Critic's Pick
Jeremy Eichler, Boston Globe, 10/10/2010
-Boston Symphony Orchestra
Mm-hm.
In other news, if you want to see a football game in Pittsburgh, try the Steelers!
Also recommended: a great way to cure hunger is eating!
Ah, Eichler. We kid because we love.
Figure 1: I mean: Come. On.After a beautifully written piece on Elliott Carter at Tanglewood, Jeremy Eichler of the Boston Globe takes the usual low road by painting Elliott as a difficult, senile centenarian.
When Carter took his bows from the stage, aided only by a cane, he was beaming.
"These pieces of music," he said in a public interview, "if they spoke English instead of notes, they would be very grateful."
I mean, he could have omitted it. Instead, there it is in plain view for everyone to see. Because, as we all know, pieces can’t speak—they’re just black dots, after all. Sheesh.
You should read the article.
And a happy three-hundredth post to us!
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[Edit 8/8/8]
I neglected to mention Soho the Dog's awesome eight-part series, Magna Carter, on the same very subject. In fact, it came first. And it's better. Well, it's more in depth and not all "I wrote this for the Globe and I have glasses so it must be good and there are a lot of big words in it. So there." You should check out Magna Carter. Good job Matthew.
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I wasn’t familiar with Elgar’s Piano Quintet, Op. 84, until I spent a few minutes (only about fifteen) on the widetubenets, digging up all kinds of information. For instance, his Opus 84 was completed in 1919, but begun before his String Quartet, Opus 83. The piece that followed both of those was his beaten-dead, but famous, “warhorse,” the Cello Concerto, made famouser by preeminent recordings with Pablo Casals, Paul Tortelier, Jaqueline du Pré and Yo-Yo Ma. The quintet in A minor is the longest of Elgar’s chamber pieces, coming in at about 35 minutes long, and was composed at his home in Brinkwells, Sussex. Lady Alice Elgar suggested that the piece may be programmatic; she noted in her diary that the first movement may represent a group of trees in Flexham Park, near Brinkwells.
According to legend, these trees comprised the remains of Spanish monks who had engaged in sacrilegious ceremonies in the park. In correspondence, Elgar too had described the first movement as "ghostly stuff". Doubt has been cast on the legend, focusing on the lack of record of any Spanish religious settlement in the area. But this obscures the point that, whatever the factual basis for the legend (and what legend contains more than a grain of truth), Elgar appears again to have drawn his inspiration from the natural beauty of the area surrounding the cottage at Brinkwells.
Interestingly, Op. 84 was dedicated to music critic Ernest Newman, who wrote for many publications including the, then, Manchester Guardian, which is now, simply, the Guardian. He was also the author of the gargantuan, four-volume “The Life of Richard Wagner.” Unfortunately, the only writing sample I found is a paraphrase taken from a 1911 New York Times review:
The old argument averred that the writer of poetic or pictorial music is like the child who adds to his rude drawing of an animal the words: “This is a dog,” writes Ernest Newman in the London Nation.
(Ernest Herman)
Fun stuff. I wonder if this viewpoint had anything to do with Elgar’s supposed “tree legend” program. A joke, perhaps?
I found nearly twenty recordings of the Quintet made within the past fifteen, or so, years, over at Amazon. I also found a number of recent performances, though not as many as, say, his Enigma Variations or the Cello Concerto.
Lastly, there is only one video of Op. 84 on YouTube, only about four minutes of the 13-minute first movement, Moderato-Allegro. It’s a really cool-sounding clip. I wish there was more, because the piece seemed cool as well. But, if you’re interested, there are many available recordings to download at iTunes, or Naxos.
Pow! Only fifteen minutes of research. One quarter of an hour. The piece is...how long again? 35 minutes? My research took half, half the time that it would have taken to listen to the piece.
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Now consider this:
The evening ended with a big-boned, big-hearted performance of Elgar's Piano Quintet, with Judith Gordon as the sensitive guest pianist. This unusually textured three-movement work is somewhat of a rarity on concert programs, but these players were equal to its demands, both in its surging stormy passages and its many moments of swelling, sighing lyricism.
1) “Unusually textured?” How was it unusual? Did you listen to it? I only heard four minutes, but couldn’t find one unusual texture. Maybe the problem is in our contradictory definitions of what constitutes an unusual texture. Mind you, by 1919, I am also used to this, and this and this and this and this and this. To what unusual textures were you referring?
2) I would like to rephrase your “but” phrase: “...but these players were equal to its demanding surging stormy passages and its demanding moments of swelling, sighing lyricism.” I just wanted to highlight that you’re emphasizing that the piece was demanding and that the performers handled themselves well. But here’s my problem: Did “stormy passages” and “swelling, sighing lyricism” describe the piece adequately? Hmmm. Sounds like you phoned it in on that one. I mean, your descriptors could apply to practically any piece ever (see above and below “this and this and this and this and this and this”).
The work was completed just after World War I, yet there is something poignant in the way the music seems to cling to an older tradition of 19th-century Romantic chamber music, as if the world that tradition described could live forever, as if it had not already disappeared.
I know that this was your impression, but...the tradition had already disappeared? In 1919? To the contrary: this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this. That’s why it was sad? Come on. You’re better than this.
