Sir Charles Mackerras (Z Chrapek)

Sir Charles Mackerras, noted for his thoughtful, lucid interpretations of Baroque and Classical-era music, died today (15 July 2010). He was 84.

Alan Charles MacLaurin Mackerras was American born – he began life in Schenectady on 17 November 1925 – but was raised in Australia. He studied oboe, piano and composition at New South Wales Conservatory in Sydney. His first gig was as principal oboist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Mackerras emigrated to Britain in 1947, and married the same year.

Though he was at home with every era of music, Mackerras was a pioneer in the early music movement. He wrote, "I was … thinking that the way Handel was performed at that time [1940s] couldn’t be right and why was it necessary to have such big orchestras .. The turning point really came when I … first saw the Boosey & Hawkes miniature scores that came out at the end of the War. And then I saw how different Handel’s own orchestrations were from the way [Hamilton] Harty had rearranged them."

Mackerras was, to my knowledge, the first modern conductor to record Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music with the instrumentation King George had demanded of Handel – no strings, all winds. Mackerras assembled his "band of warlike instruments" in 1959, on the 200th anniversary of Handel’s death. He had to record in the wee hours of the morning – the only time that he could assemble 26 professional oboists all in one place.

Mackerras opened even more eyes and ears in 1965 – still well before the HIP (Historically Informed Performance) movement really took root – when he endeavored to perform Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro as Mozart would have staged it. In the years that followed he took his interpretive ideas to several other opera companies, including the Hamburg, Bavarian, and Vienna State Operas; the Welsh National Opera; San Francisco Opera; and the Met.

As an orchestral conductor, Mackerras was associated with several ensembles, including the Czech Philharmonic (as principal guest conductor, 1997-2003) and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He was named principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in 2002.

Mackerras made many highly regarded recordings, including a fine Mozart symphony cycle for Telarc with the Prague Chamber Orchestra. However, he never had a long-term contractual relationship with any label. This left him free to record the projects he chose, with whom he chose, when he chose.

Despite the cancer which had afflicted him for several years, Mackerras maintainted an active schedule. He was to conduct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Mozart’s Idomeneo as part of the Edinburgh International Festival next month (August 2010).

Mackerras was knighted in 1979 and appointed a Companion of Honour in 2003. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Judy, and a daughter, Catherine. Another daughter, Fiona, died in 2006.

Further reading:

Sir Charles Mackerras Obituary at The Guardian

Listening:

Sir Charles Mackerras conducts Mozart Symphonies (complete): Amazon, Arkiv Music, CD Universe

Sir Charles Mackeras conducts a wind orchestra in Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music (1959): Amazon, Arkiv Music, CD Universe

WKSU receives no financial advantage from your use of any for-profit vendor cited above. Recordings are available from a variety of sources, both local and online. Links are provided solely for your information, and do not signify an endorsement of any kind.

Well Tempered Clavier Title Page (Wikimedia Commons)

Well-Tempered Clavier. What kind of a title is that, anyway? If you have a vague idea that it has something to do with how good the clavier (whatever that is) sounds, you’re cruising round the right neighborhood.

The musical octave – from C to C on the piano keyboard, for example – is a basic building block of music. Within the octave, there are certain intervals – the difference in pitch between one note and another – that have given us the fundamental sounds of Western music since the Middle Ages. These include the fifth and the third.

But here’s the problem: these intervals don’t quite come out even with the octave. To put it another way, the intervals that make an octave sound good and true and right to our ears aren’t compatible with the pitch intervals that make for a velvet-smooth third or a sweet, consonant, glorious fifth.

Here’s an experiment you can try if you have access to (and can play!) an instrument that doesn’t force you into pre-defined pitches for notes. A piano won’t work (we’ll see why later). However, a violin is a fine choice, since it has no frets on the fingerboard.

Start a recording machine. Play a low note. Now play 12 perfect fifths, starting with that same note. When you get to your last note, it should be 7 octaves above your first note. (Count ‘em for yourself.) Now, edit your recording so you have only the first and last notes you played. Listen. Is the last note exactly 7 octaves higher? Or does it seem just a little sharp?

