Today, in the paper that is often 30 years behind the times:

Why Do We Reward Bullies

by Arthur C. Brooks

I despise bullies. This doesn’t stem from my playground years but rather from a career in my 20s performing with a professional symphony orchestra. Orchestra conductors are notorious tyrants, cruel and demanding, with near-total control over the artistic lives of the players. To consolidate power, they turn players against one another, prey on weakness, destroy confidence. As we used to note, many conductors are evil geniuses, but all are evil.

We reported a year back on the British scholar who found a lost Liszt opera.

Well David Trippett now tells us the work will receive its world premiere in August.

The leading roles will be sung by Joyce El-Khoury and tenor Charles Castronovo.

From the press release:

Principal Conductor Kirill Karabits, the Staatskapelle Weimar will give the world premiere of a rediscovered Italian opera by Franz Liszt – which was left incomplete and has lain largely forgotten in a German archive for almost 100 years. “The name of the composer Franz Liszt has never been associated with Italian opera”, Karabits explains. “I’m delighted to be conducting the premiere of Sardanapalo in Weimar. This discovery should open a new page not only in Liszt’s musical heritage but also in the music history of the 19th century.” Act 1 of the opera survives complete. This will be presented in a concert version.

The music has been resurrected by David Trippett, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge. He discovered the opera manuscript was legible more than ten years ago, a century after it had been catalogued and largely forgotten in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar. “The music that survives is breath-taking – a unique blend of Italianate lyricism and adventurous harmonic turns and side-steps”, Trippett explains. “There is nothing else quite like it in the operatic world. It is suffused with Liszt’s characteristic style, but contains elements from Bellini and Meyerbeer, alongside glimmers of Wagner.”

The son of a veteran cellist has given the orchestra two rare violins.

From the BSO bulletin:

Dr Michael Nieland is the son of former BSO cellist Mischa Nieland who was a member of the BSO for 45 years, from 1943 to 1988. In 2004, four years after his father’s death, Dr. Michael Nieland and his mother, Stella Nieland, made a gift of $1 million to the BSO in honor of Mischa Nieland’s commitment and love for the orchestra, endowing the Mischa Nieland Chair. This chair is currently occupied by cellist Sato Knudsen, who began at the BSO a few years before Mr. Nieland’s retirement.

Like his father, Dr. Nieland has a deep love for music and is a gifted musician. Even after having lived and practiced medicine in Pennsylvania for much of his adult life, Dr. Nieland’s connection to the BSO remains strong. He still holds fondly his memories of growing up with a father in the BSO and recalls, “My father always seemed so pleased to walk onto the stage (at Symphony Hall). He was so reluctant to retire even at age 78.”

Over the years, Dr. Nieland has remained one of the BSO’s most faithful supporters, following annual programming and personnel changes and attending BSO concerts in Symphony Hall and Tanglewood. It is his love for music, community of family friends and musicians in the BSO, and continuing engagement with the Symphony that led Dr. Nieland to donate two rare 18th century Italian violins to the Orchestra.

The two violins are the 1754 “ex-Zazofsky” crafted by Italian luthier Johannes Baptista Guadagnini and a 1778 instrument crafted by Italian luthier Nicolò Gagliano.

This gift marks a homecoming for the well-documented “ex-Zazofsky” violin, named for former BSO violinist George Zazofsky who performed on the violin during his tenure with the orchestra from 1941 to 1969. George Zazofsky was a good friend of Mischa Nieland and his fishing buddy. Dr. Nieland recalls hearing the exceptional sound Mr. Zazofsky made while playing this same violin over a half century ago at his parents’ home in preparation for a performance the two friends gave together. The instrument’s maker, Johannes Baptista Guadagnini, is widely regarded as one of the greatest luthiers in history, alongside Stradivarius.

When this instrument came on the market about fifteen years ago, Dr. Nieland, a violinist himself, was excited to be able to purchase it. Not only had family friend George Zazofsky played this violin, but Dr. Nieland’s own adored violin instructor Ruth Posselt briefly played the instrument during a solo appearance with the BSO at Tanglewood when she broke a string and borrowed George Zazofsky’s violin to finish her performance. During his years of ownership Dr. Nieland also performed on the Guadagnini as well as on the Gagliano with members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in chamber music at his home.

At the BSO again, the “ex Zazofsky” Guadagnini will be played by First Associate BSO Concertmaster, Helen Horner McIntyre Chair, Tamara Smirnova, while the Gagliano will be played by BSO violinist James Cooke.

In late January, a reception was held in Symphony Hall in celebration of the gift of these two rare violins. The reception was attended by Peter Zazofsky and Erika Goldberg, children of the late George Zazofsky; friends of the Nieland family; Deborah and Philip Edmundson Artistic Partner Thomas Adès; as well as members of the orchestra, and BSO staff and administration.

