Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin, arr. Mason Jones
i. Prélude, at 0:00; ii. Fugue, at 3:35; iii. Menuet, at 6:30; iv. Rigaudon, at 10:34. French Woodwind Quintet: Philippe Bernold, flute; Olivier Doise, oboe; Patrick Messina, clarinet; Julien Hardy, bassoon; Hervé Joulain, horn
Just the "Prélude," in the Jones arrangement
Quintette Les Cinq: Federico Dalprà, flute; Ian Barillas-McEntee, oboe; Letizia Elsa Maulà, clarinet; Georgie Powell, bassoon; Derrick Atkinson, horn (in the Jurriaanse Zaal, De Doelen, Rotterdam, Feb. 17, 2015)
by Ken
As I sort-of-explained last week in part 1 of this post, my path to Albrecht Mayer's 2013 oboe master class began with "a birthday-gift concert of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center," at which Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin (of 1914-18) was played in a version I'd never heard, bracketed -- in a program called Through the Great War -- between a pair of piano quintets I don't think I'd ever heard at all, Dohnányi's Second (1914) and Elgar's (1918).
To my considerable surprise it was not just a terrific concert but one of my great musical experiences, at a time when such an experience was as welcome as it was unexpected. I think I'd still like to write about it, because it struck at a whole bunch of issues that are of considerable importance to me, but it's not easy, since aspects of it are pretty personal, which amps up the difficulty of writing, as well as the personal unease about how much I want to share, especially at a time when I'm finding it hard to imagine that it would be of interest to anyone but me. My best hope is that it'll get a tiny bit easier once I have more confidence that there's nobody out there reading. (And if by chance there is somebody out there reading, can you explain yourself?)
So for now for the most part I'm going to table the concert itself, except perhaps to thank the Chamber Music Society, not just for the concert but for the birthday gift. You see, when I described this as "a birthday-gift concert of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center," what may not have been clear is that it was a gift from CMS -- owing, as best I can tell, to my having once bought a ticket directly from them (probably at a discount at that, if I know myself). I meant to drop the folks there a note of thanks, but somehow I didn't. So thanks, folks!
TOO MUCH TALK! LET'S HAVE MUSIC!
Of course, the connection between the concert and the Albrecht Mayer master class is the "Prélude" of the Tombeau, whose oboe solo -- in Ravel's orchestral version -- is one of the pieces that one of the students brought to work on with A.M. So let's listen again to two of the piano performances we heard last week, and two really lovely "new" orchestral versions, more along the lines of the one by Jean Martinon we heard last week, closer in spirit to Walter Gieseking's splendid piano performance, not falling into the trap of taking it too fast to leave much room for the imagination to play. (That said, I still quite enjoy the chiseled panache of Samson François's performance.)
RAVEL: Le Tombeau de Couperin: i. Prélude
Original version for solo piano
Walter Gieseking piano. EMI, recorded in London, Dec. 10-17, 1954
Samson François, piano. EMI, recorded Mar.-July 1967
Ravel's 1919 orchestral version
Orchestre de la Suisse romande, Ernest Ansermet, cond. Decca, recorded November 1960
Cleveland Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, cond. DG, recorded April 1999
BEFEORE WE GET TO THE ACTUAL MASTER CLASS, I
WANT TO BACKTRACK A BIT -- TO HOW I GOT THERE
The thing is, for an event like the CMS concert, for me it's not just the concert itself; there's also pre-concert "prep" -- and, if I'm lucky!, some sort of necessary post-concert follow-up. The idea of pre-concert prep applies as well, or even more, to concerts like this one that I wasn't looking forward to all that much. The "prep work" itself can be a fair amount of fun -- looking at, listening to, and thinking about the music. Certainly in this case there was plenty to ponder, starting with those two generously scaled piano quintets that I didn't know at all. For that matter, while Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin was pretty familiar to me in both its six-movement original form for piano solo and in Ravel's subsequent orchestrated and somewhat rearranged four-movement version, it isn't a piece I'd ever devoted a great deal of thought to.