It turns out that when you play 12 consonant perfect fifths, the last note overshoots 7 octaves by just a little. Not a lot – not even a half step – but enough that many people can hear it. So, if you play the first and last notes of your recording at the same time, it’s apt to sound a tad tart.

You’ve just witnessed the need for temperament. Temperament systems cram fifths and thirds into a mathematically perfect octave by main force – by making the thirds and fifths something less than perfect. It’s kind of like the calendar, where some months have 30 days, some have 31, and one has 28 – or, some years, 29. The tweaked intervals won’t sound quite as rich, quite as right, but the octaves will come out even.

The obvious way to do this is to simply make all 12 notes of the octave evenly spaced. This is called equal temperament. It was probably the first temperament system invented, and it’s still used today. In fact, that’s the way the modern piano is tuned, which is why the experiment I suggested above won’t give the same result on a piano.

Equal temperament may have been the first solution to the problem, but it was far from the last. Quite a few musicians just didn’t care for the way it sounded, so they made up their own temperaments, different ways of distributing the error round the octave, adding a little here, subtracting a little there. Usually, they managed to make thirds and fifths sound close to perfect in some (not all) of the possible key signatures. The tuning systems they devised are generically called mean-tone systems.

In mean-tone systems, the varying distances between notes of the scale meant that different keys had different musical characteristics. C major might be (and was) described as the key of joy and sunlight. D major was called the key of triumph. G minor was the key of darkness and despair. For example, Mozart’s powerful 40th and 25th symphonies are written in G minor.

Into this minefield of different tunings steps Bach (if it isn’t too much of a nonsequitur for me to bring him in after Mozart).

I’m no Bach scholar, but everything I’ve read about him suggests a man almost obsessed with numbers and mathematics. For Bach, numbers had deep spiritual meanings. He attached significance to the numeric intervals in a fugue’s subject, its length in number of notes, the number of measures between entrances, and much more. Some musicologists have built their entire careers (or at least their master’s theses) on unearthing and divining the meaning of these arcane relationships.

Now, Bach’s life was music. For him, this flaw in his world must have been an endless source of frustration. But his answer wasn’t equal temperament; that’s not what the Well-Tempered Clavier was about. Nor was Bach showing off some new system of temperament he’d invented.

Rather, the Well-Tempered Clavier was Bach’s argument for a tuning system – someone else’s invention – that he called "well temperament."

Remember what I said above: mean-tone systems make different key signatures sound different. They make some keys sound better – more in tune, with those nearly-perfect thirds and fifths – and some worse. Most keyboard players and composers dealt with this by simply avoiding the keys that didn’t sound good to them.

Bach threw that practice back in their faces. The Well-Tempered Clavier comprises two books of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys. The keyboard player who bought a copy, but insisted on sticking with mean-tone tuning, would have only two choices. He could either put up with certain intervals being out of tune in the more remote keys (the ones with lots of sharps and flats), or else just not play those pieces.

The question is, how did Bach tune his harpsichords? Exactly what is this tuning system he promoted, the one he called "well-tempered," giving it the name we still use today?

The sad fact is, we don’t really know for sure. (We do know, though, that no one else could tune a harpsichord to his satisfaction.)

However, we can guess at a few candidates. The one most often suggested is a system invented in 1691 by organist Andreas Werckmeister, which Werckmeister said was for the "chromatic genius." You could say that Werckmeister’s system is a compromise between mean-tone and equal temperament. It preserves much of the distinctive character of the different keys, but makes all 24 major and minor keys – and all of Bach’s WTC preludes and fugues – playable.

Bach made his point. In the end, though, he lost – not to the mean-tone mavens, but to equal temperament. Today, few harpsichordists and pianists routinely tune their instruments in any system Bach would say was "well-tempered." Ironically, the simplest and most direct answer to the problem won out. For today’s keyboard instruments, equal temperament is nearly universal, even among musicians who otherwise embrace the principles of historically informed performance.