The program included performances on the violins, with Ms. Smirnova performing Allemande from Bach’s Partita No. 1 in b minor for Solo Violin on the “ex-Zazofsky”, Mr. Cooke performing Largo from Bach’s Sonata No. 3 in C Major for Solo Violin on the Gagliano, and a duet performance of the first movement from Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins Op. 56.

In his welcoming remarks, Eunice and Julian Cohen Managing Director Mark Volpe thanked Dr. Nieland for his generous gift, telling the guests, “We are so fortunate that despite his wonderful career in Pittsburgh, Dr. Nieland’s heart remained in Boston.”

Speaking about his family’s history with the BSO, his personal connections to these two violins, and his decision to donate them, Dr. Nieland reflected, “One should be mindful of the fact that we are all only temporary possessors of these precious objects or works of art. We are renters, in a sense. Someone owned them before us and someone will take possession of them after we are gone. . . I believe it is important to guide their destiny whenever possible. I know James and Tamara will be conscientious custodians of these rare instruments.”

The BSO is honored to join the long history of musicians who have cared for and performed on these beautiful violins.

The Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya Guedouar had it all: a full diary, a bustling agency (ZemskyGreen), major roles ahead.

She stood in for Netrebko at Covent Garden in 2007 and was chosen to replace Angela Gheorghiu the following year as Elisabetta in Verdi’s Don Carlo.

At the Met, she starred as Natasha in War and Peace, then Liu in Turandot, then Violetta, which she took over from Netrebko both in New York and replacing her on a Japan tour.

And then, in 2014, she dropped out.

Here’s what she’s doing now, and why:

Marina Poplavskaya Guedouar CITI HABITATS
Honesty, hospitality and helpfulness define Marina’s special style. She is very dedicated to her real estate profession, and more importantly, to the discerning needs of her clients. “I look forward to helping you in every way possible during the search for your new home, and will always be available to service all your needs, with the goal to get you the best scenario and value.”  

Marina knows New York City well having lived here since 2005 and explored its diverse neighborhoods. She fell in love with Manhattan since going on her first audition at the Met Opera, and knows all the great houses in the Lincoln Center area. Since 2013 when she met her husband, Marina experienced the Upper West Side and beyond, getting to know the lovely Riverside and Upper Manhattan community. When her child was born in 2015, she became even more connected through families and educational centers. “I am deep sensitive to the fact that one’s home, and feeling happy and secure in it, is essential my clients.”  

Originally from Moscow, Russia, Marina holds an MDA in Performing Vocal Arts. She enjoyed a 28-year international career as a performer at such legendary venues as The Bolshoi Theatre, ROH Covent Garden, The Met, Berlin Staatsoper, Vienna Staatsoper, La Scala and others.    With open communication, flexibility, sociability and humor, Marina will make your real estate search an enjoyable and enlightening one. Outside of her work, she is dedicated to family life, as well as singing, teaching and meeting friends. Marina is multi lingual speaking Russian, English, Italian and French. She is personable and engaging with people of every background.

This is Jenny Q Chai playing a piece by Annie Gosfield for piano and two baseballs.

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

It feels dangerously transgressive, and thus all the more enjoyable, to listen to Scarlatti’s keyboard pieces on a full-throated Steinway D piano set up in an English country barn. Why musicians submit so readily to the tyranny of political correctness — composers to the imposition of serialism, performers to the doctrines of period practice — is a mystery to me. So to find a young pianist at the start of his path who is prepared to defy the professorial rule makers and play a Bach contemporary on a modern big banger of a concert grand is a joy that restores my faith in musical free-thinkers….

Read on here.

And here.

A member of the Moscow Art Trio, Mikhail Alperin migrated to Norway in 1993 and recorded extensively for ECM.

From our diarist Anthea Kreston:

I jumped from my Taxi, arriving at Berlin’s famed Philharmonie (Home Field of the Berlin Philharmonic – a golden-topped, modernist complex with multiple concert halls, cafes and rehearsal spaces), smelly and covered in sweat, just in time to sprint to my seat for the second half of the Casals String Quartet Concert. The second of my double rehearsals ended at 9 pm, across town, and yet I was determined to finally hear this Quartet – the most celebrated Spanish String Quartet, based in Barcelona. Jason held my seat – he was fortunate enough to be able to make it to the entire program, one of their Beethoven Cycle concerts, dedicated to the 16 Quartets of Beethoven, surrounding, in 6 concerts, newly commissioned works by 6 Mediterranean composers. London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid, Japan, Lisbon, Vienna – these are just some of the places that you can hear their cycle this season.

