Renée Fleming, soprano; Hartmut Höll, piano
Presented by Celebrity Series of Boston
Symphony Hall, Boston, April 19, 2009

Renée Fleming is now 50 (in related news, we’re all older than we realized) but, based on her Symphony Hall recital this weekend, she’s singing as well as ever—or as poorly as ever, depending on one’s entrenched opinion of her. Fleming’s popularity (her program bio gives her the vaguely Maoist title of “the people’s diva”) has, inevitably, resulted in polarization, and Sunday’s performance probably won’t alter that calculus. The mannerisms that drive some people crazy were all there—vaults into notes from initial consonants a floor or two below; sudden shifts into near-Sprechstimme stage whisper; slide-whistle floating in high, soft phrases; a certain slipperiness of vowel (“uh” became “eh” fairly consistently). But her usual virtues abounded as well: the casually regal stage presence, the impossibly glamorous tone, the uncanny breath control.

What was noteworthy about this appearance, though, was Fleming’s leveraging of her diva celebrity to present notably non-diva repertoire—even given a couple of duds, this was one of the most intelligently constructed and emotionally interesting vocal programs I’d heard in a long time. It helps that, at least for me, Fleming is at her interpretive best in a recital setting (without the perpetual sustain of an orchestra, she’s less likely to stretch a phrase to the breaking point just because she can). It also may have helped that this was the final stop on the tour—Fleming and Höll left it all on the field, by turns playful, daring, and sometimes startlingly immediate. And yet the overall effect was distinctly ambiguous and bittersweet: grown-up complexity, in saturated color.

The centerpiece of the first half was four songs from Olivier Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi, the composer amplifying the liminal boundary between the individual and the collective in marriage to halogen brightness. Höll’s accompaniment was sustained, restrained intensity, breathless and quietly insistent; Fleming put the focus on Messiaen’s texts. It shifted one’s attention from the exotic beauty of the music to the near-manic drama of the poetry—the torrential prayers of “Action de grâces,” the painterly glimpse of the beloved in “Paysage.” Fleming managed a convincing attacca downshift from the “éternellement lumineux” young bodies of “La maison” to an intoxicated, drill-sergeant bark for “Les deux guerriers.” I wished she had programmed the whole cycle.

Surrounding the Messiaen were two extended monologues of pointedly darker cast. André Previn’s “The Giraffes Go To Hamburg” sets a rueful Isak Dinesen portrait of two giraffes, trapped on a steamer, leaving Africa forever for a German zoo. Previn’s music (with alto flutist Linda Toote joining Fleming and Höll) doesn’t do much more than illustrate the text’s surface, but does so with consistent flexibility and resourcefulness; the performance attained the tricky balance between journalistic observation and lush sadness. After the Messiaen was John Kander’s “A Letter from Sullivan Ballou,” the Civil War major writing to his wife shortly before being killed at Bull Run. Kander’s music is pretty light stuff—nostalgic, meandering sentimentality—but the juxtaposition with Messiaen’s warriors of love was provocative, and the programmatic sequence, the bright triumph of the “Poèmes” both set up and tempered by the bookends, made an intriguing psychological arc out of the half’s disparate parts.

The second half repeated the same pattern, a substantial burst of joy protectively encased in renunciation and loss. The center here was Richard Strauss, five songs exploring the various stages, and ages, of love. Fleming and Höll made a nearly convincing case for the over-the-top volubility of “Verführung,” though the shaggy-dog episodic nature of both poem and music never quite coalesces. “Freundliche Vision” and “Winterweihe” both explore the deeper, less fraught emotional world of mature love, and both songs received readings of warm, placid richness. The giddy, rippling “Ständchen” was a standout, Fleming and Höll in absolute ensemble in a rendition of extreme, pinball rubato: a fulsome surrender to the emo, manic-depressive exhilaration of youthful infatuation. Höll’s sensitivity came to the fore in this set; at the close of “Zueignung,” he pulled the piano back from its double-forte climax to let Fleming’s stentorian ring complete the final crescendo, a creative, nice-work-if-you-can-get-it touch.