Before I close, one last thought about the Well-Tempered Clavier. What’s a "clavier"? Is that a clavichord, as in Well-Tempered Clavichord, the title you used to see on recordings many years ago? Well, it can be, but it’s not just that. Clavier means keyboard – that is, the part of the instrument your fingers actually play. Bach simply intended the WTC for any instrument that has a keyboard. You can find modern recordings of the WTC played on the the harpsichord, the organ, the piano, and – yes – even the clavichord.

Further reading:

Introduction to Historical Tunings by musicologist and educator Kyle Gann

The Wolf At Our Heels by Jan Swafford in Slate

This article was first published in WKSU Classical on 25 April 2010.

Sometimes just being able to see a composer’s painting or photo along with his or her music adds a new dimension to the listening experience. I found a silent film (as part of something much bigger) that shows Jean Sibelius at his home in his later years. View while listening to his music.

London Street Piano

About a year ago I wrote here, more or less in passing, about London’s street pianos. Thirty-one they were, scattered round public places and provided complete with laminated songbooks.

This spring, they’ll be back – and at the same time, the Play Me I’m Yours project will also cross the ocean and invade New York.

Play Me I’m Yours is an installation, but you might say it’s also random performance art. It’s the creation of artist Luke Jerramo, whose other works include a plant orchestra at Cambridge Botanical Gardens – amplifying the sounds plants make as they take up moisture – and the acoustic wind pavilion Aeolus , soon to be sited on UK hilltops.

New York’s street piano adventure is to be carried out by the New York based artists’ activism group, Sing for Hope. Sixty public pianos will be available for anyone to play in public parks, streets and plazas from 21 June to 5 July (2010).

Further reading:

Street Pianos website

Sing for Hope website

Here are the Beethoven symphonies, arranged as [piano] duets … I would not claim that I have ever got any tremendous emotional excitement out of playing these duets, because as soon as the main theme is announced one gets so excited that one forgets to count.

Maria Sensi Sellner (sellner.org)

The Akron Symphony Orchestra has announced the new director of the Akron Symphony Chorus.

Maria Sensi Sellner studied with the noted choral director Robert Page. She holds Carnegie Mellon University graduate-level degrees in conducting and composition. She also has a degree in engineering.

Sellner is a conducting assistant for the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, which performs frequently with the Pittsburgh Symphony. The Mendelssohn Choir’s music director is Betsy Burleigh, who led the Akron Symphony Chorus from 1997 to 2002.

Sellner has also spent 8 seasons as music director of CMU’s All University Orchestra and String Theory Chamber Orchestra, and recently served as assistant conductor for productions of Bizet’s Carmen and Verdi’s Otello with Opera Carolina.

Maria Sensi Sellner replaces Hugh Ferguson Floyd, who is leaving after a two-year tenure to accept a full professorship position as coordinator of choral ensembles at Furman University.

Both composers were born on May 7th. However, if any two men in the same place and time with equal amounts of fame and talent could have been more different in action and appearance than Johannes Brahms and Peter Tchaikovsky, I cannot think of them.

Johannes Brahms was brought up in the slums of Hamburg. He was forced to play the piano in bars and brothels at age 12 to help keep the family fed. He saw too much of what a boy his age should not see. Often the women waiting for some "business" would hover around him, and tease him while he read a book and played. One of his beer steins full of tips on top of the piano might lose a few coins through the long night, while the other stein was filled with beer to keep him awake – sometimes allowing him to be exposed to the conversations of these ladies of the night and their practices.

Peter Tchaikovsky was born into Russian aristocracy and was overly protected by the women of his life. His mother doted on him and his governess was always by his side. Tchaikovsky married, but could only take a couple of weeks of living with his bride before he had to leave her. Her body repulsed him, and her agreeable nature sickened him. He tried to argue with her, in a vain attempt to justify abandoning her, but she was just too much in love with him.

She might have been a perfect wife for some other men of the era, but she was not for Tchaikovsky. The question of his sexuality became all too clear in those weeks. Once he’d left her, he never saw her again.

