AN APOLOGY: This is really inexcusable. There's no good reason why I couldn't have gotten this "FLASH" up Monday, but here it is Sunday (well, actually, Monday again by the time this is posted), and .*nbsp. . . In one source I saw something like "On demand through February 29, but I didn't know if that was a legit cutoff date for free access. I dithered. The good news is that the 2009 and 2016 interviews shouldn't be going away anytime soon. Sorry!by Ken
For once, I heard that clock ticking and punched up the 2009 Seiji-Berlin Elijah right away, and watched the whole thing. It took me a long time to come to grips with the piece, but I did, and it occupies a special place in my affections. I was especially happy to discover how strong Matthias Goerne's performance of the title role is, because without a strong Elijah the piece kind of doesn't make a lot of sense. But there's still a serious burden on the conductor, because a fair amount of the piece really does need a major effort of motivation-defining, and this is the sort of thing Seiji was so good at: helping his co-performers feel the importance of what they're performing in the moment and how it relates to a piece's grand design.
There's also some important history embedded in the Elijah performance, as I came to understand from watching the 2009 and 2016 interviews in the Digital Concert Hall archive. Onsite they're described as "conversations," and they truly are -- with a member of the orchestra, sometimes even in English, and always with subtitles even if they aren't. It turns out that the Elijah, owing to what I recall him describing in the 2016 "conversation," with his countryman Daishin Kashimoto, as "my mysterious illness" (all week I've been thinking I should really rewatch the 2016 conversation to pin down his exact words; this'll have to be close enough), would be his last Berlin appearance until he was finally able to return in 2016 to conduct an all-Beethoven second half of a concert that began with a conductorless performance by elite winds of the Berlin Phil of Mozart's stupendous Gran Partita Serenade, K. 361.
MORAL: DON'T OVERLOOK THE INTERVIEWS!
Among other things, Seiji talks about his relationships with Leonard Bernstein and especially Herbert von Karajan, with both of whom he apprenticed. He tells of going to Karajan, with whom he was already working in Berlin, when he was faced with the quandary of Bernstein's offer, after Seiji's Koussevitzky Competition triumph, to serve as an assistant conductor at the NY Phil. (Simple, according to Karajan: Seiji should "go to New York for a year, then come back here.") He explains that Karajan up to the end thought of him as his student -- to the point of informing Seiji in 1966 what his Berlin Phil debut program would be, including Mathis der Maler (i.e., Hindemith's Mathis der Maler Symphony," a piece Seiji tells us he didn't know at all. Perhaps needless to say, he learned it.
You should find the 2009 conversation here, and the 2016 one here. The general deal with the Berlin Phil Digital Concert Hall is that interviews are included in the site's generous body of free content. Normally you just have to be signed up (free!) for an account. And it's always worth checking the site to see what other stuff may be available free at the moment. There are frequently playlists, for example -- and again, I try to make it a habit, when I see one, to pounce on it, not knowing how long it'll be accessible free.
AND THE 2016 CONVERSATION, WITH DAISHIN KASHIMOTO --
Berlin principals step out front: At the 2015 Lucerne Festival, Daishin Kashimoto and Amihai Grosz play the first-movement dual-cadenza of the Mozart Sinfonia concertante, K. 364, before being rejoined (at about 1:19) by a Mozart-size cohort of their Berlin Phil colleagues under then-chief conductor Simon Rattle. (You can watch the performance on YouTube.)
As noted up top, Seiji's 2016 DCH "conversation," in Japanese, was with his countryman Daishin Kashimoto, one of the Berlin Phil's team of "first concertmaster"s. You have to understand that the orchestra generally seems to have not one, not two, but three "first concertmaster"s, not to mention an extra "mere" concertmaster. (And if you do understand, maybe you can explain the mathematics to me. I assume the overriding concern is making clear that all of the first concertmasters are equal in rank.) As Seiji recalls at the top of the 2016 conversation, Daishin had been the concertmaster for his last Berlin program, the 2009 Elijah, which must have been at or near the start of his tenure. It was certainly a logical assignment, as it was in 2016 when Daishin was again "his" concertmaster.
In 2016 Seij presumably wasn't physically up to conducting a full program; hence the split program, with those Berlin Phil winds playing Gran Partita Serenade, K. 361, after which Seiji and the orchestra proper played Beethoven's Egmont Overture and a piece with which Seiji had a long history, the Choral Fantasy for piano, soloists and/or chorus, and orchestra. The soloist had a name that was even longer-associated with the Choral Fantasy: Serkin. But it wasn't Rudolf Serkin (1903-1991), who had a thing for this deliciously and quirkily meandering piece, which Seiji had in fact recorded it back in 1982.
No, his 2016 soloist was Rudolf's now-68-year-old son Peter (1947-2020). While the piece doesn't seem to have had the same hold on Peter that it did on his father, Peter unquestionably had lots of experience of it, if only from the regular performances of it he must have heard Rudolf S. play at the Marlboro Festival. Indeed, we have a commercially released live recording in which Peter, then 34, conducted one of those Marlboro performances, in 1981.