So what had Mason wrought on the Tombeau? Once I discovered all those performances of it posted on YouTube, I didn't have to wait for the concert to get some idea, and since I had been mistakenly thinking of the wind-quintet version as derived from the piano original, I hadn't considered how much instrumental groundwork had been laid by the composer himself in the four movements he orchestrated. As with a good deal of his other piano music, he had imagined such a rich sonic universe that it didn't just lend itself to, it almost demanded, expansion to orchestral form. Neither version takes precedence over the other, it seems to me (setting aside the two additional movements possessed by the piano version) -- they're both enormously rich worlds of musical imagining waiting for release by performers of sufficient imagination, though I suppose it's fair to say that the orchestral version lays out much of that imagining more explicitly.
What was frustrating about the YouTube clips of the woodwind-quintet arrangement was how unsatisfying I found them. The consciousness-expansion process that's so important to this music seems to have gotten reversed -- these seemed shrunken realizations of this miraculous music. Of course, I told myself while still in pre-concert mode, in both its solo-piano and orchestral formats, consciousness expansion is far from guaranteed. It all depends on the performers. So I refused to believe that the problem lies in the arrangement itself. Possibly it's a mindset. Maybe performers of the quintet version somehow get the idea that hey, this is no big deal, all we have to do is get the notes right and we're home free.
Wrong!
While the CMS performance was better than any I'd seen online, it still left me feeling that the music had been significantly underserved. Which must have been what sent me, after the concert, sniffing in and around the Tombeau, and by a path I no longer recall exactly stumbling onto the clip of the Carnegie Hall master-class session devoted to the Ravel oboe solo.
WHY DON'T WE TAKE A LOOK? HERE'S THE RAVEL CLIP
FROM ALBRECHT M.'S CARNEGIE HALL MASTER CLASS
with Max Blair, oboe [clip from Weill Music Institute, Carnegie Hall]
If you'd like to follow along (perfect for frustrated oboists!) --
IF YOU'RE AT ALL LIKE ME, ONCE YOU'VE SEEN
ONE CLIP, YOU'LL WANT TO SEE MORE OF THEM
I know what we should be doing now: methodical analysis of what we've just witnessed. You've probably guessed, though, that we're not going to do that. Let's just say I don't want to influence your expectations as we look at the other clips. Yes, let's just say that! (Besides, if you were here last week, I already pulled out the comment that for me says it all: the first thing Albrecht says after the student plays.)
Believe it or not, I spent major time agonizing over whether to embed any or all of these clips. Embedding makes life more convenient for the reader, and while it's possible that the folks at Carnegie Hall might see this as furthering their educational mission, they might also feel that their property rights have been abused. My compromise, as you can see, has been to embed the Ravel, which was our primary focus, but to link to the Rossini, Brahms, and Tchaikovksy.
Again, if you were here last week, you may recall that we had audio clips of all the pieces under scrutiny. We do this week too -- and for Rossini, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky they're all different from last week's. I've just put them all at the end of the post.
ROSSINI: La Scala de seta:
Overture [6:54] [Click here]
with Mary Lynch, oboe
BRAHMS: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68:
ii. Andante sostenuto [7:49] [Click here]
with Mary Lynch, oboe
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36:
ii. Andantino in modo di canzone [6:26] [Click here]
with John Winstead, oboe
AFTERTHOUGHT: ABOUT "IN MODO DI CANZONE"
After posting, I realized that I never did refer explicitly in Part 2 to the phrase "In modo di canzone," despite its presence at the start of the title here as well as in Part 1. I could chalk this up to deliberate choice, and maybe on some semi-conscious level it was, you know, semi-deliberate. More likely I was trusting to carry-over from Part 1. After all, couldn't the many non-readers of Part 1 be counted on to be not reading Part 2 as well?
For the record, in Part 1, after offering an assortment of performances of the second movement of the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony, marked Andantino in modo di canzone ("Andantino in the mode/manner/form of song"), I did venture: "At this moment, this is my favorite musical direction." And I did point out that in the relevant master-class clip Albrecht Mayer makes quite a point of this marking.
TO BE ABSOLUTELY HONEST, I HAVEN'T BEEN
REWATCHING THE VIDEO CLIPS WITH YOU
"One begins to realize that the failings of more recent singers have been enshrined as virtues. Naturally, if a singer cannot do more than get out the notes in one color and at one level, then we prefer to hear them in strict time rather than have the artist demonstrate what he can't do. This does not mean that the possibilities of the piece are thereby explored, or that the composer intended the singer to consider an accurate reading as a finished interpretation."