Tchaikovsky was undoubtedly gay. In a time when such an orientation could mean death, he bore his sexuality in almost total silence and secrecy. Once, when Tchaikovsky thought he was about to die (he was a bit of a hypochondriac), he burned all of his diaries, believing that their secrets would forever taint his legacy.

He had few friendships with women, except for his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck. Even that relationship had one very strict rider. Though they could converse by letter, and many of their exchanges survive today, they could never meet. When the news that Tchaikovsky might be gay leaked, von Meck ended her years of support.

Brahms never married. It’s said that from those early days in brothels, he developed a distorted view of women. Still, some of his dearest friends were women. They were the wives of his closest male friends.

These women were of course quite different from the women of his childhood memories. They were not just gracious and elegant, but highly intelligent. Brahms loved conversation with a brilliant woman – that is, a married one. Limiting his relationships to married women freed him from the complications to which romantic relationships could lead, so that he could enjoy their friendship. Sometimes it seemed as if he made friends with men, just to be closer to their wives. The men seemed to understand this, and didn’t view him as a threat.

With Brahms, it might have been at least partly a matter of his persona and appearance. When he was young, he was remarkably good looking. But success came to Brahms early, so he made an effort to look more mature. He grew a beard. He gained weight. His hair greyed early.

Brahms did almost nothing to improve his appearance – especially if it meant spending money. His old, ill-fitting suits (the trousers were often too short) were almost always the same color of gray. They were often wrinkled from several days of previous wear – and resting on the floor for the night, before being worn again.

Tchaikovsky maintained the life of an aristocrat, even though his income wouldn’t allow it. His clothes were expensive and always new. His ever-present white gloves and cane made him stand out, even though he thought his dark glasses (in a day when they were rare) made him feel as if he were incognito.

When Brahms’s income began to mount, he still refused to spend it – except for original manuscripts by Mozart and other favorite composers. Certainly he wasn’t interested in new, fashionable clothing.

Tchaikovsky drank expensive wine. Brahms drank beer. Tchaikovsky loved expensive food. Brahms could be perfectly happy starting off his day eating sardines right out of the tin, and finishing it off by drinking the tin’s oil.

Tchaikovsky wore expensive perfume. Brahms smelled of old clothes and cigars. Tchaikovsky smoked one expensive cigarette after another. Brahms’s cigars were always in his mouth; when the ashes fell, they would disappear into his long, unkempt beard, or land next to a food stain on his large gray vest. Other than his steely blue eyes – and checkered underwear that now and then peeked out over the waistband of his ill-fitting trousers as he conducted – Brahms was a mass of misty grey: smoke, suits, hair, all grey.

Brahms and Tchaikovsky met on New Year’s Day, 1888. Up to this point, Tchaikovsky had made it fairly clear, in letters to a few friends and his brother, that he wasn’t a real fan of Brahms. But after that meeting, Tchaikovsky was impressed by Brahms’s down-to-earth warmth. This is a bit surprising – Brahms could be rather rough.

Both men knew the great violinist of their day, Adolph Brodsky, who had premiered Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. Brahms may have been friends with Brodsky at least partly because of Brodsky’s wife, Anna. It was she who invited Brahms and Tchaikovsky to dinner at their house in Leipzig, to celebrate that New Year.

Brahms was already there when Tchaikovsky appeared. Brahms and Brodsky were rehearsing Brahms’s third piano trio. Brodsky spotted the Russian composer in the entryway and stopped playing. Brahms, lost in his own world, carried on.

Shyly, Tchaikovsky followed Brodsky back into the music room. What happened next Anna Brodsky described in her diary:

"Tchaikovsky and Brahms had never met before. It would be difficult to find two men more unlike. Tchaikovsky, a nobleman by birth, had something elegant and refined in his whole bearing and the greatest courtesy of manner. Brahms with his short, rather square figure and powerful head, was an image of strength and energy; he was an avowed foe to all so-called ‘good manners.’ His expression was often slightly sarcastic. When A. B. introduced them, Tchaikovsky said, in his soft melodious voice: ‘Do I not disturb you?’

"’Not in the least,’ was Brahms’s reply, with his peculiar hoarseness. ‘But why are you going to hear this? It is not at all interesting.’

