So as I alluded to yesterday, last week I went to the BSO, ostensibly to hear Garrick Ohlsson play the Viktor Ullman piano concerto, not because it was Viktor Ullman but because it was Garrick Ohlsson. Ullman was a German Jew who died in a concentration camp and saw virtually none of his music performed in his lifetime. The concerto is in four short movements, sounding something like Bartok strained through Schoenberg, not bad as a piano part, the orchestration is a little thin in places.



Anyway, the rest of the program was James Conlon conducting Shostakovich 7th, the so-called "Leningrad" Symphony that stands with the 11th and 13th as the three titanic pillars of his symphonic output. The 7th clocks in at a full hour and 20 minutes, and by the end Conlon looked visibly exhausted and very sweaty, but the smallish audience was very enthusiastic (virtually no one on the main floor was bolting for the exits as they usually do as soon as the baton comes down). All that was missing was Conlon doing a Rostropovich-style hugfest with all the orchestra members during the applause.



As it turns out, I was also witness to the previous performance of Shosty 7 at the BSO, conducted by Valery Gergiev what I thought was maybe 5 years ago but turns out to be 10 (oof!). That time it was the only thing on the program, which probably makes more sense. It's just as well that a relatively forgettable work started the show this time, since it would've been a shame to program something substantial as a first course. One of my first Shostakovich acquisitions on LP was Toscanini conducting the American premiere of the 7th (along with the 1st) live on the radio, shortly after it was written. The first movement was so overwhelming I couldn't listen to the rest of the recording for days afterwards, not something that happens very often. In spite of the scratchy fidelity, the impact of the 1st movement, with all the various highs and lows, and particularly that long middle section, a repetitive, ominous death march that keeps coming at you with more instruments added each time, is quite visceral, even moreso live when you think the walls are going to cave in at any moment. This is supposedly Shostakovich's response to the Nazi siege of Leningrad, although he'd already started before the city was cut off. The 2nd and 3rd movement are less programmatic, one predominantly slow and the other more of a scherzo, but both movements jump around between fast and slow sections, with one memorable melody after another. The 4th movement doesn't really hold up to the other three, taking a long time to get going without much happening, but somewhat redeemed by a big wind-up to the finish, quoting the 1st movement again, more convincing live than on recordings, it seems.



My enthuasiam for Shostkovich started innocently enough when I first moved to Boston and was doing temp work for Coopers & Lybrand (since consumed by Price Waterhouse), listening on my walkman to classical music on WBUR (which you can't do any more either) and was smitten by a recent recording of Shostakovich 6th symphony conducted by Kondrashin, so much so that I ran out and bought the LP shortly thereafter. For some reason at that point in my life I had recently become enamored of long slow orchestral works, and Shostakovich was almost always good for one of those in his symphonies. The 6th uses a big orchestra but mixes up the instrumental combinations with infinite variety, with the music sometimes crawling almost to a complete stop. I had never thought much of Mahler in college, but Shostakovich was the composer that bridged the gap, such that by the time I'd bought most of the rest of the symphonies on records, I started buying Mahler symphonies about the same time that I switched to CD's.



That recording of the 6th, plus the Toscanini 7th and 1st, and most of what came afterwards came from the record department at Barnes and Noble on Washington Street. From Briggs and Briggs in Cambridge I could even buy the mini-scores of some of the symphonies (ridiculously expensive now, but cheap then because there were no copyrights on Russian composers). Once I had most of the symphonies (primarily with Haitink) on records, I'd bought a CD player and had to go back and get them all again, and filled in along the way with the string quartets and concertos and movie music and chamber music. Everything but the piano music, oddly enough, which is mostly written in a different idiom and doesn't have the same interest for me that the other stuff does (I substitute Prokofiev's piano music instead).