-- Conrad L. Osborne, in "A Plain Case for the
Golden Age," High Fidelity magazine, October 1967
Golden Age," High Fidelity magazine, October 1967
In the master-class clips, did you notice how often Albrecht references singing in connection with oboe-playing? And did you notice how completely his own playing references singing?
Now, I should probably have been rewatching the clips with you, but it's just too hard for me. If I were to make pro-and-con lists regarding such an undertaking, they might look like this:
"Pro" list (for rewatching all the video clips)
• Albrecht is such good company, so smart and funny and caring and supportive, and bringing to bear such deep knowledge with such clarity and compassion."Con" list (against rewatching all the video clips)
• And in his demonstrations I really really love his playing, which is so bold and sensitive and expressive over such a wide range of instrumental and human nuance.
• Um -- how to put this delicately? -- I really really don't love the students' playing. I really don't want to disrespect the years' worth of effort that got them to these levels. I know quite well how hard it is to produce consistently listenable sound from the oboe, not to mention their degrees of control over it. And I appreciate how brave and vulnerable they are, putting themselves under the scrutiny of their fellow students, the audience, and of course those merciless video cameras. Still, allowing for a certain amount of variation among them, for me it all comes out pretty much the same: streams of notes, accurately enough articulated but with hardly any humanly expressive content.Which brings me back to that comment of Albrecht's that I quoted last week, in response to the student's playing of the Ravel:
• And what really concerns me is that, as articulately as Albrecht seems to me to express his concerns and suggestions, none of the students seem to have literally the slightest idea what he's talking about. Again, I appreciate how pressurized it must feel to take in criticisms in such a public situation and try to make on-the-spot adjustments. But again, none of them seem to have any idea what Albrecht is asking of them, let alone why. Do any of them even notice, for example, that he seems to be consistently producing about twice as much sound as they are?
Beautiful! Really good! So now let's try to do this -- this is already very good, but what we need is the same beauty with a lot of energy behind."Energy behind" -- yes, that's it, the energy that's necessary to produce any kind of meaningful musical communication, any real human expression.
WHICH BRINGS US BACK TO THE TWO YOUTUBE
POSTERS' COMMENTS I NOTED LAST WEEK
• Of the Ravel: "Perhaps it's just a matter of personal preference, but it seems the student elicits a more mellow resonant sound compared to Mr Mayer's......."Last week I wrote: "Well, there's a certain evident truth to both, but in every important way they're dead wrong -- and wrong in crucially important ways, which seem to me directly related to singing."
• Of the Brahms: "She has not enough power to do what albrecht tells her"
In the first instance --
the commenter is right that there is an issue of personal preference as regards the sound, but dead wrong that the student's sound is more mellow or resonant. What it is, it seems to me, is simply that the student's sound is essentially all the same. When Albrecht wants it to be, his sound is way mellower and more resonant, but he has at his command a vast range of tonal weights, colors, and kinds of attack and phrasing, all under considerably more confident physical control even as he produces so much more as well as more attractive (my opinion, I admit -- that last part) sound.
Let's go back to the chunk I just quoted from Conrad L. Osborne's October 1967 High Fidelity piece "A Plain Case for the Golden Age," after he's talked about the Golden Age baritone Pasquale Amato's "immensely rich, soulful, and poetic" recording of Renato's great aria "Eri tu" from Verdi's Un Ballo in maschera (which he would go on to contrast with efforts of the ranking Verdi-style baritones of the then-current era). This time we'll let the quote run a sentence farther (presented here in italics).
One begins to realize that the failings of more recent singers have been enshrined as virtues. Naturally, if a singer cannot do more than get out the notes in one color and at one level, then we prefer to hear them in strict time rather than have the artist demonstrate what he can't do. This does not mean that the possibilities of the piece are thereby explored, or that the composer intended the singer to consider an accurate reading as a finished interpretation. It cannot possibly mean that Verdi would have enjoyed hearing our leading four or five baritones sing through this aria and, despite their differing timbres, their slightly differing tempos, come up with almost identically bland, anonymous interpretations, totally uninformed with the spark of individuality, the truth of creative perception.Naturally I can't speak for you, but this resonates wildly for me as I ponder the group of oboists the Carnegie Hall people apparently considered the cream of the audition-tape-submitting crop. I would just add that in the case of the baritones of the Fifties and Sixties C.L.O. was writing about (Leonard Warren, Cornell MacNeil, Robert Merrill, Giuseppe Taddei, Tito Gobbi, and Giangiacomo Guelfi), there really wasn't a significant issue of the amount of sound they produced. In my experience, in the intervening decades it has become a significantly more significant issue.