"Tchaikovsky sat down and listened attentively. Brahms’s personality, as he later told us, impressed him very favourably, but he was not pleased with the music. When the trio was over I noticed that Tchaikovsky seemed uneasy. It would have been natural that he should say something, but he was not at all the man to pay unmeaning compliments. The situation might have become difficult, but at that moment the door was flung open, and in came our dear friends—Grieg and his wife, bringing, as they always did, a kind of sunshine with them …"

The dinner was a more relaxed experience, though there was a bit of nervousness at first. Grieg’s wife was assigned the seat in between Brahms and Tchaikovsky, but she couldn’t bear the silence from the two naturally shy men. Edvard Grieg quickly volunteered to replace her. From then on he worked his magic to spark conversation with Brahms and Tchaikovsky (with the assistance of a fair amount of alcohol for Mr. Brahms).

Among the subjects discussed at that dinner table was Tchaikovsky’s and Brahms’s birth dates. Although Brahms was seven years older than Tchaikovsky, they shared the same calendar day, May 7^th.

I wish I could say that New Year’s dinner was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but it wasn’t. However, Brahms and Tchaikovsky did cross paths again. A couple of years later, Tchaikovsky was surprised to meet Brahms in the same hotel where he was staying. The story goes, they both enjoyed themselves – thanks once again to an ample supply of alcohol.

David Guerrier plays the keyed trumpet

The trumpet goes back a long, long way. Trumpeters are depicted in art from ancient Egypt, dated in the 14th century BCE.

For most of its centuries of existence, the trumpet was an instrument of royalty, used for playing fanfares. Frankly, that’s about all it was good for. These early trumpets couldn’t play all the notes of the scale. They played only the first few notes from the harmonic series, which is already a subset of the scale’s notes.

By the 16th century, instrument makers had figured out how to make trumpets play more of the notes from the harmonic series. Now, the further up you go in the harmonic series, the closer together the notes get. If you could push your trumpet far enough, and fudge the pitch of some notes a bit, you could play all the notes of the scale. By the 17th century, trumpets could actually be used to more or less play melodies.

I say "more or less" because they still didn’t do a very good job of it. It took a really talented (and fit!) player to get all the notes in tune. (Many of today’s period instrument specialists use trumpets with tiny, inconspicuous, and inauthentic "cheater holes" that help them with this challenge.) Even then, the timbre (tone quality) of the notes varied radically.

In the 15th century, a few instrument makers had experimented with adding slides (like a trombone’s) to trumpets. We have pictures! But given the design – they were straight trumpets – it’s hard to see how a player could’ve flung that slide around fast enough to play any but the slowest music. He might well have knocked his own front teeth out trying. For centuries more, trumpet players had to pretty much depend only on skill and lungs to coax a real tune from their instruments.

In the 17th century, Vienna became something of a Mecca for trumpet players. The very earliest trumpet players had been little more than vagrants, but Viennese trumpeters were given a place of honor. On high feast days the court’s string orchestra was augmented by a choir of trumpets, playing sonatas composed by the likes of Schmelzer and Biber.

But by the late 18th century the trumpet was going out of style, giving way to more agile and tonally consistent instruments. A few trumpeters, determined to salvage their careers, scrambled to develop a trumpet that could compete with the violin, flute, and oboe. Some of them achieved a measure of success by adding keys to the trumpet, so it could play all the notes of the scale, even in its lowest register.

Enter Anton Weidinger (1767 – 1852). Weidinger was a Viennese court trumpeter. Around 1793, he began experimenting with some of these keyed trumpets, refining them and practicing with them. By 1796 he was making enough progress that he convinced Haydn to write a concerto for his Klappentrompette (keyed trumpet). He took that concerto on the road in 1803, playing it in France, Germany, and England. Weidinger caught the interest of composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who composed yet another concerto for him and his curious keyed trumpet.

The critics had good things to say about Weidinger’s trumpet and his playing. But it was too late. By 1820 the valved trumpet had appeared in Vienna and was rapidly taking over. Weidinger’s keyed trumpet hung on for a little longer; some musicians and composers preferred its tone to the valved trumpet’s. But by 1840 the Klappentrompette was forgotten – obsolete.