Sorry, but you phoned it in! No question about it. I found a ton of pertinent, fun information about Op. 84 in only fifteen minutes. How long did you spend with it? The time it takes to pop some microwave popcorn? Since it was the last piece on the long program, did you just...leave? Were you tired? Long drive home? Were you fed up with the “Beat L.A.” chants during intermission? Was your nose bleeding? Did you simply not like the piece and didn’t want to investigate it further? That’s something you usually do well. What happened, man?
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Apparently Jeremy Eichler and Matthew Guerrieri are on assignment, covering the intrigues of Julian Tavarez’s conspicuous iPod playlists, because the Boston Globe instead instructed David Perkins, correspondent, to cover Dubravka Tomsic’s piano concert at Jordan Hall.
This turned out to be an epic failure. Not because of awkward grammar, like this:
She played generously, long and beautifully.
but because of... how do I say this? Romantic arching? No. Sweeping arcs? No, but closer.
I know! Sweeping assumptions. Yes, that’s it. This is an epic failure, because of Perkins’s sweeping assumptions.
Here’s what I mean:
Often one wished for more imagination and searching.
Taken by itself, this is a perfectly fine thing to say—a criticism, or, if you prefer, an opinion. Unfortunately, it goes downhill from here, to put it lightly.
The Adagio in B minor, K. 540, of Mozart, for example, had everything one loves in great Mozart playing - a singing line, graceful phrasing, and the ability to weigh chords beautifully –
How can David wish for more imagination and searching—by the way, I find “searching” to be terribly ambiguous; on the other hand, I can define imagination with some accuracy—how can he wish for more imagination and searching when Tomsic’s playing “had everything one loves in great Mozart playing?” It is not possible. But...
...but it is a strangely repetitive work, and she did not vary the color or emphasis with each return of the main subject.
So. Because Tomsic “did not vary the color or emphasis with each return of the main subject,” David finds himself wishing for more imagination and searching.
The problem, here, is that... well here’s a definition of imagination:
The faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts (OAD)
She didn’t vary Mozart’s material, right? Right. That doesn’t sound imaginative at all.
But! But, David, by assuming what could have made her performance better, i.e., variation, he renders himself blind to other possibilities, such as no variation. Thus, his viewpoint is unimaginative, not Tomsic’s. In other words, by idealizing a performance of Mozart, he denies the existence, or possibility, of new interpretations, like little or no variation, which could be considered imaginative. See?
This is probably the most boring subject, I know. But we’re not entirely done with the sweeping. So wake up!
[In the Scarlatti] she did not underline, with artful rubato, the suspense of the wonderful harmonic shifts.
Similarly, David expects rubato in Scarlatti as if he formed himself an image of an idealized performance. Thus, again, he closed himself to the possibility of other, imaginative, interpretations.
Just saying, no one should make sweeping assumptions then immediately negate them.
And “wonderful harmonic shifts?” How about “imaginative harmonic shifts?”
Anyway, levity!
She fudged only a few notes, and there were a lot of notes.
Beethoven's "Appassionata" sonata is a favorite work she played on her first Boston recital 17 years ago.
It's a half-crazy piece, and Tomsic, while a great pianist, is not good at suffering.
Please come back soon, Jeremy and Matthew! We miss you.
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I don’t know why I’m posting this, because, all in all, this is one of the best articles I’ve read in a long while. Good work Jeremy Eichler. But, damn it, there’s one obviously dictionary-mined adjective that doesn’t make sense, and I can’t help to report it, if only to supplement the previous post.
It’s about German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s s unusual sounds.
He shaped them into a masterfully strange, crepuscular music: tense, hyper-aware, quietly disquieting, at times maddeningly opaque but also with moments of improbable beauty.
(my italics) You know what? Here’s crepuscular. It kinda works, in retrospect. Not terribly well, though—you have to stretch it around a bit. But still, if I had a dictionary of unusually neglected biological terms, crepuscular wouldn’t be my first choice.
For fun: try to use crepuscular in a sentence today. You’ll either be heralded as a master linguist or you’ll receive a blank, crepuscularly crepuscular stare--both fun.
Jeremy Eichler of the Boston Globe has never been directly in the Detritus spotlight, until today! Congratulations, Jeremy! We knew you could do it.
What exactly did he do? He swiped his Charley Ticket on the Green Line, got off at Copley Square, skipped up the magnificent steps of the Boston Public Library, and found the biggest, oldest and dustiest dictionary known to mankind, closed his eyes, opened to a random page and (eyes closed) pointed to a random word. He then triumphantly skittered home and ferociously typed this lovely adjective-noun pairing.
...interstitial tenderness...
It was something the encores had,
making it clear that [Alfred] Brendel was in no particular hurry to leave the stage.
Goodbye Alfred and HEL-LOOOOOOOO Jeremy!
Seriously, take it easy Alfred.
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Mad libs from
darkly magnificent
searing
spellbinding
strange
surreally
violent
Mark Elder is in town this week to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra in this _______ and _______ work. Last night in Symphony Hall he led a _______ performance that was true to the music's _______ extremes, at times _______ in its intensity and at times _______ calm.