The equivocal cushion to Strauss’s happiness was two arias by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the comparatively obscure “Ich soll ihn niemals, niemals mehr sehn” from Die Katharin, and the more familiar “Marietta’s Lied” from Die tote Stadt. Congruent not just thematically (both characters sing of love fated to die) but musically—Fleming admitted that placing them on opposite sides of the Strauss was, in part, to ameliorate their self-plagiaristic similarity—the arias, and the performances, exemplified the Romantic happy-sad conundrum of reveling in the fullness of sorrowful emotion. (“Marietta’s Lied” was breathtakingly slow, in the Fleming manner, but Korngold can take it.)

Even a long string of encores (“it’s the end of the tour,” Fleming announced, “we’re going to do everything we know”) offset glee with wistfulness. A sassy aria from Zandonai’s Carmen-esque Conchita led into Fleming’s oft-encored “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess, more restrained than I’ve heard her do in the past, with Höll giving limpid account of Gershwin’s shifting counterpoint. Strauss’ “Cäcilie” played off a clever-melancholic mash-up of “My Funny Valentine” with Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. An audience-karaoke “I Could Have Danced All Night” would have sent everyone off with cheesy cheer, but Fleming and Höll returned for a bracingly beautiful performance of Strauss’s “Morgen.” Both poem and song lend themselves to interpretations of simple loveliness, but there’s a curious indefiniteness to the proceedings—why the focus on tomorrow and not today? Why the need for hopeful reassurance? What exactly is at the end of that walk on the beach? Happiness? Death? Both? It was as if the whole program had been designed to tease out the ambiguity of the song—and both Fleming’s serene ardor and Höll’s impeccable control, hushed to the edge of eerieness, left quiet, luminous space for that uncertainty. At the end of an afternoon notedly light on greatest hits, in “Morgen,” one of the soprano repertoire’s greatest hits of all, both singer and song were transported well beyond mere celebrity.

Not Michael Gordon.

I can’t go but maybe you can: Signal Ensemble is performing Michael Gordon’s 1995 blowout Trance this Wednesday at Le Poisson Rouge in New York. Trance is one of those pieces, I imagine, for which experiencing a live hearing is almost like a résumé item.

Here’s Part 4 of Trance:

Download (MP3, 8.4 Mb)

—which is part of a promotion for the concert, which we’ll go along with because we like Michael Gordon’s music, and you all should listen to it. Anyway, there’s a pair of tickets up for grabs—all you have to do is find the other six blogs currently hosting downloads of Trance sections and be the first to e-mail the list to promotion (at) firstchairpromo (dot) com. Here’s some clues for adjacent sections:

Previous section—Note: initial contact often makes unfamiliar helpers like you.
Next section—The senile communists are muddled.

It’s Take a Friend to Orchestra Month! It’s actually been Take a Friend to Orchestra Month for almost three weeks now. Have you taken a friend to see an orchestra? No? You’ve still got ten days. (I’m pretty sure that ELO on YouTube doesn’t count.) In the meantime, you can spend the rest of the month perusing related readings by classical music luminaries from online, offline, and everywhere in between, curated, as always, by Drew McManus.

According to the snazzy graphic there, I was supposed to write an article for Drew’s annual symphonic enablement, but Critic-at-Large Moe hijacked my spot to give the orchestra a pep talk. Head on over to see a dog talk to a cello for the first and possibly only time today.

FRANK GANNON: In the ‘ 46 and ‘ 50 campaigns, you played the piano. You played fairly often, I think, as a—sort of as a technique of campaigning. In those days people were used to gathering around the piano and singing. Did you—did you want your daughters to learn?

RICHARD NIXON: Oh, yes.

FG: Did they take lessons?