In recent Osborne on Opera blogposts, C.L.O. has been talking about lack of “laryngeal energization,” described in his June 8 post as "a simple failure, not only in singing but in the usages of everyday life -- to send a signal to the point of vocal origin strong enough to establish the foundation of a sturdy operatic structure." In that same post he ventured that usually voices with conspicuously "missing elements" --
are manifestly unstable or unresonant at least in part, or timid-sounding overall, but sometimes they can sound pushy and forced, so that the problem seems to be one of too much energy. But it’s not. It’s imprecisely directed energy, not enough energy in the right place, and by way of compensation too much in another. Anyone attempting complicated neuromuscular co-ordinations requiring a sustained high energy level (an athlete, a dancer) will meet up with analogous difficulties.And in that post he points at some of the assortment of factors that may be associated with the lowering of "laryngeal energy," including the advent of the microphone, which sped up changes in the culture that devalued strength and clarity of communication in theatrical speech generally, diminishing new generations of performers' feeling of the need for or even desirability of such physical capabilities.
IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT ALL THE C.L.O. QUOTESAnd in the second instance --
In case it isn't obvious, C.L.O. himself is responsible for the quotes only in the original contexts they've been ripped out of, which I've tried to sort of place. Any and all extrapolations, conclusions, and/or other introduced confusions are strictly my own. -- Ed.
while it is obviously true that the student "has not enough power to do what albrecht tells her," and while I'm obviously not competent to talk about the physical issues of breath production as regards either oboe-playing or singing, I do know that neither is a matter, as a lot of people suppose, of huffing and puffing and blowing the house down. That's just not how the physical process works. Notice, again, that Albrecht produces vastly more sound with what looks like considerably less physical effort. Simply blowing harder doesn't produce more sound. As he sometimes tries to explain to the students, it's not physical exertion but sounder technique that enables an oboist to produce sound that has real energy -- and, yes, more actual volume. It's not "enough power" that the student lacks, it's "enough technique."
And, just maybe, "enough will" -- a felt need or even simple desire to produce sound of the kind Albrecht is encouraging her to do. This is something I hadn't really thought about until C.L.O. raised the issue in a recent Osborne on Opera blogpost, which we'll come back to.
ABOUT C.L.O. -- AND OPERA AS OPERA:
THE STATE OF THE ART
Whether by name or merely in spirit, my friend (I'm delighted to say) Conrad Osborne has hovered over pretty much every word that has appeared in Sunday Classics -- though I hasten to stress that he shouldn't thereby be held responsible for any of those words; only the direct quotes are his, and in my own state of dim comprehension I may have mangled the context and therefore meaning of them.
Somehow Conrad has managed the writing of the book while maintaining his full teaching schedule as well as the rest of his life, and when the book at long last entered the publication process, which meant if anything more rather than less intensive work, he added to all the above a blog, Osborne on Opera: A Critical Blog, producing at a fairly consistent biweekly pace, for a year now, prodigious pieces from the staggeringly diverse angles from which he's singularly able to view the form. If you're coming new to the blog, the obvious starting point is the "Preamble" post of July 27, 2017.
There's lots more to explore on Conrad's website, conradlosborne.com, where there's also a page for Opera as Opera -- and even a link for pre-orders, no doubt soon to be replaced by a link for live orders.
UPDATE-CORRECTION: I sent C..L.O. a link to this post, to alert him to the obfuscations I had perpetrated with his name dragged in, and in his generous response he offered this significant emendation: "BTW, I worked on the book for 18 years, not a mere 6. Jeez, anyone can do 6." Noted! -- Ed.
FINALLY, HERE ARE THE ROSSINI, BRAHMS,
AND TCHAIKOVSKY PERFORMANCES
These are all "new" clips since last week's post. The Rossini and Tchaikovsky were stockpiled last week, and while I'm sure I intended to do some sort of selection process rather than just dumping them out, it appears we're going to go with the straight dump. As regards the Brahms, since the first version of this post went up, I've plucked an assortment of performances off the shelf, aiming for a bit of variety. And those performances I've chosen to say something about! Go figure. [UPDATE: Maybe out of shame, I wound up adding some notes on the Rossini and Tchaikovsky performances as well. -- Ed.]