My first and only trip to the BSO with Beth was to hear Shostakovich 13 (don't remember the conductor, the program is still in the attic somewhere), preceded by dinner at a Russian restaurant in Brookline that's not there any more (we did meet in a Russian lit class, after all). Beth established the tradition at that first outing of falling asleep at classical concerts, no matter how expensive the tickets or how loud the music. The only exception was maybe the most memorable concert I've ever witnessed, when the BU symphony did the 11th back around '91 as part of a mini-festival of Shostakovich. It was a free concert and we got there early enough to score front row center in the balcony of the Tsai. I knew the Haitink recording well by then, and this is another 80-minuter that ends with a bang like the 7th, so I expected the last crashing chords to be met by instantaneous, thunderous applause. But instead the audience was so collectively stunned by the performance that the echoes of the last chord hung in the air for what seemed like a minute before anyone dared to break the silence and start applauding. The first trumpet was a bit dicey (ironically, Don had auditioned there and not gotten in, but I'm sure he could've done a much better job), and the stage wasn't big enough to hold all the players so a lot of the percussion was on the floor on either side, but the enthusiasm of the student orchestra made for a tremendous performance, and there was enough programmatic content to the music that Beth stayed awake to the end. When I described it to Phil months later my voice cracked just talking about it. I didn't listen to a recording of the 11th for years afterwards.



Obviously there's more to Shostakovich's appeal for me than just really long slow movements now, I've always been a fan of things Russian, and while I knew he existed in my college years (in fact he received an honorary doctorate from NU a few years before his death. Supposedly when he asked the dean what the diploma was good for, the dean said, "That and a quarter will get you a cup of coffee", which is probably about right) I hadn't heard much of him beyond seeing Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the Lyric (maybe best remembered for one section where repeated trombone slides indicate the main characters are having a quickie offstage, music referred to in its initial western performances as "pornophony").



When the Chorale way back when was rehearsing a new piece by Larry Wolf that was set to text of Whitman, Wolf came to visit one time and talked about choosing text focussing on joy, saying "I understand that Shostakovich had a hard life, but I find it hard to be uplifted by that kind of music". As the program notes for last week's concert indicate, you really can't separate a lot of the Shostakovich symphonies from their programmatic elements (even though Shostakovich supposedly disavowed a lot of them in "Testimony"), giving his work an extra-musical subtext that most concert music doesn't have (much like Adams's "On the Transmigration of Souls" as a very recent example). But it's more than just that, also, there's tons of melody in his work, great harmonic progressions without (usually) resorting to just percussive clusters of notes, wide varieties of mood within the same piece, I think much of it is uplifting, exhilarating even. Maybe the piano stuff will even grow on me someday.

One good way to get through a snowy New England winter is to go to a lot of concerts, which is what I've been doing this month, so pardon me if I drone a while to catch up. The trick is to not buy tickets in advance, since you never know what the weather will be like, and what with the concert-going public's habits shifting more towards last-minute decisions anyway, this works out just fine. When I went to the BSO last Thursday to hear James Conlon conduct Shostakovich 7th, they still had rush tickets (crappy seats, but discounted to $8) available for sale at 6 pm, even though they start selling them at 10am. More on that program later.



Monday night I went to NEC to hear piano faculty member Gabriel Chodos perform the Liszt Sonata and the Hammerklavier. Richard Dyer's review is here. I generally agree, Robert was there and didn't stay for the second half, but he missed out, since while the Liszt was pretty good, the Hammerklavier was stunning, the endless slow movement and the sometimes downright bizarre last movement especially. The audience was completely taken in by the performance. The first movement went about the same as the Liszt, sort of on the athletic side, but by the same token with a strong forward-moving drive. Sitting down front, as you can only do at NEC with a free concert, the piano comes out sounding a little muddled, as though he's using too much pedal sometimes, but since you can see that he isn't, there's something in the acoustic that works a little to the music's disadvantage sometimes. I have half a dozen recordings of the Liszt Sonata and they're all completely different, but the piece does hang together very well, I'm surprised I never heard it anywhere in my college days. But I don't think I'd ever heard the Beethoven before, and considering how overplayed the last three sonatas are, it's odd that more performers haven't turned to op 106 (and 101 for that matter). Back at NU there was a short list of pieces you shouldn't touch until you're at least 30. I think the Hammerklavier would be one of them.



On Tuesdays at lunchtime the music director of King's Chapel has put together short recital series which I've been going to the last few weeks. It's very sparsely attended, but maybe that's just because every week it's been about 30 below outside. There's no piano there, but I've been to three this month, including a medieval recorder group, a tenor, and a wind quintet. They're a nice little midday diversion from the otherwise wacky world of foreign exchange. The church, which is a million years old and was original Anglican but is now Unitarian, is kind of a neat setting, too. Down the street is St. Paul's Cathedral, which has a Wednesday series. I skip the organ recitals, but there was a noontime piano recital there last week featuring a teacher from the Rivers School who played some out of the ordinary Liszt and Schubert. This was even more sparsely attended (single digits, including a homeless guy who talked to himself through half the program), they at least have a piano, although it sounds like it needs some work, and it's a much more cavernous space to fill up.