RN: Well, we—oh, yes. We went through that. The musical heritage, though, didn’t go beyond me. Both Julie and Tricia like music. Pat naturally wanted to give them an opportunity to learn. We bought an accordion for one and gave piano lessons to the other, to Tricia particularly. I remember—remember an incident on that. This is about, I would say, 1956, and at that time she would have been ten years old, and she was taking piano lessons for the first time, and I was trying to help her one night. And I was telling her, “You know, honey, the most important thing in learning to play the piano is to practice.” I said, “It’s tiring and boring, but if you practice, you can be as good as you want to be.” She thought a moment and she looked at me and said, “You know, Daddy, you should have practiced more when you were a little boy. If you had, you might have become famous and have gone to Hollywood, and they would have buried you in a special place.”

—Nixon/Gannon Interviews, February 9, 1983

OK, OK, I’ll practice this afternoon. Three hours, I promise.

I should add that the fact that Julie Nixon Eisenhower once played the accordion passes through so many conflicting layers of ironic and non-ironic cool that it must separate out into radioactive isotopes at the other end.

Take for instance the representative work Symphony in B Minor (the Unfinished Symphony) by Schubert (1797-1828), an Austrian bourgeois composer of the romantic school. The class feelings and social content it expresses are quite clear, although it has no descriptive title. This symphony was composed in 1822 when Austria was a reactionary feudal bastion within the German Confederation and the reactionary Austrian authorities not only ruthlessly exploited and oppressed the workers and peasants, but also persecuted and put under surveillance intellectuals with any bourgeois democratic ideas. Petty-bourgeois intellectuals like Schubert saw no way out of the political and economic impasse, and lacking the courage to resist they gave way to melancholy, vacillation, pessimism and despair, evading reality and dreaming of freedom. This work of Schubert’s expressed these class feelings and social content. The opening phrase is sombre and gloomy. The whole symphony continues and expands on this emotion, filling it with petty-bourgeois despair, pessimism and solitary distress. At times the dreaming of freedom does come through but this, too, is escapist and negative.

Absolute music composed in Europe in the 18th and l9th centuries are products of the European capitalist society, upholding the interests of the bourgeoisie and serving the capitalist system. The content and the ideas and feelings with which they are saturated have an unmistakably bourgeois class nature. Marx pointed out: “Capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” And it is this blood and dirt that bourgeois music extols. Although certain compositions were to some extent progressive in the sense of being anti-feudal, they failed to mirror proletarian thoughts and feelings of their time; and they are, of course, still more incompatible with our socialist system today under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Then why dismiss their class content and extol them? Yet even today there are some who would feed our young people on these musical works uncritically and intact. Where would this lead our young people?

—Chao Hua, “Has Absolute Music No Class Character?”
(Peking Review, #9, March 1, 1974)

[Akira] Kurosawa wrote One Wonderful Sunday with his childhood friend Keinosuke Uekasa…. Kurosawa said of him, “As weak as he is, he puts on a show of strength; as romantic as he is, he puts on a show of being a realist.” Perhaps it was Uekasa’s contradictory nature that led to One Wonderful Sunday‘s audacious—if not successful—climax. As Masako tries to cheer Yuzo in the bandshell after being denied tickets to hear Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, she suggests they pretend. At first her bit of inspiration works, but the sadness of the long day begins to wear on Yuzo and the imaginary music stops. Then, suddenly, Masako addresses the movie’s audience, looking striaght into the camera. With tears running down her cheeks, she pleads with the audience to clap its hands, à la Peter Pan. “Please, everyone,” she says, “if you feel sorry for us, please clap your hands. If you clap for us, I’m sure we’ll be able to hear the music.” After an excruciatingly long silence, Schubert is heard at last.

—Stuart Galbraith IV, The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune

What’s the difference between a note composed and a note improvised? Pretty much nothing, at least according to Søren Kierkegaard. Not that Kierkegaard ever explicitly addressed the issue; in his most sustained exploration of music, the section of Either/Or entitled “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic,” Kierkegaard is primarily intent on demonstrating a) that the true value of a musical work is how well it seamlessly matches form with content, and b) the significance of music “as a Christian art or, more correctly, as the art Christianity posits in excluding it from itself, as the medium for that which Christianity excludes from itself and thereby posits.”

