Sound and Fury. Reviewing Jan Swafford’s Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph.
The American Scholar, Autumn 2014.

The Radical Virtuoso. A profile of Paul Jacobs.
Yale Alumni Magazine, May/June 2014.

Score: Musical memorials to JFK, explicit and implicit.
Boston Globe, November 17, 2013.

Cut-for-space fun fact: In 1965, the Beach Boys played a show at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst—their first college performance on the east coast—headlining a fundraiser for a “JFK Room” at the school, “a room which would be filled with ‘books written for Americans by Americans.'”

(Click to enlarge. Source.) I am not sure the JFK Room was ever actually built.

Attention, upper Midwesterners: I am pleased and flattered to be part of this year’s Chippewa Valley Book Festival, which will find me at the L. E. Phillips Memorial Public Library in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, this coming Monday, October 14 at 7:00 PM. I will be talking, of course, about the only book I have managed to write, which means some far-flung Beethovenian tangents. Fun for all ages! Unless the subject of the Minnesota Orchestra Association comes up, in which case the fun will rapidly turn NC-17 (language).

The Eau Claire Bears! I do hope to make a pilgrimage to Carson Park, in honored memory of Andy Pafko.

Score: Mauricio Kagel’s elegant sabotage.
Boston Globe, October 12, 2013.

I know I’ve been terrible about linking to my various writings in this space, but this “Score” column is something that’s been going on for a few months now: the Globe lets me do a calendrical riff on something each week: a concert, an anniversary, a piece of repertoire. The list so far:

October 5: Jehan Alain and the Battle of Saumur
September 28: Carlo Gozzi and The Love for Three Oranges
September 21: The Legendary Pink Dots and the theology of psychedelia
September 14: Henry Brant’s 100th
August 31: Frederic Fradkin and the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s one and only strike
August 24: Duck That! and other musical birdcalls
August 17: Alfred Hitchcock’s Waltzes from Vienna
August 10: Joseph Schuster and other mistaken identities
July 27: The precarious political life of Cardinal Francesco Barbarini
July 13: John Jacob Astor, piano salesman
July 6: The Lyricon and its adherents
June 29: Francis Hopkinson, revolutionary and composer
June 22: The Pythian Games and the birth of music competitions
June 16: Early music connecting Boston and Bloomsday
June 8: John Cage’s Variations III
June 1: The Bach family, for multiple hands
May 27: Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Hollywood moment
May 23: K. 550 and a Bollywood pioneer

Трудно высказать и не высказать
Все, что на сердце у меня.

It is hard to express, and hard to hold back,
Everything that is in my heart.

—Mikhail Matusovsky, “Подмосковные вечера” (“Moscow Nights”)

The last time I heard Van Cliburn live was in 1998, at Tanglewood, when he played Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In the last-minute scramble for student seats in the Shed, I had ended up sitting next to a British conductor. The performance itself was mannered and decadent—the melodic line brought aggressively to the fore, the tempo wayward and undulating, even meandering. Cliburn got a standing ovation, which slightly puzzled my conductor friend. “But it wasn’t very good,” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “but he’s Van Cliburn.” We both agreed that it was more than enough explanation.

The audience was, of course, applauding the reputation as much as the man. This is not to say that Cliburn, who passed away today, was some sort of fraud. At his best, Cliburn could take his place among the greats. And even that Tanglewood performance, for all its interpretive oddness, still had plenty to marvel at: the athletically glamorous sound, the rubato, the accented chords landing with the impact of a blacksmith’s hammer. But the reputation inevitably preceded him, the machinery of celebrity so familiar that it obscured just how singular that reputation really was. Because Cliburn’s fame, his image—the fair-haired conqueror, the national hero, the eternal prodigy—was actually quite strange. That he eventually could wear it with a kind of grace was not the least of his achievements.

Cliburn’s reputation was made, of course, at the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, but the reputation was built on something more than pianistic skill. The Russian public’s reaction to Cliburn, after all, was not one of impressed acknowledgement, or hard-won respect; it was love at first sight. What was often missed in the translation of that reputation back into American terms was the fact that it was a product of Cliburn’s nonconformity, his disinclination to stay within the bounds of musical propriety. I initially thought it an odd-couple pairing that both Glenn Gould and Van Cliburn made such sensations in the Cold-War-era Soviet Union, but the more I listened, the less odd it seemed. Gould’s playing tended toward the hermetic, Cliburn’s toward the hedonistic, but both of them also had a tendency toward the outré and the theatrical that seemed to connect with Russian audiences. Witness Cliburn, in concert in Moscow, performing Rachmaninoff’s E-flat major Prelude, op. 23, no. 6:



One couldn’t ask for a better example of a performer more in thrall to the musical flow, more eager to be buffeted by the music’s implicated emotion, even sentimentality. The amount of rhythmic liberty Cliburn takes in that clip, the instances of subito-this-or-that, not to mention Cliburn’s physical demeanor, verges on kitsch, but it never quite tips over, and the result is ravishing. Cliburn’s playing possessed a special kind of fearlessness—risking vulgarity in the pursuit of an aura of heightened emotional earnestness.

It was in contrast with his persona, shy and reserved, but Cliburn was always more at home at the piano (if not necessarily in front of an audience) anyway. One of my most indelible memories of him is seeing television footage from his performance at the White House in 1987, at the time his first public appearance in years. He played one of his favorite encores—the Russian pop song “Moscow Nights”—while singing along with Mikhail Gorbachev and the rest of the Soviet delegation. While the Americans in the audience (I remember Nancy Reagan, in particular, who was sitting next to Gorbachev) looked pleased but slightly baffled, Cliburn was absolutely in his element. For all the celebrity, all the concert-opening performances of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Cliburn nevertheless seemed a little bit at odds with the American culture that lauded him; but, behind the keyboard, that quality was transformed into generosity and daring. Sometimes it came out mannered, but other times, it had an anchorite’s ecstatic eloquence. That original Tchaikovsky concerto with Kondrashin, the Rachmaninoff concerti he recorded with Reiner, his terrific version of Rachmaninoff’s second Sonata—Cliburn’s best moments will remain both touchstones and, paradoxically, forever his own.

Over at NewMusicBox, critic-at-large Moe gets into the spirits of various seasons.

I’m traveling this week, so I’m a day late on a couple links. Over at NewMusicBox this week, I consider the composer’s relationship with musical material from the vantage point of an early out.

Also, Ethan Iverson, a fellow Charles Rosen fan, asked for some reflections on his passing, which I was more than happy to attempt. If there’s a more entertaining way to expand one’s mind than a “Do the Math” post, I haven’t found it; to be part of one is flattery indeed.

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, November 20, 2012.

I have a couple of First-Four-Notes-related articles up this weekend:

On Beethoven’s Fifth and other warhorses.
Boston Globe, November 18, 2012.

Five Books Inspired by Beethoven’s Fifth.
Publisher’s Weekly, November 16, 2012.

Also, this, which I forgot to link to earlier this week:

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage.
Musical America, November 13, 2012.

I will once again, and with pleasure, acknowledge this blog’s debt to Tippett’s opera.