These lunchtime concerts are good because they're cheap (generally $3) and don't require hanging around in the city all evening, so I can still see my family once in a while. I'm just surprised, cold weather notwithstanding, that more people don't go, but then I've been working downtown for four years and just managed to drag my keister to my first one three two weeks ago, so go figure.

Christmas is over and its the dead of winter and work has been less zany lately, so I've been sneaking out at lunchtime to catch the odd concert or two when I can. After four years working downtown, it's about time I did this sort of thing.



Went to my first BSO open rehearsal a couple of weeks ago just for the heck of it, not because of the specific program or soloist or anything. Since Levine has come to town, there's been a bit of a row over how he was using his open rehearsals to actually rehearse, and to primarily rehearse the difficult new piece on the program (some Elliot Carter thing back in November really set everybody off). The general consensus of the open rehearsal-going public is that they expect to see basically a performance for $16 bucks and get to sit wherever they want, which is not a bad deal, and that is generally what they get. I think guest conductors are probably warned "rehearse at your peril" for these events. While listening to the orchestra and conductor actually rehearse would be interesting too, at least for those of us that are musically inclined, it's hampered by the lack of any means for the audience to hear what the conductor is saying to the musicians, so if he does a lot of stopping and starting with long soliloquies in between (which apparently is what Levine was doing), the natives can get restless mighty quickly, 16 bucks or not.



What I heard was more of the typical rehearsal-free open rehearsal, conducted by the Austrian Hans Graf, and consisting of two works by Hindemith and two flute concertos with Sir James Galway as soloist. Everyone on stage was in street clothes, there was a giant clock on the wall keeping the union happy, and I could sit in a $100 seat on the aisle and on the main floor. Graf did both Hindemith works (Mathis der Maler and the Op 50 Konzertmusik for string and brass) back to back, although they would bookend the actual performance. These densely textured yet very lyrical works benefited from being up close and personal and made them that much more exciting, and Graf was obvious in his element with this music. After playing each work straight through, he went back and worked on a couple of little sections but only for a few extra minutes.



Galway came out after a break to go through his stuff, a piece he commissioned from William Bolcom called "Lyric Concerto", which was full of Bolcom's jazzy melodies and definitely showed off the instrument, followed by the 2nd Mozart Flute Concerto (actually a transcription of an oboe concerto) which Galway played with great familiarity and that signature twinkle. He had his golden flute for the rehearsal, although the review said he used a platinum one in the performance. I'm not a huge fan of the solo flute repertoire, but Galway made a great case for both works, all that was missing was his usual concert get-up.

Here's the summation of last week's Classics Reading Group by our very own Laura Gillenwater (who is now named in full because she wants to be able to find this by googling on herself):

Wow - despite several of our regular members being unable to attend this

month due to conflicting priorities, illness, or injury (nothing

serious, thankfully), leaving us with a group of seven people this

month, I had a hard time reigning in the discussion at quarter to nine

so we could get to the voting! Of course there's a lot to discuss in

900+ page book with a gazillion distinct characters - which is what we

had to deal with in tonight's book, "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens. I

hardly know where to begin in terms of synopsizing (is that a word?) our

discussion! To be honest, I'd rather not even try this month (if you'll

forgive me), since it's kind of late and I want to get out the voting

results before I have go to sleep. I will say that six out of the seven

people did finish the entire book before the meeting (a better

percentage than one might expect, given the length of the book) and

everyone liked it, although at least one person felt that it didn't

really get going for him until well into the book. Everyone (or almost

everyone?) agreed that the non-Esther-narrative parts of the book were a

bit slower to read than typical Dickens, partly because there were a lot

of characters to try to keep track of (one member suggested that it

would have been helpful to have a Dramatis Personae list, like they have

for lots of Russian novels) and, possibly, as suggested by another

member, because Dickens was intentionally trying to make the progress

slower to mimic the Chancery process (an interesting theory!).