Although the Baroque natural trumpet has no shortage of proponents (and makers and players), not many musicians have shown much interest in reviving the Klappentrompette. Who can blame them? After all, what’s the point of reviving an instrument for which only two major concertos were ever written? (See also the arpeggione.) Adolf Egger has built modern reproductions, as has Christopher Monk, but they don’t seem to have had many customers. The few recordings that have been made with their instruments have quickly gone out of print, presumably for lack of interest.

But if you’d like to see and hear the keyed trumpet, here’s a rare opportunity: David Guerrier playing the first movement of the Haydn in the Festival de l’Epau last May (2009). He’s accompanied by the chamber orchestra "Les Siècles."

Further reading:

The story of the keyed trumpet, by Norwegian trumpeter Ole J Utnes

The natural trumpet in Wikipedia

Adolf Egger’s workshop

Trumpeter David Guerrier from Trumpet World

This article was first published in WKSU Classical on 28 December 2009.

Matthias Pintscher (Cleveland Orchestra)

Next month (June 2010) you’ll have a rare opportunity. You’ll be able to hear one of the world’s most revered and lauded orchestras. Now, that’s not so rare for folks in Northeast Ohio; it’s been our privilege to hear the Cleveland Orchestra for decades. The rarity is that, this time, your ticket to Severance Hall will be free.

On Saturday 5 June 2010, the Cleveland Orchestra plays works of living composers in two evening concerts. At 7pm they’ll perform Susan Botti’s Translucence, originally commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra; and Johannes Maria Staud’s On Contemplative Meteorology. At 9pm they’ll return to the Severance Hall stage for Concertate il suono by Marc-André Dalbavie and Matthias Pintscher’s with lilies white. Pintscher will be on hand and will conduct all the works.

Botti and Dalbavie will also be in town – the former now lives in New York and the latter in Paris. They’ll take part in a 6pm pre-concert discussion about "creation, performance, and the role of new music for orchestras," moderated by CIM composition department head Keith Fitch.

In the hour between the performances, the orchestra will throw a party in Severance Hall’s Grand Foyer and outside on the terrace (if the weather cooperates). Refreshments will be offered for sale. The entertainment during this interlude will be an amplified performance of Workers’ Union, created in 1975 by the Amsterdam-based composer Louis Andriessen for "any loud-sounding group of instruments."

The concert really is free, as is the reception, but you’ll still need tickets. Get them through the orchestra’s website.

Paid parking is available in the orchestra’s garage behind Severance Hall. You may be able to find free parking elsewhere in University Circle, but remember, it can be a bit of a stroll. The orchestra’s parking is a reasonable deal at $10-14, especially if you have health or security concerns.

The concert is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Further Reading:

Louis Andriessen at Wikipedia

Susan Botti’s Website

Marc-André Dalbavie at NPR

Matthias Pintscher, The Radical Conservative at The Guardian

Johannes Maria Staud: Fifteen Questions at tokafi

Listening:

Andriessen’s Workers’ Union at Youtube, performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars

Dalbavie’s Concertate il suono, music download at Amazon, performed by Radio France Philharmonic

Incipit (cantus part) from Canticum Trium Puerorum (Renato Calcaterra) Click to zoom

Now and again music history gives us personalities whose accomplishments range far and wide, well beyond composition. One such musician is Michael Praetorius. Not only did he leave us a good-sized body of music both sacred and secular, he created a reference volume that generations of early music researchers and performers have found invaluable: Syntagma Musicum, describing performing practice and musical instruments in the late Renaissance era.

Among Praetorius’s many publications of Lutheran church music is the collection Musarum Sioniarum: Motectae et Psalmi Latini. The 34th item in that volume is a setting of a text from the Latin Vulgate Bible.

It’s the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – also called Ananias, Azarias and Misael. The three men refuse to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image, so Nebuchadnezzar has them thrown into a furnace. There, the story goes, they’re protected by an angel. They walk about in the flames, unscathed, praying and singing.

