enough. The choice of her Poem No. 2 (as opposed to Poems 1 or 3) shows that Sam and/or Sarah know their Ustvolskaya – it is the one fairly conventional 1950s work that presaged her later SLEDGEHAMMER works of the 1960s. More to the point, it is her only early work that deserves a place among her greatest works. I wasn’t super familiar with the Poem No. 2 until the 2-CD set of her early works that came out on Brilliant Classics last year. The set, which comprised early stuff that, by and large, Ustvolskaya dismissed when compiling her opus list. No. 2 was by far the best track on that set, but its real genius eluded me until I saw and heard Hicks lead the MO in a driving version. I mean, it throbbed! DAMN!
The choreographed exit of musicians from the stage after the Ustvolskaya piece to set up the Shostakovich pieces for octet that came next was a nice touch. When the first musician, a member of the violin section, got up, I thought she must have broken a string or something. Then another got up, then another… All the while the lights dimmed and the red deepened; Bergman, while this went on around him, told about Stalin’s approach to governing, which – short version – was to assassinate any perceived foe. (That Monty Python Stalin gameshow gag was actually pretty much how it would’ve gone down…) When his remarks concluded, Bergman joined three other violas, two violins and two cellos in a standing horseshoe to play the two short pieces from Shostakovich’s youth against a blood red backdrop, almost in the dark. The ambiance lent a weight to the pieces – early ones, by a still-optimistic Shostakovich – that aided the transition from the Ustvolskaya.
During the intermission that followed, I walked around the multi-tiered lobby, taking in the warmth and lively chatter of a bunch of different types of people enjoying themselves. I took a few minutes to check out some display cases filled with memorabilia from the orchestra’s 117-year history on the second floor level. The orchestra has had some great conductors over that time, including Neville Marriner, Edo de Waart, and the Hungarian maestros Eugene Ormandy and Antal Dorati (who, according to his auobiography, loved his time in Minnesota and recorded a series of programs for Mercury Living Presence that remain the sine qua non for classical music on vinyl and still go for $$$ on Discogs). Besides Dorati’s, the orchestra has a vast number of recordings – 107, according to Discogs. (Vänskä‘s highly-acclaimed Sibelius and Mahler series, on the Swedish BIS label, are for sale in the lobby.) On the wall behind the display cases, the orchestra presents framed color 8x10s of each current orchestra musicians in a long row. Starting from the far left with Vänskä , I was again struck by the sheer number of women in positions of power. Five of the top seven positions – concertmaster, principal violinist, principal violist – are held by women. Another reason I love classical music is because women, at least in the present tense, enjoy equal status to men.
The movement from Shostakovich’s 10th symphony, which many consider his greatest symphony, dates from 1953, the year Stalin “gifted” the world with his death. It is a symphony I only recently listened to closely for the first time. It is easily the best of the Stalin years, I’ll say that. This allegro movement was as exuberant as Shostakovich got, at least since his fourth symphony. Very powerful in the live setting.
The Gubaidulina excerpt was from 1986, the period when “Thaw” (or post-Stalin) composers like Schnittke and Part established themselves as part of a new mainstream. Stimmen… Verstumen, a symphony in twelve movements, is one of her best, and while I’d like to have heard the full 34 minutes or at least the 11-minute eighth movement, the movement chosen was a ridiculously beautiful five minutes. It incorporates a piano and an electric keyboard and achieves max sublimity.
Lera Auerbach, next on the docket, represented the composers who attained maturity as the USSR was, like the uber-metaphorical Chernobyl, imploding. Auerbach defected – part of the last generation for whom “defect” was an action verb – to the United States while on a trip in her late teens, and she has developed into one of our (meaning, the world’s) great composers. (Why so little of her orchestral music is available on disc, especially in light of how good the stuff that has been recorded is… BIS?) Her Icarus is also the last two movements of her first symphony, from 2006. it begins full throttle and evolves into a haunting shimmer, finishing with a percussionist ringing a water-filled wine glass……………….(………….)
Polina Nazaykinskaya, composer of the 4-minute song that concluded the 2-hour show, was born on the lower Volga in ’87 and now resides in NYC. The full title of the piece (on Nazaykinskaya’s Youtube channel) calls for a “folk singer”, and the vocalist this evening was a young woman named Natalie Nowytski, a specialist in Eastern European repertoire. (The program notes say she has sung in 50 different languages, which certainly makes me feel like a mental midget…) A Ukraine native now based in the Twin Cities, she is a powerfully-built woman with the pipes to lift her voice over a couple dozen musicians directly behind her. Her approach lent the piece a folk music vibe; with sparer backing, it would have passed for a Russian folk song. It was fine, and I hoped they’d do another with her for an encore, but, alas, no such luck.
(Four of the nine composers on that program were women, in case you hadn’t noticed.)
Like all orchestras trying to stay afloat in a time when the vast number of people don’t care about art, they do a lot of audience-friendly stuff, like playing movie scores. Tonight, Sam and Sarah told those who could wait ten or fifteen minutes for the stage to be cleared that they and a number of musicians would return to the stage for a meet-and-greet. I was probably euphoric enough that I’d likely have provoked more discomfort; luckily for them, then, that I had an early flight to catch the next morning, and Daylight Savings Time was casting its long and utterly pointless shadow…
(Can this be the last time we do DST? Please?)
Finally, it has not been lost on me how lucky I was with this trip, vis-a-vis the pandemic that we’re contending with now. Had those shows been scheduled just one weekend later, I’d have been SOL. While there are times I wonder if everything is just an illusion, I am not so self-centered as to think anything is pre-ordained. But I am grateful for good luck when it arises. I wish anyone reading this the best of luck in the weeks and months ahead. It looks like there’ll be time for some concentrated listening, at least.
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Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Violin Concerto No. 2 in C-sharp minor, Op. 129; I. Moderato (1967)
Christian Tetzlaff w/ John Storgårds: Helsinki PO (Ondine)
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Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006)
Poem No. 2, “Hero’s Exploit” (1957)
Igor Borisoglebsky: Leningrad Radio Youth Symphony Orchestra
(Brilliant Classics)
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Sofia Gubaidulina (1931- )
Stimmen… verstummen (Voices… silence) (1986); VI.
Gennady Rozhdestvensky: Royal Stockholm PO (Chandos)
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Lera Auerbach (1973- )
Icarus
John Fiore: Düsseldorfer Symphoniker (Youtube)
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Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 2; II. Adagio and III. Adagio – Allegro (Ondine)
Concentration Camp 