Okay, not really a summation this time, but she would have been up all night trying to summarize the conversation, which had a lot of ground to cover what with 50+ characters all interweaving in and out of various plots and subplots. This is supposed to be Dickens best book, not his most famous or his most memorable, but most well-written. The alternating narrative styles between the journal-type entries of the goody-twoshoes heroine, Esther (whom some members of the group thought was a stronger character than others did) and the present-tense, sometimes downright poetic filling in between of all the bits that Esther wouldn't know about first hand give you as a reader enough variety that there's something for everybody. The bad guys aren't completely bad, the women aren't completely non-descript, there are few standout oddball characters, but on the whole this gives people who tend to find Dickens overwrought a little more to latch onto.



The backdrop of the chancery court case that has been dragging on for generations is easily paralleled in the present day (think Anna Nicole Smith, for a start). Richard, the young cousin who decides to devote his life to seeing the case through to completion is just sympathetic enough to be tragic, and like any great tragic figure doesn't live long enough to see his dream come to naught. Dickens gets in plenty of digs about the bureaucracy and corruption of the courts, and about the plight of those with the misfortune to be poor and uneducated. There's so much going on in this book, it benefited from a reading group discussion just so we could fill in the forgotten or unnoticed pieces in each other's reading experiences to expand our appreciation that much more.



I read this book 15 years ago and all I remembered was there was a court case and it ultimately came to nothing. I never saw the Masterpiece Theatre version, but the imagery, particularly when the case is dismissed and everyone exits the chancery building laughing, the clerk is bringing out papers and dumping them on the sidewalk, and the court-groupie Miss Flite sets her birds free, all in rapid succession, is just one of many brilliantly evocative sequences in the book. There's no Fagin, no Quilp, no Miss Haversham, so I think the specifics of the plot don't stick with you as easily, but there's also so much going on you don't get the feeling of padding like you do with some of the other books. You do get the sense that he knew where he was going from the start, though, again unlike some of the others, so there are far fewer jarring coincidences. I could keep going and going, this was a great book and a great discussion book, even for those who don't ordinarily like Dickens (although Evan wasn't there to really put that theory to the test).

Oof, six weeks? Where did the time go? Well, Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, and all that. Needless to say the holiday season is always a busy one with less time for frivolities like updating blogs, but I've also been in a mood lately where I don't feel like writing down anything.



But I did want to jot down some stuff about the concert Beth and I went to last night, to see Laurie Anderson perform live. I've always liked her stuff since first being introduced to it in Gena's theory class, and I still have the bootleg tape I made at the NU listening center of "United States", her four-LP live album. She's toured off an on through here, but there was always a conflict or whatever, so this time I was determined to finally see her in person, especially so since she just finished a two-year stint as NASA's artist in residence, the first and, as it turns out, only individual to hold that position.



The show was at the Cutler Majestic and was basically sold out. I managed to score tickets on the floor, fifth row center, due to some late returns to the box office that I picked up just this Friday. The concert got off to a rocky start, as the fire alarm went off 30 seconds after she began (maybe the fog machine), and after regrouping half an hour later, she had to stop again a few minutes further along while some sort of fisticuffs broke out behind us somewhere. Never did figure out what was going on there, somebody grabbed the wrong seat on the way back in maybe?



Anyway, after that everything settled down, the show went about 90 minutes with no break. This performance, titled "End of the Moon", features no singing, just her, talking and playing her electronic violin, with a small projector screen set up on one side of the stage and a easy chair on the other. The screen mostly just showed a shot of two craters on the moon that are close enough together and the right shape to suggest a shoe print. Towards the end she attached a small camera on a wire to her violin bow to create a sort of "bow-cam" effect. But that was it for multimedia. In an interview in Sunday's globe she said that in the old days it would take four semis to haul her stuff around from show to show, now it all fits in two suitcases.



The text part of the program was Anderson's signature combination of ruminations, anecdotes, stand-up, personal experience, juxtaposed together to make some associations that wouldn't otherwise be apparent. If it could be said to be about any one thing, it would seem to focus on an ongoing Anderson topic, questioning and deal with humanity's place in the universe and our own individual places within that. In fact, she began with the same "Hello, excuse me, can you tell me where I am?" that begins her "United States".