This text has come to be called The Prayer of the Three Holy Children. In the Latin Praetorius used, it’s Canticum Trium Puerorum – the song of the three boys. It’s not clear to me why they’re called boys or children when all of the biblical text refers to them as men, but those seem to be the terms used.

If Bach was the master of numerology, Praetorius excelled at word-painting, at least in this work. Where his text is "bless the lightning and clouds," at "fulgura" (lightning) he zig-zags the music across the voices. At "nubes" (clouds) the music gets softer and darker. Listen:

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But Praetorius’s best word-painting is the trick he plays on us throughout the entire work.

Praetorius structures Canticum Trium Puerorum as a series of verses and two alternating refrains, on a text which exhorts all of Creation to bless the Lord. In the first verse, two high voices (they would have been the boys of his choir) speak of the angels and heaven. With each verse, Praetorius adds more voices. By the time he reaches the last lines of the text almost 20 minutes later, all of Creation is indeed singing – or at least every voice in his choir.

Our recording is an early-1980s recording from Erato Records of France, with the Audite Nova Chorale of Paris and director Jean Sourisse. The choir is doubled in the refrains by a small cornett and sackbut ensemble. In general, when it comes to Renaissance music, there’s ample evidence to support the use of such doubling. However, some purists might insist that since Praetorius didn’t specify an instrumental ensemble, a pure choral reading would be safer, if you’re going for authenticity.

A reviewer for Gramophone also sniffed that the 38-voice choir was too large for Praetorius. I’ll stay out of this one and let that reviewer work it out with Praetorius, should they ever meet. I will say, though, that I suspect that reviewer would wax apoplectic if he heard Erato’s earlier recording of this work.

That older performance was my own introduction to Canticum Trium Puerorum about 3 dozen years ago. No one could possibly call that performance authentic! It was sung by a massive 500-voice choir, doubled in the refrains by a blaring brass band (the Paris Police Force brass ensemble, if you can imagine that). It was the sort of performing forces that, as the recording’s annotator pointed out, Praetorius could only have dreamed of.

That recording was distributed in the US a good half-century ago under the Westminster label, and later by Musical Heritage Society. It’s many years out of print. We’ll have to make do with just 38 voices.

This is Felix Mendlessohn’s handiwork with a watercolor paintbrush. It’s of Lake Lucerne, from 1847.

He was mostly self-taught. His studies were in German studies and Secondary Education. He did not attend a conservatory of music or take any master classes. As a matter of fact, in 1993 a jury member at a national competition (this is taken from a speech he made not too long ago in July 2007), told him to his face, that, “I will never have a musical career, that I have neither the talent nor the technique for playing the piano, and that I should find something easier to do with my life.” He is Jon Nakamatsu. This is a must-see speech.

Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni was the son of a wealthy paper maker, and never really had to work.
As a result, he was maybe the only Baroque composer who never tried to obtain a job as a church or court director. That does not mean he did not work. He composed around about fifty operas, and a fair amount of orchestra pieces.

Albinoni as a Bigwig

As was often the case in portraits, especially from that time period, there were hints as to who the person was and what he or she did. You can see that he is holding music in his hands, but the immense wig on his head is supposed to tell us a lot more. Being a musician could be an iffy thing to anyone of nobility; not of the highest standards. So, Mr. Albinoni wore the wig to let you know his rank in society. It is from those times and that hair piece that we learn that a ‘bigwig’ was a grand poobah.

Alicia de Larrocha

Pianist Mitsuko Uchida’s latest Mozart recording — the 23rd and 24th concertos — landed on my desk Monday. She’s accompanied by the Cleveland Orchestra, continuing a partnership which has lasted well beyond her 2002 – 2007 residency with the orchestra.

Though I never expect to see Mitsuko Uchida at the keyboard of a classical fortepiano, or playing in front of the Academy of Ancient Music, her career trajectory has in some ways paralleled that of the Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement. She was winning prizes in the early 1970s, at about the time the (modern) Academy of Ancient Music played its first concerts. Her New York debut was in 1985, the same year that Cleveland’s Early Music America was founded.