This was my first time sitting in the audience of this hall, and I found the atmosphere immediately engaging – we were all sitting in a-symmetrical petals of a musical artichoke, with the Quartet placed in the heart, below all of us, but close enough to be able to see every muscle in the back of the poetically strong first violinist, and to see the apt expressions on the other members of the audience, as we all surrounded, and were surrounded by each other, in a musical adventure that still occupies my thoughts, 5 days after the concert.

This group, celebrating its 20th year together, has a synergy and compassion which drew me into their world. Honestly played, historically informed, beautiful long lines – their Beethoven Op 127 was a journey into the world of late Beethoven – a meandering investigation of time, intimate rumination, and personal acceptance. They didn’t play for us, but rather for themselves, or maybe for humankind.

The brothers (the Catalonians Arnau on cello and Abel on violin) played off of IPads and Bluetooth foot pedals while Spanish violinist (Vera) and American violist (Jonathan) played from complete scores, shrunken down to teeny pages and taped together onto huge boards, placed low to the ground on sloped music stands. I loved the way that the Quartet gave us a reading of the complete picture – I could almost see the score in front of my eyes as they played – it was both intellectual and tender – perfectly representative of the time in Beethoven’s life – after his “Heroic” period, and into his contemplative, non-ego driven investigation into wholeness and an almost-spirituality. These qualities were perfectly brought to light with the Casals – their high-spirited enthusiasm contrasting with their willingness to bring us down to a nearly inaudible prayer-like whisper.

I was able to catch up with the Quartet for a Huge Beer and Wurst at the Sony Center after the concert, and was lucky enough to be able to interview Jonathan Brown, their Chicago-native (“Go Bears!) violist, whom I have known since our times together in Aspen as students.

Question:
I noticed that you use different bows – what kind are they, and do people use different kinds for different pieces?

Answer:
The different bows are part of our attempt to differentiate the sound and articulation (and therefore expression, of course) in 18th Century music with respect to 19th or 20th Century literature. We all have late-Baroque/early Classical model bows which we use for Haydn and Mozart and the other three also have ‘transition’ bows (somewhat longer and heavier, with a less angled tip) which they use for Beethoven. The violinists use these for all of the Beethovens, whereas the cellist and I use ‘Tourte-model’ bows as of the Razumovsky quartets. After considerable research, probably the most historically accurate posture is to mix different bows, within the same quartet, although as we have changed all of the other elements in play – the size  of the hall, the instrumental set-up, the strings,  – it is absurd to speak of historical accuracy. In the end we each have chosen the tools with which we can come closest to realising our personal vision of the music we are playing.

Question:
What is your basic philosophy for your Quartet – how is it structured (in terms of the individual vs the collective)?

Answer:
Like every other quartet, we struggle with the balance between the personal expression of each member and the need for a collective frame in which the voices make sense together. We have developed a decidedly democratic rehearsal technique, in which each member is allowed one-fourth of the given rehearsal time for a piece in which he/she can work on or whichever passage he/she would like, in whichever way he/she finds most necessary. This means that each person is responsible for prioritising and leading part of the rehearsal, and each has the right to propose any musical idea which he/she would like. Conversely, no one is obligated to follow someone else’s orders in concert – in case of opposing ideas, we normally we find the truth lies somewhere in between and allow ourselves to intuitively find a way which finds a balance between different perspectives. To this end, we try to define the structure or frame of a passage, the points in which we all are in agreement, and allow ourselves a considerable amount of personal freedom around the basic frame which we have established.

Question:
You have a very unique way of ending some notes altogether with such incredible speed – the sound was very clear, bright, and optimistic. Can you tell me a little about that?

Answer:
This is an interesting point, although I am not sure that we are aware of a specific technique with which to end notes. What I would say is that we often try to imitate other instruments, for example the clarity of articulation of a piano, not only at the beginning of a note or a chord, but also how to clear the sound at the end.

Question:
You switch violin 1 and 2 – how do you decide who does which piece?

Answer:
Aside from the fact that it has been very healthy for our violinists to both learn how to play each role, we use the switch as a further way of defining the quartet’s sound according to the general period in which we are playing. To that end, Abel plays first violin on all early music (Purcell, Bach, Boccherini, Haydn, Mozart) including the early Schuberts and Opus 18 Beethovens, at which point Vera plays first violin through to contemporary repertoire. We feel that this switch gives us even more possibilities for changing the sound of the quartet depending on the composer which we are playing.

Question:
Could you share with us any thoughts on what it feels like to be part of a Spanish Quartet in these troubling times?

Answer:
Everyone in Spain, but especially in Catalunya, has suffered this year through the political crisis and the quartet has not been unaffected by these events. We have found that playing ‘El Cant dels Ocells,’ the ‘Song of the Birds,’ which was Pau Casals’ homage to his homeland, a very cathartic end to our concerts, whether in Berlin, Girona or Madrid.