But Kierkegaard’s philosophical spelunking of the process of decision makes an interesting frame for a consideration of both compositional and improvisational choice. Here’s the turn-of-the-last-century Danish philosopher Harald Høffding writing about Kierkegaard:

The “qualitative dialectic” appears in Kierkegaard’s theory of knowledge in the sharp antithesis he draws between thought and reality. Even if thought should attain coherency it does not therefore follow that this coherency can be preserved in the practice of life. So long as we live we are imprisoned in becoming; hence we stand ever before the unknown, for there is no guarantee that the future will resemble the past.

In a lot of ways, this problem—the actual philosophical and psychological process of collapsing passive possibility into decisive actuality—is at the core of Kierkegaard’s work, the fixed point he aimed at from multiple pseudonymous angles. From Either/Or:

In making a choice it is not so much a question of choosing the right as of the energy, the earnestness, the pathos with which one chooses. Thereby the personality announces its inner infinity, and thereby, in turn, the personality is consolidated. Therefore, even if a man were to choose the wrong, he will nevertheless discover, precisely by reason of the energy with which he chose, that he has chosen the wrong. For the choice being made with the whole inwardness of his personality, his nature is purified.

Høffding explains:

No gradual development takes place within the spiritual sphere, such as might explain the transition from deliberation to decision…. Continuity would be broken in every such transition. As regards the choice, psychology is only able to point out possibilities and approximations, motives and preparations. The choice itself comes with a jerk, with a leap, in which something quite new (a new quality) is posited. Only in the world of possibilities is there continuity; in the world of reality decision always comes through a breach of continuity.

For Kierkegaard, theologically, that breach of continuity at the point of decision is a leap of faith, and marks the boundary between what he characterized as the aesthetic and the ethical modes of living. This contrast is easily seen in Either/Or; the famous/infamous “Diary of a Seducer” section, a wry ventriloquism of the aesthete’s disconnected, indecisive sensual limbo, shifts into the sober prose of “Judge William,” delineating ethical choices.

But the point here is that no amount of preparation for the decision, no amount of reflection or consideration, eliminates the decision’s essential discontinuity. To restrict the number of choices doesn’t smooth over the break. (“Anyone who seeks the aid of probability is lost in imagination,” Kierkegaard writes, “whatever else he may try to do.”) All choices—be they measured compositional considerations or spur-of-the-moment improvisations—are equally intuitive, equally risky, equally discontinuous. Composition and improvisation become like the two actresses director Luis Buñuel cast as a single character in his 1977 film That Obscure Object of Desire. A while back, filmmaker Errol Morris discussed the movie, and the two-actress stunt, on his New York Times blog:

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. Perhaps Buñuel sees love as a series of continuity errors? People assume there are no continuity errors in reality.

—which is, in fact, a quintessentially Kierkegaardian idea. Kierkegaard’s writings about love and sensuality always mirrored his own experience; though sincerely in love with Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard nevertheless broke off their engagement. Nominally, the reason was concern over his own melancholic personality, but throughout his works, echoes of the relationship are constantly heard whenever Kierkegaard discusses a refusal to decide, a preference to remain lost in possibility. To declare a love for someone is to choose who to love, which, somewhat paradoxically, shifts the action from the sensual plane to the ethical. From Kierkegaard’s Either/Or discussion of Don Giovanni:

Don Juan… is a downright seducer. His love is sensuous, not psychical, and, according to its concept, sensuous love is not faithful but totally faithless; it loves not one but all—that is, seduces all…. But its faithlessness manifests itself in another way also: it continually becomes only a repetition.