We've heard all three Rudolf S. recordings of the Choral Fantasy, but I don't see why we can't hear them again. I think they all hold up wonderfully well, and certainly wouldn't want to part with the more dynamic early version with Leonard Bernstein. But I think the version I'd least want to give up is the Telarc recording with Seiji, which was recorded as part of a third Rudolf S.'s Beethoven concerto cycle (finished in 1983), which along with the late series of Mozart concertos he did with Claudio Abbado forms one of the loveliest parts of his legacy.
BEETHOVEN: Choral Fantasy in C minor for piano, soloists, chorus, and orchestra, Op. 80
In a March 2010 post, "In the piano concertos, we hear Beethoven in hard-fought sort-of-harmony with the universe," I wrote, "Wikipedia has German and English texts in a pleasantly sympathetic article on the Choral Fantasy. Here's Decca's translation." And here it is again:
Enticingly fair and lovely sound
the harmonies of our life,
and from a sense of beauty arise
glowers that bloom forever.
Peace and joy flow hand in hand
like the changing play of the waves;
what was crowded together in chaos and hostility
now shapes itself into exalted feeling.
When music's enchantment reigns
and poetry's consecration speaks,
wondrous things take shape;
night and storm change to light.
Outer peace, inner bliss
are the rulers of the happy man.
But the spring sun of the arts
causes light to flow from both.
Great things that have penetrated the heart
blossom anew and beautifully on high,
and the spirit that has soared up
is always echoed by a chorus of spirits.
Take them, then, you noble souls,
gladly, these gifts of noble art.
When love and strength are wedded together
mankind is rewarded with divine grace.
Rudolf Serkin, piano; with Faye Robinson and Mary Burgess, sopranos; Lili Chookasian, contralto; Kenneth Riegel, tenor; David Gordon, baritone; Julien Robbins, bass; Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Telarc, recorded in Symphony Hall, Oct. 2 & 4, 1982
Rudolf Serkin, piano; with Nan Nall, soprano; Beverly Morgan and Shirley Close, mezzo-sopranos; Gene Tucker, tenor; Sanford Sylvan and David Evitts, baritones; Marlboro Festival Chorus and Orchestra, Peter Serkin, cond. Sony, recorded live at Marlboro, Aug. 9, 1981 (released in a Marlboro 50th anniversary set, 2000)
Rudolf Serkin, piano; Westminster Choir, New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Manhattan Center, May 1, 1962
SEIJI AND PETER S. HAD A LONG HISTORY TOGETHER
I don't know whether they'd ever done the Choral Fantasy together before 2016, but their history together goes way back, including a number of recordings. With the Chicago Symphony they did the Bartók First and Third Piano Concertos and the Schoenberg Piano Concerto, and with the BSO they did Peter Lieberson's Piano Concerto. We've heard a little of one of their well-known recordings, of Beethoven's not-especially-elegant piano arrangement of his Violin Concerto. As we rehear the Larghetto, I've tacked on the Larghetto from a 1989 performance Seiji conducted of the Violin Concerto itself.
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto in D, Op. 61 (arr. from the Violin Concerto): ii. Larghetto
Peter Serkin, piano; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. RCA, recorded in Walthamstow Town Hall, London, June 9-13, 1969
BEETHOVEN: Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61: ii. Larghetto
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Live performance from Suntory Hall, Tokyo, December 1989
You'll note that the piano version of the Larghetto concludes with a more extended -- though, interestingly, not very interesting -- version of the cadenza that leads into the concluding Rondo. To hear how this transition was originally meant to happen, I've let the violin performance run through the opening statement of the first theme of the Rondo -- and I've remade the Serkin-Ozawa clip to do the same.
MONDAY 2:20am UPDATE: Oh my! It suddenly occurred to me that, while I knew I'd made the new clip of the Serkin-Ozawa recording, extending the Larghetto into the Rondo (and upgrading the audio in the process), I didn't remember substituting the new version for the old! Yikes! It's done now! -- Ed.
HERE'S THE PLAN GOING FORWARD
Next up is the promised Part 2 of what I described in last week's "preface" as "a probably-inappropriately-impressionistic (at least at the start) musical remembrance" of Seiji taking off from those four "musical talking points," from works by Brahms, Berlioz, and Mahler. The Brahms was there mostly for me; it constitutes a particular and special musical remembrance. The Berlioz and Mahler works will get us into some consideration of that special ability Seiji had to organize large-scale works in a way that made them flow so "right" -- as if they were unfolding so logically and seemingly without manipulation.
The agenda for Part 3 will be simply to draw lots of other Seiji stuff out of the SC Archive, just for the pleasure of it all.
I thought this might all be happening in the next couple of days, but when I consider how long it took to do this post, which was designed to be a pretty simple lift, and consider that Monday at least is shaping up as a fairly hectic day, I'm that much more reluctant to make promises.
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