ROSSINI: La Scala de seta (The Silk Ladder):
Overture
Philharmonia Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. EMI, recorded June 1959 [oboe solos at 0:10, 1:42]
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Neville Marriner, cond. Philips, recorded May 1974 [oboe solos at 0:10, 1:35]
London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado, cond. RCA, recorded 1978 [oboe solos at 0:10, 1:39]
New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Jan. 15, 1963 [oboe solos at 0:09, 1:32]
At the time of release, I went wild over Neville Marriner's first Philips LP of Rossini overtures -- so poised, songful, transparent, and dynamic -- and Philips went on to record three more LPs' worth (eventually gathered in a three-CD Complete Rossini Overtures set), plus complete performancees of Cenerentola, The Barber of Seville, and Il Turco in Italia; Marriner even did a later CD of "basic" Rossini overtures for EMI. The Philips Scala di seta is from the already-less-striking second Philips overtures LP, but it still has many of the first LP's attractions. Claudio Abbado's much admired Rossini usually didn't do much for me, but I like this RCA overture disc, where the LSO seems to be having a rollicking good time, which counts for a lot in this music. The NY Phil has an even better time with Lenny B, who has maybe the best time of all -- not surprisingly, Lenny made a dramatic production of each of the Rossini overtures he recorded. (His William Tell may be my very favorite of all.) In our present context, we should probably take note of the bravura playing of longtime (1943-77) NY Phil oboe principal Harold Gomberg. (In a moment, in the Tchaikovsky Fourth, we'll be hearing his equally celebrated oboe-playing younger brother Ralph -- not once but twice!)
BRAHMS: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68:
ii. Andante sostenuto
Dresden Staatskapelle, Kurt Sanderling, cond. Eurodisc, recorded 1971 [oboe solo at 1:28]
New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, cond. Teldec, recorded live, May 1994 [oboe solo at 1:17]
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, William Steinberg, cond. Capitol-EMI, recorded Apr. 7, 1956 [oboe solo at 1:14]
Radiotelevisione Symphony Orchestra (Milan), Sergiu Celibidache, cond. Broadcast performance, Mar. 20, 1959 [oboe solo at 1:12]
Philharmonia Orchestra, Arturo Toscanni, cond. Recorded live in the Royal Albert Hall, Sept. 29-Oct. 1, 1952 [oboe solo at 1:11]
Let me say that I'll be hugely surprised if I ever hear a more beautiful Brahms symphony cycle than Kurt Sanderling's Dresden one, but that Kurt Masur's recorded-live New York cycle is a reminder of how beautifully he got the Philharmonic to play in his time here; that William Steinberg's deep musicality as usual shines through here (he later did really beautiful complete Beethoven and Brahms symphony cycles for Command); that the ever-eccentric Sergiu Celibidache doesn't sound like such an outlier with his expansive Andante sostenuto; and finally that, as everyone who's never heard them is surprised to discover, Arturo Toscanini's 1952 Royal Albert Hall Brahms performances (actually recorded but never issued by EMI, apparently for unresolvable contractual issues) are a lot more supple and songful than his NBC Symphony performances of the period.
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36:
ii. Andantino in modo di canzone
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. RCA, recorded Jan. 28, 1959
Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of London, Artur Rodzinski, cond. Westminster, recorded 1958-59
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, David Zinman, cond. Telarc, recorded Nov. 20-25, 1989
Orchestra del Teatro Regio (Turin), Vladimir Delman, cond. Fonit Cetra, recorded 1984
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch, cond. RCA, recorded Nov. 7, 1955
We begin and end here with recordings by the Boston Symphony; in 1959 the orchestra's much-loved elder statesman Pierre Monteux was completing a series of recordings of the last three Tchaikovsky symphonies made during the music directorship of Charles Munch, who himself had recorded the Fourth less than four years earlier, and it sure sounds like the oboist of both BSO recordings is the wonderful Ralph Gomberg, its oboe principal from 1950 to 1987, whose older brother Harold we heard doing such lovely work in Rossini's Scala di seta Overture.
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