A cursory extension of that analysis might extol improvisation as intuitive creation and devalue written composition as rule-bound repetition, but that misses Kierkegaard’s point—that Don Juan’s repetitive patterns are not a choice at all, but a symptom of his inability to make the leap—aesthetic to ethical—that a decision entails. (Even this is an either/or, as the French philosopher Jean Wahl explains: “But let us observe that for Kierkegaard inside freedom itself there is an action of the grace, of a divine necessity which guides us; that in the second place, the act of repetition is an act by which we say yes to our necessity and reality; and this leads us toward the understanding of what Kierkegaard means when he says that in the utmost freedom there is no more question of choice.”)

Maybe it’s an American thing. From a late lecture by the 20th-century theologian Paul Tillich:

When I came to this country and first used the word aestheticism in a lecture, a colleague of mine at Columbia University told me not to use that word in describing Americans. That is a typical European phenomenon. Americans are activists and not aestheticists. Now I do not believe this is true. I think there is quite a lot of this aesthetic detachment even in popular culture. It is present in the buying and selling of cultural goods… in which you often see a non-participating, nonexistential attitude. Here Kierkegaard’s criticism would be valid. Perhaps on the whole this is not a very great danger among the American intelligentsia. My observation has been that they jump very quickly out of the detached aesthetic attitude—in all lectures and discussions, in philosophy and the arts—to the question, “What shall we do?” This attitude was described by Kierkegaard as the attitude of the ethical stage.

Make a note of it. Doesn’t matter how.

http://www.matthewguerrieri.com/sounds/player.swf

Jean Wiéner, Blues (1929) (me, piano)

Almost back to a reasonably normal schedule. In the meantime, some vintage French through-composed jazz for your weekend.

OK, so Stravinsky wasn’t sufficiently distracting me from debilitating back pain today, so I’ve moved on to the Flaming Lips. A crisp new five-dollar bill for the first convincing mash-up of “The Spiderbite Song” with Berg’s Violin Concerto!

News of the day:

The Fairbanks Symphony is once again throwing down their yearly challenge: Run a 5K in less time than it takes to play Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.

A striking replica of Beethoven, Steve Bainbridge, runs to the beat of the music, so anyone who finishes the event ahead of the great composer will receive a voucher good for one of the Fairbanks Symphony’s season concerts for the 2009-10 season that starts in September.

Classical radio for animals. Critic-at-Large Moe approves. (The pun made him growl, though.)

Ravel becomes the latest composer to inspire speculation of secret musical codes. I blame Dan Brown!

R.I.P., Robert Delford Brown, artist, provocateur, founder of The First National Church of Exquisite Panic, Inc., and a performer in the legendary 1964 New York production of Stockhausen’s Originale. (Do him the honor of kissing a pig.)

http://www.matthewguerrieri.com/sounds/player.swf

L.C. Davis and Charles Kunkel, “Baseball vs. Opera” (1912)

A little ditty for Opening Day (Zambrano vs. Oswalt, 7:05 PM), with lyrics by sportswriter L. C. Davis, from the days when sportswriters rhymed more than they do now. (Yeah, that’s me singing. Sorry.) “Shine,” by the way, is not a racial slur against Italians as well—it’s used in the turn-of-the-century sense of “show-off.” (Too bad—I thought I could mock two of my ancestries at once.)

I’m practicing Appalachian Spring right now, trying to get my hands to stop thinking about how they already know “Simple Gifts” and instead actually pay attention to what’s on the page. (I’m pretending to be an orchestra for a conducting class later today.) I’m also still bleary from the weekend: worked all day yesterday, stayed up too late on Saturday helping my UConn-fan wife obliterate the immediate past with mojitos and Classical Barbra, and was out too late on Friday witnessing The Bad Plus in the flesh and then finally meeting Ethan Iverson. I bought Ethan a drink, after which somebody else came up and wanted to buy Ethan a drink. That’s right—his fans were fighting over who got to pay for his alcohol. Ethan swore that this had never happened to him before. I’m not sure I believe him.