Thank you, Casals Quartet!

If you would like a tutorial on how to build a Lego Casals Quartet, please watch this YouTube Video.

William Foster joins our list of the world’s longest serving players after putting in 50 years at the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC ago, half of them as Assistant Principal Viola. He played for six of the NSO’s seven music directors – Mitchell, Dorati, Rostropovich, Slatkin, Eschenbach, and Noseda.

Also retiring as the season ends are violinists Holly Hamilton (40 years in the NSO), Peter Haase (34 years) and Pam Hentges (a mere 21 years).

First reactions to last night’s world premiere of George Benjamin’s opera Lessons in Love and Violence.

Alexandra Coghlan in theartsdesk.com, under the headline ‘Savage elegance never quite glows red-hot’: Three murders, two political coups, a deposition and a betrayal give the opera plenty of meat, but this isn’t a piece that’s interested in doing. If music is, famously, the space between the notes, then Benjamin and Crimp have devised a drama that lives between the scenes. The spare, suggestive beauty of Crimp’s libretto and Benjamin’s music (which never states when it can imply, never implies where it can simply leave a dramatic door ajar) leaves room for the audience, and having been invited into their cruel world it’s almost impossible to leave.

Barry Millington, Evening Standard: If there is a countervailing force of goodness or genuine love here, it escaped me. 

Andrew Clements in The Guardian: There’s a pervading air of menace, but the drama’s implicit violence only becomes explicit in some of the orchestral interludes. If Benjamin’s score is not quite as luminous and beguiling as his orchestral writing in Written in Skin, there are still some remarkable colours and effects – soaring horn lines, long, self-renewing melodic strands, pungent punctuations from cimbalom and wooden percussion. That is matched in some of Benjamin’s vocal writing, especially Isabel’s spiralling melismas , tailor-made for Barbara Hannigan’s extraordinary agility, and the lustrous honeyed lines in the final scenes for the counter-tenor Son (who becomes Edward III), beautifully delivered by Samuel Boden…. In the end the terrible story becomes the excuse for some striking music rather than being driven along by it.

Rupert Christiansen, the Telegraph: ‘I left Covent Garden impressed rather than excited or moved. For all the refinements, Benjamin and Crimp haven’t moved on from Written on Skin so much as shuffled the cards to play the same game. Lessons in Love and Violence should be heard and seen by everyone seriously interested in the future of opera, but it lacks that magical element – surprise.’

Michael Church, the Independent: Benjamin’s fabled brilliance as an orchestrator produces a finely-wrought sonic tapestry: it’s as accessible as film music, but with original effects thanks to compositional alchemy and unfamiliar instruments including a cimbalom and steel drums. The vocal line may be relentless recitative, but the instrumental sound-world is a seductive amalgam of late-Romanticism and early-Modernism. The interludes with which the scenes are punctuated could be extracted to form the basis for a lovely orchestral suite. Benjamin insists that he doesn’t do ‘tunes’, but I left the theatre wishing that he occasionally would. 

Alice Savile in Time Out: Avant-garde director Katie Mitchell is known for scandalising opera audiences with onstage brutality (notably her take on ‘Hamlet’) but this production has a dreamlike feel, sucking the audience into this king’s life-ruining romantic obsession. Stéphane Degout has the unworldliness of a man who’s so in love he can barely make sense of his surroundings. A collection of wooden panels, a giant fish tank, and some busts of great rulers appear and reappear in different formations in every scene. When Gaveston is murdered, the fish tank is drained of life. 

Anne Ozorio, classical-iconoclast: Though the structure Benjamin uses is beautiful, like a series of miniature paintings in an illuminated album, it is also stylized and creates a sense of emotional disengagement.  It’s as if we’re observing specimens from a distance :the idea of fish in fish tanks, again. Nothing wrong with stylization, per se.  It was a feature of Greek tragedy, and is relevant to the wider implications of this tragedy, too. Thus the vocal lines are semi-abstract too, refecting Crimp’s background as poet.

photo: ROH

UPDATE: Barbara Hannigan responds

Slipped Disc’s exclusive report on the Met’s whitewashing of James Levine’s legacy from its satellite and radio channel has prompted widespread discussion about the rights and wrongs of airbrushing the historical record.

The Met has now told the Associated Press it is reviewing the ban and that Levine’s performances ‘will be reintroduced to the programming at an appropriate time.’

Good to see a rare, small victory for common sense.

The Russian saxophone player Matvey Sherling, a media star from the age of 13, was found dead yesterday in his Moscow apartment.

The circumstances are unclear.

Winner of the 2015 Gerge Gershwin International Competition, Matvey was becoming well known on the international circuit, appearing with such conductors as Vladimir Spivakov and Yuri Bashmet.