She talked about receiving the call from NASA out of the blue asking her to be their first artist in residence, so unexpected that she assumed it was a crank and hung up on them. After she was convinced of their sincerity, she asked them what does an artist in residence for NASA do, and they said, "We're not sure, what do you think they should do?" Apparently there wasn't much of a specific charter behind this idea, leaving her free to make up her own agenda, which primarily consisted of visiting most of the NASA sites (JPL, Houston, Ames, Hubble, etc.). The NASA web site only mentions her once, in an internal newsletter from towards the beginning of her tenure. She said the only thing she wanted to do and didn't get to was ride the "Vomit Comet", the airplane the astronauts use to train for weightlessness. She had decided to come up with some sort of final report to present at the end of her tenure, but while she was putting it together she found out NASA was discontinuing the artist in residence program, after which, she said, her report changed dramatically.



Since the beginning of her residence coincided with the Columbia disaster, there wasn't any opportunity to see a shuttle launch. She talked about the pieces of the shuttle falling over such a huge area, and how they were able to collect them all and reassemble what they had into a ghost of a shuttle. She did visit Baltimore where the Hubble team was showing off some new spectacular photographs of distant galaxies. When she asked about whether those were the real colors depicted in the photographs, they admitted they were colors they picked because they thought people would like them. Her reaction was one of surprise, "I thought >I< was the artist in residence", she said. She talked with people at JPL about projects for terraforming Mars to make it inhabitable by humans, projects expected to last 10,000 years, and the pointlessness of sending humans into deep space because of the law that each generation of rockets will be so much faster than the last that they would pass up any spaceships already sent towards the stars before they even got very far.



She also visited Ames labs, where they were demonstrating the latest technology in spacesuits, which were made to be much more form-fitting than the classic moon mission suits, and could enhance the wearers strength, tighten into a splint if they suffered a fracture, and inject any type of stimulant or painkiller without having to open it up. Since the application for this type of suit in space was untold years away, she said, the technology had since been co-opted by the military, in order to make protective suits for soldiers in the desert.



Her best anecdote probably had to do with a hiking trip she went on out west with her dog, Lolabelle, who suffered a near-death experience when a vulture mistook her for a rabbit and, once realizing its mistake, hovered over her for a while trying to figure out whether to attack him or not anyway. The bird eventually left, but for the rest of the trip, the dog no longer kept its nose to the ground, sniffing around for different things, but instead kept looking at the sky in an awkward way, as if this was a new dimension she had never noticed before, now aware that the same thing could happen again. Anderson connected that to the way her neighbors in New York looked in the weeks following 9/11, after, she said, they had realized two things: 1) they could attack us from the air, and 2) it would be this way from now on.



Aanother theme she touched on in her performance dealt with the nature of time, how dark energy would eventually convert all matter into a state of timelessness much like what existed before the big bang, and how she wished the period at the end of every sentence could be a small clock, indicating how long it took to write that sentence. The moon of the title only got a mention in relation to the moons of Mars, which said are the Greek words for "fear" and "panic", obviously something you would name someone else's moons and not your own, and an anecdote about how Robert McNamara had once suggested setting off nuclear bombs on the far side of the moon, and her reaction was "Can they just do that? Shouldn't we all get to vote on something like that?" She also talked about the nature of beauty, what does it mean anyway, how our moon was historically associated with beauty, that things looked more beautiful by moonlight and that the moon itself was beautiful.



What Anderson didn't really say, although I think it fits in with her observations, is how technology allowed us to get closer up to these things that have mystified humanity for centuries, and it turns out they're not nearly as interesting as we would have hoped. The moon was just a barren rock, Mars even moreso, and those planets and moons shrouded in clouds like Venus and Titan don't have anything exotic lying beneath their surfaces either. Even NASA scientists are touching up pictures of outer space to make them look more appealling to the general public. The need to explore still exists, and there are plenty of questions exploration can still help answer about how we got where we are, but the practical benefits, or even whizbang visual attraction we expected, just aren't there. Anderson did mention the first astronauts, all test pilots and not poets or writers, who couldn't come up with much verbiage to describe their experiences other than "the earth sure seems small from up there" and that sort of thing, and I think that's not really their fault because they didn't have a great deal of sensory input to work with.



The violin riffs and melodies in the program captured that signature sound, interesting to watch live to try to figure out how she can be playing one note at a time but have all these other things happening as accompaniment. It was a good show, and from a musical standpoint I'd be hard-pressed to think of another artist who would qualify for artist in residence if NASA had continued the program. A writer or painter could give you their take on the same experience, but its the blending and distillation of all these different media that Anderson does so well, and this fits right in to her general worldview anyway. Hope there's a CD forthcoming (ideally without the fire alarm or the fist fight).