I went straight to the second movement of her Mozart 24th, that gorgeous, wistful respite Mozart gave us between the dense, dark outer movements of his c-minor concerto. As I listened to Uchida’s lucid, gentle, and thoroughly unsentimental playing, I opened my computer’s web browser and discovered that another great Mozart interpreter had left this world.

Alicia de Larrocha, who died last Friday (25 September 2009) in Barcelona, her birthplace, came from the generation before Uchida’s. Make no mistake, she brought to the table much of her own generation’s musical sensibility. When she recorded the Beethoven concertos in the mid-1980s, for example, she didn’t play Beethoven’s own cadenzas. She used the late-Romantic-era cadenzas of Carl Reinecke – the ones she grew up playing.

She wasn’t particularly glamorous, and she was rather shy. But by God she could play the piano.           – Herbert Breslin

The world recognizes de Larrocha for pushing Spanish keyboard music into the Classical mainstream. To name only one example, a quick glance at one of the online CD retailers shows nearly 4 dozen current recordings of the Suite Iberia by Isaac Albeniz, a cycle she first recorded in the late 1950s. Would there be half as many choices today, had she not championed the work? If she’d accomplished nothing else, that would have been enough.

She performed and recorded plenty of full-bore romantic music — Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Liszt. But it’s for her Mozart that I remember Alicia de Larrocha best. Well before the HIP movement, she was infusing Mozart (and Haydn and Beethoven) with a luminous delicacy that few other pianists could match.

So what am I leading up to here? That Mitsuko Uchida is heir to a mantle that Alicia de Larrocha wore, one with a badge that says "Mozart Pianist"? Not at all. Both of them would have to share that garment with too many other fine pianists.

But I do think we should remember de Larrocha as part of that generation of musicians who rethought the way we approach early music. She wasn’t a Steven Lubin or a Gustav Leonhardt, of course. That wasn’t her way. But she still helped lay the groundwork for a kind of music making that assigns great importance to discovering and communicating not just the musician’s own interpretation of the music – though that’s vital – but also the composer’s intent.

She will be missed.

So what about that Mozart concerto, the one Mitsuko Uchida has just released? Alicia de Larrocha recorded it too, for RCA, back in 1991, with Colin Davis and the English Chamber Orchestra. Do the two recordings help us draw a line from the older pianist to the younger? Not on your life! All it takes is a few bars of that middle movement to telegraph how differently she and Mitsuko Uchida viewed Mozart and his 24th concerto. Bravo for that – we’re richer for having both. Listen for yourself.

Alicia de Larrocha	Mitsuko Uchida
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Menahem Pressler (l), Philip Thomson (r)

The orchestras of Akron and Canton will kick off their 2009-10 classical series seasons with guest pianists performing concertos.

The Canton Symphony welcomes Menahem Pressler as part of their "American Living Legends" series. Pressler made over 50 recordings (most of them for Philips) as pianist for the Beaux Arts Trio, arguably the world’s best known piano trio. After over a half-century of acclaimed music making, Beaux Arts disbanded late last year (see Beaux Arts Trio Bows Out in WKSU Classical), and Pressler vowed to continue performing as a soloist. The Canton Symphony will accompany him in Mozart’s 17th piano concerto (K453).

Pressler hails from Bloomington, Indiana, but the Akron Symphony found their soloist right in their own back yard, so to speak: though Canadian-born, Philip Thomson is currently on the faculty of the University of Akron. Thomson is recognized for his interpretations of Liszt’s music and has recorded for Hungaroton, Naxos and Ivory Classics. He will join the orchestra for the Grieg concerto.

The Akron Symphony’s opening concert will be on Sunday, 13 September at E J Thomas Hall. Canton’s is set for Saturday, 10 October at Umstattd Hall. Tickets are available at their respective websites, or by phone at 330 535-8131 (Akron) and 330 452-2094 (Canton).

Further reading:

American Living Legends Concert at Canton Symphony

Northern Lights Concert at Akron Symphony

Menahem Pressler’s website

Philip Thomson’s biography (pdf) at University of Akron